The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,101

still cowed by the encounter with von Rath, nodded. Von Rath’s chamber was by no means the original master bedroom of the house—either Sligo had that one or they were using it as a workroom. “Any chance of getting a quick look at the other rooms in case there’s a dead lead? It’ll take just a glance around the skirting and save me a trip back here if we still can’t find the short. That way we won’t have to disturb His Nibs again.”

Weber hesitated, then nodded, and gave Tom a tour of three other bedrooms on the upper floor, during which Tom was able to orient himself mentally and establish entries and possible escape routes. Only at the far end of the passage, where the two major bedrooms stood opposite one another, did Weber demur. “It is forbidden to go into either of those.”

“What’s in there? Secret plans?” The locks on both were new.

Trooper Weber gave him a fishy stare. “There is nothing in there.” He was a lousy liar.

Tom shrugged. “No old phone leads? It’d be a wire about so long sticking out of the skirting...”

“There is nothing like that.”

“Thank Christ for that.” He turned and limped back down the hall, deliberately slowing his pace to irritate his guard, who had to keep stride with him. To the right of the stairs as he emerged on the ground floor was a sliding door of polished mahogany, also recently decorated with a brand-new lock, but as he limped over to investigate, the door was shoved open from within and a young man poked his head out.

“Who are you? What do you want? What is this man doing here, Trooper?” The boy was short, fat, and coked stupid—past him Tom had an impression of black tapestries and some sort of altar, candles, chalked circles on the bare floorboards, and a stink like a San Francisco joss house.

Trooper Weber saluted smartly. “A man from the Fernsprechamt, Herr Twisselpeck. He wants to know if there was at any time a telephone in that room that might be causing a short in the lines in the neighborhood.”

Herr Twisselpeck—the boy couldn’t have been over eighteen—swiveled weak tea-colored eyes up to Saltwood; beneath thick glasses and enough dope to raise the dead, Tom could see the jealousy in them at his height and the breadth of his shoulders. “So they’re hiring c-cripples these days, are they?” he demanded nastily. “No, there isn’t a telephone in here. There never was a telephone in that room. You should know we’d never have ch-chosen it for the temple, the Holy Place of Power, if there had been any kind of electrical wiring in its walls.” He jerked back into the darkness of the temple and tried to slam the doors—the heavy, sliding mahogany slipped out of his jittering hand on the first try and he heaved and fussed at it for a moment to coax it closed. A moment later the lock clicked

Tom shook his head. “Takes all kinds.”

As he was limping after his escort toward the guards’ station—once the old carriage house—and taking more accurate note of the wilderness of overgrown shrubbery that should conceal very nicely his appearance over the wall, he espied an old man, clothed in nothing but a loincloth despite the autumn chill of the day, standing rigidly on a little terrace at one corner of the house, his left arm held to his side, his right crooked out before him, elbow bent so that his fingers pointed back at his abdomen, right knee bent up to rest his foot on his left knee, for all the world as if he endeavored to mold his body into an approximation of the letter B. As they passed the old man began to yodel, a long, undulating, full-throated howl in which the drawn-out sounds “Booo-o-o-o-e-r-r-r-c-cccccc...” could be barely distinguished.

Tom had seen weirder things in California.

He came back later that night.

He’d repaired the junction box, lest the inconvenience drive von Rath to contact the real Fernsprechamt. It was an easy matter to disconnect the entire box again at two A.M. With luck no one would know of Sligo’s death until morning, but if there was a slip-up and the alarm was raised, they would be that much later getting the dogs after him. With even a few hours’ start he’d be well on his way back to Hamburg.

He approached the house from behind, sliding under the wire and crawling through the scrubby sedges of the enclosed