houses over in the Grunewald to go untouched. In that way it was London all over again.
“The problem is,” Rhion went on, “I don’t know how far the field extends, or how far away I have to be to be safe.”
“Huh?” said Tom. “What field?”
The Professor raised his head again; behind the rimless glasses, his blue eyes were filled with a growing fear. “Magic field.”
Oh, Christ, Sara warned me. “Well,” Tom said, “I think we’re probably pretty safe.”
“The hell we are.” For a moment their eyes met, and there was something in the older man’s that made Saltwood pause. When he spoke again his voice was low and deadly earnest. “I had to set up a Talismanic Resonator in the temple in that house, it was the only place where there was any kind of stored power at all. It drew on the Void energies coming through the Spiracle. At the level of power available in the temple, you’ll get a field if they’re within, oh, maybe a mile, two miles of each other...”
Oh, Hillyard’s gonna love this. That the crazy little coot had something there, Tom didn’t doubt—enough to startle and blind von Rath and his minions sufficiently for Rhion to seize the control mechanism concealed in the Spiracle, at any rate. And it was abundantly clear to him by the Professor’s taut voice and desperate eyes that he wholeheartedly believed everything he said.
“But they’re not,” he pointed out, latching onto the one element of Professor Sligo’s discourse he felt he could answer intelligently. “We’ve got to be five, six miles from the house by this time.” The chain was cut almost through. Saltwood took the hacksaw from Rhion, who had begun to shiver with shock and reaction, and worked and twisted at the half-sawn link with a screwdriver from the kit until the chain broke with a loud snap. “Besides, even if von Rath has got some kind of transport by this time, the raid’s still going on, and the bridge is out.” And by the sound of it, he thought uneasily, the second wave of Wellies was on the way.
“We can’t risk it.” Rhion hurried around the other side of the cab again and scrambled in as the boom of explosions resumed over the long, shuddering siren wails. “Don’t you understand? If von Rath gets within two miles of us—of the Spiracle...” He touched his pocket, where the thing’s lumpy outline stood out against the cloth. “...or if he manages to find some kind of power source to increase the potential of the Talismanic Resonator—he’s going to be able to use magic.”
Twenty-two
WHEW, SALTWOOD THOUGHT, as he dropped the truck into gear again and jerked into motion, for a minute there he had me worried.
In the empty streets—the panic-stricken populace not yet having acquired the casual attitude the Madrilenos had eventually achieved about bombing not in their immediate neighborhood—and away from the danger of any but stray drops, Saltwood was able to make good speed. They left the sea of crowded gray monoliths of the working-class districts gradually behind them, the heavy developments giving place first to two-story shops and shabby, semidetached houses, then to trees, free-standing Biergartens, petty-bourgeoisie villas, and open fields. Here an occasional car passed them, driving fast without headlights in the slow-gathering twilight; an occasional family could be seen, crowding near a garden wall, staring southwestward toward the burning center of Berlin with horrified eyes. Get used to it, Tom thought savagely, remembering the motionless red-blanketed lumps carried away by the Air Raid Wardens from collapsed piles of London tenements, the overcrowded school buildings filled with homeless people and the stench of fear and excrement, and the middle-aged men and women picking through the piles of smoking brick for something salvageable from the only homes they’d ever known. It’s going to be bad, Hillyard had said, back in the pub before this had ever started, little knowing how bad it would get. Here’s a little greeting from your brothers and sisters in London.
It was clear the guards of 723 Teglerstrasse weren’t going to be crouched conveniently in the cellar.
“When they bring me here they hoot one long, two short,” Rhion said quietly, as the dented and mud-covered truck pulled up before the iron-sheeted gate. He’d replaced the Spiracle on von Rath’s magic staff and was again clutching it like a child hanging on to a favorite toy.
“Be ready,” Saltwood muttered, hooting out the code. He slipped the truck into first again and prepared himself