Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (25 page)

“
What
do they do?” Tally strode back, to stand over the shorter woman, hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me
you
believe the mages hold orgies at midnight…”

“You know they do.”

“Some sects do. Not the Morkensiks, or the Selarnists, or…”

“You’re arguing semantics now,” her sister said placidly, and went back to her lacemaking. “I know what Father told me, about why he thinks it better that you leave. Is Jaldis returning then, too?” And without appearing to, she watched her sister’s face from beneath straight little bronze lashes.

Tally bit her lip and looked away. A week’s custom hadn’t dulled the hurt of what Shavus Ciarnin had told her he had heard, in the dark of a dream, sleeping beside the Well.

In a gentler voice, Damson asked, “You’ve heard something, then?”

Tally shook her head and turned away. Damson, with remarkable quickness for one of her soft bulk, set aside the pillow and got to her feet, catching her sister’s slim brown wrist in her hand. “Please,” she said, her voice low now as they stood in the chapel door. “This is for your own good, Tally. You may not think they commit abominations at the turning of the year’s tides, but—”

“Who told you they were coming here?” Tally countered softly. “The priests of Agon?”

Damson’s round gray eyes shifted. “Don’t mock at Agon’s Cult.” She glanced into the close, tiny room beside them, as if behind the stone doors of the shrine, smooth and featureless like everything about that Cult, the Veiled God listened to all they said. “Yes, his devotees are everywhere. Since Esrex has become one of the inner circle of initiates he has learned a great deal; many things are now possible for our House. The influence of the High Priest Mijac may very well end in Elucia marrying the Heir.”

“The Heir?” For a moment Tally thought she meant Dinias. “You mean the
Queen’s
Heir? He’s only a toddler!”

“He’s turned four,” Damson pointed out reasonably. “And the Queen has miscarried twice, it isn’t likely now she’ll give him a rival. What’s six years, when he’s fourteen and she twenty? It isn’t as if she has a—romantic disposition, as you did.”

She was watching Tally closely now. Rhion’s name hung unspoken between them, fraught with a shaky tangle of joy to know he was alive and terror of the unknown dangers in which he stood.
I’m in trouble, help me, please
, Shavus had reported he had said.
Get me out of here… Get me out
… Tally said nothing.

“Tally,” Damson said slowly. “I don’t know whether you’ve done—anything foolish—since you married Marc. Esrex…” There was long silence, the old scandal and blackmail and coercion conjured for a moment, like the heart-twisting smell of a remembered perfume. Since the night it had happened—Rhion’s arrest, Tally’s imprisonment, the terror of not knowing what would meet her when she was finally sent for—neither sister had spoken of it—of it, or of anything else they thought or felt. They had become strangers, except for the knowledge that bound them at their roots.

After a moment Damson went on, with a certain amount of difficulty, “I’m telling you now, that kind of thing isn’t possible, if Elucia does in fact marry the Queen’s son. There must be no breath of scandal. Stop being naïve. If Father found out, he would never permit it.”

“You mean Esrex would never permit it,” Tally replied, her voice low and perfectly level now. “For whom do you think your husband is doing this, Damson? Uniting the realm of Varle with the Bragenmere lands by becoming governor, making advantageous alliances that will put the lord of those joint realms on any royal Council, putting out of commission
anyone who might be able to use other than military power against him?
You think your husband is doing that to help Father? To help the man who ousted Esrex’ family from the Ducal Seat? Who’s being naïve? Or is that something you’d just rather not know about?”

She pulled her hand away from her sister’s moist grasp and stood for a moment considering her, the cold weariness in her heart that comes with the final realization that the one you have loved has not existed for a good many years. It was a woman of thirty-five she saw, finally, and no longer the unconscious image of a plump, witty, brilliant girl of eighteen. She felt tired, and just a little sick—not like a child who has lost a cherished toy, but who has discovered in that toy a breeding place of maggots and grubs. “I suppose the real question,” she finished quietly, “is whether you’re a fool or Esrex’ whore.”

And turning, she left the vestibule and strode down the corridor, her long green skirts billowing in her wake. For a long time Damson stood without moving, round face irresolute, upon the threshold of the Shadowed God.

THE GIRL DIDN’T LOOK TO BE MORE THAN SIXTEEN.
She’d probably been pretty once, in a haunting wildcat way, before they’d shaved her head, and even now, after months of starvation and ill usage in the Kegenwald camp, some of that beauty remained. In blistered pits, her eyes seemed huge; the bones of her wrists and hands appeared grotesque as she rubbed her bare arms for warmth. The unfurnished chamber in the south wing—the great master bedchamber in which the Dark Well had supposedly been drawn—never really got warm. From his post behind a one-way mirror in the adjacent dressing room Rhion could see the girl’s pelvic bones outlined under the worn fabric of her ragged and dirty gray dress as she paced back and forth, barefoot on the uncarpeted oak planks.

When they had first brought her into the room she had huddled unmoving in a corner, like a partridge freezing into stillness in a hopeless hope that the hawk will pass it by. Having talked to Rebbe Leibnitz and the guards in the watch room and having seen the Kegenwald camp, Rhion understood this. Only an hour ago had she begun, cautiously, to move about, first doggedly examining every corner of the room, trying its three locked doors and its boarded-up windows, peering curiously into the dark sheet of the one-way mirror on the wall. These explorations had taken her rather less than two minutes, for the room was empty save for a latrine bucket in one corner. After that, she had simply paced, hugging herself for warmth and staring nervously all around her with huge, obsidian eyes.

Rhion wondered whether her fear stemmed wholly from being in the power of the Nazis—a condition that scared him sick—or whether, animallike, she sensed what was going on in the house tonight.

He glanced down at the watch that lay on the padded leather arm of his comfortable chair. Eight-thirty. The sun would have set by this time, though twilight would linger till after nine. He found himself listening intently, though he knew that both these rooms and the temple downstairs on the other side of the house were quite soundproof.

Nevertheless, he felt it when they started, as he had felt it when the sun had dipped behind the somber black pickets of the hills. His scalp prickled and he felt the sweat start on his face; if he closed his eyes he could see von Rath lying upon the naked black stone of the altar, like a sleeping god in the thin white robe—“
vestis albus pristinissimus et lanae virginis”
—save for the febrile tension of his muscles and the tautness of eyelids bruised with stress and lack of sleep. Rhion knew the horrors of the opening rites, for he had seen them again and again in tormented dreams: Poincelles pacing out the bounds of the temple, a white puppy held aloft by its hind legs in one massive hand, its dying struggles splattering his crimson robe with blood; Gall and Baldur like strange angels in black, merged with the greater shadows that followed their movements back and forth across the velvet-draped wall; the reflection of candlelight in the eyes of the victims. Bound at the foot of the altar, they would know, as occultists themselves, what would come next.

“I told you I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he’d said to von Rath that morning. They had finished the early ritual work—for which Rhion had barely made it back from bidding farewell to Rebbe Leibnitz—and had been on their way out of the temple’s small robing room: Rhion, exhausted and ravenous, to a breakfast he felt he had heartily earned; von Rath upstairs to his study. “I don’t even want to be in the Schloss when it’s going on.”

“You disapprove of what I do?” The German tilted his head a little on one side, eyes cold and flat, like frozen quicksilver, voice gentle but perilous.

“If I wrote it on ancient parchment in Latin with illuminated capitals would you believe it?” Rhion retorted, covering his outrage, his anger, his panic with sarcasm. “
What you are doing is dangerous
. It’s
always
dangerous to do a blood-rite—it’s
always
dangerous to do
any
rite drugged…” And within him another voice, made furious by everything he had learned from Leibnitz, everything he had seen and sensed of the camp—by the scenes in the crystal and the laughter of the guards—screamed
How dare you—How DARE you
—
murder human beings, men and women, for ANY reason
… while fear of von Rath and guilt at his own cowardice nearly stifled his breath. Sara would have spat in von Rath’s face and died.

He took a deep breath. “You don’t have the control over the forces you’re releasing. Without a conversion to physical operancy, you can’t.”

“So.” Von Rath’s bloodless mouth tightened. “I find it curious,” he went on, after long silence, “that of the two reasons you gave that deny me my power, one has already been proven a lie. Is the other a lie, as well?” He placed a hand on the nape of Rhion’s neck, slim fingers cold as steel and terrifyingly strong, and looked down into his eyes. Against a feverish flush the old dueling scar on his cheek stood out cold and white. “Are you lying to me, Rhion? Is this world truly bereft of the point of conversion, the crossover between will and matter?” His thumb moved around, to press like a rod of steel into the soft flesh under Rhion’s jaw. “Or is that merely your final secret, the thing that in your opinion should not be shared with those whose destiny it is?”

Backed to the wall at the foot of the dim stairs, Rhion felt the tension of that powerful hand that could, he guessed, snap his spine with a madman’s strength; in von Rath’s eyes he saw nothing human at all.

“It’s my final secret,” he said. “I just thought I’d hang around until you got tired of waiting and started sticking hot wires under my fingernails before I disappeared in a puff of smoke.” He pulled away from the thoroughly nonplussed wizard’s grip. “You brought me here as an advisor, all right? And I’m stuck in this world—for the duration of the war, considering the risk of someone else dying to open another Dark Well. That might be years. I’m not happy about that, but do you think I’m going to trade decent food and a comfortable place to live for a permanent berth in an English insane asylum? If I understood how to convert to physical operancy, you think I wouldn’t better my own position here by telling you?”

Von Rath flinched, as if from the blow that could break the self-perpetuating cycle of hysterics, and shook his head like a man waking from a dream. “No—I don’t know.” He passed his hand across his face, and for a moment his eyes were the eyes of the man Rhion had first known, the young man whose dreams had not yet become obsessions. There was even something like pain there, the pain of puzzlement, of knowing he was becoming something else and not quite knowing if he wanted it or not. “And yet for one second—Eric did. I know he did.”

He frowned and shook his head. “That’s odd, you know, it’s been weeks since I’ve even thought of him… He was my friend…”He rubbed his sunken, discolored eyes. From the half-open door of the watch room across the hall came a guard’s laughter and the nauseating gust of cigarette fumes. “But without operant magic we could never have brought you here.”

“You don’t think I’ve been living on that knowledge, that hope, for the past three months?” Rhion put his hand on the sinewy arm in its clay-colored shirt sleeve, led the way down the shadowy blueness of the hall. “I’m still trying to figure that one out. I keep telling you, I was only brought along to wash out the bottles. Jaldis was the one who knew what the Void is and how the Dark Wells work. Look,” he added more gently, “when did you last get any sleep? Or have anything decent to eat? And I’m not talking about that lousy porridge, If Poincelles can get eggs and sausage out of the cook, you sure as hell should be able to.”

The younger man pulled his arm away impatiently and stepped back toward the stair. “Later, maybe,” he said in his quiet voice. “There is too much for me to do now. Perhaps other rites of the Shining Crystal have survived, either in code as something else, or in fragments in letters—I haven’t yet found their correspondence with St. Germain or Jean Bodin, and I know there must have been some—that can be pieced together. With our position in France solidified we must be able to deal with Britain. Time is of the essence now.”

He passed his hand over his face again, and when he looked up his eyes had changed, as the hard edge of his desires crept slowly back into command. In the golden bar of light that streamed down the hall from the open door of the dining room, he looked, with his immaculate black uniform and electrum hair, like a daemon roused, blinking, from the dark of its cave.

“We aren’t asking you to be part of the ceremony, you know.” The voice was gentle, but inflexible as steel again. “Only to observe the subject and to take notes. We will be working on a naïve subject tonight, one whose mind I have never encountered. It will take all the energy the four of us can raise, but it is something in which no outsider should be allowed to meddle. Will you do that much?”

Reluctantly, Rhion had agreed.

Wearied with her pacing, the girl—a gypsy, von Rath had said, a race traditionally reputed to number a large percentage of psychics—sat again on the floor in the corner and lowered her head to her folded hands, rocking her body like a whipped child. Rhion glanced automatically at his watch. Six minutes after ten. He could feel the power growing in the house, a whispering behind him that seemed to be lodged within the walls, a terrible vibration in his bones. The bank of closed cupboard doors at his back made him nervous, as did the small, shut door of the backstairs to the kitchen, which led down from this little room. Part of him wanted to slip down that way and out of this accursed house before something happened, but terror of what might be waiting in that dark and cluttered stair stopped him. He wanted to open the main door into the hall, but feared what he might hear—or see—in its empty shadows.