The Magicians of Night

Chapter Thirteen

"YOU'RE CRAZY!"
"I thought your degree was in chemistry, not psychiatry," Rhion retorted, pulling up his feet to sit cross-legged on the lumpy bed. "You have a better suggestion?"
"Yeah," Sara said hotly. "I smuggle my father a gun instead of those silly pills and have him shoot himself instead of letting the guards do it."
"If you could figure out a way to smuggle your father a gun instead of the pills we wouldn't be having these problems."
"No." She sighed and shook her head, frizzy red hair catching the light of the candles in gold threads all around her square, slender shoulders as she leaned back in the room's rump-sprung stuffed chair. "If Papa tried to blast his way out, he'd just hurt himself, or get into an argument about time travel or the internal combustion engine with the guards... Not that he knows anything about the internal combustion engine. When Mama would go visit her sisters in Pozen, my heart was in my throat every time Papa tried to light the stove or cut up a chicken to cook. He once nearly killed himself taking the chessboard down from a shelf." She nudged the two pills - clumsy wads of gritty tallow on a twist of paper - on her knee with a fingertip, not meeting Rhion's eyes. "Maybe we'd better just forget it. Thank you for wanting to help, but..."
"You don't think I'm really a wizard, do you?"
She raised black-coffee eyes to his. "Oh, come on," she said gently. "You're sweet - you really are - but I was raised around people who thought they were wizards, you know? And about half of them claimed to be from another dimensional plane or from the future or the past, or reincarnated from being Albertus Magnus or the Dalai Lama or some kind of Inca sachem. They'd talk with Papa for hours about magic and spiritual forces and they'd swap spells like a couple of grannies trading recipes, and for what? I never saw Papa so much as keep the mice away, let alone make himself invisible so the Nazis wouldn't see him."
"I'm not going to make him invisible," Rhion explained patiently. "I'm just going to make the guards look the other way while he crosses from the infirmary to the fence."
"If you can do that, how come you're sneaking in and out of here under the wire like the rest of us poor mortals?"
"Because it takes about an hour and a half of intense meditation and mental exercises to do it, and it wipes me out for the rest of the night."
"Yeah," Sara said wisely, getting to her feet and taking a cigarette from the pocket of her scarlet frock, "they always had some reason why they couldn't do it either."
Down below the voices of the guards drifted faintly up through the open window, the ubiquitous stink of tobacco smoke vying with the sharp sweetness of the pines. The last of the lingering northern twilight had faded less than an hour ago. As he'd listened to Sara's high heels and Horst's escorting jackboots ascend the attic stairs, Rhion had thought about how badly he'd missed the sound of a woman's voice, surrounded as he had been for months by men.
"Sara," he said, "I know you don't believe in this. But believe that if your father doesn't escape from Kegenwald, he's going to die on the night of the twenty-first of this month in a way you don't want to know about. I need this help, and we've got damn little time. You say you can get into the camp on Sunday?"
She nodded. She'd risen from the chair and walked to the window, to let her cigarette smoke drift out into the luminous dark. Candlelight softened the sharpness of her features and sparkled on the little gold chain she wore around the slender softness of her throat.
It was Saturday night. Von Rath must have paid the owner of the tavern a hefty wad of marks to make up for her absence - beyond a doubt Sara would have to surrender some of what was given her as well. The dress she wore, bias-cut cotton crepe that clung to the curves of breast and hip, was better than her usual work clothes. It had taken Rhion awhile to get used to seeing a woman's calves and ankles so casually displayed, though Dr. Weineke's SS uniform had effectively killed whatever erotic interest he'd felt in the principle.
"They let families in, if the commandant's not being a putz that day," Sara went on. "Sometimes women wait for eight, ten hours outside to see their husbands, and then he decides there's no visiting till next week. They come from all over Germany, you know - it's a work camp, mostly for political prisoners. A lot of the town mayors and priests and union leaders from Poland are there, as well as Germans who said something Hitler or the local party leaders didn't like - or were something they didn't like, like Jews or gypsies or Poles. The women bring food and clothing..." Her red-painted mouth twisted. "The commandants budget for it in the rations. They count on the men being fed at least half by their families, whether they are or not."
"Have you gone before?"
She shook her head. "Even in different clothes with my hair dyed and those fake glasses I got, I didn't want to risk anyone recognizing me. God knows enough of the guards could." She smoked awhile in silence, dark gaze fixed on some middle distance beyond the window, lost in her own thoughts.
"It's funny," she said softly, her face half turned aside and the cold glare of the floodlights from below picking out the fragile wrinkles and the lines of dissipation around the mouth and eyes. "When I heard they'd picked up Papa - when I'd heard the SS had him in 'special custody' - I thought, Hell, I know how to find him... or at least how to make money and get information while I looked. I had God knows how many boyfriends in New York. I worked as an artist's model while I was in school - not that Aunt Tayta ever knew where I was always going in the evenings - and the first year I was in New York, in thirty-four, I worked as a waitress to make money to start at NYU. I used to go out to dinner with one guy, have him bring me home at eight because I said I had to study, have another guy pick me up to go to the movies, have him bring me home in time to go out with guy number three for the midnight set at the Cotton Club. So I thought doing what I do now wouldn't be so very different. Christ, was I naive."
Her lips flinched suddenly, and she looked down, crushing out her cigarette on the windowsill with fingers that shook.
"You must love him a lot," Rhion said quietly. She nodded, not looking, not willing to give him even the words of a reply. The pride in her, the anger at men, and the hatred of having to depend on one, however crazy, for help, was like a wall of thorns. He drew up his knees, wrapped his sweatshirt-clad arms around them. The half-healed knife cut still hurt like hell. "How did you get into Germany?"
"Through Basle." The request for information, for the story, steadied her as he'd hoped it would. "I used to go out with a guy named Blackie Wein - he ran protection for Lepke Buchalter down in the garment district. A mobster," she added, seeing Rhion's puzzled expression. "He was tied up with Murder, Incorporated - the Ice Pick League, they were called - but Blackie was all right. He was a Yankees fan like me. When I heard Papa had been picked up - that he was in 'designated internment' - I didn't know what else to do. I went to Lepke. He put the word out and got me identity papers for two hundred dollars from the daughter of a newspaper editor from Dresden who'd just got out with his family by the skin of his teeth. There was a guy named Fish who did me up a couple more sets to use in emergencies, plus some for Papa - Fish made his living passing bad checks - and another one of Lepke's boys taught me how to pick locks. That was the biggest help when I got to searching this place." She shrugged. "So here I am."
She straightened up, and walked to the chair again, to pick up the little screw of paper with the two waxy, lumpy pills that lay upon its padded arm. For a long moment she stood looking down at them. Then her eyes moved to Rhion, still sitting curled together on the bed. "This is crazy-stupid." The break in her voice was infinitesimal. In spite of everything, Rhion thought, she was young enough to grab at even crazy-stupid hope. She put the pills in her purse.
Rhion took a deep breath. "You say you can pick locks. Will you help me with something else?"
With an almost instinctive gesture she moved a step or two away, putting the iron-spindled footboard of the bed between them and folding her hands around its upper bar. "Like what?"
As Rhion had suspected, there were rooms in the cellar under the north wing, directly beneath the temple, on the ley-line itself, the door hidden behind the piled boxes.
"Yeah, I saw that door," Sara said, as they climbed down the shaft of the disused kitchen dumbwaiter - an invention Rhion made a mental note to mention to the Duke's kitchen steward when he got back, if he got back - clinging to the old rope while their feet sought the tiny slots let into the brick of its sides. "By the scratches on the floor it didn't get moved back and forth a lot, so obviously they weren't keeping anybody down there." Her voice sank from a whisper to barely a breath as they crawled out into the damp, pitch-black cavern of the southern part of the cellar. As they ghosted through the huge main chamber, where the furnace slept like some somnolent monster in its aura of oily dust, the tinny echo of the wireless could be heard from the guards' watch room opposite the door to the cellar stairs. "How the hell can you tell where you're going?" Her hand pressed his shoulder from behind; without her high-heeled shoes she was an inch shorter than his own barefoot height.
"I told you. I'm a wizard."
"Sorry I asked."
She fished the flashlight she usually carried with her from her purse, put her fingers over the bulb and flicked it quickly on to scan the far wall. "There."
"Just as I thought." He glanced at the ceiling beams in the blackness.
Even though several feet of floor joists, he could feel the cold evil of the temple as they came beneath its bounds. True to his word, he had gotten Horst to take him down to the Woodsman's Horn the night before last - the night of the moon's dark - and had remained there drinking bad beer and listening to a Beethoven concert over the wireless until the place had closed. It hadn't helped. Even at a distance of twenty miles he'd fancied all evening that he felt what was happening at the Schloss, and had dreaded returning there, fearing what he would find in spite of the doubled and trebled spells of protection and dispersal he had taught von Rath. He didn't know what he'd have done if one of the chosen victims had been Sara's father, but it wasn't. They had used another gypsy woman and a noted German runeologist - Aryan to the core - whose runic system had contradicted the one favored by the Bureau. After one attempt at sleep from which he'd been jerked, sweating in horror, by his dreams, he'd spent the rest of the night staring at the rafters. It seemed to him that the screams of the victims had permeated the very fabric of the house.
That afternoon von Rath had shown to him the talismans they'd made, disks of bone and crystal and stretched skin written over with the dark sigils devised by the accursed Adepts; he had talked for hours, lovingly, eagerly, obsessively, fingering them with wonderment and not seeming to remember that they had been made of the bodies of men like himself. He had spoken of the power within them and how it could be utilized and what he would do when that power was his... only that. Rhion did not have to touch the things to know that the power was there, glowing in them against the workroom's lamplit dark as phosphorous glows in the heart of a rotten tree. But neither he nor von Rath could utilize that power for even the simplest of spells they'd tried.
And that, he supposed, was just as well.
The boxes in the cellar were filled with moldy books, smelling of silverfish and mice; it took him and Sara a few minutes to move them aside. Behind them, as Sara had said, was a door, new, stout, and padlocked shut. "Probably used to be a wine room," he remarked in an undervoice, holding the flashlight as the girl knelt and began probing the lock with the various wire tools she'd taken from her purse. "There's marks of an older lock here above the new hasp." Shielding the light with his body, he strained his ears to hear any creak of footfalls in the hall overhead, any sign of approaching guards on the stair, or any clue that their activities were suspected. At this point, they could never hope to get the boxes replaced in time.
"This door isn't more than a year or so old," Sara breathed. "What the hell do you think old Pauli has in here, anyway? All the booze is in the cupboard in the library - all the booze he knows about, anyway; Poincelles has a stash of his own. I don't think he knows about the coke Baldur gets from Kurt at the Horn, or those little odds and ends Gall steals from the workroom..."
"Gall?"
"Yeah. He's got these little sacks of seeds and herbs and crystals hidden all around his room, a couple of amulets tucked under a loose floorboard, a mortar and pestle, a set of rune-stones, and a crystal ball cached in the bedsprings. It was a whole education, going through this place. Bingo," she added, an expression not translatable even with the Spell of Tongues. The padlock fell open.
His heart beating fast, Rhion pushed the door inward.
The Dark Well was there. The smell of the room was the same as he remembered from those first instants of consciousness: moist earth, wet stone, power... the strange, ozoneous air of the Void. It was here they had garnered, not in that boarded-up chamber upstairs; it was here they had taken their drugs and reached out over the Void's darkness to guide him and Jaldis. It was here Eric Hagen had died.
The pang of remembering Jaldis again twisted in him like a turned knife. Even now in this nightmare world, he still caught himself thinking that when he returned home the old man would be there. His too-active imagination wondered for a gruesome second whether his master had actually been killed by the Void or was drifting there somewhere, still alive but unable either to escape or die... He pushed the thought quickly away. It was something he would never know.
Drawing a deep breath, he stepped back through the door to where Sara waited, staring behind her into the cellar's dark.
"I'm not sure how long this will take," he murmured. "Get back up to the room; if they catch you down here you might be in real trouble."
"Not as much trouble as you're gonna be if they flash a light down the stairs and find all those boxes moved and the door open," she replied, peering hard in the direction of his voice. "I'll stick around."
"Thank you." Not that a warning would do him much good, he reflected. Even if he and Sara managed to reach the dumb-waiter shaft and get out of the cellar and up the backstairs to the dressing room on the second floor, the boxes being displaced would tell von Rath everything he needed to know. At this point he was certain von Rath would dismantle the Dark Well to keep him here - and that would only be the start of his worries.
Sara closed the door, leaving him alone in darkness.
In darkness he could see the traced lines of chalk and long-dried blood that marked where the original rites of opening had been done. The ritually charged swastika that had been his beacon across the Void's darkness was still there beside the triple circle of the Well itself, the symbol of the sun-cross at which he could now barely bring himself to look. Beyond it hung the shimmering brown column of shadow that even mageborn eyes could not pierce.
His pulse thudded loud in his ears as he approached it. The Well was quiescent - he could, he supposed, have passed his hand through it with no ill effects, but nothing would have induced him to try it. And it was so tenuous, he thought - the power that held it here so ephemeral that merely the breaking of the Circles, the erasure of any of the marks upon the floor, would destroy the Well and his chances of contacting the help he needed forever.
For a long time he only stood looking at the place, trying to steady his breathing and his thoughts.
A window into the Void.
A way to get home.
The thing that had killed Eric Hagen.
He could dimly sense the ley running deep beneath his feet, like groundwater in the earth, but he could no more have used its power to open the Void than he could have washed a tent in a thimble. On the night of the solstice, he thought, the power would be there, maybe. But there had better be one hell of a lot of power concentrated at the other end.
He took a deep breath, pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, and, kneeling, took chalk and Sara's clasp knife from his pocket. In the darkness he drew a Circle close to the charged sun-cross on the floor, its edge touching that of the Well itself, and cut open the vein near his right elbow, where it wouldn't show, to mark the signs of Power in his own blood. He had no sense of power in doing this - he never had, in this universe - but he followed the rites meticulously, making himself believe that the faint strength of the ley-path seeped up into the chalked lines, drawing the figures of air as precisely as if they were actually visible, glowing as they would be in his own world. Trying not to think about whether anyone over there was listening.
It had been almost three months. Of course someone would be listening. Jaldis' loft was the only place they could hear, unless Shavus had used the old man's notes to open another Well elsewhere. This close to the solstice, knowing it was the only time when enough power would be available to them here, of course he'd be listening for them...
But Shavus had disappeared the day before his and Jaldis' crossing - arrested, murdered, banished... he did not know.
Maybe no one knew.
We can think of neither the future that we go to, nor the past that we leave behind...
Don't do this to yourself, he commanded, feeling his resolve drain like the faint weakness and shock of opening his vein. They may not hear you if you shout for help, but they CERTAINLY won't hear you if you don't.
Only the long disciplines of his training made him turn his mind from the sweet quicksand of despair - of not having to try because it would do no good - and calm his thoughts, quiet his breathing, even out his heart rate again. He sank into meditation, not knowing how long it would take to raise the energies, gathering all his strength into his hands. Though the room was cold, sweat stood out on his face. Clear and hard, he focused his mind on the Dark Well, willing it to open, willing the glowing channel across the endless abyss of color without color to whisper into life.
Nothing happened. The Well did not seem to change.
Deepening his concentration, he started again from the beginning. Marking the floor, the walls; weaving signs in the air cleanly and precisely, willing himself to know that he was making them correctly - willing himself not to doubt. Willing himself not to think about Jaldis; about Tally; about his own world on the other side of the Void; about that naive young man who'd come stumbling out of the livid darkness ten weeks ago and into the arms of the SS. Willing himself to believe that it worked.
There was still no change in the appearance of the Dark Well, but he sensed - or imagined - a minute drop in the temperature of the room, a resurgence of the queer ozoneous smell. Rising, legs weak, he stepped to the three lines of chalk, blood, and ash that circled the inner core of darkness - a darkness barely distinguishable from the darkness surrounding it - and stood, his stockinged toes just touching the outermost ring, his arms outspread.
"Shavus," he whispered desperately, clinging to the image of the big old scar-faced Archmage, "Shavus, help me. Shavus, I'm in trouble, help me, please. Get me out of here. I'm alone here, Jaldis is dead."
He was tired now and queasy from loss of blood; his head was beginning to throb, but he conjured in his mind the images of the stones on Witches Hill. Between the ancient magic of sacrifice glowing deep in the dolomite's fabric and the dim silvery limmerance of the ley, enough power clung to the Stones to serve as a beacon, if Shavus knew what to look for. At that point, provided the Spiracle would hold the Void's magic-provided he didn't kill himself charging it - he could probably collect enough energy at the turn of the solstice-tide to open the Void and jump.
"I'll be there," he whispered, perhaps aloud, perhaps only in the dark at the bottom of his mind. "At Sunstead I'll be there, waiting. Get other wizards, get as many as you can. I can open the gate, but you'll have to get me through. Help me, Shavus, please. Get me out of here. Please get me out."
He opened his eyes, staring into the heart of the Dark Well, emptying his mind and focusing it with all the strength within him, all the strength he could raise.
He saw nothing.
He closed his eyes, gathering his strength again, patiently willing himself not to think, not to feel. Then he slowly repeated all he had said, conjuring in his mind the image of himself standing on the altar of the Dancing Stones at midnight, surrounded by the Void magic of the Spiracle, the power of the solstice and the leys, arms outstretched, waiting...
And repeated it again, the strain of it hurting him now, grinding at his bones. And again saw nothing to tell him that he wasn't just a frightened little man standing with obsessive exactness in a scribbled network of chalked lines on the floor, praying to an empty room.
In other words, he thought, mad.
It was as if he'd stood chin-deep in the ocean and had the rock upon which he was balanced tip suddenly beneath his feet; he felt despair close over him, cold and fathoms deep. A headache clamped like a steel band around his temples, and he lowered his outstretched arms, cramped and trembling, to his sides.
He has to have heard me, he thought, sinking, exhausted, to his knees. Shavus has to have heard. Sitting on his heels, he carefully removed his glasses, pressed his throbbing forehead with his hands.
Tally came to his mind, lying by the fire in the green jeweled gown of the Sea-King's daughter - the animal warmth and delight of his sons' small hands pulling at his robe as they cornered him in play. For a moment he saw the matte blue silences of the Drowned Lands under the phosphorous of the rising moon. For ten weeks he had worked very hard at not feeling pain. Now, his defenses spent, the pain came, wave after wave of it, breaking him like a child's driftwood fortress under advancing tide.
He bowed down over his hands, hurting with a deep, gouged ache that was worse than any physical pain he had ever undergone. Hugging himself as if the pain were in fact physical and could be eased by physical means, he doubled over, fighting to stay silent, fighting to hold it in, a chubby, shabby little man in his worn sweatshirt and faded trousers, alone in the dark on the edge of the abyss.
After a long time the pain eased a little, and he knew then that it was close to dawn. The thought of slipping back to his room, of going on with another day, was physically repugnant to him - easier just to roll down onto his side on the stone floor and sleep. But after a few minutes he got to his feet and staggered, knees jellied, to push open the door.
Sara had made her way across the cellar to the stairs that led up to the hall above, where she stood listening, the two-foot iron rod of an old mop-bucket wringer lever in one hand. Above them the Schloss was absolutely silent now, save for the metallic whisper of a wireless turned down low. The guards would be catching a little shut-eye in the watch room. It was a dangerous time, since they'd be guilty enough to wake at a whisper. He breathed, "Sara..." and saw her turn sharply, straining her eyes to pierce the inky dark.
As softly as he could - warily, because of the club she held - he glided toward her over the damp stone floor. "Let's get the boxes put back," he whispered, still staying well out of range until he saw her positively identify his voice and relax. Then he took her arm and led her back to where the flashlight beam couldn't possibly be seen from above.
"You want this locked up again?" she asked softly, touching the padlock. "I can put it like this but not snib it closed. That way you can get in here again if you need to."
"I will need to," he said. "But von Rath's getting more suspicious of me every day. If he finds it open, he'll know it's me tampering and will probably destroy the Well. I'll need your help getting in here again, two, maybe three more times..."
She muttered something really terrible in Polish and helped him lift each box to avoid scratching the floor and put it back in the order they had been, as precisely as they could recall. As she picked up the flashlight to turn it off she looked briefly at his face in the finger-hooded glow.
"You okay?"
He nodded, turning his face from her and taking her elbow; she switched off the light and let him guide her across the cellar, through the archway, to the old dumbwaiter with its rope and its tiny set-in steps.
The candles in his room had guttered out. He reached with his mind to relight them, then fumbled tiredly in his pocket for a match, the ache of thaumaturgical impotence bringing back the hurt of all that other pain. While Sara put on her high-heeled shoes he sank down onto the bed, head pounding, struggling to keep his grief at bay until she was gone.
"First time I ever left an evening here wearing the same lipstick I came in with," she remarked, though she renewed it for good measure, the glossy red giving her thin, triangular face a pulchritudinous lushness in the candle glow. "Come down to the tavern Monday and I'll let you know how things went. I'll tell Papa not to take the pills till Monday, so we can go through with the rest of this mishegoss Wednesday when the shop's closed... Hey? You okay?"
He nodded, not looking at her. Worried, she came around the end of the bed to stand looking down at him with her arms folded beneath the soft shelf of her breasts.
"What happened in there?"
"Nothing," he whispered.
She leaned down and gently removed his glasses from his face, putting them on the shelf beside the candle. He ached to touch her - to touch someone, only for the comfort of knowing he wasn't absolutely alone. But to her a man's touch meant only one thing, and she had enough of that, so he didn't.
After a moment she pulled the thin coverlet up over him, turned and blew out the candle. He heard her high heels click away into darkness as she descended the attic stairs, and a few minutes later heard the car engine start outside and fade as it drove off into the night.
In the iron hour before dawn his dreams were evil. Perhaps it was what he had read of the rites of the Shining Crystal; perhaps the souls of the gypsy women, of the young Jewish clairvoyant, and of the elderly runemaster still lingered to vent their bitter rage on one who had acquiesced in their murders. Perhaps it was only fear. In the dream, Rhion found himself bound to one of the pillars in the black-draped temple, forced to watch the rite again and again - saw von Rath, gaunt and yellow as a man with fever in his long white robe, and Poincelles in bloodstained red. Over and over he heard the screaming, as if the sound itself were being drawn and twisted as a spinner twists wool into yarn, drawing strands of power from death and pain. He saw the power itself collecting, like dirty ectoplasmic slime, in pools on the altar, pools that moved a little when no one watched.
And in the morning, at the rites of meditation that they still performed, though to Rhion's mind they had become a travesty of the calm opening to ritual work for which they had been designed, he observed their faces, wondering if they, too, had dreamed.
Gall, it was hard to tell. There was always a weird serenity about the old man, a calm that had nothing to do with right or wrong but depended entirely on his rigid apportioning of bodily and psychic energies, as if, for him, ultimately nothing really existed beyond the bounds of his own skin. Baldur, standing under the bloodred rune of Tiwaz at the northern "watch-tower," was twitchy and nervous, eyes glittering behind his thick glasses as if, between his endless quest for knowledge in the ancient books and the psychoactive drugs he was taking, cocaine was the only thing keeping him together.
Poincelles... If Poincelles dreamed, Rhion thought, regarding the gangling, dirty man with sudden revulsion, it was with a smile on his lips. That smile lingered now, as he made his responses with an air of amused tolerance for the peccadilloes of others. If von Rath sought the wine of power in the bloody rites of the Shining Crystal, Rhion now understood, what Poincelles enjoyed was the pressing of the grapes.
But it was von Rath who frightened Rhion most. Standing by the dark-draped altar, his hands outspread over the ritual implements there - sword and cup, book and thurifer - he was visibly thinner than he had been a week ago, as if the obsession with power - with converting power to operancy - were slowly consuming both flesh and mind.
Nietzsche, philosophical guru of the Nazi Party, had spoken of the triumph of the will, but as things were in this world it was physically impossible for von Rath's will to triumph.
And as the warm spring days crept past and the moon waxed to its first quarter and then to a bulbous distorted baroque, Rhion saw more and more frequently that icy flatness in the young wizard's eyes, and felt them on his back as he came and went.
It made things no easier that on Monday evening, in between her desultory flirting with the local Party official and a couple of guards from the Kegenwald camp - Monday was a quiet night in the tavern - Sara slipped him a note under his beer mug that simply read: No soap. In German the phrase indicated only that bathing would be an unsatisfactory experience, but in the parlance of American cinemas it meant a miscarriage of plans.
"Scum-sucking momzer didn't even let us in," Sara muttered savagely two nights later, when she was once again up in his room. The tavern was closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and she and the leggy blond Ulrica had been brought out to the Schloss at Rhion's request and Poincelles'. Her hair, dyed brown on Sunday for her visit to the camp, was now stiffer, frizzier, and redder than ever in the dim glow of the candles and the reflection of the primus stove they'd pilfered from the workroom, a scalding frame for her alabaster pallor that clashed loudly with the pink of the worn and pilled angora sweater she wore.
"We waited from seven in the morning until nine at night - some of those poor broads had been on the train since nine the night before, coming in from Berlin and Warsaw and God knows where - just sitting outside the gates of the camp on the ground, without water, without nothing." Her small, quick hands squeezed out a rag in the water she was heating; it steamed in the balmy warmth as she crossed to the bed and dabbed at the half-healed knife cut on the back of Rhion's arm.
As she worked she continued bitterly, "We were scared to walk across the road to take a squat behind a bush in the woods, for fear they'd say okay, come on in while we were gone, with the guards all coming around and hassling whoever they thought was worth it. And there was I, feeling like I was sitting naked in the middle of Ebbets Field, praying the ones I'd screwed wouldn't recognize me because I sure as hell wouldn't recognize them, hiding behind a pair of fake glasses and trying to look frumpy and middle age... Christ!"
Her hand where it steadied his bared arm squeezed tight with rage so that even the chewed-short nails bit into his flesh. "And at the end of it some tight-assed kapo comes out and says 'No visitors today. The prisoners are being punished.' "
"For what?"
"Who knows? Who cares?" She dropped the cloth on the floor, and the smell of cheap gin filled the room as she soaked a second rag - the last scrap of Rhion's old shirt. The alcohol stung his skin. "Still looks clean, but you're gonna have a bitch of a scar," she added, binding the wound up again.
"Whose fault is that?" He pulled on his sweatshirt again, though the night was warm enough to have given him no discomfort; Sara gathered the discarded rags and draped them over the edge of the table to dry, then bent to light a cigarette in the flame of the primus stove. "That pushes it till next Sunday." His eyes went involuntarily to the spot in the rafters that was the Spiracle's latest hiding place. "And that's the last Sunday before the solstice."
"You don't think I know that?" She dropped angrily back onto the bed, back propped on the iron-spindled headboard, and reached across to the tableful of bedside candles to take an angry swig from the flask of medicinal gin. "Crazy goddam witchdoctors..." She blew a stream of smoke.
Rhion decided not to mention that von Rath had spoken of doing another experiment - not merely the making of talismans, but an attempt to convert the power of the sacrifice into workable illusion - on the night of the full moon, six nights hence and a few days before the greater rite and talisman-making on the solstice itself. If they were lucky, Sara's father would be out of danger by that time anyway. The thought of what he'd have to do if they didn't succeed in freeing the old man brought the sweat cold to his face.
"What is that thing, anyway?"
He glanced across at her with a start. Sara, her knees crossed in a soft waterfall of skirt gores, was looking up at the Spiracle's hiding place. "That iron and silver gismo with the crystals in it. Do all wizards hide little tchotchkes around where they live? Papa did."
Rhion grinned, remembering Jaldis' propensity for secret devices. "Pretty much," he said. "It's the thing I need your father's help - and yours, since you'll have to get us into that room in the cellar again - to finish." He pushed the delicate wire frame of his spectacles more firmly up onto his nose. "The rite of charging it has to be done by the solstice," he added, more quietly. "If we can't get your father out by then..." He shivered at the thought of taking the thing down to the cellar and stepping into the Dark well without another wizard present to keep him from being drawn in and destroyed.
"Then we'll get him out afterward." Sara's gaze, holding his, was flint. "Won't we?"
Rhion said nothing. If they didn't get the old man out before solstice-tide the odds were horribly good he himself would be dead afterward. If he wasn't, it would be because he'd lost his nerve at the last moment - in which case it was one hell of a long time to the equinox, too long to count on - or because he'd succeeded, impossibly, in charging the Spiracle himself.
And in that case, he thought, could he leave Sara to her own devices? He remembered the brief vision in the scrying crystal, the old man with the scarred lip raising his eyes to the window far above his head. He owed neither of them a thing - his arm still hurt every time he moved it and he was damn lucky, given his inability either to work healing spells or get proper attention to the wound, that it hadn't festered.
But he knew the man was a wizard. He'd seen it in his eyes. And yet it was the solstice or nothing. He hoped he wouldn't have to make that choice.
Walking to the window, he felt Sara's dark eyes follow. Out in the yard one of the floodlights had gone out, and upon the ground below him he could see the ochre smear of reflected candlelight that marked von Rath's study window. A shadow passed across it: the SS wizard pacing, restless, fevered, an animal driven by invisible goads, far into the night.