The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2)

The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2) Page 17

"THIS WAY!"

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

"Screw that! Come on!"

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

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

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

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

"There's a trapdoor in the ceiling of the cupboard," Sara panted, pointing to the dark line of doors that had made him so nervous last night. "It leads up to the crawlspace above this wing. You have to go first, Papa... you're tall, you can pull me up. Rhion, you get your tochis back to your attic and get in your jammies. There's still time to come down rubbing your eyes and asking what the fuss is about."

"No," Rhion said softly. He did not look at her - he stood, instead, with his hand on the wing of the leather armchair, gazing transfixed into the gleaming black rectangle of the one-way glass.

"God damn it, we've got no time." Her hard little hand jerked at his sleeve, and he shook it off. He felt chilled all over, as if out of nowhere he'd felt the whistling descent of a sword blade pass within centimeters of his face, as the implications of what he saw beyond the dark glass sank in.

"Help me up there." He turned abruptly and dove into the closet, where Leibnitz' kicking feet were just vanishing through an inconspicuous square hole in the ceiling. Below, he could hear the voices of the guards as they emerged from the cellar to search the house.

"For Chrissakes..." Sara began, and he caught her waist, lifted her toward her father's reaching hands.

"Get me up there!" He shut the closet door behind him and reached up. Leibnitz caught one of his wrists in both big bony hands, and after a second, Sara caught the other. In the low, cramped space between the ceiling and the rafters of this wing, a dead lift wasn't easy, but they managed to get his shoulders up to the level of the rafters on which they crouched; after a certain amount of puffing and kicking, he pulled himself through the hole and fitted the neat plank trap over it behind him.

"Well, you sure put your foot in it now." Sara switched off her flashlight, leaving them in pitchy dark. "Old Pauli has no proof who was potchkeying around in there."

"No." Bent nearly double, he edged around behind Sara where she sat balanced on one rafter and stretched himself out on the one beyond. The crawlspace rose to a peak of about four and a half feet above either of the lodge's two wings - only in the center block was there a half-story for attic rooms. Away in the darkness he could see - and smell - the nests of the rodents that lived there, and catch a glimpse of their angry eyes. Sorry about violating your Lebensraum, he thought wryly. Into every life a little Anschluss must fall.

"There's no reason for him to guess it was you," Sara went on. "Personally, I'd love to see that momzer Poincelles sashay in here an hour from now and try to explain where he'd been."

Rhion shook his head, though Sara saw nothing of the gesture in the dark. "No," he said again. "They changed that room, the one where they put the people on the receiving end of their experiments... the room on the other side of the glass."

"Huh?"

"It's a one-way mirror." He felt carefully in his trouser pocket where he'd shoved the Spiracle in his haste. "I could see into that room."

"Oh, come on, it's pitch dark in there."

"I saw," he insisted quietly. "They've put furniture in there in the last twenty-four hours - a bed, a chair, a desk - and they've unbolted the door into the washroom on the other side."

Footsteps thudded in the hall below, and though they had been barely whispering before, all three fugitives fell silent. A thready line of diffused light briefly outlined the square of the trapdoor in the dark, but by its angle the guards didn't even aim their beams at the ceiling. In a guttural murmur of curses they were gone. Rhion laid his head down on his folded arms and breathed again.

For nearly an hour none of them spoke. Closing his eyes, stretching out his hyperacute wizard senses in the dense and stuffy blackness, Rhion found he could track the men back and forth, not only on this floor, but on the one below and in the central block and north wing of the house. He heard their voices and the thick uneasy drag of their breath as they moved from room to silent, haunted room; he felt the zapping tingle of electricity as they switched on light after light, unwilling - ignorant though they were of the inchoate powers lurking there - to be moving through the place in the dark. He heard a sergeant curse, and the opening and shutting of closet doors. Then far off, dim and deep, a voice came to him, chanting spells of breaking, of dissolution, and he heard the distant scrape of metal and soap and brickbats on stone.

Von Rath was dismembering the Dark Well.

Rhion shut his eyes, a shudder going through him at this last severing of any means of communicating through the Void. He fumbled in his trouser pocket again for the Spiracle. This has to have worked, he thought despairingly. Don't tell me I'm really stranded.

His fingers touched the twisted iron, and he knew.

Magic was in it. The cold of the Void whispered in his mind as he drew out the braided circlet. It seemed to him a faint spark glinted deep in the heart of each of the Five stones. Holding it up, he could see through it down the length of the crawlspace - rafters, dust-clotted cobwebs, the accumulated nastiness of a century of mice - to the narrow black louvers at the end. Yet as if he looked through a smoked mirror, he knew.

Down below he heard the moist pat of von Rath's bare feet, ascending the chipped stone steps to the downstairs hall. Baldur's anxious, stammering voice demanded if he was all right and what he had done. Then he heard Poincelles' deep tones and caught the sound of his own name. Rhion wondered fleetingly just what account the French wizard was giving of his evening, but, satisfied that von Rath's mind was temporarily distracted, he risked one of the lowest level spells he knew and summoned a tiny ball of blue light to his cupped palm.

It lay there glowing, the size of his little fingernail, a luminous edge of cerulean along his fingers, a chill spark in the scratched glass of his spectacle lenses and the deep blue of his eyes.

"Jesus H. Christ," Sara muttered, sitting up and stretching the kinks from her back. "All right, Merlin, what do we do now? Poincelles has got to be back by this time, so you've blown your chance of pretending it wasn't you."

Pallid dawnlight had begun to thin the gloom under the roof, and in the yard the muffled gunning of engines sounded, the clatter of metal, belt leather, boots. A man cursed.

"He is." Rhion closed his hand, killing the light that Sara had not seen. "And it wouldn't be safe for me to go back even if they didn't think it was me. The bed they've put in the other room..."

"Yeah, what was the deal with that?" Sara asked. Beyond her, on the other side of the trapdoor, her father continued to lie full length on the beam, only turning slightly to prop himself up on one bony elbow to watch them with dark eyes under the brim of his grubby cap. "The room's got locks on the doors and no windows, it's the logical place if they're gonna hold a prisoner. If you say they're going to be making a big sacrifice on the solstice..."

"If they unbolted the washroom that connects to that room," Rhion said quietly, "it argues for longer than a day. And that bed not only had blankets, it had pillows. There's only one prisoner in this place I can think of who rates a pillow and an easy chair. That room was fixed up for me. They planned to lock me up the day before the solstice, just in case."

"So, you think they don't trust you?" Leibnitz inquired, and Rhion grinned.

"As for what we do now... We lie low." He replaced the Spiracle on its string in the open neck of his shirt, the jewels gleaming softly in the dark tangle of chest hair. "Here, for twenty-four hours, while they're out searching the woods. Tomorrow morning, just before dawn, we slip out and hide in the woods."

"Great," Sara muttered savagely. She pulled off her cap and shook out her hair with an impatient gesture, the grimy light catching metallic splinters of brass in the red. "You get the whole countryside up in arms - it's gonna be a real trick for me to get back to town long enough to collect the food and clothes and money I've got stashed in my room, let alone getting the three of us to the Swiss border." Her voice was soft - they were all whispering barely louder than breath - but dripped with sarcasm. "Not to mention the fact that we don't even have identity cards for you, and on the run we sure as hell won't have a chance to get them."

"Don't worry about me," Rhion said softly. "I'm not coming with you. And once the solstice is over - after midnight Friday - von Rath won't be searching nearly as intently for me. He knows he has to catch me before the solstice, before the pull of the sun-tide gives me the power I need to open the gate in the Void and make the crossing to my own universe. That's why he's turning out his entire force now."

"Fair enough," Rebbe Leibnitz agreed and, rolling over onto both elbows, pulled a stub of pencil and his pince-nez from his pocket and began making a numerological calculation of the most auspicious hour and minute to leave the attic on the dusty plaster beneath the beam where he lay.

"I hate to break this to you, cupcake," Sara whispered dourly, "but there ain't no Santa Claus. Von Rath has mobilized the goon squad because he's afraid you're going to hightail it to England and spill your guts to Winnie Churchill. Within a week, this search is going to be nationwide." She sat up tailor fashion, slim and straight, with her red hair hanging down over her square, thin shoulders and jutting breasts beneath the grimy shirt. Some of the acid left her voice, and there was concern in her dark eyes. "You poor deluded boob, what do you think's going to happen to you tomorrow night? You'll just go 'poof and disappear?"

"Yes," Rhion said simply. "I hope so."

"Oy gevalt... We all hope so, but it doesn't work that way." She started to pull up her shirt to get at the money belt Rhion knew she habitually wore underneath, then paused, cast a quick glance at her father - obliviously working out some kind of calculation from a vesica piscis drawn over the Square of Mercury - and turned her back on both men. Rhion looked away from the girl's slender rib cage visible beneath a bizarre strap-work of lace and elastic underpinnings, and tried with indifferent success to think of other things.

She turned back, shirt tail hanging out and a creased wad of papers and marks in her hand. "These might do us in an emergency, if I can't get to the rest of my stuff," she said. "And I might not. They know I'm your - ah - friend..." She cast another quick glance at her father, as if she feared that he had somehow, within the camp, heard rumors about the redheaded bar girl at the Woodsman's Horn and intuitively connected them with his only child. "Once we get on the road it's gonna be a trick to hide Papa's head till his hair grows out a little."

She transferred the papers to her pocket, withdrew from the same pocket a pack of filthy cards and shuffled them deftly, quietly, in the half light. In the yard below, the sounds of departure had died. The smell of dust was fading. A woodpecker's hammering clattered unwontedly loud in the silence. Deep in his marrow, like a whispering of the leys that netted the earth, Rhion felt the stirring of the sun-tide begin.

"Rhion..." Sara looked up from the hand of gin she'd automatically laid out for the two of them between the rafters. "Why don't you come with us? Forget the goddam summer solstice. We'll get you out of this vershluggene country somehow."

He smiled and shook his head, touched by her concern. "I know you don't believe me," he said, "but tomorrow midnight really is my only chance to get home. It's the only time the wizards of my world will know where to look for me, and the only time I'll have enough power."

For a long moment she studied him, worry softening the brittle cynicism of her eyes. Without her customary coating of lip rouge and makeup, she looked far younger than usual, exhaustion and stress darkening the lids of her eyes and sharpening cruelly the tiny lines of dissipation already printed in the tender flesh. Then she shook her head. "I wish to hell I knew where they got you," she said softly. "Or where your home really is."

"I've told you and you don't believe me." He smiled.

"I know," she sighed. "Munchkinland."

"So what's not to believe?" Rebbe Leibnitz raised his head and adjusted his pince-nez reading glasses with long, bony fingers. "You remember Horus the Invincible, Saraleh, who stayed with us back in twenty-eight when he was an exile from his own dimension..."

"I remember he never returned the money he borrowed from you."

Leibnitz shrugged. "So if he had, would we be hiding in a better class of attic today? He needed the money to continue his search for the Lost Jewels of Power that would open the Dimensional Gates..."

Sara rolled her eyes. "I give up. Give my regards to the Witch of the West."

The day passed, oppressive and stifling. In the cramped, dark space beneath the roof tiles, the heat grew quickly intolerable; the inability to move about became torment in itself. In spite of it all, Rhion slept for hours, a breathless uncomfortable sleep on the eight-inch beam, tormented by cloudy dreams, while, unable to smoke, unable to pace, Sara fidgeted her way through endless games of solitaire and her father covered all the plaster within his considerable arm reach in a scrawled carpet of numerological abracadabra. Now and then Rhion opened his eyes to see the three hard splinters of brazen light that crawled along the slant of the struts overhead or Sara's face, sweat-beaded and intent with her dark lashes turned to ginger by the sun. Then he would slide back into a gluey abyss of dreams.

He dreamed of Tallisett, riding in a swaying litter up the coiled road that led away from Bragenmere's yellow sandstone walls and into the dry hills of the Lady Range... dreamed of the Duke, white-faced and ill, raising his head from the pillows of his sickbed to accept the cup Lord Esrex handed him with an encouraging smile, while in the background a dark, veiled shape stirred a little in the shadows... dreamed of the octagonal library tower against a robin's-egg evening sky, its windows-rosy with lights that gleamed on the steel helmets of armed men slowly gathering in the court below.

The dreams faded, turned cloudy and strange. Dimly, through his sleep, he felt the turning of the universe as the sun-tide strengthened and the year approached its pivot point, where its forces could be seized and swung by a man who knew its laws. Even those who knew nothing of magic felt it somehow, that at those two points - midsummer and midwinter - the doors that separated the mortal from the uncanny stood open, to admit sometimes fairies, sometimes the ghosts of the dead, and sometimes God. And even in his sleep, his hand, which lay curled around his glasses upon his chest, moved to touch the Spiracle, to feel there the whispered magic of the Void.

Then he dreamed, much more clearly, of Paul von Rath, sitting in his own study, that dark, vast room choked with stolen books, unkempt, unshaven for the first time since Rhion had known him, gaunt cheeks spotted with the dry fever of his obsession and gray eyes chilled and narrowed to cold silver-white as he bent over his books, reading... He wore no uniform, only the dressing gown of thick, dark silk he'd had on in the cellar, his naked chest visible beneath it and the steel swastika on its chain at his throat catching the light in a flat, hard flash. Like something scried at a distance, Rhion saw him raise his head as the study door opened and saw Poincelles there, dark face flushed with spite...

Then he woke, gasping, the heat pressing upon him like a slow ruthless vampire, and sweat running down his face, matting clothes and beard and hair. The sun was sinking. The three splinters of light from the louvered vent had stretched to arrows, then to attenuated javelins, and now were fading altogether; in the yard were the sounds of truck engines and the dulled, angry grate of men, foul-mouthed with disappointment and fatigue.

"They sound beat," Sara whispered, her lips twisting in a grin as she flipped over a card. "Good - by two in the morning, we'd be able to take a steam calliope and horses out of here without them noticing."

The sentries around the perimeter of the house had been doubled, but the men were, as Sara had said, exhausted from a day of combing the woods, and it was a simple matter to create an illusion near the fence in a spot just out of view of the gully under the wire. It was a fairly ordinary illusion - two dogs copulating - but of sufficient interest to the type of men who made up the SS to hold their attention. Rhion, Sara, and Rebbe Leibnitz crossed the yard together and slipped under the fence and so into the woods.

Rhion and Leibnitz spent the following day hiding in the woods on the slopes behind Witches Hill. The guards from the Schloss, fortified with Waffen divisions from Kegenwald and even from Gross Rosen, were still searching, though not very energetically, Rhion thought, scrying for them in a pool of standing water. Still, the danger from them was real enough to prevent him from sleeping much or from sinking for long at a time into the meditation he knew he'd need to gather his strength for tonight.

He attempted to scry for the SS wizards both in water and in his crystal and, not much to his surprise, could not. At another time of year, perhaps, with greater concentration... But for them, too, the sun-tide held some little power; their seal after all was the sun-wheel, turning in reverse. He did manage to see the Schloss from far off, a tiny image in the pond, and as the afternoon lengthened and the shadows began to cool he saw the gray truck with its black swastikas creeping like a poisonous beetle on the straight track that ran from the Schloss' gates away toward Round Pond and thence to the Kegenwald road. I will disembowel them, von Rath had said, leaning forward in the stifling gloom of the Schloss library. Every one... Every one...

They would be saving the most powerful wizard they had for tonight's sacrifice, Rhion thought, and shivered. More than one, probably, to draw out their souls, the essences of the lives, their torment, and their pain, focusing them by those ancient rituals through von Rath's drugged mind to make talismans of power in the vain hope that quantity might somehow make a qualitative difference.

If they caught him between now and midnight, Rhion had a horrible certainty about what his own fate as well as Leibnitz' would be.

At sunset, Sara returned. Rhion had scried for her half a dozen times during the day, at intervals in a thoroughly enjoyable argument with Leibnitz about the multiplicity of God, not because he thought he could help her at this distance but because he could not do otherwise. But her errand had been uneventful, and she came up the path to the clearing where they were to meet, pushing a stolen bicycle before her with a cardboard suitcase of clothes strapped to its handlebars. "I got train tickets," she said briefly, opening her handbag - a considerably older and more conservative one than she usually carried - to hand Rhion a bar of black-market chocolate and extract a cigarette for herself. She wore a sternly tailored brown dress and low-heeled walking shoes, in keeping with the persona on her identity papers, an assistant bookseller's clerk traveling with her boss on a buying tour. To her father she tossed, from the suitcase, a shabby tweed jacket, a clean shirt, and a better-looking cap. "I also got you a razor, Papa - you don't have enough beard yet to look like anything but an escapee from a camp, and if you shave, it'll look like you've got more hair than you do."

Leibnitz put a defensive hand over the half-inch of grizzled stubble that covered his jaw. "The Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria says - "

"Well, Isaac ben Solomon Luria didn't ever have to pass himself off as a goyische bookseller on the way to Switzerland, so shave! Papa, please."

"The child is a staff for the hand, the Yebamoth says," the old man muttered, turning back toward the pool that still reflected the sweet silver green of the sky, "and a hoe for the grave. 'Even a child is known by his doings...' "

Sara turned back to Rhion and, for the first time, reached out and took his hand. "Please come with us."

He smiled and shook his head. Hate himself though he might for the selfish cowardice of it, with the dipping of the sun behind the black hackles of the hills, he had felt himself relax. Von Rath and the others would be beginning their ceremony. He knew where they were, knew that the SS mage's attention would be fully occupied until after midnight. And in spite of his horror at what he knew would be going on, in spite of his loathing for what they did and were trying to do, what he felt was relief. He was safe. It wouldn't be he who lay on the black granite of the altar under Poincelles' knives; it wouldn't be his pain, his magic, his death, that they wove into their unholy power.

It occurred to him that he perhaps owed it to this world to return to the Schloss and burn the place and its books to the ground. But even the ability to convert what energy he could raise to physical operancy wouldn't help him against several dozen Deaths-Head Troopers. He could not risk even the chance of delay, and his own reserves of strength were perilously low. With the power of the solstice behind him, it was still going to take everything he had and everything he could summon from the lambent magic of the stones even to open the Void; Shavus, back at the Duke's palace in Bragenmere, had better be on the other side with one hell of a lot of magic to get him through.

"I'll be all right."

"You don't even have a goddam identity card!" Her hands, small and delicate and hard, tightened over his and she shook him, as if this would somehow make him understand.

"I keep telling you I won't need one."

She stared into his eyes for a long minute, then shook her head and turned away. "Okay," she sighed. "You win. Papa, you stay here. Rhion, I'll go with you to these rocks of yours. If you go poof and disappear, I'll admit I was wrong. If you don't... You come out of the country with us, because you're gonna need all the help you can get. Deal?"

It might have been the turning of the earth toward the darkness, the lengthening of the shadows of the black ridge of hills, but it seemed that cold came over him, the leaden taste of defeat and death. He shivered. "It might be better if you got away while you can," he said quietly. "Von Rath's... busy... tonight; I don't think the search will be heavy between now and midnight."

"The hell with that, we can take the seven A.M. train as easy as the eleven P.M. Papa, if I don't come back..."

"Then I won't come back," he said placidly, returning from the pool with a nicked and dripping face, tying his tie. "I'm coming with you. This," he added, with wistful eagerness, "I want to see."

Light lingered in the midsummer sky as they made their way down the mountain. During the long afternoon Rhion had cut an elder sapling with Leibnitz' clasp knife, the only weapon or tool either of them possessed, to make a staff, on which he mounted the Spiracle as a headpiece. Now, as they walked, the last glow of the day flickered along the rune-scribbled silver, and it seemed to him that the five crystals knotted within it whispered to one another in some unknown speech. On the western side of the hills, power was rising, power called from pain and savagery and the black crevices of the human soul, but here in the hill's long shadow the night was untouched. Among the dark pines and bracken, the cool air whispered of old enchantments. Rhion could feel a second ley when they crossed it, wan and attenuated but living with the life buried deep in the ground, pointing straight and glowing to the crossing at the Dancing Stones. Sunk in a half trance as he walked, Rhion sensed the lift and swell of the solstice power, as sun, stars, moon, and time drifted to their balance point, and it was as if every leaf, every fern, every mushroom, needle, and fallen fir cone gave forth a faint silvery shine.

The Stones, when he reached them, seemed to glow with it in the dark.

All gates stood open tonight. As he walked toward those two lumpish guardians and the broken altar between them, he felt as if he had been here on other solstice eves. His fear of pursuit, the sick terror he felt at what he guessed would happen to him if they were caught, eased and fell away. He sensed the whisper everywhere of freely given death and ecstatic mating, as if hundreds of bare feet all around him even yet swished the deep grass that washed the stones' sides.

He had reached the Stones by midnight. He could escape. Jaldis...

He wasn't sure why he thought of the old man just then - perhaps out of sorrow that for him there would be no returning, perhaps only some echo of a dream that he couldn't recall.

Sara and her father stopped just beyond the edge of the trees that ringed the meadow. Rhion, his mind already settled into the rhythm of the triumphant sun, walked on alone.

The power of the ancient stone rose to meet him as he touched it. Every breath he drew drank light from the murmuring air. Overhead the moon stood, a day past full and half risen to its zenith, like the sweet swell of summer music drowning the stars. As he invoked the four corners of the earth, Rhion touched, like a ghastly shudder in the air, a fragment of the power that was being raised to the west, a stench of burned flesh and agony, and felt along the network of the leys that elsewhere it was the same, rites of hate being performed in ancient places of power whose names were only names to him: Nuremburg, Welwelsburg, Munich. The dread of pursuit touched him again, and with it the strange sense deja vu, but with the drawing of the Circle around the Stones he cut out both the thin psychic clamor and the evil power raised.

By the stars it was after eleven, though he did not need to see the sky's great clock to know that midnight was near. Through a deepening trance he called the last remnants of his own power from his exhausted flesh, linking it with the altar stone and the turning firmament above, and he knew that no matter how many wizards Shavus had called in to help him on the other side, the jump was going to be bad.

A bluish haze of light trailed from his fingers as they brushed the altar stone, and everything that had been written there over the course of millennia seemed to swim to the surface: ancient runes; spells of light; handprints with fingers cut away in sacrifice; and the names of gods that went back to the name of the single power, the oldest names of the Mother and the Sky.

He stepped up onto the altar stone, barely aware of the world outside the Circle he had drawn and of the two dark forms of the only people he had cared for in this world watching from the edge of the trees. Raising the Spiracle on its staff he summoned, and seemed to see, far off and there inches from his feet, a column of smoky darkness, stirring nameless colors, an abyss without light. All that was within him called forth the power of the Void, of the stone of sacrifice on which he stood, and of the turning stars.

He waited.

He knew when midnight came. The whole universe whispered a single word. Somewhere, dimly, there were shrieks, but the Circle he had drawn around the place held them out. The dark field of the Void's magic enveloped him, and he reached out into it, seeking...

And found nothing.

No light, no sign, no answering call.

He deepened his concentration, forced his aching mind to focus more sharply, more clearly, searching that darkness, waiting, reaching, not thinking about what it meant that they were late.

If late was all they were.

He thought, No. Please, no.

In his trance state, time was not the same, but he knew when a half-hour passed, and then an hour. The wheel of the stars moved slightly overhead; the moon climbed, unconcerned, toward her shining zenith.

Please?

The power of the ancient stone, pouring up through him toward the balanced stars, began to fade at three. He clung to it for as long as he could, but felt it go, as the swinging momentum of the universe slid away and its vast, lazy turning resumed its wonted course. Still Rhion remained, standing upright on the stone, the staff upraised in his hands, until his knees shook with the exhaustion of forty-eight hours of fatigue and dread, and the world lapsed back from its waking dream of magic into its accustomed sleep.

They hadn't heard or couldn't come - or had decided, for reasons best known to them, to leave him where he was.

Or it might just be that Sara was right. He had only dreamed of Tally and Jaldis, of his sons and his parents and the world in which he had grown up, dreamed while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Perhaps the truth - the real truth - was merely something he had forgotten.

He closed his eyes, fighting to believe this was not the case. For a moment it seemed that everything within him ripped and gave, and inner darkness poured into the hollow that was left. Opening them, he called the last fragments of strength, or hallucination, to stare into the darkness - if it was darkness - seeking some tiny splinter of light, a mark, a rune, a thread of magic to guide him through...

But there was nothing. Only the slow growing of a pallid dawnlight and the death, each by each, of the stars before the prosaic white of day.

He lowered his arms, letting the field of Void magic around him die. His back and shoulders ached and his knees and hands were trembling, pains scarcely noticed and nothing beside the hurt that consumed him and left only hollowness behind. Tears tracked down his face, salty on his lips and wet in his beard. He bowed his head.

Then a quiet voice broke the dawn stillness. "Give me what you have in your hand."

He turned on the worn stone altar.

Twenty Storm Troopers were ranged in a semicircle behind him, rifles and submachine guns trained. At the center of the arc stood Paul von Rath, seared and haggard face somehow shocking in the nacreous morning light. "I see Poincelles was quite right about where he guessed you would be - he had been watching you for weeks, you know - and what you would attempt. A worthy wizard, if spiteful as a woman. Worthy indeed to have been the sacrifice for our solstice power. I think when we came for him he was surprised. Now give me what you have in your hand."

He did not raise his voice. It was soft and balanced, like the way he stood, tense in his black uniform and polished boots, eyes gray and cold as glacier ice. Sara stood beside him, his arm locked around her neck, the silver blade of his SS dagger pressed to her throat.