The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,34

had been the laundry beyond, also dusty and disused, for both cooking and washing were done for the mages in the SS barracks. He cautiously unbolted the outside door that looked out onto the deserted corner of the yard facing the hills.

It was still empty. Poincelles had paid the guards well.

Retracing his steps quickly to the kitchen, Rhion collected a couple of short logs from the bottom of the old woodbox. Then he pulled on his boots, took a deep breath, and stepped outside.

No one challenged him. There was no guard in sight. Behind him, in the shadow of the ornamental turrets, the russet curtains of von Rath’s study were shut.

Rhion crossed to the fence, propped the wire as he had seen Poincelles do, and, taking meticulous care not to touch it, slithered under.

He was free.

Free of money, food, and identity papers, he reminded himself firmly as he removed the logs and carried them to the shadows of the woods, all the while suppressing the impulse to leap in the air, to shout, and to dance—without the slightest idea of where he was or any convincing account of his business. Wonderful—I’ll be shot as a British spy before von Rath has time to figure out what’s taking me so long to come down to breakfast.

But free nonetheless! The cool thin smells of pine and fern were headier than von Rath’s cognac. He stashed the logs where he could easily find them again and set off after Poincelles.

Had Poincelles been able to see in the dark, as the wizards of Rhion’s world could, or had he been in the slightest bit used to traveling cross-country, Rhion would never have been able to track him. But the Frenchman was a city creature, a denizen of those bizarre places of which Rhion had only heard tales—Paris, Vienna, Berlin—and moved clumsily, leaving a trail of crushed fern, broken saplings, and footprints mashed in the thick scented carpet of fallen needles underfoot that Rhion, after seven years among the island thickets of the Drowned Lands, could have followed, he thought disgustedly, if he hadn’t been night-sighted. He overtook his quarry easily and moved along, an unobtrusive brown shadow in the denser gloom, while the gawky form plowed through pockets of waist-deep bracken and wild ivy and scrambled over fallen trunks or the granite boulders that dotted the steeply rising ground.

At length they reached the road, neglected and overgrown, but still passable through the hills. Rhion recognized the road cutting in which they’d been stopped on that first excursion to Witches Hill by the work party of slave laborers from the Kegenwald camp. Now on level ground, Poincelles strode on more swiftly, jacket flapping and the frail starlight gleaming on his greasy hair, trailing an odor of cigar smoke and sweat. Atop the cut bank in the green-black gloom beneath the trees, Rhion followed. On the other side of the hills—perhaps three miles’ swift walk—Poincelles turned off to the right down a weed-choked cart track, and in time, through the straight black of the pine trunks, Rhion glimpsed stars above a cleared meadow and the dark outlines of a barn. Part of the old estate farm of Schloss Torweg, he guessed, which had fallen to ruin in the crazy-money years, as Baldur had said. The meadow, like that around Witches Hill, was thickly overgrown and mostly turned to a sour and spongy swamp as the ponds and lakelets that dotted the landscape had spread and silted. The path that led to the barn was nearly invisible under saplings of dogwood and elder, and Poincelles, burdened still with his satchel and puffing heavily now, fought his way through them like a man in a jungle, making enough noise to startle the incessant peeping of the marsh frogs to offended silence.

He was clearly headed for the barn. Arms folded, Rhion waited in the tepid shadows of a thicket of young maples on the other side of the road. In time the crickets recommenced their cries, the frogs taking up the bass line, and after a moment, a nightingale added a comment in a liquid, hesitant alto. Only after several minutes had passed and Rhion was certain he would be unobserved as he crossed the relatively open meadow did he move on.

Not a light showed from the barn; but, as he approached it, Rhion scented incense, thick and oversweet, on the warm spring air. A moment later the deep, soaring bass of Poincelles’ voice sounded from within, and Rhion