The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,147

frizzed red down at the level of her ears. There was the peace of friendship in the way they held one another—the way he’d never dared touch her, had always been too cautious to touch her, too careful of those old wounds, old hurts.

He ought simply to be glad she was on her way to healing.

And there was Tallisett.

The hurt inside him crushed tighter at the thought of her, the slowly growing knowledge that he would never see her or his sons again—the loneliness he had endured for six endless months in hell.

He realized that what he grudged was the easing of that loneliness. In his hornier moments he had considered going to bed with Sara, but only with part of his heart. What he had really wanted was to be held, to be loved, and to know he wasn’t so goddam alone.

He was very tired of being alone.

Or just very tired. He shook his head. It was nearly dawn outside. It was an all-day walk to Witches Hill if he was going to reach the standing stones well before midnight tonight, and he’d have to find food and, he hoped, someplace to rest between here and there.

The worst of it was wondering whether he was, in fact, insane. It had occurred to him before this, jostling in the crowded trains, shoulder to shoulder with old women, fretful children, and unshaven men nervous with the nervousness of the unemployed in a land where unemployment was a crime—it had occurred to him again and again in his months of captivity, when the only faces he had seen, the only voices he had heard, had been von Rath, Baldur, Gall, and the guards.

It was a very real possibility that he was a lunatic who had dreamed all the complexities of his former life—dreamed of Tally, and his children, and the calm peace of the Drowned Lands—while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Then Tom and Sara were right, and he was only imagining that he could see his friends in this fragment of glass he’d picked up in a corner of the washroom in the Frankfurt-am-Oder station, and that he only believed he was in control of the actions of others when they did not pay attention to him.

It certainly made more sense than his own version of events.

Yet try as he would, he could conjure no picture of a former life, no rational explanation for his escape save cause and effect, no reason why von Rath and the SS would be so interested in the madness of one patently Jewish lunatic. But if he was mad, perhaps the pursuit was as illusory as the rest of it?

He shook his head, exhausted and eroded and cold to the marrow of his bones.

If he was mad, he was left with nothing—only this bleak train station, with its clean-painted white walls and its posters of noble Aryan manhood in uniform performing feats of heroism under the dingy electric glare.

If he was sane, he was left with only the standing stones and the hope that Shavus had somehow heard his cry three months ago—the hope that it had only been some unforseen hitch which had prevented the Archmage from gathering the requisite congregation of wizards to reach across the Void and bring him back, the hope that, in the precarious moments of the universe’s balance at midnight of the equinox, he could somehow raise enough power to open a gate in the fabric of Being.

And beyond the standing stones there was nothing. Exile from Germany—exile from his own world forever—at the rosiest stretch of hysterical optimism. Or death. He’d been around the SS long enough—he knew von Rath well enough—to know that a bullet in the back of the neck was another exercise in rosy optimism.

He closed his eyes, not wanting to think about the endless walk from Kegenwald to Torweg, while the sun-tides gathered, and he waited for the night.

Twenty-four hours, he thought. In twenty-four hours it would all be over, one way or the other. He would be at the stones at midnight... It was his final chance.

Outside the church clock struck four. By the electric stove at the far end of the room the guard rustled a newspaper, and the station attendant asked whether it looked like there’d be war with Russia.

Rhion opened his eyes and looked again at the glass.

He realized where Tom and Sara were.

The dark bulk behind them was the bed where he himself had slept during most of three