be done. Will it be the Dancing Stones again? Or that barn Poincelles used? I never was certain how much power that French untermensch was able to raise with those degenerate rites he practiced, and our little friend may know some way to utilize it... Was that why he wanted you?”
Her voice shook slightly. “He never laid a hand on me.”
The golden Baldur giggled like a schoolboy. “Didn’t want a dose of the clap, I expect.”
“Be still.” The inflection was that of a man ordering a dog to sit, and Baldur’s square, noble mouth puckered in a pout. “Where will he be?”
“He didn’t say.”
Von Rath shrugged and nodded to his men. “Take her into the dining room. Gall, get the tools...”
“This is stupid!” Saltwood raged, yanking against the grip of the men who held him, and at the same moment Leibnitz spoke quickly.
“Don’t tell him anything.”
“For Chrissake!”
All trace of the old man’s slightly comic air of resignation was gone. His dark eyes flashed with calm authority. “Better she should die than the Spiracle fall into their hands again,” he said quietly. “She knows it.” He turned back to his daughter. “Don’t you, Saraleh?”
Sara hesitated, mouth taut and eyes darting, suddenly huge in a face white as chalk. She doesn’t know THAT, Tom thought, but she sure as hell knows what von Rath will do to Rhion when he catches him.
“To hell with that,” he said sharply, his eyes going to von Rath. “He’s heading for the standing stones.”
Von Rath’s cold glance went immediately to Leibnitz, who had turned his face away, then to Sara’s tear-brimming eyes and the relaxed slump of her shoulders. “So,” he said quietly. “Baldur, see them locked up. Jacobus, come with me. If the two of you are going to be performing the sacrifice without me tomorrow night...” His voice faded as he climbed the stairs, the white-haired crackpot and two stone-faced guards in his wake.
Baldur signaled the other guards with a jerk of his hand, a weirdly schoolboyish gesture for an officer of the SS, and started after his master toward the stairs. Leibnitz turned to the young man as if they had been alone in the dingy hallway and said quietly, “He’s mageborn, Baldur. You think he doesn’t see you as you are?”
The young man stopped, his ridiculously crestfallen expression wildly inappropriate on that beautiful face. “I—” he stammered, halting, and the guards, too, stopped. He sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Of—of c-course he sees everything. But one has one’s p-pride, and—and there are the others... And after all these years...”
What the HELL are they talking about?
The beautiful youth shuffled his feet, sniffled again, and ran a nervous hand through the tawny splendor of his hair. “It—it came to me tonight, when Paul’s power... That is—I realized I c-could be however I chose, look however I willed. With the field of the Resonator I have power! For the first time in my life, it is as I have always dreamed it would be! Would you like to see it?” There was suddenly an ugly glitter in his eyes. “You’ll see it tomorrow night anyway, Jew.”
“Yes,” Leibnitz said gently. “Yes, I would.”
Baldur snapped his fingers at the guards like the Crown Prince of Ruritania in an MGM musical. “Bring them.”
To do him credit, the sergeant hesitated, but apparently thought better of any remark containing the words ought not. In any case, Saltwood thought, there were enough and more than enough guards to subdue the three of them, and more yet visible through the door of the watch room which led off the hall. Led by Baldur, the squad escorted them down a short corridor to a locked door, Saltwood wondering how much more insane things would get. There had to be reality somewhere under this increasingly baffling layer cake of fantasy, reality that could be used to escape, at least to get word to England...
As he unlocked the double mahogany doors Baldur said, quite seriously, to the sergeant, “Kill them if they attempt to cross the threshold. Beyond it is holy ground.”
Oh, boy!
For the first moment Saltwood had a vague impression of darkness, of black walls on which silver hoodoo signs gleamed softly in the reflection of the dim corridor light, of a faint smell that must have been much worse closer up, for the old rabbi drew back with an expression of revulsion and horror, as if the door had been opened to a charnel house.
And with Leibnitz out of the