The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,163
word just before we left England, a message for you from a Mr. Mayfair. He said he’d put through special immigration papers for Mr. Leibnitz—as a former prisoner of the SS there’ll be no problem.”
“When I was just somebody Hitler wanted to have starved and beaten to death it was ‘Well, everybody’s got their troubles,’ ” Leibnitz muttered under his breath as the copilot’s dark form vanished once more behind the cockpit curtain. “But let them think I can be of some use to them, and they’re baking me a cake. Made it where?”
Tom glanced down at Sara’s sleeping form, tucked one cigarette behind his ear, and busied himself with lighting the other. The gold glow of the match outlined his cupped hands in light, sparkled in the silky whiteness of Leibnitz’ beard. He lowered his voice, as if fearful that even in her sleep, Sara would sigh and roll her eyes in disgust. “Made it back to where he came from.”
The smell of burnt sulfur whiffed a little in the cold air of the cabin, then a draft dispersed the thin ribbon of smoke to nothing again.
Leibnitz’ voice spoke out of the dark. “There was a lot of power released that night—in the battle, in the destruction of the Spiracle, in the implosion of the field and the rising-up in rage of all those talismans von Rath had made for himself... All that power channeled to magic, picked up by the net of the leys, spread out to the corners of the world and brought back again. Power far beyond the power of the equinoxes, the power of the heavens... power such as this world has not known in along time.”
By daylight, Tom thought—when they stumbled off this flying sardine can onto the tarmac of Coventry Field in the gray fog of an English morning—he wouldn’t believe this anymore, either. He knew he’d start to wonder if he’d looked closely enough at the frost around the standing stones, or if Rhion had been less badly wounded than he’d seemed. But now he remembered only the glint of the five jewels in that last pouring stream of lightning, and the way Rhion’s upturned glasses had picked up the glare of it, and the dark blood mingling with the scribbled spiderweb of chalk upon the stone, with no body in the center where a body had lain before.
Months later, long after it had become obvious that the cross-Channel invasion had, in fact, been canceled for that year, on one of his trips down to London, he was to stop in at the Red Cow again and encounter Alec Mayfair, grizzled and slow and cautious as ever...
And because of their conversation on that occasion Mayfair lent him a copy of a dossier, a folder filled with copies of Intelligence reports not considered secret enough or important enough to rate special classification. The reports spoke of a massive series of escapes from concentration camps and labor camps throughout Germany: during an outbreak of inexplicable fires at Dachau that kept the guards too busy to notice the departure of eighty-seven Jews led by three of von Rath’s “specially designated” Kabbalists; unexplained quarrels among the guards at Buchenwald that amounted to a campwide riot during which fifty-four Polish, Jewish, and gypsy children vanished from the camp along with a “specially designated” gypsy witch; the execution of three guards at Gross Rosen for neglect of duty in allowing twelve Jewish and Polish occultists apparently to cut the wires literally under their noses and walk out; and others; many others... all, apparently, at or about midnight on the night of September 23.
There were other matters in the file, too: notes of a British coven raising a visible cone of white light that was seen by a number of witnesses to stretch eastward through the black overcast of the skies toward Germany; a copy of a Gestapo report of the collapse of scaffolding supporting landing barges destined for the invasion at Brest pinned to a local newspaper clipping from the village of Carnac on the Quiburon Peninsula forty miles to the south telling of “lights” seen among the long rows of standing stones at the very hour of the scaffolding’s collapse—midnight of the twenty-third—and of the strange things found in the morning among cold ashes at the foot of a menhir known as Le Manio.
An article from the Indian Hill, Massachusetts, Intelligencer describing the onstage heart attack of a vaudeville magician during the six P.M. show on the