The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,94
hammering clattered unwontedly loud in the silence. Deep in his marrow, like a whispering of the leys that netted the earth, Rhion felt the stirring of the sun-tide begin.
“Rhion...” Sara looked up from the hand of gin she’d automatically laid out for the two of them between the rafters. “Why don’t you come with us? Forget the goddam summer solstice. We’ll get you out of this vershluggene country somehow.”
He smiled and shook his head, touched by her concern. “I know you don’t believe me,” he said, “but tomorrow midnight really is my only chance to get home. It’s the only time the wizards of my world will know where to look for me, and the only time I’ll have enough power.”
For a long moment she studied him, worry softening the brittle cynicism of her eyes. Without her customary coating of lip rouge and makeup, she looked far younger than usual, exhaustion and stress darkening the lids of her eyes and sharpening cruelly the tiny lines of dissipation already printed in the tender flesh. Then she shook her head. “I wish to hell I knew where they got you,” she said softly. “Or where your home really is.”
“I’ve told you and you don’t believe me.” He smiled.
“I know,” she sighed. “Munchkinland.”
“So what’s not to believe?” Rebbe Leibnitz raised his head and adjusted his pince-nez reading glasses with long, bony fingers. “You remember Horus the Invincible, Saraleh, who stayed with us back in twenty-eight when he was an exile from his own dimension...”
“I remember he never returned the money he borrowed from you.”
Leibnitz shrugged. “So if he had, would we be hiding in a better class of attic today? He needed the money to continue his search for the Lost Jewels of Power that would open the Dimensional Gates...”
Sara rolled her eyes. “I give up. Give my regards to the Witch of the West.”
The day passed, oppressive and stifling. In the cramped, dark space beneath the roof tiles, the heat grew quickly intolerable; the inability to move about became torment in itself. In spite of it all, Rhion slept for hours, a breathless uncomfortable sleep on the eight-inch beam, tormented by cloudy dreams, while, unable to smoke, unable to pace, Sara fidgeted her way through endless games of solitaire and her father covered all the plaster within his considerable arm reach in a scrawled carpet of numerological abracadabra. Now and then Rhion opened his eyes to see the three hard splinters of brazen light that crawled along the slant of the struts overhead or Sara’s face, sweat-beaded and intent with her dark lashes turned to ginger by the sun. Then he would slide back into a gluey abyss of dreams.
He dreamed of Tallisett, riding in a swaying litter up the coiled road that led away from Bragenmere’s yellow sandstone walls and into the dry hills of the Lady Range... dreamed of the Duke, white-faced and ill, raising his head from the pillows of his sickbed to accept the cup Lord Esrex handed him with an encouraging smile, while in the background a dark, veiled shape stirred a little in the shadows... dreamed of the octagonal library tower against a robin’s-egg evening sky, its windows-rosy with lights that gleamed on the steel helmets of armed men slowly gathering in the court below.
The dreams faded, turned cloudy and strange. Dimly, through his sleep, he felt the turning of the universe as the sun-tide strengthened and the year approached its pivot point, where its forces could be seized and swung by a man who knew its laws. Even those who knew nothing of magic felt it somehow, that at those two points—midsummer and midwinter—the doors that separated the mortal from the uncanny stood open, to admit sometimes fairies, sometimes the ghosts of the dead, and sometimes God. And even in his sleep, his hand, which lay curled around his glasses upon his chest, moved to touch the Spiracle, to feel there the whispered magic of the Void.
Then he dreamed, much more clearly, of Paul von Rath, sitting in his own study, that dark, vast room choked with stolen books, unkempt, unshaven for the first time since Rhion had known him, gaunt cheeks spotted with the dry fever of his obsession and gray eyes chilled and narrowed to cold silver-white as he bent over his books, reading... He wore no uniform, only the dressing gown of thick, dark silk he’d had on in the cellar, his naked chest visible beneath it and the steel swastika on