Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (30 page)

But there was nothing. Only the slow growing of a pallid dawnlight and the death, each by each, of the stars before the prosaic white of day.

He lowered his arms, letting the field of Void magic around him die. His back and shoulders ached and his knees and hands were trembling, pains scarcely noticed and nothing beside the hurt that consumed him and left only hollowness behind. Tears tracked down his face, salty on his lips and wet in his beard. He bowed his head.

Then a quiet voice broke the dawn stillness. “Give me what you have in your hand.”

He turned on the worn stone altar.

Twenty Storm Troopers were ranged in a semicircle behind him, rifles and submachine guns trained. At the center of the arc stood Paul von Rath, seared and haggard face somehow shocking in the nacreous morning light. “I see Poincelles was quite right about where he guessed you would be—he had been watching you for weeks, you know—and what you would attempt. A worthy wizard, if spiteful as a woman. Worthy indeed to have been the sacrifice for our solstice power. I think when we came for him he was surprised. Now give me what you have in your hand.”

He did not raise his voice. It was soft and balanced, like the way he stood, tense in his black uniform and polished boots, eyes gray and cold as glacier ice. Sara stood beside him, his arm locked around her neck, the silver blade of his SS dagger pressed to her throat.

EQUINOX

THE HOUSE IDENTIFIED BY INTELLIGENCE AS
von Rath’s Berlin headquarters stood isolated in the colorless autumn wasteland of empty fields, scrubby birch and pinewoods and nodding weed stems that stretched along the Spandau canal north and west of the city, a wasteland Berliners called the Jungfern Heide. Limping awkwardly down the long drive that connected it to the tramline of the Alt-Moabitstrasse, Captain Thomas Saltwood studied what could be seen of the building above its gray stone wall. The steep roof had shingles cut out in coy Victorian half circles like a fish’s scales, a bit of rusted iron gingerbread along its ridge crest, and two rounded dormers that spoke of attics above the second floor.
Or first floor, as the British would have it
, Tom thought with a wry grin. In Barcelona he’d nearly gotten himself killed by climbing one flight of stairs too few to meet a local Communist leader in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong flat. He still remembered the disgusted lecture Hillyard had given him on the King’s English, once the shooting was done.

As the long-delayed Intelligence reports had indicated, the nearest house—another middle-class Victorian villa—was boarded up and deserted, over a half mile away, and the isolation of the SS house was further emphasized by the wire fence enclosing nearly an acre of ground outside its already forbidding stone wall.

“But it beats hell out of that lodge in the forest they were in all summer,” Tom murmured to himself, as he let himself through the unlocked, unguarded chain-link gate where the drive entered this outer perimeter. He said it in German. He had been speaking in German, even to himself, since he’d paddled ashore the night before last in Hamburg.

The villa wall was eight feet high, blocks of the same dreary gray granite from which most of Berlin’s overpoweringly heavy public buildings were made. The wrought-iron gate had recently been backed by sheet steel; on either side of it, cut stumps and a litter of twigs, chips, and rotting berries marked where two beautiful old rowan trees had flourished.
Blocked the field of fire from the gate
, Tom thought, looking regretfully down at the raw, foot-wide stumps.
Damn Nazis
.

In a way he was a little surprised actually to be here. The confusion of an impending invasion that had followed Dunkirk had put off his errand; the chaos of German bombs hammering London—invariably pulping those East End neighborhoods whose inhabitants were only trying to make ends meet on two pounds a week, he added to himself—had put it off again. Hillyard had departed for a Commando base in Scotland, taking Tom with him, and though Tom had ultimately spent an energetic summer, he hadn’t really expected to get any closer to the SS’s tame magicians than Boulogne.

He scratched his unshaven jaw, checked his watch, and turned back to survey the line of telephone poles that ran from the villa back to the drive’s junction with the main road. Acid-drip devices were accurate to within ten minutes or so. He was burdened with a heavy tool kit and a massive orthopedic boot that not only made him limp whether he remembered to or not but that provided—along with the patch over his left eye—a visible reason why a man of good health and military age was wearing no uniform more formidable than that of the telephone company. It had taken him at least that long to walk this far.

He rang the bell by the gate. “Telephone company,” he said to the young Storm Trooper who appeared, speaking in the slangy Berlin dialect he’d picked up from old Stegler in the Wobblies. “We had half a dozen complaints this morning; we’re tryin’ to trace a fault in the line. You having trouble?”

“No,” the young man said, regarding the orthopedic boot with unconcealed distaste and starting to shut the gate again.

Tom pulled out two cigarettes and offered one to the sentry, who hesitated, then pushed the heavy gate back. “ ’Preciate it if you’d check,” Tom said, ignoring as best as he could the derision in the young man’s eye. “We’re short on petrol this month and it’s a bitch of a hike.”

“Do you good,” the guard said coolly, taking a lungful of smoke. “It is better to strengthen feeble muscles than to pamper them.”

Saltwood made himself laugh heartily. “I keep tellin’ myself that.” He grinned, thinking,
I hope you draw guard duty tonight, creep
.

But the guard, clearly mollified by this gesture of submissiveness, stepped back and opened the gate. Mentally thanking the encyclopedia salesman he’d once ridden the rails with, who’d taught him the value of agreeing with insults, Saltwood limped in, gazing around him incuriously at the house and outbuildings while the young man went into a small wooden gate lodge and picked up the telephone. By the way he slammed it down again Tom knew the acid drip he’d rigged in the main junction box had worked.

The Storm Trooper emerged from the lodge looking at Saltwood as if the crippled telephone repairman had been personally responsible for the nuisance—which was, in fact, the case—and said, “I’ll take you in.”

Saltwood shook his head sympathetically and stubbed his cigarette out against the granite of the gatepost, carefully stowing the butt behind one ear. “Bitched-up Jew wiring, that’s what it is.” He followed the young man across the yard.

From atop the telephone pole while installing the drip, Tom had gotten a fair look at the house already. In a way, he was glad of the summer’s delays—it would be a hell of a lot easier to disappear into Berlin once the job was done than to escape the hue and cry in the wilds of the Prussian woods. He guessed this house at ten rooms exclusive of attics, completely surrounded by the wall. The old coach house and a servants’ cottage had been converted to quarters for half a dozen guards, Deaths-Head SS, not Wehrmacht—not an army project, then. The shrubbery all around the inside of the wall was badly overgrown, an easy sneak-up. While the sentry knocked diffidently on the door of the downstairs study, Saltwood observed the catches on the windows, easy enough to trip with a knife blade.

“I hope for your sake the matter is critical, Trooper Weber,” said a voice as soft as a thug’s silk scarf. Turning, Saltwood saw in the study doorway the man who must be Captain von Rath.

Saltwood shifted his eyes away immediately, knowing he must not stare. But the man who stood framed in the umber gloom was only superficially recognizable as the one whose picture he had seen in London. The man in the picture he’d been shown in London—a picture taken in Prussia in the spring—had had the look of a man dying, burning up inside. This man…

For some reason, Saltwood, schooling his features into casual respect that had no trace of recognition as he looked back, was reminded more than anything else of a wealthy and well-cared-for woman in the fourth month of a pregnancy that pleases her. Von Rath had that same glow, that same sense of beauty fulfilled and radiant… that same very slight air of smugness. The gauntness had filled out without losing the shape of those splendid cheekbones, and even the man’s hair seemed thicker, brighter, stronger despite its close military cut. Yet there was something else, something that the picture had entirely failed to convey, though Saltwood was damned if he could figure out what. Strong as a physical impact, he had a sense of evil, of wrongness—of darkness masquerading as triumphant light.

Oh, come on
! he chided himself, disgusted.
I thought you got over that good guys/bad guys stuff in Spain!

But when von Rath’s frost-silver gaze touched him, he shivered and came at the major’s beckoning with an unwillingness that went to the bone.

“Short in the wiring someplace,” Tom explained, his ingratiating grin feeling like a badly made denture. “Buggered up half the lines around here. We need to check whether it was in a phone here, either one that’s still in use or an outlet that was taken out, see.” Von Rath made no response, and Tom felt the sweat start under his cheap billed cap.

He had talked strike in mines and on factory floors, never knowing which of those scared and angry men were the management bulls, but he’d never in his life had this sense of irrational terror of another man. As he spoke, he noticed small details: the almost metallic quality of the pale gaze; the short saber scar on the cheek; and the white slimness of the hands. Of course with a “von” hanging off the front of his name, he’d never done a day’s manual work in his life. Like Marvello the Magnificent and every other carney magician Tom had ever met, von Rath wore hoodoo amulets around his neck—twenty or more circles made of jewels and glass and what looked like animal bone on one necklace, and on another a single uneven ring of woven silver, crystal, and iron. This medicine-show fooferaw should have been funny, like Hitler wearing
lederhosen
, but it wasn’t. Tom couldn’t tell why.

“There is a telephone in my study,” von Rath said at last, “and another upstairs in my room. A third is in the guards’ lodge out back. Those are all that have ever been in this house. Take him around, Weber, and see that I am not disturbed again.”

While Saltwood opened up the bottom of the study telephone and poked around inside, von Rath returned to his bulbous Beidermeyer desk and his book, but Tom was nerve-wrackingly conscious of the man’s presence in the room.
Get a hold of yourself
, he thought irritably, trying not to run out of the room when he was done; but by the gleam of sweat on Trooper Weber’s upper lip when that young man met him in the hall again, he saw that von Rath had that effect on others, as well.

And why not?
he thought, disgusted with himself as he followed Weber upstairs.
He looks like a dangerous hombre to cross, even if he does wear Woolworth’s Finest strung around his neck. HE’s the one I ought to kill
.

But ten years of bar fights, of tangles with management stooges on picket lines and occasional pop-skulled crazies in hobo jungles made him think uneasily,
I’d sure hate to try
.

“Chilly bugger,” he volunteered, pulling apart the phone in von Rath’s Spartan bedroom and giving it, and the skirting boards, a cursory once-over. Trooper Weber, his arrogance still cowed by the encounter with von Rath, nodded. Von Rath’s chamber was by no means the original master bedroom of the house—either Sligo had that one or they were using it as a workroom. “Any chance of getting a quick look at the other rooms in case there’s a dead lead? It’ll take just a glance around the skirting and save me a trip back here if we
still
can’t find the short. That way we won’t have to disturb His Nibs again.”

Weber hesitated, then nodded, and gave Tom a tour of three other bedrooms on the upper floor, during which Tom was able to orient himself mentally and establish entries and possible escape routes. Only at the far end of the passage, where the two major bedrooms stood opposite one another, did Weber demur. “It is forbidden to go into either of those.”

“What’s in there? Secret plans?” The locks on both were new.

Trooper Weber gave him a fishy stare. “There is nothing in there.” He was a lousy liar.

Tom shrugged. “No old phone leads? It’d be a wire about so long sticking out of the skirting…”

“There is nothing like that.”

“Thank Christ for that.” He turned and limped back down the hall, deliberately slowing his pace to irritate his guard, who had to keep stride with him. To the right of the stairs as he emerged on the ground floor was a sliding door of polished mahogany, also recently decorated with a brand-new lock, but as he limped over to investigate, the door was shoved open from within and a young man poked his head out.

“Who are you? What do you want? What is this man doing here, Trooper?” The boy was short, fat, and coked stupid—past him Tom had an impression of black tapestries and some sort of altar, candles, chalked circles on the bare floorboards, and a stink like a San Francisco joss house.

Trooper Weber saluted smartly. “A man from the Fernsprechamt, Herr Twisselpeck. He wants to know if there was at any time a telephone in that room that might be causing a short in the lines in the neighborhood.”

Herr Twisselpeck—the boy couldn’t have been over eighteen—swiveled weak tea-colored eyes up to Saltwood; beneath thick glasses and enough dope to raise the dead, Tom could see the jealousy in them at his height and the breadth of his shoulders. “So they’re hiring c-cripples these days, are they?” he demanded nastily. “No, there isn’t a telephone in here. There never was a telephone in that room. You should know we’d never have ch-chosen it for the temple, the Holy Place of Power, if there had been any kind of electrical wiring in its walls.” He jerked back into the darkness of the temple and tried to slam the doors—the heavy, sliding mahogany slipped out of his jittering hand on the first try and he heaved and fussed at it for a moment to coax it closed. A moment later the lock clicked.