The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,92
said again. “They changed that room, the one where they put the people on the receiving end of their experiments... the room on the other side of the glass.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a one-way mirror.” He felt carefully in his trouser pocket where he’d shoved the Spiracle in his haste. “I could see into that room.”
“Oh, come on, it’s pitch dark in there.”
“I saw,” he insisted quietly. “They’ve put furniture in there in the last twenty-four hours—a bed, a chair, a desk—and they’ve unbolted the door into the washroom on the other side.”
Footsteps thudded in the hall below, and though they had been barely whispering before, all three fugitives fell silent. A thready line of diffused light briefly outlined the square of the trapdoor in the dark, but by its angle the guards didn’t even aim their beams at the ceiling. In a guttural murmur of curses they were gone. Rhion laid his head down on his folded arms and breathed again.
For nearly an hour none of them spoke. Closing his eyes, stretching out his hyperacute wizard senses in the dense and stuffy blackness, Rhion found he could track the men back and forth, not only on this floor, but on the one below and in the central block and north wing of the house. He heard their voices and the thick uneasy drag of their breath as they moved from room to silent, haunted room; he felt the zapping tingle of electricity as they switched on light after light, unwilling—ignorant though they were of the inchoate powers lurking there—to be moving through the place in the dark. He heard a sergeant curse, and the opening and shutting of closet doors. Then far off, dim and deep, a voice came to him, chanting spells of breaking, of dissolution, and he heard the distant scrape of metal and soap and brickbats on stone.
Von Rath was dismembering the Dark Well.
Rhion shut his eyes, a shudder going through him at this last severing of any means of communicating through the Void. He fumbled in his trouser pocket again for the Spiracle. This has to have worked, he thought despairingly. Don’t tell me I’m really stranded.
His fingers touched the twisted iron, and he knew.
Magic was in it. The cold of the Void whispered in his mind as he drew out the braided circlet. It seemed to him a faint spark glinted deep in the heart of each of the Five stones. Holding it up, he could see through it down the length of the crawlspace—rafters, dust-clotted cobwebs, the accumulated nastiness of a century of mice—to the narrow black louvers at the end. Yet as if he looked through a smoked mirror, he knew.
Down below he heard the moist pat of von Rath’s bare feet, ascending the chipped stone steps to the downstairs hall. Baldur’s anxious, stammering voice demanded if he was all right and what he had done. Then he heard Poincelles’ deep tones and caught the sound of his own name. Rhion wondered fleetingly just what account the French wizard was giving of his evening, but, satisfied that von Rath’s mind was temporarily distracted, he risked one of the lowest level spells he knew and summoned a tiny ball of blue light to his cupped palm.
It lay there glowing, the size of his little fingernail, a luminous edge of cerulean along his fingers, a chill spark in the scratched glass of his spectacle lenses and the deep blue of his eyes.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Sara muttered, sitting up and stretching the kinks from her back. “All right, Merlin, what do we do now? Poincelles has got to be back by this time, so you’ve blown your chance of pretending it wasn’t you.”
Pallid dawnlight had begun to thin the gloom under the roof, and in the yard the muffled gunning of engines sounded, the clatter of metal, belt leather, boots. A man cursed.
“He is.” Rhion closed his hand, killing the light that Sara had not seen. “And it wouldn’t be safe for me to go back even if they didn’t think it was me. The bed they’ve put in the other room...”
“Yeah, what was the deal with that?” Sara asked. Beyond her, on the other side of the trapdoor, her father continued to lie full length on the beam, only turning slightly to prop himself up on one bony elbow to watch them with dark eyes under the brim of his grubby cap. “The room’s got locks on the doors and no windows, it’s the logical place if