Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (14 page)

“Try them on,” she invited in what she evidently considered a genial voice. “One will surely be close enough to allow you to continue your so-valuable labors.”

Rhion put his hand into the box and nearly threw up with shock.

The psychic impact was as if he’d unsuspectingly plunged his arm into acid. Yet at the same time what was in the box—the dim miasma floating over those neat, insectile frames and dust-covered lenses—was ephemeral, gone even as he jerked his hand out, sweating and gray-lipped and sick. He glanced quickly to see if von Rath and Weineke had noticed, but they were talking together, the SS doctor dimpling under the young mage’s adroit courtesy as if his words were a glass of cognac. If she’d known how she would have smiled.

Hands shaking, sweat standing cold on his face, Rhion looked back at the box. For a moment it seemed to him that those flat, folded shapes of metal and glass were the skeletons of men, stacked like cordwood for burning, sunken eyes sealed shut and mouths opened in a congealed scream of uncomprehending despair.

He blinked. The vision disappeared.

“Where did you get these?”

Weineke glanced over at him with a clinical little frown; von Rath, too, looked worried at the sudden whiteness around his mouth. The doctor said, “They were confiscated from political prisoners, criminals, enemies of the Reich. Is there something wrong?”

“Just… I—my head aches.” He turned away quickly and, aware of their eyes upon him, put his hand into the box again.

Now that he was braced for it, the sensation was almost gone. The gold-rimmed spectacles he picked up were only spectacles. The concentration of evil, of horror, of a depth of despair unimaginable to him—of the truest touch of hell he had ever encountered—had slipped beneath the surface of reality again like a bloated corpse momentarily submerging in a pool. He could have probed into the metal and crystal to look for it, but didn’t dare.

He hated the thought of putting them against his face.

They were an old man’s glasses, meant to adjust farsightedness rather than myopia. He blinked and took them off. One of the most evil men he’d ever encountered, the old Earl of Belshya, had been ninety-four, and he supposed the Reich could have enemies that ancient who were dangerous enough to be locked up in the hell whose aura hurt his fingers as he reached into the carton again. He didn’t believe it.

The next pair, silver-rimmed, he couldn’t even touch. The boy who had worn them was dead. Through the silver, the most psychically conductive of metals, he could still feel how it had happened.

Beside him, von Rath and Weineke were engaged in soft-voiced conversation. “…victory slipping through our hands. Those prisoners I asked you to hold in readiness for us…” The primrose air smelled of cigar smoke and coffee, and across the room Horst was roaring with laughter over one of Poincelles’ witticisms. Rhion barely heard. He doubted he’d have been so aware of the auras clinging to the glasses if they hadn’t been all together in a box, if he hadn’t just been shocked from a psychometric trance; but he realized now where he’d felt that aura before. It was the same sense that clung to the yellow-patterned dishes on which they were sometimes served lunch, to one particular chair he hated in the library, to the watch they’d given him and the books in strange tongues he found hard to touch.

Those were things that had been confiscated when their owners—those mysterious and ubiquitous “enemies of the Reich”—had been taken away to be tortured and to die for crimes, it was clear from the aura of the glasses, they for the most part did not even comprehend.

He picked a tortoiseshell pair—tortoiseshell being almost completely nonconductive—but the man who had worn them had been far more shortsighted than he, almost blind. Horst and Poincelles sauntered over, still carrying their coffee cups, the Frenchman’s cigar polluting the air all around them. “Oh, not those,” Poincelles objected, taking the tortoiseshells from Rhion’s hand, “they make you look like a mole.”

“How about these?” Horst took a pair from the box and tried them on, making faces through them; Poincelles laughed.

“Trudi will go for those. You know she loves intellectual types.”

The young Storm Trooper crowed with laughter—Trudi, if Rhion recalled correctly, was the little black-haired minx at the Horn who had yet to give any evidence of literacy. Of course, in a country whose ideal woman was a devout and pregnant cook, this would scarcely be held against her.

“These are close.” Rhion put on a pair of rimless glasses with fragile silver temple pieces. They weren’t as close as another pair he’d  tried, but the horror that clung to these was less suffocating, less terrifying, than some.

Poincelles grunted. “They make you look like a damn rabbi.”

The word—not in German—came to his mind with the meaning of “teacher,” but was overlain with a complex of connotations Rhion could not easily identify. Von Rath laughed gaily. “You’re right! All he needs is side curls,” but Dr. Weineke gave him a long, thoughtful scrutiny that turned his blood cold for reasons he couldn’t guess.

“How about these?” Horst balanced a pair of gold-framed lenses without temple pieces on the high, slightly skewed bridge of his nose and assumed an exaggeratedly pedagogical air. “If the class will now come to order!” He rapped with his knuckles on the table and pinched his lips.

“You’re right.” Poincelles grinned. “I had a Greek teacher at Cambridge who wore some like that, the strait-laced old quean. You’ve captured the look of him…”

“Ah!” Von Rath laughed again, plucked them off the Storm Trooper’s face, and adjusted them on Rhion’s. “Now
that’s
the thing for you. Distinguished and scholarly.”

The old man
. The thought came to him instantly and whole, and was as swiftly gone, a half-familiar face glimpsed while crossing a crowded street. He touched the delicate frame hesitantly—the lenses balanced by pressure alone—and, though afraid of what he might find, closed his eyes and dipped within.

It was the same old man whose personality he had felt buried in the depths of the knife. But he sensed clearly here a gray old city, a basement room of stove, table, thick-crowding shelves of worn books, and a bed behind a faded curtain of flowered calico; grimy windows afforded only the view of passing boots. He saw bony hands using the ivory clasp knife to sharpen old-fashioned quills. The smells of cabbage soup, the sound of contented laughter, constant learned argument, droning chants—a little dark-haired girl with coal-black eyes…

And beneath the patina of pain and shock and dread, of hunger and the ever-present stinks of filth, degradation, and death, he tasted again the elusive wisp of magic.

Beside him Horst was laughing. “No, a monocle! Hey, Doc, any of those dung-eating Communist Jews wear a monocle?”

“You don’t look well.” Von Rath’s voice slipped softly under the younger man’s coarse guffaws. He leaned one flank on the table next to Rhion, stood looking down at him, head tipped a little to one side, dark, level brows drawn in a frown of concern.

Rhion removed the pince-nez and inconspicuously slipped it into his shirt pocket, and eased the rimless glasses carefully on over the swollen left side of his face. Though he felt as guilty as if he’d erased a plea for help written in a dying man’s blood, he knew he’d have to ritually cleanse them if he was going to wear them regularly.

Did von Rath know? he wondered, looking up at that beautiful face, delicate even with its sword scar—dreamer, wizard, as much an exile in this world as he was himself.

He’d been talking to Dr. Weineke with the casual intimacy of longtime partners.

He knew.

Rhion closed his eyes, fighting the tide of inchoate realization about what the Nazis did and were. “My head aches,” he said truthfully. “You have no idea how stupid I feel falling down the stairs like a two-year-old, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back up and lie down again. I’ll come back in a couple of hours. Maybe you and I can work through the Dee and the Vatican letters tonight, so the day won’t be a total loss.”

Von Rath shook his head. “It does not matter if it is. Baldur and I will finish them. Rest if you need to rest.”

Horst and Poincelles were still playing with Weineke’s collection of eyeglasses as Rhion mounted the stairs to his own room.

“WHO’S THE OLD MAN?”

Taken unawares by the question, the barmaid Sara turned sharply, slopping beer on the tray she had been about to lift from the bar; for a split second uncertainty and fear gleamed in those spitcat eyes before they melted into warmth as ersatz as the average cup of German coffee. Then she smiled and brushed her hip lightly against Rhion’s crotch. “Don’t worry about my old man, Angeldrawers. Old Pauli does the settling-up with him.” But he knew she was sparring for time.

“I don’t mean your pimp,” Rhion said quietly and took from the breast pocket of his shabby brown shirt the gold pince-nez. “I mean the old man who wore these—the old man who used to cut quills with the knife you tried to stab me with.”

Her hand shut around his wrist with the same startling strength he’d felt dragging him off-balance in the laundry room, and her eyes changed from a courtesan’s to an assassin’s. “Where did you get those?”

They were jammed shoulder to shoulder in a mob of black-uniformed men and locals in shabby serge around the bar; with the cessation of the newscaster’s staccato voice a few moments ago, the Woodsman’s Horn had returned to a chaos more characteristic of Saturday nights than of the normally quiet Thursdays. But with the triumphs in the West, the locals had all crowded in to listen to the broadcasts. Now men slapped each other on the shoulder and laughed, congratulating and triumphant—the French falling back in utter confusion, the British ousted, helpless, waiting for the Reich’s conquering armies, Belgium and Holland on their knees… An extremely drunk man in the golden belts and brown uniform of a local Party leader was explaining at the top of his voice to a bored-looking Trudi how England’s work force would be organized for the good of the Reich, and over at the piano a group of the guards from the Kegenwald labor camp were singing “
When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, things go twice as well. ”

Rhion transferred the glasses to his free hand and thence to his shirt pocket again. He didn’t raise his voice. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

She drew breath to speak, not sure, he guessed, whether to try out another lie. The next instant someone grabbed Rhion roughly from behind, twisting his arm painfully as a boozy gust of breath from over his shoulder demanded, “This Jewish squirt bothering you, sweetheart?” Twisting to look back, Rhion saw two Storm Troopers, camp guards, blond, clean-shaven men with iron eyes. “You want us to give him a lesson in manners?”

Since you’re so highly qualified in that field
… Rhion, panicked, had the sense not to say it; his gaze cut frantically to the smoky room, but Horst, who’d driven him into town, was nowhere in sight.
Christ, I’ll report the bastard
…

For a moment Sara considered the matter. Then she dimpled coquettishly and shook her head. “Oh, let him go.” She made bedroom eyes at the men and insinuated herself between them, and they released Rhion to make room for her. Her little hands fluttered, caressing collar flashes and sleeve bands as if in childlike admiration of the insignia. “But it’s good to know German maidenhood is being so well protected.”

Obviously the qualifications for maidens have been lowered for the war
, Rhion thought, edging out of the crowd as quickly and inconspicuously as possible and heading for one of the vacant tables in a shadowy corner of the room.
I wonder if Poincelles made that clear beforehand to the lords of the Tartarean Seat?
As he sat down, he found he was shaking. He hadn’t counted on Sara having allies, nor considered the possibility of being beaten bloody in an alley in mistake for a Jew.

He studied her as she teased and flirted with the growing circle of Storm Troopers, always in motion, touching the wrist of one man as he lighted a cigarette for her, the arm of another as she looked up into his face with those huge black eyes. Her garish hair was sticky with the sweat that sheened her face in the frowsty heat; in her cheap, green, flowered dress, her body seemed to crackle with nervous energy and the promise of sensual outrageousness.

Though there was always one barmaid on active duty, it was never the same one—the girls appeared and disappeared regularly through the inconspicuous door near the bar. Old Johann was slumped unconscious in a corner, no more regarded tonight than a half-dead dog. Music blared forth from the radio again, soaring, passionate, incongruously beautiful—the music of this world was some of the loveliest Rhion had ever heard, totally unlike anything he had known in his former life. He wished he could write some of it down for Tally, who would be fascinated by its complexities.

“Who are you?”

Rhion looked up. Sara set two tankards of beer on the table before him. He had seen nightshade sweeter than her eyes.

“Professor Rhion Sligo.” He took a sip of one of the beers. “But Auguste told you that last week.” He produced the pince-nez again and held it out to her. “I found these in a box of about two hundred pairs that the doctor from Kegenwald brought for me to choose from after you broke mine the other night.” Up at the bar he’d seen her take in the black eye and the bruise on the side of his face.

Her hand, which had started toward the glasses, flinched back and clenched on itself, and the red mouth, wide and generous under its paint, hardened. She blew a cloud of cigarette smoke at him and laughed. “I was pretty drunk here the other night but I think I’d remember breaking your glasses for you, Professor. Maybe it was Trudi—she’s pretty much like me when the lights are out.” She plucked the glasses from his hand and tucked them in the soft chasm between her breasts, and gave him a mocking smile, daring him to lay a hand on her with the men within call.

“I’m talking about three o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday,” Rhion said quietly. “At Schloss Torweg, after you got done helping Poincelles raise his—ah—ritual energies. As the closest thing this country has to a professional wizard, when someone tries to kill me I can usually figure out who it is.” He pulled the knife from his pocket and slid it across the table toward her.