Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (21 page)

“I told you. I’m a wizard.”

“Sorry I asked.”

She fished the flashlight she usually carried with her from her purse, put her fingers over the bulb and flicked it quickly on to scan the far wall. “There.”

“Just as I thought.” He glanced at the ceiling beams in the blackness.

Even though several feet of floor joists, he could feel the cold evil of the temple as they came beneath its bounds. True to his word, he had gotten Horst to take him down to the Woodsman’s Horn the night before last—the night of the moon’s dark—and had remained there drinking bad beer and listening to a Beethoven concert over the wireless until the place had closed. It hadn’t helped. Even at a distance of twenty miles he’d fancied all evening that he felt what was happening at the Schloss, and had dreaded returning there, fearing what he would find in spite of the doubled and trebled spells of protection and dispersal he had taught von Rath. He didn’t know what he’d have done if one of the chosen victims had been Sara’s father, but it wasn’t. They had used another gypsy woman and a noted German runeologist—Aryan to the core—whose runic system had contradicted the one favored by the Bureau. After one attempt at sleep from which he’d been jerked, sweating in horror, by his dreams, he’d spent the rest of the night staring at the rafters. It seemed to him that the screams of the victims had permeated the very fabric of the house.

That afternoon von Rath had shown to him the talismans they’d made, disks of bone and crystal and stretched skin written over with the dark sigils devised by the accursed Adepts; he had talked for hours, lovingly, eagerly, obsessively, fingering them with wonderment and not seeming to remember that they had been made of the bodies of men like himself. He had spoken of the power within them and how it could be utilized and what he would do when that power was his… only that. Rhion did not have to touch the things to know that the power was there, glowing in them against the workroom’s lamplit dark as phosphorous glows in the heart of a rotten tree. But neither he nor von Rath could utilize that power for even the simplest of spells they’d tried.

And that, he supposed, was just as well.

The boxes in the cellar were filled with moldy books, smelling of silverfish and mice; it took him and Sara a few minutes to move them aside. Behind them, as Sara had said, was a door, new, stout, and padlocked shut. “Probably used to be a wine room,” he remarked in an undervoice, holding the flashlight as the girl knelt and began probing the lock with the various wire tools she’d taken from her purse. “There’s marks of an older lock here above the new hasp.” Shielding the light with his body, he strained his ears to hear any creak of footfalls in the hall overhead, any sign of approaching guards on the stair, or any clue that their activities were suspected. At this point, they could never hope to get the boxes replaced in time.

“This door isn’t more than a year or so old,” Sara breathed. “What the hell do you think old Pauli has in here, anyway? All the booze is in the cupboard in the library—all the booze he knows about, anyway; Poincelles has a stash of his own. I don’t think he knows about the coke Baldur gets from Kurt at the Horn, or those little odds and ends Gall steals from the workroom…”

“Gall?”

“Yeah. He’s got these little sacks of seeds and herbs and crystals hidden all around his room, a couple of amulets tucked under a loose floorboard, a mortar and pestle, a set of runestones, and a crystal ball cached in the bedsprings. It was a whole education, going through this place. Bingo,” she added, an expression not translatable even with the Spell of Tongues. The padlock fell open.

His heart beating fast, Rhion pushed the door inward.

The Dark Well was there. The smell of the room was the same as he remembered from those first instants of consciousness: moist earth, wet stone, power… the strange, ozoneous air of the Void. It was here they had gathered, not in that boarded-up chamber upstairs; it was here they had taken their drugs and reached out over the Void’s darkness to guide him and Jaldis. It was here Eric Hagen had died.

The pang of remembering Jaldis again twisted in him like a turned knife. Even now in this nightmare world, he still caught himself thinking that when he returned home the old man would be there. His too-active imagination wondered for a gruesome second whether his master had actually been killed by the Void or was drifting there somewhere, still alive but unable either to escape or die… He pushed the thought quickly away. It was something he would never know.

Drawing a deep breath, he stepped back through the door to where Sara waited, staring behind her into the cellar’s dark.

“I’m not sure how long this will take,” he murmured. “Get back up to the room; if they catch you down here you might be in real trouble.”

“Not as much trouble as you’re gonna be if they flash a light down the stairs and find all those boxes moved and the door open,” she replied, peering hard in the direction of his voice. “I’ll stick around.”

“Thank you.” Not that a warning would do him much good, he reflected. Even if he and Sara managed to reach the dumbwaiter shaft and get out of the cellar and up the backstairs to the dressing room on the second floor, the boxes being displaced would tell von Rath everything he needed to know. At this point he was certain von Rath would dismantle the Dark Well to keep him here—and that would only be the start of his worries.

Sara closed the door, leaving him alone in darkness.

In darkness he could see the traced lines of chalk and long-dried blood that marked where the original rites of opening had been done. The ritually charged swastika that had been his beacon across the Void’s darkness was still there beside the triple circle of the Well itself, the symbol of the sun-cross at which he could now barely bring himself to look. Beyond it hung the shimmering brown column of shadow that even mageborn eyes could not pierce.

His pulse thudded loud in his ears as he approached it. The Well was quiescent—he could, he supposed, have passed his hand through it with no ill effects, but nothing would have induced him to try it. And it was so tenuous, he thought—the power that held it here so ephemeral that merely the breaking of the Circles, the erasure of any of the marks upon the floor, would destroy the Well and his chances of contacting the help he needed forever.

For a long time he only stood looking at the place, trying to steady his breathing and his thoughts.

A window into the Void.

A way to get home.

The thing that had killed Eric Hagen.

He could dimly sense the ley running deep beneath his feet, like groundwater in the earth, but he could no more have used its power to open the Void than he could have washed a tent in a thimble. On the night of the solstice, he thought, the power would be there, maybe. But there had better be one hell of a lot of power concentrated at the other end.

He took a deep breath, pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, and, kneeling, took chalk and Sara’s clasp knife from his pocket. In the darkness he drew a Circle close to the charged sun-cross on the floor, its edge touching that of the Well itself, and cut open the vein near his right elbow, where it wouldn’t show, to mark the signs of Power in his own blood. He had no sense of power in doing this—he never had, in this universe—but he followed the rites meticulously, making himself believe that the feint strength of the ley-path seeped up into the chalked lines, drawing the figures of air as precisely as if they were actually visible, glowing as they would be in his own world. Trying not to think about whether anyone over there was listening.

It had been almost three months. Of course someone would be listening. Jaldis’ loft was the only place they could hear, unless Shavus had used the old man’s notes to open another Well elsewhere. This close to the solstice, knowing it was the only time when enough power would be available to them here, of course he’d be listening for them…

But Shavus had disappeared the day before his and Jaldis’ crossing—arrested, murdered, banished… he did not know.

Maybe no one knew.

We can think of neither the future that we go to, nor the past that we leave behind…

Don’t do this to yourself
, he commanded, feeling his resolve drain like the faint weakness and shock of opening his vein.
They may not hear you if you shout for help, but they CERTAINLY won’t hear you if you don’t
.

Only the long disciplines of his training made him turn his mind from the sweet quicksand of despair—of not having to try because it would do no good—and calm his thoughts, quiet his breathing, even out his heart rate again. He sank into meditation, not knowing how long it would take to raise the energies, gathering all his strength into his hands. Though the room was cold, sweat stood out on his face. Clear and hard, he focused his mind on the Dark Well, willing it to open, willing the glowing channel across the endless abyss of color without color to whisper into life.

Nothing happened. The Well did not seem to change.

Deepening his concentration, he started again from the beginning. Marking the floor, the walls; weaving signs in the air cleanly and precisely, willing himself to know that he was making them correctly—willing himself not to doubt. Willing himself not to think about Jaldis; about Tally; about his own world on the other side of the Void; about that naïve young man who’d come stumbling out of the livid darkness ten weeks ago and into the arms of the SS. Willing himself to believe that it worked.

There was still no change in the appearance of the Dark Well, but he sensed—or imagined—a minute drop in the temperature of the room, a resurgence of the queer ozoneous smell. Rising, legs weak, he stepped to the three lines of chalk, blood, and ash that circled the inner core of darkness—a darkness barely distinguishable from the darkness surrounding it—and stood, his stockinged toes just touching the outermost ring, his arms outspread.

“Shavus,” he whispered desperately, clinging to the image of the big old scar-faced Archmage, “Shavus, help me. Shavus, I’m in trouble, help me, please. Get me out of here. I’m alone here, Jaldis is dead.”

He was tired now and queasy from loss of blood; his head was beginning to throb, but he conjured in his mind the images of the stones on Witches Hill. Between the ancient magic of sacrifice glowing deep in the dolomite’s fabric and the dim silvery limmerance of the ley, enough power clung to the Stones to serve as a beacon, if Shavus knew what to look for. At that point, provided the Spiracle would hold the Void’s magic—provided he didn’t kill himself charging it—he could probably collect enough energy at the turn of the solstice-tide to open the Void and jump.

“I’ll be there,” he whispered, perhaps aloud, perhaps only in the dark at the bottom of his mind. “At Sunstead I’ll be there, waiting. Get other wizards, get as many as you can. I can open the gate, but you’ll have to get me through. Help me, Shavus, please. Get me out of here. Please get me out.”

He opened his eyes, staring into the heart of the Dark Well, emptying his mind and focusing it with all the strength within him, all the strength he could raise.

He saw nothing.

He closed his eyes, gathering his strength again, patiently willing himself not to think, not to feel. Then he slowly repeated all he had said, conjuring in his mind the image of himself standing on the altar of the Dancing Stones at midnight, surrounded by the Void magic of the Spiracle, the power of the solstice and the leys, arms outstretched, waiting…

And repeated it again, the strain of it hurting him now, grinding at his bones. And again saw nothing to tell him that he wasn’t just a frightened little man standing with obsessive exactness in a scribbled network of chalked lines on the floor, praying to an empty room.

In other words, he thought, mad.

It was as if he’d stood chin-deep in the ocean and had the rock upon which he was balanced tip suddenly beneath his feet; he felt despair close over him, cold and fathoms deep. A headache clamped like a steel band around his temples, and he lowered his outstretched arms, cramped and trembling, to his sides.

He has to have heard me
, he thought, sinking, exhausted, to his knees.
Shavus has to have heard
. Sitting on his heels, he carefully removed his glasses, pressed his throbbing forehead with his hands.

Tally came to his mind, lying by the fire in the green jeweled gown of the Sea-King’s daughter—the animal warmth and delight of his sons’ small hands pulling at his robe as they cornered him in play. For a moment he saw the matte blue silences of the Drowned Lands under the phosphorous of the rising moon. For ten weeks he had worked very hard at not feeling pain. Now, his defenses spent, the pain came, wave after wave of it, breaking him like a child’s driftwood fortress under advancing tide.

He bowed down over his hands, hurting with a deep, gouged ache that was worse than any physical pain he had ever undergone. Hugging himself as if the pain were in fact physical and could be eased by physical means, he doubled over, fighting to stay silent, fighting to hold it in, a chubby, shabby little man in his worn sweatshirt and faded trousers, alone in the dark on the edge of the abyss.

After a long time the pain eased a little, and he knew then that it was close to dawn. The thought of slipping back to his room, of going on with another day, was physically repugnant to him—easier just to roll down onto his side on the stone floor and sleep. But after a few minutes he got to his feet and staggered, knees jellied, to push open the door.

Sara had made her way across the cellar to the stairs that led up to the hall above, where she stood listening, the two-foot iron rod of an old mop-bucket wringer lever in one hand. Above them the Schloss was absolutely silent now, save for the metallic whisper of a wireless turned down low. The guards would be catching a little shut-eye in the watch room. It was a dangerous time, since they’d be guilty enough to wake at a whisper. He breathed, “Sara…” and saw her turn sharply, straining her eyes to pierce the inky dark.

As softly as he could—warily, because of the club she held—he glided toward her over the damp stone floor. “Let’s get the boxes put back,” he whispered, still staying well out of range until he saw her positively identify his voice and relax. Then he took her arm and led her back to where the flashlight beam couldn’t possibly be seen from above.