The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,148

months. The white glow of the floodlights lay in cross-barred patches over the beaky dark shape of Rebbe Leibnitz’ forehead and nose. The chair where Saltwood and Sara curled together in a tight knot of trust was the one where he’d sat endless hours, peering at his broken piece of scrying glass alone.

They were at Schloss Torweg.

Rhion lowered his forehead to his hand and thought, No. PLEASE, no.

They must have come after him.

And they’d somehow stumbled into Nazi hands. Evidently von Rath hadn’t completely shut up the Schloss when they’d come to Berlin for the demonstration.

If they were there, the place would be guarded. He thought about what it would take, the strength it would need to work the requisite spells, the drain on the last thin reserve he was keeping to catch the momentum of the universe, to fling across the Void in the hopes of reaching the farthest extent of Shavus’ power...

He couldn’t do it.

His power was exhausted.

In any case he doubted he could do it before midnight. And if he wasn’t at the stones at midnight...

Sitting slumped on the bench, shivering in his long black coat, Rhion cursed for several minutes in German, in Polish, in Yiddish, and in his own rich, half-forgotten tongue. Then he got to his feet, stiff and aching and leaning on his crystal-headed staff, and wondered where in Kegenwald it would be possible to buy black-market chocolate.

Twenty-six

IT WAS AFTERNOON when Saltwood woke up, feeling worse than he’d felt since his teenage bar-fighting days in Tulsa. There were other similarities to those days, too, besides the general sensation of having gone to sleep wadded up in the bottom of a clothes hamper after having been thoroughly beaten with a chair: the gluey stickiness in his mouth, the feeling that his eyeballs had been deep-fried, and the sleeping presence in his arms of a woman whose existence he hadn’t even suspected forty-eight hours ago.

The differences were that he was starving hungry instead of nauseated by the mere mention of food, that he felt awe and admiration as well as tenderness for the woman curled up against his chest, and that her father was sitting on the floor six feet away, rocking back and forth whispering Hebrew magic to himself.

It was the day of the autumn equinox. The twenty-third of September. Tomorrow—unless by some miracle Rhion Sligo could avoid capture—the invasion of England was going to start, spearheaded by Paul von Rath and whatever infernal device was controlled by the iron Spiracle. That the device in some fashion caused the most believable hallucinations this side of the soft room was beyond question. Whether it could or couldn’t affect the weather or blow things up at a distance was undecided, but that first effect would be enough to give the Luftwaffe the edge they needed over the RAF. Hell, he thought, they might be able to use it to fox that secret early-warning system the Brits were said to be using—who knew?

He knew already that with von Rath and his men waiting for Sligo on Witches Hill tonight, both rescue and assassination were out of the question. There were simply too many of them—in the face of those odds his own recapture would be a foregone conclusion. Everything within him might revolt at the thought of leaving the device and its hapless inventor in the hands of the Nazis, but at the moment, the thing of paramount importance was to get word back to England somehow and warn them at least what to expect.

And here he was, the only man who might possibly be able to save England, locked up in a Gothic mansion in Prussia with a woman he suspected he was falling in love with and a lunatic rabbi.

Cautiously so as not to wake Sara, he wormed his way out of the worn plush chair, gritting his teeth at the thought of what straightening his back was going to be like. Bar fights with the oil company goons, he decided, had nothing on explosions and car crashes. Clutching at furniture and cursing all the way, he stumbled into the little washroom—barred and secured as tight as the main bedroom—that adjoined it.

After dashing cold water on his face—which didn’t help—he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. No wonder Sara’d had second thoughts about sitting on his knee. There was a cut on his forehead and a blackening bruise on his cheek he hadn’t even noticed from the crash last night, as well as