The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,10
any case there was nothing to be seen. Only the bare oak planks...
...bare oak planks...
What was it, he wondered suddenly, about the oak planks of the floor that touched a chord of wrongness in his mind? As wrong as the backward-turning swastikas, as wrong as the eyes of the guards in the watch room, cold and caring nothing except to follow whatever orders they were given...
And then he remembered coming to in darkness, sick and freezing and exhausted to the marrow of his being, wondering with what strength was left in him that he was alive at all and thinking how the stones of the floor would have been cold if any warmth had been left in his hands.
The stones of the floor.
His eyes went back to the oak planks, naked and worn and scuffed with a thousand scrubbings.
Von Rath lied.
His heart jolted with a lurching surge of certainty, knowing that it was true.
Von Rath lied so that I’d think there wasn’t a way home. So that I’d be at their mercy. So that I’d do whatever I could to restore magic in this world, because only in restoring magic could I get myself home.
Excitement, rage, dread that he was wrong, and bone-deep awareness that he was right swept through him in a confused wave, like the stab of needles and pins in a long-numbed limb coming once more to life. He began to shake, his breath coming fast with hope and blazing anger.
They drew up fake Circles here while I was unconscious, to make me believe them. Hell, they could have brought me here from another building, another place entirely, the way cars can travel...
They could have drugged me... I have only their word on how long I was out.
I have only their word on everything.
For a long time he stood there unmoving: a stout little man with his shabby, graying beard and thick-lensed spectacles, listening to von Rath’s quiet voice talking to Baldur in the hall by the library door, the crunch of car tires on gravel outside, and the distant, indistinguishable murmur of the guards exchanging greetings as they walked the barbed-wire perimeter of the fence. He felt exactly as if he had been crossing a floor that he had thought to be solid, only to feel it buckle suddenly beneath him and to hear the echoes of bottomless chaos yawning under his feet.
A floor enormously wide, he thought. And no way of knowing which way to run for safety.
If I have only their word on everything...
What else are they lying to me about?
Three
“YOU WANT ME TO find a what?” Tom Saltwood tossed the slim dossier of photographs, maps, handwritten notes, and one or two cheesily printed magazine articles back onto the desk and regarded the man who had been his commander in Spain with mingled bemusement and uncertainty. “With all due respect, Colonel Hillyard...”
“I know.” Hillyard’s mouth flicked into its wry, triangular grin. “I’ll admit that’s how it sounded to me.”
“And to me.” The third man in the nameless London office, a stooped Englishman with very bright black eyes peering from a heavily lined face, reached across to the dossier with one arthritic finger and flipped free a snapshot that hadn’t been very good even before it had been blown up to eight-by-ten. Mayfair, Hillyard had introduced him to Saltwood, though Tom was pretty certain that wasn’t his name.
“But some rather strange rumors have come to us from some of the more secret bureaus of the SS, and this one we’ve had—er—independently confirmed. We think it bears looking into.”
“Not,” Hillyard added, settling his lean form back in the worn brown leather of his chair and reaching briefly, almost automatically, behind him to tweak the tiniest chink out of the bow window’s heavy curtains, “that it would be easier to believe if we’d had it confirmed by personal telegram from Hitler, but there it is.”
Tom was silent for a moment, wondering what it was that was causing the alarm bells to go off at the back of his mind. A false note in Hillyard’s voice, maybe, or the way he tilted his head when he looked across at the man he called Mayfair—the suspicion and query in his eyes. Maybe it was just time and place. What three weeks ago—when he’d gotten the enigmatically worded request to report back to London—would have been normal or at least explicable now bore a staggering load of contextual freight.
Or maybe he was just tired. Several hours spent crammed in a