Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (24 page)

Leibnitz made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, I’m just a student, a scholar,” he said. “All I can do is keep an open mind. All my life I’ve studied the Talmud and the Kabbala, searching for order in the universe, but it’s a dangerous thing to translate the power one channels down from Higher Aether through the Tree of Life into magic here—”

“Aside from the fact that it can’t be done, you mean?” Sara chipped in sarcastically, braking gently to ease the car into yet another rutted track.

Rhion opened his mouth to reply, but Leibnitz shook his head with a gentle smile. “Always she was like this,” he said. “Well, she’s a Taurus. And since she was born in the second degree of her sign, by multiplying the letters of her name by their position and adding the digits, it gives her a Tarotic key of twenty-seven, which is really nine—the Hermit, the sign of Science, but also the sign of skepticism. And added to the year of her birth this gives her a Natal Sum of one thousand nine hundred forty-four, which adds together to eighteen, the Moon, the sign of doubt… She has talked to wizards traveling in other bodies through the universe down from fifty thousand years in the future, and she’d say, ‘It can’t be done because it can’t be done.’ Now what kind of attitude is that?”

“The usual one, unfortunately,” Rhion said, remembering with a grin his own attitude about three-quarters of the mystical gobbledygook in the Schloss library and most of what Leibnitz had just said. “You’re right. Magic and those who can work it are distrusted in my own world, hated, legislated against…”

“It is because magic is arbitrary,” Leibnitz concluded. “And so it is. And unfair, and in many cases against the Will of the Creator. It is cheating. What business is it of mine to use the powers of the universe to make myself richer, when for whatever reasons the Lord thinks that in this lifetime I could learn more as a poor man?”

“He used to give Mama that argument when there wasn’t money to buy milk.”

They had reached the edge of the old meadow where Poincelles’ secret temple stood. Though woods crowded thickly on its higher end near the barn, down here the ground was boggy, standing water glinting between patches of rank, waist-high grass. The crying of a thousand frogs prickled the night.

“Can you walk, Papa?” Sara asked worriedly, turning in the driver’s seat. “I don’t dare try to take the car through this. Even if we didn’t get stuck we’d leave a track they could follow from hell to Detroit. Besides, I have to get the car back to the Mayor’s…”

“She not only steals cars, she steals the Mayor’s car,” Leibnitz informed—presumably—God, looking skyward as he clambered out.

“He was the only one who had a gas ration.”

“I’ll take him up to the barn.” Rhion slid along the seat and scrambled out the same door Leibnitz had, for the lane was narrow, and tangled ditches filled with stagnant water and blackberry brambles flanked it on either side. As he put his hands on the doorpost to pull himself out, Sara caught his wrist, dragging him back. Her whisper was carbon steel in the darkness.

“You tell him anything about how I’m living now and, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”

Shocked that she’d even think of it, Rhion started to demand
What the hell do you think I am?
But the vicious glitter in her eyes told him what she thought he was—a man, coarse, careless, and stupid. He shook his head, an infinitesimally small gesture that her father, standing by the corner of the car staring raptly around him at the milky darkness, would not see. “I promise.”

She threw his hand from her grip, despising his touch, and turned her face away to put the car in gear. Its rear wheel nearly ran over Rhion’s foot as she popped the clutch and drove off without a word.

“Poincelles, feh.” Leibnitz picked his way through the long weeds that surrounded the barn and its three crumbling sheds, disregarding, as Rhion did, the black and terrible Seals of the demons Andras, Flauros, and Orobas written in secret places to defend against intrusion. “A
paskudnyak
out for what he can get. I knew him when he was still with the Order of the Golden Dawn, and even then I didn’t trust him. What can you expect of a man whose numerological key works out to be sixteen? And if you trace out his name on the number grid of the geometric square of Saturn…”

“In here.” Rhion pushed aside a plank on the back of the barn, slipped through the crack, and edged along between the splintery boards of the wall and the tarpaulin that hung inside until he found the opening between two tarps. Behind him, he heard Leibnitz’ breath hiss sharply, though it was pitch-dark in the barn until he drew from his pocket a match and the stub of a candle. The tiny light spread gradually outward but did no more than hint at the dark shapes of the draped altar, the black candlesticks, and the shadowy gleam of the inverted pentagram beneath which Sara had lain. The smell of old tar and dust was almost drowned by an ugly medley of dried blood, snuffed incense, the thick choke of burned wood.

“
Chas vesholem
,” the old man whispered, looking around him in the dark.

Hating the place himself, Rhion moved swiftly to the far wall, where, behind another join in the tarps, he found the tin box of food and the bundle of clothes and blankets Sara had left there the day before. Rebbe Leibnitz did not move from where he stood; when Rhion returned to him, the box and bundles under his arm, he turned firmly and, slipping through the tarps again, went out the way they had come.

“Poincelles has already bribed the Troopers at the Schloss to stay away from this place,” Rhion said, as they settled down in the darkness of one of the sheds and, after a muttered prayer, the old Kabbalist set to the bread and cheese and apples in the box like a starving wolf. “When he hears about the hue and cry for you, it’s a good bet he’ll take steps to keep the camp guards away, as well. My guess is von Rath knows about the place already but I suspect Poincelles doesn’t think so—and anyhow he’s stolen too much of the Occult Bureau’s property to furnish it to want anyone looking too closely.”

“The
tzadik
Akiba ben Joseph, the greatest of the rabbis, says that it is no sin to eat food that is unclean to save one’s life, for your life is the Lord’s property, which it is incumbent upon you to preserve… and by extension I suppose that it is also permissible to hide behind the demon Lilith’s skirts in there.” The old man jerked one greasy thumb at the dark bulk of the barn against the star-powdered sky. “But that place makes me want to wash more than nine months in the pigsty of their camp.”

“Amen,” Rhion muttered, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. Poincelles’ spells, curses, and protective demon seals might have no power in them, but the dirty magics done in the barn clung to the place like a stench. “It’s only for a couple of nights.”

The old man grunted, wrapped what was left of the food again in its papers, and replaced it in the box. “There. If I eat more I’ll be sick. Now—what are they doing in that place? That Schloss, that lodge of theirs… I saw the truck go out last week, and twice the week before, taking people they’ve been keeping, like me, apart from the others, people they don’t put onto the lumber gangs or send to the mills to work. And the ones who work in the crematoria whisper about how they came back…”

“Have you ever heard of a group called the Adepts of the Shining Crystal?”

Cocking his head, Leibnitz thought about it for a moment, then frowned. “No. And I’ve heard of most, at least in Europe, though in America…” He shrugged resignedly, leading Rhion to wonder what this America, whose participation in the war von Rath seemed to fear, was really like. “They’re crazy over there.”

Sitting in the blackness of the shed, his back to one of its splintery doorposts, Rhion spoke of all that had befallen him since he had received, in the rainy solitudes of the Drowned Lands, word that Jaldis had wanted to see him in Bragenmere. He had meant to give a swift and concise encapsulation, but it didn’t turn out that way.

“We have the night before us,” the old man said gently, and, for the first time in three months, Rhion found himself able to talk—about the Nazis, about his unhealed grief for his old master, and about his loneliness and his growing fears. Sometimes he touched back on his original topics—the Spiracle, the Dark Well, the need to be at the stones on Witches Hill at the maximum pull of the sun-tides—but more frequently, as the Dog Star rose burning above the eastern trees and the birds woke and cried their territories, each to each, in the hushed dark of early summer predawn, he found himself talking about Tallisett and his sons, about the Ladies of the Moon, about wizardry, and about magic.

“As far as I can tell magic just—just
isn’t
in this world anymore, ” he said, turning his head a little to look down the slope at the meadow, spread out in a shimmering of water and weeds and a thin white ground mist. In the stillness and utter peace it seemed impossible that such a place as Kegenwald existed. “From what I can tell, nobody did anything to cause this, any more than human malice causes the fall of night. It happened. Even the faes are gone, the faërie-folk—water goblins, pookas, lobs, grims. It might change some day, but there’s nothing I or anyone can do to change it.”

He sighed. “I’m not even sure if the damn Spiracle will work, you know? They work on little things, but something like this… It’s never been tried. I thought of rigging up a Talismanic Resonator, which would draw on the Void itself…” He shook his head. “But aside from the fact that it would create a field anyone could use, including von Rath, it just needs too much power. So it has to be a Spiracle.”

He looked back, aware that the old scholar was regarding him quietly in the darkness.

“What you are doing,” Leibnitz said slowly. “It is irresponsible, you know.”

Rhion closed his eyes. From the first that knowledge had murmured in his heart, try as he would to turn his mind away from it, he knew that the old man was right. “It’s my only chance.”

“That does not matter. If for whatever reasons the Lord saw fit to withdraw operant magic from this world—if that is what happened—it says much for your opinion of your own judgment that you want to bring it back for your own convenience.”

“I’m not talking about my convenience, dammit!” Rhion said passionately. “I’m talking about my life! I wasn’t the first one who circumvented the rules; I shouldn’t even
be
here!” But he knew that any of the mages of his own world—Shavus, Jaldis, the Lady—would have told him that it didn’t matter. And in his heart he knew it didn’t.

But in his heart he could not bear the knowledge that he would never see Tally again, never see his sons. That he would be trapped in this hellish place, a prisoner of the Reich, for what remained of his life.

“
Tzadik
, please,” he whispered. “There’s only one place they know where to look for me now and only one time when I’ll be able to raise enough power to open the Void. Part of it’s that I think I really would rather die trying to escape than stay here, but as things are I think it’s only a matter of time before von Rath kills me anyway. With or without your help, I’m going to have to try.”

“There.” The old man’s hand was warm and strong on his wrist. The first nacreous grayness of dawn showed him the hooked nose, the long brows curling down over shadowed eyes, the strong lips with the shameful stubble of a convict and the red, raw circle of the scar. “You deliver me from hell and three hours later I’m coming on you like the
balabos
… You have given me my life, and you have found and taken care of my Sara. For that I owe you. And I can’t let you remain in this world long enough for these evildoers to figure out some way of bending your knowledge to their wills. So I will do what I can, and let the Lord of Hosts—Who knows more about the whole thing anyway—handle the rest.”

“HE’S SENDING ME AWAY!” TALLISETT PACED
angrily to the long windows of her sister’s room, the dark-green wool of her skirt sweeping across the tufted green-and-purple rugs, her hair catching a wheaten gleam as she passed through the windows’ latticed light. Her sister Damson, seated beside the cold fireplace in the long brocade gown she favored in her rooms because it hid her partridge plumpness, didn’t look up.

“He wouldn’t even see me!” Tally continued passionately. “He said he was ill, but he was out hunting yesterday… He sent his
chamberlain
to tell me!”

“Father is ill,” Damson replied, her voice low. Her short, stubby fingers continued to move over the lace ruffle she was making, crossing and recrossing the glass bobbins over one another on the pillow with a faint, musical clinking as she worked, the sunlight sparkling on the jeweled galaxy of her rings. “It’s the summer heat, you know. It brings on the flux unexpectedly. He was taken ill last night. So were Esrex and Elucia, a little.”

“But
why
?"

Damson was silent for a few moments more, her hands like stout little overdecorated spiders spinning a web. In this room the strong summer sunlight was broken into harlequin shards by the window grilles and softened by the moiré shadows of the trees in the water garden outside; beyond Damson’s shoulder, Tally could see into the small room that had been fitted up as a private chapel to Agon, the Hidden One, Lord of the Eclipsed Sun. The smell of incense lay thick upon the air.

“Father thought it would be best.” She sounded maddeningly like Esrex. Tally sometimes tried to remember whether her older sister had been that secretive, that calculating, that single-minded, before she’d married their cousin. But it had been twelve years, and her recollections of that time were little more than a child’s, passionately worshipful of everything her sister said and did. In those days she had also had nothing to hide herself.

“We’ve heard that the Serpentlady of Dun is in the town,” Damson went on, her owlish, protuberant eyes still fixed upon the twinkling bobbins. “And Erigalt of Pelter. With the Archmage still here, there are those who say it’s scandalous for the Duke’s daughter to be spending her time—”

“Who says?” Tally demanded, and this time Damson looked up at her, mildly blinking, her face a careful blank.

“It is nearly the summer solstice,” she said. “With what the mages do at that time, Father thinks it would be better if you were somewhere else.”