The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,128

Packard in front of him. They were in among the narrow streets of tenement warrens now, pitch dark save where they were lit by the yellow glare of fires. A bombed building had disgorged a vast talus spill of debris across the road before them. Beyond, the street was a chaos of flames, of firemen and tangled hoses, of brown water trickling down the broken asphalt glittering hotly in the reflections of the blaze. Men and women crowded around them, dazed and quiet. A little boy in the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth stood alone, sobbing in helpless pain and terror with blood running down the side of his face from a huge cut in his scalp. Above them loomed what was left of the tenement, the rooms ripped open as if by a giant knife, shabby wallpaper, dirty old furniture, and cramped, tiny chambers laid bare to the glaring orange inferno.

Saltwood set the brake and got out of the car. Rhion and Sara had already debarked. For a few moments the four of them stood together on the fringe of the ruin, unnoticed by the people coming dazedly from the shelter across the across the road or stumbling, bleeding and covered with filth and a hundred years’ worth of coal and plaster dust, from the cellars of the buildings all around.

Aside from the boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven—God knew where his parents were, or if they’d survived—there wasn’t a Nazi uniform in sight but Saltwood’s own.

Rhion whispered, “And I wondered why magic had been taken from this world.”

Around them there was a mutter of voices: “The English... The English...” “Everything we saved...” “Maybe we can sleep at Aunt Berthe’s... But she was down in Tempelhof, they were hit, too...” “Has anyone seen a little girl? Six years old—her name is Anna, she has brown hair...” “He won’t let this go unavenged. Our Führer won’t let them get away with this...”

Rhion’s hands closed tight over the staff he held, the crystals of its iron head glinting softly, as if with a light of their own, in the leap and jitter of the shadows. “Christ, what would they do if they had it?”

Over the city, the sirens were sounding the all-clear.

As they drove south again through the Moabit district, avoiding the fires and ruins and tangled traffic of the industrial targets, Rhion was silent, sitting beside Saltwood with closed eyes, head bowed and hands folded tight around the smooth, rune-scrawled wood of the staff. Leibnitz, leaning forward from the backseat of the Packard, was speaking to him in low, passionate German that lapsed frequently into Yiddish: “...Already you have endangered all the world in making the Spiracle... given them a chance to use magic, to call up the forces of the universe... open the windows to let through the energies of the Void into this world, where only the Most High knows what they will do...”

“I had to do something,” Rhion whispered. “I had to get it back.”

“At the cost of bringing to life again the magic they seek? And if he takes the Spiracle from you this time...”

“He won’t.” The little man did not open his eyes, but Saltwood could feel him shiver as if, beneath that quiet, the tension of fear, of dread, of grief were nearly unbearable. “He won’t.”

“And you grew up with this going on?” Tom threw a glance back to the seat behind him, where Sara was half turned around, watching through the small oval of the rear window for signs of pursuit.

She half laughed. “This and worse. We’d always have somebody staying with us: Kabbalists arguing until four in the morning whether the path between the Cosmic Spheres of Yesod and Netzach was represented by the Star or the Emperor; white witches cussing like fishwives at the Adepts of the Golden Dawn; pyramidiots and menhir-hunters pulling each other’s hair about how many inches are in a megalithic foot and whether Easter Island lies on a ley... ay gevalt! And Papa making his little number squares and adding up the letters of everybody’s names and birth planets while Mama hunted through all the pockets of all the coats in the house for enough kopecks to buy bread for the next day. And then like as not Papa would give whatever was in the cupboards to some crazy Rosicrucian who needed it to get to France where, he’d been ‘directed in meditation,’ he’d find the clues that would lead to the rediscovery of