The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,150
little surprised even at himself. But there was something inside him that had lost one too many things, one too many people, in the course of his life. The thought of losing her before they’d even properly begun was a darkness he couldn’t bear to face.
“...and anyhow,” she finished, her face still turned away, “I couldn’t leave Papa. No.” Then she shrugged and chuckled grimly, looking up at him with bitter amusement in her eyes. “What the hell are we talking about anyway? We’re never gonna get out of here.”
His voice was very quiet. “I’ll be fast.” Their eyes met, and he saw the fear in hers.
“You’ll still be...”
“Rhion?”
Leibnitz’ whisper brought both their heads around sharply. The old man was bent over the fragment of mirror glass he held cupped in his palm, his open eyes fixed upon it with an odd, glazed expression. In German he said, “Rhion, is this you, can you hear me?” And he leaned down toward the glass, a listening expression on his face.
Saltwood tiptoed soundlessly up behind him, Sara close at his side. Looking down over the old man’s shoulder, he could see only a broken triangle of Leibnitz’ lined face reflected in the glass.
“Rhion,” the old man breathed, “a door-unlocker spell I need, fast, and whatever you do to make them not see you.”
They traded glances. Sara’s expression was one of deep concern and pity, but Saltwood felt the hairs creep on the back of his neck as Leibnitz added querulously, “No, I don’t know what kind of locks they are!” His exasperated tone was exactly that of a man having an argument on the telephone. “They’re the locks on your room at the Schloss!”
There was a long silence. Baffled, Saltwood stepped around in front of him to watch his eyes. At the move the old man’s head jerked up. “Don’t step on the...”
Saltwood looked down at the lines of chalk under his feet.
Leibnitz relaxed in disgust, straightening his bowed back, and finished, “...Tree. And now we have lost him.” He held out his other hand to Sara, and she had to almost lift him to his feet.
“Papa...” she began worriedly.
“Come,” he cut her off, staggering as he turned toward the door so that she had to catch him again. Saltwood realized the old scholar had been sitting in meditation all night. The room had been far from warm, and his injuries had stiffened; he was lucky he could stand. It didn’t seem to have affected the calm serenity of his madness. “We got no time to lose.”
“Papa, for crying out loud...”
“You got a better way to spend the afternoon waiting for them to come kill us?”
Pretty inarguable. Saltwood hid a grin and turned back to the window, rubbing absently where the manacle of the cut-off handcuff still chafed his left wrist and studying the yard once more. There was the electrified fence, though that wouldn’t be on during the day when the main gate was open. The Schloss stood on high ground, sloping down on three sides outside the perimeter of the fence. All the land around the bottom of its little rise was clear. Only on the side toward the hills did the pines crowd in close on the fence, though there was still a gap of thirty feet. He couldn’t see any vehicles from here, though the guards last night had had an LG-3000 and the Waffen Troopers had to have gotten here somehow from Kegenwald. Stealing something from Kegenwald village looked more promising, though it would be a hell of a hike. They could get food there, too, and be on the main road east to Danzig.
But, as Sara had said, what the hell was he talking about? They still had to get out of the room.
He turned around to study the layout of the place once more just in time to see Leibnitz open the door.
“We’ve got to destroy the Resonator!” Leibnitz whispered urgently. “At the cost of our own lives the thing has got to be destroyed!”
“The hell it has,” Saltwood muttered back, keeping a firm grip on the old man’s skinny arm. There was no guard in the upstairs hall, but he could hear them below, lots of them, as they slipped into the little dressing room next door and down the old backstairs. “If they’re getting ready for some kind of fandango at sunset, that temple’s gonna be crawling. What we’ve got to do is get the hell out of here.”