The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,162

and kissed her gently on the lips.

She shook her head, holding him closer, her face pressed to the old, dry bullet holes and bloodstains of his jacket. “I don’t know what I’m like anymore. Like I’ve been torn apart and haven’t been put back together yet. That’s—that’s the worst of this.”

“Well,” he said softly, “I’ll be there, if you want me to stick around, while you’re figuring it out. There’s no hurry. Warm up the car.” From the tail of his eye he could see her father crawling stiffly out from under the Mercedes where he’d taken refuge during the shooting, picking frozen weed stems out of his car rug and beard. “I’ll be back,” Tom promised gently. “And then I’ll take you home.”

He climbed the sloping meadow in the pewter twilight of dawn, the frost-thick grass crunching under his boots, his automatic in his hand. He’d been afraid the Storm Troopers had gotten to Rhion, but a glance at the stiffened carpet of the grass told him otherwise—it would have held the mark of a butterfly’s foot. It shimmered eerily, like powdered silver, in the light of the moon that hung like a baroque pearl above the hill where the old holy place had been. The frost there was thicker, all but covering the tracks he, Sara, and her father had left a few hours ago. It furred the ancient altar of sacrifice, half obscuring the crooked abracadabra that Leibnitz had written there in the hopeless hope of attracting the attention of some mythical convocation of wizards gathered in the Emerald City of Rhion’s deranged dreams.

But the odd thing was that it seemed to have worked.

The black greatcoat lay flung back, stiff with rime and patched with blood, and blood lay in congealing puddles on the age-pitted surface of the enchanted stone itself, mixing with the Kabbalistic nonsense of signs. But of Rhion himself there was no trace, nor did any track but Saltwood’s own cut the frost that glittered in a carpet of fragile ice in every direction.

Twenty-eight

“D’YOU THINK HE made it?”

The drone of the DC-3’s engines steadied as they reached cruising speed; Tom Saltwood turned away from the icy window glass through which could be seen a fumy, tossing ocean of cloud, ink and pewter meringued with the icy white of the late-rising moon. Pillars and columns of vapor loomed around them, solid-seeming as the mountains of some fantastic landscape. Tom hoped the gangly Yorkshireman in the cockpit knew what the hell he was doing, because at black and freezing three A.M., he wasn’t even sure he himself could have said which way England lay under all that cloud cover, much less how to get there without crashing. He also hoped the Freedom Fighters in Danzig had gotten their radio message through to England, and that they weren’t going to be met by a squad of Spitfires, after all the long, exhausting journey to Danzig and two days of hiding out in the radio man’s cellar, living on canned beans.

But at the moment, he scarcely cared. They were airborne. The Luftwaffe, being largely occupied elsewhere, hadn’t sent a plane after them beyond one or two cursory shots as they’d passed over Danzig.

It was over.

He felt as he had felt jammed in a corner of the destroyer Codrington’s gun deck, grimy and exhausted, amid stinks of oil and cordite, sweat and vomit, and feeling glad to be there with all of his soul that was still awake enough to feel anything...

It was over. He was heading home.

The DC-3 had been stripped for conversion to a cargo carrier, and rattled like an empty boxcar. Curled on the cleated wood decking at his side, Sara lay wrapped in a couple of gray Army blankets, her crazy red-and-black hair glinting every now and then when the jogging gleams of the dim cockpit lights struck it. Other than that, the narrow hold was in darkness, Rebbe Leibnitz hawklike face no more than a pale blur and a liquid gleam of eyes.

“Made it?” the old man asked, the lift of his eyebrow audible as a note in his voice.

Shadow blotted the dim glow of the cockpit lights; a voice with a soft Somersetshire burr said, “We’re leveled off—will you have a cigarette, Captain?”

“Yes—thanks,” Tom said, and the copilot leaned in to extend a pack. “Mind if I take another for Miss Leibnitz when she wakes up? She’ll kill me if I don’t ask.”

The man laughed. “By all means. By the way, we got