Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (41 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Nor do I.” A skiff of wind moved the skirts of Rhion’s greatcoat like a dark wing. “And I don’t want to find out. Or what you’d do with it after that. I never wanted to come to your world, or to have anything to do with your
verkakte
war. In any case, my only way out of Germany—my only way out of your world—lies at the Dancing Stones near Schloss Torweg. That’s the only place the wizards in my world will know where to look for me, and tomorrow night, the night of the autumn equinox, is the only time when I’ll be able to raise enough power to reach out to them and make the crossing. And that’s where I’m going.”

“The hell you are,” Tom said, his voice now equally soft.

“Rhion,” Sara said quietly, “you did that at the summer solstice. Nothing happened. Except that you got caught.”

The Professor flinched at her words, averting his face; his pudgy hands tightened around the pale wood of the witch staff. “I don’t know why it didn’t work last time,” he said, keeping his voice level with audible effort. “Anything could have gone wrong. The political situation there was unstable when I left…” He shook his head, as if trying to clear some cloudy image there, some half-remembered dream. “But I do know it’s my only chance. My last chance. I have to believe they’ll try again, at least this once. I have to be there.”

Kindness, pity, and compassion deepened Sara’s voice. “And if it doesn’t work?”

There was a long silence, broken only by the distant hooting of an owl in the frost-thick silence of the starlight. Then Rhion whispered, “I can’t think about that.”

She moved toward him, hand outstretched, but he stepped back abruptly, dark against the starry darkness, the light catching in his glasses and the crystals of the ring. Looking at him, Saltwood had the curious impression that the night sky seen through the Spiracle was different. Perhaps it was only the way the crystals caught the light… but it seemed to him for a split second that half a galaxy of brightness, of tiny pinlights infinitely far away, seemed caught within that loop, an alternate firmament that had nothing to do with the one overhead.

“Tom,” the soft voice came from the compact silhouette, “if you could get Sara and her father to England I’d appreciate it. Von Rath planned to use the magic of the Spiracle to take out the RAF. Without it they’ve got no illusion, they’ve got no weather-witching—they’ve got no more than they had in June. By the time they can reformulate a plan—any plan—it’ll be winter. Tomorrow and the next few days are really their last chance this year. Just by escaping, just by taking this, I’ve put a hole in their plans, and von Rath knows it.”

“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t make another one, or use that Resonator thing.”

“If they made one they couldn’t charge it,” Rhion argued in the self-evident tone of a medium explaining why the lights have to be turned down before George Washington’s spirit will tip tables. “The Resonator’s useless away from the Spiracle. Believe me, once the Spiracle is gone there’ll be no way they can convert psychic energy to magic.”

“Not so fast.” Saltwood dropped his cigarette end and stepped clear of Sara, his automatic now in his hand, leveled at Sligo’s chest. “I don’t want to take you to England at gunpoint, Professor, but I’ll do it. We need you and we need that widget of yours, whatever the hell it really is and whatever it really does. And don’t think I won’t pull the trigger,” he added quietly, as Rhion made a move to step past him, “because I will.”

Behind him he heard the whisper of Sara’s indrawn breath, but, after all, she said nothing. She understood.

“Now, I was sent here to kill you. I’d rather take you back alive—I’d rather you
came
back with me willingly—but I’ll kill you rather than let you fall into Nazi hands again, which is exactly what you’ll do if you pull this dumb routine because you think the fairies are gonna come take you away if you stand in the right place. So sit down… Sara, there’s a couple pairs of handcuffs in the gear we took from Teglerstrasse. Get me one.”

Sara stepped toward the car.

Saltwood remembered her doing that. She was still standing a few feet from him, her hand on the car door, moments—
but how many moments?—
later, when he realized that Rhion Sligo was gone.

Stunned—more than stunned—he shook his head. He hadn’t—he COULDN’T have—fallen asleep on his feet.

He looked down at his hands. He still held the gun, but the map of the area he’d shoved into his pants pocket was gone.

Sara whispered, “
Mah nishtanna
,” and staggered. Saltwood sprang to steady her. She pushed him away in swift revulsion. “All right already, I’m fine…” In the reflected glare of the headlights she was white. “What the
hell
did he do? He was just standing there one second…”

In the long weeds of the road bank, Rhion’s track was starkly clear where he’d waded through the powder of glittering dew.

“He has the Spiracle,” Leibnitz’ voice said, deep and quiet, out of the darkness. “He can do pretty much whatever he can conjure up the strength within him to do—whatever he dares do.” In the starlight his white hair and beard glittered as if they, like the grass, were touched with frost, his eyes, pits of shadow under the long jut of brows. “I only hope—and you should hope, too, Captain Saltwood—that he makes it back to those stones okay, and that his friends really do pick him up at midnight tomorrow night.” His breath was steam as he spoke, his long hands, wrapped around his arms, colorless as a mummy’s against the gray cloth.

“Because if he doesn’t—if Paul von Rath gets his hands on that Spiracle again—I’m telling you now the Nazis invading England are going to be the least of everybody’s problems.”

“
Goddam
crazy little bastard.” Saltwood eased the car through the long weeds, overgrown branches of elder and hawthorn slapping wetly against the windscreen, wishing to hell he dared uncover the headlights enough to get a good view of the potholes of the farm track that led back to the main road. But the risk of being stopped was great enough without tampering with blackout regulations, and without Rhion and the Spiracle—whatever it really was—there was little chance a questioner wouldn’t notice the bulletholes in Saltwood’s uniform jacket, the pile of gear in the backseat, his lack of true resemblance to any of the various i.d. papers he carried, or the startling similarity of all the car’s passengers to the descriptions of fugitives undoubtedly being circulated by this time to every corner of the Third Reich.

In addition to the map it rapidly became clear that Rhion seemed to have taken a third of their money and food, and assorted ration books and identity papers, as well. Those last had been stowed in the car. Thinking about that made the hair creep on Saltwood’s scalp. How the hell long had he been standing there, gun pointing at nothing, unaware of anything taking place around him?

“Where the
hell
did they dig him out of?”

“I been trying to figure that out for months.” Sara pulled her knees up under a second field jacket she’d put over them like a blanket, and huddled tighter into the one over her shoulders. Her father, on her other side, still sat ramrod-straight and shivering in his shirts sleeves, his dark gaze turned worriedly out into the frost and blackness of the night.

“My
guess
,” she went on slowly, “is that who he thinks he is is based on some kind of distorted reality, though it’s hard to tell what that originally was. And he believes in it one hundred percent himself.”

Saltwood glanced curiously sidelong at her as the car emerged onto the Rathenow road. Instead of turning left, which would have taken them eventually to the Elbe and thence to the Hamburg autobahn, he turned right, eyes straining in the darkness for the crossroad where he’d turn off toward Brandenburg and then swing south of Berlin and head east.
Thank God the Germans can’t stand anything that isn’t neatly, labeled
. He recalled only too clearly trying to get around in London after its inhabitants—expecting an invasion any hour—had taken down every street and road sign in the city, not that London was ever over-supplied with such things.

“So he told you?”

She nodded and brushed back a tendril of the dark hair which framed her face. “Three, four days after they took us prisoner last June, that bodyguard of his, Horst Eisler, showed up at Kegenwald one night and drove me back to the Schloss. Rhion was still laid up—I don’t think he’d have told me some of the things he did if he hadn’t been doped up and hurting and scared. He…” She paused, and Saltwood felt, rather than saw, the change in the way she sat, the lessening of the reflex tension of her muscles as she forgot where she was, remembering only the darkened room, the pudgy hand desperately gripping her own.

Then she shrugged, rearranging the first thoughts to cut less close to her own heart. “He talked to me then about his woman and his kids back in Oz or wherever the hell he thinks he comes from. About his old master who was supposed to come here with him but died or disappeared on the way through this Void thing he talks about, and about how his parents wrote down in the family Bible that he’d died the day he told them he was going to be a wizard. The whole setup—he claims his woman’s father is a Duke or something—makes me think he might be a Hungarian or Austrian Jew from one of the old university towns, except that, when I met him, he claimed he didn’t even know what a Jew was. A Freudian would say that’s significant in itself.

“But you know,” she went on softly, “he didn’t have to do what he did. He didn’t
have
to give von Rath that Spiracle in the first place, or let them make him teach them how to use the device it’s a control to, if there is one. I mean, Papa and I had no claim on him. He’d only met me about three weeks before, only broke Papa out of the camp because of some magic ceremony he claimed he needed to work down in the cellars under Schloss Torweg.”

“Then he isn’t…” Tom began, with elaborate casualness, swinging the car to the right and heading down the two-lane strip of asphalt through the dark, tree-sprinkled fields that would eventually lead to the old Prussian capital. “You and he aren’t…”

He hadn’t thought so, watching them together—the physical stiffness, so at odds with the sensuality of her face, was noticeable with him, as well. But though the affection between them seemed casual, it clearly ran very deep. His impression was that she regarded the Professor as an uncle or an older brother… only not quite. And in the panic confusion of flight from Berlin, of the bombing and getting through the blockades and out into the open darkness of the countryside, there had been no time for unnecessary words, no way to tell for sure. He felt more relief than he’d have cared to admit when she laughed, startled and tickled, and said “RHION? Oh, Christ…”and laughed again.

Good
, he thought.

“But you know,” she added more quietly, switching to English with a quick glance at her father, who was deep in trying to calculate, with a pencil stub on the back of a ration book, some elaborate
kamea
regarding the superimposition of the number keys of all of their names over the Seal of Mars, “if I ever
do
get interested in a man again, it’ll be because…” Then she shied away from that train of thought, too. “Well… Rhion was the first man I’ve met in—oh, years—who wasn’t a bastard.” She spoke a little defensively, seeming to retreat in on herself again, and Tom felt a flash of anger at them, whoever they were: the man or men who had put that wariness in his dark-haired girl’s eyes.

She’d been a hostage, a prisoner of the SS—the way she watched him, the way she’d pulled away from the touch of his hand, the grim set to her mouth as she’d gotten back in the car, might, he had thought, have stemmed from that. But now he wasn’t so sure. Very carefully, he said, “Be that as it may—whatever happens, I promise you I’m not a bastard.”

Their eyes met, and held; then Tom flicked his gaze back to the dark road unwinding before them. The sinking glow of the fires in Berlin was to their left now and farther off in the darkness. Overhead, the gypsy moon did a fan dance with the clouds.

“Thank you,” Sara said softly, and after that was silent for some time.

It was a hundred and sixty miles to Kegenwald, eastward toward the Polish border. Beyond that, according to Sara, it was another fifteen or twenty to Schloss Torweg itself. “These stones he’s heading for are in a kind of overgrown meadow the other side of the hills from the Schloss—which is just an old hunting lodge from back in Bismarck’s time. There’s a farm track through the hills… Let me borrow the pencil, Papa.”

The old man sniffed and relinquished it. He’d outgrown the back of the ration book and was currently filling up both sides of an envelope he’d unearthed from beneath the seat with abstruse numerical calculations, magical squares, and jotted transliterations between Hebrew and Greek. “Those stones probably started life as an observatory of some kind,” he remarked, angling the envelope to what little moonlight filtered through the window. “They’re a hundred and fifty kilometers east of the easternmost examples of chambered barrows, let alone stone circle or alignments. I’ll have to write my friend Dr. Etheridge in Florida about this… We’ve been corresponding now fifteen years…”

“I don’t think there was anybody who published anything in an anthropology or linguistics or archaeology journal in the last thirty years Papa
didn’t
correspond with,” Sara explained. “Not that he ever got them before they were at least six and usually ten years out of date.”

“If it was real knowledge it never goes out of date.”

“Tell that to all those Newtonian physicists.”

“So Newton wasn’t wrong. Gravity still works,
nu
?”

“Here.” Sara held up the map she’d drawn—Tom risked a glance at it, then went back to concentrating on the road. “That noise better be the tappets knocking,” she added after a moment, cocking an ear at the dry rattle the engine had developed.

“Doesn’t sound like a valve,” Tom replied. “Though God knows how long this baby was driven after grease and oil got scarce… Thanks,” he added. “If it wasn’t for you coming with me, I’d have hell’s own time catching up with our Professor. It looks as if he could have picked up a train in any of three places that would get him to Kegenwald by tomorrow afternoon. At least I’ll know where to intercept him.”