Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (47 page)

The wizard went on, “We have just time to reach Witches Hill, if we drive fast. Gall is waiting there already, but, with our hostage guaranteed, now we should have no trouble. So the night will not be totally lost. But you…”He turned to Saltwood, and a spiteful vindictiveness crept into his voice. “By leading this escape you have cost me the power I could have raised through an equinox sacrifice. You have almost cost me what I could have gotten from a second sacrifice, the sacrifice of a wizard, for without his Jewish whore as hostage, he would not have let himself be taken alive. You will pay for that.”

Saltwood felt something twist inside of him, a sharp stab of pain in his entrails, like the appendicitis he’d had as a kid. He bit his lip, gasping, trying not to cry out, but the pain grew, turning his knees to water. For a moment the men who were holding him took his weight; then they dropped him to the icy and broken pavement of the road.

Christ
, he thought,
what is this?
all the while curling tighter over himself, tighter, retching as red claws ripped at him inside, like taking a bayonet in the gut, worse… He heard Sara cursing, was dimly aware of her fighting like a wildcat against the men who held her, men who were staring from him to von Rath’s cool face and back with growing uneasy horror. He tasted blood and bile in his mouth, blood trickling from his nose, and his teeth shut on a scream, fighting to keep himself from screaming
Stop it! STOP IT! PLEASE!!
and thinking
Bastard, I won’t give that to you
. Powder trails of pain and fire ignited along every nerve, burning up his flesh. It was all he could do not to scream, and he could feel that, too, coming…

Then the pain was over and he was lying on the wet gravel, weak and shaking and scared as he had never been scared before. Cloudily he was aware of a man swearing, “Bite me, you Jew bitch!” and von Rath’s voice, querulous and peremptory, commanding, “NO!”

Looking up, Tom saw one of the guards who’d been holding Sara shaking his bloodied hand, the other still gripping her, his fist frozen in middraw.

Von Rath shook his head, his brows pulling slightly together, the expression of a man puzzled by something he has done flickering, very briefly, to life in his inhuman eyes. His soft voice had a halting note. “We—we have no time for this.” He passed his hand across his eyes and then the expression was gone, but for a moment Tom had the impression the SS wizard had been too involved in his own display of power to remember even the necessity of capturing Sligo alive. As if, for the moment of the exercise of his power, he had forgotten, literally, everything.

Then he looked back at Saltwood, the inhuman calm returning to his eyes. “I must…” A last fragment of uncertainty flawed his voice, then was gone. “I must try this again with someone of equal strength.” His glance shifted to the guards. “Kill him.”

Saltwood felt the barrel of an automatic press the back of his neck and heard the trigger pull.

Only the silence after Sara’s scream “TOM!” made it possible to hear the flat click of the hammer coming down.

As if he didn’t quite believe that nothing had happened, the guard pulled the trigger twice more, the clicks very loud now in the growing silence that spread among the men gathered beneath the cold umbrella of phosphor light, and all heads turned, not to von Rath, but to the dark of the road beyond.

Beyond the range of the corpse-candle glow, feral starlight caught in the lenses of glasses, in the five crystals of the Spiracle at the head of a staff. Then darkness fell, blinding and total, and Saltwood whipped one leg behind him and jerked down the guard with the gun, smashing the man’s head on the pavement and ripping the dagger from his belt while noise erupted all around him, a chaos of shouts, curses, the crunch of boots, and the slap of bodies running head-foremost into the sides of trucks.

Then the darkness split, lightning tearing down in splattering flame as the bolts hit the road where Rhion had stood. In the white-purple glare, Tom saw Sara standing still a foot or so away and grabbed her wrist as darkness slammed down on them again, some instinct telling him to pull her away from the truck behind her. An instant later the vehicle burst into flames that illuminated a milling chaos of black- and gray-uniformed men surging all around them.

“Papa!” Sara yelled as the bushes on both sides of the road went up, and lunged for the second truck. For the first time Saltwood noticed that she, too, had acquired a dagger. At the same moment he almost tripped over the body of the Storm Trooper whom von Rath had stopped in the act of striking her. The beautiful Baldur met her in the dark arch of the truck’s canvas cover, his own dagger held point-down for the overhead stab favored by Hollywood directors—Saltwood hurled him easily aside into the path of another advancing Trooper. Sara was already dragging her stunned father from the back of the truck; Tom kicked another attacker in the groin, grabbed the old man’s arm, and, as the second truck burst into flames, bolted for the dark of the road cut where Rhion had last been seen.

Underfoot the potholed pavement heaved and split, hurling the three of them to their knees. Its center buckled upward, pulling apart to spew forth what seemed, for a hideous second in the holocaust of shadows, to be black things, shining, living, glittering, and crawling among a sticky ooze of glowing greenish slime. The next instant fire swept across it and the things were still—pebbles, Saltwood thought dimly, scrambling back into the shelter of a granite boulder that projected from the tall road bank—only pebbles and water after all, but burning, burning in impossible flame…

Lightning struck the bracken of the opposite bank, the dry brush roaring up in a screen of incandescent gold. A dark figure broke from it a second before it flared, darting across the lowering flames that still flickered on the pavement as if every crack and pothole were filled with gasoline. Another levin bolt cracked, tearing the road to pieces behind them, and then Rhion rolled into the shelter of the boulder, face streaming sweat as if he’d plunged it into a sink.

“They took that Resonator you made to the Schloss,” Saltwood gasped. “Whatever the hell it does…”

“He still thinks it’s a Flash Gordon deathray,” Leibnitz chipped in, as were-light exploded around them and Rhion flinched and gasped.

“Yeah, I figured that out.” He was holding himself upright on the staff, his face drawn with pain—Saltwood remembered as if from a nightmare the gut-rending agony von Rath had…
willed on him? But that was impossible
. Then Rhion drew a deep breath, and the pain seemed to ease. But in his blue eyes the haunted look of darkness remained, of grief and hopeless loss.

It was, Saltwood realized, only minutes short of midnight. Quite quietly, he said, “Sorry we made you miss your bus.”

“Not your fault.” Lightning flashed again, striking at the boulder behind which they crouched and seeming to shatter off it, splattering in all directions and running down the stone in lapis rivulets of fire.

“Gall’s waiting for you up there, you know—or at least he was. He’s probably hot-footing it back here as fast as he can to cut us off.”

Rhion nodded. Beneath the brown tangle of his beard his face was ashy and taut with pain, his breathing a ragged gasp.

“We couldn’t warn you…”

“This flat-footed, goyischer
shlemiel
stepped on the Tree of Life before I could tell you…”

“It’s all right. I’d hoped…” He gasped, averting his face for a moment, his whole body shuddering under the renewed onslaught of pain. Leibnitz reached quickly up, his bony, age-spotted hands folding over the smooth pudgy ones where they clung to the wood of the staff. For an instant Saltwood felt a burn of heat on his back, smelled scorching wool—then with a cry he saw spots of flame spring up on the back of Sara’s jacket. He struck them out, panicked and disoriented, feeling heat breathe on his face, his hair…

Then it was gone, and Rhion was straightening up again, shaking, as if his strength had gone with it. “I can’t…”he whispered. “He has the talismans… all their power, drawn into himself… Poincelles and the strength of the summer solstice. All the sacrifices they did…” He shook his head. In a small voice he added, “And he was stronger than me from the start.”

Slowly, between the surface of the rock and Sara’s shoulder, Leibnitz levered himself to his feet. “It will be midnight soon,” he said softly, and Rhion nodded. Under the scratched spectacles and the sweaty points of his hair his eyes were shut. Sara’s image sprang to Saltwood’s mind again, the mad Professor standing on his magic stones, arms outspread, waiting to be taken away by wizards and enchantments that never came.

Dimly, from down the road beyond them, the growl of truck motors could be heard. A moment later hooded headlights flashed into view, and standing up in the lead truck’s open cab Saltwood made out the long white mane and silvery beard of the wizard Gall, cutting them off from any hope of flight.

On their other side von Rath had stepped forth into the roadway. The blazes that still flickered, impossibly, on the riven asphalt sank; the ranks of Storm Troopers formed up behind him like a wing of darkness and steel. A nimbus of shadow seemed to surround the Nazi wizard himself, that queer, eldritch, spider-shot aura that Saltwood had once or twice thought he’d seen from the corner of his eye floating near the Spiracle. But this darkness was growing, spreading, lifting like a column of smoke around a core of lightless flame.

“Can you run for it?” Rhion asked quietly.

“Are you kidding? With Gall and his stooges behind us and von Rath able to zap us the minute we…”

Rhion shook his head, and for an instant, from the corner of his eye, Saltwood had the same strange sense he’d had before about the Spiracle—that the shadow-twin of the darkness which surrounded von Rath gathered there like a veil of impossibly fine black silk, shot through with invisible silver. Its crystals seemed to have caught the cold glitter of the stars, but no stars at all could be seen now, through the center of its iron ring. Saltwood wasn’t sure what it was that he
did
see there, in that terrible, shining abyss.

“No.” Rhion’s voice was barely audible, his eyes not on Saltwood, but on von Rath’s advancing form. “No. It will be all right. It was my fault—my doing… But it will be all right.”

His face like chalk, Rhion stepped from cover and walked to the center of the charred and rutted ruin of the road. Gall called out something and men sprang down from the truck and started to run forward, but something about that solitary brown figure made them hesitate and stumble to a halt.

In the silence of midnight, Rhion held up the staff in both his hands.

It seemed to Saltwood that the lightning came down from five separate points of the heavens—heavens deep and star-powdered and impossibly clear. They hit the head of the staff and for one second he thought the darkness—the veil—the whatever-it-was that had always seemed to hang there invisibly—was illuminated with a horrible electric limmerance that speared out in all directions along those silver spider strands.

Von Rath shouted “No!” in a voice of rage and disbelief and inhuman despair.

And the very air seemed to explode.

Von Rath screamed.

It was like twenty men screaming, a hundred—dunked into acid, eaten by rats, rolled in fire that wouldn’t die. The chain of amulets around his neck burst simultaneously into—not flame, but something else, something worse, something Saltwood had never seen before—something that sheathed the Nazi wizard in searing brightness even as it sank into his flesh, eating into him as fire streamed back out of every orifice of his body, as if he had been ignited by that lightning from within. The screaming seemed to go on for minutes but couldn’t have lasted for more than twenty seconds or so, while Rhion stood braced, the glare of the lightning that never ceased to pour like water down into the head of the staff blazing off his glasses, and von Rath screaming, screaming like the damned in their long plunge to hell.

Then silence, and the dying crackle of flame. The Spiracle at the head of the staff was gone, the staff itself burned down to within inches of Rhion’s hands. The troops on both sides stood back in frozen horror, staring at the crumbling, burning thing in the SS uniform slowly folding itself down to the blackened ground.

A voice shrieked
“Pauli, NO!”
There was the flat crack of an automatic, and Rhion twisted, his body buckling over, and fell without a cry.

Baldur Twisselpeck, short and
fat—And where the hell did he come from?—
stood in front of von Rath’s Mercedes, clothed in a straining SS uniform to which he couldn’t possibly have had any right and clutching an automatic, tears pouring down his pimply cheeks.

Ashen-faced, the men started to move forward in the sinking illumination that came from the fires along the roadbed and the two burning trucks, toward Rhion’s body and what was left of Paul von Rath. None of them seemed to notice Baldur, who had fallen to his knees, sobbing hysterically, clutching his gun to him and groaning “Paul… Paul…”

“Let’s go,” Saltwood breathed, turning to Sara—and found her gone.

The first spattering burst of machine-gun fire from the abandoned Mercedes cut Baldur nearly in half. The second sustained volley took out both Gall and the gas tank of the truck in which he stood, and as men scattered in all directions the Mercedes jumped forward, bounding like a stallion over the chewed-up pavement to screech to a stop a few feet from the boulder where Saltwood and Rebbe Leibnitz still crouched.

Sara yelled “Get in, goddammit!” from behind the wheel.

Saltwood heaved Leibnitz into the backseat, which contained all the guns Sara could collect, grabbed a Schmeisser, and sent raking bursts in both directions at the men who were already starting to run towards them. Bullets panged noisily off the fenders and hood, and Saltwood felt one of them sting the back of his calf as he bent down to haul Rhion’s body out of the way of the wheels.

How much of that HAD been real?
he wondered, looking down at the slack face, the broken glasses, the black bruise of the garrote across the throat. If they got out of this alive, there’d be time to mourn. But he was acutely aware that Rhion had done what he himself had refused, for expediency’s sake, to do: he’d come back for them, and to hell with what it cost.