Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (33 page)

“Do you know,” she faltered, “what time that night the wizards were arrested? Whether it was before or after midnight?”

And Marc shook his head.

They will have destroyed the Dark Well
, Tally thought, crossing the paddock quietly and turning toward the villa, almost shocked at her own ability to appear calm. Her heart pounded sickeningly in her breast, and her belly turned cold every time she thought about how confession was extracted—about what Rhion had told her of his own brush with the priests of Agon.

Was he one of the ones they took?
She thought about it for a moment and found it unlikely.
Even if he had
… Her mind shied from the thought of what Esrex would have done to force a confession from Rhion as to the paternity of her sons.
Even if he had withstood it and died, Esrex wouldn’t have passed up the chance to let me know
.

But if he didn’t make the crossing before the arrest—if he didn’t come stumbling out of the Dark Well right into the arms of Esrex and the masked servants of the Hidden God—that means he’s still stranded wherever he is, with Jaldis dead, without magic, in trouble, he said.

And there was no one of sufficient power to bring him home.

She paused at the rear door of the house, hating the thought of returning to her rooms. The purple handprints would be fading by this time, as they did after a few hours, though the Hand-Pricker in the village had assured her that at a word from him they would return.
For all the good that would do
, she thought bitterly.
Marc would never consent to bringing him here—and as things are, if he has any sense of self-preservation he won’t come
.

And in any case, disposing of one spy would only mean there’d soon be another one that she didn’t know about.
His devotees are everywhere
, Damson had said.

With sudden resolution, Tally turned her steps left, crossing behind the rustic sandstone of the stable’s east wall and thence around to the long, sloppy succession of sheds and huts that housed the kennels and the mews. At this time of the day the dog boy was in the rough brick kitchen, preparing the mulch of chopped mutton and grain the dogs were fed on those days when they weren’t hunting; the pack bounded happily to the low fence to greet her, swarming around her skirts, tails lashing furiously as she climbed over the stile and hopped down among them. Despite her fears, despite her dread, she had to laugh at the earnest joy in those furry unhuman faces, and clucked to them, calling them the love names that always made Marc roll up his eyes: “My rosy peaches, my angelmuffins, my little wuzzle-poufkins…” The big staghounds and mastiffs, the rangy wolf killers whose shoulders came up to her waist rolled ecstatically on the ground, long legs waving in the air, for her to scratch their bellies.

In time she made her way into the first of the half-dozen huts where the dogs slept, raised a little off the ground for ventilation, low-roofed and smelling of the old blankets on which they slept and the herbs hung from the rafters to freshen the air. Tucking up her skirts, Tally knelt in the sun-splintered shade at the back, surrounded by a sniffing congregation of interested wolfhounds, pulled aside the mass of blankets, and lifted the floorboard beneath.

Barely visible in the gloom below the floor, she could make out the shape of a large square bundle, wrapped in waxed leather; under the leather, she knew, for she was the one who had wrapped it and the four others like it hidden in other holes and corners of the kennel, was oiled silk, and then the spell-woven cloth they’d been swathed in when she’d first smuggled them out of her father’s strong room. All summer she had been waiting for a question from someone—her father, Shavus,
someone—
about where they were.

Now she knew the question wouldn’t come.

No one but her father knew where Jaldis’ books had been bestowed—her father, the wizards, and she.

I feared that the knowledge would be lost
, the Gray Lady had said. And, speaking of the wizards,
Without them it would become a contest of strongmen
.

And very calmly, she wondered where it would be best to hide her children, when she fled from Erralswan and made her way to the Ladies of the Moon.

THE ROOM WAS SMALL, SMALLER THAN THE ATTIC
cell in which Saltwood had spent last night and the long, nerve-racking day before, and empty save for the wooden chair in which he sat and the mirror on the wall. Its windows, like the ones of the cell, were boarded over, the boards not hastily nailed but screwed down with proper Teutonic thoroughness and the screwheads countersunk. Since the Storm Troopers who’d searched him—none too gently—had taken his watch, he could only estimate the passage of time, but in the locked attic room with its iron military cot he’d been fed three times, and by the raw cold—what? twelve hours ago? Anyway between meal #2 and meal #3—he’d assumed it was night. At least the bed had had blankets.

And that made today Monday, the twenty-second of September.

The day of von Rath’s “demonstration.”

Restless, he rose from the hard-backed chair and prowled the room again, as if he hadn’t done so immediately upon being locked in. It told him nothing he didn’t already know with dreary intimacy—that the room was ten feet by ten, that the bare walls had been papered once and later thickly painted in yellowish white, that the naked floorboards were stained and dirty and that at one point whoever had owned the house had possessed a small dog, imperfectly trained. A wire screen protected the mirror, clearly a one-way window.
Spying bastards
.

He’d been here nearly an hour already, to the best of his estimation, and wondered how long it would be before anyone came. Boredom and tension had long ago erased most of his fear of the Nazis, even some of his dread of von Rath, and he would have welcomed almost anything as an alternative to this hideous combination of inaction and surmise.

Yesterday, as von Rath had instructed, the magician Gall and a gray-haired female SS doctor with a face like the sole of a boot had come to his cell, backed up by four Storm Troopers. They’d ordered him to strip at gunpoint and conducted a physical examination in eerie silence, never asking him a question, never even giving him a verbal order after the first, as if he were a beast whose docility was assured. And with four automatics pointed at him, he reflected wryly, it sure as hell was. In the event it hadn’t been nearly as bad as being gone over by Franco’s boys.

The really unpleasant part of all this, he figured, was only a matter of time.

A sharp, whining buzz made his head jerk up, while his hackles prickled with loathing at the unmistakable quality of the sound.
Hornet!
There’d been nests of them in the tangled creek bottoms where cows habitually got themselves hung up, and over the years he’d been stung enough to give him a healthy loathing of all insects that flew with their feet hanging down.

Black and ill-tempered, it was banging against the ceiling over his head, wings roaring in a fashion reminiscent of the Heinkels over London.

They should be nesting in September, dammit
, he thought, and then,
How the hell did it get in here?
Then it buzzed him with a strafing run like a Messerschmitt’s and he backed away, ducking and swatting with his hand. There had to be a nest in the rafters above the ceiling panels, though how it had gotten into the room was a mystery.

The hornet, fully aroused now, dove at his face, and he swatted at it again, cursing the Nazis for taking away his belt, his cap, and anything that might be used to protect his hand. He crowded into a corner as the insect whirred up against the ceiling again, where it droned in furious, thwarted circles, banging against the plaster in its rage. Finally it lighted, crawling discontentedly around like a huge, obscene fly.

Saltwood didn’t budge. It buzzed and circled a time or two more, then lighted on the wall.

Cautiously Tom edged forward, flattening and stiffening the muscles of his hand. The hornet remained where it was. A quick glance around the room revealed no way it could have gotten in, no crack or chink, but the concern was academic at the moment. He moved out of his corner, more slowly, more carefully than he had stalked the guard he’d killed last night, more delicately than he had entered that poor wretch Sligo’s little cell. He needed all the experience he’d picked up in Spain and all the training Hillyard had beaten and cursed into him at the Commando base at Lochailort—if he missed now he was in for a hell of a stinging.

The insect heard him and was in flight when he struck it. It made a satisfying crunch and splat on the wall.

Great
, he thought, wiping his ichorous palm on his thigh.
You’re looking at torture by the Gestapo and what really scares you? Two inches of black bug
.

But at least he could fight back against the bug.

Slowly he walked around the room again.
Dammit, the bastard had to have gotten in somehow. If there was access to a crawlspace
… The thought of wriggling out through a crawl-space filled with hornets wasn’t particularly appealing, but neither was the alternative. And in any case he’d
been
over the place…

He stopped, staring up at the ceiling. How he’d missed it before he couldn’t imagine, but there it was—the faint, unmistakable outline of a trapdoor. It fit flush. Nailholes marked where a molding had been pulled off and painted over…
Painted over? So how had the hornet got into the room?

He couldn’t imagine, but didn’t particularly care. The ceiling was high, higher than he could reach even at nearly six feet with long arms. He cast a wary glance at the mirror—Who knew when they’d come into that side of it to watch him get the third degree?—and fetched the chair. It wouldn’t buy him much time, but anything would help.

With a roar like a thunderclap the chair burst into flames.

He flung it from him, flattening back against the wall in shock. The chair bounced against the opposite wall near the door, the fire spreading across the dry wood of the floor in greedy amber trails.
Diversion?
he thought, ripping off his clay-colored uniform shirt to wad over his mouth and nose against the smoke.
Maybe. It’ll weaken the door, if the smoke doesn’t get me first
. A firefighter in Tulsa had told him once that most victims of fire weren’t burned but smothered. The flames were spreading fast, but he pushed back his panic at being locked in with the blaze and crouched low to the floor where the air would be better. The fire was around the door, but it was eating its way across the planks toward him as well. In the midst of it the chair was beginning to fall apart, smoke streaks crawling up to blacken the walls. He shrank back as the fire’s heat seared his bare arms and chest. The blaze was all around the door—if he miscalculated his timing, flung himself at the door and it
didn’t
give, he’d burn.

Then, abruptly as it had begun, the fire began to sink. Before Saltwood’s startled eyes the flames ceased their advance, flickering down into fingerlets and then tiny tongues no bigger than two-penny nails that guttered out one by one. Within minutes, the only things left of the blaze were a huge patch of charred floor, the still-guttering chair, the suffocating heat, and the upside-down waterfall of smoke stains around the door.

What the HELL?!?

He crossed swiftly to the door, pulling his shirt hastily on without bothering to button it, and tried body-slamming the door. It didn’t give, though it was roasting-hot to the touch. He kicked it, hoping the wood had weakened. It hadn’t.

Puzzled, shaken, he turned back to stare at the flame still flickering over what was left of the chair. He’d seen a dozen fires in his year in the Tulsa oil fields, but
nothing
like that. Doubtfully he took a step toward it.

What happened then took him so completely by surprise that his mind barely registered the impossibility of it, only reacted in terror and shock.
SOMETHING
came at him, from out of where he couldn’t imagine—something round and small and bristling with dripping scales, something with huge jaws and tiny black hands like a monkey’s, something that whizzed through the air like a thrown baseball straight at his face.

With a yell of horror he struck at it, dodging back. It zigzagged crazily after him, chisel teeth snapping in a spray of sulfur-smelling slime. He retreated across the room, slapping at it in growing panic, his mind stalled with fear; his back hit the wall and the thing dove in under his block, the claws of its little hands ripping and digging in the flesh of his arm. He yelled again as it began to climb toward his shoulder, and smashed it against the wall. It bounced squishily and continued fighting its way up, its round mouth tearing tablespoon-size chunks of his flesh, its slobber and the ooze that dripped from its smashed head burning the ripped muscle like lye. He beat it again and again on the wall, shoulder numb from the impact, and still it came on. It was making for his face, his eyes…

In panic, he dove for the burning chair and shoved his arm, the thing still clinging greedily, into the center of the sinking blaze.

His shirt caught immediately, but the creature fell off, wriggling and twisting like a lizard with a broken back. Saltwood stripped off his shirt, flung it away to burn itself out in a corner, arm seared and blistered and throbbing with pain, flesh hanging in gory flaps and blood dripping from his fingers. Staggering, he fell back against the rear wall of the room, matching the creature’s death agonies in the fire until it was still. A stench like burning rubber filled the room, with the hideous smell of his own charred flesh.

The secret weapon
, he thought, gripping his burned arm tight against him, fighting the nauseating wash of shock and pain.
Damn Sligo, damn that crazy little bastard
… His breath came in ragged sobs, sweat burning his eyes, the agony in his arm making him dizzy. He had no idea how the Nazis would use this secret, these hideous things, but whatever he had experienced here, he wouldn’t wish on Hitler.

Well
, he thought,
maybe
…

And then he blinked. The pain in his arm was gone.

The burned patches on the floor were gone.

The chair was whole, lying on its side near the door where he’d thrown it.