The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2)

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

"AS FAR AS we can determine," Paul von Rath said, the light wind generated by their vehicle's speed flicking the fair hair like a raw-silk pennon from his forehead, "magic has not existed in our world for at least a hundred and seventy years. Whether this was the result of the actions of the men who hated it - and in our world magic has been deeply hated by both society and the church, as Jaldis told me that it is in yours - or whether it was an accident, a natural event like the fall of night, we have not been able to determine."

He sighed and turned his head, watching the endless monotony of dark pinewoods flashing past them: the low roll of moraine hills still shawled with cold blue shadows on their western sides, though the sky overhead was bright; the gray loom of granite boulders among soft green bracken or pine straw the color of dust; a landscape occasionally broken by abandoned meadows rank with weeds and murky with shallow, silted ponds; and here and there a crumbling barn.

"We only know that accounts of what can be termed actual magic became more and more sparse, and harder and harder to authenticate, until they ceased entirely. And that when we attempt to work what magicians of old claimed to be spells, we achieve nothing."

Rhion shivered, wondering what it must have been to be born with the power of wizardry - as he had been born - in a world where magic no longer existed - where such power, such longing, such dreams, could never be consummated and could never be anything but the slow oncoming of madness.

It was something he didn't like to think of at present. It was difficult enough to tell himself, as he did daily, sometimes hourly, that even the smallest of his own powers and perceptions - his ability to scry through a crystal, to channel energy into divining cards, or to deepen his senses to perceive sounds and scents and vibrations beyond the range of ordinary human awareness - would return and that they had not been permanently stripped away by the passage through the Void.

Three weeks isn't so long...

The first two weeks had seemed an eternity of lying feverish and weak in the great, gray granite hunting lodge called Schloss Torweg, mourning for Jaldis, sick with terror, disoriented and more alone than he had ever felt in his life.

He had been up and around for some days, but it was good now to be out in open air.

They came onto the main road through the hills. Gold morning sunlight slanted into their eyes as they drove eastward, palpable as javelins of gold. It splashed with light the tangles of wild ivy crowning the steep banks of the road cut, turned to liquid gold the buttercups in the roadside ditches, and made stars of the frail white spangles of dogwood and may. Somewhere in the woods a robin called, the sweet notes a comforting reminder of the thickets of the Drowned Lands, where for seven years he had served the Ladies of the Moon as scribe. A gray hare flickered momentarily into view at the top of the bank, but bounded away at the roaring approach of the vehicle they called a car.

Rhion had to grin at the thought of the car. It was a conveyance straight out of a fairy tale, moving, without beast to draw it, at speeds that covered in an hour the distance it would take to journey in a day - except, of course, that no talespinner he'd ever encountered in any marketplace in the Forty Civilized Realms had ever thought to describe such a marvel as being so raucously noisy or so comprehensively smelly.

Beside him, von Rath went on, "Germany is the only realm now whose rulers believe in magic, who will support wizards and them give them aid and help. And now her enemies have declared war on her and are massing on our borders, ready to attack as soon as the weather dries. It is essential that we recover magic, learn what became of it and how we can bring it back. For, if they conquer, even what belief still exists will perish and there will be nothing left - only those mechanistic bureaucracies, those believers in nothing, who seek to destroy what they cannot understand."

In the front seat the young blond titan named Horst Eisler who had been assigned as their driver by the Protection Squad - Schutzstaffel, in the harsh German tongue, shortened, as the Germans did with all long words, to SS - gazed straight ahead at the broken black cut of the pavement where it passed through the hills. Baldur, sitting beside the driver, was as usual twisted half round in his seat so that he could hang onto von Rath's every word. The driver slowed, easing the car around a place where last night's rain had washed a great slide of mud and boulders down from the twelve-foot banks that hemmed in this stretch of road; because of a car's speed and power, it required a deal more concentration to drive than a horse and, moreover, required a far better surface to drive upon.

To Rhion's right, Auguste Poincelles was arguing with Gall, who sat perched on the little jump seat that folded down from the door. "Of course Witches Hill was a place of power, a holy place!" Gall was fulminating in his shrill Viennese accent, his silver mane and beard streaming in the wind. "It lies upon a crossing of the leys, the energy-tracks that cover all the earth in a net of energy. Moreover, upon the night of the last full moon I slept among the time-runneled menhirs there, among the Dancing Stones, and a vision was visited unto me of eldritch Druids and olden warriors with the sacred swastika tattooed upon their broad breasts..."

Poincelles let out a crack of rude laughter. "Druids in Germany? You've been reading Bulwer-Lytton's novels again, Jacobus." He took a cigar from his pocket and lit it. Most of the people in this world were addicted to the inhaled smoke of cured tobacco leaves, and everything - cars, houses, furniture, and clothing - stank of it.

"Scoff if you like," the old wizard replied calmly, and his pale, fanatic eyes took on a faraway gleam. "I saw them, I tell you. Upon those stones they performed sacrifices that raised the power to keep the mighty armies of Rome at bay."

Poincelles laughed again, shaking back his greasy black forelock. "Ah, now when Mussolini invades us we'll know just what to do!"

Rhion sighed inwardly, not surprised at the constant bickering of the three wizards under von Rath's command. Wizards in his own world squabbled constantly. He wondered, with a stab of grief and regret, what Jaldis would have made of them.

He wondered, too, when they reached the place called of old Witches Hill, whether Jaldis would have been able to detect the ancient magic Gall claimed had been raised upon that spot.

The hill itself was clearly artificial, standing alone at one end of an overgrown meadow to the east of the long pine-cloaked ridge that backed Schloss Torweg. As they waded toward it through the knee-deep grass, Rhion studied the low, flattened mound, guessing that there had probably once been an energy-collecting chamber of some kind underneath - it was a good guess that if ley-lines did exist in this world, this was raised on one. According to Gall, Schloss Torweg had been likewise built upon a ley. Certainly the little hill upon which it stood, larger than this one but probably also artificial, had enjoyed a rather queer reputation in centuries past.

Standing among the three lumpish stones that crowned the hill - the Dancing Stones, they were called, one erect, two lying fallen and nearly covered with dew-sodden weeds - Rhion could feel no magic here at all.

And yet, he thought, that didn't mean it didn't exist. While the others moved about among the stones, Poincelles caressing the worn dolomite with his eyes half shut and Gall swinging pebbles on pendulum threads, their feet leaving dark-green swathes in the flashing diamond carpet of the dew, Rhion sat at one end of a fallen stone, breathing silence into his heart and listening. Though he was unable yet to detect the faint, silvery pulse of ley-energy through the ground, still the sweet calm of the April sunlight that warmed his face eased something within him. For the first time since his coming to this world, the hurt of losing Jaldis and the fear that he would never be able to find his way back lessened. He found himself thinking, If magic still exists here it might give von Rath and his partners another energy source, help them in their efforts.

Suddenly curious, he got to his feet, brushed the dirt and twigs from the hand-me-down Wehrmacht fatigue pants he wore, and turned his steps down the little hill. Pinewoods surrounded the meadow on all sides, rising to the west almost at the hill's foot behind a tangled belt of laurel and blackberry brambles. Though Rhion still sensed no buried energy as he picked his way among nests of fern, bracken, and fallen gray branches, still the cool spice of the pine scent, the sigh of the moving boughs, and the occasional coin-bright warmth of stray beads of sunlight were balm to him. The land sloped gently toward the main ridge as he walked on. There was some hope, he thought, both for himself and for this world, for magic's return...

"Halt!"

Startled, Rhion stopped and raised his head. A Storm Trooper in the black uniform of the Protection Squad - the SS - stood beside a boulder a few yards away. His rifle - another product of the magicless magic of this world - was leveled at Rhion's chest. Like most of the SS, this man's hair was fair, his eyes light, chill, and empty, reminding Rhion of something, of someone else...

"You will return to the meadow, please."

Rhion blinked at him in surprise, pushed his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. "I'm just investigating..."

"You will return to the meadow." Dapplings of light strewed one sleeve of his black uniform jacket, made the silver buttons flash. Upon his left sleeve the sun-cross - the swastika - splashed black on a crimson ground, pointing backward, toward chaos, toward darkness, toward death. "This was Captain von Rath's order."

"Look," Rhion said reasonably, "I'm sure Captain von Rath didn't mean I needed protection from getting hit on the head by a falling pine cone..."

"It is not my business what Captain von Rath meant," the young man said without change of inflection, though his pale arrogant eyes traveled over Rhion's short, stocky form and his curly brown hair and beard with chill disapproval and suspicion. "Nor is it yours. He said you were not to be permitted to leave sight of the others. You will return, or I will take you back there myself. I assure you I will shoot you if you attempt to flee."

"You're making flight sound more and more appealing," Rhion remarked, turning back toward the meadow, and realized the next second that the guard probably took his jest literally and had his rifle cocked and ready. He was conscious of it behind him, all the way back through the trees down the slope toward the sunlight.

"I am dreadfully sorry," von Rath apologized, as the car picked its way along the rutted and potholed black pavement once again. "The young man was only following orders; he will be reprimanded for his lack of tact. But indeed, it does not do for you to wander too far alone. For one thing, you might have become lost and, having no identity papers... We are getting you some, of course, but these things take time."

And, seeing the expression on Rhion's face, he added gently, "The government has taken wizardry and all its workings under its protection, has given the Occult Bureau guards to make sure it is not interfered with. We are at war with forces that do not believe in wizardry, that hate our government, and that seek to destroy us. Believe me, this protection is needed."

"If you say so." Rhion settled back into the leather seat cushions and watched the landscape whisk by, the occasional silted meadows and crumbling barns among the dark trees speaking of a time when the countryside had been prosperous and well tended.

"It was the war," von Rath explained, when Rhion asked about it. "We were defeated in the war..."

"We were betrayed," Baldur put in, twisting around in the front seat where he sat next to the driver. "Betrayed by C-Communists and Jews who had wormed their way like maggots into the government while true men were fighting. All lost their money, except the Jews. That's why the Nazi Party appeared, with the SS as its adamantine spearhead, to save the German race from the muck into which it had been dragged and to lead it to its d-destiny."

Poincelles' dark eyes gleamed with malice. "And I suppose slitting the throats of most of its original members was a part of the Party's destiny?"

"That's a lie!" Baldur snapped, his fat cheeks mottling red. Since leaving the meadow he had been increasingly jittery, the restlessness of his weak brown eyes behind their thick glasses and of his twitchy, curiously shapely hands confirming Rhion's earlier suspicions that the boy was addicted to some kind of drug. "And anyway they were traitors to the Party and h-h-homosexuals..."

"All - what was it? Nearly a thousand? - of them?"

"I think now is not the time for a discussion of the Party's internal politics," von Rath said with quiet smoothness. "I doubt there is a government in the world that did not go through its formative upheavals. I trust, Rhion, that this expedition has not proved too tiring for you?"

Poincelles sneered, but settled back without argument and applied himself to fouling the air with another cigar. His fingernails, Rhion noticed not for the first time, were long and dirty and filed to points, his fingers stained yellow with nicotine. Gall, throughout the discussion, had merely stared ahead of him, perched again upon the little jump seat. Though, as far as Rhion could ascertain, neither Gall nor Baldur were actual members of the SS, both wore the close-fitting black trousers and clay-colored uniform shirts of the Order, a garb that was less than flattering to the lumbering boy. Poincelles retained civilian clothes - in this case a pair of rather loud tweed trousers and a tweed jacket, reeking of cigar smoke and old sweat.

"I'm tired, yes, but I think that will pass." Rhion turned to look up at the young Captain beside him. "The ritual of meditation we've been doing in the mornings helps; all week I've felt my strength coming back."

The gray eyes changed, losing their coldness. "Eric - Major Hagen - had used the morning ritual for years, since he was a youth at school." His soft, steady voice still echoed with the grief of loss, a grief as sharp, Rhion knew, as his own mourning for Jaldis. Was it Gyzan the Archer who had said Perhaps the ending of all dreams is death...?

"That was what first brought us together, years ago - the dawn opening of the ways to power. I had the Crowley texts and was looking for those that had been his sources - I was only sixteen, and terrified that the masters at the Academy would find out I was interested in such matters. A bookseller in Brandenberg gave me Eric's name. He was living in the most awful garret while he pursued his studies..." He shook his head, his mouth quirking a little as he recalled the young student he had known, the haunted, conscientious little cadet he had himself been... "He was the only one who understood, the only one I could talk to about that which was within me - that which I knew had to be true."

Then he laughed a little, like a sudden flash of sun on frost-hard December earth. "I remember the winter night in that garret of his when we first contacted Jaldis. It was a few days before Christmas and freezing cold. I had to be on the train home the next morning, to a true old Prussian Christmas with every aunt and uncle and cousin I possessed. With the drugs we were using to project our minds into the Void, I still can't imagine why we didn't kill ourselves..."

The car slowed as it swung into the shadows of the road cut, where earlier they had edged past the washed-down rocks and mud. Now a gang of men was there, chained together and wearing shabby gray shirts and trousers, shoveling the clayey yellow mud into a sort of sledge under the rifles of four or five gray-uniformed guards. One of the guards yelled, "Get that verfluchter sledge the hell out of the road!" Others cuffed and shoved the corvee to obey. The men moved with the slow shakiness of borderline starvation as they set down their shovels and stumbled to comply.

The officer in charge hastened to the side of the car as it pulled to a halt. "Heil Hitler. My apologies, Captain, we'll have it clear in a minute. This road sees so little traffic..."

"That's hardly an excuse for blocking it!" Baldur flared, but von Rath waved him quiet.

"Quite understandable, Lieutenant."

"I - I heard about Major Hagen, sir," the officer said after a moment, touching the brim of his cap in respect. His uniform was gray instead of black, but Rhion recognized the insignia of the SS on collar and shoulder tabs; he reflected that the Reich of Germany was probably the most comprehensively protected realm he had ever seen. "A great loss to the service of the Reich, but I was afraid something of the kind would happen. The drugs you were using for those experiments..." He shook his head. "He should have taken a little more time. After all the men who died while he was experimenting for the right dosage, he should have been more careful. Hell," he added, nodding toward the workers, stumbling as they dragged at the sledge. "The Commandant would have sent him over as many more of these swine as he needed to make sure."

"We were under a time constraint," von Rath said politely. "Thank you, Officer."

With a gravelly scraping on the rough asphalt of the road, the sledge was hauled clear. Horst put the car in gear and started to move forward slowly. The officer touched his cap again. "Ah, well, there it is. If you need any more, just let us know!"

"That troubled you." With a touch on his sleeve von Rath halted Rhion in the doorway of the library, a long room occupying much of the main lodge's eastern face, and let the others go past them along the upstairs hall to their own rooms to prepare for lunch. Only Baldur stopped and came back to trail them into the long, gloomy chamber, unwilling, Rhion suspected, to let his hero have a conversation with anyone in which he was not included.

Still shaky with shock, anger, and a vague sense of betrayal, Rhion didn't much care. "Just a little, yes."

Neither von Rath nor Baldur seemed to notice the heavy sarcasm in his voice. Baldur snuffled, wiped his nose on his crumpled sleeve, and said matter-of-factly, "I d-don't see why it should. They were just..."

"I did debate about whether to tell you how we arrived at the drugs under whose influence we were able to project our minds into the Void." Von Rath cut the boy off gently, seating himself at the library's long table. "I did not know what your attitude toward it would be. Further, you were sufficiently grieved over your master's death that I did not wish to burden you with the possibility of fancied guilt."

"Fancied guilt?"

Even at this hour of the late morning the library, facing east into the little courtyard between the wings of the grim, gray lodge, was thick with gloom. The tobacco-colored velvet curtains, which were never opened, created a dusk, thick and palpable as the smells that seemed to have accumulated over the hundred-odd years of the building's life: the odors of dust and the stale, gritty foetor of ancient wool carpets; the faint moldery atmosphere that clung to the desiccated trophy head of an antelope over the doorway; the dry breath of old paper, crumbling cloth and glue; and the beaten-in reminiscence of tobacco smoke that would never come out. The walls here were thick with books, more books than Rhion had ever imagined: Lanz and von List; Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and the Chymische Hochzeit; Nostradamus' prophecies; the collected works of Charles Fort; and the Library of Those Who are Blond and Defend the Rights of the Male. They had overflowed the original mahogany shelves and stacked two deep the newer pine planks that had been erected over the ornamental paneling. Neat boxes of half-decayed scrolls and chests of parchment codices were arranged upon the floor; in those few spaces of wall not occupied by books hung fragments of Assyrian carvings and the long, fading columns of Egyptian glyphs. Rhion, used as he was to the libraries of the Duke of Mere and the Ladies of the Moon, had been staggered at the prodigality of books in this world.

Here he spent most of his afternoons, listening to Baldur, Gall, or von Rath as they read to him from these endless texts. The Spell of Tongues that permitted him to understand German worked, in essence, from mind to mind - thus he could understand what was read aloud, if the reader understood it, though the written languages were a mystery to him. And here Baldur spent most of his nights, taking notes, looking up obscure references, reading his way patiently through collections of ancient letters, centuries-old diaries, crumbling grimoires, and yellowing broadsides and scandal sheets that the SS's Occult Bureau in Berlin had sent them, searching for some scrap of knowledge, some clue that would show them how and why magic had died in this world and how it might be restored.

Baldur was sitting now, hunched over his notes, puffy, untidy, and sullen, snuffling and wiping his nose on his soiled sleeve. On Rhion's world, Lord Esrex, son-in-law of the Duke of Mere and an old enemy of Rhion's, was addicted to a drug brewed from certain leaves given to him by the priests of the dark Cult of Agon. Here a similar substance was - rather disgustingly, in Rhion's opinion - rendered to a powder that was then snorted through the nasal membranes, with the result that Baldur's sinuses always ran.

"Fancied, yes." Von Rath's well-shaped brows drew down slightly, shadowing his clear gray eyes. "The men who were used in Eric's experiments were criminals, traitors against the state, men whose crimes in any society would have rendered their lives forfeit. The SS has the management of the labor camps and the concentration camps in which they in some measure atone for their deeds by service to the state they have tried to destroy. We had to find some way of speaking through the Void, some way of renewing contact, and drugs - mescaline, psilocybin, and others - were the only things we had found that worked. We were permitted an arrangement with the commandant of the Kegenwald camp to obtain men for experiments with the correct dosage. But the men themselves would have died anyway."

There was a polite tapping at the door; von Rath looked up as one of the guards assigned to watch room duty in the old parlor at the foot of the stairs entered. "Reichsfuhrer Himmler is on the phone for you, Captain."

"Please excuse me." Von Rath reached for the telephone on the corner of the library table, and Rhion, rising, left him in such privacy as Baldur's company afforded. Telephones were another thing straight out of tales of wonder, though in marketplace fables the means by which two people without magical powers could communicate instantaneously over distance generally involved sight as well as hearing.

Curiously, though the Spell of Tongues held good when the speaker was in his presence, Rhion could not understand an electronically transmitted voice, either over the telephone or on that totally unexpected device, the wireless radio. Last night, when he had gone down to the big drawing room downstairs for the first time to watch a cinema being shown for the benefit of the guards - the simple and unspeakably tragic love story of a wise man for a whore - Poincelles had had to translate for him.

He turned down the hallway of the south wing, paused before the door of what had been the great master bedroom, pushed it open, and stood looking in.

The room was still empty. Yellow sunlight filled it from the wide south-facing windows; through the uncurtained panes could be seen the rude and hastily built block of the guards' barracks and, beyond, the wire fence that enclosed the entire low hill upon which the Schloss had been built. Telephones, automobiles, even the huge quantities of books available in this world hadn't staggered Rhion so much as the cheap plentifulness of wire. In his own world it was so difficult to manufacture that it was generally used only for decorative jewelry. When the gate was closed at night the wire fence was charged with enough electricity to knock a man down, and Rhion had been warned repeatedly against going anywhere near it. Not, he reflected wryly, remembering his experiences that morning, that the perimeter guards would let me.

And in the chamber itself...

Dust motes sparkled in the mellow sunlight. On the oak planks of the floor every trace of the Circles of Power had been eradicated.

Jaldis, dammit, he thought, grief for his master's loss mingling with exasperation and regret. Why didn't you trust me with the secret of its making? Even though I worked for the Ladies of the Moon, you know I wouldn't have passed that secret on to them. But Jaldis had never trusted wizards of any other Order, as far as his secrets were concerned.

"I'm sorry." Von Rath's soft voice spoke at his elbow. Rhion, leaning in the sunny doorway, glanced back to see the tall black figure in the shadows of the hall. He said nothing in reply, and there was a long moment's silence, the younger wizard looking over his shoulder into the room, empty and filled with light, where the darkness had been.

"I'm sorry," von Rath said again, and this time he was not simply apologizing for the interruption of their conversation by a telephone call from Berlin. His voice was quieter, gentle with regret. "You know, I do think that the use of drugs to create the Well probably had something to do with... with its collapse. With Eric's death. I am sorry..." He shook his head, closing his gray eyes as if doing so would erase the image from his mind.

After a moment he went on, his voice hesitant as if he were carefully choosing his words. "I swear to you, Rhion, that as soon as it is possible to... to risk it... we will weave a Dark Well again. We will get in touch with wizards on your own side of the Void, to take you back through. But you understand that it is not possible now."

"Yes." Rhion sighed almost inaudibly, leaned once more against the oak doorjamb, weary in every bone. "Yes, I understand."

"Spring is the time for war," Paul said quietly. "When the weather clears... I fear that the English, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Russians are only waiting for that. They will launch an attack upon us at any time now, and we cannot risk losing another one of us, should what happened to Eric happen again. Not when we have made this much progress toward returning magic to our world."

"I understand," Rhion said again.

The strong, slender hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, tightened encouragingly, as if willing him strength, like a commander willing his men to be brave in coming battle. For a moment something in that touch made Rhion think the younger wizard was about to say something else, but he did not. After a brief time, he turned away, and Rhion heard the highly polished boots retreat down the hall to his own small study, leaving Rhion alone.

In the silence, the faint chatter of the radio in the watch room downstairs seemed very loud. Outside in the yard, a Storm Trooper cracked a rude soldier's joke, and another guard guffawed. Rhion remained where he was, bone-tired and hopeless, leaning in the doorway of that sun-flooded room, remembering...

There HAD to have been some magic on this side, he thought, even the tiniest fragment - there had to be magic on both sides of the Void for a crossing.

Somehow, just for that instant, at the stroke of midnight on the night of the spring equinox, some spark of magic had been kindled in a fashion that von Rath and his colleagues still did not understand. Enough to bring him through.

His mind returned to that fact, again and again. Perhaps Eric had known... But Eric was dead, destroyed in the Well that he had made. If that magic could be duplicated, even for an instant...

If he could only find some way to remake the Dark Well and contact the wizards in his own world.

But even if Baldur had found notes of it in the library, he reflected, they'd never reveal that to him. And without someone to read the texts to him he was helpless, illiterate, as utterly dependent upon them as he was for clothing and food and - he grinned wryly at the irony - Protection.

He stared down at the bare oak planks of the floor, seeking for some remaining trace of the Circles. He only remembered from seeing the ones Jaldis had made that they were hellishly complicated - blood, earth, silver, and light interwound and woven with smaller rings, curves, and crescents of power. And even so he did not know the words that went with their making.

In any case there was nothing to be seen. Only the bare oak planks...

...bare oak planks...

What was it, he wondered suddenly, about the oak planks of the floor that touched a chord of wrongness in his mind? As wrong as the backward-turning swastikas, as wrong as the eyes of the guards in the watch room, cold and caring nothing except to follow whatever orders they were given...

And then he remembered coming to in darkness, sick and freezing and exhausted to the marrow of his being, wondering with what strength was left in him that he was alive at all and thinking how the stones of the floor would have been cold if any warmth had been left in his hands.

The stones of the floor.

His eyes went back to the oak planks, naked and worn and scuffed with a thousand scrubbings.

Von Rath lied.

His heart jolted with a lurching surge of certainty, knowing that it was true.

Von Rath lied so that I'd think there wasn't a way home. So that I'd be at their mercy. So that I'd do whatever I could to restore magic in this world, because only in restoring magic could I get myself home.

Excitement, rage, dread that he was wrong, and bone-deep awareness that he was right swept through him in a confused wave, like the stab of needles and pins in a long-numbed limb coming once more to life. He began to shake, his breath coming fast with hope and blazing anger.

They drew up fake Circles here while I was unconscious, to make me believe them. Hell, they could have brought me here from another building, another place entirely, the way cars can travel...

They could have drugged me... I have only their word on how long I was out.

I have only their word on everything.

For a long time he stood there unmoving: a stout little man with his shabby, graying beard and thick-lensed spectacles, listening to von Rath's quiet voice talking to Baldur in the hall by the library door, the crunch of car tires on gravel outside, and the distant, indistinguishable murmur of the guards exchanging greetings as they walked the barbed-wire perimeter of the fence. He felt exactly as if he had been crossing a floor that he had thought to be solid, only to feel it buckle suddenly beneath him and to hear the echoes of bottomless chaos yawning under his feet.

A floor enormously wide, he thought. And no way of knowing which way to run for safety.

If I have only their word on everything...

What else are they lying to me about?