The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,149
an itchy pyrite glitter of stubble. There was no razor, of course. Considering the amount of time the Professor must have spent in places where they wouldn’t give him a razor, it was no wonder he wore a beard.
When he came out, finger-combing his short fair hair back from his face, Sara was awake, and her smile when she saw him reduced Hitler, the war, von Rath, the invasion of England, and the fact that he was surrounded by candidates for the funny farm and stood in immediate danger of being killed to inconsequential sidelights.
“You look awful,” he said conversationally, and Sara grinned back, shoving the red-streaked raven tangle of hair back from her bruised face.
“Well, your resemblance to Clark Gable at the moment isn’t strong enough to knock me down. I feel like I fell down a flight of stairs.”
He nodded toward her father. “What’s he up to?”
“About the eighth Sephiroth.” The old man had chalked a giant diagram on the floor before him, three interlocked lines of circles connected by trails of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a cloud of jotted notes in the same writing. “It’s the Tree of Life, supposedly the diagram of the way the universe works. Meditating on it and calling on the names of the angels of each Sephiroth—each of those little circles—you’re supposed to be able to summon sparks of holy fire down from the Outer Aether to help you out with your spells.”
He leaned his shoulders against the wall, hands hooked in his pockets, and studied the complicated maze of abracadabra scribbled across the gray floorboards. “He know any?”
“Sure.” She got to her feet and began gingerly twisting her back and shoulders, her black brows pulled together in pain. “Call up fabulous wealth, yes; fame and fortune, yes; the wisdom of Solomon, yes; avert an evil eye the size of Ebbets Field, yes; but unlock the door? Nah!” She winced at an incautious movement of her neck and added, “Ow! Aunt Tayta always told me never to go driving with American boys and by damn she was right. Those chozzers took my cigarettes, too.”
She padded over to him in her stockinged feet, the SS jacket still wrapped stolewise around her shoulders and the sunlight from the window calling electric gleams of copper and cinnabar from the red portion of her hair as she looked out at the men moving in the yard below. By the light, Tom calculated it was just past one o’clock, and more or less warm.
“They all look pretty real to me,” he commented, and Sara gave a wry chuckle.
“He must have called in reinforcements from Kegenwald,” she said after a moment. “The ones in the gray field dress are Waffen from the camp—I recognize a couple of them. The ones in black must be those Pauli brought with him from Berlin.”
Tom frowned. There were, in fact, not very many of those, not nearly as many as he’d seen when they were taken last night.
“Look,” he said quietly, still keeping to English. “They were serious about your father, weren’t they?”
She nodded.
“When will they come for him?”
“A little before sundown. They have to—to make certain preparations in the temple.”
“They’ll probably take you away then, too, if they’re going to use you as a hostage when they wait for Rhion up on Witches Hill. Since they haven’t tried to feed us so far, we’d better not count on anyone coming in before that.” He took a deep breath, knowing what he had to say next and hating the expediency of it, hating those dry odds of life and death. “You know if we do manage to get out of here, we can’t stick around to save him.”
Her mouth compressed hard, but she said nothing.
“The only place we know where to find him, they’ll be there, too. And right now the thing that has to be done is to get word back to England. With luck we might—just—make it to Danzig by morning. That’s the bottom line, Sara. I’m sorry.”
For a moment he was afraid she’d suggest that she remain and attempt the rescue, but she didn’t. Her square, thin shoulders relaxed; her breath blew in a soft sigh of defeat. “I know. I probably couldn’t make it through to Danzig by myself and, anyhow, I wouldn’t know who to get in contact with—I could be Gestapo for all your contacts know...”
And if you were killed I don’t think I could stand it. He bit his tongue on the words, a