The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,98

of the stars moved slightly overhead; the moon climbed, unconcerned, toward her shining zenith.

Please?

The power of the ancient stone, pouring up through him toward the balanced stars, began to fade at three. He clung to it for as long as he could, but felt it go, as the swinging momentum of the universe slid away and its vast, lazy turning resumed its wonted course. Still Rhion remained, standing upright on the stone, the staff upraised in his hands, until his knees shook with the exhaustion of forty-eight hours of fatigue and dread, and the world lapsed back from its waking dream of magic into its accustomed sleep.

They hadn’t heard or couldn’t come—or had decided, for reasons best known to them, to leave him where he was.

Or it might just be that Sara was right. He had only dreamed of Tally and Jaldis, of his sons and his parents and the world in which he had grown up, dreamed while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Perhaps the truth—the real truth—was merely something he had forgotten.

He closed his eyes, fighting to believe this was not the case. For a moment it seemed that everything within him ripped and gave, and inner darkness poured into the hollow that was left. Opening them, he called the last fragments of strength, or hallucination, to stare into the darkness—if it was darkness—seeking some tiny splinter of light, a mark, a rune, a thread of magic to guide him through...

But there was nothing. Only the slow growing of a pallid dawnlight and the death, each by each, of the stars before the prosaic white of day.

He lowered his arms, letting the field of Void magic around him die. His back and shoulders ached and his knees and hands were trembling, pains scarcely noticed and nothing beside the hurt that consumed him and left only hollowness behind. Tears tracked down his face, salty on his lips and wet in his beard. He bowed his head.

Then a quiet voice broke the dawn stillness. “Give me what you have in your hand.”

He turned on the worn stone altar.

Twenty Storm Troopers were ranged in a semicircle behind him, rifles and submachine guns trained. At the center of the arc stood Paul von Rath, seared and haggard face somehow shocking in the nacreous morning light. “I see Poincelles was quite right about where he guessed you would be—he had been watching you for weeks, you know—and what you would attempt. A worthy wizard, if spiteful as a woman. Worthy indeed to have been the sacrifice for our solstice power. I think when we came for him he was surprised. Now give me what you have in your hand.”

He did not raise his voice. It was soft and balanced, like the way he stood, tense in his black uniform and polished boots, eyes gray and cold as glacier ice. Sara stood beside him, his arm locked around her neck, the silver blade of his SS dagger pressed to her throat.

Equinox

Eighteen

THE HOUSE IDENTIFIED BY intelligence by von Rath’s Berlin headquarters stood isolated in the colorless autumn wasteland of empty fields, scrubby birch and pinewoods and nodding weed stems that stretched along the Spandau canal north and west of the city, a wasteland Berliners called the Jungfern Heide. Limping awkwardly down the long drive that connected it to the tramline of the Alt-Moabitstrasse, Captain Thomas Saltwood studied what could be seen of the building above its gray stone wall. The steep roof had shingles cut out in coy Victorian half circles like a fish’s scales, a bit of rusted iron gingerbread along its ridge crest, and two rounded dormers that spoke of attics above the second floor. Or first floor, as the British would have it, Tom thought with a wry grin. In Barcelona he’d nearly gotten himself killed by climbing one flight of stairs too few to meet a local Communist leader in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong flat. He still remembered the disgusted lecture Hillyard had given him on the King’s English, once the shooting was done.

As the long-delayed Intelligence reports had indicated, the nearest house—another middle-class Victorian villa—was boarded up and deserted, over a half mile away, and the isolation of the SS house was further emphasized by the wire fence enclosing nearly an acre of ground outside its already forbidding stone wall.

“But it beats hell out of that lodge in the forest they were in all summer,” Tom murmured to himself, as he let himself through the unlocked,