"WHY WASN'T I TOLD you were going to do a major ceremonial last night?"
Von Rath looked quickly up from his breakfast porridge and then away. In the buttercup brilliance of the sunlight pouring through the wide dining-room windows he looked ghastly, drawn and gray and sleepless. As if, Rhion thought, even after he had gone to bed, staggering from the drugs he had taken, he had not slept, but had only lain awake in the whispering darkness, wanting more.
"Baldur only came to me after you had left for the village." Von Rath set his spoon meticulously across the top of the bowl of barely touched oatmeal. On the other side of the room, Poincelles was consuming a hearty plate of bacon and eggs in blithe disregard of Himmler's recommendation that SS Troopers breakfast upon porridge and mineral water - Himmler owned the largest mineral water concession in Germany. On top of Rhion's memories of last night the greasy smell of the bacon was nauseating. Neither Baldur nor Gall were anywhere to be seen.
A little too airily von Rath went on, "Oh, perhaps we should have waited for you to return, but when he showed me the rite he had discovered - decoded from the Venetian Lucalli's diaries - somehow I knew we did not need to wait."
"Like hell." Rhion dropped into a chair. "It takes more than an hour and a half to push through the paperwork to get three prisoners sent over here from Kegenwald for you to disembowel. They're efficient, but they're not that efficient."
The gray eyes met his, the cold opal gaze a stranger's, and Rhion saw again the demon move in their depths. "Do you object to that?"
"I object," Rhion said slowly, picking his words with the utmost care, "to you doing a rite involving human sacrifice, especially an unwilling human sacrifice, without consulting me. The field of power raised from such a sacrifice is septic and unpredictable. Without stronger guards than you can raise in this world, you could end up killing everyone in the house. You don't know how to direct the power you raised last night - you sure as hell didn't know how to disperse it."
Von Rath frowned, genuinely puzzled. With a chill stab of shock Rhion understood then that the man had not even been aware of the horrors that had gibbered in the corners of the darkness last night.
"It was dispersed," von Rath said. "We used the usual formulae..."
"The usual formulae are about as effective as a traffic citation against a division of Panzers! The whole house was glowing when I got here. What you did - human sacrifice, especially a torture sacrifice - is the most dangerous way there is of raising power..."
"Nonsense." There wasn't even defensiveness in his voice - only a kind of brisk relief. "Human sacrifice has been practiced since the dawn of time, and the Adepts of the Shining Crystal never spoke of danger, though they regularly used this method of raising power." He spoke with the same matter-of-fact calm with which he had quoted his "scientific" statistics on the intelligence of women or the cultural superiority of the Aryan race. "And in any case," he went on, "they were not true human beings. The women were gypsies, the boy a Jew."
Rhion looked away from him, his fist clenching involuntarily with rage, fighting back words that wouldn't change the calm conviction in those opaque eyes but would only put paid to what little freedom of action he himself might still have. Von Rath had once said to him Surely you've tried to have a reasonable argument with a woman... Rhion had had plenty of those, but what he'd never had - though he'd occasionally been foolish enough to try - had been a reasonable argument with a member of either sex in the grip of an obsession that amounted to lust.
After a few moments he said quietly, "I don't care if they were Hitler's charladies and the King of Belgium; unless the victim is willing, a blood-rite with a sentient intelligence runs the risk of releasing forces that can completely distort the powers raised. You raised a hell of a lot of power last night, but without physical operancy - without technique - you can't control it."
Von Rath leaned forward and, with slender white fingers still stained faintly brown under the nails, moved his porridge bowl just slightly, so that the edge of the saucer lined up perfectly with the waxed oak grain of the table's wood. "And whose fault is it," he asked gently, "that we do not have physical operancy?"
Rhion experienced a sensation exactly similar to that of a man hanging by a rope above an abyss, when he feels the first strand part.
Oh, Christ.
Von Rath went on in that soft, level voice, "You were the one who told us that the Rites of the Shining Crystal, should we decode them, would be of no use to us. Fortunately Baldur saw in them more promise than you apparently did."
"What Baldur saw in them was the possibility of power." Rhion had known that this would come, but still he felt the blood leaving his extremities. He was aware as he never had been before of his absolute isolation in this place, of von Rath's absolute power over him... of the beating of his own heart. "What he didn't see - what my guess is he didn't want to see - is their danger to the magician who uses them."
"And why was there no mention of this danger made by the Adepts of the Shining Crystal themselves?"
"Maybe because they were so goddam vain they wouldn't admit there might be anything wrong with what they were doing?"
"Or because their own souls were strong enough to shed the petty hates of the weak?" Von Rath broke off suddenly, dark brows flinching as if at the bite of unexpected pain. He put his hand to his smudged and sunken eyes, and shook his head.
"I - I'm sorry," he said softly. When he looked up the metallic hardness had faded momentarily from his eyes, leaving them again the eyes of the young man who had dreamed of wizardry, who had asked only to be taught. "I don't know what... Rhion, I respect your learning. You still have a great deal of technique to teach me, and I admit I am still a novice." He frowned, trying to collect his thoughts. "But it is plain to me that you do not understand the nature of - of heroism, for want of a better word. There comes a time when a student must realize his own truth, not his teacher's; when a man must see with his own heart and his own eyes, not through books written by other men. It is intuition and courage that lie behind great deeds, not hairsplitting pedantry for its own sake."
"In other words experience isn't valid if it isn't your experience?" Rhion retorted dourly, recognizing the image of the intuitive Aryan hero from the cheaper sort of pulp fiction and the more fatuous articles in Der Sturmer available in the watch room. He knew that at this point he should have gotten up and left, but he was angry as well as scared, angry at that arrogance, angry for the old man he had seen with the wounded lip, angry for last night's dead.
"I'm saying it is valid only up to a point. Then a man must learn, and know for himself. It isn't the first time human sacrifice has been performed in the cause of the Black Order, you know."
"No," Rhion agreed slowly. "But as I understood it, the sacrifices performed by the SS at Welwelsburg were of volunteers, SS men themselves. A willing sacrifice is an entirely different matter, a completely different way of raising power."
"Is it?" Von Rath tilted his head a little, that opaqueness, that curious opalescent quality, slowly filtering back into his fatigue-shadowed eyes. "I wonder. But in any case our needs now are different. We must obtain the wherewithal to defeat Britain and defeat her quickly. And in so doing, we will give the SS power to become the Holy Order it should be, so that it can take its rightful place in the defense of the Reich and its destiny." His cool gaze seemed distant, fixed upon some unknown point, some ancient dream. "And that power now lies in my hands."
"It doesn't," Rhion said, his voice steady but his heart beating hard. "And it won't."
The gray gaze didn't even shift, didn't acknowledge that anything could stand in its way. "It will. Given time - and correct teaching." He turned back to Rhion, studying him with glacial, objective calm. "Tell me... Do you object to the blood-rites on so-called humanitarian grounds, or because of the danger?"
Rhion closed his eyes, seeing again the brown gypsy woman's body, the inked blue symbols of the rites barely visible under the blood that glistened everywhere on the shredded skin. He understood then the black self-loathing he'd read on everything Sara had touched. "What you do with your criminals here is no concern of mine," he made himself say. "But for preference I'd rather not be in the Schloss at all while you're performing a blood-rite." Everything within him was screaming Coward. Coward and whore. And looking up, he saw the words reechoed in the contemptuous thinning of von Rath's colorless lips.
"Of course I respect your wishes," the SS wizard said. "But you will give us the benefit of your wisdom and your teaching betweentimes? Because we will master this, Rhion." His tone glinted like the blued edge of a knife. "And let us have no more - ah - judgments on your part as to what is and is not safe for us to know. Understand?"
And with a gesture infinitely graceful he drained his glass of mineral water and, rising, walked from the room.
"In other days," Baldur read, his thin voice freed for once of its nervous stammer as it framed the sonorous Latin of the ancient text, "a mage alone could call forth power by simple acts, or by words spoken either aloud or within the mind, as in ancient times men spoke face to face with gods."
He paused to turn a page: a narrow book, bound in brown leather mottled and crumbling with mildew, its parchment pages hand-copied, so Baldur claimed, by a scholar in the old city of Venice three centuries ago from documents far older, documents copied in Byzantium from sources more ancient still. This was a usual claim made by occult societies, in Rhion's world as in this one. Baldur, no novice at dating manuscripts, had affirmed that this copy had indeed originated in the seventeenth century - a designation that puzzled Rhion, for, though records went back over forty centuries in places, this world seemed to count their years in both directions from the middle. The seventeenth century (counting forward) had been a time of intensive occult activity just before the rise of mechanistic industrialism. Through a sentence in a papal letter and a reference in the Dee correspondence, Baldur claimed to have identified the Venetian scholar Lucalli as a possible member of the infernal Shining Crystal group, though no direct mention was made of it either in Lucalli's diary or in this Praecepta, which, though catalogued in his library in the 1908 - counting forward - inventory, might or might not have been his. But from what he had heard of the text, Rhion thought it was a good guess.
"Now men must have resort to the wills of a great congregation of folk, joined together with one accord and stirred up by dancing and the beating of drums and by the act of generation promiscuously performed (all these methods being anciently employed to rouse up the vital flames). More and more the Adept must rely upon the turning of the stars and the taking of the universe at its flow-tide, and upon the use of potions and salves which free the spirit and stir forth the vital flame of life from their flesh. For mark this: there is an energy, afire, in the human flesh and the human soul, from which magic can be woven."
Lounging in his corner near the window of the dimly curtained library, Poincelles glanced up from his own book and smiled.
"All possess this flame in some measure, but to greater or lesser extent, as fire burns the more or less brightly from oil depending on the degree to which it is pure. Most brightly it burns in the True Adepts, who by means of drugs and potions can call it forth from themselves at will; but lesser men of wisdom still have great measure of this flame. Even the dross of humanity, the human cattle which eat grass and breed and exist only for the purposes of the True Adepts, possess it in some degree, and thus can be used, as the flesh of cattle is used to sustain the life of a true man. This the Indian wizards of the New World knew, when they made their sacrifices; this the devotees of the black cults of Atys and Magna Mater understood, when they performed deeds for which the Emperor Trajan had their names stricken from the records of history. And this knowledge has been handed down unto those who understand.
"And it's true, it worked," Baldur added, looking up.
In the filtered afternoon light coming through the library windows the boy looked absolutely awful, his face like putty behind the thick spectacles, his hands trembling where they lay on the stained parchment page. His repeated sniffling informed Rhion also that Baldur had fortified himself with a quick sniff of his favorite poison before leaving his room, where he'd lain in a stupor since concluding his part of last night's experiment. No fear from this group, Rhion thought with dour irony, settling deeper into the tapestry embrace of a worn wing chair. They'll dope themselves to death before they can destroy the world.
But it was what they would do in the meantime that had him worried.
"What?" he asked cautiously.
"Don't you see? Of c-course you have to see!" Baldur almost shouted at him, twitching impatiently in his chair and dragging a damp and crumpled sleeve under his raw nostrils. "Those gypsy b-b-bitches last night, and the Jew... Pau - er - the Captain sent for them specially. The wo-women were fortune-tellers, the brat a psychic of some kind, I forget what. The Captain was wise enough - it was his idea to have anyone with p-power be picked up. 'Sp-Specially Designated.' He knew we'd need them."
"You mean, whether they'd done anything wrong or not?"
Baldur stared at him, flaccid lips agape. "They were Jews," he pointed out. "And anyway the experiment worked! We were right! Thursday night - at the dark of the moon - we'll work the rite using someone of greater power, greater magic, and we'll make a talisman of p-power that'll blow the roof off the building!"
"That's exactly what I'm afraid of."
Baldur heaved a sigh and slumped back in his chair, his weak brown eyes dreamy. "What a pity they destroyed it. The Shining Crystal... Do you think it might have been one and the same with the Holy Grail? Wolfram von Eschenbach describes the Grail as a stone, you know. Just like the Jewish-Christian Church to have pulverized such a talisman and slaughtered its guardians!"
"Jewish-Christian Church?" Rhion was startled. "I thought the Christians spent the last ten centuries killing the Jews!"
Baldur waved an airy hand. "They all come from the same source," he declared, as if that made them a single organization. "They hate and suppress m-magic, the same way they've tried to suppress the pure Aryan Race, whose birthright true magic is."
"And whose most sterling representative and spokesman you are?" Poincelles purred maliciously.
Baldur's pasty face blotched with red. "My family can trace its German heritage back past 1640!"
"Ah, I see - that should get you into the SS with no problem, then, shouldn't it?"
The boy jerked furiously to his feet, his pudgy hands bunching with rage, and Rhion caught his arm and pulled him back as he started toward the Frenchman. To Poincelles, Rhion snapped, "Look, if you're going to waste your time pulling the wings off flies, why don't you do it someplace where it won't waste my time, too? Christ, it's like being in a girls' school - except if Baldur were a schoolgirl, you'd be doing more to him than calling him names."
Poincelles grin widened appreciatively. "Touche," he murmured, rising; book under his arm, he strolled out onto the veranda just beyond the long windows, where Gall, stripped to a loincloth, was engaged in boneless runic yoga in the pale afternoon sun.
"French-Jewish pig," Baldur gritted, bending down to scrabble for the notes he'd knocked off the table in his hysterical haste. He puffed a little as he moved; the thin bar of sunlight, penetrating from the curtain Poincelles had left open, picked out a mist of sweat on his pimpled forehead.
"Is he Jewish?" Sara hadn't mentioned it.
Baldur shrugged. "All the French are." It was a statement Rhion knew to be untrue. "They're a degenerate race - apemen, beastmen, whose only desire is genetically to pollute the Aryans, the true descendants of the Atlantean root race, through the s-sexual corruption of their wo-wo-women." He straightened up, barely missing the edge of the table with his head, his hands shaking badly as he shuffled his papers into order once again.
His pouchy eyes gazed past Rhion after the older occultist with sudden, jealous hate. In a low, furious mutter he went on, "It's against him and men like him that the SS was formed. The real SS, the inner core of the SS - the shining sword blade of the Aryan Race that will turn the tide of genetic slopwork that threatens to engulf us from the East! We're more than just an imperial guard, you know," he went on, turning to meet Rhion's eyes. "We're a religious order, like the ancient Teutonic Knights, a sacred band of all that's best of the Aryan Race. It's only fitting that we, with our birthright of magic, of vril, should be doing what we're doing now - forming a point of adamant for the spear of our destiny. Paul - P-Paul understands."
He gestured angrily toward the windows, beyond which, by Gall's furious gesticulations, it was obvious Poincelles had succeeded in baiting the Austrian mage. "And Himmler uses men like that for his purposes! When P-Paul comes into his own, when they make him head of the SS - as they'll have to, when by magic we encompass the British defeat! - the Order will be as it should be, as it has always been destined to be, a sacred band of blood and fire and m-m-magic - "
"Baldur..."
The boy almost leaped out of his chair at the sound of von Rath's quiet voice. Without so much as an Excuse me he abandoned Rhion and hurried into the hall - from his seat in the wing chair, Rhion could see the two of them standing together, the boy clutching his notes to his sagging breasts and nodding, the man speaking softly, his head tilted a little to one side, sunlight from the hall window dappling his black shoulders, his pale hair, and the scarred left profile visible through the door with pallid gold. Von Rath said something and gestured toward the library door; Rhion thought the heard his name, but the Nazi mage made no move to greet him or to enter the room.
He understood - he had understood at breakfast - that he had placed himself outside the circle of those whom von Rath considered his own kind, placed himself, in effect, with the women and children being used for strafing practice on the road. He was now merely useful, for as long as that would last.
