The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,65
name, but the Nazi mage made no move to greet him or to enter the room.
He understood—he had understood at breakfast—that he had placed himself outside the circle of those whom von Rath considered his own kind, placed himself, in effect, with the women and children being used for strafing practice on the road. He was now merely useful, for as long as that would last.
Thirteen
“YOU’RE CRAZY!”
“I thought your degree was in chemistry, not psychiatry,” Rhion retorted, pulling up his feet to sit cross-legged on the lumpy bed. “You have a better suggestion?”
“Yeah,” Sara said hotly. “I smuggle my father a gun instead of those silly pills and have him shoot himself instead of letting the guards do it.”
“If you could figure out a way to smuggle your father a gun instead of the pills we wouldn’t be having these problems.”
“No.” She sighed and shook her head, frizzy red hair catching the light of the candles in gold threads all around her square, slender shoulders as she leaned back in the room’s rump-sprung stuffed chair. “If Papa tried to blast his way out, he’d just hurt himself, or get into an argument about time travel or the internal combustion engine with the guards... Not that he knows anything about the internal combustion engine. When Mama would go visit her sisters in Pozen, my heart was in my throat every time Papa tried to light the stove or cut up a chicken to cook. He once nearly killed himself taking the chessboard down from a shelf.” She nudged the two pills—clumsy wads of gritty tallow on a twist of paper—on her knee with a fingertip, not meeting Rhion’s eyes. “Maybe we’d better just forget it. Thank you for wanting to help, but...”
“You don’t think I’m really a wizard, do you?”
She raised black-coffee eyes to his. “Oh, come on,” she said gently. “You’re sweet—you really are—but I was raised around people who thought they were wizards, you know? And about half of them claimed to be from another dimensional plane or from the future or the past, or reincarnated from being Albertus Magnus or the Dalai Lama or some kind of Inca sachem. They’d talk with Papa for hours about magic and spiritual forces and they’d swap spells like a couple of grannies trading recipes, and for what? I never saw Papa so much as keep the mice away, let alone make himself invisible so the Nazis wouldn’t see him.”
“I’m not going to make him invisible,” Rhion explained patiently. “I’m just going to make the guards look the other way while he crosses from the infirmary to the fence.”
“If you can do that, how come you’re sneaking in and out of here under the wire like the rest of us poor mortals?”
“Because it takes about an hour and a half of intense meditation and mental exercises to do it, and it wipes me out for the rest of the night.”
“Yeah,” Sara said wisely, getting to her feet and taking a cigarette from the pocket of her scarlet frock, “they always had some reason why they couldn’t do it either.”
Down below the voices of the guards drifted faintly up through the open window, the ubiquitous stink of tobacco smoke vying with the sharp sweetness of the pines. The last of the lingering northern twilight had faded less than an hour ago. As he’d listened to Sara’s high heels and Horst’s escorting jackboots ascend the attic stairs, Rhion had thought about how badly he’d missed the sound of a woman’s voice, surrounded as he had been for months by men.
“Sara,” he said, “I know you don’t believe in this. But believe that if your father doesn’t escape from Kegenwald, he’s going to die on the night of the twenty-first of this month in a way you don’t want to know about. I need this help, and we’ve got damn little time. You say you can get into the camp on Sunday?”
She nodded. She’d risen from the chair and walked to the window, to let her cigarette smoke drift out into the luminous dark. Candlelight softened the sharpness of her features and sparkled on the little gold chain she wore around the slender softness of her throat.
It was Saturday night. Von Rath must have paid the owner of the tavern a hefty wad of marks to make up for her absence—beyond a doubt Sara would have to surrender some of what was given her as well. The dress she wore, bias-cut cotton crepe that clung