The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,118
academic.”
Saltwood saw the impact of that widen her eyes as he was pushed through the door.
Soldiers were everywhere in the wide wire-fenced enclosure that encircled the house in the Jungfern Heide when von Rath’s little cavalcade rumbled carefully through the opened wire gate and off the drive. Sitting with half a dozen Storm Troopers in the back of the covered transport, Saltwood got a glimpse through its canvas curtains of the men who closed the gate behind them. They turned to look at him with stony hatred in their blue eyes. Must have found the body of their pal in the downstairs hall. A bad lookout when von Rath was done with him—always provided he survived this round of “psychological tests.”
As the truck pulled around he could see Goering, with his gray mob of Luftwaffe bodyguards, walking slowly back and forth across the flat, weedy ground of the field, pausing now and then to stamp the hard-packed earth. “Absolutely no hidden wires, ladies and gentlemen,” Saltwood said wryly to no one in particular in the voice of W. C. Fields. “You will observe that there is nothing up my sleeve but my arm.” Closer to, Himmler was making a much more cursory examination, which he broke off when von Rath’s car braked to a halt and came hurrying to its side.
“It was astounding, Captain,” Saltwood heard the little Reichsführer-SS say. “You have completely vindicated the Occult Bureau! Completely vindicated the true purposes of the SS as the spearhead of our Race’s destiny. And if you have, as you say, found a method to release the vril, the sacred power bequeathed to the Aryan Race from the root race of Atlantis, we will indeed have nothing further to fear from those who oppose us. I have already put you in for promotion to full Colonel and a position as First Assistant to the head of the Occult Bureau...”
“I am honored,” Von Rath inclined his head respectfully to the nervous, bespectacled bureaucrat before him. But by the steely edge of his soft reply, Saltwood guessed that Sara had been right. Completely vindicated Himmler’s pet bureau and all he gets out of it is full Colonel? First Assistant? He’d heard Himmler was stingy and jealous of his influence and power. How long would it be, he wondered, before the Reichsführer-SS went diving out a window for fear of something he thought he saw in the middle of the night, leaving the power of the SS like a honed dagger in von Rath’s patrician hands?
Did von Rath believe it was magic? Or were the chain of faintly clinking amulets and the concealment of the control mechanism of Sligo’s hellish device as an iron circle that, sure enough, he now carried on the head of a bona fide wizard’s staff merely cover, a ruse to approach that clever, sneaky, powerful little man on his credulous blind side?
Sara was right about the Spiracle, too. It did give him a faint creeping sensation. Not when he looked at it straight, but a moment ago, glimpsing it from the corner of his eye, he’d seen—he didn’t know what he’d seen—a darkness that wasn’t really darkness radiating around it, a sense of spider strands of something too fine to see floating in all directions, webbing the air...
A fragmented picture flashed through Saltwood’s mind, something driven from his memory by the blow that had knocked him out—maybe only a hallucination itself... Rhion Sligo had been perched in the darkness on his tall-legged stool, watching raptly as a ball of bluish light drifted slowly up from his hand...
But before he could think about it, he was being shoved over the lowered tailgate and walked between four guards to where Paul von Rath, accompanied now by Himmler and Goering as well as the inevitable swarm of bodyguards, stood beside a slightly smaller—maybe two-ton—covered flatbed transport truck.
A man in the clay-colored uniform of the motor pool was holding the hood propped open, and a Luftwaffe Captain reverently held Goering’s white gloves as the big Reichsmarshall poked around the engine.
“It hasn’t been out of my sight all day, Herr Reichsmarshall,” the driver was saying. “You can see yourself there’s nothing in the engine...”
The huge man grunted and straightened up, chest ribbons flashing like an unimaginative rainbow in the pale sunlight. Saltwood remembered Sara’s joke and grinned. “I’m more familiar with a plane’s engine than a car’s,” Goering said, as the driver shut and latched the hood, “but I’ll swear he’s right. Very well, then.”