Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (40 page)

Even as the scene had returned to her—whole and complete in seconds—she had been scanning the pass, seeking cover in the rocks, looking for anything, a stand of trees, a boulder large enough to conceal a woman and two horses…

But there was nothing, only a few scrubby knots of mountain laurel halfway up the gray-yellow shale of the cliffs, a low-growing tangle of heather among the rocks…

Her gloved hands, aching from the unaccustomed work of making and striking camp, of caring for the horses, and loading the packs, felt cold on the reins. She must either sit in full sight of the riders when they came into view and pray that the Hand-Pricker hadn’t told them who to look for… or flee.

If she fled they would certainly see her. And she wasn’t at all sure she could outrun riders in the rocky tangle of the pass.

Panic pounded at her, flapping like a bird against the cage of her ribs. Every second lost made it increasingly unlikely she could escape if she bolted.

It would be a long way down the damp gray forests of the north side of the mountains, misty country among the clouds, and then the rainy lower slopes leading down to the Drowned Lands below. She could never do it with the riders of Esrex’ household, the riders of the White Bragenmeres, on her heels. Not traveling alone.

What it came to, she thought, was trust. Trust in that scabby, frightened man in Yekkan; trust in his not-very-strong amulet; trust in the strength of his heart against the fear of the Veiled God. She drew her horse a little out of the main road and bowed her head, feeling as if she were drawing in upon herself, making herself invisible in spirit and hoping that Shilmarglinda, Goddess of Beasts, Fruit, and Birth, would keep the horses from snorting or neighing.

And waited.

From the misty shadows of the pass the masked riders of Agon appeared, anonymous, dark-clothed, empty-eyed, and at least thirty strong, and swept down the road beside which she sat, their hoofbeats ringing in the narrow way.

“RIGHT,” TOM SAID GRIMLY, SLOWING AND DOWN-SHIFTING.
“Rabbi, Sara, down on the floor. Rhion, get one of those guns and get ready. We’re going to crash it.”

“No!” Rhion said sharply.

At the same moment Sara added, “If you give Rhion a gun we’re
all
gonna be killed,” a judgment call with which Saltwood had to agree, though he wanted to point out that the chances that they would all be killed in the next five minutes were astronomically high as things stood.

While the car slowed Rhion busily unwrapped the iron wire that held the circlet to the staff. Concentrating on the barricade, Saltwood was conscious again of a strange and disturbing optical effect connected with the Spiracle whose nature he couldn’t quite define. In the dim flare of the approaching flashlights he had an evanescent sense once more of seeing something floating around the twined iron loop, something that wasn’t precisely a webby cloud of spider strands, but that made him think of one for reasons he couldn’t guess.

Yet when he turned his head he saw nothing strange and, in fact, wondered why he had thought he had. It was only a ring of twisted iron and silver, scratched with odd little marks and holding five crystals in a pattern not symmetrical, but certainly definite, a pattern governed by what he dimly guessed to be the proportions of some non-Euclidean geometry. He noticed how gingerly the Professor cupped the Spiracle in his hand, framing it with thumb and middle finger and never allowing his fingers to pass through its rim.

Rhion’s voice was very calm. “Lie on the floor over the guns and gear,” he instructed, handing the decapitated staff back over the seat. He glanced at Tom. “You have a pass?”

“Yeah, but they’re looking into the cars with flashlights, in case you didn’t notice.” Slowing down, he had to talk fast—in another few seconds he’d have to decide whether to hit the gas or the brake. “If we stop long enough for that…”

“Don’t worry about it.” Rhion settled himself back into the seat, folded his arms with the circlet concealed in his hand, and bowed his head, his eyes slipping shut.

“Don’t worry about it?
Are you out of your frigging mind? You think they’re not going to notice two people crouching down on the floor… ? Not to mention you sitting there looking like a picture on a wanted poster…”

“I said don’t worry about it! Tell them you’re transporting the car through to somebody important at Ostend! Don’t mention us at all.”

“You’re nuts!”

“Do it, Tom!” Rhion’s head came up, his eyes blazing behind the glasses that flashed redly in the lights of the barrier. “There are about forty soldiers on the other side of that barrier with guns. You crash it and we’re Swiss cheese!”

Saltwood wasn’t sure how he’d deduced that, for beyond the lights of the barrier he himself could see only darkness. “Dead is one thing! Trying out the electrical fittings at Gestapo headquarters is another!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Rhion demanded, his voice shaking, the burn scars on his face and throat shiny in the moving glare. “Do it. They won’t see us.”

The barrier was twenty feet away—yellow-and-black-striped sawbucks stretched between a couple of trucks parked across the road, around which hooded lights threw a feeble blur of illumination. Beyond that the blackout made anything further impossible to determine. At least a dozen Storm Troopers were in evidence, plus one or two civilians—Gestapo. He threw a fast glance at Rhion, who had subsided again into his attitude of meditative stillness. Did he only guess there were more men waiting in the darkness, or could the man really somehow see without light?

Muffled from the floor behind him, Sara’s voice said, “Trust him, cowboy. He got Papa out of the camp at Kegenwald in the weirdest cockamamie way I’ve ever seen.”

After one last agonizing waver Tom eased on the brake. “If this goes wrong I’ll kill you.”

“You do that,” Rhion mumbled. He sounded half asleep.

A flashlight slammed its beam into Saltwood’s eyes, and he squinted against it and wondered if they noticed the sweat that prickled his hair and every inch of his backbone. “Name?” a voice demanded from behind the light.

“Deitmarr, and get that bloody light out of my eyes!” Saltwood snapped furiously.

The light moved aside as he thrust the late Corporal Deitmarr’s identity card up at the SS lieutenant in charge of the barrier. “I’m taking this heap through to Kesselring at Ostend,” he added, jerking his hand to indicate the shiny length of the Packard. “And a damned cow it is, too, but he says he wants it.”

The flashlight beam flicked over Rhion’s still, dozing form, swished the backseat mechanically while the lieutenant was still studying Saltwood’s pass. “You seen any sign of a gray open Mercedes, four passengers, bearded man, red-haired girl, blond man in part of an SS uniform…” He rattled the words off mechanically, as if his mind were on something else.

“Crucifix, no! I’ve spent all afternoon in the damn garage trying to get this expletive deleted bastard of a bloody car to start.”
Aren’t you going to ask me about those people crouched down in the backseat? Or this handcuff manacle on my left wrist?

“You taking it all the way to Ostend?”

“If the thing doesn’t effing die on me on the way.” It was impossible that the man didn’t hear the slamming of Saltwood’s heart.

“Good luck, then.”

He thumped the roof of the car. Saltwood drove on, wondering if he’d somehow been shot without noticing it and this was delirium. He forced himself not to pat the dried blood on his uniform jacket, the bullet holes that had finished off its last occupant.
Dammit, they HAVE to have shown up that close, the guard HAS to have seen them!
The headlights flashed across lines of armed shadows, massed in the darkness behind the trucks. Tom wondered how Rhion had known that.

“Nobody get up,” Rhion mumbled into his beard, the iron circlet still cradled between thumb and middle finger, almost out of sight against his side. “There’ll be more. Tell me when the next one’s coming up, please, Tom.”

Saltwood swore, quietly but with considerable feeling, through the next three miles of street, pausing only long enough to repeat the entire performance at the next roadblock. When he glanced beside him he could see in the gleam of the receding flashlights that sweat trickled down the sides of the Professor’s forehead and matted the long strings of his hair. As they drove on into the blackness of the countryside, Saltwood was quiet for a long time.

“He did that getting Papa out of the camp.” Sara fished in the pocket of the SS field jacket she wore over her somewhat grubby BDM uniform and produced a couple of cigarettes that she must have looted from the dead guards on Teglerstrasse. Crouched by the dim glow of the hooded headlight with a local map, Saltwood grinned—he hadn’t thought of looking for cigarettes himself, but the woman didn’t miss a trick.

Behind them, above the dark blur of half-naked trees, Berlin was a smear of smoke, lit from beneath by the fevered glare of fires still burning out of control in every industrial district in the city and from above by ice-hard diamond stars. Sara’s breath puffed in the deepening cold as she went on, “He told me to go up and cut my way through the wire in full sight of two guard towers, with every floodlight in the place on… He’d told Papa just to walk out the door and over to the fence to meet me. And all the time he just sat there at the edge of the woods, like he did in the car tonight, with his eyes shut, meditating.” She pulled a lighter out of another pocket, steel with the wreathed Deaths-Head of the SS embossed upon it. The bright leaf of flame called reddish echoes from even the dusky hair that framed her face and picked sharp little shadows from the corners of her eyes. In the car behind her the Professor and Rebbe Leibnitz were conferring quietly, heads together. She glanced back at the two shadowy forms and her dark brows pulled down over her nose. “Sometimes it’s like he’s just another of Papa’s harmless lunatics,” she said softly. “Other times…”

She held out the lighter. When Saltwood touched her hand to steady it, she flinched very slightly, but consciousness of her fingers’ touch went through him like a swig of brandy, warming even when he took his hand away.

It seemed impossible to him that, when he’d waked up that morning, he hadn’t known her. In a way he had, he thought… He’d seen the scratches she’d made on the inside of the dresser drawer, marking off days in defiance of captivity, in defiance of helplessness. And he grinned to himself.
Now there’s a step better than those heroes of legend who fall in love with a lady’s portrait
…

And now it was as if he’d known her for years.

“You figured out where we are?” she asked, her scratchy Brooklyn accent breaking into reveries he knew he had no business having until they were safely back in England—or at least safe on the submarine.

“Uh—I think so.” There had been half a dozen maps in the glove box, but only this one had shown the countryside around Berlin in any kind of detail. “That T-fork we just passed must be this one here.” He pointed on the map. Around them the thin woods of birch and elm were silent, save where, not too far in the distance—probably at the end of this twisting, weed-choked lane—a wireless chattered in some farmhouse in the cold stillness of the night. “Which means that has to be the road to Rathenow. Even if we keep to the side roads, we can make Hamburg easy by midnight. The people I know can get in touch with the patrol boat…”

“That’s in the wrong direction.”

Saltwood looked up, startled. Rhion and Rebbe Leibnitz had gotten quietly out of the car and were standing behind him in the deep, dew-soaked grass that clogged the lane. Rhion wore the black greatcoat of an SS officer that reached nearly to his ankles, starshine glimmering faintly in the round lenses of his glasses and in the irregular pentangle of crystals on the head of his staff. Leibnitz, still in shirt sleeves, was hugging himself and shivering with cold.

“Papa, for Chrissake put on a jacket…” Sara began, exasperated, and Leibnitz shook his head stubbornly.

“I wear what they give me because I will not go naked like Noah before the eyes of the Lord, but before I put on their damn
Todten Kopf
uniform I will freeze.”

“What do you mean,” Saltwood asked wearily, “the wrong direction?” He stood up out of the dingy pool of headlight glow, a powerful bulk towering over the smaller Professor. Weariness, hunger, and the exertions of the day were catching up with him. His left arm still hurt damnably, as if the monster head that had ripped his flesh and the fire that had seared it had been real, and the manacle of the sawed-off handcuff chafed painfully at the wristbones. The last thing he needed, he reflected irritably, was another of Rhion’s meaningless quibbles about where they should and shouldn’t go. “It’s the only direction there is, pal, if we want to get to England.”

“But I don’t,” Rhion said. “Where the hell
is
England
, anyway?”

He really IS nuts
, Saltwood thought, exhaling a thin trail of cigarette smoke that shimmered white in the icy dark.
Not that I had any question about it before
… “You want to stay in Germany, maybe? I guarantee you won’t like it.”

The Professor shook his head. Starlight caught the silver bevel of his spectacle edge, the cold double-Sieg-rune on the collar of his coat. He gestured with the staff he held, and the Spiracle’s crystals winked frostily, an all-seeing, faceted eye. “I didn’t take this back from von Rath—I didn’t risk what’s going to happen to me if he catches me this time—to go to work for the people who were dropping those bombs this afternoon.” He nodded back toward the glowing red stain in the sky.

Saltwood began, outraged, “Do you know what the Nazi bombers have been doing to London… ?”

“And what would
you
people do if you had magic?” Rhion asked quietly. “If you could use the powers channeled through the Spiracle? Pulp Berlin, maybe, to convince Hitler to withdraw from the war?”

Saltwood hesitated. Later he supposed he shouldn’t have. But he remembered Spain—that war of freedom against facism in which the “free” countries of the world had declined to participate—and he knew full well how the military mind worked. He should, he supposed, have denied the possibility utterly. Maybe if he’d been a real soldier he would have.