is illusion.” Leibnitz drew up his long legs to sit tailor-fashion on the end of the iron-framed cot. “Like the illusions of the lights that pursued us on the road, the illusions you both saw in their little tests... Like half those guards downstairs were illusions. Von Rath hasn’t got twenty men in this house. How could he have got more than that away when Himmler wanted them all on the westward roads?”
“Thanks for not telling me that downstairs,” Saltwood grumbled, prowling back to the door to verify that the hinges were, in fact, on the outside. “I’d have had a nervous breakdown trying to figure out which ones to watch out for.” What would he have done, he wondered, if Leibnitz had said down there, Hey, pal, half those guys aren’t real. Like Rhion, the old man could be weirdly authoritative. If I stay here much longer, I’m going to be as crazy as the rest of them.
But from what von Rath had said, a long association didn’t look at all likely.
“Don’t you understand?” The old man leaned forward, his brown-spotted hands curiously graceful in the bars of bitter light. “The Resonator that didn’t work two miles from the Spiracle back at that little pishke temple in Berlin has all the power, everything, they raised here all summer. It’s pulling the energies of the Void through it and feeding them back into one hell of a field, and in that field von Rath, and Gall, and that poor doppess Baldur can do as they please... What have you there, Saraleh?”
While he’d been speaking Sara had been testing the floorboards under the bed, and had found a loose one. But when she crawled out of the leaden bar of shadow Saltwood saw only a few bits of chalk in her hand and the glinting flash of a piece of broken mirror. She shook her head, her shoulders slumped under the baggy and bullet-holed black jacket she still wore. “Nothing, Papa. Just chalk.”
“Nothing is nothing,” Leibnitz said, and rose stiffly. Saltwood, his own bruises seizing up, hated to think how a sixty-five-year-old man’s brittle bones and unworked muscles were handling that kind of maltreatment.
He was sore enough to be sarcastic, however. “There’s a piece of wisdom for you.”
“Good,” Leibnitz approved, nodding. “Your shaygets does recognize wisdom when it comes up and bites his ankle. There’s hope for the goyim yet.” He took the odd collection of fragments from Sara’s hand and carried them back to the wan stripes of the window-light.
“Some kid’s collection, it looks like—”
“No,” her father corrected, stirring them with his fingers. It really was only a few pieces of odd trash. His breath made a smoke against the sharp chiaroscuro of the floodlights, for it was icy cold in the room. Outside, frost glimmered silver upon the ground, the guards’ tracks leaving a ragged streak of black along the perimeter fence. “This was the room where they kept Rhion after they caught him, wasn’t it? I think they were his things.”
While the old man muttered and poked at the bits of glass and chalk, Sara walked back to where Saltwood stood next to the rump-sprung plush easy chair that, with the bed and a broken-down dresser, was all the furniture that the room contained. Her arms were folded as if for protection across her breasts, her face drawn and waxy with strain and tiredness. It was close to dawn. Half hidden by that weirdly particolored hair, the bruise on her cheek from von Rath’s slap was darkening; by the way she walked, the wreck had left a couple of doozies on her shoulder and hip.
“Thank you,” she said softly, not looking up at Tom for a moment, speaking English so her father would not hear. “I—I didn’t know what to say. To von Rath, I mean. I didn’t want to tell them—I know what they’ll do to him—but...”
“Did your father really mean that?” he asked, still more softly, as if speaking English were not sufficient to exclude the old man from their conversation. “That he’d expect you to die—to let them torture you—before you’d let them get hold of that stupid magic wand Rhion’s so crazy over?”
She sighed, still hugging herself, a small, compact dark figure, save for those splendid white legs and that pointed little face. “Papa... Yes, he meant it. And he would die over those crazy magic games he plays. I used to think I was tough enough to die before I’d rat on a