The Magicians of Night

SARA WHISPERED, "THIS HAD better work." Her hands, as she shoved her crazy hair up under a man's cloth cap, were steady and her white face calm, stark without its habitual disguise of lipstick and paint. But the brazen glare of the camp floodlights at the bottom of the hill caught the fine glitter of sweat on her short upper lip.



Rhion only nodded. He wanted to reassure her, but was too deep in his trance of concentration to speak. In any case they had been through it all on the drive from the crossroads near the Schloss where Sara had picked him up.



In the surrounding dark of the pinewoods a nightingale warbled. Six miles away, the Kegenwald village church clock spoke its two notes, the sound carrying clearly in the moonless hush of the night. These sounds, like Sara's voice, seemed to come to Rhion from a very great distance, clear but tiny, like images in the scrying crystal. Far more real to him were the two watch-towers of the Kegenwald camp perimeter visible from this hillside, open wooden turrets mounted on long legs like sinister spiders, each ringed in floodlights and dark within.



He stood in each of those watchtowers, a shadowy consciousness more real to him now than the body kneeling in its scratched protective circle just within the gloom of the woods' edge. He spoke to each man separately - a flaxen-haired boy in the left-hand turret, an older man, tough and scarred with a broken nose, in the right. They did not precisely hear his voice, as he whispered to them the dreamy, buzzing songs of nothingness that the Ladies of the Drowned Lands had taught him. But they listened nevertheless, gazing idly in opposite directions, outward into the night.



It was not an easy illusion to maintain. With his own awareness split into dim ectoplasmic twins, he had to keep within his mind from instant to instant the separate realities of the two watchtowers - the hollow clunk of wooden floors underfoot, the dark webwork of the struts that supported the roof and the pattern the wires stapled to them made, leading up to the lights above; the moving sharpness of the air from the bristled darkness of the woods; the murky nastiness of the men's dreams. To the older sentry Rhion breathed songs dipped from the man's cramped and limited mind, the taste of liquor and blue tobacco smoke woven into fantasies of endless, repetitive, impossible intercourse with woman after woman, and all of them alike, all gasping with delight or sobbing with grateful ecstasy. To the younger, after searching the narrow hate-stained thoughts, he wove a different dream, of assembling, disassembling, assembling again some kind of automatic weapon, polishing, cleaning, making all perfect. Oddly enough he sensed the same pleasure in the precise click and snap of metal and the neat, controlled movements as the first Trooper had in his reveries of bulling endless willing blondes.



What facets of human nature these dreams revealed he couldn't allow himself to speculate, nor upon how close this magicless magic of dream and illusion was to the very devices von Rath hoped to use against the British pilots when the invasion began. It was difficult enough to maintain them, to renew again and again the sharp sweetness of their pleasure, as if every time were the first - to inject the tiniest twinge of regret and hurt if either man turned his eyes even slightly toward the hillside between the woods and the barbed-wire fence, or thought about looking back at the stretch of open ground behind them that separated the fence, with its electrified inner pale, from the long gray building of the camp infirmary.



Fence and camp lay starkly naked beneath the floodlights' acrid glare, exactly as Sara had described them, exactly as he had glimpsed them in his crystal; the hillside was bare of cover, clothed only with a thin scrim of grass against which, now, Sara's gray trousers and pullover stood out dark and unmistakable as she crept toward the fence. She moved as he had instructed her, crouched close to the earth. A few slow steps and stillness, count ten, two more slow steps and stillness again, an even, gentle progression that would not catch the guards' dreaming attention. In a long, lumpy, muslin flour sack at her belt, she carried wire cutters, wire, and wooden props to get her under the inner electric fence. Edging forward under the barrels of the turret guns, there was nothing else she could possibly have been.



Yet neither guard moved. The slight relaxation induced by the nicotine they smoked Rhion subtly deepened, increasing with his songs the influence of the drug. To them it had never tasted so good, to them their dreams had never been so fulfilling, so hurtfully satisfying...



Just as Sara finished cutting a slit in the wire of the fence, the back door of the infirmary opened. Through a haze of oiled machinery and shuddering bosoms Rhion was aware of the tall, rawboned form standing in the shadowy opening, the floodlight throwing a coarse glitter of silver on scalp and jaw as he turned his head, looking doubtfully from one tower to the other. Then he looked across the open ground.



It was nearly seventy feet from the shelter of the shadowed door to the wire. The infirmary stood a little apart from the ugly ranks of green-painted barracks, ground commanded by the wooden towers and the dark muzzles of the guns. Between the towers Sara was a sitting target, propping up the electrified wire of the inner fence with two lengths of wood. The old man shrugged and walked forward - slowly, as Rhion had hoped Sara remembered to specify in her whispered instructions of last Sunday.



... red lips parted in a gasp of ecstasy, a white throat exposed by a thrown-back head... Oh, thank you, thank you... Just so much solvent on the patch... ram home...



One of the guards shifted his weight to scratch his crotch, started to turn toward the yard behind him. But sudden cold, sudden sorrow, overwhelmed him, an aching loneliness - and there was, after all, no need. Everything was quiet. His daydream smiled and beckoned, a warm cocoon of virile joy. He gave a sort of sigh and settled back as he had been before, his chin on his fist.



The old man squirmed awkwardly under the wire, sat up, looked with a start at what he must have assumed until then to be a young man, in her trousers and pullover, with her hat pulled down to hide her flaming hair. Rhion saw him grasp her arm, saw her shake free and signal for silence.



She pulled the props loose, shoved them into her bag, and took out a bundle of short pieces of wire. The old man slipped through the hole in the fence and waited while Sara pulled the slit shut again, secured it with a dozen twists of wire so it wouldn't be obvious from a distance that it had been cut. Then they moved forward gingerly, slowly, under the dreaming eyes of the guns.



... touch of gun oil in the lock, a touch in the pin housing... not too much, too much is as bad as too little... they can never say I was less than perfect... soft white hands with red nails digging into the muscles of the back... The sweaty softness of those massive breasts, of thighs clutching at his hips... Again, oh please, again...



Sweat ran down Rhion's face, his muscles aching as if the intensity of his concentration were a physical labor. Dammit, come on, I can't keep on with this...



A few steps and pause. Wait. Creep-creep-pause. The floodlights glared behind them like harsh yellow moons, throwing feeble shadows on the bare ground, like two bugs paralyzed on a kitchen floor. The night breeze turned, and Rhion smelled a vast stench of human filth, overcrowded quarters, and, deeper and more hideous, the stink of death and narrow-minded evil.



They reached the trees. The old man flung his arms around Sara, bending his tall height to clasp her close, and even in his tranced state Rhion reflected that it was the first time he'd seen Sara respond with uncalculated warmth to any man's touch. She reached joyfully up to fling her arms around his neck, for that one second her father's little girl again, happy, clean, and filled with love. His mind still on the guards, Rhion didn't hear clearly the old man's first half-sobbing words or what Sara replied, but he saw her place a hand on her father's arm when he turned toward where Rhion knelt and shake her head. As Rhion had instructed her beforehand, she led her father away through the bracken and impenetrable shadows, toward the road where the Mayor of Kegenwald's car was hidden.



Rhion let his mental voice die into a gentle soughing. His two dim psychic twins stepped in unison to the wide openings in the turret walls, swung themselves over the wooden rails and out into the dark air. Between the towers they met and melded into one. For a moment from that high vantage point, Rhion looked down on the camp itself, long wooden buildings already beginning to warp and split, heavier cement constructions beyond them - barracks, offices, workrooms, cells of solitary confinement or special purpose, raw-new or the older structures of the old pulp mill the place had originally been - and the pale barren rectangle of the exercise yard, all lying stark and motionless within the steel-thorned boundary of towers and fence. And because he was not within his body, he saw clearly the glow of horror that hung over the place, a sickly greenish mist, as if the very air were rotting from what was done within that place.



Turning, sickened, Rhion looked out over the woods and road in the luminous chill of the starlight. The somber pines were still and utterly dark. He saw no cars, no track of trampled bracken, and no sign that they had been pursued, observed, or detected. So far, so good.



He walked down over the air above the defoliated hillside, and in the darkness at the woods' rim saw a pudgy little form in old army trousers and a snagged white sweater, kneeling with head bowed in the dim scratchwork of a magic circle, the starlight glinting in his silver-rimmed glasses and on the sweat upon his face. He passed through the invisible door that lay between them, settling himself around the armature of those sturdy bones; then closed and sealed the door behind him.



Sickness hit him like a blow with a club. He doubled over, swearing in German as he felt the blood leave his face and extremities; though it was a mild night, he shivered with desperate chill, hair and clothing sticking to him with sweat. Knees trembling with cramp, he got somehow to his feet and staggered off through the dark woods to the disused woodsman's track where they'd hidden the car.



Sara was busy renewing the hot-wiring of the little Ford's engine when he arrived. "Christ, I don't believe it!" she breathed, as he slumped down onto the running board. "I don't effing believe it! We must have been out in the open for thirty minutes! What the hell did you do?"



"I told you I'm a wizard." He managed to grin.



"Are you all right, my son?" A long, bony hand closed around his arm, gently raising him. He looked up and met the dark eyes of the man he'd seen in the scrying crystal, the thin old man with the shaven head and the raw, new scar on his lip.



"Yeah," he whispered, but when the old man opened the door for him Rhion almost fell into the car's backseat. "I'll be fine in a minute."



The car moved off, Sara guiding it carefully down a farm track that had mostly gone back to ruts and potholes where it twisted through bracken, wild ivy, and trees. She dug in the glove box and produced a bar of American chocolate candy wrapped in paper, which she passed to them over the back of the front seat. "Give him this, Papa."



Rhion gulped down half of the bar's oily sweetness without even tasting it, then remembered Sara's father probably hadn't had anything resembling decent food for nine months and held out the rest of it to him.



The old man turned it over in long, blue-veined fingers, sniffed it interestedly, and said, "Well, according to Sylvester Graham, sugar is a pollution of the temple of the body, and I'm not sure whether chocolate is kosher or not because who knows what they put into the stuff, but as Rabbi Hillel said, it isn't what goes into a man's body that defiles it, but the words that come out of a man's mouth... So I think an exception is in order. Thanks be to God... and to you, my son." He popped the chocolate into his mouth and clasped Rhion's hand while he chewed and swallowed. "And you are? My daughter only said she had a friend who would get me out."



"Professor Rhion Sligo." The Germanized form of the name was second nature to him now.



"Isaac Leibnitz. I don't always smell like this, but I don't suppose Jonah was any bundle of roses when he came out after spending three days in the belly of a fish, either. So they teach driving cars as well as stealing them in this New York University you went to, Saraleh?"



"You'd rather I stayed in Germany and learned to cook and clean and have babies for our Fuhrer?" she tossed back over her shoulder. In point of fact the old man smelled like an animal, his patched clothing half rotted with old sweat and crawling with fleas, his mouth, when he spoke, showing the dark gaps of missing teeth. He was pallid, emaciated, and still shaky from two days of being sick from the pills Rhion had sent to guarantee that he'd be in the poorly guarded infirmary instead of the concrete cell in which "specially designated" prisoners were kept. But for all of that, there was about him a daft and gentle charm such as Rhion had encountered in other wizards in his own world, infinitely comforting in its familiarity after the greed, fanaticism, and inhuman obsessions of the Schloss Torweg mages.



"What did you do?" he asked gently after a moment. "Except deliver me from out of Gehinnom, for which I will always be more in your debt than you can ever conceive. What's your birthdate, by the way?"



"Don't thank me yet." Rhion sat up and produced a handkerchief from his pocket to polish his glasses. "I'm afraid I'm going to ask you to stick around for a few days and return the favor. As for what I did, I guess it's called astral planing here. I'd meant to cast a spell of distraction on both guards, but I couldn't do it from that distance."



"No wonder you're tired," Leibnitz commented, stroking his stubbled lip in a kind of subconscious mourning for his vanished beard, while Sara made an undervoiced comment of her own in the front seat.



Rhion sighed and put his glasses back on. "It all takes so goddam much time and energy. I don't know how much Sara told you..."



"What could she say, with all those chaperons standing around with rifles? She said you'd get me out if I took the pills, was sick two days, and then got up at two in the morning and walked out across the back exercise yard slow enough to let the guards take real good aim at me. She said I had to have faith."



"It must have sounded pretty crazy."



He shrugged. "They say the Red Sea didn't part for the Children of Israel until the first man got his feet wet. But to get my daughter to believe you - now that's magic."



Rhion's grin was wry. "Believing crazy things seems to be what's done in this country. I'm working for the SS Occult Bureau. They're keeping me prisoner at Schloss Torweg, an old hunting lodge about forty kilometers from here. Are you familiar with the theory of multiplicity of universes, or am I going to have to go through this explanation from scratch?"



"No, no." Rebbe Leibnitz shook his head decisively. "Are you from another world on the same cosmic plane as ours - that is, Malkut, the plane of material reality - or from one of the spiritually higher planes?"



"Same plane," Rhion said, since, as far as he knew, multiplanar cosmic reality was as unprovable in his own world as it was in this. "I'm a wizard there - operative magic works there as it no longer works here. That was originally the reason my master wanted us to come here - to find out why it no longer works." He bit his lip, remembering Jaldis again with a sudden stab of unhealed loss.



"Well, my personal theory is that the roads from the spiritual Sephiroth of Tepheret to the Sephiroths of Yesod and Malkut have become blocked due to the increased influences of the elements of sulfur and fire, though that wouldn't take into account why it still works in other universes than this. Numerologically this century lies under the influence of Mars, always a bad time for those under the protection of the Beni-Elohim, the Angels of the Sephiroth of Hod. But I've heard other theories. I've met wizards from other universes before, you understand, both of the dense physical plane and those who were of a higher spiritual order, merely disguising themselves in the form of matter. There was an Englishman named Galworthy possessed by a spirit named Angarb-Koleg - and that young fellow Inglorion who stayed with me in thirty-eight - and that Theosophist woman Zelzah the Red who was traveling from dimension to dimension preaching the true path to rightness. She used to hold seances at our apartment on Gestia Ulica to contact spirits in other universes - she said the vibrations there were sympathetic - and in fact it was there she met Antonio Murillo, who it turned out had known her in a previous existence when he was a priest of the ancient Egyptian cult of Ptah and she was a temple prostitute..."



Rhion had heard all about ancient Egyptian cults and their reincarnated priests from Poincelles. No wonder Sara looked at him strangely. "And you?"



Leibnitz made a dismissive gesture. "Oh, I'm just a student, a scholar," he said. "All I can do is keep an open mind. All my life I've studied the Talmud and the Kabbala, searching for order in the universe, but it's a dangerous thing to translate the power one channels down from Higher Aether through the Tree of Life into magic here - "



"Aside from the fact that it can't be done, you mean?" Sara chipped in sarcastically, braking gently to ease the car into yet another rutted track.



Rhion opened his mouth to reply, but Leibnitz shook his head with a gentle smile. "Always she was like this," he said. "Well, she's a Taurus. And since she was born in the second degree of her sign, by multiplying the letters of her name by their position and adding the digits, it gives her a Tarotic key of twenty-seven, which is really nine - the Hermit, the sign of Science, but also the sign of skepticism. And added to the year of her birth this gives her a Natal Sum of one thousand nine hundred forty-four, which adds together to eighteen, the Moon, the sign of doubt... She has talked to wizards traveling in other bodies through the universe down from fifty thousand years in the future, and she'd say, 'It can't be done because it can't be done.' Now what kind of attitude is that?"



"The usual one, unfortunately," Rhion said, remembering with a grin his own attitude about three-quarters of the mystical gobbledygook in the Schloss library and most of what Leibnitz had just said. "You're right. Magic and those who can work it are distrusted in my own world, hated, legislated against..."



"It is because magic is arbitrary," Leibnitz concluded. "And so it is. And unfair, and in many cases against the Will of the Creator. It is cheating. What business is it of mine to use the powers of the universe to make myself richer, when for whatever reasons the Lord thinks that in this lifetime I could learn more as a poor man?"



"He used to give Mama that argument when there wasn't money to buy milk."



They had reached the edge of the old meadow where Poincelles' secret temple stood. Though woods crowded thickly on its higher end near the barn, down here the ground was boggy, standing water glinting between patches of rank, waist-high grass. The crying of a thousand frogs prickled the night.



"Can you walk, Papa?" Sara asked worriedly, turning in the driver's seat. "I don't dare try to take the car through this. Even if we didn't get stuck we'd leave a track they could follow from hell to Detroit. Besides, I have to get the car back to the Mayor's..."



"She not only steals cars, she steals the Mayor's car," Leibnitz informed - presumably - God, looking skyward as he clambered out.



"He was the only one who had a gas ration."



"I'll take him up to the barn." Rhion slid along the seat and scrambled out the same door Leibnitz had, for the lane was narrow, and tangled ditches filled with stagnant water and blackberry brambles flanked it on either side. As he put his hands on the doorpost to pull himself out, Sara caught his wrist, dragging him back. Her whisper was carbon steel in the darkness.



"You tell him anything about how I'm living now and, so help me God, I'll kill you."



Shocked that she'd even think of it, Rhion started to demand What the hell do you think I am? But the vicious glitter in her eyes told him what she thought he was - a man, coarse, careless, and stupid. He shook his head, an infinitesimally small gesture that her father, standing by the corner of the car staring raptly around him at the milky darkness, would not see. "I promise."



She threw his hand from her grip, despising his touch, and turned her face away to put the car in gear. Its rear wheel nearly ran over Rhion's foot as she popped the clutch and drove off without a word.



"Poincelles, feh." Leibnitz picked his way through the long weeds that surrounded the barn and its three crumbling sheds, disregarding, as Rhion did, the black and terrible Seals of the demons Andras, Flauros, and Orobas written in secret places to defend against intrusion. "A paskudnyak out for what he can get. I knew him when he was still with the Order of the Golden Dawn, and even then I didn't trust him. What can you expect of a man whose numerological key works out to be sixteen? And if you trace out his name on the number grid of the geometric square of Saturn..."



"In here." Rhion pushed aside a plank on the back of the barn, slipped through the crack, and edged along between the splintery boards of the wall and the tarpaulin that hung inside until he found the opening between two tarps. Behind him, he heard Leibnitz breath hiss sharply, though it was pitch-dark in the barn until he drew from his pocket a match and the stub of a candle. The tiny light spread gradually outward but did no more than hint at the dark shapes of the draped altar, the black candlesticks, and the shadowy gleam of the inverted pentagram beneath which Sara had lain. The smell of old tar and dust was almost drowned by an ugly medley of dried blood, snuffed incense, the thick choke of burned wood.



"Chas vesholem," the old man whispered, looking around him in the dark.



Hating the place himself, Rhion moved swiftly to the far wall, where, behind another join in the tarps, he found the tin box of food and the bundle of clothes and blankets Sara had left there the day before. Rebbe Leibnitz did not move from where he stood; when Rhion returned to him, the box and bundles under his arm, he turned firmly and, slipping through the tarps again, went out the way they had come.



"Poincelles has already bribed the Troopers at the Schloss to stay away from this place," Rhion said, as they settled down in the darkness of one of the sheds and, after a muttered prayer, the old Kabbalist set to the bread and cheese and apples in the box like a starving wolf. "When he hears about the hue and cry for you, it's a good bet he'll take steps to keep the camp guards away, as well. My guess is von Rath knows about the place already but I suspect Poincelles doesn't think so - and anyhow he's stolen too much of the Occult Bureau's property to furnish it to want anyone looking too closely."



"The tzadik Akiba ben Joseph, the greatest of the rabbis, says that it is no sin to eat food that is unclean to save one's life, for your life is the Lord's property, which it is incumbent upon you to preserve... and by extension I suppose that it is also permissible to hide behind the demon Lilith's skirts in there." The old man jerked one greasy thumb at the dark bulk of the barn against the star-powdered sky. "But that place makes me want to wash more than nine months in the pigsty of their camp."



"Amen," Rhion muttered, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. Poincelles' spells, curses, and protective demon seals might have no power in them, but the dirty magics done in the barn clung to the place like a stench. "It's only for a couple of nights."



The old man grunted, wrapped what was left of the food again in its papers, and replaced it in the box. "There. If I eat more I'll be sick. Now - what are they doing in that place? That Schloss, that lodge of theirs... I saw the truck go out last week, and twice the week before, taking people they've been keeping, like me, apart from the others, people they don't put onto the lumber gangs or send to the mills to work. And the ones who work in the crematoria whisper about how they came back..."



"Have you ever heard of a group called the Adepts of the Shining Crystal?"



Cocking his head, Leibnitz thought about it for a moment, then frowned. "No. And I've heard of most, at least in Europe, though in America..." He shrugged resignedly, leading Rhion to wonder what this America, whose participation in the war von Rath seemed to fear, was really like. "They're crazy over there."



Sitting in the blackness of the shed, his back to one of its splintery doorposts, Rhion spoke of all that had befallen him since he had received, in the rainy solitudes of the Drowned Lands, word that Jaldis had wanted to see him in Bragenmere. He had meant to give a swift and concise encapsulation, but it didn't turn out that way.



"We have the night before us," the old man said gently, and, for the first time in three months, Rhion found himself able to talk - about the Nazis, about his unhealed grief for his old master, and about his loneliness and his growing fears. Sometimes he touched back on his original topics - the Spiracle, the Dark Well, the need to be at the stones on Witches Hill at the maximum pull of the sun-tides - but more frequently, as the Dog Star rose burning above the eastern trees and the birds woke and cried their territories, each to each, in the hushed dark of early summer predawn, he found himself talking about Tallisett and his sons, about the Ladies of the Moon, about wizardry, and about magic.



"As far as I can tell magic just - just isn't in this world anymore," he said, turning his head a little to look down the slope at the meadow, spread out in a shimmering of water and weeds and a thin white ground mist. In the stillness and utter peace it seemed impossible that such a place as Kegenwald existed. "From what I can tell, nobody did anything to cause this, any more than human malice causes the fall of night. It happened. Even the faes are gone, the faerie-folk - water goblins, pookas, lobs, grims. It might change some day, but there's nothing I or anyone can do to change it."



He sighed. "I'm not even sure if the damn Spiracle will work, you know? They work on little things, but something like this... It's never been tried. I thought of rigging up a Talismanic Resonator, which would draw on the Void itself..." He shook his head. "But aside from the fact that it would create a field anyone could use, including von Rath, it just needs too much power. So it has to be a Spiracle."



He looked back, aware that the old scholar was regarding him quietly in the darkness.



"What you are doing," Leibnitz said slowly. "It is irresponsible, you know."



Rhion closed his eyes. From the first that knowledge had murmured in his heart, try as he would to turn his mind away from it, he knew that the old man was right. "It's my only chance."



"That does not matter. If for whatever reasons the Lord saw fit to withdraw operant magic from this world - if that is what happened - it says much for your opinion of your own judgment that you want to bring it back for your own convenience."



"I'm not talking about my convenience, dammit!" Rhion said passionately. "I'm talking about my life! I wasn't the first one who circumvented the rules; I shouldn't even be here!" But he knew that any of the mages of his own world - Shavus, Jaldis, the Lady - would have told him that it didn't matter. And in his heart he knew it didn't.



But in his heart he could not bear the knowledge that he would never see Tally again, never see his sons. That he would be trapped in this hellish place, a prisoner of the Reich, for what remained of his life.



"Tzadik, please," he whispered. "There's only one place they know where to look for me now and only one time when I'll be able to raise enough power to open the Void. Part of it's that I think I really would rather die trying to escape than stay here, but as things are I think it's only a matter of time before von Rath kills me anyway. With or without your help, I'm going to have to try."



"There." The old man's hand was warm and strong on his wrist. The first nacreous grayness of dawn showed him the hooked nose, the long brows curling down over shadowed eyes, the strong lips with the shameful stubble of a convict and the red, raw circle of the scar. "You deliver me from hell and three hours later I'm coming on you like the balabos... You have given me my life, and you have found and taken care of my Sara. For that I owe you. And I can't let you remain in this world long enough for these evildoers to figure out some way of bending your knowledge to their wills. So I will do what I can, and let the Lord of Hosts - Who knows more about the whole thing anyway - handle the rest."