Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (20 page)

“You mean, whether they’d done anything wrong or not?”

Baldur stared at him, flaccid lips agape. “They were
Jews
,” he pointed out. “And anyway the experiment worked! We were right! Thursday night—at the dark of the moon—we’ll work the rite using someone of greater power, greater magic, and we’ll make a talisman of p-power that’ll blow the roof off the building!”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Baldur heaved a sigh and slumped back in his chair, his weak brown eyes dreamy. “What a pity they destroyed it. The Shining Crystal… Do you think it might have been one and the same with the Holy Grail? Wolfram von Eschenbach describes the Grail as a stone, you know. Just like the Jewish-Christian
Church to have pulverized such a talisman and slaughtered its guardians!”

“Jewish-Christian
Church?” Rhion was startled. “I thought the Christians spent the last ten centuries killing the Jews!”

Baldur waved an airy hand. “They all come from the same source,” he declared, as if that made them a single organization. “They hate and suppress m-magic, the same way they’ve tried to suppress the pure Aryan Race, whose birthright true magic is.”

“And whose most sterling representative and spokesman you are?” Poincelles purred maliciously.

Baldur’s pasty face blotched with red. “My family can trace its German heritage back past 1640!”

“Ah, I see—that should get you into the SS with no problem, then, shouldn’t it?”

The boy jerked furiously to his feet, his pudgy hands bunching with rage, and Rhion caught his arm and pulled him back as he started toward the Frenchman. To Poincelles, Rhion snapped, “Look, if you’re going to waste your time pulling the wings off flies, why don’t you do it someplace where it won’t waste my time, too? Christ, it’s like being in a girls’ school—except if Baldur were a schoolgirl, you’d be doing more to him than calling him names.”

Poincelles grin widened appreciatively. “
Touché
,” he murmured, rising; book under his arm, he strolled out onto the veranda just beyond the long windows, where Gall, stripped to a loincloth, was engaged in boneless runic yoga in the pale afternoon sun.

“French-Jewish pig,” Baldur gritted, bending down to scrabble for the notes he’d knocked off the table in his hysterical haste. He puffed a little as he moved; the thin bar of sunlight, penetrating from the curtain Poincelles had left open, picked out a mist of sweat on his pimpled forehead.

“Is he Jewish?” Sara hadn’t mentioned it.

Baldur shrugged. “All the French are.” It was a statement Rhion knew to be untrue. “They’re a degenerate race—apemen, beastmen, whose only desire is genetically to pollute the Aryans, the true descendants of the Atlantean root race, through the s-sexual corruption of their wo-wo-women.” He straightened up, barely missing the edge of the table with his head, his hands shaking badly as he shuffled his papers into order once again.

His pouchy eyes gazed past Rhion after the older occultist with sudden, jealous hate. In a low, furious mutter he went on, “It’s against him and men like him that the SS was formed. The real SS, the inner core of the SS—the shining sword blade of the Aryan Race that will turn the tide of genetic slopwork that threatens to engulf us from the East! We’re more than just an imperial guard, you know,” he went on, turning to meet Rhion’s eyes. “We’re a religious order, like the ancient Teutonic Knights, a sacred band of all that’s best of the Aryan Race. It’s only fitting that we, with our birthright of magic, of
vril
, should be doing what we’re doing now—forming a point of adamant for the spear of our destiny. Paul—P-Paul understands.”

He gestured angrily toward the windows, beyond which, by Gall’s furious gesticulations, it was obvious Poincelles had succeeded in baiting the Austrian mage. “And Himmler uses men like
that
for his purposes! When P-Paul comes into his own, when they make him head of the SS—as they’ll have to, when by magic we encompass the British defeat!—the Order will be as it should be, as it has always been destined to be, a sacred band of blood and fire and m-m-magic—”

“Baldur…”

The boy almost leaped out of his chair at the sound of von Rath’s quiet voice. Without so much as an
Excuse me
he abandoned Rhion and hurried into the hall—from his seat in the wing chair, Rhion could see the two of them standing together, the boy clutching his notes to his sagging breasts and nodding, the man speaking softly, his head tilted a little to one side, sunlight from the hall window dappling his black shoulders, his pale hair, and the scarred left profile visible through the door with pallid gold. Von Rath said something and gestured toward the library door; Rhion thought the heard his name, but the Nazi mage made no move to greet him or to enter the room.

He understood—he had understood at breakfast—that he had placed himself outside the circle of those whom von Rath considered his own kind, placed himself, in effect, with the women and children being used for strafing practice on the road. He was now merely useful, for as long as that would last.

“YOU’RE CRAZY!”

“I thought your degree was in chemistry, not psychiatry,” Rhion retorted, pulling up his feet to sit cross-legged on the lumpy bed. “You have a better suggestion?”

“Yeah,” Sara said hotly. “I smuggle my father a gun instead of those silly pills and have him shoot
himself
instead of letting the guards do it.”

“If you could figure out a way to smuggle your father a gun instead of the pills we wouldn’t be having these problems.”

“No.” She sighed and shook her head, frizzy red hair catching the light of the candles in gold threads all around her square, slender shoulders as she leaned back in the room’s rump-sprung stuffed chair. “If Papa tried to blast his way out, he’d just hurt himself, or get into an argument about time travel or the internal combustion engine with the guards… Not that he knows anything about the internal combustion engine. When Mama would go visit her sisters in Pozen, my heart was in my throat every time Papa tried to light the stove or cut up a chicken to cook. He once nearly killed himself taking the chessboard down from a shelf.” She nudged the two pills—clumsy wads of gritty tallow on a twist of paper—on her knee with a fingertip, not meeting Rhion’s eyes. “Maybe we’d better just forget it. Thank you for wanting to help, but…”

“You don’t think I’m really a wizard, do you?”

She raised black-coffee eyes to his. “Oh, come on,” she said gently. “You’re sweet—you really are—but I was
raised
around people who thought they were wizards, you know? And about half of them claimed to be from another dimensional plane or from the future or the past, or reincarnated from being Albertus Magnus or the Dalai Lama or some kind of Inca sachem. They’d talk with Papa for
hours
about magic and spiritual forces and they d swap spells like a couple of grannies trading recipes, and for what? I never saw Papa so much as keep the mice away, let alone make himself invisible so the Nazis wouldn’t see him.”

“I’m not going to make him invisible,” Rhion explained patiently. “I’m just going to make the guards look the other way while he crosses from the infirmary to the fence.”

“If you can do that, how come you’re sneaking in and out of here under the wire like the rest of us poor mortals?”

“Because it takes about an hour and a half of intense meditation and mental exercises to do it, and it wipes me out for the rest of the night.”

“Yeah,” Sara said wisely, getting to her feet and taking a cigarette from the pocket of her scarlet frock, “they always had some reason why they couldn’t do it either.”

Down below the voices of the guards drifted faintly up through the open window, the ubiquitous stink of tobacco smoke vying with the sharp sweetness of the pines. The last of the lingering northern twilight had faded less than an hour ago. As he’d listened to Sara’s high heels and Horst’s escorting jackboots ascend the attic stairs, Rhion had thought about how badly he’d missed the sound of a woman’s voice, surrounded as he had been for months by men.

“Sara,” he said, “I know you don’t believe in this. But believe that if your  father doesn’t escape from Kegenwald, he’s going to die on the night of the twenty-first of this month in a way you don’t want to know about. I need this help, and we’ve got damn little time. You say you can get into the camp on Sunday?”

She nodded. She’d risen from the chair and walked to the window, to let her cigarette smoke drift out into the luminous dark. Candlelight softened the sharpness of her features and sparkled on the little gold chain she wore around the slender softness of her throat.

It was Saturday night. Von Rath must have paid the owner of the tavern a hefty wad of marks to make up for her absence—beyond a doubt Sara would have to surrender some of what was given her as well. The dress she wore, bias-cut cotton crepe that clung to the curves of breast and hip, was better than her usual work clothes. It had taken Rhion awhile to get used to seeing a woman’s calves and ankles so casually displayed, though Dr. Weineke’s SS uniform had effectively killed whatever erotic interest he’d felt in the principle.

“They let families in, if the commandant’s not being a putz that day,” Sara went on. “Sometimes women wait for eight, ten hours outside to see their husbands, and then he decides there’s no visiting till next week. They come from all over Germany, you know—it’s a work camp, mostly for political prisoners. A lot of the town mayors and priests and union leaders from Poland are there, as well as Germans who said something Hitler or the local party leaders didn’t like—or
were
something they didn’t like, like Jews or gypsies or Poles. The women bring food and clothing…” Her red-painted mouth twisted. “The commandants budget for it in the rations. They count on the men being fed at least half by their families, whether they are or not.”

“Have you gone before?”

She shook her head. “Even in different clothes with my hair dyed and those fake glasses I got, I didn’t want to risk anyone recognizing me. God knows enough of the guards could.” She smoked awhile in silence, dark gaze fixed on some middle distance beyond the window, lost in her own thoughts.

“It’s funny,” she said softly, her face half turned aside and the cold glare of the floodlights from below picking out the fragile wrinkles and the lines of dissipation around the mouth and eyes. “When I heard they’d picked up Papa—when I’d heard the SS had him in ‘special custody’—I thought, Hell, I know how to find him… or at least how to make money and get information while I looked. I had God knows how many boyfriends in New York. I worked as an artist’s model while I was in school—not that Aunt Tayta ever knew where I was always going in the evenings—and the first year I was in New York, in thirty-four, I worked as a waitress to make money to start at NYU. I used to go out to dinner with one guy, have him bring me home at eight because I said I had to study, have another guy pick me up to go to the movies, have
him
bring me home in time to go out with guy number three for the midnight set at the Cotton Club. So I thought doing what I do now wouldn’t be so very different. Christ, was I naïve.”

Her lips flinched suddenly, and she looked down, crashing out her cigarette on the windowsill with fingers that shook.

“You must love him a lot,” Rhion said quietly. She nodded, not looking, not willing to give him even the words of a reply. The pride in her, the anger at men, and the hatred of having to depend on one, however crazy, for help, was like a wall of thorns. He drew up his knees, wrapped his sweatshirt-clad arms around them. The half-healed knife cut still hurt like hell. “How did you get into Germany?”

“Through Basle.” The request for information, for the story, steadied her as he’d hoped it would. “I used to go out with a guy named Blackie Wein—he ran protection for Lepke Buchalter down in the garment district. A mobster,” she added, seeing Rhion’s puzzled expression. “He was tied up with Murder, Incorporated—the Ice Pick League, they were called—but Blackie was all right. He was a Yankees fan like me. When I heard Papa had been picked up—that he was in ‘designated internment’—I didn’t know what else to do. I went to Lepke. He put the word out and got me identity papers for two hundred dollars from the daughter of a newspaper editor from Dresden who’d just got out with his family by the skin of his teeth. There was a guy named Fish who did me up a couple more sets to use in emergencies, plus some for Papa—Fish made his living passing bad checks—and another one of Lepke’s boys taught me how to pick locks. That was the biggest help when I got to searching this place.” She shrugged. “So here I am.”

She straightened up, and walked to the chair again, to pick up the little screw of paper with the two waxy, lumpy pills that lay upon its padded arm. For a long moment she stood looking down at them. Then her eyes moved to Rhion, still sitting curled together on the bed. “This is crazy-stupid.” The break in her voice was infinitesimal. In spite of everything, Rhion thought, she was young enough to grab at even crazy-stupid hope. She put the pills in her purse.

Rhion took a deep breath. “You say you can pick locks. Will you help me with something else?”

With an almost instinctive gesture she moved a step or two away, putting the iron-spindled footboard of the bed between them and folding her hands around its upper bar. “Like what?”

As Rhion had suspected, there were rooms in the cellar under the north wing, directly beneath the temple, on the ley-line itself, the door hidden behind the piled boxes.

“Yeah, I saw that door,” Sara said, as they climbed down the shaft of the disused kitchen dumbwaiter—an invention Rhion made a mental note to mention to the Duke’s kitchen steward when he got back, if he got back—clinging to the old rope while their feet sought the tiny slots let into the brick of its sides. “By the scratches on the floor it didn’t get moved back and forth a lot, so obviously they weren’t keeping anybody down there.” Her voice sank from a whisper to barely a breath as they crawled out into the damp, pitch-black cavern of the southern part of the cellar. As they ghosted through the huge main chamber, where the furnace slept like some somnolent monster in its aura of oily dust, the tinny echo of the wireless could be heard from the guards’ watch room opposite the door to the cellar stairs. “How the hell can you tell where you’re going?” Her hand pressed his shoulder from behind; without her high-heeled shoes she was an inch shorter than his own barefoot height.