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

The sun-cross, Rhion noticed for the first time, was reversed, so that it turned not toward light, but toward darkness.

“My name, by the way,” Paul’s voice said quietly, “is Captain Paul von Rath, of the Occult Bureau of the Ancestral Heritage Division of the Protection Squad. And though it is a sorry and tragic welcome, I do welcome you nevertheless, in the name of the German Reich.”

SOLSTICE

“AS FAR AS WE CAN DETERMINE,” PAUL VON RATH
said, the light wind generated by their vehicle’s speed flicking the fair hair like a raw-silk pennon from his forehead, “magic has not existed in our world for at least a hundred and seventy years. Whether this was the result of the actions of the men who hated it—and in our world magic has been deeply hated by both society and the church, as Jaldis told me that it is in yours—or whether it was an accident, a natural event like the fall of night, we have not been able to determine.”

He sighed and turned his head, watching the endless monotony of dark pinewoods flashing past them: the low roll of moraine hills still shawled with cold blue shadows on their western sides, though the sky overhead was bright; the gray loom of granite boulders among soft green bracken or pine straw the color of dust; a landscape occasionally broken by abandoned meadows rank with weeds and murky with shallow, silted ponds; and here and there a crumbling barn.

“We only know that accounts of what can be termed actual magic became more and more sparse, and harder and harder to authenticate, until they ceased entirely. And that when we attempt to work what magicians of old claimed to be spells, we achieve nothing.”

Rhion shivered, wondering what it must have been to be born with the power of wizardry—as he had been born—in a world where magic no longer existed—where such power, such longing, such dreams, could never be consummated and could never be anything but the slow oncoming of madness.

It was something he didn’t like to think of at present. It was difficult enough to tell himself, as he did daily, sometimes hourly, that even the smallest of his own powers and perceptions—his ability to scry through a crystal, to channel energy into divining cards, or to deepen his senses to perceive sounds and scents and vibrations beyond the range of ordinary human awareness—would return and that they had not been permanently stripped away by the passage through the Void.

Three weeks isn’t so long…

The first two weeks had seemed an eternity of lying feverish and weak in the great, gray granite hunting lodge called Schloss Torweg, mourning for Jaldis, sick with terror, disoriented and more alone than he had ever felt in his life.

He had been up and around for some days, but it was good now to be out in open air.

They came onto the main road through the hills. Gold morning sunlight slanted into their eyes as they drove eastward, palpable as javelins of gold. It splashed with light the tangles of wild ivy crowning the steep banks of the road cut, turned to liquid gold the buttercups in the roadside ditches, and made stars of the frail white spangles of dogwood and may. Somewhere in the woods a robin called, the sweet notes a comforting reminder of the thickets of the Drowned Lands, where for seven years he had served the Ladies of the Moon as scribe. A gray hare flickered momentarily into view at the top of the bank, but bounded away at the roaring approach of the vehicle they called a car.

Rhion had to grin at the thought of the car. It was a conveyance straight out of a fairy tale, moving, without beast to draw it, at speeds that covered in an hour the distance it would take to journey in a day—except, of course, that no talespinner he’d ever encountered in any marketplace in the Forty Civilized Realms had ever thought to describe such a marvel as being so raucously noisy or so comprehensively smelly.

Beside him, von Rath went on, “Germany is the only realm now whose rulers believe in magic, who will support wizards and them give them aid and help. And now her enemies have declared war on her and are massing on our borders, ready to attack as soon as the weather dries. It is essential that we recover magic, learn what became of it and how we can bring it back. For, if they conquer, even what belief still exists will perish and there will be nothing left—only those mechanistic bureaucracies, those believers in nothing, who seek to destroy what they cannot understand.”

In the front seat the young blond titan named Horst Eisler who had been assigned as their driver by the Protection Squad—Schutzstaffel, in the harsh German tongue, shortened, as the Germans did with all long words, to SS—gazed straight ahead at the broken black cut of the pavement where it passed through the hills. Baldur, sitting beside the driver, was as usual twisted half round in his seat so that he could hang onto von Rath’s every word. The driver slowed, easing the car around a place where last night’s rain had washed a great slide of mud and boulders down from the twelve-foot banks that hemmed in this stretch of road; because of a car’s speed and power, it required a deal more concentration to drive than a horse and, moreover, required a far better surface to drive upon.

To Rhion’s right, Auguste Poincelles was arguing with Gall, who sat perched on the little jump seat that folded down from the door. “Of course Witches Hill was a place of power, a holy place!” Gall was fulminating in his shrill Viennese accent, his silver mane and beard streaming in the wind. “It lies upon a crossing of the leys, the energy-tracks that cover all the earth in a net of energy. Moreover, upon the night of the last full moon I slept among the time-runneled menhirs there, among the Dancing Stones, and a vision was visited unto me of eldritch Druids and olden warriors with the sacred swastika tattooed upon their broad breasts…”

Poincelles let out a crack of rude laughter. “Druids in Germany? You’ve been reading Bulwer-Lytton’s novels again, Jacobus.” He took a cigar from his pocket and lit it. Most of the people in this world were addicted to the inhaled smoke of cured tobacco leaves, and everything—cars, houses, furniture, and clothing—stank of it.

“Scoff if you like,” the old wizard replied calmly, and his pale, fanatic eyes took on a faraway gleam. “I saw them, I tell you. Upon those stones they performed sacrifices that raised the power to keep the mighty armies of Rome at bay.”

Poincelles laughed again, shaking back his greasy black forelock. “Ah, now when Mussolini invades us we’ll know just what to do!”

Rhion sighed inwardly, not surprised at the constant bickering of the three wizards under von Rath’s command. Wizards in his own world squabbled constantly. He wondered, with a stab of grief and regret, what Jaldis would have made of them.

He wondered, too, when they reached the place called of old Witches Hill, whether Jaldis would have been able to detect the ancient magic Gall claimed had been raised upon that spot.

The hill itself was clearly artificial, standing alone at one end of an overgrown meadow to the east of the long pine-cloaked ridge that backed Schloss Torweg. As they waded toward it through the knee-deep grass, Rhion studied the low, flattened mound, guessing that there had probably once been an energy-collecting chamber of some kind underneath—it was a good guess that if ley-lines did exist in this world, this was raised on one. According to Gall, Schloss Torweg had been likewise built upon a ley. Certainly the little hill upon which it stood, larger than this one but probably also artificial, had enjoyed a rather queer reputation in centuries past.

Standing among the three lumpish stones that crowned the hill—the Dancing Stones, they were called, one erect, two lying fallen and nearly covered with dew-sodden weeds—Rhion could feel no magic here at all.

And yet, he thought, that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. While the others moved about among the stones, Poincelles caressing the worn dolomite with his eyes half shut and Gall swinging pebbles on pendulum threads, their feet leaving dark-green swathes in the flashing diamond carpet of the dew, Rhion sat at one end of a fallen stone, breathing silence into his heart and listening. Though he was unable yet to detect the faint, silvery pulse of ley-energy through the ground, still the sweet calm of the April sunlight that warmed his face eased something within him. For the first time since his coming to this world, the hurt of losing Jaldis and the fear that he would never be able to find his way back lessened. He found himself thinking,
If magic still exists here it might give von Rath and his partners another energy source, help them in their efforts
.

Suddenly curious, he got to his feet, brushed the dirt and twigs from the hand-me-down Wehrmacht fatigue pants he wore, and turned his steps down the little hill. Pinewoods surrounded the meadow on all sides, rising to the west almost at the hill’s foot behind a tangled belt of laurel and blackberry brambles. Though Rhion still sensed no buried energy as he picked his way among nests of fern, bracken, and fallen gray branches, still the cool spice of the pine scent, the sigh of the moving boughs, and the occasional coin-bright warmth of stray beads of sunlight were balm to him. The land sloped gently toward the main ridge as he walked on. There was some hope, he thought, both for himself and for this world, for magic’s return…

“Halt!”

Startled, Rhion stopped and raised his head. A Storm Trooper in the black uniform of the Protection Squad—the SS—stood beside a boulder a few yards away. His rifle—another product of the magicless magic of this world—was leveled at Rhion’s chest. Like most of the SS, this man’s hair was fair, his eyes light, chill, and empty, reminding Rhion of something, of someone else…

“You will return to the meadow, please.”

Rhion blinked at him in surprise, pushed his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I’m just investigating…”

“You will return to the meadow.” Dapplings of light strewed one sleeve of his black uniform jacket, made the silver buttons flash. Upon his left sleeve the sun-cross—the swastika—splashed black on a crimson ground, pointing backward, toward chaos, toward darkness, toward death. “This was Captain von Rath’s order.”

“Look,” Rhion said reasonably, “I’m sure Captain von Rath didn’t mean I needed protection from getting hit on the head by a falling pine cone…”

“It is not my business what Captain von Rath meant,” the young man said without change of inflection, though his pale arrogant eyes traveled over Rhion’s short, stocky form and his curly brown hair and beard with chill disapproval and suspicion. “Nor is it yours. He said you were not to be permitted to leave sight of the others. You will return, or I will take you back there myself. I assure you I will shoot you if you attempt to flee.”

“You’re making flight sound more and more appealing,” Rhion remarked, turning back toward the meadow, and realized the next second that the guard probably took his jest literally and had his rifle cocked and ready. He was conscious of it behind him, all the way back through the trees down the slope toward the sunlight.

“I am dreadfully sorry,” von Rath apologized, as the car picked its way along the rutted and potholed black pavement once again. “The young man was only following orders; he will be reprimanded for his lack of tact. But indeed, it does not do for you to wander too far alone. For one thing, you might have become lost and, having no identity papers… We are getting you some, of course, but these things take time.”

And, seeing the expression on Rhion’s face, he added gently, “The government has taken wizardry and all its workings under its protection, has given the Occult Bureau guards to make sure it is not interfered with. We are at war with forces that do not believe in wizardry, that hate our government, and that seek to destroy us. Believe me, this protection is needed.”

“If you say so.” Rhion settled back into the leather seat cushions and watched the landscape whisk by, the occasional silted meadows and crumbling barns among the dark trees speaking of a time when the countryside had been prosperous and well tended.

“It was the war,” von Rath explained, when Rhion asked about it. “We were defeated in the war…”

“We were betrayed,” Baldur put in, twisting around in the front seat where he sat next to the driver. “Betrayed by C-Communists and Jews who had wormed their way like maggots into the government while true men were fighting. All lost their money, except the Jews. That’s why the Nazi Party appeared, with the SS as its adamantine spearhead, to save the German race from the muck into which it had been dragged and to lead it to its d-destiny.”

Poincelles’ dark eyes gleamed with malice. “And I suppose slitting the throats of most of its original members was a part of the Party’s destiny?”

“That’s a lie!” Baldur snapped, his fat cheeks mottling red. Since leaving the meadow he had been increasingly jittery, the restlessness of his weak brown eyes behind their thick glasses and of his twitchy, curiously shapely hands confirming Rhion’s earlier suspicions that the boy was addicted to some kind of drug. “And anyway they were traitors to the Party and h-h-homosexuals…”

“All—what was it? Nearly a thousand?—of them?”

“I think now is not the time for a discussion of the Party’s internal politics,” von Rath said with quiet smoothness. “I doubt there is a government in the world that did not go through its formative upheavals. I trust, Rhion, that this expedition has not proved too tiring for you?”

Poincelles sneered, but settled back without argument and applied himself to fouling the air with another cigar. His fingernails, Rhion noticed not for the first time, were long and dirty and filed to points, his fingers stained yellow with nicotine. Gall, throughout the discussion, had merely stared ahead of him, perched again upon the little jump seat. Though, as far as Rhion could ascertain, neither Gall nor Baldur were actual members of the SS, both wore the close-fitting black trousers and clay-colored uniform shirts of the Order, a garb that was less than flattering to the lumbering boy. Poincelles retained civilian clothes—in this case a pair of rather loud tweed trousers and a tweed jacket, reeking of cigar smoke and old sweat.

“I’m tired, yes, but I think that will pass.” Rhion turned to look up at the young Captain beside him. “The ritual of meditation we’ve been doing in the mornings helps; all week I’ve felt my strength coming back.”