Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (43 page)

“
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
.