Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (10 page)

“Nonsense,” Gall retorted coldly, returning his pendulum to its box. “I have said before, it is a wizard’s sublime faith in himself that conquers poison.”

“It c-can’t be! Then a talisman of protection wouldn’t protect someone who didn’t know what it was.”

“Precisely. It is only the illuminatus, the initiate, the pure, who can draw upon the
vril
…”

They were bickering acrimoniously as they opened the door, going from the lamplit gloom of the workroom to the sun-drenched morning brilliance of the upstairs hall outside.

Von Rath sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “I didn’t truly expect it to work,” he said. “And Jacobus would tell me that was why it didn’t, of course. But, Rhion, we have done everything, tried everything… You said the ritual of meditation this morning raised more power than ever before, but you know and I know it wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. Not even with every allowance you made for the position of the stars, the phase of the moon… Nothing. And with our army going into France…”

He paused, seeing the flicker of expression that passed across Rhion’s eyes. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know what you would be saying. But truly, war as it is fought now—as it is fought in this world—is the province of the first attacker. Had we not taken the initiative this spring—and it was they who first attacked us a year ago—we would have been driven, as we now drive them.”

“Yes,” Rhion lied, turning away to mop the spilled poison where it had slopped from the dish. “Yes, I understand that.”

Von Rath’s voice was low and urgent. “Please understand also that the war is nothing—it is, for us, only a means to an end. It is our last chance—the last chance of wizardry—to demonstrate our powers, to regain our powers with the backing of the government. That is why we
must
succeed at what we do here.”

He picked up the garnet talisman and returned it to a box of failed experiments, of talismans—properly made, properly charged—that simply did not work. The lamplight flashed across the jewel’s central facet and caught on a scratch on one side, as if the stone had been prised from a setting. A good-quality gem, Rhion thought, far better than most wizards in his own world could afford for talismanic work unless they had an extremely rich patron. He could understand von Rath’s concern—without the support of the government, the group would never have been able to work under these ideal conditions.

But it crossed his mind to wonder, suddenly, where the Occult Bureau got the gems it sent them.

“Rhion,” von Rath said, closing the box and turning with one slender hand still on its lid, “you haven’t been—coming down to the laboratory to work at night, have you?”

Rhion felt himself get cold. In anything but the golden kerosene light he knew von Rath could have seen him pale. “I did once or twice when I first got back on my feet, but not lately.” He could feel sweat start under his hair and beard.

Von Rath frowned. “No, this would have been the night before last. I thought the laboratory was disturbed a little yesterday morning, as if it had been used.”

While part of Rhion breathed a prayer of gratitude that he’d always been meticulous about returning things to rights after his nights of work—so von Rath
did
notice things like that—another part of him was able to put genuine puzzlement in his voice as he said, “The night before last?” He’d finished the Spiracle last week and had been catching up on lost sleep ever since.

“Yes. And Baldur also seems to think that his room has been searched, though he has become… a little paranoid.”

“I’m told cocaine does that.” Rhion remembered his own conviction that his room had been searched.

Von Rath’s gem-pure lips tightened; then he sighed. “He takes it to continue his researches, you know,” he said quietly. “There is a truly formidable amount of material to get through—diaries, letters, court cases dating back to the fifteenth century… I keep a close eye on how much he takes.”

If you’re his only source
, thought Rhion. But, anxious to turn the Captain’s thoughts away from who might have been using the laboratory at night, he suggested, “Do you think the problem of raising power might be with the composition of this group?” He pushed his glasses more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose and followed von Rath as the younger wizard started moving about the laboratory, turning down the kerosene lamps until their wicks snuffed to nothing and the shadows hovered down about them like the fall of night.

“According to Gall, and to what Baldur’s read to me, the old covens seem to have been much larger than ours. Five men isn’t a lot, even if they are mageborn and more or less trained. Magic can be raised from the emotional or psychic or life-force energies of human beings, as Baldur pointed out last night. But blood-sacrifice, either voluntary or involuntary, isn’t the only way of doing that, you know. Perhaps if you worked with twice as many men as this, and an equal number of women, you’d get better results.”

Von Rath chuckled wearily and turned from replacing a lamp chimney, shadows of irony flickering in his tired eyes. “My dear Rhion, have you any concept of the contortions Eric had to undertake to gather even this group? To find men whose loyalty was as reliable as their potential for power, and who were even willing to work as a group?” He shook his head with a half-comic smile and led the way out into the sunlit upstairs hall. “And as for women…” The gesture of his hand, as dismissive as a shrug, raised the hackles on Rhion’s neck. “Women have no place in magic.”

“WHAT?”

“Not true magic.”
Surely you must know that
, said the flex of his voice, as Rhion stared at him, too dumbfounded even to feel outrage. “Their emotions are uncontrollable—surely you’ve tried to have a reasonable argument with a woman? Their intellects are on the average less than men’s. That’s been scientifically proven. Oh, there are one or two exceptions…”

“I’ve met enough exceptions to constitute a rule, personally.”

But the little smile and the small, amused shake of his head were impenetrable. It was not, Rhion saw, a matter even for serious argument, as if Rhion had suggested petitioning the help of the kitchen cat.

Von Rath gave him a boyish half grin, a man-to-man expression of complicity. “It’s hard to explain, but
you
know. It’s one of those things that a true man
knows
by intuition. And at bottom, magic
is
a masculine trait. A woman’s emotionalism and wooly-mindedness would only delay us, always supposing we could
find
a woman with even a tenth the level of power of a man.”

Given the intolerable pressures a mageborn girl would have faced in Germany, Rhion hadn’t been terribly surprised that the Torweg group was entirely masculine. And yet from Poincelles he knew that there were and always had been women occultists. But not, it appeared, in Nazi Germany.

“And in any case,” von Rath went on, turning down the hallway toward his rooms, “the question at the moment is an academic one. We must find a way to raise power—we must find a way to convert that power to operationality—and we must find them soon. Only through those—only through the victory that such power will bring—can magic be returned to this world.”

“And did little ratty die?” Cigar in hand, Poincelles looked around from the doorway of the watch room at the foot of the stairs. Beyond him Rhion—who had changed once more into his usual fatigue pants and a brown army shirt—could see that the room had been curtained to dimness, and the portable screen set up on which cinemas were displayed; the black-and-white images of newsreels of the war in the West flickered across it like jiggling ghosts.

“Did you have money on it living?”

The Frenchman grinned broadly. After the dawn ritual of meditation to raise power he hadn’t even bothered to attend the experiment with the talisman. He’d changed out of his robe back into the same loud tweed trousers and jacket he’d had on last night—the same shirt and underclothing by the smell of it. “Boche idiots,” he said.

Past Poincelles’ angular shoulder the fluttering images of huge war machines appeared on the screen in the gloom of the watch room, monstrous metal beetles rumbling down the cobbled streets of towns with their turret guns swinging watchfully back and forth; then, with dreamlike quickness, they were transformed to images of men—Rhion did not have enough German unassisted by spells of understanding to catch who they were—being herded out of a building somewhere, herded into boxcars with their hands above their heads. The Ministry of Propaganda sent these newsreels, these moving pictures, out regularly to the SS, even as it sent whatever American cinemas they wanted to see… they had taught Rhion more about the German Reich than von Rath had counted on. Most of all, they had taught him that the Reich was sufficiently proud enough of those fearsome columns of marching men, those lines of resistant “slave peoples” being shot for intransigence, to have them thus immortalized and displayed.

Baldur, clattering down the steps behind Rhion in his own ill-fitting and dirty trousers and rumpled shirt, paused and snapped spitefully, “For a man whose country will be the next to fall to the victorious German Armies you have no room to talk!” He pointed into the watch room, where columns of armored trucks and marching men flickered across the screen. “You know where they’re headed now? France! Your cowardly government is on the run and they’ll be in Paris before the week is out!”

Poincelles only raised the back of his fist up under one hairy nostril and snorted in a mime of inhaling cocaine. Baldur’s fleshy neck turned bright red and, wheeling, the youth lumbered away to the dining room, tripping on a corner of the hall rug as he went.

“Does he think I’m going to weep when the Krauts march into La Belle Paris?” The Frenchman’s skeletal face grimaced with scorn. “I am a citizen of the world, my friend, born and reborn down through generations. What is this war to me? What is France to me? I was high mage to the court of Kublai Khan, who conjured for him the eldritch secrets of the Aklo and the Hyperborean races. Before that, in the dark years of glory in the seventh century, I conjured for Pope Leo those things that would have caused his name to be stricken from the pages of history, had any known of them but I. In the black abysses of time I was High Priest of the Cult of Thoth for the Pharaoh Ptah-Hotep, who was accursed in the Red
Land and the Black
Land
for the things that he caused to be done…”

He took the cigar from his mouth and blew a stinking stream of blue smoke into the sunlit air. In the watch room Rhion heard the men give a great delighted cheer; on the screen he saw a country road, jammed with people—old men pushing bicycles laden with household goods, women hurrying, stumbling, dragging frightened children by the hand, old cars maneuvering slowly through the choking throng of people fleeing with whatever they could carry…

And from the sky the war planes descended, lean and deadly with the twisted sun-cross emblazoned on their silver sides, opening fire with their machine guns on the fleeing civilians below. The guards in the watch room cheered and whooped at the sight of the women running for shelter, dropping all they carried and catching up their terrified children, men scrambling like scared sheep into the bushes alongside the road, faces twisted in silent cries.

Rhion felt sick and cold. Beside him, Poincelles’ voice went on, “That Baldur, he puts on airs because he wants to be in the SS, to be one of Himmler’s darlings. Himmler, huh! A mediocrity, a crank—using the most powerful and dangerous elite the world has ever known to serve tea in white gloves at Hitler’s garden parties. It’s like using a Damascus blade to cut eclairs! Himmler claims he was the Emperor Henry the Fowler in his former life—pah! I knew Henry the Fowler! I served in his court in the great days of the Dark Ages, in the wars against the Magyars and the Slavs, and Himmler is no more his reincarnation than you are. I learn from them, yes”—he waved the cigar in the direction of the sun-washed dining room, where Baldur’s voice could be heard querulously demanding more sugar for his coffee, —“as I learn from you. But all this is merely a step along the way.”

The black, knowing eyes gleamed and he reached out to pat Rhion’s cheek, the pointed fingernails pricking through his beard like dirty claws. “I am in this for myself, my little friend. You really ought to trust me.”

On the newsreel screen the war planes made another strafing run at the crowded road. A man scrambled out of one of the cars and bolted for the roadside; his foot tangled in the wheel-spokes of a fallen bicycle and for a moment he tugged frantically to free it, desperate, horrified, as the double line of bullets rip-sawed the road, bursting a crate of chickens ten feet from him in an explosion of blood and feathers, then swept on to cut him in half. The guards catcalled and shouted facetious advice; Horst Eisler half turned in his wooden chair, called out, “Rhion, you got to come in and see this!”

And the wizard born and reborn, mage to the court of Kublai Khan and High Priest of the gray cult of Thoth in the silent deeps of time, strolled off down the hall toward the dining room to get his breakfast, trailing a line of bluish stench in his wake.

FROM HIS WINDOW IN THE DARKNESS, RHION
watched the cadaverous shadow of Poincelles cross the yard to the wire. The sentry had been loitering in the spot, smoking, for some minutes now—it was this which had first caught Rhion’s attention. Now he saw the Frenchman hand the Storm Trooper something and, reaching out with his mageborn senses, heard him say, “…maybe all night. Square the next man, will you?”

“
Jawohl
, mate.” The guard saluted. “Heil Hitler.” And he strolled away lighting a cigarette, his shadow fawning about his feet like a cat as he passed beneath the floodlight.

Fascinating
. Rhion scratched his beard and leaned an elbow on the sill. With his room unlit behind him, there was little danger of being seen as long as he kept back far enough to prevent the glare from catching on his glasses.

His first thought, that Poincelles was out to do some courting in the woods, was banished by the rather large satchel the French mage carried. Services rendered were usually paid for more neatly than that. Besides, he knew the man generally got his boots waxed, as the saying went, in the village, or had Horst Eisler bring one of the barmaids up to the Schloss itself.