Free Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night by Barbara Hambly Page A

his flat, bony shoulders against the doorframe and stood up straight, lighting a cigar as he strolled out of the room and down the electric brightness of the hall, the acrid whiff of smoke as disrespectful as the snap of fingers.
    With a massive sniffle Baldur started to jerk to his feet to go after him, and von Rath waved him down again. “I agree,” the young Captain said with a sigh, and rubbed the high bridge of his nose with his fingers, as if his eyes were suddenly weary even of the candlelight.
    “That still doesn’t give him the right…”
    “Of course one doesn’t need voluntary sacrifice!” Gall declared. “That was a different matter entirely.”
    “No.” Von Rath lowered his hand and looked over at Rhion again. “You’re right. We do not know what might happen. But we must find something, some way out of this impasse, before the Americans decide to interfere in our struggle against England and its allies. We lost Eric… we cannot take another risk like that.”
    “I’ll search,” Baldur promised, bending down clumsily to gather his notes again from where he’d dropped them on the floor. His hands were nervous and fidgety, his eyes flicking restlessly from von Rath’s face to the shadows of the bookshelves, thick with ancient knowledge, that crowded the long room. “The ancient societies performed the rites in safety. The p-proper rites, the correct means of making the sacrifices, have to be there… I’ll find them for you, P-Paul… C-Captain…”
    “Books.” Gall got to his feet contemptuously and shook back his snowy mane. “Books are the refuge of those who need such things. It is by the purification of the body and the mind that the True Adept will come to an understanding of the
    
     vril
    
     within him.” He was still muttering as he left in Baldur’s shuffling wake.
    Von Rath expelled his breath in a sound of mingled amusement and exasperation, and got to his feet. “Children.” He laughed, shaking his head. “All of them—jealous and quibbling and fractious. In the past six months I’ve acquired an enormous respect for my old nanny… Would you care for some cognac?” He crossed the room to a cabinet whose brass-grilled doors formed one of the few places in the wall not solidly paved in books. Rhion wondered where the Occult Bureau had collected so many; according to von Rath, Himmler, the Bureau’s head, had a library of his own three times this size.
    The young Captain paused with his hand on the cabinet door. “Or did you have enough of liquor among the camel drivers?”
    “Camel drivers?” Rhion leaned back against the arm of the red leather chair, looking up at von Rath in the swimming halo of candlelight. Two minutes ago he’d been furious with outrage at this black-uniformed wizard’s callous readiness to practice blood-sacrifice; for weeks he had lived with the knowledge that von Rath was his jailor and that the wizard was lying to him about the existence of the Dark Well and had lied from the moment Rhion had regained consciousness. But the other side of the man was genuine, as well: the quiet courtesy, the soft-voiced charm, the gentleness with which he handled Baldur’s nervous worship, and the homesickness that he had made clear he understood Rhion felt.
    “
    
     And some who went into the wilderness
    
    ,” von Rath quoted, returning with two fragile glass bubbles of henna-colored liquor, “
    
     and thirsted with the beasts of prey, merely did not want to sit around the cistern with the filthy camel drivers
    
    . Nietzsche. A wise man and a brilliant one—I’ll have Baldur read him to you sometime, if your German isn’t up to it yet, as a break from the
    
     Malleus Maleficarum
    
    . Do you still thirst, my friend?”
    “For something that hasn’t obviously come out of a cistern, yes.” Lacking a friend, the undeniable pleasure of the man’s company was difficult to resist.
    A smile of great sweetness momentarily swept the cold angel face. For a