The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,127

If we get too close, we risk it picking up the Void energies of the Spiracle and reestablishing the field.”

“Dammit,” Saltwood snapped, “I’m not taking a fifteen-mile detour around the other side of Berlin because you don’t want to step on the cracks of the sidewalk! They’re gonna have the dogs on us fast enough! Now get in the car!”

Rhion balked. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand we haven’t got the time or the gas to waste. We’ve only got a couple hours’ lead, if that, before they figure out where we’re headed and get the whole SS on our butts, and I for one would rather risk all the wicked wizards in the world than half a squad of sore-assed Deaths-Heads, so get in the car and quit arguing!”

Rhion opened his mouth to protest further, but Sara reached out, grabbed the Professor by the arm, and dragged him into the Packard with her and set off down the lane. Muttering to himself, Saltwood slammed into the Mercedes and followed, hoping they wouldn’t encounter any unscheduled pedestrians in the utter darkness to complicate matters still further. As they neared Berlin again the red light of fires illuminated their way, burning out of control among the endless blocks of workers’ flats. Smoke stung Saltwood’s eyes as he drove.

“Friggin’ crazy—loony,” he muttered to Leibnitz, who sat in the backseat of the open Mercedes like a king en route to his coronation. “When I tried to get him to let go of that silly stick I thought he was going to tear into me! He may be some kind of genius, but...”

“He surrendered it once three months ago,” the old scholar said softly, “and has regretted it since. I think he would die rather than let von Rath have it again.” The wind flicked back his silky white hair and the ragged strands of his grizzled beard. In spite of the plain gray Labor Service uniform he wore—like Sara’s and Rhion’s, stripped of all its emblems—he reminded Tom strongly of the old Jewish men who’d argue pilpul and politics on the stoops of Yorkville, thrashing the easy theories of communism and socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World into their component atoms and examining them one by one, as was the fashion of Talmudic scholars everywhere. “So what did he mean, field? What Resonator was he talking about?”

“Christ knows.” Saltwood frowned, concentrating on keeping the Packard in sight. Its taillights had been removed to comply with blackout regulations, and, in blocks where intact buildings shielded them from the glare of the fires, it was difficult to see anything at all. The night was getting cold, too. In spite of having stripped a uniform jacket from one of the less gory corpses Saltwood felt chilled, driving in the open car. “He made this widget out of wire and glass and claims it lets him do magic if it gets within a couple miles of that—that Spiracle of von Rath’s.”

He heard Leibnitz gasp. The old man leaned forward sharply, white hair fluttering back over his shoulders. “Did he say how?”

The desperate earnestness in his voice made Tom remember Sara had described her father as being as crazy as Sligo. Just what I need—TWO of them! “I don’t know. Some boruyo about drawing energy through the Spiracle and setting up a resonating field.”

“Kayn aynhoreh,” Leibnitz whispered in horror. “Chas vesholem, he can’t have.”

“He sure as hell thinks he has.” And yet, unbidden, there rose again to his mind that half-obliterated fragment of memory: Rhion Sligo with one hand on that tangle of wire and crystal in the dim candlelight of his prison room, and the bluish drift of ball lightning floating upward from his other—empty—palm.

Hallucination, he thought, made uncomfortable at some deep level by the thought, as if, back in his socialist days, he’d stumbled across conclusive evidence that it was not economics but women’s fashions—or sunspots—or maybe even God—that ruled history. Maybe some kind of electrical byproduct of the device, whatever it is, like the St. Elmo’s Fire that burned on the horns of the cattle on the nights of thunderstorms, when they were thinking about stampeding...

“Stop them,” Leibnitz ordered. His long, blue-veined hands, resting on the seat back beside Tom’s head, were shaking. “He’s right, we’ll have to detour through the center of the city.”

“Down Prinzalbertstrasse past SS headquarters? Don’t you start!”

“You don’t understand! We can’t risk...”

They rounded a corner, and Saltwood jammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a collision with the