The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,157

pain seemed to ease. But in his blue eyes the haunted look of darkness remained, of grief and hopeless loss.

It was, Saltwood realized, only minutes short of midnight. Quite quietly, he said, “Sorry we made you miss your bus.”

“Not your fault.” Lightning flashed again, striking at the boulder behind which they crouched and seeming to shatter off it, splattering in all directions and running down the stone in lapis rivulets of fire.

“Gall’s waiting for you up there, you know—or at least he was. He’s probably hot-footing it back here as fast as he can to cut us off.”

Rhion nodded. Beneath the brown tangle of his beard his face was ashy and taut with pain, his breathing a ragged gasp.

“We couldn’t warn you...”

“This flat-footed, goyischer shlemiel stepped on the Tree of Life before I could tell you...”

“It’s all right. I’d hoped...” He gasped, averting his face for a moment, his whole body shuddering under the renewed onslaught of pain. Leibnitz reached quickly up, his bony, age-spotted hands folding over the smooth pudgy ones where they clung to the wood of the staff. For an instant Saltwood felt a burn of heat on his back, smelled scorching wool—then with a cry he saw spots of flame spring up on the back of Sara’s jacket. He struck them out, panicked and disoriented, feeling heat breathe on his face, his hair...

Then it was gone, and Rhion was straightening up again, shaking, as if his strength had gone with it. “I can’t...” he whispered. “He has the talismans... all their power, drawn into himself... Poincelles and the strength of the summer solstice. All the sacrifices they did...” He shook his head. In a small voice he added, “And he was stronger than me from the start.”

Slowly, between the surface of the rock and Sara’s shoulder, Leibnitz levered himself to his feet. “It will be midnight soon,” he said softly, and Rhion nodded. Under the scratched spectacles and the sweaty points of his hair his eyes were shut. Sara’s image sprang to Saltwood’s mind again, the mad Professor standing on his magic stones, arms outspread, waiting to be taken away by wizards and enchantments that never came.

Dimly, from down the road beyond them, the growl of truck motors could be heard. A moment later hooded headlights flashed into view, and standing up in the lead truck’s open cab Saltwood made out the long white mane and silvery beard of the wizard Gall, cutting them off from any hope of flight.

On their other side von Rath had stepped forth into the roadway. The blazes that still flickered, impossibly, on the riven asphalt sank; the ranks of Storm Troopers formed up behind him like a wing of darkness and steel. A nimbus of shadow seemed to surround the Nazi wizard himself, that queer, eldritch, spider-shot aura that Saltwood had once or twice thought he’d seen from the corner of his eye floating near the Spiracle. But this darkness was growing, spreading, lifting like a column of smoke around a core of lightless flame.

“Can you run for it?” Rhion asked quietly.

“Are you kidding? With Gall and his stooges behind us and von Rath able to zap us the minute we...”

Rhion shook his head, and for an instant, from the corner of his eye, Saltwood had the same strange sense he’d had before about the Spiracle—that the shadow-twin of the darkness which surrounded von Rath gathered there like a veil of impossibly fine black silk, shot through with invisible silver. Its crystals seemed to have caught the cold glitter of the stars, but no stars at all could be seen now, through the center of its iron ring. Saltwood wasn’t sure what it was that he did see there, in that terrible, shining abyss.

“No.” Rhion’s voice was barely audible, his eyes not on Saltwood, but on von Rath’s advancing form. “No. It will be all right. It was my fault—my doing... But it will be all right.”

His face like chalk, Rhion stepped from cover and walked to the center of the charred and rutted ruin of the road. Gall called out something and men sprang down from the truck and started to run forward, but something about that solitary brown figure made them hesitate and stumble to a halt.

In the silence of midnight, Rhion held up the staff in both his hands.

It seemed to Saltwood that the lightning came down from five separate points of the heavens—heavens deep and star-powdered and impossibly clear. They hit the head of the staff