The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,109

into the first of the half-dozen huts where the dogs slept, raised a little off the ground for ventilation, low-roofed and smelling of the old blankets on which they slept and the herbs hung from the rafters to freshen the air. Tucking up her skirts, Tally knelt in the sun-splintered shade at the back, surrounded by a sniffing congregation of interested wolfhounds, pulled aside the mass of blankets, and lifted the floorboard beneath.

Barely visible in the gloom below the floor, she could make out the shape of a large square bundle, wrapped in waxed leather; under the leather, she knew, for she was the one who had wrapped it and the four others like it hidden in other holes and corners of the kennel, was oiled silk, and then the spell-woven cloth they’d been swathed in when she’d first smuggled them out of her father’s strong room. All summer she had been waiting for a question from someone—her father, Shavus, someone—about where they were.

Now she knew the question wouldn’t come.

No one but her father knew where Jaldis’ books had been bestowed—her father, the wizards, and she.

I feared that the knowledge would be lost, the Gray Lady had said. And, speaking of the wizards, Without them it would become a contest of strongmen.

And very calmly, she wondered where it would be best to hide her children, when she fled from Erralswan and made her way to the Ladies of the Moon.

Twenty

THE ROOM WAS SMALL, smaller than the attic cell in which Saltwood had spent last night and the long, nerve-racking day before, and empty save for the wooden chair in which he sat and the mirror on the wall. Its windows, like the ones of the cell, were boarded over, the boards not hastily nailed but screwed down with proper Teutonic thoroughness and the screwheads countersunk. Since the Storm Troopers who’d searched him—none too gently—had taken his watch, he could only estimate the passage of time, but in the locked attic room with its iron military cot he’d been fed three times, and by the raw cold—what? twelve hours ago? Anyway between meal #2 and meal #3—he’d assumed it was night. At least the bed had had blankets.

And that made today Monday, the twenty-second of September.

The day of von Ram’s “demonstration.”

Restless, he rose from the hard-backed chair and prowled the room again, as if he hadn’t done so immediately upon being locked in. It told him nothing he didn’t already know with dreary intimacy—that the room was ten feet by ten, that the bare walls had been papered once and later thickly painted in yellowish white, that the naked floorboards were stained and dirty, and that at one point whoever had owned the house had possessed a small dog, imperfectly trained. A wire screen protected the mirror, clearly a one-way window. Spying bastards.

He’d been here nearly an hour already, to the best of his estimation, and wondered how long it would be before anyone came. Boredom and tension had long ago erased most of his fear of the Nazis, even some of his dread of von Rath, and he would have welcomed almost anything as an alternative to this hideous combination of inaction and surmise.

Yesterday, as von Rath had instructed, the magician Gall and a gray-haired female SS doctor with a face like the sole of a boot had come to his cell, backed up by four Storm Troopers. They’d ordered him to strip at gunpoint and conducted a physical examination in eerie silence, never asking him a question, never even giving him a verbal order after the first, as if he were a beast whose docility was assured. And with four automatics pointed at him, he reflected wryly, it sure as hell was. In the event it hadn’t been nearly as bad as being gone over by Franco’s boys.

The really unpleasant part of all this, he figured, was only a matter of time.

A sharp, whining buzz made his head jerk up, while his hackles prickled with loathing at the unmistakable quality of the sound. Hornet! There’d been nests of them in the tangled creek bottoms where cows habitually got themselves hung up, and over the years he’d been stung enough to give him a healthy loathing of all insects that flew with their feet hanging down.

Black and ill-tempered, it was banging against the ceiling over his head, wings roaring in a fashion reminiscent of the Heinkels over London.

They should be nesting in September, dammit, he thought, and then, How the