The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,75
settled back as he had been before, his chin on his fist.
The old man squirmed awkwardly under the wire, sat up, looked with a start at what he must have assumed until then to be a young man, in her trousers and pullover, with her hat pulled down to hide her flaming hair. Rhion saw him grasp her arm, saw her shake free and signal for silence.
She pulled the props loose, shoved them into her bag, and took out a bundle of short pieces of wire. The old man slipped through the hole in the fence and waited while Sara pulled the slit shut again, secured it with a dozen twists of wire so it wouldn’t be obvious from a distance that it had been cut. Then they moved forward gingerly, slowly, under the dreaming eyes of the guns.
... touch of gun oil in the lock, a touch in the pin housing... not too much, too much is as bad as too little... they can never say I was less than perfect... soft white hands with red nails digging into the muscles of the back... The sweaty softness of those massive breasts, of thighs clutching at his hips... Again, oh please, again...
Sweat ran down Rhion’s face, his muscles aching as if the intensity of his concentration were a physical labor. Dammit, come on, I can’t keep on with this...
A few steps and pause. Wait. Creep-creep-pause. The floodlights glared behind them like harsh yellow moons, throwing feeble shadows on the bare ground, like two bugs paralyzed on a kitchen floor. The night breeze turned, and Rhion smelled a vast stench of human filth, overcrowded quarters, and, deeper and more hideous, the stink of death and narrow-minded evil.
They reached the trees. The old man flung his arms around Sara, bending his tall height to clasp her close, and even in his tranced state Rhion reflected that it was the first time he’d seen Sara respond with uncalculated warmth to any man’s touch. She reached joyfully up to fling her arms around his neck, for that one second her father’s little girl again, happy, clean, and filled with love. His mind still on the guards, Rhion didn’t hear clearly the old man’s first half-sobbing words or what Sara replied, but he saw her place a hand on her father’s arm when he turned toward where Rhion knelt and shake her head. As Rhion had instructed her beforehand, she led her father away through the bracken and impenetrable shadows, toward the road where the Mayor of Kegenwald’s car was hidden.
Rhion let his mental voice die into a gentle soughing. His two dim psychic twins stepped in unison to the wide openings in the turret walls, swung themselves over the wooden rails and out into the dark air. Between the towers they met and melded into one. For a moment from that high vantage point, Rhion looked down on the camp itself, long wooden buildings already beginning to warp and split, heavier cement constructions beyond them—barracks, offices, workrooms, cells of solitary confinement or special purpose, raw-new or the older structures of the old pulp mill the place had originally been—and the pale barren rectangle of the exercise yard, all lying stark and motionless within the steel-thorned boundary of towers and fence. And because he was not within his body, he saw clearly the glow of horror that hung over the place, a sickly greenish mist, as if the very air were rotting from what was done within that place.
Turning, sickened, Rhion looked out over the woods and road in the luminous chill of the starlight. The somber pines were still and utterly dark. He saw no cars, no track of trampled bracken, and no sign that they had been pursued, observed, or detected. So far, so good.
He walked down over the air above the defoliated hillside, and in the darkness at the woods’ rim saw a pudgy little form in old army trousers and a snagged white sweater, kneeling with head bowed in the dim scratchwork of a magic circle, the starlight glinting in his silver-rimmed glasses and on the sweat upon his face. He passed through the invisible door that lay between them, settling himself around the armature of those sturdy bones; then closed and sealed the door behind him.
Sickness hit him like a blow with a club. He doubled over, swearing in German as he felt the blood leave his face and extremities; though it was a mild night, he shivered with desperate