The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,76
chill, hair and clothing sticking to him with sweat. Knees trembling with cramp, he got somehow to his feet and staggered off through the dark woods to the disused woodsman’s track where they’d hidden the car.
Sara was busy renewing the hot-wiring of the little Ford’s engine when he arrived. “Christ, I don’t believe it!” she breathed, as he slumped down onto the running board. “I don’t effing believe it! We must have been out in the open for thirty minutes! What the hell did you do?”
“I told you I’m a wizard.” He managed to grin.
“Are you all right, my son?” A long, bony hand closed around his arm, gently raising him. He looked up and met the dark eyes of the man he’d seen in the scrying crystal, the thin old man with the shaven head and the raw, new scar on his lip.
“Yeah,” he whispered, but when the old man opened the door for him Rhion almost fell into the car’s backseat. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”
The car moved off, Sara guiding it carefully down a farm track that had mostly gone back to ruts and potholes where it twisted through bracken, wild ivy, and trees. She dug in the glove box and produced a bar of American chocolate candy wrapped in paper, which she passed to them over the back of the front seat. “Give him this, Papa.”
Rhion gulped down half of the bar’s oily sweetness without even tasting it, then remembered Sara’s father probably hadn’t had anything resembling decent food for nine months and held out the rest of it to him.
The old man turned it over in long, blue-veined fingers, sniffed it interestedly, and said, “Well, according to Sylvester Graham, sugar is a pollution of the temple of the body, and I’m not sure whether chocolate is kosher or not because who knows what they put into the stuff, but as Rabbi Hillel said, it isn’t what goes into a man’s body that defiles it, but the words that come out of a man’s mouth... So I think an exception is in order. Thanks be to God... and to you, my son.” He popped the chocolate into his mouth and clasped Rhion’s hand while he chewed and swallowed. “And you are? My daughter only said she had a friend who would get me out.”
“Professor Rhion Sligo.” The Germanized form of the name was second nature to him now.
“Isaac Leibnitz. I don’t always smell like this, but I don’t suppose Jonah was any bundle of roses when he came out after spending three days in the belly of a fish, either. So they teach driving cars as well as stealing them in this New York University you went to, Saraleh?”
“You’d rather I stayed in Germany and learned to cook and clean and have babies for our Führer?” she tossed back over her shoulder. In point of fact the old man smelled like an animal, his patched clothing half rotted with old sweat and crawling with fleas, his mouth, when he spoke, showing the dark gaps of missing teeth. He was pallid, emaciated, and still shaky from two days of being sick from the pills Rhion had sent to guarantee that he’d be in the poorly guarded infirmary instead of the concrete cell in which “specially designated” prisoners were kept. But for all of that, there was about him a daft and gentle charm such as Rhion had encountered in other wizards in his own world, infinitely comforting in its familiarity after the greed, fanaticism, and inhuman obsessions of the Schloss Torweg mages.
“What did you do?” he asked gently after a moment. “Except deliver me from out of Gehinnom, for which I will always be more in your debt than you can ever conceive. What’s your birthdate, by the way?”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Rhion sat up and produced a handkerchief from his pocket to polish his glasses. “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to stick around for a few days and return the favor. As for what I did, I guess it’s called astral planing here. I’d meant to cast a spell of distraction on both guards, but I couldn’t do it from that distance.”
“No wonder you’re tired,” Leibnitz commented, stroking his stubbled lip in a kind of subconscious mourning for his vanished beard, while Sara made an undervoiced comment of her own in the front seat.
Rhion sighed and put his glasses back on. “It all takes so goddam much time and energy. I don’t know