The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,121
something lumpy wrapped in a blanket and dashed almost under his wheels. He missed her with a screeching of tires and, in the rearview mirror, saw two gold-rimmed Meissen teacups fall out of the blanket and shatter on the tarmac of the road.
Another explosion went off close enough to make the ground shudder. “For Chrissake, they’re not anywhere near you yet,” he muttered, slamming on the horn, then the brakes, and swerving around a panic-stricken elderly couple in the road. “Worse than the goddam Londoners.”
The Berliners, of course, were not nearly as used to air raids—yet, he thought grimly—as Londoners. And it was obviously the first time for Sligo, though, locked up in the Jungfern Heide, he might have heard the sound of far-off bombs. The little professor’s face was gray with shock, appalled horror in his blue eyes behind their rimless specs as he looked around him at the panic and the rising flames.
“This is... how you people fight wars.”
“You oughta see London if you think this is good,” Tom muttered savagely, slewing through the intersection of Turm Strasse, the steely waters of the Landwehr Canal winking bleakly through brown and yellow trees. “Or Rotterdam—what the Luftwaffe left of it. Or Guernica and Madrid, for that matter.” An explosion to their left jerked the vehicle almost off its wheels. Saltwood flinched at the roar of the blast, the shattering storm of fragments of brick, window glass, and filth that came spitting from the mouth of one of those narrow gray working-class streets that surrounded the canal locks. For a moment, the cloud of plaster dust and dirt was a yellow-gray fog through which nothing was visible, and Tom slowed as much as he dared, knowing by the droning buzz that the Wellies were directly overhead now. “I’m just hoping to hell the bridge across the locks is still standing when we get there—it’ll be one of their main targets.”
“It will be,” Rhion said softly. His hands, chubby, yet curiously skilled-looking, moved along the rune-scratched wood of the staff. His eyes were shut.
“Right,” Saltwood muttered, gunning again through the clearing fog of debris, the wheels jerking and bumping over the edge of a vast talus slope of loose bricks, broken lath, twisted pipe, and shattered glass that lay half across the road.
And by some miracle, the bridge over the Landwehr Canal still stood, though the locks themselves were a shambles of burning weirs and floating debris. Looking across that vast span of unguarded concrete, Saltwood felt his stomach curl in on itself. Buildings were burning on all sides here, the heavy gray nineteenth-century warehouses and the massive, six-story tenement warrens of the working-class districts all around. He slowed, feeling safer in the shadows of the buildings.
“There’s got to be a tool kit in this thing,” he said, twisting his body to grope with his free hand behind the seat. “I want you to hunt for a hacksaw, get me out of this damn handcuff.”
“Later!” Rhion said urgently. “After we get across the bridge!”
“Yeah? You’re not the one who’s gonna be handcuffed to four thousand pounds of internal combustion engine if that bridge takes a hit when we’re in the middle of it.”
“It won’t,” Rhion insisted, fixing Tom with a desperate blue stare. “Believe me, it won’t! We have to get across now—it could be destroyed while we’re trying to get the cuffs off...”
“So we just backtrack to the Turm Strasse and go around. Christ knows the streets are clear.” Another blast, very close this time, and both men ducked involuntarily as brick and glass spattered on the side of the cab like a shotgun blast.
“No! Please believe me, I know what I’m talking about, we’ve got to get across it, put as much distance between ourselves and that house as soon as possible.”
Through the clearing dust, Saltwood saw that the bridge still stood. Would it ten minutes from now, always supposing they could find the goddam hacksaw and the blade didn’t break?
He let out the clutch. “If we go down I’m taking you with me, pal.”
He hit the bridge at fifty and accelerating. Concrete abutments flashed past, a glimpse of fires roaring up out of oil spilled on roiled brown water and of metal snags and cables floating like water weeds. Once clear of the buildings, he saw how many bombers were overhead—the whole sky was crossed with the smoke of rising fires. Like a bird laying eggs on the wing, he saw a Wellington directly above them drop its