The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,2
ceiling. Rhion blinked up at it for a moment, shading his eyes against its blaring strength, then looked at the floor again.
But there was nothing to be seen among the spirals and circles of power—dribbled candle wax, dried blood, a few dark spots where the Water Circle had been drawn, only the great ritual sun-cross they had drawn as a guide, the emblem of magic’s eternal renewal scrawled upon the floor, and the prosaic air of this world dispersing the last veils of smoke.
“Well,” he said shakily, putting a hand on the wall for balance to stand. “It took Jaldis three days to weave one on our side of the Void—the gods know how long it will take him here. But I don’t expect he’ll be well enough to for weeks—the Void’s magic drained his strength very badly the last time he touched it—and after one crossing I for one am in no hurry to have him start. Is he... Is he all right?”
It came to him that none of them had mentioned his master; as the cloudiness and exhaustion cleared a little from his mind, he cursed himself for not asking earlier. Jaldis might need him; tampering with the Void or working with the Dark Well had always left the old man prostrated, too exhausted to work so much as a simple fire-spell, for days, sometimes weeks... Seven years ago, during an earlier vain attempt to contact the wizards whose voices he had heard crying out of magic’s death, he had suffered a mild stroke.
But the four men surrounding him remained silent.
Cold touched him inside, an echo of cries in darkness, forever unheard.
At length Paul asked quietly, “You mean... Jaldis came with you after all?”
Looking up into that beautiful angel face, Rhion felt as if the floor beneath his feet had given way. “He... he stepped into the Void with me, yes.”
No, he thought numbly, grayness beginning to creep into the edges of his sight. Oh please, gods of magic, don’t tell me he’s dead... Jaldis my friend... Don’t tell me I’m here on my own... Jaldis dead... no way back... Jaldis my friend...
From what seemed to be a great distance Paul’s voice came to him. “He said he was trying to get another wizard to come in his stead.” His gray eyes were worried as he touched Rhion’s elbow with a steadying hand. “He was blind, he said, and in need of certain magical implements to see and speak...”
Dear gods... Rhion’s mind stalled on the brink of a roaring vortex of panic and despair. Dear gods, don’t do this to me. “The other mages couldn’t come.” He was surprised at how steady his voice sounded, even though barely audible even to his own ears. “He and I... I wasn’t going to let him come alone...”
“But you are a wizard, too, aren’t you?” Baldur demanded, sudden anxiety in his watery brown eyes. “We c-can’t have wasted...”
“Shut up, pig-dog!” Paul snapped viciously, his own face chalky in the hard yellow glare.
A thousand images swam through Rhion’s mind in a single hideously elongated instant of time—Tally, his beloved, the sunlight dappling her hair as they lay together in the grotto at the end of her father the Duke’s palace gardens; the laughter of his sons. Jaldis’ thin mechanical voice saying We can afford to think neither of the future nor of the past which we leave behind...
So this was the end of the dream Jaldis had cherished these seven years—the dream that had sustained him, obsessed him—the dream of restoring magic to a world in which it had vanished, the dream of, perhaps, saving magic, if it came to be threatened in their own.
I’m here alone.
No magic. And no way home.
Jaldis had never showed him how to weave a Dark Well. And though he had studied magic for seventeen of his thirty-five years, he knew that his own power was no more than average, his learning scanty in comparison to what his master’s had been, what Shavus the Archmage’s was, or what any of the great wizards of his own or any other of the major Orders...
“Come.” Paul urged him gently back through the door. Blindly Rhion was aware of Baldur touching the button on the wall again, and the light vanishing as instantly as it had appeared, with a hard metallic click. So that’s electricity.
“Lie down and sleep. We’ll speak of this in the morning; we’ll find some way to continue the work your friend wanted to help us do.”