The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,129

Atlantis... not that there was ever very much,” she added, her voice turning small. “In the cupboard, I mean.”

Tom was silent, remembering the pinched gray look on his own mother’s face those nights after an oatmeal supper when she’d sit working on the bills. Though there’d always been food of some kind on the table, he’d always been hungry—especially in the spring, when they simply couldn’t afford to lose what one steer would bring them toward the mortgage and the costs. Toward the end it had been the worst. “What happened to her?” he asked quietly. “Your mother?”

“She died.” The words were like the chop of a kindling ax. In the dark of the backseat she turned her face away, a delicate shadow profiled against the blackness of the city, the occasional flare where a far-off blaze burned near a warehouse or factory. There were few of those here in the Charlottenburg district, amid the blocks of expensive flats with their pseudo-Assyrian cornices and their Hollywood-Gothic turrets and pillars. Every window was blacked out, but the very air around those eyeless monoliths seemed to seethe with suppressed life.

After a moment, Sara added quietly, “While I was in America. Of influenza. I should have gone back to Warsaw then and tried to make Papa come with me, but there just wasn’t the money. I could barely make my school expenses, much less get passage for one over and two back. And anyhow the immigration quotas for Jews were jammed, and nobody was gonna let an extra one through.”

He wondered how she’d gotten the passage money when she’d heard her father had been interned—much less the dough it would cost for the black-market identity cards she’d mentioned—but didn’t ask. The lines around her mouth and in the corners of those coal-black eyes said things about where she’d been and what she’d passed through on her way, and he knew better than to touch those open wounds. He found her beautiful, with her dark, hard eyes and her crazy particolored hair, in the way he’d found the Spanish girls beautiful, who’d fought beside him in the hills, a beauty of voice and inflection, a beauty of toughness, like cats who fend for themselves and can only occasionally be coaxed to curl purring on a man’s knee.

Beside him, Rhion seemed to have revived a little, eating bread and cheese out of Leibnitz’ little string shopping bag and gesturing with it as he said, “...and in any case I had no choice. I could never have gotten the edge over him, even for the second I did, without magic of some kind, and by myself I didn’t have the power to keep the field going. Everything here requires such a hell of a lot of power. The temple there was the only place to get it. There any fruit in there? Or chocolate?”

“Chocolate, ha! They all trade it for cigarettes, the Nazi chozzers... You still shouldn’t have left it.”

“As long as we stay away from that house we’re safe. Outside the range of a couple of miles from the Spiracle the Resonator’s inert. The way it draws power, it should be even less than that, by this time. We should be far enough away to be safe. By the way...” He turned to Saltwood, glasses flashing dimly in the darkness. “Where are we headed?”

But even as he spoke Tom was hitting the brakes, cursing, his stomach sinking within him. “Gestapo headquarters, it looks like,” he said grimly, shifting gears and starting up again slowly, knowing there was no escape, no evasion. “Or hell. So hang onto your hats.”

Ahead of them, in a line of flashing red lights, dark forms, and bobbing electric torches, stretched an SS roadblock.

Twenty-three

IN THE THROAT of the pass of God’s Ax, Tally drew rein and rose in her stirrups for the tenth time that day, turning her head and listening. The wind keened thinly along the high stone faces of the cliffs that lined the way, whined among the boulders that strewed their feet, and roared with a soughing like the sea in the pines that formed a spiky black rampart along their brows, a hundred and twenty feet above. But when it eased for a moment the sound came again, unmistakable, and then Tally knew.

She was being followed.

Wind caught at her hair and whipped it in her eyes as she scanned the pass behind her. The earthquake that had twisted the foundations of the world six hundred years ago had