The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,104

himself looking into Sligo’s wide, terrified blue eyes...

And the next instant light exploded, blinding as the glare of a welder’s torch, inches in front of his nose. Taken totally by surprise, Tom flinched back from it and felt the body pinned beneath him twist free. Blinded by the aftermath of the glare, he made one flailing cut at where he thought Sligo would be as he tried to get to his feet, and, a split second too late, thought, That stool...

Somewhere behind him Tom heard the sobbing gasp of Sligo’s breath—then the lab stool connected full force with his head and shoulders.

Saltwood couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. Electric light flooded the room as he came to; yells, curses drifted into his awareness, and a black ring of shapes swimming like sharks through his returning vision. He curled instinctively as a boot crashed into his belly; a second one exploded against the back of his head...

And then silence.

Swamped in pain and half stunned, still he knew what that silence meant.

“Stand up,” said the voice like the whisper of silk over the point of a knife.

It wasn’t easy to do so without retching. Groping at the table for support, Saltwood noticed the lumpy gizmo of iron and crystal was gone. Professor Sligo stood next to the door, green with shock except for the livid red bruise of the garrote across his throat.

“Lay him on the bed,” von Rath instructed quietly, not moving from the doorway where he stood. “Get him brandy.” Over the dark-red silk of his dressing gown, the double chain of amulets gleamed faintly, the small circles of bone clinking against one another and against the twisted ring of silver and iron. His face was calm, impersonal, but Saltwood knew that with him in charge of it, whatever would happen next was going to be bad.

“Who sent you?”

“He’s one of ours!” Baldur Twisselpeck gasped, stumbling belatedly through the door and shoving his smudged glasses onto his face as one of the half-dozen Storm Troopers pulled the forged SS i.d. from Saltwood’s pocket.

“Don’t be stupider than you are.” Von Rath barely glanced at the young man. “Papers can be faked—as can a patched eye, a limp, and a telephone repair kit.”

“You mean that was him today?” Baldur gaped, blinking. He was shouldered out of the doorway by Jacobus Gall, barefooted and, like von Rath, evidently naked under his dressing gown, and like von Rath also seemingly indifferent to cold. Gall went to where Sligo lay, eyes shut now under a tangle of hair that was almost black against his waxy skin, on the bed that occupied most of the narrow room’s western wall. Looking around him, Saltwood saw in the better light that the room was, in fact, Sligo’s bedroom. Its windows were boarded up; the door had no handle on the inside.

Tom realized that Sligo was a prisoner, and not a free agent as Mayfair had believed.

“He should have a doctor,” Gall stated, examining the bruises left by the garrote. “If he is to assist in the demonstration Monday...”

“The phones are dead again, Captain,” an SS Sergeant reported, entering from the lights of the hall. “We could send Reinholt to the Lebensborn in the Grünewald—that’s the nearest doctor—and from there he could phone the Gestapo...”

“I expect you put the telephone out again before entering this house.” Von Rath’s ice-gray eyes returned to Saltwood’s face. “Didn’t you?”

Saltwood said nothing.

Without looking back at them, von Rath added, “As for the Gestapo, I think not.” Head tilted a little to one side, he continued to study Saltwood with disquietingly impersonal interest. “He is of a higher type, isn’t he, than the Jew and Slavic swine they’ve been sending us from the camps?” he went on softly. “A finer body, certainly, and therefore a stronger and fitter mind.”

Saltwood felt his stomach curl with dread. Oh, Christ...

“Shameful, isn’t it?” Baldur Twisselpeck said sententiously, crowding back to van Rath’s side. “The orphans of the race, betraying the heritage of their Fatherland to breed with the corrupt apemen of Jewish-dominated countries like—”

“Oh, I think not,” von Rath purred, with a dreaminess in his level voice that was almost pleasure, though his eyes remained chill, almost blank, as if whatever dwelled inside were wholly occupied with itself and itself alone. “If that is the case—if his blood is corrupt—he is certainly a throwback to the original root race, and that’s all we need. It is all that the best of the British will