The Magicians of Night

Twenty-five


“YOU BROUGHT THE RESONATOR here, didn’t you?” Rebbe Leibnitz spoke so calmly, so conversationally, that for a moment Saltwood thought von Rath was going to be surprised into answering him man to man. The SS wizard paused on the threshold of the great, grim old stone lodge on its flattened hill, startled, and looked back at the elderly Jew in the glow of the hall lights as they passed inside; he even opened his mouth to reply. Then he seemed to settle back a little—Tom had seen the same effect when an Alabama bigot was addressed from behind by an educated black man—and cold superiority returned to his eyes. He had, after all, been addressed not by a real man, but by only a whatever “only” was in these parts.

His smile was that same flat stretching of the lips. “He was a fool to have left it,” he said softly. “Did he think I would bow meekly to that imbecile Himmler’s insistence that you were headed west to England? That I couldn’t come up with enough of my own men to follow him to the ends of the earth to recover the Spiracle and avenge its theft?”

“I thought he’d made it to begin with,” Tom said, and the frosted quicksilver gaze turned upon him.

“The Spiracle is the property of the Reich’s destiny, the tool of its ultimate triumph. As I am its tool.” Saltwood wasn’t fooled by the well-bred calm of his voice: it was the voice of a man insane with jealousy, quietly citing every rational reason why his woman had no right to leave him—to leave HIM. He could see von Rath almost visibly trembling with hate.

“We are all its tools,” said that shiningly beautiful youth—whose name was apparently Baldur, too—who dogged at his elbow in the same fashion Baldur Twisselpeck had back in Berlin. And where was Twisselpeck, anyway? Saltwood wondered obliquely.

The young man sniffled and put a hand on von Rath’s elbow, then went on in a curiously familiar whining voice, “And he’ll pay for it, P-Pauli. Don’t worry. Let me do it this time instead of Gall—I’ll see to it.

“Indeed.” This time von Rath’s smile was genuine. “And the Resonator can run for years, I expect, on the power we will raise from that—payment. The soul of a wizard, trained and empowered...”

Madre de Dios! Saltwood thought, shaken by what he saw in that dreamy smile. He really BELIEVES it!

“A pity we won’t be able to take him until nearly midnight,” Gall said, coming up to join the other two, like a demented patriarch with his flowing locks and silver beard. “Between the old Jew and the forces of the equinox itself I should be able to raise the energies to make quite a tolerable talisman of power—although not as much as if you yourself were to be officiating—but it does seem a waste.”

But if von Rath believes it’s magic, Saltwood thought, groping in confusion for some thread of rationality in all this, and Rhion believes it, and evidently Gall and Twisselpeck and this other Baldur, whoever HE is... Then who IS the scientific brains behind this—this device, whatever it is? How can they make it work if they’re ALL nuts?

Von Rath turned and studied them by the dreary glow of the hallway lamps. The fading of the smile he’d worn when contemplating Rhion’s death under the knife—and Sara had told Saltwood during the drive of how these self-styled mages “raised power”—left his face completely inhuman again, as if the only emotion of which he was capable were inseparably connected to the Spiracle—as if to him, only the Spiracle and the powers it gave him were real.

He reached out and cupped Sara’s chin with his hand. “Where will he be?”

She pulled back angrily and the gloved black grip tightened, the guard who held her handcuffed wrists behind her shoving her forward again. Saltwood was aware that any struggle on his part would be useless, for there were two guards holding his arms, besides the dozen or so ranged around the wood-paneled hallway with guns. But he was aware of an overwhelming desire to smash in that scarred, godlike face.

Sara said, “I don’t know, goy.”

As calmly as he had struck Saltwood for mouthing off at Himmler, von Rath slapped her, keeping hold of her chin with his other hand to prevent her head from giving with the blow. Tom gritted his teeth and looked away, knowing a struggle wouldn’t help Sara and might get him hurt badly enough to prevent later escape. When he looked back, he saw the red welt puffing up on the girl’s cheekbone and the involuntary tears of pain in her eyes.

“I know he’s in the neighborhood by the fact that the Resonator has come to life,” von Rath went on softly. “Ironic, isn’t it? Had he not been approaching—though to be sure, with the power from the temple here the field of magic is nearly eighty kilometers wide—I would not have been able to use my powers to capture you with such ease. I shall have to tell him that, as he watches you die. And having captured you, I think taking him will be an easy matter. Surely he isn’t fool enough to come here with any kind of silly notion of reopening the Dark Well—I’m sure he knows as well as I do that it cannot be done. Will it be the Dancing Stones again? Or that barn Poincelles used? I never was certain how much power that French untermensch was able to raise with those degenerate rites he practiced, and our little friend may know some way to utilize it... Was that why he wanted you?”

Her voice shook slightly. “He never laid a hand on me.”

The golden Baldur giggled like a schoolboy. “Didn’t want a dose of the clap, I expect.”

“Be still.” The inflection was that of a man ordering a dog to sit, and Baldur’s square, noble mouth puckered in a pout. “Where will he be?”

“He didn’t say.”

Von Rath shrugged and nodded to his men. “Take her into the dining room. Gall, get the tools...”

“This is stupid!” Saltwood raged, yanking against the grip of the men who held him, and at the same moment Leibnitz spoke quickly.

“Don’t tell him anything.”

“For Chrissake!”

All trace of the old man’s slightly comic air of resignation was gone. His dark eyes flashed with calm authority. “Better she should die than the Spiracle fall into their hands again,” he said quietly. “She knows it.” He turned back to his daughter. “Don’t you, Saraleh?”

Sara hesitated, mouth taut and eyes darting, suddenly huge in a face white as chalk. She doesn’t know THAT, Tom thought, but she sure as hell knows what von Rath will do to Rhion when he catches him.

“To hell with that,” he said sharply, his eyes going to von Rath. “He’s heading for the standing stones.”

Von Rath’s cold glance went immediately to Leibnitz, who had turned his face away, then to Sara’s tear-brimming eyes and the relaxed slump of her shoulders. “So,” he said quietly. “Baldur, see them locked up. Jacobus, come with me. If the two of you are going to be performing the sacrifice without me tomorrow night...” His voice faded as he climbed the stairs, the white-haired crackpot and two stone-faced guards in his wake.

Baldur signaled the other guards with a jerk of his hand, a weirdly schoolboyish gesture for an officer of the SS, and started after his master toward the stairs. Leibnitz turned to the young man as if they had been alone in the dingy hallway and said quietly, “He’s mageborn, Baldur. You think he doesn’t see you as you are?”

The young man stopped, his ridiculously crestfallen expression wildly inappropriate on that beautiful face. “I—” he stammered, halting, and the guards, too, stopped. He sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Of—of c-course he sees everything. But one has one’s p-pride, and—and there are the others... And after all these years...”

What the HELL are they talking about?

The beautiful youth shuffled his feet, sniffled again, and ran a nervous hand through the tawny splendor of his hair. “It—it came to me tonight, when Paul’s power... That is—I realized I c-could be however I chose, look however I willed. With the field of the Resonator I have power! For the first time in my life, it is as I have always dreamed it would be! Would you like to see it?” There was suddenly an ugly glitter in his eyes. “You’ll see it tomorrow night anyway, Jew.”

“Yes,” Leibnitz said gently. “Yes, I would.”

Baldur snapped his fingers at the guards like the Crown Prince of Ruritania in an MGM musical. “Bring them.”

To do him credit, the sergeant hesitated, but apparently thought better of any remark containing the words ought not. In any case, Saltwood thought, there were enough and more than enough guards to subdue the three of them, and more yet visible through the door of the watch room which led off the hall. Led by Baldur, the squad escorted them down a short corridor to a locked door, Saltwood wondering how much more insane things would get. There had to be reality somewhere under this increasingly baffling layer cake of fantasy, reality that could be used to escape, at least to get word to England...

As he unlocked the double mahogany doors Baldur said, quite seriously, to the sergeant, “Kill them if they attempt to cross the threshold. Beyond it is holy ground.”

Oh, boy!

For the first moment Saltwood had a vague impression of darkness, of black walls on which silver hoodoo signs gleamed softly in the reflection of the dim corridor light, of a faint smell that must have been much worse closer up, for the old rabbi drew back with an expression of revulsion and horror, as if the door had been opened to a charnel house.

And with Leibnitz out of the doorway, Saltwood could peer inside.

There still wasn’t much to see. Marvello the Magnificent had put up a better front in a canvas tent. By comparison with the Meditation Chamber of the Swami of the Celestial Realms, the place was stark and the decorations amateurish. There wasn’t even the inevitable portrait of Hitler on the wall—only a crimson swastika, seeming to burn somberly against the darkness. And yet... and yet...

The place raised the hackles on Tom’s neck.

On the black altar in the center stood the widget he’d last seen by candlelight in the locked bedroom in Berlin, the device he hadn’t paid much attention to, being in the process of getting ready to strangle its inventor. The grimy light from the hall must have caught odd reflections in those spheres of glass wound like bubbles in kelp among the strips of iron, for they had an odd glow that seemed to be answered from one portion of the heart of that fist-size lump of raw crystal. Even the rough iron and the other metal—brass or gold, though surely it couldn’t be gold—had a glitter that, through a trick of the shadows—maybe one of the guards behind him was moving—seemed to pulse like the beat of a heart.

Whatever was going on, Saltwood thought uneasily, backing away, it might not be magic, but it was pretty damn weird. Just what had he seen in his rearview mirror? How had von Rath been so sure his gun would jam?

Magnetic field? he wondered, trying to separate what little he knew of actual science from Einstein’s speculations and Flash Gordon serials. Something under the altar, maybe? It’s one for Mayfair’s boffins, if I can even get word of it back to them... Christ, they’re starting the invasion the day after tomorrow!

Leibnitz’ deep voice interrupted his thoughts. “I wonder how long it’s going to take Himmler—and Hitler, for that matter—to realize they’re playing Frankenstein to von Rath’s Adam.”

“And why not?” Baldur retorted hotly, his voice scaling up nearly an octave with excitement, his blue eyes glittering as if drugged. “Not the Adam of that stupid fable, not a monster against nature, but the culmination of nature, the New Adam of the Reich’s destiny. Why shouldn’t it be P-P-Paul? He can raise power! He can store it in talismans! And when he achieves the Spiracle Rhion stole from him, he’ll be able to use it against his enemies, outside the Reich and within it. The SS has always known the virtue of magic, so what better glory can they ask than magic itself?...”

The boy was working himself into a frenzy. Saltwood, feverishly calculating ways and means of escaping at least long enough to get hold of a radio and warn England, barely listened. But as Baldur turned to close and lock the “temple” doors and the guards led their prisoners away, he cast one glance back, and wondered why he had the impression, even as the shadows fell across it, that Rhion’s Resonator glowed more brightly in the dark.

“Now would you mind telling me,” Saltwood asked, crossing the bedroom to make sure the window bars were as firmly embedded in the concrete of the sill as they looked, “what the hell that was all about? You sounded like you knew that kid.” The bars were solid. They were lucky, he supposed, that the window wasn’t boarded over, as it had been quite recently by the look of the woodwork around it. It would have been nice had the heat in the rest of the house penetrated to this room, but one couldn’t expect everything.

The salt-white glare of the arclights in the yard—they were far out of range of even the most stray British bomber—turned Leibnitz’ long hair to silver as he sat wearily down on the bare mattress of the bed. “Oh, I do. Baldur Twisselpeck, one of von Rath’s tame wizards.”

“Baldur Twisselpeck?”

At the same time Sara, halting in her examination of the wooden walls, the floorboards, the ceiling for possible means of egress, turned to stare at her father. “That’s crazy! Baldur is that poor greasy shmendrik who followed von Rath everyplace...”

“That was him,” Leibnitz said and, when Sara stared at him in the dense pewter-colored gloom, “Wasn’t that his voice?”

She hesitated, thinking back. Then she shook her head, the tangle of her red-and-black hair swirling. “Papa, that’s insane! Baldur was a geek, a nuchshlepper! It couldn’t be a disguise; that kid’s six inches taller, the eyes weren’t the same color, and the face...” She hesitated again.

“It is illusion.” Leibnitz drew up his long legs to sit tailor-fashion on the end of the iron-framed cot. “Like the illusions of the lights that pursued us on the road, the illusions you both saw in their little tests... Like half those guards downstairs were illusions. Von Rath hasn’t got twenty men in this house. How could he have got more than that away when Himmler wanted them all on the westward roads?”

“Thanks for not telling me that downstairs,” Saltwood grumbled, prowling back to the door to verify that the hinges were, in fact, on the outside. “I’d have had a nervous breakdown trying to figure out which ones to watch out for.” What would he have done, he wondered, if Leibnitz had said down there, Hey, pal, half those guys aren’t real. Like Rhion, the old man could be weirdly authoritative. If I stay here much longer, I’m going to be as crazy as the rest of them.

But from what von Rath had said, a long association didn’t look at all likely.

“Don’t you understand?” The old man leaned forward, his brown-spotted hands curiously graceful in the bars of bitter light. “The Resonator that didn’t work two miles from the Spiracle back at that little pishke temple in Berlin has all the power, everything, they raised here all summer. It’s pulling the energies of the Void through it and feeding them back into one hell of a field, and in that field von Rath, and Gall, and that poor doppess Baldur can do as they please... What have you there, Saraleh?”

While he’d been speaking Sara had been testing the floorboards under the bed, and had found a loose one. But when she crawled out of the leaden bar of shadow Saltwood saw only a few bits of chalk in her hand and the glinting flash of a piece of broken mirror. She shook her head, her shoulders slumped under the baggy and bullet-holed black jacket she still wore. “Nothing, Papa. Just chalk.”

“Nothing is nothing,” Leibnitz said, and rose stiffly. Saltwood, his own bruises seizing up, hated to think how a sixty-five-year-old man’s brittle bones and unworked muscles were handling that kind of maltreatment.

He was sore enough to be sarcastic, however. “There’s a piece of wisdom for you.”

“Good,” Leibnitz approved, nodding. “Your shaygets does recognize wisdom when it comes up and bites his ankle. There’s hope for the goyim yet.” He took the odd collection of fragments from Sara’s hand and carried them back to the wan stripes of the window-light.

“Some kid’s collection, it looks like—”

“No,” her father corrected, stirring them with his fingers. It really was only a few pieces of odd trash. His breath made a smoke against the sharp chiaroscuro of the floodlights, for it was icy cold in the room. Outside, frost glimmered silver upon the ground, the guards’ tracks leaving a ragged streak of black along the perimeter fence. “This was the room where they kept Rhion after they caught him, wasn’t it? I think they were his things.”

While the old man muttered and poked at the bits of glass and chalk, Sara walked back to where Saltwood stood next to the rump-sprung plush easy chair that, with the bed and a broken-down dresser, was all the furniture that the room contained. Her arms were folded as if for protection across her breasts, her face drawn and waxy with strain and tiredness. It was close to dawn. Half hidden by that weirdly particolored hair, the bruise on her cheek from von Rath’s slap was darkening; by the way she walked, the wreck had left a couple of doozies on her shoulder and hip.

“Thank you,” she said softly, not looking up at Tom for a moment, speaking English so her father would not hear. “I—I didn’t know what to say. To von Rath, I mean. I didn’t want to tell them—I know what they’ll do to him—but...”

“Did your father really mean that?” he asked, still more softly, as if speaking English were not sufficient to exclude the old man from their conversation. “That he’d expect you to die—to let them torture you—before you’d let them get hold of that stupid magic wand Rhion’s so crazy over?”

She sighed, still hugging herself, a small, compact dark figure, save for those splendid white legs and that pointed little face. “Papa... Yes, he meant it. And he would die over those crazy magic games he plays. I used to think I was tough enough to die before I’d rat on a friend, on someone I cared as much about as I care about poor old Rhion. And I’d like to think I am that tough. But still...” She looked up at him through the tangles of her black hair, and there was a tiny gleam of self-deprecating humor in her eyes. “Does it sound as awful to you as it does to me to say I’m glad you told him?”

“Yep,” he said and, reaching out, gently took her hand, drawing her down into the chair with him. It was almost big enough for them both to sit comfortably—he felt her shy from the touch of his arm around her, his shoulder against hers. Then she relaxed, a wordless Oh, what the hell that went from her body to his like a sigh of relief; he’d been afraid she’d pull away, and lie the night in uncompromising loneliness and pain. After forty-eight hours of physical and mental strain, of which the last twenty-four had been without sleep, culminating in violent physical exertion, a drive halfway across Germany, and an automobile accident, he couldn’t get interested in much more, even if she’d let him.

But though he felt her uncertainty still, her hesitance and reflex caution, it was a start—the start of something he wanted more, and differently, than anything he could remember wanting since he’d gone back to Detroit from a year in the oil fields to discover his mother and sisters were gone, no one knew where.

Things took time. He sensed that time was what he would need with this woman, this girl. To gain her trust, her—Go on, say it, Tom!—love, he was willing to put in all the time he had.

Which was, at a rough guess, about twenty hours. But they drifted to sleep together in the armchair as if world enough and time lay before them like a warm English summer, back in the days before the sun-cross was anything more than a good-luck symbol superstitious women stitched into baby quilts.

In the hard electric glare of a corner of the Kegenwald train station, Rhion of Sligo, wizard, mad professor, exile from another universe, and fugitive-at-large, sat huddled in a black SS greatcoat with his staff propped at his side, staring down at the broken fragment of mirror in his hand. He couldn’t see clearly, for even the little effort involved in scrying tired him, and he was exhausted already from the thin cloak of look-over-there and who-me? that he’d held about him for the past eight hours—the spells that had let ticket sellers be distracted as they glanced not-quite-at the identity cards of men seven inches taller than he with blond hair, the spells that had caused pretty girls to walk past or minor fights to break out as the police or the SS came near him in train stations, and the spells that had given people the impression he was a smelly old derelict like Johann at the Woodsman’s Horn, a presence to be noted very briefly and then resolutely ignored.

But he was very tired now. He was freezing cold, for the night ticket seller and the single police guard on duty at the station were sitting next to the electric stove at the far end of the bare little room—men who had not seen him get off the train and would not see him leave. He was worn out physically with the sustained effort of magic-working in a world where the energy levels of air and earth were so low, despite the coming equinox, his body hurting for sleep that he knew would be far too dangerous a luxury. Food helped, though it was difficult to get the sweets he chiefly craved—he’d scored some black-market chocolate on the train but that hadn’t lasted long—and what passed for coffee in stations along the route didn’t have nearly the kick of the rations the SS got.

So his vision in the fragment of mirror was at first only shapes against darkness. He had, of course, used a shard of mirror to keep tabs on Sara and her father while they were at Kegenwald, to make sure von Rath didn’t move them elsewhere, or hurt them... though there was nothing he could have done if von Rath had.

Then the vision cleared a little, and he felt a pang go through him as he realized what he saw.

Sara and Saltwood.

Well, that was logical, he thought, seeing how dark the girl’s hair was, pressed to Saltwood’s shoulder, only flaming into its old crazy, frizzed red down at the level of her ears. There was the peace of friendship in the way they held one another—the way he’d never dared touch her, had always been too cautious to touch her, too careful of those old wounds, old hurts.

He ought simply to be glad she was on her way to healing.

And there was Tallisett.

The hurt inside him crushed tighter at the thought of her, the slowly growing knowledge that he would never see her or his sons again—the loneliness he had endured for six endless months in hell.

He realized that what he grudged was the easing of that loneliness. In his hornier moments he had considered going to bed with Sara, but only with part of his heart. What he had really wanted was to be held, to be loved, and to know he wasn’t so goddam alone.

He was very tired of being alone.

Or just very tired. He shook his head. It was nearly dawn outside. It was an all-day walk to Witches Hill if he was going to reach the standing stones well before midnight tonight, and he’d have to find food and, he hoped, someplace to rest between here and there.

The worst of it was wondering whether he was, in fact, insane. It had occurred to him before this, jostling in the crowded trains, shoulder to shoulder with old women, fretful children, and unshaven men nervous with the nervousness of the unemployed in a land where unemployment was a crime—it had occurred to him again and again in his months of captivity, when the only faces he had seen, the only voices he had heard, had been von Rath, Baldur, Gall, and the guards.

It was a very real possibility that he was a lunatic who had dreamed all the complexities of his former life—dreamed of Tally, and his children, and the calm peace of the Drowned Lands—while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Then Tom and Sara were right, and he was only imagining that he could see his friends in this fragment of glass he’d picked up in a corner of the washroom in the Frankfurt-am-Oder station, and that he only believed he was in control of the actions of others when they did not pay attention to him.

It certainly made more sense than his own version of events.

Yet try as he would, he could conjure no picture of a former life, no rational explanation for his escape save cause and effect, no reason why von Rath and the SS would be so interested in the madness of one patently Jewish lunatic. But if he was mad, perhaps the pursuit was as illusory as the rest of it?

He shook his head, exhausted and eroded and cold to the marrow of his bones.

If he was mad, he was left with nothing—only this bleak train station, with its clean-painted white walls and its posters of noble Aryan manhood in uniform performing feats of heroism under the dingy electric glare.

If he was sane, he was left with only the standing stones and the hope that Shavus had somehow heard his cry three months ago—the hope that it had only been some unforseen hitch which had prevented the Archmage from gathering the requisite congregation of wizards to reach across the Void and bring him back, the hope that, in the precarious moments of the universe’s balance at midnight of the equinox, he could somehow raise enough power to open a gate in the fabric of Being.

And beyond the standing stones there was nothing. Exile from Germany—exile from his own world forever—at the rosiest stretch of hysterical optimism. Or death. He’d been around the SS long enough—he knew von Rath well enough—to know that a bullet in the back of the neck was another exercise in rosy optimism.

He closed his eyes, not wanting to think about the endless walk from Kegenwald to Torweg, while the sun-tides gathered, and he waited for the night.

Twenty-four hours, he thought. In twenty-four hours it would all be over, one way or the other. He would be at the stones at midnight... It was his final chance.

Outside the church clock struck four. By the electric stove at the far end of the room the guard rustled a newspaper, and the station attendant asked whether it looked like there’d be war with Russia.

Rhion opened his eyes and looked again at the glass.

He realized where Tom and Sara were.

The dark bulk behind them was the bed where he himself had slept during most of three months. The white glow of the floodlights lay in cross-barred patches over the beaky dark shape of Rebbe Leibnitz’ forehead and nose. The chair where Saltwood and Sara curled together in a tight knot of trust was the one where he’d sat endless hours, peering at his broken piece of scrying glass alone.

They were at Schloss Torweg.

Rhion lowered his forehead to his hand and thought, No. PLEASE, no.

They must have come after him.

And they’d somehow stumbled into Nazi hands. Evidently von Rath hadn’t completely shut up the Schloss when they’d come to Berlin for the demonstration.

If they were there, the place would be guarded. He thought about what it would take, the strength it would need to work the requisite spells, the drain on the last thin reserve he was keeping to catch the momentum of the universe, to fling across the Void in the hopes of reaching the farthest extent of Shavus’ power...

He couldn’t do it.

His power was exhausted.

In any case he doubted he could do it before midnight. And if he wasn’t at the stones at midnight...

Sitting slumped on the bench, shivering in his long black coat, Rhion cursed for several minutes in German, in Polish, in Yiddish, and in his own rich, half-forgotten tongue. Then he got to his feet, stiff and aching and leaning on his crystal-headed staff, and wondered where in Kegenwald it would be possible to buy black-market chocolate.