The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,159

Rhion’s eyes were open now, staring with a curious, terrible bitterness into the midnight sky. “Bad.”

With a small sigh that broke off sharply in a wince of pain Rhion turned his head, beard and eyebrows standing out blackly with shock in the moonlight. “Can you get me to the Stones?” His voice sounded normal but very quiet.

“Oh, for Chrissake!” Sara groaned, exasperated. “We’ve got enough of a head start to make it to Danzig.”

“Please.”

“It’s too goddam late! You said midnight, and midnight is over! Do we need to keep on with this?”

“Saraleh,” Leibnitz said gently, “the reason it’s too late is because he came back to help us.”

The fires had vanished into the darkness behind them. On the other side of the hills another glare of orange flame and rising smoke marked where Schloss Torweg would be, and Saltwood was so numbed, so exhausted, so shaken that he didn’t bother trying to think up a reasonable explanation for that.

The big car rocked and jolted over the sorry road, and, beyond the spiky black of the pines, the wheel of the stars moved calmly past its point of balance, down the long road to the next solstice at the dead heart of winter, three months away. The cinnamon tips of her hair flicking back under the fingers of the night wind, Sara continued to expostulate, “We’re gonna get frigging caught! This is our chance, our last chance...There’ll be search parties all over the goddam countryside...”

Rhion, teeth shut hard now, said nothing, but Saltwood said, “Get us there, Sara, okay?” and felt Rhion’s hand tighten on his own.

“He’s not gonna make it,” Sara said softly, “is he?”

Around them, the countryside was deeply silent. They had found the Stones deserted, though ringed with plentiful evidence of Gall’s earlier ambuscade—cigarette butts, tramplings in the wet grass, and an occasional puddle of urine behind a tree. That no one had been there since they’d departed shortly before midnight was obvious; dew had formed already on the grass, and would hold the slightest mark. In the deepening cold it was already turning to frost.

Saltwood looked back at the form lying on the fallen stone in the cold starlight, which picked out in chilly relief the lenses of his glasses, the silver swastikas and buttons of the SS greatcoat they’d put over him. “Not the way we’d have to be traveling.”

Like a bent, gray stork in the wavery shadows, Rebbe Leibnitz sat on the edge of the stone at Rhion’s side, sketching the arcane circles of the Sephiroth and writing all the Angelic Names he knew in the last crumbling fragments of the chalk he’d had in his pockets. The Hebrew letters formed a pale shroud of spiderweb, draped over the ancient stone of sacrifice and trailing away into shadow. In its center Rhion lay without moving, his breathing agonizing to hear.

Hesitantly Sara said, “The Nazis would probably patch him up if they found him. With von Rath gone they’re going to need him...”

“No!” Rhion half raised himself from where he lay on the stone, then sank back with a gasp, his hand pressed to the makeshift bandages on his side. As they strode back to him Saltwood could see the track of blood glittering in his beard, and the dark seep dripping through his fingers. “Don’t let them...” Then his eyes met Saltwood’s, and he managed a faint grin. “Oh, hell, it’s your job not to let them, isn’t it?”

“ ’Fraid so,” His voice was gentle.

Rhion coughed, fighting hard not to. When he was twelve, Saltwood remembered, he’d been chousing cows out of the edges of the badlands twenty miles from the ranch when his horse Mickey had broken a leg. He’d known that to leave the animal alive would be to condemn it to being brought down and torn to pieces by coyotes. The hurt had lasted in him till he’d left the ranch completely... and enough of it remained even now to make him remember as he unholstered his gun.

Glancing up, he could see the echo of his thoughts in Sara’s eyes. It was after three in the morning of the first day of the long slide of autumn to winter. It would be a cold drive to Danzig.

Hesitantly Sara said, “We—we don’t need to travel that fast. I mean, with von Rath dead and the Spiracle gone, that puts the kibosh on whatever secret plan they had for the invasion of England. As Rhion said, even a week’s delay to figure out something