The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,116
Egyptian priests I met when I was a little girl, or travelers from other dimensions or other astral planes, and they were all wizards or used to be, but they couldn’t practice in this dimension for one reason or another. You might as well sit down and take a break, cowboy. I’ve been over this room half a dozen times in the past week or so. You could fill it up with water and it wouldn’t leak.”
“That’s how long you’ve been here?” After one final glance out the windows at the guards standing around the vehicles, he came back to her, but remained on his feet beside the table where she sat, unable to conquer his restlessness.
She nodded, setting her cigarette to burn itself out on the table’s edge. “Eleven days—I kept count, scratching marks on the inside of the dresser drawer in my cell.”
Tom had seen the marks when he’d gone over the room where he’d been kept. “Why inside the drawer?”
She shrugged, long black lashes veiling her eyes as if embarrassed at the childishness of her impulse. “If they knew I was keeping track they’d erase them, add to them, or change them when they searched the room, just to make me crazy—to make me—I don’t know, feel helpless, feel off guard, like nothing was my own. Papa says they did that a lot in the camp.”
“Hell,” Tom said, feeling the old anger heat in him. “And I thought the special deputies were bad, the ones the fruit growers hired to chouse the migrants from camp to camp.” He settled on the edge of the table, his handcuffed hands folded on his thigh. “Your father’s here, too?”
“Yeah. I bunked in his room last night, sleeping on the floor.” She glanced up at him, and he saw, in spite of the cynical toughness in her eyes, how close she was to tears of sheer exhaustion, worn down by the bitter grindstone of being always watched, always helpless, and of never knowing what would happen next. Her brows, heavy and unplucked, grew together in a dark down over the bridge of her nose; there was a fine little pen-scratch line on either side of her mobile red mouth that emphasized each wry twist and each smile.
She shrugged again and made her voice offhand. “One more strike against that momzer von Rath. They kept us in the solitary cells at Kegenwald when Rhion was still at Schloss Torweg. They’d bring him in once a week to talk to us, once he was on his feet again. They—hurt him pretty bad after they caught him,” she added slowly. “There was a limit to what they could do if they wanted him to go on working for them, but I don’t think he ever really got over it. But he insisted on seeing us, talking to us, to make sure we were all right and hadn’t been taken away.” Her gaze returned to her lap, where her small, hard fingers traced over and over again a seam of her skirt.
Great, Saltwood thought. And after all that, I come along and try to assassinate the poor stiff for being a Nazi. And I may have to yet, he reflected. “So what is it he’s doing?” he asked gently. “What is it he’s made?”
Her mouth twisted, and the old gleam of ironic humor came back to her eyes. “Like I said.” She grinned up at him. “I’ve met dozens of wizards in my life, and they were all working on some kind of shmegegeleh that let them do magic—or would, once they got it perfected, usually out of the damnedest stuff—cardboard pyramids, ‘sympathetic vibrating generators’ made out of old colanders and copper wire, hoodoo amulets with stuff I didn’t want to know about wadded up and stinking to high heaven inside. But none of them gave me the creeps the way that Spiracle does. Old Pauli’ll stand there fingering it, either on the chain around his neck with all his other damn filthy tchotchkes or fixed on the head of a wooden staff, and the look in his eyes is the same as I’d see in the eyes of the real crazy ones, the ones who claimed to hear God or the Devil whispering at them.”
She shook her head again, her dark brows pinching together; then she dismissed the fear with a dry chuckle. “Rhion—and Papa, who’s just as bad—claims it gives von Rath magic powers.”
“Great!” He made a gesture of disgust with his manacled