The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,156

eyes and then the expression was gone, but for a moment Tom had the impression the SS wizard had been too involved in his own display of power to remember even the necessity of capturing Sligo alive. As if, for the moment of the exercise of his power, he had forgotten, literally, everything.

Then he looked back at Saltwood, the inhuman calm returning to his eyes. “I must...” A last fragment of uncertainty flawed his voice, then was gone. “I must try this again with someone of equal strength.” His glance shifted to the guards. “Kill him.”

Saltwood felt the barrel of an automatic press the back of his neck and heard the trigger pull.

Only the silence after Sara’s scream “TOM!” made it possible to hear the flat click of the hammer coming down.

As if he didn’t quite believe that nothing had happened, the guard pulled the trigger twice more, the clicks very loud now in the growing silence that spread among the men garnered beneath the cold umbrella of phosphor light, and all heads turned, not to von Rath, but to the dark of the road beyond.

Beyond the range of the corpse-candle glow, feral starlight caught in the lenses of glasses, in the five crystals of the Spiracle at the head of a staff. Then darkness fell, blinding and total, and Saltwood whipped one leg behind him and jerked down the guard with the gun, smashing the man’s head on the pavement and ripping the dagger from his belt while noise erupted all around him, a chaos of shouts, curses, the crunch of boots, and the slap of bodies running head-foremost into the sides of trucks.

Then the darkness split, lightning tearing down in splattering flame as the bolts hit the road where Rhion had stood. In the white-purple glare, Tom saw Sara standing still a foot or so away and grabbed her wrist as darkness slammed down on them again, some instinct telling him to pull her away from the truck behind her. An instant later the vehicle burst into flames that illuminated a milling chaos of black- and gray-uniformed men surging all around them.

“Papa!” Sara yelled as the bushes on both sides of the road went up, and lunged for the second truck. For the first time Saltwood noticed that she, too, had acquired a dagger. At the same moment he almost tripped over the body of the Storm Trooper whom von Rath had stopped in the act of striking her. The beautiful Baldur met her in the dark arch of the truck’s canvas cover, his own dagger held point-down for the overhead stab favored by Hollywood directors—Saltwood hurled him easily aside into the path of another advancing Trooper. Sara was already dragging her stunned father from the back of the truck; Tom kicked another attacker in the groin, grabbed the old man’s arm, and, as the second truck burst into flames, bolted for the dark of the road cut where Rhion had last been seen.

Underfoot the potholed pavement heaved and split, hurling the three of them to their knees. Its center buckled upward, pulling apart to spew forth what seemed, for a hideous second in the holocaust of shadows, to be black things, shining, living, glittering, and crawling among a sticky ooze of glowing greenish slime. The next instant fire swept across it and the things were still—pebbles, Saltwood thought dimly, scrambling back into the shelter of a granite boulder that projected from the tall road bank—only pebbles and water after all, but burning, burning in impossible flame...

Lightning struck the bracken of the opposite bank, the dry brush roaring up in a screen of incandescent gold. A dark figure broke from it a second before it flared, darting across the lowering flames that still flickered on the pavement as if every crack and pothole were filled with gasoline. Another levin bolt cracked, tearing the road to pieces behind them, and then Rhion rolled into the shelter of the boulder, face streaming sweat as if he’d plunged it into a sink.

“They took that Resonator you made to the Schloss,” Saltwood gasped. “Whatever the hell it does...”

“He still thinks it’s a Flash Gordon deathray,” Leibnitz chipped in, as were-light exploded around them and Rhion flinched and gasped.

“Yeah, I figured that out.” He was holding himself upright on the staff, his face drawn with pain—Saltwood remembered as if from a nightmare the gut-rending agony von Rath had... willed on him? But that was impossible. Then Rhion drew a deep breath, and the