The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,100

an easy sneak-up. While the sentry knocked diffidently on the door of the downstairs study, Saltwood observed the catches on the windows, easy enough to trip with a knife blade.

“I hope for your sake the matter is critical, Trooper Weber,” said a voice as soft as a thug’s silk scarf. Turning, Saltwood saw in the study doorway the man who must be Captain von Rath.

Saltwood shifted his eyes away immediately, knowing he must not stare. But the man who stood framed in the umber gloom was only superficially recognizable as the one whose picture he had seen in London. The man in the picture he’d been shown in London—a picture taken in Prussia in the spring—had had the look of a man dying, burning up inside. This man...

For some reason, Saltwood, schooling his features into casual respect that had no trace of recognition as he looked back, was reminded more than anything else of a wealthy and well-cared-for woman in the fourth month of a pregnancy that pleases her. Von Rath had that same glow, that same sense of beauty fulfilled and radiant... that same very slight air of smugness. The gauntness had filled out without losing the shape of those splendid cheekbones, and even the man’s hair seemed thicker, brighter, stronger despite its close military cut. Yet there was something else, something that the picture had entirely failed to convey, though Saltwood was damned if he could figure out what. Strong as a physical impact, he had a sense of evil, of wrongness—of darkness masquerading as triumphant light.

Oh, come on! he chided himself, disgusted. I thought you got over that good guys/bad guys stuff in Spain!

But when von Rath’s frost-silver gaze touched him, he shivered and came at the major’s beckoning with an unwillingness that went to the bone.

“Short in the wiring someplace,” Tom explained, his ingratiating grin feeling like a badly made denture. “Buggered up half the lines around here. We need to check whether it was in a phone here, either one that’s still in use or an outlet that was taken out, see.” Von Rath made no response, and Tom felt the sweat start under his cheap billed cap.

He had talked strike in mines and on factory floors, never knowing which of those scared and angry men were the management bulls, but he’d never in his life had this sense of irrational terror of another man. As he spoke, he noticed small details: the almost metallic quality of the pale gaze; the short saber scar on the cheek; and the white slimness of the hands. Of course with a “von” hanging off the front of his name, he’d never done a day’s manual work in his life. Like Marvello the Magnificent and every other carney magician Tom had ever met, von Rath wore hoodoo amulets around his neck—twenty or more circles made of jewels and glass and what looked like animal bone on one necklace, and on another a single uneven ring of woven silver, crystal, and iron. This medicine-show fooferaw should have been funny, like Hitler wearing lederhosen, but it wasn’t. Tom couldn’t tell why.

“There is a telephone in my study,” von Rath said at last, “and another upstairs in my room. A third is in the guards’ lodge out back. Those are all that have ever been in this house. Take him around, Weber, and see that I am not disturbed again.”

While Saltwood opened up the bottom of the study telephone and poked around inside, von Rath returned to his bulbous Beidermeyer desk and his book, but Tom was nerve-wrackingly conscious of the man’s presence in the room. Get a hold of yourself, he thought irritably, trying not to run out of the room when he was done; but by the gleam of sweat on Trooper Weber’s upper lip when that young man met him in the hall again, he saw that von Rath had that effect on others, as well.

And why not? he thought, disgusted with himself as he followed Weber upstairs. He looks like a dangerous hombre to cross, even if he does wear Woolworth’s Finest strung around his neck. HE’s the one I ought to kill.

But ten years of bar fights, of tangles with management stooges on picket lines and occasional pop-skulled crazies in hobo jungles made him think uneasily, I’d sure hate to try.

“Chilly bugger,” he volunteered, pulling apart the phone in von Rath’s Spartan bedroom and giving it, and the skirting boards, a cursory once-over. Trooper Weber, his arrogance