The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,122

load, black teardrop shapes drifting leisurely down.

Though Tom would have taken oath the bombs were dead on target, the nearest hit the water thirty yards away. The blast nearly swept the truck off the bridge—he felt the tooth-jarring clatter of the speeding vehicle’s door bouncing on the railings and veered, blinded, into the tidal wave of brown water hurled up by the blast. He cut in the windscreen wipers and through a grimy blur glimpsed—impossibly—the concrete span still arrowing before them, and hit the gas as hard as he could. At the same time he screamed, “You crazy Jew!”

A second stick of bombs took out the bridge as the truck slewed onto See Strasse and away through the burning town.

“Right,” Tom whispered, braking to a halt. They had passed the big intersection of Müller Chausse and the main force of the bombing lay behind them now, though the streets were still empty as if in a city of the dead. “Now you dig out that tool kit and cut me the hell out of this!”

“How far have we come?” Rhion asked, not moving, though he cast a panicked glance at the streets behind them.

“Six or seven miles, and what the hell difference—”

“More than you think.” He fumblingly unfixed the Spiracle from the head of the staff—it was held on with a wrapped iron wire—his hands shaking so he could barely manage it, and shoved the iron circlet into his shirt pocket before he’d set the staff aside and get out of the cab. Bombs were still falling as close as a half mile away in the cramped, sprawling labyrinths of the nineteenth-century factory districts around the canals, and, though Rhion flinched at the sound, he moved swiftly, decisively, as he came around the cab and dug behind the seat for the gray-painted tin box. “I don’t know how far the Talismanic Resonator’s field extends, for one thing. For another, von Rath’s bound to search the house...”

“How the hell did you get out of your cell anyway?” Saltwood looked up from pawing, one-handed, through the tool kit. “I thought they locked you in.”

“They did.” Rhion grinned shakily. “But you left the key in the lock when you—ah—”

“Uh—yeah,” Tom finished. In brief silence they regarded one another. There was a shiny patch of red scar tissue on the inside of the bridge of Rhion’s nose, close to his left eye-circular, almost half an inch across, the size of the end of a cigarette. The burn was only a few months old; Saltwood could see another one in the pit of Rhion’s throat through the open collar of his shirt. They hurt him pretty bad, Sara had said. The bruise of the garrote was still purple-red and angry under the clipped line of his beard.

“Look,” Rhion said awkwardly, starting to saw inexpertly at the handcuff chain. “I’m sorry I knocked you out. I didn’t know... I hope they didn’t...”

“Nah. They needed me in one piece to blow me up. Here, be careful—there’s no replacement blade in that kit. You ever used one of these things before? Put your strength in the pull, and keep it straight...”

“I could have used the power of the Resonator itself to open the lock,” Rhion went on matter-of-factly, bending over his work, “but even that little—comparatively little—might not have left me enough power of my own to put on the lightshow that blinded von Rath and his guards long enough to let me grab the Spiracle itself, and Baldur or Gall might have sensed something. Frankly, I don’t know whether they could or not. So the keys helped. Surprise was the only edge I had... I was hoping you’d figure out what was going on and pick me up, since I’m not sure I could drive one of these things and I had to get enough distance between the Spiracle and the Resonator to break up the field before von Rath figured out what I’d done.”

“Uh-huh,” Tom said soothingly, as Rhion glanced behind him again—Tom had seen him look in the truck’s side and rear-view mirrors a dozen times on the hellish dash along See Strasse. Not surprisingly, of course. Bombs were still falling to the south and west of them, close enough for the ground to shudder under the nearer blasts. It was typical of the way things were done, Saltwood thought dourly, that it would be these sprawling slums, where two and three families shared windowless and crowded flats, to get the pulping, and the millionaires’