The Magicians of Night

Twenty-six


IT WAS AFTERNOON when Saltwood woke up, feeling worse than he’d felt since his teenage bar-fighting days in Tulsa. There were other similarities to those days, too, besides the general sensation of having gone to sleep wadded up in the bottom of a clothes hamper after having been thoroughly beaten with a chair: the gluey stickiness in his mouth, the feeling that his eyeballs had been deep-fried, and the sleeping presence in his arms of a woman whose existence he hadn’t even suspected forty-eight hours ago.

The differences were that he was starving hungry instead of nauseated by the mere mention of food, that he felt awe and admiration as well as tenderness for the woman curled up against his chest, and that her father was sitting on the floor six feet away, rocking back and forth whispering Hebrew magic to himself.

It was the day of the autumn equinox. The twenty-third of September. Tomorrow—unless by some miracle Rhion Sligo could avoid capture—the invasion of England was going to start, spearheaded by Paul von Rath and whatever infernal device was controlled by the iron Spiracle. That the device in some fashion caused the most believable hallucinations this side of the soft room was beyond question. Whether it could or couldn’t affect the weather or blow things up at a distance was undecided, but that first effect would be enough to give the Luftwaffe the edge they needed over the RAF. Hell, he thought, they might be able to use it to fox that secret early-warning system the Brits were said to be using—who knew?

He knew already that with von Rath and his men waiting for Sligo on Witches Hill tonight, both rescue and assassination were out of the question. There were simply too many of them—in the face of those odds his own recapture would be a foregone conclusion. Everything within him might revolt at the thought of leaving the device and its hapless inventor in the hands of the Nazis, but at the moment, the thing of paramount importance was to get word back to England somehow and warn them at least what to expect.

And here he was, the only man who might possibly be able to save England, locked up in a Gothic mansion in Prussia with a woman he suspected he was falling in love with and a lunatic rabbi.

Cautiously so as not to wake Sara, he wormed his way out of the worn plush chair, gritting his teeth at the thought of what straightening his back was going to be like. Bar fights with the oil company goons, he decided, had nothing on explosions and car crashes. Clutching at furniture and cursing all the way, he stumbled into the little washroom—barred and secured as tight as the main bedroom—that adjoined it.

After dashing cold water on his face—which didn’t help—he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. No wonder Sara’d had second thoughts about sitting on his knee. There was a cut on his forehead and a blackening bruise on his cheek he hadn’t even noticed from the crash last night, as well as an itchy pyrite glitter of stubble. There was no razor, of course. Considering the amount of time the Professor must have spent in places where they wouldn’t give him a razor, it was no wonder he wore a beard.

When he came out, finger-combing his short fair hair back from his face, Sara was awake, and her smile when she saw him reduced Hitler, the war, von Rath, the invasion of England, and the fact that he was surrounded by candidates for the funny farm and stood in immediate danger of being killed to inconsequential sidelights.

“You look awful,” he said conversationally, and Sara grinned back, shoving the red-streaked raven tangle of hair back from her bruised face.

“Well, your resemblance to Clark Gable at the moment isn’t strong enough to knock me down. I feel like I fell down a flight of stairs.”

He nodded toward her father. “What’s he up to?”

“About the eighth Sephiroth.” The old man had chalked a giant diagram on the floor before him, three interlocked lines of circles connected by trails of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a cloud of jotted notes in the same writing. “It’s the Tree of Life, supposedly the diagram of the way the universe works. Meditating on it and calling on the names of the angels of each Sephiroth—each of those little circles—you’re supposed to be able to summon sparks of holy fire down from the Outer Aether to help you out with your spells.”

He leaned his shoulders against the wall, hands hooked in his pockets, and studied the complicated maze of abracadabra scribbled across the gray floorboards. “He know any?”

“Sure.” She got to her feet and began gingerly twisting her back and shoulders, her black brows pulled together in pain. “Call up fabulous wealth, yes; fame and fortune, yes; the wisdom of Solomon, yes; avert an evil eye the size of Ebbets Field, yes; but unlock the door? Nah!” She winced at an incautious movement of her neck and added, “Ow! Aunt Tayta always told me never to go driving with American boys and by damn she was right. Those chozzers took my cigarettes, too.”

She padded over to him in her stockinged feet, the SS jacket still wrapped stolewise around her shoulders and the sunlight from the window calling electric gleams of copper and cinnabar from the red portion of her hair as she looked out at the men moving in the yard below. By the light, Tom calculated it was just past one o’clock, and more or less warm.

“They all look pretty real to me,” he commented, and Sara gave a wry chuckle.

“He must have called in reinforcements from Kegenwald,” she said after a moment. “The ones in the gray field dress are Waffen from the camp—I recognize a couple of them. The ones in black must be those Pauli brought with him from Berlin.”

Tom frowned. There were, in fact, not very many of those, not nearly as many as he’d seen when they were taken last night.

“Look,” he said quietly, still keeping to English. “They were serious about your father, weren’t they?”

She nodded.

“When will they come for him?”

“A little before sundown. They have to—to make certain preparations in the temple.”

“They’ll probably take you away then, too, if they’re going to use you as a hostage when they wait for Rhion up on Witches Hill. Since they haven’t tried to feed us so far, we’d better not count on anyone coming in before that.” He took a deep breath, knowing what he had to say next and hating the expediency of it, hating those dry odds of life and death. “You know if we do manage to get out of here, we can’t stick around to save him.”

Her mouth compressed hard, but she said nothing.

“The only place we know where to find him, they’ll be there, too. And right now the thing that has to be done is to get word back to England. With luck we might—just—make it to Danzig by morning. That’s the bottom line, Sara. I’m sorry.”

For a moment he was afraid she’d suggest that she remain and attempt the rescue, but she didn’t. Her square, thin shoulders relaxed; her breath blew in a soft sigh of defeat. “I know. I probably couldn’t make it through to Danzig by myself and, anyhow, I wouldn’t know who to get in contact with—I could be Gestapo for all your contacts know...”

And if you were killed I don’t think I could stand it. He bit his tongue on the words, a little surprised even at himself. But there was something inside him that had lost one too many things, one too many people, in the course of his life. The thought of losing her before they’d even properly begun was a darkness he couldn’t bear to face.

“...and anyhow,” she finished, her face still turned away, “I couldn’t leave Papa. No.” Then she shrugged and chuckled grimly, looking up at him with bitter amusement in her eyes. “What the hell are we talking about anyway? We’re never gonna get out of here.”

His voice was very quiet. “I’ll be fast.” Their eyes met, and he saw the fear in hers.

“You’ll still be...”

“Rhion?”

Leibnitz’ whisper brought both their heads around sharply. The old man was bent over the fragment of mirror glass he held cupped in his palm, his open eyes fixed upon it with an odd, glazed expression. In German he said, “Rhion, is this you, can you hear me?” And he leaned down toward the glass, a listening expression on his face.

Saltwood tiptoed soundlessly up behind him, Sara close at his side. Looking down over the old man’s shoulder, he could see only a broken triangle of Leibnitz’ lined face reflected in the glass.

“Rhion,” the old man breathed, “a door-unlocker spell I need, fast, and whatever you do to make them not see you.”

They traded glances. Sara’s expression was one of deep concern and pity, but Saltwood felt the hairs creep on the back of his neck as Leibnitz added querulously, “No, I don’t know what kind of locks they are!” His exasperated tone was exactly that of a man having an argument on the telephone. “They’re the locks on your room at the Schloss!”

There was a long silence. Baffled, Saltwood stepped around in front of him to watch his eyes. At the move the old man’s head jerked up. “Don’t step on the...”

Saltwood looked down at the lines of chalk under his feet.

Leibnitz relaxed in disgust, straightening his bowed back, and finished, “...Tree. And now we have lost him.” He held out his other hand to Sara, and she had to almost lift him to his feet.

“Papa...” she began worriedly.

“Come,” he cut her off, staggering as he turned toward the door so that she had to catch him again. Saltwood realized the old scholar had been sitting in meditation all night. The room had been far from warm, and his injuries had stiffened; he was lucky he could stand. It didn’t seem to have affected the calm serenity of his madness. “We got no time to lose.”

“Papa, for crying out loud...”

“You got a better way to spend the afternoon waiting for them to come kill us?”

Pretty inarguable. Saltwood hid a grin and turned back to the window, rubbing absently where the manacle of the cut-off handcuff still chafed his left wrist and studying the yard once more. There was the electrified fence, though that wouldn’t be on during the day when the main gate was open. The Schloss stood on high ground, sloping down on three sides outside the perimeter of the fence. All the land around the bottom of its little rise was clear. Only on the side toward the hills did the pines crowd in close on the fence, though there was still a gap of thirty feet. He couldn’t see any vehicles from here, though the guards last night had had an LG-3000 and the Waffen Troopers had to have gotten here somehow from Kegenwald. Stealing something from Kegenwald village looked more promising, though it would be a hell of a hike. They could get food there, too, and be on the main road east to Danzig.

But, as Sara had said, what the hell was he talking about? They still had to get out of the room.

He turned around to study the layout of the place once more just in time to see Leibnitz open the door.

“We’ve got to destroy the Resonator!” Leibnitz whispered urgently. “At the cost of our own lives the thing has got to be destroyed!”

“The hell it has,” Saltwood muttered back, keeping a firm grip on the old man’s skinny arm. There was no guard in the upstairs hall, but he could hear them below, lots of them, as they slipped into the little dressing room next door and down the old backstairs. “If they’re getting ready for some kind of fandango at sunset, that temple’s gonna be crawling. What we’ve got to do is get the hell out of here.”

In broad daylight? demanded the part of his mind that still didn’t believe Leibnitz had picked the lock on the door. It had to have been jammed, or not caught in the first place—Jesus, what an idiot he’d been for testing all the window bars six times and not thinking to check whether the lock on the door had really caught! But he was positive he had checked. Anyway, they could have been in Danzig by this time.

Across—what?—thirty feet of open ground and under the wire?

The insanity around here must be contagious. Rebbe Leibnitz certainly seemed to believe he’d received instructions for invisibility through a two-by-three-inch chunk of broken mirror, but Saltwood was still wondering how he’d gotten talked into making a break for it under those circumstances.

Perhaps, he thought, as Sara opened the door to the lightless and mildew-stinking pit of the backstairs, because they had no choice. If they stuck around they were dead meat anyway, and being the only three people in the history of Naziism who actually were shot while trying to escape beat hell out of getting asked questions by the Gestapo. So in the long run it probably didn’t matter.

And just as they reached the end door of the old service wing, a fight broke out on the other side of the Schloss.

The noise was unmistakable—from the Tulsa oil fields to the West Virginia mines, in the migrant camps of California and every dockside bar from New York to San Francisco, it was the same—the way every Storm Trooper, whether von Rath’s black-uniformed goons or the gray-clothed stooges from Kegenwald, dropped whatever they were doing and ran around the corner of the building. God knew what it was about, Saltwood thought—Cigarettes, at a guess, since there’re no women around.

It’s damn convenient, he reflected as the three of them walked rapidly across to the wire and Tom held it up for Sara and her father to slip under, then rolled through the little gully himself. But it ain’t magic.

They crossed the open ground and disappeared into the woods beyond.

“There’s a big farm about three miles this side of Kegenwald where they’ve got a Hillman Minx up on blocks,” Sara panted, striding as rapidly as she could under the added burden of helping her father. “The owner’s one of the local Party bosses. He used to see me when I was—ah—tending bar in town...”

“Kayn aynhoreh,” Leibnitz groaned. “You lay on top of the piano and sang songs, too?”

“Don’t gripe, Papa, it’s how I found you. Anyhow,” she went on hastily, “once they find out we’re gone, they’ll sure as hell guard the camp and may be able to spare a patrol or two in town, but they can’t cover all the farms.”

“A Minx is a trashcan!”

“It’s the newest car in the neighborhood—besides, the Nazi chozzer’s got a tractor, too, we can steal the battery out of, and there’ll be petrol. He wangles the rationing.”

“Let’s hope he wangles oil and grease, as well,” Tom grumbled, wading ahead through a waist-deep pocket of soft autumn bracken. “Minxes eat grease—if we can’t get some we’re gonna be walking to Danzig.”

“Danzig, shmanzig,” Leibnitz muttered, balking as his daughter tried to hurry him over the uneven ground. “If we don’t go back and destroy that Resonator this whole thing is pointless.”

“When we radio for a pickup in Danzig, I’ll ask for an air strike, how’s that?” Saltwood said, more to pacify him than because he had any intention of demanding bombers that would, he suspected, be desperately needed on the southern beaches by morning.

“And what makes you think they’ll be able to find it?” the rabbi demanded, limping heavily, his dark eyes grim in the shadow of his billed cap. “What makes you think they won’t crash on the way, the same way they’re going to crash when they come against the Luftwaffe over the Channel?”

“Oh, hell, Papa, if they’ve got the device out at the Channel they can’t use it to guard the Resonator here, can they?” added Sara.

“You don’t understand! The Resonator—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Saltwood snapped, feeling like he was in an argument with a six-year-old about where the Lone Ranger got his silver bullets from. “Let’s take first things first.”

“The car,” Sara said.

“No—food.”

“Destroying the Resonator should be the first thing.”

Saltwood sighed. It was going to be a long, long way to Tipperary.

It had been a number of years since Saltwood had had occasion to live entirely off the countryside. In Spain he and his mates had usually been able to scrounge a meal out of Republican partisans, even if it had only been bread and goat cheese. But the memories of his hobo days, of riding the rails in search of work or traveling to organize for the union, stood him in good stead now.

Sara, a denizen of the streets, first of Warsaw, then of New York, looked askance at the berries he gathered from the hedges and stared at him in disbelief when he offered her a handful of rosehips. “You sure they’re not poison?”

At the far end of the pasture he cut a milk cow out of a small herd—“This was easier when I had a horse”—and improvised a pail from a tin can found in a ditch and washed out in one of the ponds that dotted the countryside. “For somebody who looks like a big dumb farmboy you know a lot.”

“For a Yankees fan,” he replied with a grin, “you’re not too bad yourself.”

She stuck out her tongue at him and handed the improvised cup on to her father. It was good to be in the open air again. Purely aside from the swarms of SS goons, lunatics, and self-proclaimed wizards that had thronged it, there was something Tom had definitely not liked about that house. The rough country of sandy pine hills and isolated farmsteads through which they traveled, swinging wide to avoid the roads whenever they could, slowed them down but kept them out of sight of whatever authorities might be around; it also impressed on Saltwood the impossibility of intercepting Rhion before the Professor walked into von Rath’s trap.

“Poor little bastard,” he remarked, keeping a weather eye down the farm track beside whose weed-grown ditch they had paused to rest. The sun was touching the tips of the pine-cloaked hills to the west, gilding the throw-pillow clouds heaped around it and covering all the eastward lands in a pall of cold blue shadow. “I wish there was something we could do for him. I wouldn’t leave a dog to the SS, but he’s the one who ducked out on us.”

And if it wasn’t for him and his stubbornness about returning to those damn stones we wouldn’t even BE in this mess.

As if she read his mind Sara sighed and shook her head. She’d grown quieter during the day’s long hike, exhaustion and hunger slowing her down more than she’d counted on, though up until an hour or so ago, she’d still frothed every time Saltwood had insisted they take a rest. “I felt terrible, you know, watching him standing there on that stupid stone with his hands upraised, waiting. Like watching—I don’t know. Some poor goyische kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Claus.” Sitting on a felled and rotting fence post, she pitched a pebble across the narrow road into the thickets of brown sedge and fireweed. She glanced up at Tom. “You ever have Santa not show up, cowboy?”

He shook his head, remembering paper chains and popcorn strings, and the line of shabby stockings pinned to the wall near the belly-stove—Tom-John-Kathy-Helen-Shanna-Ma’n’Pa. He still rattled off the family names as they all had, as a single word, and smiled a little at the memory. He’d spent a year searching for Ma and the girls, and still wondered what had become of them, and if there was something else he should have done.

“Nope. Sometimes he didn’t bring a whole lot, but he always showed.” He glanced at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour,” he said quietly. “We’ve got to stick closer to the roads if we’re not going to get lost.”

“They’ll know we’re gone now.” She pulled the scuffed jacket closer around her and rubbed her hands. The evening was cold already and, from the feel of the air, by morning there would be hard frost, “They’ll be hunting.”

“They’ll be sore as wet cats,” Tom said, “but as bad as they want Sligo and that patented whizzbang of his, most of their men will be up at Witches Hill. There’s just too much territory for them to cover to find us.” He held a hand down and helped Sara and her father, who had sat silent, numbed with exhaustion, to their feet. If they didn’t get a vehicle soon, the old man wouldn’t be able to go on, and Saltwood didn’t like to think about what might happen in that event. Sara might realize the impossibility of risking England’s defeat to go back for Rhion, but she’d never leave her father. And in that case...

He pushed the thought of that decision away. First things first. He shrugged his shoulders deeper into his scarred and bullet-holed jacket and revised his estimate of times again to allow for a slower pace.

It was an hour after full dark, and icily cold, when they saw the first of the lights.

A bluish ghost-flicker of ball lightning shown far to their right in the trees; catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye, Tom halted in his tracks; but when he scanned the rustling darkness, it was gone. “What is it?” Sara asked quickly, looking up at him in the gloom, and her father, taking advantage of the halt, leaned against a pine trunk, his hand pressed, as it had been more and more frequently, to his chest.

Saltwood shivered, wondering just what kind of powers the Resonator—whatever it did—gave to von Rath, and at how great a distance. “Nada,” he breathed. “Let’s get moving.”

The second light flickered a hundred yards ahead of them ten minutes later, and this time they saw it clearly. Over head-high—ten, twelve feet above the tips of the bracken and weeds—it bathed the delicate fans of dry foliage around it with cold dim light for a few seconds, then vanished as inexplicably as it had come. Distantly, Saltwood thought he heard a truck pass on the road that their course had paralleled since dark. It was hardly unusual for a rural district on a clear autumn evening, but something inside him prickled a warning. “Move back into the woods.”

The third light flickered into being closer still and to their left a few minutes later and, after a short time, appeared again, near enough to shine on their upturned faces. It was small, the size of a child’s hand, a round blue-white bubble like the glow around some innermost seed of brightness. The chilly light reminded Saltwood of something... candlelit darkness... the phosphor reflection in upturned glasses... They pressed on, both of them supporting Leibnitz now, deeper into the blackness between the trees. Increasing cold made their breath steam and stung the inside of his nostrils. The old man, who still adamantly refused to wear any part of the SS uniform, had begun to shiver.

Then that glowworm brightness glimmered into being directly over their heads, and somewhere not too far behind them he heard the muffled confusion of men’s voices.

“Christ, they’re trackers!”

“Can you kill it?” Saltwood whispered, turning to Leibnitz and not even thinking about what that question implied. “Or send it someplace else?”

“I... I think...” The old scholar frowned, his high forehead corrugating into thick lines of concentration as he held onto the younger man’s broad shoulder. Above their heads the light faded, wavered a little where it hung, then slowly began to drift away.

Mental powers, Saltwood decided. A brain-wave amplification device and to hell with your ethylene and platinum, Saraleh. Unless it was sheer coincidence... He tightened his grip around the old man’s rib cage and headed up the rising ground. Glancing back, he saw the light bobble uncertainly and go out.

“I—Rhion said...” The old man spoke with difficulty, his eyes shut, still concentrating hard. “He said a wizard... cannot scry the presence of another wizard... The Resonator field...”

They were right at the feet of a line of low moraine hills, nearly invisible above them in a vast looming bulk of pine trees, and the countryside here was littered with granite boulders half buried in weeds and sedge. Saltwood left father and daughter in the dark blot of one such outcrop’s shadow and moved softly back toward the oncoming swish of boots in bracken, flexing his hands. In the shadows of the trees it was almost impossible to see, save where the starlight caught on silver and on the blued gleam of a rifle barrel. A nervous guttural voice whispered something about “die Hexenlichte...”

Tom rose out of the bracken almost under the Trooper’s feet. It was very fast—grab, strangle, twist, and then the man’s body was inking down into the deep pocket of brown fern, and Tom was moving off, dagger, sidearm, rifle in his hands. He supposed he should have stopped to strip the coat, but it would have occupied dangerous seconds—the man’s companions weren’t fifty feet away among the pitchy shadows of the trees—and Leibnitz would have put up a fight about wearing it anyway.

The old man was shuddering, his eyes pressed shut, his breathing the rasp of a saw, when Saltwood reached their hiding place again. Without looking up Leibnitz whispered, “I can’t... He is stronger than I. I feel his will pressing on me... his strength... The talismans he has made... Ach, that strength...”

Dimly, blue lights began to flicker and weave among the black pine needles overhead.

Saltwood handed Sara the rifle and dragged Leibnitz to his feet. “Move!”

Behind them someone yelled.

Lights were bobbing everywhere now, the yellow lances of flashlight beams springing on, zagging wildly among the trees. Tiny balls of witchlight, purplish flecks of St. Elmo’s Fire, swirled like fireflies overhead, and against him Saltwood could feel Leibnitz sobbing for breath as they ran. The lights broke and scattered, but it was like trying to elude a swarm of softly shining hornets—they reformed, drifted, darting here and there in a numinous cloud. Had Sara been Saltwood’s only companion he would have told her to head in another direction to split the pursuit, but he knew she was as exhausted as he and unable to manage her father’s unwieldy bulk alone.

Leave her. He could just hear Hillyard saying it. It’s your duty to warn England, your duty not to be taken, no matter what the cost...

Stick my bloody duty. He shoved aside the image of the RAF Spitfires crashing on the Sussex beaches in flames. Rhion had said, I didn’t risk what’s going to happen to me to work for the people who were dropping those bombs...

The words echoed in his mind. What the hell’s the point of defeating the Nazis if you become one inside? “There anyplace to go?” he gasped, as they thrashed their way up the high ground, dodging trees and flashlights, stumbling over rocks half buried in the pine mast and ferns. “Cover, anything?”

“Not with those frigging lights overhead there’s not!” In the blue glow, the sweat made points of her dark hair around that pale triangular face, moisture gleaming on her cheeks in spite of the cold that turned their breath to steam.

Creepers, wild ivy and morning glory, snagged at their feet, branches slashed their faces as they stumbled on. Leibnitz gasped “...strength is growing... talismans... all those deaths... He can use it... equinox... midnight...”

Midnight! It must be close to that. Rhion would walk slap into the ring of SS troopers on Witches Hill... von Rath would head for Ostend in the morning with the Spiracle to take part in the invasion... The British wouldn’t get so much as a warning as to what was coming up the beaches, out of the skies... until their pilots bailed out because of imaginary cockpit fires or imaginary monsters chewing on the wings. The lights poured around them in a bluish cloud. Stumbling under Leibnitz’ weight, Saltwood couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t been shot yet.

The ground fell out from under them so abruptly it was only Saltwood’s hair-trigger reflexes that kept them from going over. He felt the gravelly clay crumble under his boots before he actually saw anything but darkness ahead, and flung himself back, catching Sara and her father. Beyond the last overhanging thickets of dead and dying undergrowth the road lay at the bottom of a twelve-foot bank where it cut through the saddle of land between the hills. Blue light flooded them as they skidded to a halt on its brink, searchlight-bright, only it blazed from over their heads: the glow of witchfire, of magelight... of magic.

There were two covered trucks and an open Mercedes down on the road below, with half a dozen Storm Troopers grouped around them. Baldur—the godlike golden SS Baldur, not the podgy, bespectacled Baldur Twisselpeck from Berlin—was at the wheel of the car, and as the guards leveled their submachine guns on the fugitives, Paul von Rath stood up in the backseat, Lucifer ascendant in fire and shadow and rage.