The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,95
its chain at his throat catching the light in a flat, hard flash. Like something scried at a distance, Rhion saw him raise his head as the study door opened and saw Poincelles there, dark face flushed with spite...
Then he woke, gasping, the heat pressing upon him like a slow ruthless vampire, and sweat running down his face, matting clothes and beard and hair. The sun was sinking. The three splinters of light from the louvered vent had stretched to arrows, then to attenuated javelins, and now were fading altogether; in the yard were the sounds of truck engines and the dulled, angry grate of men, foul-mouthed with disappointment and fatigue.
“They sound beat,” Sara whispered, her lips twisting in a grin as she flipped over a card. “Good—by two in the morning, we’d be able to take a steam calliope and horses out of here without them noticing.”
The sentries around the perimeter of the house had been doubled, but the men were, as Sara had said, exhausted from a day of combing the woods, and it was a simple matter to create an illusion near the fence in a spot just out of view of the gully under the wire. It was a fairly ordinary illusion—two dogs copulating—but of sufficient interest to the type of men who made up the SS to hold their attention. Rhion, Sara, and Rebbe Leibnitz crossed the yard together and slipped under the fence and so into the woods.
Rhion and Leibnitz spent the following day hiding in the woods on the slopes behind Witches Hill. The guards from the Schloss, fortified with Waffen divisions from Kegenwald and even from Gross Rosen, were still searching, though not very energetically, Rhion thought, scrying for them in a pool of standing water. Still, the danger from them was real enough to prevent him from sleeping much or from sinking for long at a time into the meditation he knew he’d need to gather his strength for tonight.
He attempted to scry for the SS wizards both in water and in his crystal and, not much to his surprise, could not. At another time of year, perhaps, with greater concentration... But for them, too, the sun-tide held some little power; their seal after all was the sun-wheel, turning in reverse. He did manage to see the Schloss from far off, a tiny image in the pond, and as the afternoon lengthened and the shadows began to cool he saw the gray truck with its black swastikas creeping like a poisonous beetle on the straight track that ran from the Schloss’ gates away toward Round Pond and thence to the Kegenwald road. I will disembowel them, von Rath had said, leaning forward in the stifling gloom of the Schloss library. Every one... Every one...
They would be saving the most powerful wizard they had for tonight’s sacrifice, Rhion thought, and shivered. More than one, probably, to draw out their souls, the essences of the lives, their torment, and their pain, focusing them by those ancient rituals through von Rath’s drugged mind to make talismans of power in the vain hope that quantity might somehow make a qualitative difference.
If they caught him between now and midnight, Rhion had a horrible certainty about what his own fate as well as Leibnitz’ would be.
At sunset, Sara returned. Rhion had scried for her half a dozen times during the day, at intervals in a thoroughly enjoyable argument with Leibnitz about the multiplicity of God, not because he thought he could help her at this distance but because he could not do otherwise. But her errand had been uneventful, and she came up the path to the clearing where they were to meet, pushing a stolen bicycle before her with a cardboard suitcase of clothes strapped to its handlebars. “I got train tickets,” she said briefly, opening her handbag—a considerably older and more conservative one than she usually carried—to hand Rhion a bar of black-market chocolate and extract a cigarette for herself. She wore a sternly tailored brown dress and low-heeled walking shoes, in keeping with the persona on her identity papers, an assistant bookseller’s clerk traveling with her boss on a buying tour. To her father she tossed, from the suitcase, a shabby tweed jacket, a clean shirt, and a better-looking cap. “I also got you a razor, Papa—you don’t have enough beard yet to look like anything but an escapee from a camp, and if you shave, it’ll look like you’ve got more hair than