Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (27 page)

Rhion crossed the open ground first, setting up his props, slipping under the wire, and returning to the darkness of the old laundry room that he had so recently left. He sank his mind down through the stillness of the black house, picking out the dim chatter of the wireless in the watch room and the creak of a lazy body shifting in a chair. Mice scratched behind the dining room wainscot and in the stuffy backstairs, beetles ticked like watches, timing the coming of the summer-tide. The very air of the house felt uneasy, filled with angry dark things that waited behind some sightless angle invisible to human eyes, hunting for a way out into the world of men. When his fingers brushed the wood of the wall, it felt warmer than it should have, charged with unholy power. The whole house was turning into a giant battery, a hideous talisman of the forces released there.

He turned his mind quickly from it and sought in the thick dark air of those turning corridors, those closed-in rooms, for other sounds. He heard the slow, untroubled draw of breath from Gall’s room—a panting, adenoidal snuffle from Baldur’s. Then soft, shallow, and even, the breathing of von Rath sounded in a closed and seemly sleep.

At his low whistle Leibnitz and Sara left the shelter of the woods, crossed to the fence, set props, slithered under, took the props and moved across the yard to join him with surprising agility and speed. Rhion pulled the door shut; his pulse was hammering and a cold tightness in his chest had driven out all tiredness or thought of sleep. There was no turning back now. The only way out was through.

“Here.” By the reflected glow of the yard lights beyond the windows, Sara led the way to the old dumbwaiter shaft. “Can you manage, Papa?”

“Fifty years I am learning the wisdom of great men, the Torah and the Talmud and the names of the angels of each sphere of the world and the numbers by which the Lord rules the universe, and now at my age I find I should have studied to be Tarzan instead.” He glanced at the neat footholds recessed into the shaft wall and the rope hanging down into darkness. “How many steps are those?”

Sara shrugged. “I don’t know. Twelve or thirteen, I think.”

He waved his hands and addressed the ceiling. “She doesn’t know. If it’s twelve it computes to three, which is fulfillment and the realization of goals, but if it is thirteen it computes to four, an astronomic squaring that implies legally constituted authority which around here is not something we want to be dealing with…” His voice faded into a mutter as he climbed gingerly down the shaft. “I should have known that when the sum of my birth’s Gematria computed with this year’s date to give me 3,255, I should have known then to watch out…”

Sara rolled her eyes ceilingward, and followed.

The cellar was pitch black. Sara fumbled her flashlight from the deep pocket of her trousers, but Rhion caught her hand and shook his head, then, remembering she couldn’t see the gesture, breathed, “No.”

“A light’s not gonna call more attention than the sound of us tripping over boxes.”

“I’ll guide you.” Their voices were barely a flicker of sound in the stillness, but nonetheless made him uneasy. They were close, so close. It seemed to him now that in the silence von Rath must hear, even in sleep, the thudding of his heart.

A rat skittered through the dusty coal bin as they passed it; ghostly sheets of spider floss lifted from the old drying racks with the breeze stirred by their passing. Rhion led them down the long abyss of the cellar, past the crouching, crusted iron monster of the sleeping furnace, his ears straining for the faintest sound from above.

But there was nothing. Only the faint underwhisper that had begun to grow in the house itself, the angry, buzzing murmur of its restless ghosts.

This has to work
, he thought desperately, his hands cold in the warm strong grip of Leibnitz’ fingers, the hard little clutch of Sara’s.
This is our last chance. Please, God, let it work
.

But the gods of his own universe and of this one hated wizards.
It figures
.

They shifted the boxes as quietly as they could, and while Rhion and Leibnitz stood between the flashlight glare and the stairs that led up into the main part of the house, Sara went to work on the lock.

“This also you learn in America?”

Sara opened her mouth to retort and Rhion cut her off hastily with a whispered “Will you stand guard?”

“What, you’re not going to give her a tommy gun?”

“Papa, I’m telling you I’d trade Mama’s silver candlesticks for one right now.”

Rhion pulled the scandalized scholar through the door before he could reply, and closed it behind him. For a moment they stood, sealed into the darkness; then Rhion took a stub of candle from his pocket and, with a guard’s steel lighter with its Deaths-Head engraving, called flame to its wick.

Beside him, Leibnitz breathed, “
Kayn aynhoreh
…”

The dim patterns of protective circles drawn upon the floor, the marks of old blood and ashes, lay undisturbed in the darkness. In their center was nothing to be seen, even with a wizard’s sight, yet somehow, though its light touched the dirt-crusted stone of the opposite wall, the candle flame did not penetrate that inner dark. The air here seemed colder than in the cellar outside; the silence had the anechoic quality of unseen infinity.

“What…is it?”

“Can you see it?” Rhion nodded toward the circles.

The old man’s grizzled eyebrows knotted, and the dark eyes beneath them were suddenly the eyes of a mage. “Not
see.
”

Rhion took from his pocket the other candle stubs he had brought. Doubled and trebled, the soft glow filled the room with a wavering underwater light. Around him he sensed the heavy calm of the earth that grounded away the horrors that had been raised in the house; for a second he seemed to hear the stirring of the night breeze through the long grass of the meadow beneath Witches Hill, and see the glimmer of the full moon in the round pond near the ruins of the old Kegenwald church. Far-off he sensed other things, long lines of stones in the molten glow of the moon, earthen mounds shaped like serpents among summer trees at dawn, stone crosses, many-roofed shrines gleaming like gold on distant hills in dry afternoon sun. Beneath his feet he was aware of the slow pulse of the ley that joined that dim net of power overlying all the earth.

He set the candles down. His shaking fingers fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, and drew from under it, on its string around his neck, the Spiracle of iron and silver and salt, each of its five crystals seeming to speak one glinting, unknown word as the lights touched them. The candle glow slid along the silver in a running flow of amber runes.

“This is not a good thing that you do,” the old man whispered. “But you must be got away from this—this abomination of a place, to let these men here destroy themselves as they will.” He stood stroking the round, ragged scar on his stubbled lip, gazing with a kind of reverie into the dark colors of the circle’s heart. The wistfulness Rhion remembered in von Rath’s eyes from the early days, the yearning to know only that it was true, shone briefly on his face. “I am glad that the Lord let me see this,” he added simply. “ Tell me what you need me to do.”

As when he had worked with the Dark Well just after the new moon, once Rhion entered the trance state necessary to raise power he had only the vaguest idea of time. For awhile he and Leibnitz worked together, drawing out signs of protection and concentration, he in his own blood, the Kabbalist in the ochre chalk he’d instructed Rhion to procure from the wizards-kitchen above. In the candles they burned a tiny pinch of the dittany the old man had insisted was proper for such spells; as a background to his own meditations, Rhion heard the murmur of that deep old voice framing one by one the names of. the angels of the Sephiroth of Malkut, the protectors of the material world, but, oddly enough, the sound was soothing rather than distracting, a familiar mantra of magic, no matter what form it took. From the Circle of Power they drew a corridor to the edge of the Dark Well, and for a long time Rhion stood on the brink of the abyss, staring into a cold darkness of colors he could not consciously see.

But it was there. Endless, lightless, it yawned just—and only just—beyond the perception of his mind, a column of nothing into which it would be perilously easy to step. An angle of perception… a degree of difference from the sane and material earth… The twisted metal of the Spiracle seemed cold and dense in his hand, and through the concentration of his spells he wondered if he shouldn’t have taken the safer route and set up a simple resonator after all.

But it was far too late. The spells of charging coiled like smoke through his exhausted brain, spells he had learned in the Drowned Lands, in the octagonal library tower in Bragenmere, and in Shavus’ strange stone house; he had no notion of whether they would work or not.

He twisted his fingers through the string that had held the Spiracle around his neck; the crystals bit deep in the soft flesh of his left palm as he grasped it tight. Leibnitz’ bony grip closed firm around his right. This had killed Eric Hagen, they had said… Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the Well.

Though the Well itself was only half awakened, he could feel its pull on him immediately through his trance state, the cold pressure on his solar plexus, at the base of his skull, in his eyes. His mind held hard to the spells of protection Jaldis had taught him the night before they’d entered the Void together, and felt the strength of the Void overwhelming him.

But there was magic there. The taste of it, the touch, was unmistakable; he raised the Spiracle in his left hand and saw the blue light that ran round the iron ring, springing in tiny serpents from crystal to crystal, flickering down his fingers like electrical bug feet, to lift the hair on the back of his arm. The Void was drawing at him—drawing him in and drowning him—but he held the ensorcelled circle high and whispered the words he had learned and used when it had only been a question of making devices that would let him breathe underwater, or keep him warm in places of lightless cold. He could see the dark of the Void now, a colored abyss without light in which burned not one distant gleam to show him the way through.

And that dark he wove to the Spiracle, like a man tying floating strands of silver spider thread one by one into a basket’s rim, binding the wild magic to follow him like a banner into the magicless world outside. The Void pressed on him, dragged at him. It was becoming difficult to breathe and he had to call on all his strength merely to remain conscious, but he barely noticed. When he moved the Spiracle in the throbbing darkness, he saw how each separate crystal of the ring left a track of shuddering silver light.

Magic was his again.

Eric Hagen must have felt it, bursting on him like argent lightning in the dark—joy like the shattering of a star.

Blackness rushed through the split defenses of his mind, sweeping him away. His sight went dark, and he fell.

A hand clutched his, the jerk of its strength nearly dislocating his shoulder. A voice cried his name. Drowning in freezing blackness, Rhion could see nothing—darkness, ghost shapes that tore at him in swirling wind—bitter cold. Then tight and hard, a beam of what looked like brilliant yellow light stabbed through the murk, and he thought he heard names being called upon, syllables of power, like falling sparks of fire, a resonant vibration in his bones. Fighting back a wave of faintness, lungs hurting as they sucked vainly at airless void, he tried to make his way along that light, tried to see its end.

Numb with cold and nearly unconscious, still he could feel the hand holding his. He grabbed at the sinewy wrist with both his hands, fumbling desperately, and for an instant blacked out completely.

Then he was on his knees on the cold stone floor, gasping at the moldy air with its faint whiff of ozone, shaking desperately and clutching the tall skeletal body that held him close against it. Though the room was cold and damp, it felt warm by comparison. For a moment the lenses of his glasses misted. Groggily he was aware of a name being called.

“Rhion… Rhion…”

His hands tightened over the smelly wool of Leibnitz’ shirt. Both hands… He gasped, “Oh, Christ, no…” and then saw the Spiracle hanging by its string, where the string was tangled tight around his nerveless fingers.

“Rhion…”

“Rhion, goddammit!” A blast of air struck his face as the door was opened suddenly; he got his feet under him and stood as Leibnitz turned. The new voice was Sara’s.

“Get the hell out of there, both of you! All the guards in the goddam world are coming down the stairs!”

“THIS WAY!”

“The door…” Rhion whispered, his mind still cloudy, his numb hands fumbling with the Spiracle as Sara and her father dragged him away into the dark of the cellar. “Cover it back—”

“Screw that! Come
on
!”

A second’s thought told him she was right. The jackboots of Storm Troopers thundered in the hall above, the locks rattled open… He was a fool not to have realized that von Rath, even in his dreams, would know that magic had entered this world.

They were beyond the shadowy tower of the furnace before the yellow blast of flashlight beams stabbed down into the room, focusing on the open door, the scattered boxes. Leaning heavily on Leibnitz—though he was six inches shorter than the old Kabbalist, Rhion outweighed him by a good forty pounds—he cast a quick glance behind them, and saw von Rath himself, naked beneath a red silk bedgown, among his black-clothed guards, standing in the black door that led to the Well. Then Sara was shoving him ahead of her into the dumbwaiter shaft.

By the time he’d climbed to the old kitchen, Rhion knew there was no hope of escape across the yard. A chaos of shouts and drumming boots was rising like a storm outside, where dark forms raced back and forth in the chilly arclight. As she swung herself across the dumbwaiter counter, Sara whispered hoarsely, “Up the backstairs… fast…”

Neither Rhion nor her father questioned that she had a plan. She had been over the house enough times to know its every trapdoor and closet. Rhion could hear the guards from the watch room searching the cellar in groups of three and four while those in the barracks combed the yard outside. They had a few moments. Flashlight shielded by her palm, Sara led the way up the old servants’ stair, cursing as she banged her shins on the mold-furred bales of worthless currency. They emerged into the old dressing room with its one-way mirror, where Rhion had watched the gypsy girl last night.