The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,160

else is going to put them into winter. We could keep ahead of them...”

“It wouldn’t do us any good,” Saltwood said gently. “He needs a doctor, and he needs care; long before we could get him either of those, he’d be dead in a lot of pain and we’d have put ourselves in a concentration camp for nothing.”

He looked back at the stone, where Leibnitz, draped like a Roman patriarch in the carriage rug that had been in the back of the Mercedes, was inscribing the pyramids of power over the numerological squares of the planets, scribbling the Names of the 1,746 Angels in charge of the Cosmos and all its myriad doings. Saltwood still wasn’t entirely certain what had gone on back there on the road. Whatever the device had been—radio-controlled explosives or clairvoyant hallucinogens or whatever—Rhion had somehow caused it to backfire on itself badly, that was clear. That he’d done so under the impression that he was destroying his only means of returning to his fantasy home lent a quixotic heroism to the little madman that dragged on some corner of Tom’s heart he thought he’d left in a Spanish prison.

And Rhion had saved their lives—and bought England and the world time—at the cost of his own.

Sara walked back to the altar stone, her Schmeisser tucked under one arm. Her breath was a ghostly cloud in the moonlight as she said, “Papa, you should be back in the car.” The open vehicle wouldn’t be much warmer, but Leibnitz was clearly at the end of his strength. “You can’t do anything further here.”

Saltwood half expected the old man to protest, but he didn’t. He stepped back, holding the blanket around his skinny shoulders with one hand.

“No,” the old scholar said softly, and the moonlight glimmered on the steam of his breath, the silky stiffness of his ragged beard, like quicksilver frost. “I have summoned it back, all the power that went forth from their meeting; summoned it back from the energy tracks along which it dispersed to all the corners of this sorry earth.”

He turned his head to look down at the still, dark shape lying upon the altar, and in the emaciated wrinkles of his face Saltwood could see the glint of tears. “It is sacrifice that gives power, you see, Saraleh,” the old man whispered. “Not death, but the willingness to give up everything, to burn the future to ashes, and all that it could have been, and to let it go. That is what they did not and could not understand, wanting power only for what it could give to them. That is what raises the great power from the earth and the air and the leys beneath the ground, that thunderclap of power that went forth; that is why he conquered,”

His hand sketched a magic sign in the air; then, bending, he kissed the tangled hair that lay over Rhion’s forehead. “The Lord go with you, my friend—to wherever it is that you will go.”

Rhion made no response. Sara stepped forward and kissed him in her turn. Then she turned quickly away, hitching the machine gun under her arm. Taking her father’s elbow, she walked slowly back toward the car, the tracks of their footprints dark and broken in the first glitter of the frost.

Saltwood walked over to the Stone. In the moonlight the chalked Kabbalistic symbols seemed to glimmer on the close-grained dolomite of the ancient altar. The night was still, but with the passage of shadows across their ice-powdered faces the other two Stones did, in fact, seem ready to begin dancing, as soon as no one remained to see.

His automatic felt like lead in his hand.

Rhion raised his head a little, propping himself on one elbow. His hand, pressed to his side, was black with blood. “I know you have to get moving if you’re going to make it to Danzig ahead of the pursuit,” he said, his breath a blur of whiteness in the freezing air, slow and ragged as if he fought for every lift of his ribs. His eyes were sunk back into hollows of shadow behind the broken spectacles, his forehead creased with pain. “But can you give me till dawn?”

For what? Saltwood thought. For your magic friends to get their act together and show up with the fiery chariot after all?

But something told him Rhion didn’t really expect that to happen anymore. A rime of frost glittered already on the coarse wool of the greatcoat draped