The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,161
over him—its hems and sleeves, even, scribbled with the Seals of Solomon, the Tetragrammaton and the Angelic Names—and turned the weeds around the stone to a frail lace of ice, and the night promised colder yet.
With any luck, Saltwood thought, cold as it was, by dawn Rhion would be dead.
He put the automatic back in its holster. “Hell,” he said softly, “you gave us till spring.”
Rhion shook his head, his strength leaving him as he sank back down onto the bloody stone. “When I came here,” he said quietly, “it was because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than a world where magic no longer existed. But I’ve seen...” He coughed again, pressing his hand to his side. “I’ve seen what is worse—a world where even the concept that other human beings are as human as you are is disappearing... and I see now, too, that this—this kind of lie—is what was starting in my own world, was being used like a weapon for whoever cared to wield it. That is how it starts...” He was silent for a moment, his face tense with the struggle against agony, and Tom saw the dark threads of blood creep from beneath him to mingle with the pale signs of the chalk.
Then he whispered, “I couldn’t let them have it. But when I went back... it wasn’t for that.”
“I know,” Saltwood said.
“Take care of her.”
He grinned wryly. “You think she’ll let me?”
A sharp spatter of gunfire crackled on the edge of the woods. Saltwood ducked instinctively, turned and ran back along the black track of footprints in the palely shining grass toward the red flash of Sara’s gun barrel. It was a party of Storm Troopers from Kegenwald. The whole countryside was probably alive with them, either seeking vengeance for the somewhat confused events of the night or still hunting for Rhion, unaware of what had gone on in the road cut. It really didn’t matter. The results would be the same.
The skirmish was sharp but protracted, a cat-and-mouse game of quick firefights and long waiting in the deepening cold, of slipping and stalking painstakingly through the absolute darkness of the pine woods, of waiting for a whisper, a breath, the movement of a shape against the slightly paler gleam of the frozen pine mast. Saltwood had done it a hundred times over the last few years, in the mountains of Spain and in training in the hills of Scotland, and upon occasion, more recently, in the wet fields of France. He had fought colder, fought hungrier, fought in worse physical shape, but when he came back to the car with the thin dawnlight streaking the sky above the trees he didn’t remember ever being this tired, this bone-weary of fighting, this fed up with the expediency of killing men to make the world a better place.
Since he’d gotten into the unions in his early twenties, it seemed to him that he’d always been fighting somebody to make the world a better place to live in. One day, he thought, if he survived the war, it would be good simply to live in it for a change.
Like Rhion, he wanted to go home.
Sara came out of the woods, an officer’s greatcoat slung over one arm and three more submachine guns hanging by their straps from her other shoulder. With characteristic practicality she had been looting the bodies of the slain. In the frame of her dark hair, her face was gray with strain and exhaustion, and blood smeared her hands and her knees, and tipped the ends of her hair. She stood for a long moment in the deep, frozen grass looking at Tom, and in her face, in the tired stoop of her body, he saw the sickness of utter weariness, of nausea with everything she had done from the day she had set out for Germany to rescue her father. She did not move toward him, but when he crossed to her, his feet crunching in the brittle weeds, she held out her arms, and they stood pressed together, locked in each other’s warmth for a long time while she wept.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered finally, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, a schoolgirl gesture that touched his heart. “I don’t... I’m not usually this stupid...” Her arms tightened around his waist, and he felt her shivering. ‘I’m really not—not like you’ve seen me at all. It’s just...”
“I hope you’re not too different when things are quiet,” Tom said,