Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (42 page)

Sara didn’t answer, and he felt her silence, as surely as he felt the vibration of the road through the tires and the engine’s choking clink. Her father had gone back to making sigils and demon keys on the back of the envelope.

Hesitantly Saltwood asked, “You do understand that’s my first duty, don’t you? To find him. To bring him back with me, if I can, but… to make sure the Nazis don’t get him or his device again, one way or the other.”

She sighed deeply, as if giving up something she knew she never could have. “I understand. It’s what you came here to do—I know that. But I think after midnight tomorrow he’ll come. He’ll have no place else to go. You think I’m riding along just to act as your guide?”

“I hoped it was because you’d fallen desperately in love with me,” he said, and she flashed him a wicked grin. “But I still think we should have found a hiding place to leave your father.”

“If you think I’m going to let my daughter go hotzenplotzing around the countryside with some Amerikanischer shaygets, you have another think coming,” Leibnitz said resignedly. “And besides, according to these calculations…”

“By the way,” Tom asked Sara, anxious to avert another spate of numerological abracadabra, “have you ever heard Rhion speak anything other than German?”

“N-no,” said Sara. “That is…” She hesitated, and a glance sideways in the muted lights of a passing military convoy showed him a look of bafflement, as if she had suddenly been faced with a memory that did not fit. He eyebrowed for amplification, but after a moment she shook her head, dismissing something for which she could find no words. “No.”

They met no opposition as they drove on eastward in the cold Prussian pines. All the roadblocks, Saltwood guessed, had been set with the assumption that they’d take the westward road:
To England, home, and glory
, as Hillyard would have said. Obviously no one was counting on the fact that their mad Professor was even madder than they’d thought.

They stopped at eleven in Custrin, the little town sunk in darkness and sleep. While Sara “laid chick,” as they said on the East Side, watching out for the local bulls, Saltwood broke the lock on the gas pump in front of the general store, filled the Packard’s tank and the jerry cans, then raided the store itself for several quarts of oil and as much bread, cheese, mineral water, and bottled beer as he could cram into his pockets. He left the late Corporal Deitmarr’s money in a pile on the counter and, as an afterthought, helped himself to a cheap cloth laborer’s cap, which he presented to Rebbe Leibnitz on his return to the car. There was nothing resembling a blanket or jacket in the ranks of tinned food, cheap galoshes, and clothespins, or he would have taken that, too, but the old man greeted the gift of the cap with startled joy, and with thanks and a murmured benediction immediately put it on.

There were, of course, a number of SS uniform caps in the back of the car—Saltwood had needed one, as well as a tie and a belt and various odds and ends to complete his disguise—but he’d guessed the old Jew would rather go bareheaded and disrespectful in the eyes of the Lord than wear one, and no wonder. “I didn’t think you cowboys knew about things like that,” Sara said softly in English as they pulled away from the darkened store and once more into the sandy pine barrens.

“What’s not to know?” Tom shrugged. “Half the agitators in the union were Jewish. We had this Trotskyite Chassidic rabbi who used to come in to play chess with me and argue politics with old Stegler every Saturday as soon as it got dark enough so you couldn’t tell a black thread from a white one. He told me that a man of your people would no more walk around without his head covered than he’d walk around without pants.” And, seeing how she still looked at him, half unbelieving, like men he’d seen when a woman turned out to know what a manifold was, he added with a grin, “You been hanging around with Nazis too long.”

She smiled back slowly. “I guess I have.”

“Chas vesholem.”

Even asleep—if the restless doze in which he drifted could be so termed—Saltwood heard the shock in the old man’s voice and felt him startle through the worn leather of the Packard’s lumpy seats. He came awake at once. Dark pines still flashed past the car’s windows, as they had when he’d given the wheel to Sara and tried to get some rest. The rattle in the engine was worse—
Just what we need. A ring job in the middle of Germany
. The windows were fogged with the outer cold, save for long smears on the front where Sara had wiped them with her sleeve. It was too dark to see his watch—or, more accurately, the late Corporal Deitmarr’s watch.

“What’s up?”

Leibnitz shook his head. He, too, had clearly been asleep, blinking and startled, like a man waked by an evil dream. “I don’t know.” He lifted his cap enough to smooth his rumpled hair and replaced it, looking around him, disoriented, shaken. “Something—some feel in the air. Can’t you feel?”

Saltwood shook his head but said softly, “Pull over, Sara, and cut the lights.”

She obeyed. They all had for too much respect for instinct to quibble over the delay. Without asking she got out, and Tom behind her. For a moment they stood listening, the air like bitter steel on their faces, their breath a steam of diamonds in the moonlight filtering down through the black pine branches above. The weeds on the banks above the road were stiff with frost like a white salt rime that would show the smallest track. On such a night noise would carry. But Saltwood heard nothing: no rustle of bracken in the woods all around, no crunch of tires on the ill-tended asphalt. He checked his watch by the moonlight—quarter past two.

Uneasily he got back into the car, taking the wheel once more. Irritated as he had once been by the hooded headlights that kept their speed down in the flat stretches, now they made him feel safer.

“Where are we?” he asked quietly.

“About twenty miles from Kegenwald.”

“We pass anyone?”

“Not since that motorcyclist an hour ago… What’s that?” He felt the jerk of her body as she slewed around in the seat. At the same moment light flicked in the corner of his vision and, a second later, gleamed in his rearview mirror. Leibnitz and Sara were both pressed to the side window, their breath misting it again, peering tensely into the dark. “Cut the lights,” Sara ordered hoarsely, and Tom obeyed. With the strength of the moonlight there wasn’t much difference, except where the pines overgrew the road in pockets of inky shadow. “There,” she breathed. “See?”

Blue lights were moving among the pines along the side of the road. Saltwood felt the hair lift on his neck.

They were not lanterns. They were moving too fast, for one thing; for another, some of them floated far too high for a man to be holding. By the eerie glow in the bracken, others were rolling along the ground, though the undergrowth, stiff and brittle with frost, did not rustle, only shone with that skeletal light. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, weaving in and out among the trees, but they were definitely following the course of the car.

Saltwood turned on the headlamps and pressed the accelerator, thankful that these Prussian roads ran straight and flat as a Kansas highway and to hell with the ruts and potholes and teeth-rattling jolts of the chewed and broken paving. Whatever was happening, he wanted no part of it.

In the rearview mirror he saw the lights swirl down the bank onto the road, then pour after the car like bubbles on a river. He pressed the pedal harder, and the lights followed in a bobbing swarm; Saltwood thought they were growing brighter. The car bucked and pitched over the broken road, and he veered, trying to avoid the worst of it. But his eyes kept returning to the mirrors as he sped faster and faster, fear growing within him at what he saw—or thought he saw—or almost saw—behind the lights. Something dark and large, something that ran silent, vibrationless, with a faint glint of metal. Something that moved with level and deadly speed.

He pushed the car for more jolting speed, Sara and her father clinging to the interior straps for all they were worth, knowing to the marrow of his bones that whatever was back there, its black shiny smoothness catching the blue gleams of the lights, he must not let it overtake them. Peripherally he was aware of other lights, a bluish glow powdering the frost-stiff bracken and thin blue discharges like tiny lightning sparking down the trunks of the pines. The granite faces of the old glacial boulders by the road glittered as if laced with diamonds. He barely saw them, his eyes glued now to the mirror.

Why did he have the impression that whatever moved behind those blue lights, metallic, shining, mechanical though it seemed, was alive? More speed, the Packard’s old motor clanking hideously…

“TOM!”

His eyes flashed back in time to take in a blurred impression of the road’s sudden curve, the black masses of boulders looming directly ahead. He hit clutch and brake, the heavy car fish-tailing wildly—they should have plowed straight into those boulders but somehow didn’t, and he felt the wheels leave the ground.

The car rolled at least once—Tom wasn’t sure—and struck something with a glancing blow before it came to a rocking halt on its side. Sara twisted on top of him, her flat-heeled shoes digging into his thigh as she wrenched her door open like a hatch. Tom remembered the three five-gallon cans of gas in the trunk and was halfway out of the door after Sara before it occurred to him to wonder if the pain in his legs was because one of them might have been broken. Together they dragged open the rear door, in crammed black panic during which his mind registered nothing but the seconds ticking by until the car would go up like a bomb, and dragged the stunned Leibnitz out of the tangled welter of guns, groceries, and papers in the back. Dragging the old man between them, they ran.

The Packard blew up in a fireball of red light, Tom and Sara falling flat with Leibnitz between them, while fragments of metal and stray bullets from all the spare clips exploded like shrapnel and hissed on the frosted ground. Frozen pine needles jabbed Saltwood’s stubbled cheeks like splintered glass as he buried his face in his arms.
Maybe it’ll think we died in the crash
.

It?

The blackness moving behind the blue lights, implacable and deadly and… real?

As real as the flying demon head that had ripped his arm?

He sat up slowly, his legs stabbing with pain. Now that the fluid in his veins was turning from adrenaline back to blood again, the pain was starting, in his legs, in his back, in his thigh where Sara had stepped on him getting out of the car, and in a dozen other places where he’d hit the framis in the crash or where flying clips of ammo or miscellaneous junk had hit him…

Sara, too, was sitting up, shuddering with cold and shock, pine needles sticking in her hair.

The blue lights were gone. Beyond the glare of the burning car, which lay on its side with its front end twisted where it had struck a tree, the road ran straight as an arrow out of sight in both directions under pine-shrouded blackness. Tom could see the black tire lines where he’d hit the brakes and the swerve and jag marking the skid where he’d tried to turn to avoid rocks that weren’t there.

Around them in the dark, boots crunched shrilly on the frost.

Tom scrambled to his knees, gun in hand, as metal glinted in the dark of the trees all around.
Dozens of them, Jesus
…

The flames on the car leaped suddenly higher, outlining a single shape before him, thick ivory hair and the face of a scarred angel.

With a dozen guns leveled on him, Saltwood pulled the trigger. The gun clicked harmlessly.

Automatics
did
jam, of course.

“Throw it down.” Von Rath’s voice was still that same soft level, as calm as if he had known all along that it would misfire. They might have been back at the house in the Jungfern Heide—Jesus, had it just been that morning?—getting ready for another “psychological test.” Yet there was a difference. The cold angel face almost glowed, coruscating with a kaleidoscope of emotion—fever, hate, and triumph like the crack of lightning that could burst planets asunder; in the red reflection of the flames, the amulets of bone and jewel seemed to bleed glowing blood.

More Storm Troopers materialized from the woods, fire glinting on the muzzles of their guns. To fight would be hopeless, suicidal… Tom wondered how they’d known where the car would go off the road.

“Throw it down,” von Rath repeated. “I’m going to give you a demonstration and you might not wish to lose your hand just yet.”

“Throw it down already!” Leibnitz breathed, using his daughter’s shoulder to haul himself painfully to his feet.

Though it went violently against the grain to do so, Saltwood obeyed, tossing the weapon onto the frozen pine straw between them and standing up carefully, keeping his hands raised and in view. Von Rath looked down at the gun for a moment and moved his fingers.

With a rending bark, the clip blew up.

Von Rath smiled, and one fine, slender hand came up to stroke the talisman’s that rattled and whispered around his neck. “So,” he said softly. “I was correct in my guess. Rhion Sligo has come east, bringing the Spiracle with him. The invasion will not have to be postponed after all. I should hate to disappoint Reichsmarshall Goering, after all of this.” The cold gray eyes, no more human now than a snake’s, passed over Tom and touched Sara briefly, then came to rest upon her father.

“Very good,” he murmured. Two men came up behind him, the bearded wizard Gall and a tall fair Storm Trooper of unbelievable beauty whom Saltwood had the dim impression he’d seen before, but knew he never had. “Just in time for the sacrifice of power, to raise the forces of the equinox to help the invasion of England. There will be, of course, another sacrifice later…” His lips stretched a little, as if part of him still remembered about smiling without remembering why, and he spoke to the beautiful youth who came crowding close to his side. “And that, my Baldur, though a little late for the equinox, will, I’m sure, give us no less of a yield of talismanic power—and no less gratification in the making of it. Take them away.”