Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (48 page)

Then he saw Rhion’s eyelids flinch. One of those chubby hands tried to close around his wrist, then loosened again, but by that time Saltwood was hauling him into the backseat of the Mercedes, heedless of the rifle bullets whining like angry flies around him. “Drive like hell!” he yelled as Sara hit the gas. “He’s still with us!”

“How bad?” she yelled back, as Storm Troopers scattered before the big car’s radiator like leaves in a gutter. The burning truck with Gall’s half-roasted body still hanging out of it flashed past; a last bullet sang off the fender and Sara swore. Then there was darkness, and the remote white light of the cold half-moon.

There was an entry wound between the two middle ribs; the exit wound, gaping and messy with splintered bone, was just under the shoulder blade, and hissed faintly with every gasping breath. Behind the rimless glasses Rhion’s eyes were open now, staring with a curious, terrible bitterness into the midnight sky. “Bad.”

With a small sigh that broke off sharply in a wince of pain Rhion turned his head, beard and eyebrows standing out blackly with shock in the moonlight. “Can you get me to the Stones?” His voice sounded normal but very quiet.

“Oh, for Chrissake!” Sara groaned, exasperated. “We’ve got enough of a head start to make it to Danzig.”

“Please.”

“It’s too goddam late! You said midnight, and midnight is over! Do we need to keep on with this?”

“Saraleh,” Leibnitz said gently, “the reason it’s too late is because he came back to help us.”

The fires had vanished into the darkness behind them. On the other side of the hills another glare of orange flame and rising smoke marked where Schloss Torweg would be, and Saltwood was so numbed, so exhausted, so shaken that he didn’t bother trying to think up a reasonable explanation for that.

The big car rocked and jolted over the sorry road, and, beyond the spiky black of the pines, the wheel of the stars moved calmly past its point of balance, down the long road to the next solstice at the dead heart of winter, three months away. The cinnamon tips of her hair flicking back under the fingers of the night wind, Sara continued to expostulate, “We’re gonna get frigging caught! This is our chance, our last chance… There’ll be search parties all over the goddam countryside…”

Rhion, teeth shut hard now, said nothing, but Saltwood said, “Get us there, Sara, okay?” and felt Rhion’s hand tighten on his own.

“He’s not gonna make it,” Sara said softly, “is he?”

Around them, the countryside was deeply silent. They had found the Stones deserted, though ringed with plentiful evidence of Gall’s earlier ambuscade—cigarette butts, tramplings in the wet grass, and an occasional puddle of urine behind a tree. That no one had been there since they’d departed shortly before midnight was obvious; dew had formed already on the grass, and would hold the slightest mark. In the deepening cold it was already turning to frost.

Saltwood looked back at the form lying on the fallen stone in the cold starlight, which picked out in chilly relief the lenses of his glasses, the silver swastikas and buttons of the SS greatcoat they’d put over him. “Not the way we’d have to be traveling.”

Like a bent, gray stork in the wavery shadows, Rebbe Leibnitz sat on the edge of the stone at Rhion’s side, sketching the arcane circles of the Sephiroth and writing all the Angelic Names he knew in the last crumbling fragments of the chalk he’d had in his pockets. The Hebrew letters formed a pale shroud of spiderweb, draped over the ancient stone of sacrifice and trailing away into shadow. In its center Rhion lay without moving, his breathing agonizing to hear.

Hesitantly Sara said, “The Nazis would probably patch him up if they found him. With von Rath gone they’re going to need him…”

“No!” Rhion half raised himself from where he lay on the stone, then sank back with a gasp, his hand pressed to the makeshift bandages on his side. As they strode back to him Saltwood could see the track of blood glittering in his beard, and the dark seep dripping through his fingers. “Don’t let them…” Then his eyes met Saltwood’s, and he managed a faint grin. “Oh, hell, it’s your job not to let them, isn’t it?”

“ ’Fraid so,” His voice was gentle.

Rhion coughed, fighting hard not to. When he was twelve, Saltwood remembered, he’d been chousing cows out of the edges of the badlands twenty miles from the ranch when his horse Mickey had broken a leg. He’d known that to leave the animal alive would be to condemn it to being brought down and torn to pieces by coyotes. The hurt had lasted in him till he’d left the ranch completely… and enough of it remained even now to make him remember as he unholstered his gun.

Glancing up, he could see the echo of his thoughts in Sara’s eyes. It was after three in the morning of the first day of the long slide of autumn to winter. It would be a cold drive to Danzig.

Hesitantly Sara said, “We—we don’t need to travel that fast. I mean, with von Rath dead and the Spiracle gone, that puts the kibosh on whatever secret plan they had for the invasion of England. As Rhion said, even a week’s delay to figure out something else is going to put them into winter. We could keep ahead of them…”

“It wouldn’t do us any good,” Saltwood said gently. “He needs a doctor, and he needs care; long before we could get him either of those, he’d be dead in a lot of pain and we’d have put ourselves in a concentration camp for nothing.”

He looked back at the stone, where Leibnitz, draped like a Roman patriarch in the carriage rug that had been in the back of the Mercedes, was inscribing the pyramids of power over the numerological squares of the planets, scribbling the Names of the 1,746 Angels in charge of the Cosmos and all its myriad doings. Saltwood still wasn’t entirely certain what had gone on back there on the road. Whatever the device had been—radio-controlled explosives or clairvoyant hallucinogens or whatever—Rhion had somehow caused it to backfire on itself badly, that was clear. That he’d done so under the impression that he was destroying his only means of returning to his fantasy home lent a quixotic heroism to the little madman that dragged on some corner of Tom’s heart he thought he’d left in a Spanish prison.

And Rhion had saved their lives—and bought England and the world time—at the cost of his own.

Sara walked back to the altar stone, her Schmeisser tucked under one arm. Her breath was a ghostly cloud in the moonlight as she said, “Papa, you should be back in the car.” The open vehicle wouldn’t be much warmer, but Leibnitz was clearly at the end of his strength. “You can’t do anything further here.”

Saltwood half expected the old man to protest, but he didn’t. He stepped back, holding the blanket around his skinny shoulders with one hand.

“No,” the old scholar said softly, and the moonlight glimmered on the steam of his breath, the silky stiffness of his ragged beard, like quicksilver frost. “I have summoned it back, all the power that went forth from their meeting; summoned it back from the energy tracks along which it dispersed to all the corners of this sorry earth.”

He turned his head to look down at the still, dark shape lying upon the altar, and in the emaciated wrinkles of his face Saltwood could see the glint of tears. “It is sacrifice that gives power, you see, Saraleh,” the old man whispered. “Not death, but the willingness to give up everything, to burn the future to ashes, and all that it could have been, and to let it go. That is what they did not and could not understand, wanting power only for what it could give to them. That is what raises the great power from the earth and the air and the leys beneath the ground, that thunderclap of power that went forth; that is why he conquered.”

His hand sketched a magic sign in the air; then, bending, he kissed the tangled hair that lay over Rhion’s forehead. “The Lord go with you, my friend—to wherever it is that you will go.”

Rhion made no response. Sara stepped forward and kissed him in her turn. Then she turned quickly away, hitching the machine gun under her arm. Taking her father’s elbow, she walked slowly back toward the car, the tracks of their footprints dark and broken in the first glitter of the frost.

Saltwood walked over to the Stone. In the moonlight the chalked Kabbalistic symbols seemed to glimmer on the close-grained dolomite of the ancient altar. The night was still, but with the passage of shadows across their ice-powdered faces the other two Stones did, in fact, seem ready to begin dancing, as soon as no one remained to see.

His automatic felt like lead in his hand.

Rhion raised his head a little, propping himself on one elbow. His hand, pressed to his side, was black with blood. “I know you have to get moving if you’re going to make it to Danzig ahead of the pursuit,” he said, his breath a blur of whiteness in the freezing air, slow and ragged as if he fought for every lift of his ribs. His eyes were sunk back into hollows of shadow behind the broken spectacles, his forehead creased with pain. “But can you give me till dawn?”

For what?
Saltwood thought.
For your magic friends to get their act together and show up with the fiery chariot after all?

But something told him Rhion didn’t really expect that to happen anymore. A rime of frost glittered already on the coarse wool of the greatcoat draped over him—its hems and sleeves, even, scribbled with the Seals of Solomon, the Tetragrammaton and the Angelic Names—and turned the weeds around the stone to a frail lace of ice, and the night promised colder yet.

With any luck, Saltwood thought, cold as it was, by dawn Rhion would be dead.

He put the automatic back in its holster. “Hell,” he said softly, “you gave us till spring.”

Rhion shook his head, his strength leaving him as he sank back down onto the bloody stone. “When I came here,” he said quietly, “it was because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than a world where magic no longer existed. But I’ve seen…” He coughed again, pressing his hand to his side. “I’ve seen what is worse—a world where even the concept that other human beings are as human as you are is disappearing… and I see now, too, that this—this kind of lie—is what was starting in my own world, was being used like a weapon for whoever cared to wield it. That is how it starts…” He was silent for a moment, his face tense with the struggle against agony, and Tom saw the dark threads of blood creep from beneath him to mingle with the pale signs of the chalk.

Then he whispered, “I couldn’t let them have it. But when I went back… it wasn’t for that.”

“I know,” Saltwood said.

“Take care of her.”

He grinned wryly. “You think she’ll let me?”

A sharp spatter of gunfire crackled on the edge of the woods. Saltwood ducked instinctively, turned and ran back along the black track of footprints in the palely shining grass toward the red flash of Sara’s gun barrel. It was a party of Storm Troopers from Kegenwald. The whole countryside was probably alive with them, either seeking vengeance for the somewhat confused events of the night or still hunting for Rhion, unaware of what had gone on in the road cut. It really didn’t matter. The results would be the same.

The skirmish was sharp but protracted, a cat-and-mouse game of quick firefights and long waiting in the deepening cold, of slipping and stalking painstakingly through the absolute darkness of the pine woods, of waiting for a whisper, a breath, the movement of a shape against the slightly paler gleam of the frozen pine mast. Saltwood had done it a hundred times over the last few years, in the mountains of Spain and in training in the hills of Scotland, and upon occasion, more recently, in the wet fields of France. He had fought colder, fought hungrier, fought in worse physical shape, but when he came back to the car with the thin dawnlight streaking the sky above the trees he didn’t remember ever being this tired, this bone-weary of fighting, this fed up with the expediency of killing men to make the world a better place.

Since he’d gotten into the unions in his early twenties, it seemed to him that he’d always been fighting
somebody
to make the world a better place to live in. One day, he thought, if he survived the war, it would be good simply to live in it for a change.

Like Rhion, he wanted to go home.

Sara came out of the woods, an officer’s greatcoat slung over one arm and three more submachine guns hanging by their straps from her other shoulder. With characteristic practicality she had been looting the bodies of the slain. In the frame of her dark hair, her face was gray with strain and exhaustion, and blood smeared her hands and her knees, and tipped the ends of her hair. She stood for a long moment in the deep, frozen grass looking at Tom, and in her face, in the tired stoop of her body, he saw the sickness of utter weariness, of nausea with everything she had done from the day she had set out for Germany to rescue her father. She did not move toward him, but when he crossed to her, his feet crunching in the brittle weeds, she held out her arms, and they stood pressed together, locked in each other’s warmth for a long time while she wept.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered finally, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, a schoolgirl gesture that touched his heart. “I don’t… I’m not usually this stupid…” Her arms tightened around his waist, and he felt her shivering. “I’m really not—not like you’ve seen me at all. It’s just…”

“I hope you’re not too different when things are quiet,” Tom said, and kissed her gently on the lips.

She shook her head, holding him closer, her face pressed to the old, dry bullet holes and bloodstains of his jacket. “I don’t know what I’m like anymore. Like I’ve been torn apart and haven’t been put back together yet. That’s—that’s the worst of this.”

“Well,” he said softly, “I’ll be there, if you want me to stick around, while you’re figuring it out. There’s no hurry. Warm up the car.” From the tail of his eye he could see her father crawling stiffly out from under the Mercedes where he’d taken refuge during the shooting, picking frozen weed stems out of his car rug and beard. “I’ll be back,” Tom promised gently. “And then I’ll take you home.”

He climbed the sloping meadow in the pewter twilight of dawn, the frost-thick grass crunching under his boots, his automatic in his hand. He’d been afraid the Storm Troopers had gotten to Rhion, but a glance at the stiffened carpet of the grass told him otherwise—it would have held the mark of a butterfly’s foot. It shimmered eerily, like powdered silver, in the light of the moon that hung like a baroque pearl above the hill where the old holy place had been. The frost there was thicker, all but covering the tracks he, Sara, and her father had left a few hours ago. It furred the ancient altar of sacrifice, half obscuring the crooked abracadabra that Leibnitz had written there in the hopeless hope of attracting the attention of some mythical convocation of wizards gathered in the Emerald City of Rhion’s deranged dreams.