Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (16 page)

As von Rath pulled him through that hideously vibrant house Rhion held out his hand, summoning witchlight to his palm. Nothing happened. He fumbled a match from his pocket and held it out, half afraid to call fire to the dried red sulfur-paste at its tip. He felt almost afraid to speak, for fear of waking some terrible force by the softest of words.

No fire burst onto the match, but out of an obscure fear that things were on the verge of uncontrolled chaos Rhion put the match tip into his mouth and wet it thoroughly before dropping it onto a table in the hall. “Were you able to convert it?”

“Not yet.” Von Rath halted with him before the temple’s doors.

There were no guards in this part of the house, no lights. The temple doors stood open, and Rhion recoiled before the dark power he saw moving within, shifting and quivering in the blur of candlelight and smoke. Within the long, black-painted room he could see horribly half-familiar marks scrawled everywhere on the parquet, save around the altar, where Gall, stripped to his underwear, was engaged in washing the floor.

The smell told Rhion what had gone on that night, and the hair lifted on his neck.

“But don’t you see?” von Rath giggled, shivering all over with triumph and glee. “
We won’t need to
. I made Baldur see the things I wanted him to see. The three of us here in the temple, performing the blood-rites of power, and him on the other side of the house… I made illusions in his mind and
he saw them
!”

Rhion pulled away from the clutching hands, disgusted and horrified. “If he was as crocked as you are I’m surprised he didn’t see Venus on the half shell rising out of the sink!”

“No.” He caught Rhion’s face between his palms, staring down into his eyes and seeing in them nothing but his own triumph, his own vindication, his own joy. “He saw nothing, no hallucination, but those that I projected into his mind. He wrote them down, with the exact times of their appearances—they were the same, Rhion!

“Don’t you see? Maybe we can’t convert power to physical operancy, not yet, though that will come. But once we can control illusion,
we can take out the British air cover
. And that will be enough to ensure the success of the invasion of England. And after that—” His voice sank to a whisper, “—they’ll give me anything I want.”

SARA WAS WAITING FOR HIM WHEN HE GOT TO HIS
attic room. The door was barricaded; he tapped at it softly and spoke her name, and after a moment heard a chair being moved. Her hair was rumpled, half the buttons torn off her dress to show a sailor’s paradise of bosom, her smile sardonic. “Big hotshot wizard and you can’t levitate a little chair?” The electric bulb over the bed was on; Rhion automatically switched it off and took a match from his pocket to light the candles. In the diffuse glow of the yard lights outside Sara put her hands on her hips. “Now, look,
boychik
, I’ve had enough…”

“I hate that light,” he said wearily, pushing up his glasses to rub his eyes. From his trouser pocket he took the notes he had been given—notes von Rath had insisted on going over with him, while Gall cleaned up something in the corner of the temple that clattered with soft metallic noises—and put them in the drawer with the wristwatch he never wore these days. “Horst brought you up here?”

She sniffed, sitting back on a corner of the bed but watching him warily. “After a couple of the boys in the watch room who’d heard old Pauli declare open season got done pawing me, yeah.”

He winced. “I’m sorry.”

“The hell you are. You got a cigarette?”

He shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

“You and Hitler.” In the candlelight her eyes were dark and very angry. “You’re all bastards.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“Home?” She laughed bitterly. “I haven’t
got
a home. You think after all this I’m gonna be able to go back to Aunt Tayta and Uncle Mel in New York and be their little girl again?” She turned her face from him, the wide mouth clenched taut under its smeared lipstick. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her as he would have comforted anyone in that much pain, but he knew if he touched her she’d break his jaw.

Then she drew a deep breath, forcing some of the tension to ease. “Oh, hell,” she said in time. “I get pinched and kissed all the time at the tavern—it wasn’t anything I don’t do every day.” Rhion thought about the two Storm Troopers and wisely said nothing. “ ‘Invest in good faith,’ Uncle Mel is always saying—he’s a tailor. ‘Make them smile when they remember you.’ Auntie would kill him if she knew how I was applying that particular sample of avuncular wisdom.”

And still she watched him, like a cornered animal, waiting for him to make a move toward her, to prove to her that he was, in fact, like every other man. After a long minute, when he didn’t, she said in a much quieter voice, “I want to see my Papa. You say you’re a wizard. You show me him in that damn crystal of yours.” She jerked her head toward the scrying crystal’s hiding place in the rafters and he realized she must have taken some opportunity, either now or during her earlier searches of the place, to go through his room. “Then I’ll go back to town.”

Rhion took a deep breath, brought over a chair, and fetched the crystal down. “I can’t show you him.”

Her mouth twisted. “What a surprise!” she said sarcastically. “How come it’s always the wizard who gets to squint into the crystal ball? It’s only his word to the marks what this person or that person is doing.”

“Well, it’s the goddam best I can do!” Rhion flared. “Now do you want it, or do you just want to get the hell out of here and let me go to bed? Jesus, why do I always end up dealing with you at three in the morning?”

“I want to see him,” Sara said, her voice suddenly small and tight, and looked away.

She had, as she’d said, slept her way through every SS barracks between here and the Swiss border to find him. Rhion felt the anger go out of him, remembering that. Of course she expected him to cheat her. Sitting on the bed with her disheveled hair and rumpled dress, she looked very young and alone. Rhion moved the chair out of the way, wincing as the cut on the back of his arm pulled, and said, “All right, give me the glasses. But I can guarantee you right now, if your father’s as wise as you think he is, that what he’s doing is sleeping.”

He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and sketched around himself a Circle of Power. As he settled his mind, deepening it into preliminary meditation, he noted that Sara, chatty as she was with the men in the tavern, seemed to realize the need for silence.
Of course
, he thought.
She’s a wizard’s daughter
. Whether she thought it was hooey or not, her father had taught her the rules.

The moon stood low, a sickly scrap of itself tangled in the black of the eastern trees. Even the crickets’ endless screeking in the warm spring night had fallen silent. With the moon’s waning the dark field of power enveloping the house felt stronger yet. Rhion guessed he could have tapped into that field to make the scrying easier, but instead blocked it from the Circle as best he could; as a result, it took him the usual endless forty minutes to raise the strength. His head began to ache, but nothing would have induced him to partake of what had been done tonight. The pince-nez lay like an insect’s cast chitin in his right hand, the crystalline lattices of the glass holding the psychic energies that had surrounded them; in his left the scrying crystal flashed sharply in the reflected candlelight. He pursued those flame reflections down into the stone’s structure, sinking through the gem’s familiar pathways until colors came, then darkness, then the clear gray mist that rolled aside so suddenly to reveal a tiny image, like something reflected over his shoulder or in another room.

“It’s a cell about eight feet square,” he murmured, and somewhere behind him the bedsprings creaked as Sara leaned forward. “Cement walls, cement floor, iron cot, bucket in one corner.” A part of him whispered in relief. He had been afraid to look into the place where the glasses had come from, afraid of what he might see. “There’s a window high up, floodlight outside… A man sitting on the edge of the cot. Tall and skinny…” Rhion frowned, concentrating on details. “His head’s been shaved, the stubble’s gray and white… Long eyebrows, curling—gray. There’s a scar on his lip, not very old…”

The glasses still between his fingers, he touched the place and heard Sara’s hissing intake of breath. “Bastards.
Bastards!
” Poisoned tears shook in her voice. “He had a mole there, under his beard. They shave them when they put them in the camps.”

If he thought about it—if he let anger or outrage or anything else intrude on the effort of concentration—he would lose the image altogether and be unable to get it back. His training had given him discipline to exclude even the worst of horrors from his mind. But it was a near thing.

After a moment he went on, “He’s wearing dark pants of some kind, patches… gray shirt in rags. His knees are skinny, bones sticking out through the cloth—long thin hands, brown age spots—He looks too old to be your father.”

Dimly he heard her voice say, “He was forty-one when he met Mama.”

“He’s standing up, walking to the window, trying to look out but it’s over his head. He’s worried, fidgety, pacing around.”

“Can you tell where the place is?” She leaned forward, her hands with their bitten red nails clasped on her knees. “Is he still at Kegenwald?”

“I don’t know.” He spoke dreamily, detached, struggling to keep his concentration focused on the old man’s face. A curious face, beaky and strong in spite of its egglike nakedness, the dark eyes as they gazed up at the narrow window filled with horror and concern that held no trace of personal fear. Rhion felt a kind of awe, for having tasted the aura of the place, through the box of glasses and through Dr. Weineke’s cold smile, he knew he himself would have been huddled in a corner puking with terror. And he knew there were still things about this that he didn’t know.

“Have you seen the camp?” he asked softly. “I can go up and look through the window myself, describe what I see…”

Within the crystal he saw the old man look up swiftly, at some unheard sound outside. Then he pressed to the wall beneath the window, straining to hear, and Rhion concentrated on moving past him, up the wall until he was level with the opening, which, he saw now, was barred, wire laced into the glass. Through it he could see a vast, bare yard under the glare of yellow floodlights, row upon row of bleak wooden barracks beyond and, past them, a wire fence closing off the compound from the dreary, endless darkness of the pinewoods. Wooden towers stood along the fence, manned by dark shapes with glinting machine guns. Between two such towers was a wire gate, which gray-clothed sentries opened to admit the smaller of Schloss Torweg’s two flatbed transport trucks.

The truck turned in the yard, pulled to a stop before a building opposite the barracks; more guards emerged from the building’s lighted door into the floodlit glare. With them was Dr. Weineke, her graying fair hair pulled back tight and every button buttoned, though it must be nearing four in the morning, and another man in a more ornate black SS uniform whom Rhion guessed was the commandant of the camp. Auguste Poincelles climbed down from the truck cab, rumpled and unshaven but moving with that gawky, skeletal lightness characteristic of him. He said something to Weineke and gestured; she nodded, and the camp commandant craned his head a little to see as guards untied the canvas flaps of the truck’s cover.

They brought out three stretchers, one of which they hadn’t had a spare blanket to cover.

“Jesus!” Rhion shut his eyes, but not fast enough—for an instant he thought he was going to be sick. The facets of the crystal bit his palm as he clenched his hand over it, as if that could let him unsee what he had seen. “Oh, God…”

“What?”

He pressed his hands to his face, unable for a moment to speak. By the face—or what was left of the face—of the woman on the stretcher, she’d been conscious for most of it.

Then anger hit him, terror laced with rage. Though violence had never been part of his nature, he’d have horsewhipped a man who’d perform such acts upon so much as a rat. Baldur had read him secondhand accounts of the accursed Shining Crystal group, but the thought of such things actually being done, no matter in what cause—the thought of the kind of power that would result and what it would do to those who summoned it—turned his stomach and brought sweat cold to his face.

“Are you all right?” Hard little hands touched his shoulders, soft breasts pressed into his back. “What did you see? What is it?”

He shook his head, and managed to whisper, “Your father’s all right,” knowing that would be her first concern. “It’s just—I looked out through the window… He’s at Kegenwald, all right. Weineke was there, and Poincelles—Poincelles drove the truck…”

“What truck?”

He shook his head again, trying to rid it of what he knew would always be there now, as if burned into his forebrain.

“What did you see?” She pulled him around to face her where she knelt on the floor. When he wouldn’t answer she snagged her purse from where it lay at the foot of the bed, took out a tin flask, and pressed it into his hands. He wasn’t sure whether the stuff inside was intended to be gin or vodka, but it didn’t succeed at either one. Nevertheless, it helped.

After a long moment he whispered hoarsely, “Back in my world those in the Dark Traffic—the necromancers, the demon-callers—usually have trouble getting victims. I see now they just don’t have the right connections.”

“You mean von Rath’s doing human sacrifice.”

Though he knew she was only thinking in terms of throat-cutting, he nodded.

“Papa…”

“It’s all right,” he said quickly, seeing the fear in her eyes. “I’ll help you get him out.”

For the length of an intaken breath she was just a girl, wonder and gratitude flooding her wide dark eyes. But the next moment all that she’d done to get this far came back on her, and her body settled again, her parted lips close and wry. “And what do you get out of it?”

“I need his help. I need the help of a wizard to get me back to my own world.”