The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,15
Against the pale scars of cut-up earth, Saltwood saw the low, dim bulk of a redbrick air-raid shelter, new and raw and waiting. He remembered Madrid again, and what he’d seen of the village of Guernica. Though the night was warm and peaceful, he shivered.
Hillyard shook his head. “He approached me privately, asked if there was anyone from the Brigade who’d be reliable. Most of the native Brits, I might add, have already vanished into the F.O.’s murky ranks—not that that affected my choice much. If he hadn’t arranged to call you back now over this, I’d still have been waiting for you on the docks.”
“I bet you meet all the ships, honey.” Tom grinned and made a smooching noise in the dark. From behind them came the sudden, full-throated rumble of a car’s engine—a big eight-cylinder American job by the sound of it—and a moment later a lightless black shape swept gleaming past them and away into the dark. “Whoa—somebody was sure thinking when they drew up the blackout regs... What’s up?”
“Well, there’s been a certain amount of discussion about forming guerilla forces, probably based in Scotland...”
“You don’t think England’s going to surrender, then?”
“Never,” Hillyard said decisively. “You’ve been in the fighting, so I don’t know how much you’ve seen of what the Luftwaffe and the German army did to Rotterdam...”
“I’ve heard.” Saltwood’s voice was grim.
“It’s going to be bad here,” Hillyard went on, suddenly quiet, as if he sensed all those families, all those children, all those peaceful lives and day-to-day joys that lay like a vast, murmuring hive around them in the lightless city. “And it may get bad very soon. But Churchill’s never going to surrender.”
“And with all this going on,” Saltwood said thoughtfully, dropping his cigarette butt to the sidewalk and grinding it out under his heel, “Mayfair still thinks this mad professor of theirs is important enough for me to go over to Germany now?”
There was long silence, broken only by the strike of the two men’s boots on the sidewalk and by the occasional surge of traffic—punctuated now and then by the startled screech of brakes—a few blocks away in Gower Street. But there were few passersby. Everyone in London—everyone in England, Tom thought—would be glued to a radio tonight.
They turned a corner, Hillyard seemed to know where he was going—but then, he always did, and could see like a cat in the dark. He steered Tom carefully across the street to avoid an entanglement of sandbags and barbed wire around some large building, nearly invisible in the pitchy gloom. Once they were stopped by a coveralled civilian, a fat old white-haired man wearing a warden’s armband and carrying a gas mask strapped to his belt, and asked for their papers, but when he saw their uniforms by the quick glow of his flashlight he hastily saluted and waved them on by.
At length Hillyard said, “We’ll probably have a little bit of breathing space, anyway—the latest reports say the German armored divisions are already turning south to mop up France.”
“Makes sense if Hitler wants to secure naval bases on the Channel.”
“So it does. But if there is to be an invasion, Mayfair seems to think that whatever Sligo is doing will make the situation worse. He’s been scared pretty badly.”
“Yeah, but... a wizard, Bill?”
And Hillyard laughed. “Well, I didn’t read the reports. That should be the Red Cow opposite.” He gestured toward what appeared to be a solid and anonymous wall of dark buildings on the other side of the narrow lane. “There isn’t a wireless in the hotel room. Think you can stay awake long enough for a beer?”
“I always knew you could smell beer across a street.”
Together they plunged across the bumpy pavement, dark as the inside of a closet, narrowly missing being run down by something powerful and nearly silent—a Dusenberg or Bentley, Tom guessed by the throb of the engine—that passed close enough to them that the wind of it flapped their trouser legs against their calves. Having spent twenty-four hours in a shell crater on the beach listening to machine-gun bullets smacking into the sand on all sides of him, Tom didn’t bother to jump, just quickened his stride enough to let the whizzing car pass.
“Here lies the body of Thomas Leander Saltwood,” he quoted his own epitaph, “who survived union goons in the West Virginia mines, special deputies in the California orchards, two years of fighting in Spain, nine months in a Spanish prison, the German invasion