Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (6 page)

They’ll never make it
, Tom thought, leaning back against the dark wainscot walls and letting his eyes slip closed. Hillyard had gone to get them drinks—the soft murmur of voices washed over him, men’s and women’s both. It was a neighborhood pub, a family pub… It was good beyond anything to be among normal people, decent people, not in the terror and sweat and dirt of battle, the horrible inferno of waiting under shellfire, maybe to have your life saved and maybe not…

The rocking of the old
Codrington
that had taken him off the beach returned to him, seemingly woven into his bones. Like the rhythmic jostle of the freight cars he’d ridden, he thought, that came back to a man even when he was lying on a stable bed again. The memory of the smell of tornado weather, the dense, waiting stillness, the livid color of the sky, waiting and watching for spouts.

Funny, he hadn’t thought about that since he was fourteen, the summer the ranch had finally gone bust and the bank foreclosed on them, sold their hard-held herd and plowed the whole concern under for a wheat farm. That was the first time he’d ridden the rails, down to Oklahoma, looking for work in the oil fields.

His head jerked; he realized he’d been slipping over into sleep. He saw Hillyard still by the bar, bending forward to catch the radio announcer’s voice. He tried to remember the last time he’d been this warm, this comfortable—tried to remember the last time he hadn’t been expecting to get blown away by the Germans in the next ten seconds…

His eyes slid closed again. The smells of tobacco and beer wreathed his thoughts, the gentle patter of voices like falling rain.

“…expecting an announcement by the King of Belgium…
Abukir
destroyed…
Shikari
and
Scimitar
at Dover… special trains to take the men to rest camps…”

“…must use his influence, now more than ever,” a woman’s soft voice murmured at the next table. He’d noticed the two women there when he’d sat down, one delicate little white-haired finch of a lady, like a duchess in plain clothes, the other a striking redhead with eyes the color of the sherry in her glass. Like everyone else in the pub, they had gas masks with them, incongruous on the floor beside their worn leather handbags and as little regarded. The redhead’s voice was low and desperate as she went on, “I saw it in the crystal. I felt his coming on the night of the equinox… I felt it the first time he used the power of the leys. If he isn’t found, if he isn’t stopped…”

“He will be, darling,” the old lady’s comforting tones came, motherly and gentle through the drowsy fog of dreaming that padded Saltwood’s mind like a goose-down quilt. What they were saying made no sense, but it was good to just listen to women’s voices, after all those weeks of men, of gunfire, and of the overhead shriek of planes.

“Trust my husband to do his part, as we do ours. We have raised the power to keep the skies clear for the planes… later we can call down the clouds over the Channel… Alec!” she added in surprise, and Tom opened his eyes—or thought he opened his eyes, though he could very well have been dreaming, he thought—surely it was a dream that Mayfair had come into the pub, gas mask tucked under his arm, and was stooping, hesitant with arthritis, to kiss the little duchess on the lips.

“It is all being taken care of,” Mayfair said, and the red-haired woman sighed, her slim shoulders bowing suddenly, as if with exhausted relief. He added, “As the Americans say, God willing and the creek don’t rise…”

“No beer for you, Sergeant.”

Tom jerked awake, to see Hillyard standing at his elbow, a glass in either hand.

“I refuse to carry you all the way to Torrington Place.”

Saltwood blinked and rubbed his eyes. The table beside his was empty.

“Sorry for the delay.” Hillyard settled himself into the chair next to Tom and gave himself the lie by pushing a pint of Bass across to him. “They say they’ve got somewhere near seventeen thousand men landed at Dover and more coming over all the time… nearly all the army’s within the perimeter of Dunkirk. And the German armored divisions have definitely turned south, toward Paris. That leaves the Luftwaffe to contend with, but we may get a little breathing space… it’s my guess, in fact, that with Intelligence in a frenzy, there’ll be quite a delay in your setting out on your travels. It takes time to assemble papers, arrange transport, get photographs and maps, especially if one is doing it on the sneak.”

“Look,” Tom said curiously, as a few cautious sips of the nut-flavored ale cleared his head a little. “Just who
is
Mayfair? What department is he in? I mean, how did he find out about Sligo in the first place, if he’s not in Intelligence?”

“I didn’t ask.” Hillyard smiled. “Not that he’d have told me if I had. He’s in Finance—an auditor. Rumors do get around, especially the weird ones—perhaps he heard it from his wife.”

“His wife?”
Alec
, the little Duchess in his dream—if it had been a dream—had exclaimed. In her simple tweed skirt and strand of pearls under the neat home-knitted green cardigan the old lady had certainly been no Mata Hari. “Is she in Intelligence? ”

Hillyard chuckled. “Intelligence? No—it’s just that for years there’s been a rumor going about that she’s a witch.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “
Wunderbar. ”

“WELL, TOTO,” RHION SIGHED, MISQUOTING TO AN
imaginary canine companion a line from the American cinema he had watched—with a certain amount of bemusement—last week, “I’d say just offhand that we are definitely not in Kansas anymore.” Over the din in the tavern the Woodsman’s Horn nobody heard, which was probably just as well.

There was a piano in the corner, a relic of the tavern’s more respectable days before the SS had been garrisoned at the Kegenwald labor camp. From Tally, Rhion had acquired an interest in all sorts of musical instruments, but the chief virtues of pianos seemed to be that they were capable of far more volume than any similar instrument in his own world, and that it was much easier to play them badly. Both attributes were being lavishly demonstrated at the moment by the Storm Trooper at the keyboard, and a dozen or so Troopers around him were bawling out the words to a filthy cabaret song about Jewish girls at the top of their collective lungs. The air was blue and acrid with tobacco smoke, and Rhion, sitting in a dark corner at a table with Auguste Poincelles, pushed up his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and hoped to hell this trip would be worth the headache he was going to take back with him to the Schloss.

“Ten ships, ten of them!” a weedy, middle-aged merchant at the bar was whooping triumphantly to the impassive counterman. “Our boys are blasting the damned English out of the water! We’ll be in London by this time next week!”

So much
, Rhion thought wearily,
for our enemies attacking us at any moment
. He wondered that he could possibly have been naïve enough to have believed von Rath’s version of the progress of the war, no matter how it had started. But he had not mentioned the discrepancy to von Rath.

Beside him, Poincelles raised one dirty, pointed fingernail to the nearest barmaid. The girl slithered like a weasel from among a pawing crowd of uniformed admirers and came across the room to them, splendid haunches switching under the thin blue cotton of her dress. It was Poincelles who had proposed tonight’s expedition, to discuss matters that could not easily be mentioned in the presence of Baldur, Gall, and von Rath, Rhion guessed.

He couldn’t possibly have come here for the beer.

“A whiskey, Sara, if there is such a thing in this place.” Poincelles glanced inquiringly at Rhion. “Professor?”

Rhion gestured with his three-quarters-full steel mug, smiled, and shook his head. The barmaid Sara regarded him with eyes black and bright as anthracite coal in a pointed, triangular face, skin pale to translucence save for the garish redness of her painted mouth.

“So this is your famous professor?” She sized him up with a professional eye and shifted the tray she held so that her breasts bulged like white silk pillows beneath the half-unbuttoned bodice of her dress. “Glad you’ve finally come out of seclusion in that monastery they’re running out there. We’ve heard tell about you. Go on, have another beer, Professor. Old Pauli’s good for it.”

“Later.” Rhion smiled gallantly. “That way I get to watch you walk across the room again.”

She laughed, tossed her frizzed red head, and returned to the bar to fetch Poincelles’ whiskey, deliberately undulating her hips to the noisy approbation of the group around the piano.

“Nice little piece, that,” Poincelles remarked. He produced a cigar from his pocket and a lighter—a small gold box containing flint, steel, and a highly combustible liquid fuel, as good as a fire-spell, Rhion thought, at least within arm’s length and while the fuel lasted. Rhion coughed in the ensuing cloud of smoke and resigned himself to being ill for the rest of the night. “The girls here are the only decent thing about the place. That beer has no more relationship to hops than the petrol in the car does. At least the whiskey’s more or less pure.”

“Pure what?” Rhion demanded, coughing. Poincelles laughed, as at a witticism, and handed another cigar back over his shoulder to Horst, their SS driver-cum-bodyguard. The young man accepted it gratefully and strolled off to join the group around the piano. The other two barmaids were there already, one a honey-fair girl who reminded Rhion heart-stoppingly of Tally, the other a little black-haired minx who had only moments ago emerged from the back room with an elderly man in the gold-belted brown uniform of a local Nazi Party leader. The piano thumped tunelessly, the stout barman paused in his steady dispensing of beer to sell condoms to a couple of Storm Troopers, someone turned up the radio to better hear the latest bulletins from the war in the West, and someone else shouted, “Hey, you know what they’re going to get Hitler for his birthday? Frontier posts mounted on wheels!” The noise was deafening, the smoke nauseating as a gas. Rhion sighed, closed his eyes, and wished with everything that was in him that he could simply go home.

May was fading into June. Even at this hour, light lingered in the sky, soft as the color of pigeons’ eggs, and the air outside was thick with the smell of apple blossoms from the nearby farms. Now and then the wind stirred, carrying the scent of pinewoods, whose dark wall enclosed the village, as it enclosed the Schloss, the undulating sandy hills, and, it sometimes seemed to Rhion, the entire world in a whispering monotony of somber green. In the Drowned Lands, the streams would still be high, and broad lakes would hold like quicksilver the shining echo of the light.

He felt a hand touch his wrist, warm and very strong; opening his eyes in the choke of cigar smoke, he saw that Poincelles had leaned near him, vulpine face as close to his as a lover’s.

He whispered, “I can help you get home.”

Rhion had been expecting those words, waiting for them—waiting for them, in fact, for several weeks. And he had almost been certain that it would be Poincelles to say them. Still he felt the jolt of adrenaline in his veins, and the pounding of his heart nearly stifled him.

And the words having been said, he must, he knew, go very carefully now. He kept his face impassive, but his fingers were shaking as he moved his arm away from Poincelles’ grip and turned his beer mug a judicious ninety degrees on the grimed and splintery table. Though he neither liked nor trusted the Frenchman, he needed the help of another wizard and needed it desperately.

“You never have trusted them, have you?” the French occultist went on in his deep, beautiful voice. “Captain von Rath, and Baldur, and Gall.”

“Well,” Rhion admitted, “I must admit I was a little put off when I found out about the enemies of the Reich who were used for the drug experiments.”

Poincelles blinked, for one second actually looking surprised that this was what had bothered him. Then he quickly molded his features into an expression of disgust and anger. “Oh—oh, yes!” He waved his cigar, trailing a ribbon of blue smoke. “I was horrified, as well, completely shocked—a ghastly business. I was furious when I heard, for of course I wasn’t told about any of it until it was too late.” He smiled slyly and added, “They don’t exactly trust me, these Nazis.”

“Now, how could anyone distrust a man of such obvious virtue and probity?” Rhion made his blue eyes wide behind his glasses, and Poincelles grinned like a wolf with his stained teeth.

“Clever.” He smiled, and pinched Rhion’s cheek. “I like a clever boy.” He cast a quick glance across the room at Horst, presently conversing crotch to crotch with the blond barmaid. Like most Storm Troopers, Horst didn’t impress Rhion as being terribly bright, but it didn’t pay to take chances. Lowering his voice, Poincelles went on, “They don’t trust me, but they needed my help in the rituals that went into the making of the Dark Well. They needed my power. I know von Rath has told you that, with the offensive on, none of us can be risked just now to create a Dark Well so that you can locate your home again—if he intends to send you home at all, ever. Myself, I doubt it.”

He laid his hand again on Rhion’s wrist, the cigar smoldering between two fingers, and his dark eyes gleamed beneath the shelved hollows of his brows. “My memory for matters of ritual is excellent. I can help you create another Dark Well.”

Rhion looked away, understanding now the nature of the proposition—understanding that with those words, Poincelles had in fact announced that he had no intention of helping him get home. Disappointment settled like a swallow of cold mercury in his chest as he realized the man was not to be trusted, not to be turned to for help.

He said nothing.

“For a price,” Poincelles went on.

Over by the bar there were fresh howls of laughter. A Waffen SS lieutenant in the gray uniform of the Kegenwald labor camp was pitching pfennigs for an old derelict, a whiskery drunk who made his living selling papers and picking up trash, to crawl for. As the old man groped on hands and knees for the coins, the other Troopers would kick them farther and farther out of his reach, like children tormenting a crippled dog. Horst whooped “Here’s a drink for free!” and poured his whiskey over the old man’s head; old Johann sat up, grinning with a terrible combination of terror and fogged pleasure, with hope that this would be the worst that would happen, and lapped at the liquid running down his hair.