Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (37 page)

“There’s got to be a tool kit in this thing,” he said, twisting his body to grope with his free hand behind the seat. “I want you to hunt for a hacksaw, get me out of this damn handcuff.”

“Later!” Rhion said urgently. “After we get across the bridge!”

“Yeah? You’re not the one who’s gonna be handcuffed to four thousand pounds of internal combustion engine if that bridge takes a hit when we’re in the middle of it.”

“It won’t,” Rhion insisted, fixing Tom with a desperate blue stare. “Believe me, it won’t! We have to get across now—it could be destroyed while we’re trying to get the cuffs off…”

“So we just backtrack to the Turm Strasse and go around. Christ knows the streets are clear.” Another blast, very close this time, and both men ducked involuntarily as brick and glass spattered on the side of the cab like a shotgun blast.

“No! Please believe me, I know what I’m talking about, we’ve got to get across it, put as much distance between ourselves and that house as soon as possible.”

Through the clearing dust, Saltwood saw that the bridge still stood. Would it ten minutes from now, always supposing they could
find
the goddam hacksaw and the blade didn’t break?

He let out the clutch. “If we go down I’m taking you with me, pal.”

He hit the bridge at fifty and accelerating. Concrete abutments flashed past, a glimpse of fires roaring up out of oil spilled on roiled brown water and of metal snags and cables floating like water weeds. Once clear of the buildings, he saw how many bombers were overhead—the whole sky was crossed with the smoke of rising fires. Like a bird laying eggs on the wing, he saw a Wellington directly above them drop its load, black teardrop shapes drifting leisurely down.

Though Tom would have taken oath the bombs were dead on target, the nearest hit the water thirty yards away. The blast nearly swept the truck off the bridge—he felt the tooth-jarring clatter of the speeding vehicle’s door bouncing on the railings and veered, blinded, into the tidal wave of brown water hurled up by the blast. He cut in the windscreen wipers and through a grimy blur glimpsed—impossibly—the concrete span still arrowing before them, and hit the gas as hard as he could. At the same time he screamed, “You crazy Jew!”

A second stick of bombs took out the bridge as the truck slewed onto See Strasse and away through the burning town.

“Right,” Tom whispered, braking to a halt. They had passed the big intersection of Muller Chausse and the main force of the bombing lay behind them now, though the streets were still empty as if in a city of the dead. “Now you dig out that tool kit and cut me the hell out of this!”

“How far have we come?” Rhion asked, not moving, though he cast a panicked glance at the streets behind them.

“Six or seven miles, and what the hell difference—”

“More than you think.” He fumblingly unfixed the Spiracle from the head of the staff—it was held on with a wrapped iron wire—his hands shaking so he could barely manage it, and shoved the iron circlet into his shirt pocket before he’d set the staff aside and get out of the cab. Bombs were still falling as close as a half mile away in the cramped, sprawling labyrinths of the nineteenth-century factory districts around the canals, and, though Rhion flinched at the sound, he moved swiftly, decisively, as he came around the cab and dug behind the seat for the gray-painted tin box. “I don’t know how far the Talismanic Resonator’s field extends, for one thing. For another, von Rath’s bound to search the house…”

“How the hell did you get out of your cell anyway?” Saltwood looked up from pawing, one-handed, through the tool kit. “I thought they locked you in.”

“They did.” Rhion grinned shakily. “But you left the key in the lock when you—ah—”

“Uh—yeah,” Tom finished. In brief silence they regarded one another. There was a shiny patch of red scar tissue on the inside of the bridge of Rhion’s nose, close to his left eye—circular, almost half an inch across, the size of the end of a cigarette. The burn was only a few months old; Saltwood could see another one in the pit of Rhion’s throat through the open collar of his shirt.
They hurt him pretty bad
, Sara had said. The bruise of the garrote was still purple-red and angry under the clipped line of his beard.

“Look,” Rhion said awkwardly, starting to saw inexpertly at the handcuff chain. “I’m sorry I knocked you out. I didn’t know… I hope they didn’t…”

“Nah. They needed me in one piece to blow me up. Here, be careful—there’s no replacement blade in that kit. You ever used one of these things before? Put your strength in the pull, and keep it straight…”

“I could have used the power of the Resonator itself to open the lock,” Rhion went on matter-of-factly, bending over his work, “but even that little—comparatively little—might not have left me enough power of my own to put on the lightshow that blinded von Rath and his guards long enough to let me grab the Spiracle itself, and Baldur or Gall might have sensed something. Frankly, I don’t know whether they could or not. So the keys helped. Surprise was the only edge I had… I was hoping you’d figure out what was going on and pick me up, since I’m not sure I could drive one of these things and I had to get enough distance between the Spiracle and the Resonator to break up the field before von Rath figured out what I’d done.”

“Uh-huh,” Tom said soothingly, as Rhion glanced behind him again—Tom had seen him look in the truck’s side and rear-view mirrors a dozen times on the hellish dash along See Strasse. Not surprisingly, of course. Bombs were still falling to the south and west of them, close enough for the ground to shudder under the nearer blasts. It was typical of the way things were done, Saltwood thought dourly, that it would be these sprawling slums, where two and three families shared windowless and crowded flats, to get the pulping, and the millionaires’ houses over in the Grunewald to go untouched. In that way it was London all over again.

“The problem is,” Rhion went on, “I don’t know how far the field extends, or how far away I have to be to be safe.”

“Huh?” said Tom. “What field?”

The Professor raised his head again; behind the rimless glasses, his blue eyes were filled with a growing fear. “Magic field.”

Oh, Christ, Sara warned me
. “Well,” Tom said, “I think we’re probably pretty safe.”

“The hell we are.” For a moment their eyes met, and there was something in the older man’s that made Saltwood pause. When he spoke again his voice was low and deadly earnest. “I had to set up a Talismanic Resonator in the temple in that house, it was the only place where there was any kind of stored power at all. It drew on the Void energies coming through the Spiracle. At the level of power available in the temple, you’ll get a field if they’re within, oh, maybe a mile, two miles of each other…”

Oh, Hillyard’s gonna love this
. That the crazy little coot had something there, Tom didn’t doubt—enough to startle and blind von Rath and his minions sufficiently for Rhion to seize the control mechanism concealed in the Spiracle, at any rate. And it was abundantly clear to him by the Professor’s taut voice and desperate eyes that he wholeheartedly believed everything he said.

“But they’re not,” he pointed out, latching onto the one element of Professor Sligo’s discourse he felt he could answer intelligently. “We’ve got to be five, six miles from the house by this time.” The chain was cut almost through. Saltwood took the hacksaw from Rhion, who had begun to shiver with shock and reaction, and worked and twisted at the half-sawn link with a screwdriver from the kit until the chain broke with a loud snap. “Besides, even if von Rath has got some kind of transport by this time, the raid’s still going on, and the bridge is out.” And by the sound of it, he thought uneasily, the second wave of Wellies was on the way.

“We can’t risk it.” Rhion hurried around the other side of the cab again and scrambled in as the boom of explosions resumed over the long, shuddering siren wails. “Don’t you understand? If von Rath gets within two miles of us—of the Spiracle…” He touched his pocket, where the thing’s lumpy outline stood out against the cloth. “… or if he manages to find some kind of power source to increase the potential of the Talismanic Resonator—he’s going to be able to use magic.”

WHEW
, SALTWOOD THOUGHT, AS HE DROPPED THE
truck into gear again and jerked into motion,
for a minute there he had me worried
.

In the empty streets—the panic-stricken populace not yet having acquired the casual attitude the Madrilenos had eventually achieved about bombing not in their immediate neighborhood—and away from the danger of any but stray drops, Saltwood was able to make good speed. They left the sea of crowded gray monoliths of the working-class districts gradually behind them, the heavy developments giving place first to two-story shops and shabby, semidetached houses, then to trees, free-standing
Biergartens
, petty-bourgeoisie villas, and open fields. Here an occasional car passed them, driving fast without headlights in the slow-gathering twilight; an occasional family could be seen, crowding near a garden wall, staring southwestward toward the burning center of Berlin with horrified eyes.
Get used to it
, Tom thought savagely, remembering the motionless red-blanketed lumps carried away by the Air Raid Wardens from collapsed piles of London tenements, the overcrowded school buildings filled with homeless people and the stench of fear and excrement, and the middle-aged men and women picking through the piles of smoking brick for something salvageable from the only homes they’d ever known.
It’s going to be bad
, Hillyard had said, back in the pub before this had ever started, little knowing how bad it would get.
Here’s a little greeting from your brothers and sisters in London
.

It was clear the guards of 723 Teglerstrasse weren’t going to be crouched conveniently in the cellar.

“When they bring me here they hoot one long, two short,” Rhion said quietly, as the dented and mud-covered truck pulled up before the iron-sheeted gate. He’d replaced the Spiracle on von Rath’s magic staff and was again clutching it like a child hanging on to a favorite toy.

“Be ready,” Saltwood muttered, hooting out the code. He slipped the truck into first again and prepared himself for a frenzy of strong arm. “With luck they won’t see that half those dents are bullet holes till it’s too late.”

Only one Storm Trooper opened the gate. He stepped back to let the truck pull in, then stepped casually close, his Schmeisser dangling at his back.

Saltwood slammed the door open into the man’s face, threw himself out before the guard had regained either his balance or his wits, pulled the Schmeisser from him with one hand, and slugged him hard and clean across the chin with the other. The Storm Trooper staggered and Saltwood shot him with a fast burst of shells, ripped the sidearm from the bloody corpse’s holster as Rhion was springing down from the cab on the other side. He grabbed the Professor’s arm and the two of them pelted up the gravel drive at a weaving run.

Bullets spattered from the open door. Saltwood returned fire and the guard there fell out forward, sprawling at the top of the steps with blood trickling down the worn marble in the dove-gray evening light. Without letting go of his staff, Rhion bent and pulled the man’s weapons free: automatic, submachine gun, and the silver-mounted dagger of the SS. “Search him,” Saltwood yelled, ducking into the door and covering the downstairs hall. “Get his identity papers, any money you can…”

A head appeared around a door and Saltwood fired at it with the automatic, ducked back at a returning shot and flung himself down with a long, low roll to catch the guard as he leaned around the door for a second try. Weaving from side to side, Rhion darted into the shadows of the hall and stopped to relieve Saltwood’s newest victim of his weapons, as well.

“You ever fired one of those things?”

The Professor shook his head as he followed Saltwood up the stairs at a run.

“Stand guard here. Tuck it into your arm like this, arm
tight
to the body, pull the trigger—it’ll fire a burst as long as you hold the trigger down. Aim
low
. The kick’ll pull the gun up. And put down that goddam stick.”

Rhion’s hand tightened stubbornly around the smooth wood as Tom yanked on it, his eyes suddenly blazing. There was no time to argue so Tom let the matter drop, muttering, “Crazy bastard…” to himself as he dashed up the attic stairs to the room where he himself had been kept.

The doors up there were bolted, not locked with keys. He slammed the bolts back and threw the door open; only a residual burst of caution, like a sixth sense, stopped him on the threshold when he saw the room empty. The next second a chair swooshed down hard enough to have broken his shoulder—Sara had been hiding next to the door.

“Christ almighty…”

She saw who it was—she already had the chair coming up for another swipe—and her pointed pale face burst into a smile that stopped Saltwood dead in his tracks, as if he’d seen a striking snake unfurl butterfly wings. “Tom!” And, a second later, the child-nymph turned lynx again. “There’s five, six guards in the house… I heard shooting…”

On the other side of a narrow hall was another locked door. Throwing it open, he saw a mirror image of the room where he’d been kept two nights and a day—like a cheap hotel with cot, chair, a few books and magazines, and a copy of
Mein Kampf
instead of a Gideon Society Bible. For a moment he saw no one. Then Sara yelled “Papa!” and a tall, gangly, bearded old man emerged from crouching behind the door of the tiny washroom.

“So is this the cavalry or the Indians?” he demanded in German with a thick Yiddish accent, cocking one wise dark eye at Saltwood.

“Cavalry,” Sara said briefly, already helping herself to the spare pistol and SS dagger Saltwood had stuck through his belt. “There’s a shed out back, I didn’t hear them take out the staff car today.”

A shot rang out somewhere below as they were racing down the attic stairs. Rhion was flattened behind the corner at the top of the next flight, the Schmeisser in one hand and his magic wand tucked awkwardly under his arm. Keeping his grip on the staff, he stepped quickly around the corner and let fly a burst from the submachine gun that knocked him staggering and ripped holes in every direction in the wall panels and ceiling before the gun juddered itself completely out of his hands.