Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (23 page)

What facets of human nature these dreams revealed he couldn’t allow himself to speculate, nor upon how close this magicless magic of dream and illusion was to the very devices von Rath hoped to use against the British pilots when the invasion began. It was difficult enough to maintain them, to renew again and again the sharp sweetness of their pleasure, as if every time were the first—to inject the tiniest twinge of regret and hurt if either man turned his eyes even slightly toward the hillside between the woods and the barbed-wire fence, or thought about looking back at the stretch of open ground behind them that separated the fence, with its electrified inner pale, from the long gray building of the camp infirmary.

Fence and camp lay starkly naked beneath the floodlights’ acrid glare, exactly as Sara had described them, exactly as he had glimpsed them in his crystal; the hillside was bare of cover, clothed only with a thin scrim of grass against which, now, Sara’s gray trousers and pullover stood out dark and unmistakable as she crept toward the fence. She moved as he had instructed her, crouched close to the earth. A few slow steps and stillness, count ten, two more slow steps and stillness again, an even, gentle progression that would not catch the guards’ dreaming attention. In a long, lumpy, muslin flour sack at her belt, she carried wire cutters, wire, and wooden props to get her under the inner electric fence. Edging forward under the barrels of the turret guns, there was nothing else she could possibly have been.

Yet neither guard moved. The slight relaxation induced by the nicotine they smoked Rhion subtly deepened, increasing with his songs the influence of the drug. To them it had never tasted so good, to them their dreams had never been so fulfilling, so hurtfully satisfying…

Just as Sara finished cutting a slit in the wire of the fence, the back door of the infirmary opened. Through a haze of oiled machinery and shuddering bosoms Rhion was aware of the tall, rawboned form standing in the shadowy opening, the floodlight throwing a coarse glitter of silver on scalp and jaw as he turned his head, looking doubtfully from one tower to the other. Then he looked across the open ground.

It was nearly seventy feet from the shelter of the shadowed door to the wire. The infirmary stood a little apart from the ugly ranks of green-painted barracks, ground commanded by the wooden towers and the dark muzzles of the guns. Between the towers Sara was a sitting target, propping up the electrified wire of the inner fence with two lengths of wood. The old man shrugged and walked forward—slowly, as Rhion had hoped Sara remembered to specify in her whispered instructions of last Sunday.

…
red lips parted in a gasp of ecstasy, a white throat exposed by a thrown-back head
…
Oh, thank you, thank you… Just so much solvent on the patch… ram home
…

One of the guards shifted his weight to scratch his crotch, started to turn toward the yard behind him. But sudden cold, sudden sorrow, overwhelmed him, an aching loneliness—and there was, after all, no need. Everything was quiet. His daydream smiled and beckoned, a warm cocoon of virile joy. He gave a sort of sigh and settled back as he had been before, his chin on his fist.

The old man squirmed awkwardly under the wire, sat up, looked with a start at what he must have assumed until then to be a young man, in her trousers and pullover, with her hat pulled down to hide her flaming hair. Rhion saw him grasp her arm, saw her shake free and signal for silence.

She pulled the props loose, shoved them into her bag, and took out a bundle of short pieces of wire. The old man slipped through the hole in the fence and waited while Sara pulled the slit shut again, secured it with a dozen twists of wire so it wouldn’t be obvious from a distance that it had been cut. Then they moved forward gingerly, slowly, under the dreaming eyes of the guns.

…
touch of gun oil in the lock, a touch in the pin housing… not too much, too much is as bad as too little… they can never say I was less than perfect
…
soft white hands with red nails digging into the muscles of the back… The sweaty softness of those massive breasts, of thighs clutching at his hips… Again, oh please, again
…

Sweat ran down Rhion’s face, his muscles aching as if the intensity of his concentration were a physical labor.
Dammit, come on, I can’t keep on with this
…

A few steps and pause. Wait. Creep-creep-pause. The floodlights glared behind them like harsh yellow moons, throwing feeble shadows on the bare ground, like two bugs paralyzed on a kitchen floor. The night breeze turned, and Rhion smelled a vast stench of human filth, overcrowded quarters, and, deeper and more hideous, the stink of death and narrow-minded evil.

They reached the trees. The old man flung his arms around Sara, bending his tall height to clasp her close, and even in his tranced state Rhion reflected that it was the first time he’d seen Sara respond with uncalculated warmth to any man’s touch. She reached joyfully up to fling her arms around his neck, for that one second her father’s little girl again, happy, clean, and filled with love. His mind still on the guards, Rhion didn’t hear clearly the old man’s first half-sobbing words or what Sara replied, but he saw her place a hand on her father’s arm when he turned toward where Rhion knelt and shake her head. As Rhion had instructed her beforehand, she led her father away through the bracken and impenetrable shadows, toward the road where the Mayor of Kegenwald’s car was hidden.

Rhion let his mental voice die into a gentle soughing. His two dim psychic twins stepped in unison to the wide openings in the turret walls, swung themselves over the wooden rails and out into the dark air. Between the towers they met and melded into one. For a moment from that high vantage point, Rhion looked down on the camp itself, long wooden buildings already beginning to warp and split, heavier cement constructions beyond them—barracks, offices, workrooms, cells of solitary confinement or special purpose, raw-new or the older structures of the old pulp mill the place had originally been—and the pale barren rectangle of the exercise yard, all lying stark and motionless within the steel-thorned boundary of towers and fence. And because he was not within his body, he saw clearly the glow of horror that hung over the place, a sickly greenish mist, as if the very air were rotting from what was done within that place.

Turning, sickened, Rhion looked out over the woods and road in the luminous chill of the starlight. The somber pines were still and utterly dark. He saw no cars, no track of trampled bracken, and no sign that they had been pursued, observed, or detected. So far, so good.

He walked down over the air above the defoliated hillside, and in the darkness at the woods’ rim saw a pudgy little form in old army trousers and a snagged white sweater, kneeling with head bowed in the dim scratchwork of a magic circle, the starlight glinting in his silver-rimmed glasses and on the sweat upon his face. He passed through the invisible door that lay between them, settling himself around the armature of those sturdy bones; then closed and sealed the door behind him.

Sickness hit him like a blow with a club. He doubled over, swearing in German as he felt the blood leave his face and extremities; though it was a mild night, he shivered with desperate chill, hair and clothing sticking to him with sweat. Knees trembling with cramp, he got somehow to his feet and staggered off through the dark woods to the disused woodsman’s track where they’d hidden the car.

Sara was busy renewing the hot-wiring of the little Ford’s engine when he arrived. “Christ, I don’t believe it!” she breathed, as he slumped down onto the running board. “I don’t effing believe it! We must have been out in the open for thirty minutes! What the hell did you do?”

“I told you I’m a wizard.” He managed to grin.

“Are you all right, my son?” A long, bony hand closed around his arm, gently raising him. He looked up and met the dark eyes of the man he’d seen in the scrying crystal, the thin old man with the shaven head and the raw, new scar on his lip.

“Yeah,” he whispered, but when the old man opened the door for him Rhion almost fell into the car’s backseat. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

The car moved off, Sara guiding it carefully down a farm track that had mostly gone back to ruts and potholes where it twisted through bracken, wild ivy, and trees. She dug in the glove box and produced a bar of American chocolate candy wrapped in paper, which she passed to them over the back of the front seat. “Give him this, Papa.”

Rhion gulped down half of the bar’s oily sweetness without even tasting it, then remembered Sara’s father probably hadn’t had anything resembling decent food for nine months and held out the rest of it to him.

The old man turned it over in long, blue-veined fingers, sniffed it interestedly, and said, “Well, according to Sylvester Graham, sugar is a pollution of the temple of the body, and I ‘m not sure whether chocolate is kosher or not because who knows what they put into the stuff, but as Rabbi Hillel said, it isn’t what goes into a man’s body that defiles it, but the words that come out of a man’s mouth… So I think an exception is in order. Thanks be to God… and to you, my son.” He popped the chocolate into his mouth and clasped Rhion’s hand while he chewed and swallowed. “And you are? My daughter only said she had a friend who would get me out.”

“Professor Rhion Sligo.” The Germanized form of the name was second nature to him now.

“Isaac Leibnitz. I don’t always smell like this, but I don’t suppose Jonah was any bundle of roses when he came out after spending three days in the belly of a fish, either. So they teach driving cars as well as stealing them in this New York
University you went to, Saraleh?”

“You’d rather I stayed in Germany and learned to cook and clean and have babies for our Führer?” she tossed back over her shoulder. In point of fact the old man smelled like an animal, his patched clothing half rotted with old sweat and crawling with fleas, his mouth, when he spoke, showing the dark gaps of missing teeth. He was pallid, emaciated, and still shaky from two days of being sick from the pills Rhion had sent to guarantee that he’d be in the poorly guarded infirmary instead of the concrete cell in which “specially designated” prisoners were kept. But for all of that, there was about him a daft and gentle charm such as Rhion had encountered in other wizards in his own world, infinitely comforting in its familiarity after the greed, fanaticism, and inhuman obsessions of the Schloss Torweg mages.

“What
did
you do?” he asked gently after a moment. “Except deliver me from out of Gehinnom, for which I will always be more in your debt than you can ever conceive. What’s your birthdate, by the way?”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Rhion sat up and produced a handkerchief from his pocket to polish his glasses. “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to stick around for a few days and return the favor. As for what I did, I guess it’s called astral planing here. I’d meant to cast a spell of distraction on both guards, but I couldn’t do it from that distance.”

“No wonder you’re tired,” Leibnitz commented, stroking his stubbled lip in a kind of subconscious mourning for his vanished beard, while Sara made an undervoiced comment of her own in the front seat.

Rhion sighed and put his glasses back on. “It all takes so goddam much time and energy. I don’t know how much Sara told you…”

“What could she say, with all those chaperons standing around with rifles? She said you’d get me out if I took the pills, was sick two days, and then got up at two in the morning and walked out across the back exercise yard slow enough to let the guards take real good aim at me. She said I had to have faith.”

“It must have sounded pretty crazy.”

He shrugged. “They say the Red Sea didn’t part for the Children of Israel until the first man got his feet wet. But to get my daughter to believe you—now that’s magic.”

Rhion’s grin was wry. “Believing crazy things seems to be what’s done in this country. I’m working for the SS Occult Bureau. They’re keeping me prisoner at Schloss Torweg, an old hunting lodge about forty kilometers from here. Are you familiar with the theory of multiplicity of universes, or am I going to have to go through this explanation from scratch?”

“No, no.” Rebbe Leibnitz shook his head decisively. “Are you from another world on the same cosmic plane as ours—that is, Malkut, the plane of material reality—or from one of the spiritually higher planes?”

“Same plane,” Rhion said, since, as far as he knew, multiplanar cosmic reality was as unprovable in his own world as it was in this. “I’m a wizard there—operative magic works there as it no longer works here. That was originally the reason my master wanted us to come here—to find out why it no longer works.” He bit his lip, remembering Jaldis again with a sudden stab of unhealed loss.

“Well, my personal theory is that the roads from the spiritual Sephiroth of Tepheret to the Sephiroths of Yesod and Malkut have become blocked due to the increased influences of the elements of sulfur and fire, though that wouldn’t take into account why it still works in other universes than this. Numerologically this century lies under the influence of Mars, always a bad time for those under the protection of the Beni-Elohim, the Angels of the Sephiroth of Hod. But I’ve heard other theories. I’ve met wizards from other universes before, you understand, both of the dense physical plane and those who were of a higher spiritual order, merely disguising themselves in the form of matter. There was an Englishman named Galworthy possessed by a spirit named Angarb-Koleg—and that young fellow Inglorion who stayed with me in thirty-eight—and that Theosophist woman Zelzah the Red who was traveling from dimension to dimension preaching the true path to rightness. She used to hold seances at our apartment on Gestia Ulica to contact spirits in other universes—she said the vibrations there were sympathetic—and in fact it was there she met Antonio Murillo, who it turned out had known her in a previous existence when he was a priest of the ancient Egyptian cult of Ptah and she was a temple prostitute…”

Rhion had heard all about ancient Egyptian cults and their reincarnated priests from Poincelles. No wonder Sara looked at him strangely. “And you?”