The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,138
Torweg itself. “These stones he’s heading for are in a kind of overgrown meadow the other side of the hills from the Schloss—which is just an old hunting lodge from back in Bismarck’s time. There’s a farm track through the hills... Let me borrow the pencil, Papa.”
The old man sniffed and relinquished it. He’d outgrown the back of the ration book and was currently filling up both sides of an envelope he’d unearthed from beneath the seat with abstruse numerical calculations, magical squares, and jotted transliterations between Hebrew and Greek. “Those stones probably started life as an observatory of some kind,” he remarked, angling the envelope to what little moonlight filtered through the window. “They’re a hundred and fifty kilometers east of the easternmost examples of chambered barrows, let alone stone circle or alignments. I’ll have to write my friend Dr. Etheridge in Florida about this... We’ve been corresponding now fifteen years...”
“I don’t think there was anybody who published anything in an anthropology or linguistics or archaeology journal in the last thirty years Papa didn’t correspond with,” Sara explained. “Not that he ever got them before they were at least six and usually ten years out of date.”
“If it was real knowledge it never goes out of date.”
“Tell that to all those Newtonian physicists.”
“So Newton wasn’t wrong. Gravity still works, nu?”
“Here.” Sara held up the map she’d drawn—Tom risked a glance at it, then went back to concentrating on the road. “That noise better be the tappets knocking,” she added after a moment, cocking an ear at the dry rattle the engine had developed.
“Doesn’t sound like a valve,” Tom replied. “Though God knows how long this baby was driven after grease and oil got scarce... Thanks,” he added. “If it wasn’t for you coming with me, I’d have hell’s own time catching up with our Professor. It looks as if he could have picked up a train in any of three places that would get him to Kegenwald by tomorrow afternoon. At least I’ll know where to intercept him.”
Sara didn’t answer, and he felt her silence, as surely as he felt the vibration of the road through the tires and the engine’s choking clink. Her father had gone back to making sigils and demon keys on the back of the envelope.
Hesitantly Saltwood asked, “You do understand that’s my first duty, don’t you? To find him. To bring him back with me, if I can, but... to make sure the Nazis don’t get him or his device again, one way or the other.”
She sighed deeply, as if giving up something she knew she never could have. “I understand. It’s what you came here to do—I know that. But I think after midnight tomorrow he’ll come. He’ll have no place else to go. You think I’m riding along just to act as your guide?”
“I hoped it was because you’d fallen desperately in love with me,” he said, and she flashed him a wicked grin. “But I still think we should have found a hiding place to leave your father.”
“If you think I’m going to let my daughter go hotzenplotzing around the countryside with some Amerikanischer shaygets, you have another think coming,” Leibnitz said resignedly. “And besides, according to these calculations...”
“By the way,” Tom asked Sara, anxious to avert another spate of numerological abracadabra, “have you ever heard Rhion speak anything other than German?”
“N-no,” said Sara. “That is...” She hesitated, and a glance sideways in the muted lights of a passing military convoy snowed him a look of bafflement, as if she had suddenly been faced with a memory that did not fit. He eyebrowed for amplification, but after a moment she shook her head, dismissing something for which she could find no words. “No.”
They met no opposition as they drove on eastward in the cold Prussian pines. All the roadblocks, Saltwood guessed, had been set with the assumption that they’d take the westward road: To England, home, and glory, as Hillyard would have said. Obviously no one was counting on the fact that their mad Professor was even madder than they’d thought.
They stopped at eleven in Custrin, the little town sunk in darkness and sleep. While Sara “laid chick,” as they said on the East Side, watching out for the local bulls, Saltwood broke the lock on the gas pump in front of the general store, filled the Packard’s tank and the jerry cans, then raided the store itself for several quarts of oil and as much bread, cheese, mineral water, and