The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,93
they’re gonna hold a prisoner. If you say they’re going to be making a big sacrifice on the solstice...”
“If they unbolted the washroom that connects to that room,” Rhion said quietly, “it argues for longer than a day. And that bed not only had blankets, it had pillows. There’s only one prisoner in this place I can think of who rates a pillow and an easy chair. That room was fixed up for me. They planned to lock me up the day before the solstice, just in case.”
“So, you think they don’t trust you?” Leibnitz inquired, and Rhion grinned.
“As for what we do now... We lie low.” He replaced the Spiracle on its string in the open neck of his shirt, the jewels gleaming softly in the dark tangle of chest hair. “Here, for twenty-four hours, while they’re out searching the woods. Tomorrow morning, just before dawn, we slip out and hide in the woods.”
“Great,” Sara muttered savagely. She pulled off her cap and shook out her hair with an impatient gesture, the grimy light catching metallic splinters of brass in the red. “You get the whole countryside up in arms—it’s gonna be a real trick for me to get back to town long enough to collect the food and clothes and money I’ve got stashed in my room, let alone getting the three of us to the Swiss border.” Her voice was soft—they were all whispering barely louder than breath—but dripped with sarcasm. “Not to mention the fact that we don’t even have identity cards for you, and on the run we sure as hell won’t have a chance to get them.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rhion said softly. “I’m not coming with you. And once the solstice is over—after midnight Friday—von Rath won’t be searching nearly as intently for me. He knows he has to catch me before the solstice, before the pull of the sun-tide gives me the power I need to open the gate in the Void and make the crossing to my own universe. That’s why he’s turning out his entire force now.”
“Fair enough,” Rebbe Leibnitz agreed and, rolling over onto both elbows, pulled a stub of pencil and his pince-nez from his pocket and began making a numerological calculation of the most auspicious hour and minute to leave the attic on the dusty plaster beneath the beam where he lay.
“I hate to break this to you, cupcake,” Sara whispered dourly, “but there ain’t no Santa Claus. Von Rath has mobilized the goon squad because he’s afraid you’re going to hightail it to England and spill your guts to Winnie Churchill. Within a week, this search is going to be nationwide.” She sat up tailor fashion, slim and straight, with her red hair hanging down over her square, thin shoulders and jutting breasts beneath the grimy shirt. Some of the acid left her voice, and there was concern in her dark eyes. “You poor deluded boob, what do you think’s going to happen to you tomorrow night? You’ll just go ‘poof and disappear?”
“Yes,” Rhion said simply. “I hope so.”
“Oy gevalt... We all hope so, but it doesn’t work that way.” She started to pull up her shirt to get at the money belt Rhion knew she habitually wore underneath, then paused, cast a quick glance at her father—obliviously working out some kind of calculation from a vesica piscis drawn over the Square of Mercury—and turned her back on both men. Rhion looked away from the girl’s slender rib cage visible beneath a bizarre strap-work of lace and elastic underpinnings, and tried with indifferent success to think of other things.
She turned back, shirt tail hanging out and a creased wad of papers and marks in her hand. “These might do us in an emergency, if I can’t get to the rest of my stuff,” she said. “And I might not. They know I’m your—ah—friend...” She cast another quick glance at her father, as if she feared that he had somehow, within the camp, heard rumors about the redheaded bar girl at the Woodsman’s Horn and intuitively connected them with his only child. “Once we get on the road it’s gonna be a trick to hide Papa’s head till his hair grows out a little.”
She transferred the papers to her pocket, withdrew from the same pocket a pack of filthy cards and shuffled them deftly, quietly, in the half light. In the yard below, the sounds of departure had died. The smell of dust was fading. A woodpecker’s