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

time he stood cradling the glass in his hands, his eyes like smoky opals gazing into a candlelit middle distance, his face in repose young and very sad.
    “You understand what is at stake here?” he asked softly, after a long time in thought. His gaze returned to Rhion’s, tiredness and old wounds in his eyes. “It is not only victory over the English, you know; not only doing what our Führer demands that we do. It is the ability to do it that will be our victory, a victory over magic’s true foes—a matter less simple. It is… vindication. Do you understand?”
    Sitting on the hassock, bespectacled and unprepossessing, Rhion looked down into his glass for a moment, unwilling to admit how much he understood. “I think so.”
    “Since I was a boy,” the young wizard continued slowly, “I have felt—I have
    
     known—
    
    that there had to be something else, something other than the sterile pragmatism of Freud, of Marx, and now of this man Einstein—Jews all, incidentally, but it goes deeper than that. Something… I don’t know. And as the years went on and I kept looking, and there was nothing… Just the world closing in and bleeding to death without even being aware of what it was losing or what it had lost.”
    He shook his head, returned to perch on the arm of his chair, and stared for a time into the depths of his glass as if to scry there where the magic had gone. “But it had died,” he said, very simply, his voice almost too low to hear.
    “Eric said he had felt the same thing,” he went on after a time, and his eyes flinched shut for a moment in remembered pain. “Eric was the first man I ever knew who had felt it. He and I…” He shook his head quickly.
    “Without magical operancy—without the ability to transform the will into physical being—magic remains only a legend, and the fire that consumes me—that consumed us—is no more regarded by other men than a thousand similar crank curiosities, on par with phrenology and ginseng and that mediocre bureaucratic, keyhole-listener Himmler’s stupid attempts to locate the ancient races that are said to dwell in the hollow earth. And so it will remain, unless you and I can prove to them that it is… real.”
    Rhion was silent, remembering again his first meeting with Jaldis on the bridge in the City of Circles.
    
     Are you searching for secrets
    
    ? Remembering the sensation of ice-locked bone breaking open inside him, when he had first called fire from cold wood. Remembering the aching relief of knowing he was not mad.
    “How old were you,” von Rath asked quietly, “when you first understood that you were a wizard?”
    “Twelve,” Rhion said slowly. “I mean, I didn’t understand what it was then, but I knew I was different.”
    “I was fourteen.” His voice sank almost to a whisper, as if he spoke not to another man but to the quiet, gold-haired boy he saw across all that gulf of years. “Immured in a military academy in Gross-Lichterfelde, learning parade drill and classical Latin, while outside a pound of sausage was going for a million marks… The fact that you had any choice in the matter makes me so envious that I could kill you.”
    Choice. Had there really ever been any? Tally had asked him once why he’d become a wizard, if he had known what it would mean: that he could not marry the woman he loved to desperation; that he could not admit that the children she bore were his for fear that they would be killed; and that he and Jaldis would spend most of their ten years together as outcasts, living on the love spells he concocted for sale to people who despised them. He remembered the growing fear of what he was, pain so awful he had wanted to kill himself, hollowness and fear of what he sensed was growing in his dreams, then the worse pain of knowing what it would cost him to pursue those dreams.
    I tried so damn hard to be good
    
    , he had said to her.
    And for Paul von Rath there hadn’t even been that choice—only the