"WELL, TOTO," RHION SIGHED, misquoting to an imaginary canine companion a line from the American cinema he had watched - with a certain amount of bemusement - last week, "I'd say just offhand that we are definitely not in Kansas anymore." Over the din in the tavern the Woodsman's Horn nobody heard, which was probably just as well.
There was a piano in the corner, a relic of the tavern's more respectable days before the SS had been garrisoned at the Kegenwald labor camp. From Tally, Rhion had acquired an interest in all sorts of musical instruments, but the chief virtues of pianos seemed to be that they were capable of far more volume than any similar instrument in his own world, and that it was much easier to play them badly. Both attributes were being lavishly demonstrated at the moment by the Storm Trooper at the keyboard, and a dozen or so Troopers around him were bawling out the words to a filthy cabaret song about Jewish girls at the top of their collective lungs. The air was blue and acrid with tobacco smoke, and Rhion, sitting in a dark corner at a table with Auguste Poincelles, pushed up his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and hoped to hell this trip would be worth the headache he was going to take back with him to the Schloss.
"Ten ships, ten of them!" a weedy, middle-aged merchant at the bar was whooping triumphantly to the impassive counterman. "Our boys are blasting the damned English out of the water! We'll be in London by this time next week!"
So much, Rhion thought wearily, for our enemies attacking us at any moment. He wondered that he could possibly have been naive enough to have believed von Rath's version of the progress of the war, no matter how it had started. But he had not mentioned the discrepancy to von Rath.
Beside him, Poincelles raised one dirty, pointed fingernail to the nearest barmaid. The girl slithered like a weasel from among a pawing crowd of uniformed admirers and came across the room to them, splendid haunches switching under the thin blue cotton of her dress. It was Poincelles who had proposed tonight's expedition, to discuss matters that could not easily be mentioned in the presence of Baldur, Gall, and von Rath, Rhion guessed.
He couldn't possibly have come here for the beer.
"A whiskey, Sara, if there is such a thing in this place." Poincelles glanced inquiringly at Rhion. "Professor?"
Rhion gestured with his three-quarters-full steel mug, smiled, and shook his head. The barmaid Sara regarded him with eyes black and bright as anthracite coal in a pointed, triangular face, skin pale to translucence save for the garish redness of her painted mouth.
"So this is your famous professor?" She sized him up with a professional eye and shifted the tray she held so that her breasts bulged like white silk pillows beneath the half-unbuttoned bodice of her dress. "Glad you've finally come out of seclusion in that monastery they're running out there. We've heard tell about you. Go on, have another beer, Professor. Old Pauli's good for it."
"Later." Rhion smiled gallantly. "That way I get to watch you walk across the room again."
She laughed, tossed her frizzed red head, and returned to the bar to fetch Poincelles' whiskey, deliberately undulating her hips to the noisy approbation of the group around the piano.
"Nice little piece, that," Poincelles remarked. He produced a cigar from his pocket and a lighter - a small gold box containing flint, steel, and a highly combustible liquid fuel, as good as a fire-spell, Rhion thought, at least within arm's length and while the fuel lasted. Rhion coughed in the ensuing cloud of smoke and resigned himself to being ill for the rest of the night. "The girls here are the only decent thing about the place. That beer has no more relationship to hops than the petrol in the car does. At least the whiskey's more or less pure."
"Pure what?" Rhion demanded, coughing. Poincelles laughed, as at a witticism, and handed another cigar back over his shoulder to Horst, their SS driver-cum-bodyguard. The young man accepted it gratefully and strolled off to join the group around the piano. The other two barmaids were there already, one a honey-fair girl who reminded Rhion heart-stoppingly of Tally, the other a little black-haired minx who had only moments ago emerged from the back room with an elderly man in the gold-belted brown uniform of a local Nazi Party leader. The piano thumped tunelessly, the stout barman paused in his steady dispensing of beer to sell condoms to a couple of Storm Troopers, someone turned up the radio to better hear the latest bulletins from the war in the West, and someone else shouted, "Hey, you know what they're going to get Hitler for his birthday? Frontier posts mounted on wheels!" The noise was deafening, the smoke nauseating as a gas. Rhion sighed, closed his eyes, and wished with everything that was in him that he could simply go home.
May was fading into June. Even at this hour, light lingered in the sky, soft as the color of pigeons' eggs, and the air outside was thick with the smell of apple blossoms from the nearby farms. Now and then the wind stirred, carrying the scent of pinewoods, whose dark wall enclosed the village, as it enclosed the Schloss, the undulating sandy hills, and, it sometimes seemed to Rhion, the entire world in a whispering monotony of somber green. In the Drowned Lands, the streams would still be high, and broad lakes would hold like quicksilver the shining echo of the light.
He felt a hand touch his wrist, warm and very strong; opening his eyes in the choke of cigar smoke, he saw that Poincelles had leaned near him, vulpine face as close to his as a lover's.
He whispered, "I can help you get home."
Rhion had been expecting those words, waiting for them - waiting for them, in fact, for several weeks. And he had almost been certain that it would be Poincelles to say them. Still he felt the jolt of adrenaline in his veins, and the pounding of his heart nearly stifled him.
And the words having been said, he must, he knew, go very carefully now. He kept his face impassive, but his fingers were shaking as he moved his arm away from Poincelles' grip and turned his beer mug a judicious ninety degrees on the grimed and splintery table. Though he neither liked nor trusted the Frenchman, he needed the help of another wizard and needed it desperately.
"You never have trusted them, have you?" the French occultist went on in his deep, beautiful voice. "Captain von Rath, and Baldur, and Gall."
"Well," Rhion admitted, "I must admit I was a little put off when I found out about the enemies of the Reich who were used for the drug experiments."
Poincelles blinked, for one second actually looking surprised that this was what had bothered him. Then he quickly molded his features into an expression of disgust and anger. "Oh - oh, yes!" He waved his cigar, trailing a ribbon of blue smoke. "I was horrified, as well, completely shocked - a ghastly business. I was furious when I heard, for of course I wasn't told about any of it until it was too late." He smiled slyly and added, "They don't exactly trust me, these Nazis."
"Now, how could anyone distrust a man of such obvious virtue and probity?" Rhion made his blue eyes wide behind his glasses, and Poincelles grinned like a wolf with his stained teeth.
"Clever." He smiled, and pinched Rhion's cheek. "I like a clever boy." He cast a quick glance across the room at Horst, presently conversing crotch to crotch with the blond barmaid. Like most Storm Troopers, Horst didn't impress Rhion as being terribly bright, but it didn't pay to take chances. Lowering his voice, Poincelles went on, "They don't trust me, but they needed my help in the rituals that went into the making of the Dark Well. They needed my power. I know von Rath has told you that, with the offensive on, none of us can be risked just now to create a Dark Well so that you can locate your home again - if he intends to send you home at all, ever. Myself, I doubt it."
He laid his hand again on Rhion's wrist, the cigar smoldering between two fingers, and his dark eyes gleamed beneath the shelved hollows of his brows. "My memory for matters of ritual is excellent. I can help you create another Dark Well."
Rhion looked away, understanding now the nature of the proposition - understanding that with those words, Poincelles had in fact announced that he had no intention of helping him get home. Disappointment settled like a swallow of cold mercury in his chest as he realized the man was not to be trusted, not to be turned to for help.
He said nothing.
"For a price," Poincelles went on.
Over by the bar there were fresh howls of laughter. A Waffen SS lieutenant in the gray uniform of the Kegenwald labor camp was pitching pfennigs for an old derelict, a whiskery drunk who made his living selling papers and picking up trash, to crawl for. As the old man groped on hands and knees for the coins, the other Troopers would kick them farther and farther out of his reach, like children tormenting a crippled dog. Horst whooped "Here's a drink for free!" and poured his whiskey over the old man's head; old Johann sat up, grinning with a terrible combination of terror and fogged pleasure, with hope that this would be the worst that would happen, and lapped at the liquid running down his hair.
The barmaid Sara, who had returned with Poincelles' drink, bumped Rhion's shoulder playfully with her hip. "No sense of humor, Professor?"
His mouth quirked dryly. "I guess not."
She looked down at him and some of the brittle quality eased from her face. "Kurt will see they don't hurt him, you know," she said in a quieter voice, and nodded at the impassive barman. She shrugged her shoulders, oddly delicate above the jutting splendor of her breasts. In spite of the lines of cynicism and dissipation around her dark eyes, Rhion realized she couldn't be more than twenty-two. "It gives the boys a laugh. They don't mean any harm."
Neither, Rhion supposed as the girl strolled away, had the guards in the Temple of Agon, the faceless servants of the Veiled God, who had pretended to set his oil-soaked beard on fire when Lord Esrex had had him imprisoned there.
He looked back to meet Poincelles' narrow, speculative eyes behind a haze of putrid smoke. "What price?"
"I want you to teach me."
Rhion gave his beer mug another quarter turn. "I am teaching you," he said quietly. "I have been teaching you for over six weeks now, and aside from the fact that you now know spells that work in my world, and your technical knowledge is cleaner than it was, none of the four of you is any closer to making magic work than you were before I came. You know that."
"I know that." Poincelles leaned forward and the smell of his breath, drowned in whiskey and cigar, was like the exhalation of a month-old grave. "And I know also that you're keeping something back."
Rhion kept his eyes on the beer mug but his hands and feet turned perfectly cold.
The Frenchman chuckled throatily. "My little friend, we all keep something back." He drained his whiskey with a gulp, stood and shook back the limp swatch of hair from his forehead. Across the room Horst, engaged in buying a condom from the barman to augment the weekly barracks ration of one, hastily departed to fetch the car around. After a long moment, Rhion stood up also and followed the tall occultist shakily from the room.
If the man has to make one true statement in the entire night - which is not a bad average for Poincelles, Rhion thought as he climbed into the rear seat of the open Mercedes that waited for them in the harsh trapezoid of yellow electric light - why does it have to be that one!
For Poincelles was quite right. They all did keep something back.
What Poincelles had kept back in the course of the discussion was what von Rath and the others had been keeping back from the start - that the Dark Well had not, in fact, been destroyed.
Rhion had confirmed his suspicions a few weeks after the expedition to the Dancing Stones, as soon as his ability to use his scrying crystal had grown strong enough to get a clear image once more. Those weeks in between, those weeks of suspicion, of not knowing who was lying to him and when, were nothing he would care to go through again. He had known he was entirely at von Rath's mercy for food and shelter and advice in this strange world - only during those weeks had he realized how much he'd felt comforted by the illusion that he was among friends.
He sighed and shook his head, glancing sidelong at the tall man beside him as the car shot with its eerie speed along the forty kilometers of woods between Kegenwald village and Schloss Torweg. He still felt keenly the disappointment that had come over him when it had been clear that Poincelles had no intention of telling him that the Well still existed; the fact that the Germans were in the process of invading his erstwhile country evidently did not mean that the Frenchman opposed them in principle. Had that little charade tonight been for Poincelles' own purposes, he wondered, or at von Rath's instigation, to find out if Rhion knew more about magic than he'd taught them in the weeks since his recuperation?
In either case, it made no odds. Poincelles was not to be trusted, and it left him in a horrible position, for he desperately needed the help of a wizard he could trust.
For Rhion, too, was keeping something back.
He had found - or thought he had found - the thing for which the wizards of the Occult Bureau had begged Jaldis to come here in the first place - the trick of making magic work in this magicless world.
The problem was that without the help of another wizard, bringing this about in order to get himself home would almost certainly kill him.
"Captain wants to see you," the guard at the gate reported when the car pulled up and the electricity was turned off long enough for the gate to be opened. When the SS had taken over Schloss Torweg, in addition to erecting the fence and cutting down all the trees that surrounded the lodge itself, it had rigged floodlights to drench the grounds in a harsh white electrical glare. The sentry at the gate furthermore shined the beam of an electric torch - a flashlight, they called such things - into the back of the open car before passing it on through, presumably, Rhion thought, to assure himself that no "enemies of the Reich" were hidden under the lap rugs.
Von Rath was waiting for them in the library. The voices of Baldur and Gall were audible - arguing as usual - as Rhion and Poincelles ascended the wide, wood-paneled stairs.
"I still say that electricity must have something to do with the disappearance of m-magic! There is no d-documented, authenticated case of magical operancy - of the human will being converted to physical instrumentality - after the middle of the eighteenth century, and that was just when experiments with electricity were becoming p-popular. Benjamin Franklin..."
"Nonsense! Magic is a quality of the vril, the mystical power inherited by the Aryan Race from the men of Atlantis whom Manu, the last the Atlantean Supermen, led across Europe to the secret fastnesses of Thibet. It is not electricity, but the slow race pollution by mutants and Jews after the fall of the third moon that has robbed the race of its power. In Thibet the Hidden Masters and Unknown Supermen still hold this power..."
"And it's in Thibet that this c-curse of electricity does not exist!"
"Nor does any way of verifying the reports one hears of magic and Hidden Masters," Poincelles added maliciously, lounging in the doorway.
Baldur looked up swiftly from a huge mass of notes, his weak, piggy eyes slitted with irritation and cocaine; Gall merely sniffed. "That is the sort of argument one would expect from a Frenchman," he remarked.
Von Rath, from the depths of his red leather armchair, raised a finger for quiet. Though the Schloss had been fitted with electricity thirty years ago, the wizards - for varying reasons - avoided using it, and the library, like the Temple of Meditations in what had been the ballroom of the north wing and the workshop above it, was illuminated by candles. They made a soft halo of his ivory-pale hair and caught sparks of molten gold in the silver buttons and collar flashes of his black uniform as he leaned forward to speak.
"You've been listening to the news, I suppose," he said, and Poincelles folded his long arms and grinned.
"Yes - it looks as if the Luftwaffe's botched the job pretty thoroughly and let the English army get clean away."
Baldur jerked to his feet furiously. "The German Air Forces are mo-more than capable of d-d-destroying those d-d-debased b-b-b..." Rhion knew from past outbursts that the youth's stutter was infinitely exacerbated both by anger and by cocaine, and the present combination was deadly. Poincelles' grin widened at the boy's blazing-eyed frustration and he was about to speak again when von Rath's soft, level voice cut him off.
"I've had a call from Himmler. The German Armies will invade England before the summer is out."
"Of c-course we must," Baldur declared, sitting clumsily down again and knocking a sheaf of his notes to the floor. "The destiny of the Reich demands that all of Europe be ours," he went on rather thickly as he spoke while bending over to collect them. "It is obvious that..."
"What is obvious," von Rath said with a quick sidelong glance at Rhion's impassive face, "is that the Jews and Communists who run the government of America from behind the scenes aren't going to permit that country to mind its own business. If we don't have England secured for our own defenses before they force the government into a declaration of war, the Americans will use it as a base to overrun us."
When Rhion did not dispute this he turned to him more fully, his gray eyes grave in the deep shadows of his brows. "Himmler was quite emphatic in his demand that we of the Occult Bureau have something to contribute to this final battle, something to tip the scales in our favor to resolve the conflict in Europe once and for all. And I believe Baldur may have arrived at a way to solve the problem of the raising of magical power."
Young Twisselpeck sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve, then rooted around in his notes again. Rhion settled himself on the red leather hassock beside von Rath's chair, his mind still half preoccupied with the problem of how to gain the magical assistance he needed without giving Poincelles - the only thing resembling a maverick among the group - any information that could be used against him.
"My insight into this n-new line of reasoning," Baldur began in his reedy tenor, "goes back, I think, to Major Hagen's d-death..."
And for one cold, sickening instant Rhion thought, They've guessed...
The boy sniffled loudly and pushed his glasses more firmly into place on his nose. "He d-died stepping into the Dark Well, you see. And it was only after that, as he was dying, that our spells reached out into the Void and got anywhere. It must have been his death that released the magic."
They haven't guessed, Rhion thought, shaken with relief. They hadn't stumbled into the keystone of his own secret.
Then he realized what conclusion Baldur had stumbled into.
"Now in the Grimoire of Pope Leo, and d'Ehrliffe's Cube des Goules, and in any number of letters and diaries, there are reports of power being raised by drawing it out of a human being at d-death. We have partial accounts of the Blue Hummingbird Society of the Aztecs, and these tally closely with what we know of the rites practiced by the Adepts of the Shining C-Crystal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - "
"No!" Rhion cried sharply, almost before he was aware he was speaking.
"DON'T INTERRUPT ME!" the boy screamed passionately. "Everybody's always interrupting me! Here!" He fumbled in the notes, dropping papers all around him like a tree shedding leaves in a high wind. "There are seven references in the Vatican letters, two in the communications of the Fuger banking house, one in Nostradamus' third letter to the Viscountess de la Pore and in Bemal D-Diaz's account of - "
"I'm not arguing that you can't make magic from the energies released from the human psyche at death," Rhion retorted, aware from the corner of his eye of the interest on the candlelit faces of Poincelles and Gall. "But it's a damn dangerous thing to do and in my world there isn't a respectable wizard who'd try it... I take it you're not talking about using volunteers."
"Of course not!" Gall snapped indignantly. "The ancient Druids raised power from the sacrifice of prisoners of war! The spirits of the noblest of their foes..."
"Here!" Baldur straightened up and thrust out a mass of references with trembling hands. "Letter from Gustavus Dremmel to the Fugers, November of 1612. 'B-by reliable witnesses these Adepts have been seen, by various rites and ceremonies involving the murder of the aforesaid wo-wo-women, to empower talismans which later enabled them to find hidden treasure, to drink poisons unscathed, to draw the love of both wo-wo-women and men...' "
"Well, that should interest you, at any rate," Poincelles remarked sotto voce, studying his pointed fingernails.
"If we c-could discover what those rites were..."
"Is it truly so dangerous?" Von Rath crossed his knees, his tall boots gleaming like oil in the wavering light. "You understand that we are willing to take the risk."
YOU are willing?!? Rhion almost shouted at him. But there was nothing in those grave eyes that he could shout it to.
There was long silence, von Rath waiting politely for his answer, and Rhion, struggling with shock and outrage, trying to come up with an argument against murder that the Nazi would credit. At length he said, "You seem to think dropping dead like Hagen did is the only thing that will happen. You've never seen a magic field go septic. I've talked to people who have. I'm telling you: Don't do it."
Down at his end of the table Jacobus Gall straightened his thin shoulders militantly and stroked his flowing silver beard. "That is nonsense. On Witches Hill, in my dreams of ancient days, I saw the ancient priests cut the throats of their tribal enemies, pouring out the sacred blood of sacrifice to bring them victory..."
"As you saw the Roman legions surrounded and routed by their Teutonic foes in places the maps show to have been permanently underwater since the retreat of the last glacier?" Poincelles retorted, his black eyes glinting wickedly.
"You understand none of these things."
"My friends..." The Frenchman raised his hands. "We've gone to a great deal of trouble to bring in an expert as a consultant, and while I've got no objections on principle to slitting a few throats, I'd say that we listen when he says something is dangerous, because he does know more about this than we do. But it's up to you - do as you please." And with that he pushed with 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 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 Fuhrer 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 disreputable shadow world of cranks and covens and charlatans, of theosophists and hollow earthers and those who sought Atlantis or Shangri-La, infinitely less thinkable for the only child of Prussian aristocrats than a career as a wizard had been for the son of the wealthiest banker in the City of Circles.
"I'm sorry" was all he could say.
Von Rath shook his head and smiled again. "No, it is I who should apologize to you for becoming maudlin in my cups. I like you, Rhion, and I truly regret that you are here in my world against your will... and I know it is against your will. I know you miss your own world, your loved ones. Do not think that I don't know."
Rhion was silent, remembering Tally... remembering his sons... remembering his home in the Drowned Lands - with a poignance that shook him to his bones.
Von Rath hesitated, struggling briefly with some inner decision, then said, "I promise you that as soon as the war with England is won we shall... we shall open another Dark Well, no matter what the risk to us, and search through it to find the wizards of your home." His voice was wistful at the thought of a world in which his dream of magic was reality. "But for the time being we must serve destiny. Yours...mine...the Reich's." He sighed softly. "Heil Hitler." His hand barely sketched the salute.
"Heil Hitler." Setting his glass down quietly, Rhion returned the gesture, then rose and stepped out into the brassy electric glare of the hall.