The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,17
a lady, like a duchess in plain clothes, the other a striking redhead with eyes the color of the sherry in her glass. Like everyone else in the pub, they had gas masks with them, incongruous on the floor beside their worn leather handbags and as little regarded. The redhead’s voice was low and desperate as she went on, “I saw it in the crystal. I felt his coming on the night of the equinox... I felt it the first time he used the power of the leys. If he isn’t found, if he isn’t stopped...”
“He will be, darling,” the old lady’s comforting tones came, motherly and gentle through the drowsy fog of dreaming that padded Saltwood’s mind like a goose, down quilt. What they were saying made no sense, but it was good to just listen to women’s voices, after all those weeks of men, of gunfire, and of the overhead shriek of planes.
“Trust my husband to do his part, as we do ours. We have raised the power to keep the skies clear for the planes... later we can call down the clouds over the Channel... Alec!” she added in surprise, and Tom opened his eyes—or thought he opened his eyes, though he could very well have been dreaming, he thought—surely it was a dream that Mayfair had come into the pub, gas mask tucked under his arm, and was stooping, hesitant with arthritis, to kiss the little duchess on the lips.
“It is all being taken care of,” Mayfair said, and the red-haired woman sighed, her slim shoulders bowing suddenly, as if with exhausted relief. He added, “As the Americans say, God willing and the creek don’t rise...”
“No beer for you, Sergeant.”
Tom jerked awake, to see Hillyard standing at his elbow, a glass in either hand.
“I refuse to carry you all the way to Torrington Place.”
Saltwood blinked and rubbed his eyes. The table beside his was empty.
“Sorry for the delay.” Hillyard settled himself into the chair next to Tom and gave himself the lie by pushing a pint of Bass across to him. “They say they’ve got somewhere near seventeen thousand men landed at Dover and more coming over all the time... nearly all the army’s within the perimeter of Dunkirk. And the German armored divisions have definitely turned south, toward Paris. That leaves the Luftwaffe to contend with, but we may get a little breathing space... it’s my guess, in fact, that with Intelligence in a frenzy, there’ll be quite a delay in your setting out on your travels. It takes time to assemble papers, arrange transport, get photographs and maps, especially if one is doing it on the sneak.”
“Look,” Tom said curiously, as a few cautious sips of the nut-flavored ale cleared his head a little. “Just who is Mayfair? What department is he in? I mean, how did he find out about Sligo in the first place, if he’s not in Intelligence?”
“I didn’t ask.” Hillyard smiled. “Not that he’d have told me if I had. He’s in Finance—an auditor. Rumors do get around, especially the weird ones—perhaps he heard it from his wife.”
“His wife?” Alec, the little Duchess in his dream—if it had been a dream—had exclaimed. In her simple tweed skirt and strand of pearls under the neat home-knitted green cardigan the old lady had certainly been no Mata Hari. “Is she in Intelligence?”
Hillyard chuckled. “Intelligence? No—it’s just that for years there’s been a rumor going about that she’s a witch.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Wunderbar.”
Four
“WELL, TOTO,” RHION SIGHED, misquoting to an imaginary canine companion a line from the American cinema he had watched—with a certain amount of bemusement—last week, “I’d say just offhand that we are definitely not in Kansas anymore.” Over the din in the tavern the Woodsman’s Horn nobody heard, which was probably just as well.
There was a piano in the corner, a relic of the tavern’s more respectable days before the SS had been garrisoned at the Kegenwald labor camp. From Tally, Rhion had acquired an interest in all sorts of musical instruments, but the chief virtues of pianos seemed to be that they were capable of far more volume than any similar instrument in his own world, and that it was much easier to play them badly. Both attributes were being lavishly demonstrated at the moment by the Storm Trooper at the keyboard, and a dozen or so Troopers around him were bawling out the words to a filthy cabaret song about Jewish girls at the top of their collective