Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (46 page)

Sara, a denizen of the streets, first of Warsaw, then of New York, looked askance at the berries he gathered from the hedges and stared at him in disbelief when he offered her a handful of rosehips. “You sure they’re not poison?”

At the far end of the pasture he cut a milk cow out of a small herd—“This was easier when I had a horse”—and improvised a pail from a tin can found in a ditch and washed out in one of the ponds that dotted the countryside. “For somebody who looks like a big dumb farmboy you know a lot.”

“For a Yankees fan,” he replied with a grin, “you’re not too bad yourself.”

She stock out her tongue at him and handed the improvised cup on to her father. It was good to be in the open air again. Purely aside from the swarms of SS goons, lunatics, and self-proclaimed wizards that had thronged it, there was something Tom had definitely not liked about that house. The rough country of sandy pine hills and isolated farmsteads through which they traveled, swinging wide to avoid the roads whenever they could, slowed them down but kept them out of sight of whatever authorities might be around; it also impressed on Saltwood the impossibility of intercepting Rhion before the Professor walked into von Rath’s trap.

“Poor little bastard,” he remarked, keeping a weather eye down the farm track beside whose weed-grown ditch they had paused to rest. The sun was touching the tips of the pine-cloaked hills to the west, gilding the throw-pillow clouds heaped around it and covering all the eastward lands in a pall of cold blue shadow. “I wish there was something we could do for him. I wouldn’t leave a dog to the SS, but he’s the one who ducked out on us.”

And if it wasn’t for him and his stubbornness about returning to those damn stones we wouldn’t even BE in this mess.

As if she read his mind Sara sighed and shook her head. She’d grown quieter during the day’s long hike, exhaustion and hunger slowing her down more than she’d counted on, though up until an hour or so ago, she’d still frothed every time Saltwood had insisted they take a rest. “I felt terrible, you know, watching him standing there on that stupid stone with his hands upraised, waiting. Like watching—I don’t know. Some poor
goyische
kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Claus.” Sitting on a felled and rotting fence post, she pitched a pebble across the narrow road into the thickets of brown sedge and fireweed. She glanced up at Tom. “You ever have Santa not show up, cowboy?”

He shook his head, remembering paper chains and popcorn strings, and the line of shabby stockings pinned to the wall near the belly-stove—Tom-John-Kathy-Helen-Shanna-Ma’n’Pa. He still rattled off the family names as they all had, as a single word, and smiled a little at the memory. He’d spent a year searching for Ma and the girls, and still wondered what had become of them, and if there was something else he should have done.

“Nope. Sometimes he didn’t bring a whole lot, but he always showed.” He glanced at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour,” he said quietly. “We’ve got to stick closer to the roads if we’re not going to get lost.”

“They’ll know we’re gone now.” She pulled the scuffed jacket closer around her and rubbed her hands. The evening was cold already and, from the feel of the air, by morning there would be hard frost. “They’ll be hunting.”

“They’ll be sore as wet cats,” Tom said, “but as bad as they want Sligo and that patented whizzbang of his, most of their men will be up at Witches Hill. There’s just too much territory for them to cover to find us.” He held a hand down and helped Sara and her father, who had sat silent, numbed with exhaustion, to their feet. If they didn’t get a vehicle soon, the old man wouldn’t be able to go on, and Saltwood didn’t like to think about what might happen in that event. Sara might realize the impossibility of risking England’s defeat to go back for Rhion, but she’d never leave her father. And in that case…

He pushed the thought of that decision away.
First things first
. He shrugged his shoulders deeper into his scarred and bullet-holed jacket and revised his estimate of times again to allow for a slower pace.

It was an hour after full dark, and icily cold, when they saw the first of the lights.

A bluish ghost-flicker of ball lightning shown far to their right in the trees; catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye, Tom halted in his tracks; but when he scanned the rustling darkness, it was gone. “What is it?” Sara asked quickly, looking up at him in the gloom, and her father, taking advantage of the halt, leaned against a pine trunk, his hand pressed, as it had been more and more frequently, to his chest.

Saltwood shivered, wondering just what kind of powers the Resonator—whatever it did—gave to von Rath, and at how great a distance. “
Nada
,” he breathed. “Let’s get moving.”

The second light flickered a hundred yards ahead of them ten minutes later, and this time they saw it clearly. Over head-high—ten, twelve feet above the tips of the bracken and weeds—it bathed the delicate fans of dry foliage around it with cold dim light for a few seconds, then vanished as inexplicably as it had come. Distantly, Saltwood thought he heard a truck pass on the road that their course had paralleled since dark. It was hardly unusual for a rural district on a clear autumn evening, but something inside him prickled a warning. “Move back into the woods.”

The third light flickered into being closer still and to their left a few minutes later and, after a short time, appeared again, near enough to shine on their upturned faces. It was small, the size of a child’s hand, a round blue-white bubble like the glow around some innermost seed of brightness. The chilly light reminded Saltwood of something… candlelit darkness…the phosphor reflection in upturned glasses… They pressed on, both of them supporting Leibnitz now, deeper into the blackness between the trees. Increasing cold made their breath steam and stung the inside of his nostrils. The old man, who still adamantly refused to wear any part of the SS uniform, had begun to shiver.

Then that glowworm brightness glimmered into being directly over their heads, and somewhere not too far behind them he heard the muffled confusion of men’s voices.

“Christ, they’re trackers!”

“Can you kill it?” Saltwood whispered, turning to Leibnitz and not even thinking about what that question implied. “Or send it someplace else?”

“I…I think…” The old scholar frowned, his high forehead corrugating into thick lines of concentration as he held onto the younger man’s broad shoulder. Above their heads the light faded, wavered a little where it hung, then slowly began to drift away.

Mental powers
, Saltwood decided.
A brain-wave amplification device and to hell with your ethylene and platinum, Saraleh
. Unless it was sheer coincidence… He tightened his grip around the old man’s rib cage and headed up the rising ground. Glancing back, he saw the light bobble uncertainly and go out.

“I—Rhion said…” The old man spoke with difficulty, his eyes shut, still concentrating hard. “He said a wizard… cannot scry the presence of another wizard… The Resonator field…”

They were right at the feet of a line of low moraine hills, nearly invisible above them in a vast looming bulk of pine trees, and the countryside here was littered with granite boulders half buried in weeds and sedge. Saltwood left father and daughter in the dark blot of one such outcrop’s shadow and moved softly back toward the oncoming swish of boots in bracken, flexing his hands. In the shadows of the trees it was almost impossible to see, save where the starlight caught on silver and on the blued gleam of a rifle barrel. A nervous guttural voice whispered something about “
die Hexenlichte
…”

Tom rose out of the bracken almost under the Trooper’s feet. It was very fast—grab, strangle, twist, and then the man’s body was inking down into the deep pocket of brown fern, and Tom was moving off, dagger, sidearm, rifle in his hands. He supposed he should have stopped to strip the coat, but it would have occupied dangerous seconds—the man’s companions weren’t fifty feet away among the pitchy shadows of the trees—and Leibnitz would have put up a fight about wearing it anyway.

The old man was shuddering, his eyes pressed shut, his breathing the rasp of a saw, when Saltwood reached their hiding place again. Without looking up Leibnitz whispered, “I can’t… He is stronger than I. I feel his will pressing on me…his strength… The talismans he has made… Ach, that strength…”

Dimly, blue lights began to flicker and weave among the black pine needles overhead.

Saltwood handed Sara the rifle and dragged Leibnitz to his feet. “Move!”

Behind them someone yelled.

Lights were bobbing everywhere now, the yellow lances of flashlight beams springing on, zagging wildly among the trees. Tiny balls of witchlight, purplish flecks of St. Elmo’s Fire, swirled like fireflies overhead, and against him Saltwood could feel Leibnitz sobbing for breath as they ran. The lights broke and scattered, but it was like trying to elude a swarm of softly shining hornets—they reformed, drifted, darting here and there in a numinous cloud. Had Sara been Saltwood’s only companion he would have told her to head in another direction to split the pursuit, but he knew she was as exhausted as he and unable to manage her father’s unwieldy bulk alone.

Leave her
. He could just hear Hillyard saying it.
It’s your duty to warn England, your duty not to be taken, no matter what the cost
…

Stick my bloody duty
. He shoved aside the image of the RAF Spitfires crashing on the Sussex beaches in flames. Rhion had said,
I didn’t risk what’s going to happen to me to work for the people who were dropping those bombs
…

The words echoed in his mind.
What the hell’s the point of defeating the Nazis if you become one inside?
“There anyplace to go?” he gasped, as they thrashed their way up the high ground, dodging trees and flashlights, stumbling over rocks half buried in the pine mast and ferns. “Cover, anything?”

“Not with those frigging lights overhead there’s not!” In the blue glow, the sweat made points of her dark hair around that pale triangular face, moisture gleaming on her cheeks in spite of the cold that turned their breath to steam.

Creepers, wild ivy and morning glory, snagged at their feet, branches slashed their faces as they stumbled on. Leibnitz gasped “…strength is growing… talismans… all those deaths… He can use it… equinox… midnight…”

Midnight
! It must be close to that. Rhion would walk slap into the ring of SS troopers on Witches Hill… von Rath would head for Ostend in the morning with the Spiracle to take part in the invasion… The British wouldn’t get so much as a warning as to what was coming up the beaches, out of the skies… until their pilots bailed out because of imaginary cockpit fires or imaginary monsters chewing on the wings. The lights poured around them in a bluish cloud. Stumbling under Leibnitz’ weight, Saltwood couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t been shot yet.

The ground fell out from under them so abruptly it was only Saltwood’s hair-trigger reflexes that kept them from going over. He felt the gravelly clay crumble under his boots before he actually saw anything but darkness ahead, and flung himself back, catching Sara and her father. Beyond the last overhanging thickets of dead and dying undergrowth the road lay at the bottom of a twelve-foot bank where it cut through the saddle of land between the hills. Blue light flooded them as they skidded to a halt on its brink, searchlight-bright, only it blazed from over their heads: the glow of witchfire, of magelight… of magic.

There were two covered trucks and an open Mercedes down on the road below, with half a dozen Storm Troopers grouped around them. Baldur—the godlike golden SS Baldur, not the podgy, bespectacled Baldur Twisselpeck from Berlin—was at the wheel of the car, and as the guards leveled their submachine guns on the fugitives, Paul von Rath stood up in the backseat, Lucifer ascendant in fire and shadow and rage.

“BRING THEM DOWN.”

Saltwood had already heard the men come up behind him, crowding out of the shadows of the trees. With a bitter oath Sara turned, bringing up her rifle, but the range was already too close. A Trooper tore it out of her hand and shoved her backward over the edge of the bank. Saltwood, hampered by Leibnitz’ full weight, was only starting to turn when three rifle barrels thrust into his back and then he was falling, too, rolling down a slide of desiccated ivy and fern in a tangle of arms and legs.

He landed hard in a cold puddle of water, started to rise, and was struck over the back of the head by somebody’s gun butt, driving him to his hands and knees. Gun and dagger were ripped from his belt before he recovered enough to think about committing suicide by putting up a fight.

“Put the Jew in the truck,” went on that calm, soft voice, shaking now with an inner core of blinding rage. “Bind him, gag him, blindfold him. Baldur, remain with him, since he seems to be able to twist the powers we have released to his own corrupt and dirty spells.”

Raising his head, Tom could see the golden youth and three or four Storm Troopers cross to where Leibnitz lay facedown in the wet yellow leaves of the roadside ditch. They picked the old man up, a broken scarecrow with his patched gray clothing and emaciated limbs. Only when they were halfway to one of the covered trucks did Leibnitz show by the feeble, disoriented movements of returning consciousness that he was still alive. Baldur struck him.

“You goddam Nazi coward!”
Sara flung herself toward them but was caught, easily, by two Storm Troopers—Saltwood lunged to his feet more to protect her than to go after Baldur, and the men behind him had been waiting for that. The struggle wasn’t long.

“Bind the whore and put her in the other truck,” von Rath said calmly, still standing in the backseat of the open Mercedes, Satan in uniform, the thick chain of talismans lying like a hellish emblem of office over shoulders and breast. Those that had been made of jewels seemed to burn in the shadowless blue magelight that flickered all around him, and even those wrought of bone and skin and twisted hair pulsed in that strange radiance, with something that might have been a kind of light but was more probably, Saltwood thought distractedly, a reflection sparked from the jewels, or the silver on his uniform, or something… some rational explanation… In some odd way those dead and mounted mementos of past sacrifices seemed more living than von Rath’s eyes.