The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,153
that case...
He pushed the thought of that decision away. First things first. He shrugged his shoulders deeper into his scarred and bullet-holed jacket and revised his estimate of times again to allow for a slower pace.
It was an hour after full dark, and icily cold, when they saw the first of the lights.
A bluish ghost-flicker of ball lightning shown far to their right in the trees; catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye, Tom halted in his tracks; but when he scanned the rustling darkness, it was gone. “What is it?” Sara asked quickly, looking up at him in the gloom, and her father, taking advantage of the halt, leaned against a pine trunk, his hand pressed, as it had been more and more frequently, to his chest.
Saltwood shivered, wondering just what kind of powers the Resonator—whatever it did—gave to von Rath, and at how great a distance. “Nada,” he breathed. “Let’s get moving.”
The second light flickered a hundred yards ahead of them ten minutes later, and this time they saw it clearly. Over head-high—ten, twelve feet above the tips of the bracken and weeds—it bathed the delicate fans of dry foliage around it with cold dim light for a few seconds, then vanished as inexplicably as it had come. Distantly, Saltwood thought he heard a truck pass on the road that their course had paralleled since dark. It was hardly unusual for a rural district on a clear autumn evening, but something inside him prickled a warning. “Move back into the woods.”
The third light flickered into being closer still and to their left a few minutes later and, after a short time, appeared again, near enough to shine on their upturned faces. It was small, the size of a child’s hand, a round blue-white bubble like the glow around some innermost seed of brightness. The chilly light reminded Saltwood of something... candlelit darkness... the phosphor reflection in upturned glasses... They pressed on, both of them supporting Leibnitz now, deeper into the blackness between the trees. Increasing cold made their breath steam and stung the inside of his nostrils. The old man, who still adamantly refused to wear any part of the SS uniform, had begun to shiver.
Then that glowworm brightness glimmered into being directly over their heads, and somewhere not too far behind them he heard the muffled confusion of men’s voices.
“Christ, they’re trackers!”
“Can you kill it?” Saltwood whispered, turning to Leibnitz and not even thinking about what that question implied. “Or send it someplace else?”
“I... I think...” The old scholar frowned, his high forehead corrugating into thick lines of concentration as he held onto the younger man’s broad shoulder. Above their heads the light faded, wavered a little where it hung, then slowly began to drift away.
Mental powers, Saltwood decided. A brain-wave amplification device and to hell with your ethylene and platinum, Saraleh. Unless it was sheer coincidence... He tightened his grip around the old man’s rib cage and headed up the rising ground. Glancing back, he saw the light bobble uncertainly and go out.
“I—Rhion said...” The old man spoke with difficulty, his eyes shut, still concentrating hard. “He said a wizard... cannot scry the presence of another wizard... The Resonator field...”
They were right at the feet of a line of low moraine hills, nearly invisible above them in a vast looming bulk of pine trees, and the countryside here was littered with granite boulders half buried in weeds and sedge. Saltwood left father and daughter in the dark blot of one such outcrop’s shadow and moved softly back toward the oncoming swish of boots in bracken, flexing his hands. In the shadows of the trees it was almost impossible to see, save where the starlight caught on silver and on the blued gleam of a rifle barrel. A nervous guttural voice whispered something about “die Hexenlichte...”
Tom rose out of the bracken almost under the Trooper’s feet. It was very fast—grab, strangle, twist, and then the man’s body was inking down into the deep pocket of brown fern, and Tom was moving off, dagger, sidearm, rifle in his hands. He supposed he should have stopped to strip the coat, but it would have occupied dangerous seconds—the man’s companions weren’t fifty feet away among the pitchy shadows of the trees—and Leibnitz would have put up a fight about wearing it anyway.
The old man was shuddering, his eyes pressed shut, his breathing the rasp of a saw, when Saltwood reached their hiding place again. Without looking up Leibnitz