The Magicians of Night

Chapter Nine

"WHO'S THE OLD MAN?"
Taken unawares by the question, the barmaid Sara turned sharply, slopping beer on the tray she had been about to lift from the bar; for a split second uncertainty and fear gleamed in those spitcat eyes before they melted into warmth as ersatz as the average cup of German coffee. Then she smiled and brushed her hip lightly against Rhion's crotch. "Don't worry about my old man, Angeldrawers. Old Pauli does the settling-up with him." But he knew she was sparring for time.
"I don't mean your pimp," Rhion said quietly and took from the breast pocket of his shabby brown shirt the gold pince-nez. "I mean the old man who wore these - the old man who used to cut quills with the knife you tried to stab me with."
Her hand shut around his wrist with the same startling strength he'd felt dragging him off-balance in the laundry room, and her eyes changed from a courtesan's to an assassin's. "Where did you get those?"
They were jammed shoulder to shoulder in a mob of black-uniformed men and locals in shabby serge around the bar; with the cessation of the newscaster's staccato voice a few moments ago, the Woodsman's Horn had returned to a chaos more characteristic of Saturday nights than of the normally quiet Thursdays. But with the triumphs in the West, the locals had all crowded in to listen to the broadcasts. Now men slapped each other on the shoulder and laughed, congratulating and triumphant - the French falling back in utter confusion, the British ousted, helpless, waiting for the Reich's conquering armies, Belgium and Holland on their knees... An extremely drunk man in the golden belts and brown uniform of a local Party leader was explaining at the top of his voice to a bored-looking Trudi how England's work force would be organized for the good of the Reich, and over at the piano a group of the guards from the Kegenwald labor camp were singing "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, things go twice as well."
Rhion transferred the glasses to his free hand and thence to his shirt pocket again. He didn't raise his voice. "Can we go somewhere and talk?"
She drew breath to speak, not sure, he guessed, whether to try out another lie. The next instant someone grabbed Rhion roughly from behind, twisting his arm painfully as a boozy gust of breath from over his shoulder demanded, "This Jewish squirt bothering you, sweetheart?" Twisting to look back, Rhion saw two Storm Troopers, camp guards, blond, clean-shaven men with iron eyes. "You want us to give him a lesson in manners?"
Since you're so highly qualified in that field... Rhion, panicked, had the sense not to say it; his gaze cut frantically to the smoky room, but Horst, who'd driven him into town, was nowhere in sight. Christ, I'll report the bastard...
For a moment Sara considered the matter. Then she dimpled coquettishly and shook her head. "Oh, let him go." She made bedroom eyes at the men and insinuated herself between them, and they released Rhion to make room for her. Her little hands fluttered, caressing collar flashes and sleeve bands as if in childlike admiration of the insignia. "But it's good to know German maidenhood is being so well protected."
Obviously the qualifications for maidens have been lowered for the war, Rhion thought, edging out of the crowd as quickly and inconspicuously as possible and heading for one of the vacant tables in a shadowy corner of the room. I wonder if Poincelles made that clear beforehand to the lords of the Tartarean Seat? As he sat down, he found he was shaking. He hadn't counted on Sara having allies, nor considered the possibility of being beaten bloody in an alley in mistake for a Jew.
He studied her as she teased and flirted with the growing circle of Storm Troopers, always in motion, touching the wrist of one man as he lighted a cigarette for her, the arm of another as she looked up into his face with those huge black eyes. Her garish hair was sticky with the sweat that sheened her face in the frowsty heat; in her cheap, green, flowered dress, her body seemed to crackle with nervous energy and the promise of sensual outrageousness.
Though there was always one barmaid on active duty, it was never the same one - the girls appeared and disappeared regularly through the inconspicuous door near the bar. Old Johann was slumped unconscious in a corner, no more regarded tonight than a half-dead dog. Music blared forth from the radio again, soaring, passionate, incongruously beautiful - the music of this world was some of the loveliest Rhion had ever heard, totally unlike anything he had known in his former life. He wished he could write some of it down for Tally, who would be fascinated by its complexities.
"Who are you?"
Rhion looked up. Sara set two tankards of beer on the table before him. He had seen nightshade sweeter than her eyes.
"Professor Rhion Sligo." He took a sip of one of the beers. "But Auguste told you that last week." He produced the pince-nez again and held it out to her. "I found these in a box of about two hundred pairs that the doctor from Kegenwald brought for me to choose from after you broke mine the other night." Up at the bar he'd seen her take in the black eye and the bruise on the side of his face.
Her hand, which had started toward the glasses, flinched back and clenched on itself, and the red mouth, wide and generous under its paint, hardened. She blew a cloud of cigarette smoke at him and laughed. "I was pretty drunk here the other night but I think I'd remember breaking your glasses for you, Professor. Maybe it was Trudi - she's pretty much like me when the lights are out." She plucked the glasses from his hand and tucked them in the soft chasm between her breasts, and gave him a mocking smile, daring him to lay a hand on her with the men within call.
"I'm talking about three o'clock in the morning the day before yesterday," Rhion said quietly. "At Schloss Torweg, after you got done helping Poincelles raise his - ah - ritual energies. As the closest thing this country has to a professional wizard, when someone tries to kill me I can usually figure out who it is." He pulled the knife from his pocket and slid it across the table toward her.
She laughed again, shaking back her hair. "Christ Jesus, a wizard! What'd you do, cut the cards and get a number that added up to the Gematria of my name? Going to turn in your Ouija board notes as evidence to the local Gauleiter? You'd better find your keeper and head on back to the Schjoss, or you will get a lesson in manners." With a cocky flip of her skirt she turned to go.
"Wait a minute! Don't call the Etiquette Squad!"
She turned back, irresolute, and he talked fast.
"If I'm Gestapo all I have to do is pull an i.d. and it's you they'll be taking out of here, not me. If I'm not..." She came back like a feral cat, ready to scratch or flee. He lowered his voice again. "If I'm not you don't have anything to lose listening to me, do you? What have you been looking for up at the Schloss?"
Her dark eyes shifted. The soft mouth flexed a little, and she brushed aside a sticky tendril of hair from her cheek. "Drugs," she said quietly. "Cocaine - Baldur keeps a stash of it under a floorboard in the corner of the workroom upstairs."
"Don't be ridiculous. Why risk being shot for spying over something you can get out of Poincelles in trade for a couple of trips up to his temple? And you know as well as I do that in this country they make arrests on a lot thinner evidence than party tricks and numerology."
Slowly, still tense and unwilling, she pulled out a chair and sat across from him, dropping her cigarette and crushing it out beneath one high red heel.
"Are you working for the old man? You've been searching the place - what are you looking for?" He leaned across to her. "I have to know." And when she didn't answer, only studied him with those wary black eyes, he added, "I haven't told von Rath. I can't - I couldn't let him know I'd been out of the compound that night. I'm more or less a prisoner there myself. The old man is a wizard, isn't he?"
She picked up the knife where he had left it on the table, turning its blunt brownish length over in her hands. The red paint on her nails was chipped and chewed, the nails themselves bitten off short. "Yes," she said, after a long time. "He's my father."
"Can you take me to him?"
Her voice was vicious. "It's word of him I'm looking for." She fumbled another cigarette from her dress pocket and flicked the wheel on a brass lighter made from a rifle bullet, but her fingers were trembling. Rhion, though he hated cigarette smoke, reached to steady the flame for her, but she jerked her hands away with a vitriol glare that made him remember how the knife had reeked with her loathing of men.
The mild narcotic of the nicotine seemed to steady her. "I've seen people do psychometry," she said after a moment. "One of the girls in my dorm at college used to do it at parties, but she had to be two drinks drunk..."
"College?"
Under the sweaty points of her red hair her glance was scornful. "You think I could get into every SS barracks between here and the Swiss border by waving my degree in chemistry, pal?"
"Ahh - no."
She smoked in silence, her lipstick leaving lurid stains on the white paper of the cigarette, her eyes avoiding his. As she smoked she swallowed back her rage, a little at a time, like a bile of nausea. "I heard the SS had an Occult Bureau that was holding people like him in special custody. Then I found out about your place..." She raised her eyes to his, and in them he saw how she hated him for having the power to tell her what he knew. "You say those came from Kegenwald. Could you tell me if he... if he's still alive?"
In spite of his black eye and the wound on his arm that smarted every time he moved, Rhion's heart went out to her. For all her hardness she was very young. She would, he knew, far rather have been hurt herself stealing the information, would rather have traded her favors for it, than simply ask it of a man. "He wasn't dead, or in immediate fear of dying, when they took his glasses off him," he said slowly. "But I have no way of telling how long ago that was, or what might have happened to him since. Do you know why the Occult Bureau is imprisoning wizards?"
"God knows." She shook her head wearily.
"And the magic that he uses..." The name of it, half-glimpsed in the deepest fabric of the penknife, returned to him. "The - the Kabbala..."
Her eyes, closed in momentary frustration, flicked open again, and in them he saw the bitter look of a cornered animal. "So you know," she said, and suddenly all the tautness seemed to go out of her, all the catlike readiness to scratch and flee. She sighed, her eyelids creasing with an exhausted irony. "The damned thing is that if he wasn't a Kabbalist I think he'd be dead now. Most of the people they arrested in Warsaw that first week ended up dead - not just Jews, but gypsies, teachers, priests, Communists, newspaper editors..." She pushed wearily at her hair. "Papa's brothers are all rabbis, they thought what he studied was crazy. But I think it's the only reason he was separated out, locked up instead of shot. I've been searching the Schloss for information, something that might tell me if he's still alive, and where, and what they want with him..."
"You're a Jew, then?" Rhion said, enlightened but keeping his voice as quiet as possible.
Sara rolled her eyes ceilingward. "So what are you, the flower of Aryan manhood?"
He blinked at her, startled. "I'm from another universe," he explained. "I don't even know what a Jew looks like."
"Holy Mother of... The boys in the barracks said you were crazy. Are you circumcised?"
"Yes," Rhion said, nonplussed by the apparent switch in topic. "What does that have to do with anything?"
She regarded him, baffled, through the bluish haze of smoke, then shook her head. "I'm beginning to believe you're from another universe," she said in a tone that indicated she believed no such thing. "Just don't get yourself picked up by the SS, pal. And you might remember that if you breathe one word about my own ancestry, they won't even take me outside to spare the furniture before they shoot me. All right?"
"All right," Rhion agreed, still puzzled. "How powerful a wizard is your father? I've heard von Rath mention the Kabbala, but he seemed to think it was worthless by definition, being Jewish. Is there power in it?"
"Is there..." Sara stared at him, mouth open. "It's all hooey, you poor deluded shnook! The whole goddam business is about as real as the tooth fairy! If there was anything in it, do you think they'd be able to round up Kabbalists and their families like sheep for the..."
"Sara!" a voice behind her bawled, and two Storm Troopers came swaggering up. One of them, a guard from the Schloss, saw him and muttered, "Oh, Professor..." but the other eyed him with utter contempt.
"C'mon, Sara, the beer don't taste as good without you to serve it."
"What you want with this little kike, anyway?" the other added, pulling her to her feet and into his arms.
Sara smiled, kittenish, her body suddenly supple again, all hips and breasts and teasing little hands. "Well, what's a poor girl to do if real men don't give her a cigarette now and then?" She took one from the camp guard's breast pocket and put it between soft pouty lips. The man's arm was around her, his hand cupping her buttock, as the three of them vanished into the crowd around the bar.
Rhion sipped his beer, deep in thought.
So much, he thought, for the last country in the world to believe in and support wizardry. Evidently the Reich only supported such wizards as would give it what it asked for, and somehow it made him feel better to know that other wizards had had the good taste to be "enemies of the Reich." There was a wizard as close as the Kegenwald camp, five miles at most from where he sat.
Adrenaline scalded his veins. There was, in fact, a possibility of getting out of here alive.
He thought back on what von Rath had told him of the Kabbala. It hadn't been clear because it was a field of studies rather than any specific book or rite, a tangled labyrinth of meditation and spells rooted in a central symbol called the Tree of Life and spreading in endless thickets of numerological calculation, esoteric scriptural exegesis, and six thousand years' worth of learned quibbling. Sara had taken the knife - her father's folding penknife - from the table, but he recalled vividly the sense of magic deep within it, like the lingering brightness that lay within the Dancing Stones.
Horst appeared at his side, adjusting his tie by touch and clearly unaware of the immense smear of fuchsia lipstick under his left ear. The blond girl Ulrica was walking with that leggy stride back to the bar, already smiling a mechanical smile for the next man or men, and Rhion saw Sara heading toward the recently vacated back room with the two Troopers who'd taken her from him.
He glanced up at Horst. "Would you talk to whoever you have to talk to about having that Sara girl come back to the Schloss with me tonight?"
Horst's face split into a grin of complicity and delight. "Sure thing!" he said, and then added hastily, "Sir. I mean - I knew you'd like her."
He turned at once toward the bar and Rhion said quickly, "When she's not busy." No sense adding a couple of sexually frustrated drunk Nazis to his other problems.
He settled back in his chair, nursing his beer and wondering how difficult it was going to be to break Sara's father out of Kegenwald.
"And don't get any ideas, cupcake," Sara murmured, snuggling against him in the dark backseat of the open car and running a hand along his thigh. "Your chauffeur eavesdrops - he can see us in the driving mirror, too. Unless that's part of your price?" She turned her head against his shoulder, and he felt the tension in her muscles as he put his arm around that slim hard waist and drew her close.
"I have a wife and two kids at home and I never sleep with women who've tried to knife me."
"I bet there's lots of those."
The men were leaving the tavern. As Horst turned the big blue Mercedes in the yard, the yellow headlight beams splashed across the Schloss' three-ton Benz flatbed, catching a firefly glister of silver buttons and gleaming eyes beneath the rolled-up canvas cover. The gray-uniformed Kegenwald guards were mostly walking back to the camp, and as the open Mercedes passed them, striding along in threes and fours down the single narrow street of the village, one or another would wave and call out to Horst, or to Sara.
The street ran past the new church, and the old church, and so out into the dark of the endless pines.
It was thirty minutes' drive to Schloss Torweg, a walk of nearly forty kilometers. Railway trains - the primary means of long-distance transportation in this world - went faster than that, flying machines faster yet. Rhion smiled, hearing the Gray Lady's voice in his mind: To go so far at such speed, and yet you will still arrive there with what you are inside.
He leaned back in the soft leather of the seat, watching the stars flick in and out of the black frieze of branches. The constellations were the same ones he knew, though their names here were different.
This potential for perfection, for comfort, he thought as the wind riffled his hair, and what are they doing? Using their airplanes to strafe fleeing civilians and their radios to incite men to hate. He remembered what he had seen in the scrying crystal and in the Ministry of Propaganda's newsreels.
Had the world gone insane when magic had disappeared?
Not a pleasant thought.
Then they turned a corner where the road returned to its ancient, sunken track, picking up once more the line of the Kegenwald ley, and his blood turned cold.
Power was running along the ley. He could sense it like a sound, a texture in the air, and even stronger, there came to him the chill psychic stench of evil. But as he reached to touch it, to see what it was and where, it was gone. Sara felt the flinch of his body and raised her tousled head sharply from his shoulder, and he realized that quiet as she had been, she'd been waiting tensely for his slightest move.
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
But a hundred yards' distance from the Schloss he felt it again, as the harshness of the yard lights glowed between the black trees, and this time he knew.
They had raised power.
The whole lodge - even the air around it - was lambent with energy, darkly glowing with a horrible, unfocused strength. Sara asked him again softly, "What is it?" as she felt his breath catch in horror; she sat up and pushed back her ruffled curls, but by her voice he could tell she felt nothing. A guard came whistling casually to open the gates. Horst cracked a joke with him about Goering's wedding night that he'd heard at the Horn.
In the luminous square of the lodge's open door von Rath stood waiting. He still wore his white ceremonial robes, and the electric glare in the hall behind him showed his body through. It was only when Rhion got close that he saw blood spots on the hem and sleeves.
"We've done it!" Von Rath sprang down the steps to seize his arms and staggered. Even allowing for the lesser light of the floodlit yard, the younger wizard's eyes were dilated to black, and he swayed on his feet like a drunken man. His hands, gripping Rhion's shoulders, were convulsively strong. "We've done it!" The smell of his robes was horrible: fresh blood, burned flesh, incense. Past him Rhion could see the air in the hall pulsing with power, power that flowed uncontrolled down the paneling and moved like snakes of cold light on the stairs. Instinctively he balked when von Rath tried to draw him over the threshold.
"Horst," he ordered shakily, "take the girl up to my room. Sara, wait for me."
Von Rath waved impatiently. "Let the guards have her, you don't want a woman at a time like this. Come." His hand like iron on the nape of Rhion's neck, he dragged him up the steps and into the accursed house.
"Baldur was right, you see," he whispered exultantly as he pulled Rhion past the watch room and down the wide, paneled hall. His drugged eyes had a hard, terrible shine, like opals in which some evil spirit had been bound. "Gall was right. The Adepts of the Shining Crystal - they knew! They had the secret of how life force can be woven into magic! Baldur found the rites - they were coded, concealed in the Lucalli Diaries... How to draw forth power, all the power we need..."
As von Rath pulled him through that hideously vibrant house Rhion held out his hand, summoning witchlight to his palm. Nothing happened. He fumbled a match from his pocket and held it out, half afraid to call fire to the dried red sulfur-paste at its tip. He felt almost afraid to speak, for fear of waking some terrible force by the softest of words.
No fire burst onto the match, but out of an obscure fear that things were on the verge of uncontrolled chaos Rhion put the match tip into his mouth and wet it thoroughly before dropping it onto a table in the hall. "Were you able to convert it?"
"Not yet." Von Rath halted with him before the temple's doors.
There were no guards in this part of the house, no lights. The temple doors stood open, and Rhion recoiled before the dark power he saw moving within, shifting and quivering in the blur of candlelight and smoke. Within the long, black-painted room he could see horribly half-familiar marks scrawled everywhere on the parquet, save around the altar, where Gall, stripped to his underwear, was engaged in washing the floor.
The smell told Rhion what had gone on that night, and the hair lifted on his neck.
"But don't you see?" von Rath giggled, shivering all over with triumph and glee. "We won't need to. I made Baldur see the things I wanted him to see. The three of us here in the temple, performing the blood-rites of power, and him on the other side of the house... I made illusions in his mind and he saw them!"
Rhion pulled away from the clutching hands, disgusted and horrified. "If he was as crocked as you are I'm surprised he didn't see Venus on the half shell rising out of the sink!"
"No." He caught Rhion's face between his palms, staring down into his eyes and seeing in them nothing but his own triumph, his own vindication, his own joy. "He saw nothing, no hallucination, but those that I projected into his mind. He wrote them down, with the exact times of their appearances - they were the same, Rhion!
"Don't you see? Maybe we can't convert power to physical operancy, not yet, though that will come. But once we can control illusion, we can take out the British air cover. And that will be enough to ensure the success of the invasion of England. And after that - " His voice sank to a whisper, " - they'll give me anything I want."