The Magicians of Night

Chapter Five

IN THE DARKNESS of his attic bedroom Rhion fetched the hard wooden chair from the corner and put it beneath a certain spot in the rafters. Through the wide windows opposite the foot of his iron-framed bed shone a broad rectangle of chalky arc light from the yard below, making eerie runic shadows of the bare ceiling beams with their trailing curtains of cobweb. Through the open window he could smell the pinewoods, and the drift of smoke from the cigarette of the guard patrolling the fence; the peep of crickets and frogs and the occasional cry of a nightbird came to him like comforting echoes of a life he'd once known.
Standing on the chair, he stretched to reach the rafter, edging along it with his fingers until his hand encountered a small wash-leather bag. Thrusting this in his pocket, he climbed carefully down, moved the chair to another place, and climbed up again. This time he brought forth a packet wrapped in several sheets of the Volkischer Beobachter, a packet that weighed heavily in his hand.
He put the chair back in its corner. The room had been searched three times in the seven weeks he'd occupied it, the last occasion less than a week ago.
Rhion had originally asked for the small south attic room - a servant's, in some former era - because the rest of the Schloss was permeated by the smell of cigarettes. But he'd found that from its big window he could see the light that fell from the window of von Rath's study to the bare ground at the side of the lodge, and thus tell when the young Captain went to bed.
The glow was there now, a citreous smudge on the hard-packed earth below him and to his left. Von Rath must have retired there from the library after their cognac together, to meditate and to write up the endless reports demanded by the Occult Bureau of their daily experiments - with magic, with electricity, with talismans, with pendulums, with anything they or any writer before them had ever been able to think of that might possibly hold a key to the return of magic to this thaumaturgically silent world. But even as Rhion watched, the glow dimmed as von Rath snuffed the candles one by one.
He'd be asleep in an hour, Rhion thought. Resting his forehead on the sill, he closed his eyes and reached down through the ancient lodge with a trained mage's deep, half-meditative senses. He heard Gall's sonorous murmur as he recited runic mantras before retiring and the jittery crackle of parchment and pen from Baldur's room and the youth's endless muttering and sniffling. Farther down, he heard the tinny staccato of the radio in the guards' watch room at the foot of the main stairs, repeating names he did not understand: Leutze, the Scheldt, Dunkirk. A guard spoke. Newspaper rattled.
Too early. Much too early.
Turning, Rhion crossed the room to the rough plank wall behind the head of his bed. In a tin box - for there were mice in the attics - behind a loose board he kept a stash of coffee beans. He'd had a beer and a healthy jolt of cognac, and had never had much head for liquor. Eating half a dozen coffee beans made him slightly sick to his stomach, but at least he wouldn't fall asleep.
Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he took up the newspaper-wrapped package, unfolded it, and looked at the thing that lay within it in the dark.
He thought about the nature of magic.
The thing in his hands was a metal ring, roughly the diameter of his palm, formed of strips of iron of varying thicknesses-some of meteor iron, some drawn of iron mixed with salt or with certain other impurities - all carefully pilfered over the course of the last five weeks from the supplies requisitioned from the Occult Bureau. Twisted around the iron were an equal number of strips of the purest silver obtainable, silver so pure it was soft, each strip scribbled with a hair-fine line of runes. Between the iron and the silver, five crystals were twined, in a specific shape Rhion hoped he'd calculated properly - he'd never made one of these for the purposes he planned for this and wasn't entirely sure whether his theoretical estimates would stand up in reality. He had been weeks assembling this, laboriously raising what little power he could in this world, whispering spells as he worked in the laboratory in the dead of night - hoping, as he worked, that von Rath wouldn't guess what was going on, and wondering fearfully what would happen to him if he did guess. There was still a great deal Rhion did not know about the Nazis, and he didn't want to find out.
And the making of the ring, he reflected with an odd, cold feeling behind his breastbone, was the easy part.
Since he had come to this world, Rhion had given a great deal of thought to magic: what had happened to it here; why it had failed; and how it might be brought back. As the Torweg group had found out very early, power of a sort could still be raised through the rites of their morning meditations. But it cost an enormous amount of energy to raise even the smallest power, and it was never enough to do much with, even had they been able to convert it to physical instrumentality. The power levels of this world had sunk, as water sinks back into the earth in drought, but it was still there, like the slow silvery pulse of the ley-lines that he had felt through the wheels of the car as they'd driven along the ancient road from the village back to the Schloss.
What had vanished utterly from this world was the point of conversion between power and operationality.
And that, Rhion thought, turning the iron circle over in his hand, was why he and Jaldis would have died in the Void but for Eric Hagen stepping to his death in the Dark Well.
Baldur had almost guessed it tonight. But, his mind running on the ancient cults and societies that he so endlessly studied, the efforts of past wizards to solve the problem of waning levels of power and not the conversion point between power and magic, the youth had seen only Hagen's death, and not the fact that for one second, before the Void had killed him, Hagen had been working his spells outside the confines of this world. For those few moments, he had been standing in the Void itself.
And there was magic in the Void.
Every mythological Fire-Bringer Rhion had ever heard of, when faced with the problem of Darkness, of Night, had had to steal fire from a source. And so, Rhion thought, must it be here. He hadn't the faintest idea how to create a Dark Well, for Jaldis, fearing Rhion's connection with the Ladies of the Moon, had never taught his student the mechanics of the multiplicity of Universes. But in his pursuit of information about water goblins, Rhion had manufactured Spiracles of Air, devices that, charged with the element of air and then bound upon his forehead, had held that element around him while he walked the muddy bottoms of the Drowned Lands' endless ponds and canals, seeking the goblins in their forests of ribbonweed and cattail root.
He was theoretically acquainted with the spells by which Spiracles of Heat could be charged to keep their wielder surrounded by warmth in bitterest cold, or Spiracles of Daylight that would permit, within their small field of brightness, the use of spells that ordinarily had power only during the hours when the sun was in the sky. Whether a Spiracle could be charged so that it would hold the essence of the Void's magic about itself he didn't know, for it had never to his knowledge been tried.
Theoretically, once he had a localized field of magic from the Spiracle, there was no reason why he had to be anywhere near the Dark Well to open a gate through the Void - all that it required was magic. Practically, of course, unless he wanted to perish in the airless cold chaos between universes, he needed the Dark Well, needed it to establish contact with the Archmage Shavus and the other Morkensik wizards so that they could draw him through the Void, back to his own world.
Not to mention the fact, he thought dryly, though his stomach was sinking with terror and dread, that he would have to be standing in the Void to charge the Spiracle.
And that meant the Dark Well.
That meant doing the thing that had taken Eric Hagen's life.
And that brought him back to Poincelles and the conversation in the tavern tonight.
Rhion got to his feet and prowled restlessly back to the window. In the acid glare he could see the black-uniformed sentry, rifle on shoulder, walking the perimeter of the fence. He needed help, needed another wizard to ground him, hold him anchored to this world, while he charged the Spiracle with the Void's wild magic, but the thought of putting his life in Auguste Poincelles' nicotine-yellowed hands terrified him. For all von Rath's gentle charm, it was perfectly possible that the SS Captain had put Poincelles up to making a pass at Rhion tonight in the tavern to test his intentions - to see whether he really was holding something back.
He didn't know, and the uncertainty, the dreadful sensation of never knowing whom to trust and whether his instincts were correct or not, was profoundly disorienting and exhausting.
"And anyhow," he muttered dourly, climbing back on the chair and replacing the Spiracle in its hiding place in the rafters, "the whole question is pretty academic until I can find the goddam Dark Well."
He returned to the window and checked the stars. Shortly after midnight. By the glow in the east above the spiky black of the tree-clothed hills, the moon would be rising soon, wan and cold in its last quarter. First dawn was some three hours away. From the drawer in the dresser where he kept his old brown robes Rhion fished the wristwatch von Rath had given him, and after a moment's study confirmed the timepiece's accuracy, at least as far as he understood the way time was reckoned here.
He put the watch back in the drawer. Though he recognized the ingeniousness of the mechanism he seldom wore it, chiefly from annoyance at the obsession these people had with the correct time. But every now and then, when he handled the intricate golden lozenge, he sensed upon it a vague psychometric residue of uncleanness that repelled him, but that he could not quite place. Other things in the Schloss had it, too, odd things: the plates of a certain pattern in the big, sunny dining room in the south wing; the radio in the guards' watch room; some of the books in the library. He wasn't quite sure what was wrong with them - and indeed, it was something he sensed only intermittently. But he didn't like it.
He listened now, and the lodge was quiet.
His stockinged feet made no sound on the bare floor boards as he crossed first the darkness of his own room, then the vast, dusty spaces of the main attic. The descending stair debouched close to von Rath's study and bedroom. From the main stair to the lower floor he heard the soft crackle of the radio still. By now he knew enough German to follow the broadcast, though not most of Chancellor Hitler's speeches. Now and then a Storm Trooper's voice would speak, desultory and half asleep. In his long nights of quiet listening Rhion had learned that inside duty generally involved three sentries who made a patrol or two of the ground floor in between long periods of sitting around the watch room smoking, reading cheap tabloids like Der Sturmer, and comparing notes about the barmaids at the Woodsman's Horn. Sometimes one or another of the barmaids was smuggled in, to be taken by a dozen of the men in turn in the deserted kitchen or laundry in the south wing - occasionally he heard Poincelles' voice on those nights.
But tonight there was only the desultory conversation of men who have said everything they had to say months ago. He waited until he heard all three voices, then, barely daring to breathe, he stole soundlessly down the stairs and slipped like a shadow past the watch room door. There was, he knew, a backstairs leading down to the kitchen in the south wing, but its upper end was in the little dressing room attached to the empty chamber where the Dark Well had allegedly been drawn - the false Dark Well, to convince him that it had been destroyed - and that chamber was next to von Rath's. In any case he would still have had to pass the watch room door to reach his destination on the ground floor, an old ballroom in the north wing that Hagen and von Rath, upon taking possession of the Schloss the previous fall, had converted into a temple for occult rites.
Its door lay at the end of a wide oak-paneled hallway and, like all the Torweg wizards, Rhion had a key. As he relocked the door behind him Rhion could feel a sort of afterglow of power whispering around him in the utter darkness of the vast, velvet-draped room, the residue of morning after morning of ritual work and occult meditation, of painfully tiny quantities of power raised and dispersed. Beneath that, he dimly sensed the even fainter silvery tide of the ley-line that ran below.
In years past the site of the Schloss had enjoyed a peculiar reputation - it was on this spot, Rhion guessed, crossing the worn parquet floor to the altar, here where the ley-line bisected the mound, that the ancient god had originally been worshipped and the witches had later held their sabbats. He settled himself cross-legged against the altar stone, a six-foot slab of black granite draped, like the walls, in black. Upon the altar a second drape hid the ritual implements of cup, sword, dagger, and thurifer. Coming here to scry was somewhat riskier than doing it in his room, but far quicker; in his room it sometimes took him as much as an hour of intense concentration before he was able to see anything in the crystal.
He lit the stub of candle he had to force himself to remember to carry in his pocket these days - thanking all the gods of wizardry that von Rath had seen fit to board up all the windows of this room and no light would show to the guards in the compound outside - and, taking the scrying crystal from its bag, angled its facets to the light.
The Dark Well was still there, wherever "there" was. It was quiescent, no more than a half-seen shadow in the absolute blackness of that other, windowless room. Studying it with his wizard's sight through the medium of the crystal, Rhion estimated the size and proportions of that chamber: thirty feet wide and immensely long, the low ceiling propped with heavy beams, the uneven floor paved with the rough, damp stone he recalled. In fact, he reflected wryly, it was of a size and shape and composition to be directly beneath the ballroom/temple where he now sat. Ceiling, beams, and floor were as far as he could tell identical to those in the portions of the Schloss' cellars that he had entered.
"I'm probably sitting directly on top of the goddam thing," he muttered to himself, closing his hand over the crystal, the image dying in the darkness of his palm. The stairs leading down into the cellar were kept double padlocked, and it was a good guess that the only keys were in the hands of von Rath and of the SS lieutenant in charge of the guards. On one of his trips down there - unobtrusively supervised by von Rath - he had gained the impression that the portion of the cellar which should lie under the north wing was blocked off by a wall, the wall piled high with boxes. That meant a concealed door, undoubtedly locked, as well.
He cursed himself mildly for never having taken up Shavus on the old Archmage's offer to teach him to pick locks. The only way he could get into that cellar was by magic... and of course he would not be able to use magic until he could get into the cellar and charge the Spiracle - if his spells worked, and if the charging didn't kill him.
And unless he had another wizard to help him, it probably would.
Always, like an ox at the millstone, he came around to that again: to the Dark Well; to Poincelles... to trust; and to his instinct that stepping into the Void alone and unassisted would be safer than trusting the French occultist with the smallest information regarding his real intentions and abilities.
He sighed and pushed up his glasses to rub his aching eyes. Twenty days remained until the summer solstice, twenty days until he could - with luck - raise enough power from the turning point of the Universe to open a gap in the Void so Shavus and the others could pull him through...
If he could get in touch with them. If he could find another wizard he could trust. If...
He shook his head and, opening his hand, looked down into the crystal again.
In it he saw the sea. Black waves ran up onto beaches in darkness, beaches crowded with men whose faces and bodies were outlined in the sudden, terrible glare of yellow-white explosions - beaches littered with wrecked equipment, hideously strewn with tangled corpses in the shell-holed sand, and men standing knee-deep in water, or huddled in shallow holes they'd scooped out in the sand, desperate for even the illusion of shelter. A long quay extended into the sea, longer than Rhion had ever seen, even in the great harbor of Nerriok, and this, too, was jammed with men. They stood quiet, without shoving, while death spat and whistled around them, burning fragments of metal leaving red streams of fire in the dark. Men waiting. And far out over the water to the west, the gold pinprick of a ship's light gleamed suddenly in the black.
Perhaps, Rhion thought wearily, closing his hand over the crystal again, he should be glad. These men would be the spiritual brothers of those who had blinded and mutilated Jaldis, who looked with distrust upon magic and all that it stood for, who could not see beyond their own pockets and their own bellies and who wanted to turn the world into the image of their own greedy, limited minds.
Perhaps he was simply weak; between the Reich's obsessive racism, self-righteous closed-mindedness, and casual arrogance, and these corrupt and nameless servants of the mechanist English, there didn't seem to be a lot to choose. The best thing he could do, Rhion thought, would be simply to go home.
If he could.
"Useless!" Paul von Rath thrust from him the body of the dead white rat and the pan of poisoned sugar water in which a seven-carat garnet gleamed mockingly, a talisman of protection inscribed with the colored sigil of the interlaced runes of Eohl, Boerc, and Ehwis. "Nothing - it did nothing at all!"
"I d-don't understand," Baldur stammered, his weak, bulging eyes peering from rat to gem and back again with baffled outrage. "The rite we used to charge this talisman came from Johan Weyer's own private journal! There was no way he would have recorded a false rite, or - or changed details. I made every allowance, every transposition of the k-key words and phrases according to the best redaction we possess of the Dyzan manuscript..."
Rhion, hitching back the sleeves of the long white robe in which the wizards all worked in their meditations and occult experiments, crossed the big laboratory and picked the jewel from its glass petri dish. He wiped the poisoned solution off with a lab towel and turned the gem a few times in his palm. "It's charged, all right."
"Of c-course it's charged!" Baldur whirled to paw through the stack of notes on the nearby bench as if for documentation of the fact, nearly knocking over a beaker of the strychnine distillate they'd used to test the poison spell's effectiveness. "The formula was impeccable, the source absolutely certain!"
"Give me that." Gall, in his flowing robe and shoulder-length white hair looking very much like the ancient priests of whom he was always having visions, almost snatched the talisman from Rhion's hand. From a little labeled box on the laboratory table he removed a smooth stone tied to a silken string - this he held over the gem, watching its random movement with pale, intolerant eyes.
"No one is blaming you, Baldur," von Rath said gently.
"But nothing can have gone wrong! The p-power you raised in this morning's rite was enormous, stupendous..."
"It was certainly greater than it has been," Rhion remarked, retreating to the corner of the lab. Like the temple immediately below it, the room that they had fitted up as a wizards-kitchen had had all of its windows boarded over - a pointless affectation from a thaumaturgical point of view but one that had allowed Rhion to work on the Spiracle late at night unobserved by the guards in the yard. The reflections of the kerosene lamps that illuminated the room in preference to electricity gilded the young Captain's fair hair almost to the color of honey and glinted on the steel swastika he wore on a chain about his neck. On shelves around what had at one time been a drawing room on the second floor of the north wing an assortment of jars, boxes, and packets contained everything Rhion had ever heard of as necessary to the making of talismans: iron, silver, gold, and copper of various purities; salts and rare earths; every sort of herb and wood imaginable; gems, crystals, both cut and uncut; parchments and strange inks. There was a small forge, crucible, and press, even an icebox containing samples of the blood of various animals and birds. And yes, he thought, smiling to remember the first time Tally had come to the rooms he'd shared with Jaldis, even a mummified baby alligator...
And for all the good it had done them so far, the shelves might just as well have been stocked with twigs and pebbles, like children playing "store."
Baldur snuffled and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his robe. "Maybe the formulae are p-poison-specific? It could explain..."
"Nonsense," Gall retorted coldly, returning his pendulum to its box. "I have said before, it is a wizard's sublime faith in himself that conquers poison."
"It c-can't be! Then a talisman of protection wouldn't protect someone who didn't know what it was."
"Precisely. It is only the illuminatus, the initiate, the pure, who can draw upon the vril..."
They were bickering acrimoniously as they opened the door, going from the lamplit gloom of the workroom to the sundrenched morning brilliance of the upstairs hall outside.
Von Rath sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. "I didn't truly expect it to work," he said. "And Jacobus would tell me that was why it didn't, of course. But, Rhion, we have done everything, tried everything... You said the ritual of meditation this morning raised more power than ever before, but you know and I know it wasn't enough, wasn't nearly enough. Not even with every allowance you made for the position of the stars, the phase of the moon... Nothing. And with our army going into France..."
He paused, seeing the flicker of expression that passed across Rhion's eyes. "Yes," he said quietly, "I know what you would be saying. But truly, war as it is fought now - as it is fought in this world - is the province of the first attacker. Had we not taken the initiative this spring - and it was they who first attacked us a year ago - we would have been driven, as we now drive them."
"Yes," Rhion lied, turning away to mop the spilled poison where it had slopped from the dish. "Yes, I understand that."
Von Ram's voice was low and urgent. "Please understand also that the war is nothing - it is, for us, only a means to an end. It is our last chance - the last chance of wizardry - to demonstrate our powers, to regain our powers with the backing of the government. That is why we must succeed at what we do here."
He picked up the garnet talisman and returned it to a box of failed experiments, of talismans - properly made, properly charged - that simply did not work. The lamplight flashed across the jewel's central facet and caught on a scratch on one side, as if the stone had been prised from a setting. A good-quality gem, Rhion thought, far better than most wizards in his own world could afford for talismanic work unless they had an extremely rich patron. He could understand von Rath's concern - without the support of the government, the group would never have been able to work under these ideal conditions.
But it crossed his mind to wonder, suddenly, where the Occult Bureau got the gems it sent them.
"Rhion," von Rath said, closing the box and turning with one slender hand still on its lid, "you haven't been - coming down to the laboratory to work at night, have you?"
Rhion felt himself get cold. In anything but the golden kerosene light he knew von Rath could have seen him pale. "I did once or twice when I first got back on my feet, but not lately." He could feel sweat start under his hair and beard.
Von Rath frowned. "No, this would have been the night before last. I thought the laboratory was disturbed a little yesterday morning, as if it had been used."
While part of Rhion breathed a prayer of gratitude that he'd always been meticulous about returning things to rights after his nights of work - so von Rath did notice things like that - another part of him was able to put genuine puzzlement in his voice as he said, "The night before last?" He'd finished the Spiracle last week and had been catching up on lost sleep ever since.
"Yes. And Baldur also seems to think that his room has been searched, though he has become... a little paranoid."
"I'm told cocaine does that." Rhion remembered his own conviction that his room had been searched.
Von Rath's gem-pure lips tightened; then he sighed. "He takes it to continue his researches, you know," he said quietly. "There is a truly formidable amount of material to get through - diaries, letters, court cases dating back to the fifteenth century... I keep a close eye on how much he takes."
If you're his only source, thought Rhion. But, anxious to turn the Captain's thoughts away from who might have been using the laboratory at night, he suggested, "Do you think the problem of raising power might be with the composition of this group?" He pushed his glasses more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose and followed von Rath as the younger wizard started moving about the laboratory, turning down the kerosene lamps until their wicks snuffed to nothing and the shadows hovered down about them like the fall of night.
"According to Gall, and to what Baldur's read to me, the old covens seem to have been much larger than ours. Five men isn't a lot, even if they are mageborn and more or less trained. Magic can be raised from the emotional or psychic or life-force energies of human beings, as Baldur pointed out last night. But blood-sacrifice, either voluntary or involuntary, isn't the only way of doing that, you know. Perhaps if you worked with twice as many men as this, and an equal number of women, you'd get better results."
Von Rath chuckled wearily and turned from replacing a lamp chimney, shadows of irony flickering in his tired eyes. "My dear Rhion, have you any concept of the contortions Eric had to undertake to gather even this group? To find men whose loyalty was as reliable as their potential for power, and who were even willing to work as a group?" He shook his head with a half-comic smile and led the way out into the sunlit upstairs hall. "And as for women..." The gesture of his hand, as dismissive as a shrug, raised the hackles on Rhion's neck. "Women have no place in magic."
"WHAT?"
"Not true magic." Surely you must know that, said the flex of his voice, as Rhion stared at him, too dumbfounded even to feel outrage. "Their emotions are uncontrollable - surely you've tried to have a reasonable argument with a woman? Their intellects are on the average less than men's. That's been scientifically proven. Oh, there are one or two exceptions..."
"I've met enough exceptions to constitute a rule, personally."
But the little smile and the small, amused shake of his head were impenetrable. It was not, Rhion saw, a matter even for serious argument, as if Rhion had suggested petitioning the help of the kitchen cat.
Von Rath gave him a boyish half grin, a man-to-man expression of complicity. "It's hard to explain, but you know. It's one of those things that a true man knows by intuition. And at bottom, magic is a masculine trait. A woman's emotionalism and wooly-mindedness would only delay us, always supposing we could find a woman with even a tenth the level of power of a man."
Given the intolerable pressures a mageborn girl would have faced in Germany, Rhion hadn't been terribly surprised that the Torweg group was entirely masculine. And yet from Poincelles he knew that there were and always had been women occultists. But not, it appeared, in Nazi Germany.
"And in any case," von Rath went on, turning down the hallway toward his rooms, "the question at the moment is an academic one. We must find a way to raise power - we must find a way to convert that power to operationality - and we must find them soon. Only through those - only through the victory that such power will bring - can magic be returned to this world."
"And did little ratty die?" Cigar in hand, Poincelles looked around from the doorway of the watch room at the foot of the stairs. Beyond him Rhion - who had changed once more into his usual fatigue pants and a brown army shirt - could see that the room had been curtained to dimness, and the portable screen set up on which cinemas were displayed; the black-and-white images of newsreels of the war in the West flickered across it like jiggling ghosts.
"Did you have money on it living?"
The Frenchman grinned broadly. After the dawn ritual of meditation to raise power he hadn't even bothered to attend the experiment with the talisman. He'd changed out of his robe back into the same loud tweed trousers and jacket he'd had on last night - the same shirt and underclothing by the smell of it. "Boche idiots," he said.
Past Poincelle's angular shoulder the fluttering images of huge war machines appeared on the screen in the gloom of the watch room, monstrous metal beetles rumbling down the cobbled streets of towns with their turret guns swinging watchfully back and forth; then, with dreamlike quickness, they were transformed to images of men - Rhion did not have enough German unassisted by spells of understanding to catch who they were - being herded out of a building somewhere, herded into boxcars with their hands above their heads. The Ministry of Propaganda sent these newsreels, these moving pictures, out regularly to the SS, even as it sent whatever American cinemas they wanted to see... they had taught Rhion more about the German Reich than von Rath had counted on. Most of all, they had taught him that the Reich was sufficiently proud enough of those fearsome columns of marching men, those lines of resistant "slave peoples" being shot for intransigence, to have them thus immortalized and displayed.
Baldur, clattering down the steps behind Rhion in his own ill-fitting and dirty trousers and rumpled shirt, paused and snapped spitefully, "For a man whose country will be the next to fall to the victorious German Armies you have no room to talk!" He pointed into the watch room, where columns of armored trucks and marching men flickered across the screen. "You know where they're headed now? France! Your cowardly government is on the run and they'll be in Paris before the week is out!"
Poincelles only raised the back of his fist up under one hairy nostril and snorted in a mime of inhaling cocaine. Baldur's fleshy neck turned bright red and, wheeling, the youth lumbered away to the dining room, tripping on a corner of the hall rug as he went.
"Does he think I'm going to weep when the Krauts march into La Belle Paris?" The Frenchman's skeletal face grimaced with scorn. "I am a citizen of the world, my friend, born and reborn down through generations. What is this war to me? What is France to me? I was high mage to the court of Kublai Khan, who conjured for him the eldritch secrets of the Aklo and the Hyperborean races. Before that, in the dark years of glory in the seventh century, I conjured for Pope Leo those things that would have caused his name to be stricken from the pages of history, had any known of them but I. In the black abysses of time I was High Priest of the Cult of Thoth for the Pharaoh Ptah-Hotep, who was accursed in the Red Land and the Black Land for the things that he caused to be done..."
He took the cigar from his mouth and blew a stinking stream of blue smoke into the sunlit air. In the watch room Rhion heard the men give a great delighted cheer; on the screen he saw a country road, jammed with people - old men pushing bicycles laden with household goods, women hurrying, stumbling, dragging frightened children by the hand, old cars maneuvering slowly through the choking throng of people fleeing with whatever they could carry...
And from the sky the war planes descended, lean and deadly with the twisted sun-cross emblazoned on their silver sides, opening fire with their machine guns on the fleeing civilians below. The guards in the watch room cheered and whooped at the sight of the women running for shelter, dropping all they carried and catching up their terrified children, men scrambling like scared sheep into the bushes alongside the road, faces twisted in silent cries.
Rhion felt sick and cold. Beside him, Poincelles' voice went on, "That Baldur, he puts on airs because he wants to be in the SS, to be one of Himmler's darlings. Himmler, huh! A mediocrity, a crank - using the most powerful and dangerous elite the world has ever known to serve tea in white gloves at Hitler's garden parties. It's like using a Damascus blade to cut eclairs! Himmler claims he was the Emperor Henry the Fowler in his former life - pah! I knew Henry the Fowler! I served in his court in the great days of the Dark Ages, in the wars against the Magyars and the Slavs, and Himmler is no more his reincarnation than you are. I learn from them, yes" - he waved the cigar in the direction of the sun-washed dining room, where Baldur's voice could be heard querulously demanding more sugar for his coffee - "as I learn from you. But all this is merely a step along the way."
The black, knowing eyes gleamed and he reached out to pat Rhion's cheek, the pointed fingernails pricking through his beard like dirty claws. "I am in this for myself, my little friend. You really ought to trust me."
On the newsreel screen the war planes made another strafing run at the crowded road. A man scrambled out of one of the cars and bolted for the roadside; his foot tangled in the wheel-spokes of a fallen bicycle and for a moment he tugged frantically to free it, desperate, horrified, as the double line of bullets rip-sawed the road, bursting a crate of chickens ten feet from him in an explosion of blood and feathers, then swept on to cut him in half. The guards catcalled and shouted facetious advice; Horst Eisler half turned in his wooden chair, called out, "Rhion, you got to come in and see this!"
And the wizard born and reborn, mage to the court of Kublai Khan and High Priest of the gray cult of Thoth in the silent deeps of time, strolled off down the hall toward the dining room to get his breakfast, trailing a line of bluish stench in his wake.