Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (44 page)

But from what von Rath had said, a long association didn’t look at all likely.

“Don’t you understand?” The old man leaned forward, his brown-spotted hands curiously graceful in the bars of bitter light. “The Resonator that didn’t work two miles from the Spiracle back at that little
pishke
temple in Berlin has all the power, everything, they raised here all summer. It’s pulling the energies of the Void through it and feeding them back into one hell of a field, and in that field von Rath, and Gall, and that poor
doppess
Baldur can do as they please… What have you there, Saraleh?”

While he’d been speaking Sara had been testing the floorboards under the bed, and had found a loose one. But when she crawled out of the leaden bar of shadow Saltwood saw only a few bits of chalk in her hand and the glinting flash of a piece of broken mirror. She shook her head, her shoulders slumped under the baggy and bullet-holed black jacket she still wore. “Nothing, Papa. Just chalk.”

“Nothing is nothing,” Leibnitz said, and rose stiffly. Saltwood, his own bruises seizing up, hated to think how a sixty-five-year-old man’s brittle bones and unworked muscles were handling that kind of maltreatment.

He was sore enough to be sarcastic, however. “There’s a piece of wisdom for you.”

“Good,” Leibnitz approved, nodding. “Your
shaygets
does recognize wisdom when it comes up and bites his ankle. There’s hope for the
goyim
yet.” He took the odd collection of fragments from Sara’s hand and carried them back to the wan stripes of the window-light.

“Some kid’s collection, it looks like—”

“No,” her father corrected, stirring them with his fingers. It really was only a few pieces of odd trash. His breath made a smoke against the sharp chiaroscuro of the floodlights, for it was icy cold in the room. Outside, frost glimmered silver upon the ground, the guards’ tracks leaving a ragged streak of black along the perimeter fence. “This was the room where they kept Rhion after they caught him, wasn’t it? I think they were his things.”

While the old man muttered and poked at the bits of glass and chalk, Sara walked back to where Saltwood stood next to the rump-sprung plush easy chair that, with the bed and a broken-down dresser, was all the furniture that the room contained. Her arms were folded as if for protection across her breasts, her face drawn and waxy with strain and tiredness. It was close to dawn. Half hidden by that weirdly particolored hair, the bruise on her cheek from von Rath’s slap was darkening; by the way she walked, the wreck had left a couple of doozies on her shoulder and hip.

“Thank you,” she said softly, not looking up at Tom for a moment, speaking English so her father would not hear. “I—I didn’t know what to say. To von Rath, I mean. I didn’t want to tell them—I know what they’ll do to him—but…”

“Did your father really mean that?” he asked, still more softly, as if speaking English were not sufficient to exclude the old man from their conversation. “That he’d expect you to die—to let them torture you—before you’d let them get hold of that stupid magic wand Rhion’s so crazy over?”

She sighed, still hugging herself, a small, compact dark figure, save for those splendid white legs and that pointed little face. “Papa… Yes, he meant it. And he would die over those crazy magic games he plays. I used to think I was tough enough to die before I’d rat on a friend, on someone I cared as much about as I care about poor old Rhion. And I’d like to think I am that tough. But still…” She looked up at him through the tangles of her black hair, and there was a tiny gleam of self-deprecating humor in her eyes. “Does it sound as awful to you as it does to me to say I ‘m glad you told him?”

“Yep,” he said and, reaching out, gently took her hand, drawing her down into the chair with him. It was almost big enough for them both to sit comfortably—he felt her shy from the touch of his arm around her, his shoulder against hers. Then she relaxed, a wordless
Oh, what the hell
that went from her body to his like a sigh of relief; he’d been afraid she’d pull away, and lie the night in uncompromising loneliness and pain. After forty-eight hours of physical and mental strain, of which the last twenty-four had been without sleep, culminating in violent physical exertion, a drive halfway across Germany, and an automobile accident, he couldn’t get interested in much more, even if she’d let him.

But though he felt her uncertainty still, her hesitance and reflex caution, it was a start—the start of something he wanted more, and differently, than anything he could remember wanting since he’d gone back to Detroit from a year in the oil fields to discover his mother and sisters were gone, no one knew where.

Things took time. He sensed that time was what he would need with this woman, this girl. To gain her trust, her—
Go on, say it, Tom!—
love, he was willing to put in all the time he had.

Which was, at a rough guess, about twenty hours. But they drifted to sleep together in the armchair as if world enough and time lay before them like a warm English summer, back in the days before the sun-cross was anything more than a good-luck symbol superstitious women stitched into baby quilts.

In the hard electric glare of a corner of the Kegenwald train station, Rhion of Sligo, wizard, mad professor, exile from another universe, and fugitive-at-large, sat huddled in a black SS greatcoat with his staff propped at his side, staring down at the broken fragment of mirror in his hand. He couldn’t see clearly, for even the little effort involved in scrying tired him, and he was exhausted already from the thin cloak of look-over-there and who-me? that he’d held about him for the past eight hours—the spells that had let ticket sellers be distracted as they glanced not-quite-at the identity cards of men seven inches taller than he with blond hair, the spells that had caused pretty girls to walk past or minor fights to break out as the police or the SS came near him in train stations, and the spells that had given people the impression he was a smelly old derelict like Johann at the Woodsman’s Horn, a presence to be noted very briefly and then resolutely ignored.

But he was very tired now. He was freezing cold, for the night ticket seller and the single police guard on duty at the station were sitting next to the electric stove at the far end of the bare little room—men who had not seen him get off the train and would not see him leave. He was worn out physically with the sustained effort of magic-working in a world where the energy levels of air and earth were so low, despite the coming equinox, his body hurting for sleep that he knew would be far too dangerous a luxury. Food helped, though it was difficult to get the sweets he chiefly craved—he’d scored some black-market chocolate on the train but that hadn’t lasted long—and what passed for coffee in stations along the route didn’t have nearly the kick of the rations the SS got.

So his vision in the fragment of mirror was at first only shapes against darkness. He had, of course, used a shard of mirror to keep tabs on Sara and her father while they were at Kegenwald, to make sure von Rath didn’t move them elsewhere, or hurt them… though there was nothing he could have done if von Rath had.

Then the vision cleared a little, and he felt a pang go through him as he realized what he saw.

Sara and Saltwood.

Well, that was logical, he thought, seeing how dark the girl’s hair was, pressed to Saltwood’s shoulder, only flaming into its old crazy, frizzed red down at the level of her ears. There was the peace of friendship in the way they held one another—the way he’d never dared touch her, had always been too cautious to touch her, too careful of those old wounds, old hurts.

He ought simply to be glad she was on her way to healing.

And there was Tallisett.

The hurt inside him crushed tighter at the thought of her, the slowly growing knowledge that he would never see her or his sons again—the loneliness he had endured for six endless months in hell.

He realized that what he grudged was the easing of that loneliness. In his hornier moments he had considered going to bed with Sara, but only with part of his heart. What he had really wanted was to be held, to be loved, and to know he wasn’t so goddam alone.

He was very tired of being alone.

Or just very tired. He shook his head. It was nearly dawn outside. It was an all-day walk to Witches Hill if he was going to reach the standing stones well before midnight tonight, and he’d have to find food and, he hoped, someplace to rest between here and there.

The worst of it was wondering whether he was, in fact, insane. It had occurred to him before this, jostling in the crowded trains, shoulder to shoulder with old women, fretful children, and unshaven men nervous with the nervousness of the unemployed in a land where unemployment was a crime—it had occurred to him again and again in his months of captivity, when the only faces he had seen, the only voices he had heard, had been von Rath, Baldur, Gall, and the guards.

It was a very real possibility that he was a lunatic who had dreamed all the complexities of his former life—dreamed of Tally, and his children, and the calm peace of the Drowned Lands—while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Then Tom and Sara were right, and he was only imagining that he could see his friends in this fragment of glass he’d  picked up in a corner of the washroom in the Frankfurt-am-Oder station, and that he only believed he was in control of the actions of others when they did not pay attention to him.

It certainly made more sense than his own version of events.

Yet try as he would, he could conjure no picture of a former life, no rational explanation for his escape save cause and effect, no reason why von Rath and the SS would be so interested in the madness of one patently Jewish lunatic. But if he was mad, perhaps the pursuit was as illusory as the rest of it?

He shook his head, exhausted and eroded and cold to the marrow of his bones.

If he was mad, he was left with nothing—only this bleak train station, with its clean-painted white walls and its posters of noble Aryan manhood in uniform performing feats of heroism under the dingy electric glare.

If he was sane, he was left with only the standing stones and the hope that Shavus had somehow heard his cry three months ago—the hope that it had only been some unforseen hitch which had prevented the Archmage from gathering the requisite congregation of wizards to reach across the Void and bring him back, the hope that, in the precarious moments of the Universe’s balance at midnight of the equinox, he could somehow raise enough power to open a gate in the fabric of Being.

And beyond the standing stones there was nothing. Exile from Germany—exile from his own world forever—at the rosiest stretch of hysterical optimism. Or death. He’d been around the SS long enough—he knew von Rath well enough—to know that a bullet in the back of the neck was another exercise in rosy optimism.

He closed his eyes, not wanting to think about the endless walk from Kegenwald to Torweg, while the sun-tides gathered, and he waited for the night.

Twenty-four hours, he thought. In twenty-four hours it would all be over, one way or the other. He would be at the stones at midnight… It was his final chance.

Outside the church clock struck four. By the electric stove at the far end of the room the guard rustled a newspaper, and the station attendant asked whether it looked like there’d be war with Russia.

Rhion opened his eyes and looked again at the glass.

He realized where Tom and Sara were.

The dark bulk behind them was the bed where he himself had slept during most of three months. The white glow of the floodlights lay in cross-barred patches over the beaky dark shape of Rebbe Leibnitz’ forehead and nose. The chair where Saltwood and Sara curled together in a tight knot of trust was the one where he’d sat endless hours, peering at his broken piece of scrying glass alone.

They were at Schloss Torweg.

Rhion lowered his forehead to his hand and thought,
No. PLEASE, no
.

They must have come after him.

And they’d somehow stumbled into Nazi hands. Evidently von Rath hadn’t completely shut up the Schloss when they’d come to Berlin for the demonstration.

If they were there, the place would be guarded. He thought about what it would take, the strength it would need to work the requisite spells, the drain on the last thin reserve he was keeping to catch the momentum of the Universe, to fling across the Void in the hopes of reaching the farthest extent of Shavus’ power…

He couldn’t do it.

His power was exhausted.

In any case he doubted he could do it before midnight. And if he wasn’t at the stones at midnight…

Sitting slumped on the bench, shivering in his long black coat, Rhion cursed for several minutes in German, in Polish, in Yiddish, and in his own rich, half-forgotten tongue. Then he got to his feet, stiff and aching and leaning on his crystal-headed staff, and wondered where in Kegenwald it would be possible to buy black-market chocolate.

IT WAS AFTERNOON WHEN SALTWOOD WOKE UP
, feeling worse than he’d felt since his teenage bar-fighting days in Tulsa. There were other similarities to those days, too, besides the general sensation of having gone to sleep wadded up in the bottom of a clothes hamper after having been thoroughly beaten with a chair: the gluey stickiness in his mouth, the feeling that his eyeballs had been deep-fried, and the sleeping presence in his arms of a woman whose existence he hadn’t even suspected forty-eight hours ago.

The differences were that he was starving hungry instead of nauseated by the mere mention of food, that he felt awe and admiration as well as tenderness for the woman curled up against his chest, and that her father was sitting on the floor six feet away, rocking back and forth whispering Hebrew magic to himself.

It was the day of the autumn equinox. The twenty-third of September. Tomorrow—unless by some miracle Rhion Sligo could avoid capture—the invasion of England was going to start, spearheaded by Paul von Rath and whatever infernal device was controlled by the iron Spiracle. That the device in some fashion caused the most believable hallucinations this side of the soft room was beyond question. Whether it could or couldn’t affect the weather or blow things up at a distance was undecided, but that first effect would be enough to give the Luftwaffe the edge they needed over the RAF. Hell, he thought, they might be able to use it to fox that secret early-warning system the Brits were said to be using—who knew?