The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,37

feet, knees trembling. It was an hour’s walk back to the Schloss, and after last night’s efforts at scrying he was achingly short of sleep.

On his way down the hill he paused and looked back at the Dancing Stones. They seemed to have sunk back in on themselves, returned to being no more than three massive, almost shapeless slabs of rock, half hidden by the long grass of the neglected hill.

If any living magic remained in them it was too dim, too deeply buried, for his own attenuated powers to raise. But at solstice-tide it would draw on the powers of the leys, and that would help. And it was bright enough to serve as a beacon, provided he could get word to Shavus about what to look for in the dark of the Void.

He turned and headed back to his prison again.

He reached it an hour before the early summer dawn. Watching from the edge of the woods, he saw no sign of a guard. “At least Poincelles got his money’s worth out of something tonight,” he muttered, as he set up his props and wriggled under the fence. On the walk back, he’d felt sick from the strain of concentration; now that had passed, and he was ravenously hungry. As he slipped through the laundry room door his mind was chiefly occupied with ways to sneak a few hours of unnoticed sleep during the day.

Then he saw that the door into the old kitchen was open. He’d closed it behind him—he knew he had. A guard? he wondered, and then his eye lighted on two pieces of wood, suspiciously similar to the short logs still tucked beneath his arm, lying against the wall where the shadows were thickest. If he hadn’t been night-sighted he wouldn’t have seen then at all.

Poincelles would have bolted the outside door when he came in. So would a guard who found it open.

God damn it.

So someone else was poking about the Schloss at night, undoubtedly the same someone who had searched Baldur’s room, perhaps who had searched his own.

He set down one of his props silently and hefted the longer one clubwise in his left hand. He wondered if he should summon a guard to take care of the intruder, if there was an intruder, but realized in the next instant that it would only lead to questions about what he was doing wandering about at two in the morning with dew-soaked trouser legs and pine needles sticking to his boots.

Pushing his glasses firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, he tiptoed to the half-open door.

Like the disused laundry room, the old kitchen was dark and almost empty, containing little but old counters and a big stone sink. The door opened to his left. Taking a deep breath, he sprang forward and slammed it back fast and hard.

Unfortunately the unknown intruder was hiding under a counter to the right of the door, and an arm was around his neck and jerking him backward before he could react to the swish of trouser cloth and the stink of ingrained tobacco smoke behind him.

He twisted against the grip, fighting for balance. Tearing pain sliced his upper arm; he flailed with the club, wrenching and thrashing, and half felt, half heard a knife go clattering at the same moment an elbow smashed him full force across the face, sending his glasses spinning off sideways as he crashed back against the sharp edge of the sink. Before he could get his breath a fist caught him in the solar plexus with an impact like a club.

For an instant as he crumpled over, he remembered the knife and thought, This isn’t fair... Then swift footfalls retreated and left him lying at the foot of the sink wondering if his lungs would ever work again. He had just come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t when other footfalls, distant but purposeful in the opposite direction, warned him that the SS was on its way.

“Just what I need,” he gasped, lurching painfully to his feet. “Protection.” For a moment he thought he was going to vomit; the small of his back where he’d slammed into the sink hurt more than he’d thought possible, and he could feel the side of his face beginning to puff up. His right arm hurt, but he could move it, and he felt blood soaking into his shirt sleeve. It took him a nerve-wracking minute to find what was left of his glasses, twisted