The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,97

in the ground, pointing straight and glowing to the crossing at the Dancing Stones. Sunk in a half trance as he walked, Rhion sensed the lift and swell of the solstice power, as sun, stars, moon, and time drifted to their balance point, and it was as if every leaf, every fern, every mushroom, needle, and fallen fir cone gave forth a faint silvery shine.

The Stones, when he reached them, seemed to glow with it in the dark.

All gates stood open tonight. As he walked toward those two lumpish guardians and the broken altar between them, he felt as if he had been here on other solstice eves. His fear of pursuit, the sick terror he felt at what he guessed would happen to him if they were caught, eased and fell away. He sensed the whisper everywhere of freely given death and ecstatic mating, as if hundreds of bare feet all around him even yet swished the deep grass that washed the stones’ sides.

He had reached the Stones by midnight. He could escape. Jaldis...

He wasn’t sure why he thought of the old man just then—perhaps out of sorrow that for him there would be no returning, perhaps only some echo of a dream that he couldn’t recall.

Sara and her father stopped just beyond the edge of the trees that ringed the meadow. Rhion, his mind already settled into the rhythm of the triumphant sun, walked on alone.

The power of the ancient stone rose to meet him as he touched it. Every breath he drew drank light from the murmuring air. Overhead the moon stood, a day past full and half risen to its zenith, like the sweet swell of summer music drowning the stars. As he invoked the four corners of the earth, Rhion touched, like a ghastly shudder in the air, a fragment of the power that was being raised to the west, a stench of burned flesh and agony, and felt along the network of the leys that elsewhere it was the same, rites of hate being performed in ancient places of power whose names were only names to him: Nuremburg, Welwelsburg, Munich. The dread of pursuit touched him again, and with it the strange sense déjà vu, but with the drawing of the Circle around the Stones he cut out both the thin psychic clamor and the evil power raised.

By the stars it was after eleven, though he did not need to see the sky’s great clock to know that midnight was near. Through a deepening trance he called the last remnants of his own power from his exhausted flesh, linking it with the altar stone and the turning firmament above, and he knew that no matter how many wizards Shavus had called in to help him on the other side, the jump was going to be bad.

A bluish haze of light trailed from his fingers as they brushed the altar stone, and everything that had been written there over the course of millennia seemed to swim to the surface: ancient runes; spells of light; handprints with fingers cut away in sacrifice; and the names of gods that went back to the name of the single power, the oldest names of the Mother and the Sky.

He stepped up onto the altar stone, barely aware of the world outside the Circle he had drawn and of the two dark forms of the only people he had cared for in this world watching from the edge of the trees. Raising the Spiracle on its staff he summoned, and seemed to see, far off and there inches from his feet, a column of smoky darkness, stirring nameless colors, an abyss without light. All that was within him called forth the power of the Void, of the stone of sacrifice on which he stood, and of the turning stars.

He waited.

He knew when midnight came. The whole universe whispered a single word. Somewhere, dimly, there were shrieks, but the Circle he had drawn around the place held them out. The dark field of the Void’s magic enveloped him, and he reached out into it, seeking...

And found nothing.

No light, no sign, no answering call.

He deepened his concentration, forced his aching mind to focus more sharply, more clearly, searching that darkness, waiting, reaching, not thinking about what it meant that they were late.

If late was all they were.

He thought, No. Please, no.

In his trance state, time was not the same, but he knew when a half-hour passed, and then an hour. The wheel