Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (39 page)

Aside from the boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven—God knew where his parents were, or if they’d survived—there wasn’t a Nazi uniform in sight but Saltwood’s own.

Rhion whispered, “And I wondered why magic had been taken from this world.”

Around them there was a mutter of voices: “The English… The English…”

“Everything we saved…”

“Maybe we can sleep at Aunt Berthe’s… But she was down in Tempelhof, they were hit, too…”

“Has anyone seen a little girl? Six years old—her name is Anna, she has brown hair…”

“He won’t let this go unavenged. Our Führer won’t let them get away with this…”

Rhion’s hands closed tight over the staff he held, the crystals of its iron head glinting softly, as if with a light of their own, in the leap and jitter of the shadows. “Christ, what would they do if they had it?”

Over the city, the sirens were sounding the all-clear.

As they drove south again through the Moabit district, avoiding the fires and ruins and tangled traffic of the industrial targets, Rhion was silent, sitting beside Saltwood with closed eyes, head bowed and hands folded tight around the smooth, rune-scrawled wood of the staff. Leibnitz, leaning forward from the backseat of the Packard, was speaking to him in low, passionate German that lapsed frequently into Yiddish: “…Already you have endangered all the world in making the Spiracle… given them a chance to use magic, to call up the forces of the Universe… open the windows to let through the energies of the Void into this world, where only the Most High knows what they will do…”

“I had to do something,” Rhion whispered. “I had to get it back.”

“At the cost of bringing to life again the magic they seek? And if he takes the Spiracle from you this time…”

“He won’t.” The little man did not open his eyes, but Saltwood could feel him shiver as if, beneath that quiet, the tension of fear, of dread, of grief were nearly unbearable. “He won’t.”

“And you grew up with this going on?” Tom threw a glance back to the seat behind him, where Sara was half turned around, watching through the small oval of the rear window for signs of pursuit.

She half laughed. “This and worse. We’d always have somebody staying with us: Kabbalists arguing until four in the morning whether the path between the Cosmic Spheres of Yesod and Netzach was represented by the Star or the Emperor; white witches cussing like fishwives at the Adepts of the Golden Dawn; pyramidiots and menhir-hunters pulling each other’s hair about how many inches are in a megalithic foot and whether Easter Island lies on a ley…
oy gevalt
! And Papa making his little number squares and adding up the letters of everybody’s names and birth planets while Mama hunted through all the pockets of all the coats in the house for enough kopecks to buy bread for the next day. And then like as not Papa would give whatever was in the cupboards to some crazy Rosicrucian who needed it to get to France where, he’d been ‘directed in meditation,’ he’d find the clues that would lead to the rediscovery of Atlantis… not that there was ever very much,” she added, her voice turning small. “In the cupboard, I mean.”

Tom was silent, remembering the pinched gray look on his own mother’s face those nights after an oatmeal supper when she’d sit working on the bills. Though there’d always been food of some kind on the table, he’d always been hungry—especially in the spring, when they simply couldn’t afford to lose what one steer would bring them toward the mortgage and the costs. Toward the end it had been the worst. “What happened to her?” he asked quietly. “Your mother?”

“She died.” The words were like the chop of a kindling ax. In the dark of the backseat she turned her face away, a delicate shadow profiled against the blackness of the city, the occasional flare where a far-off blaze burned near a warehouse or factory. There were few of those here in the Charlottenburg district, amid the blocks of expensive flats with their pseudo-Assyrian cornices and their Hollywood-Gothic turrets and pillars. Every window was blacked out, but the very air around those eyeless monoliths seemed to seethe with suppressed life.

After a moment, Sara added quietly, “While I was in America. Of influenza. I should have gone back to Warsaw then and tried to make Papa come with me, but there just wasn’t the money. I could barely make my school expenses, much less get passage for one over and two back. And anyhow the immigration quotas for Jews were jammed, and nobody was gonna let an extra one through.”

He wondered how she’d gotten the passage money when she’d heard her father had been interned—much less the dough it would cost for the black-market identity cards she’d mentioned—but didn’t ask. The lines around her mouth and in the corners of those coal-black eyes said things about where she’d been and what she’d passed through on her way, and he knew better than to touch those open wounds. He found her beautiful, with her dark, hard eyes and her crazy particolored hair, in the way he’d found the Spanish girls beautiful, who’d fought beside him in the hills, a beauty of voice and inflection, a beauty of toughness, like cats who fend for themselves and can only occasionally be coaxed to curl purring on a man’s knee.

Beside him, Rhion seemed to have revived a little, eating bread and cheese out of Leibnitz’ little string shopping bag and gesturing with it as he said, “…and in any case I had no choice. I could never have gotten the edge over him, even for the second I did, without magic of some kind, and by myself I didn’t have the power to keep the field going. Everything here requires such a
hell
of a lot of power. The temple there was the only place to get it. There any fruit in there? Or chocolate?”

“Chocolate, ha! They all trade it for cigarettes, the Nazi
chozzers
… You still shouldn’t have left it.”

“As long as we stay away from that house we’re safe. Outside the range of a couple of miles from the Spiracle the Resonator’s inert. The way it draws power, it should be even less than that, by this time. We should be far enough away to be safe. By the way…”He turned to Saltwood, glasses flashing dimly in the darkness. “Where are we headed?”

But even as he spoke Tom was hitting the brakes, cursing, his stomach sinking within him. “Gestapo headquarters, it looks like,” he said grimly, shifting gears and starting up again slowly, knowing there was no escape, no evasion. “Or hell. So hang onto your hats.”

Ahead of them, in a line of flashing red lights, dark forms, and bobbing electric torches, stretched an SS roadblock.

IN THE THROAT OF THE PASS OF GOD’S AX, TALLY
drew rein and rose in her stirrups for the tenth time that day, turning her head and listening. The wind keened thinly along the high stone faces of the cliffs that lined the way, whined among the boulders that strewed their feet, and roared with a soughing like the sea in the pines that formed a spiky black rampart along their brows, a hundred and twenty feet above. But when it eased for a moment the sound came again, unmistakable, and then Tally knew.

She was being followed.

Wind caught at her hair and whipped it in her eyes as she scanned the pass behind her. The earthquake that had twisted the foundations of the world six hundred years ago had changed the shape of this pass; steep and jagged now, it ran straight for barely a hundred yards at any one time, winding back and forth through the fractured bones of the Mountains of the Sun; only in the thirty years of her father’s rule in Mere had it been possible for a lone rider to pass through without fear of being robbed, not once, but several times.

Worriedly she reached inside her grimy sheepskin jacket, to touch the amulet she wore.

This is the only road down to the Drowned Lands
, she told herself firmly.
It’s logical I’d be taking it; logical they’d guess where I’d be going. The fact that they’re coming doesn’t mean I was betrayed
.

Her horse jittered uneasily, and the spare mount, burdened with food and the leather-wrapped bundles of Jaldis’ books, flicked its ears and snuffed at the wind. Tally gauged the length of this particular reach of the pass, calculated in her mind how many more miles of narrow canyon, hemmed in by unscalable cliffs, lay between her and the wet, cloud-scarved woods of the downward slopes beyond.

A burst of speed…

But no burst of speed would take her beyond the sight of the riders in the pass behind her, and the clatter of her horses’ hooves would carry. Then they’d know she was there, and the amulet she wore would not hide her from their eyes.

But if that old Hand-Pricker told them to look twice at any sloppy-looking man in an old sheepskin coat
, she thought, panic rising in her chest,
it won’t hide me anyway
…

Whatever happened, she knew she must not let herself be caught. Not in flight from Erralswan. Not with Jaldis’ books.

In a scattered few seconds the whole scene in the Hand-Pricker’s hut returned to her, and with it the memory of the smell of the place, the reek of filth, old blood, dirty bedding, and cats. The Hand-Pricker himself had shrunk blinking from her, an emaciated man of middle age whose light-brown hair and beard had both been crusted stiff at the ends with the blood of sacrifices made years ago; bloodstains had shown up even on the faded black of his robe. He’d stammered, “T-the woman who wanted the powder,” and in his watery yellow eyes was the fear that more trouble was coming to him.

“I need an amulet,” Tally had said, setting down a small bag of money among the litter of herbs and sticks and crumbling fragments of half-mummified toads on the table. She’d already cropped her hair short like an urchin boy’s, and wore a boy’s breeches, shirt, and dirty sheepskin jacket. “An amulet that will turn aside men’s eyes, make them believe that they see a man in these clothes, fat and harmless and bearded; and I need it quickly.”

“Who—whom do you flee?”

In his eyes she saw that he’d already half guessed.
The eyes of Agon are everywhere
…

“Isn’t it enough to know,” she had asked softly, “that I fear for my life and the lives of those I love?”

Fumblingly, he had made the amulet, pulling at the cords that passed through his fingers and palms and earlobes until the blood came, rocking and whispering above the flat rock in the corner of his hut, stretching forth his bleeding hands to murmur the name of the familiar spirit that gave him—so the Hand-Prickers believed—his power. And Tally, sitting at the table with the Hand-Pricker’s cats purring around her boots and sleeping on her lap, had strained her ears for sounds in the village back lane outside, praying that no one had yet marked her lateness in returning to her husband’s house.

She had already left Kir and Brenat, in the charge of their nurse, with the local physician. That worthy had been sufficiently puzzled by Kir’s symptoms—hallucinations, convulsions, and pains in the joints unaccompanied by any fever or inflammation (Kir was an enthusiastic actor but Tally had drawn the line at drugs that might do him real harm)—to recommend sending him immediately to a more skilled practitioner in Brottin, far down the mountain and, she hoped, out of harm’s way. But there was always a chance that their nurse was one of Agon’s spies. Or one of the grooms. Or…

Or anyone.

That was the worst, the nightmare of all this. Not knowing whom to trust.

Those who did not serve Agon through hate, like Mijac, or cynicism, like Esrex, might just as easily do the Veiled God’s bidding through fear.

“I’m sorry to have brought this upon you,” she said, reaching out to take the dirty little bolus of wax, blood, sticks, and feathers that the wizard held out to her in his sticky hands. “But truly, even if I hadn’t come here, trouble would come upon you. The men who hate magic are moving—the men who seek to remove magic from the world, so that no one may challenge their power or see their doings and expose them for the lies they are.”

“But I—I’m not one of the great ones, you know,” the mage had whispered. “I stay out of the way—I don’t make trouble—the Lord of Erralswan has never…”

“The Lord of Erralswan has never thought of you one way or the other,” Tally said sadly. “And now people are making him think. If you can use a scrying crystal to see the movements of armies—if you can cast a spell of darkness, confusion, or illness against an enemy’s troops—if you have the slightest ability to read the winds or the signs of the bones that would tell of treachery and ambush—people will make the Lord of Erralswan think that you are his enemy, you are a traitor, you are not deserving of even a hearing because you are who and what you are. It needs no magic to cast an illusion like that.”

The man had only looked at her, holding his big gray cat in his arms, his eyes stupid with fear and the hope that she wasn’t right.

Tally looped the amulet’s cord about her neck and slipped the blob of gritty wax into her jacket. “Flee, if you can,” she said, her voice quiet and her eyes holding his. “The Lady of the Drowned Lands is gathering mages on her islands; you will be safe there. She needs the help of everyone who can do magic, everyone who was born with that seed in his blood…”

“Is that where you are going?”

She hesitated, but knew the man would guess it; then nodded.

He’d swallowed hard, his thin fingers, pierced through with bits of twine and string for the small blood-sacrifices of his system of power, stroking the soft, thick fur of his cat’s head while the animal rubbed its cheek against the tattered black sleeve. “I—I’ve lived here all my life,” he’d said uncertainly. “The people here know me…”

But as Tally turned to go he’d stepped quickly forward, to touch her sleeve.

“That amulet…”he said. “It won’t… My power, the power of my blood, of my familiar spirits, isn’t—isn’t great. The amulet will keep you cloaked from the eyes of your foes, only as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself. If they know you’re there, if they’ve noticed you, or are looking for you, it won’t help you. You must keep still.”

You must keep still.

Rhion had said something of the kind to her, also, when he’d given her similar talismans to keep the neighbors from seeing her, all that long summer she’d first known him, when he and Jaldis had been living in the Lower
Town. But listening to the jingle of harness, the strike of hooves, clear and sharp now in the stony pass behind her, she knew that if these riders had visited the Hand-Pricker in Yekkan and had forced from him that the woman they sought was going disguised as a man, the amulet would do her no good.