Chapter Twenty-Four
"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 flin
ched 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.
"I don't know. "
"Nor do I. " A skiff of wind moved the skirts of Rhion's greatcoat like a dark wing. "And I don't want to find out. Or what you'd do with it after that. I never wanted to come to your world, or to have anything to do with your verkakte war. In any case, my only way out of Germany - my only way out of your world - lies at the Dancing Stones near Schloss Torweg. That's the only place the wizards in my world will know where to look for me, and tomorrow night, the night of the autumn equinox, is the only time when I'll be able to raise enough power to reach out to them and make the crossing. And that's where I'm going. "
"The hell you are," Tom said, his voice now equally soft.
"Rhion," Sara said quietly, "you did that at the summer solstice. Nothing happened. Except that you got caught. "
The Professor flinched at her words, averting his face; his pudgy hands tightened around the pale wood of the witch staff. "I don't know why it didn't work last time," he said, keeping his voice level with audible effort. "Anything could have gone wrong. The political situation there was unstable when I left. . . " He shook his head, as if trying to clear some cloudy image there, some half-remembered dream. "But I do know it's my only chance. My last chance. I have to believe they'll try again, at least this once. I have to be there. "
Kindness, pity, and compassion deepened Sara's voice. "And if it doesn't work?"
There was a long silence, broken only by the distant hooting of an owl in the frost-thick silence of the starlight. Then Rhion whispered, "I can't think about that. "
She moved toward him, hand outstretched, but he stepped back abruptly, dark against the starry darkness, the light catching in his glasses and the crystals of the ring. Looking at him, Saltwood had the curious impression that the night sky seen through the Spiracle was different. Perhaps it was only the way the crystals caught the light. . . but it seemed to him for a split second that half a galaxy of brightness, of tiny pinlights infinitely far away, seemed caught within that loop, an alternate firmament that had nothing to do with the one overhead.
"Tom," the soft voice came from the compact silhouette, "if you could get Sara and her father to England I'd appreciate it. Von Rath planned to use the magic of the Spiracle to take out the RAF. Without it they've got no illusion, they've got no weather-witching - they've got no more than they had in June. By the time they can reformulate a plan - any plan - it'll be winter. Tomorrow and the next few days are really their last chance this year. Just by escaping, just by taking this, I've put a hole in their plans, and von Rath knows it. "
"That doesn't mean they couldn't make another one, or use that Resonator thing. "
"If they made one they couldn't charge it," Rhion argued in the self-evident tone of a medium explaining why the lights have to be turned down before George Washington's spirit will tip tables. "The Resonator's useless away from the Spiracle. Believe me, once the Spiracle is gone there'll be no way they can convert psychic energy to magic. "
"Not so fast. " Saltwood dropped his cigarette end and stepped clear of Sara, his automatic now in his hand, leveled at Sligo's chest. "I don't want to take you to England at gunpoint, Professor, but I'll do it. We need you and we need that widget of yours, whatever the hell it really is and whatever it really does. And don't think I won't pull the trigger," he added quietly, as Rhion made a move to step past him, "because I will. "
Behind him he heard the whisper of Sara's indrawn breath, but, after all, she said nothing. She understood.
"Now, I was sent here to kill you. I'd rather take you back alive - I'd rather you came back with me willingly - but I'll kill you rather than let you fall into Nazi hands again, which is exactly what you'll do if you pull this dumb routine because you think the fairies are gonna come take you awa
y if you stand in the right place. So sit down. . . Sara, there's a couple pairs of handcuffs in the gear we took from Teglerstrasse. Get me one. "
Sara stepped toward the car.
Saltwood remembered her doing that. She was still standing a few feet from him, her hand on the car door, moments - but how many moments? - later, when he realized that Rhion Sligo was gone.
Stunned - more than stunned - he shook his head. He hadn't - he COULDN'T have - fallen asleep on his feet.
He looked down at his hands. He still held the gun, but the map of the area he'd shoved into his pants pocket was gone.
Sara whispered, "Mah nishtanna," and staggered. Saltwood sprang to steady her. She pushed him away in swift revulsion. "All right already, I'm fine. . . " In the reflected glare of the headlights she was white. "What the hell did he do? He was just standing there one second. . . "
In the long weeds of the road bank, Rhion's track was starkly clear where he'd waded through the powder of glittering dew.
"He has the Spiracle," Leibnitz voice said, deep and quiet, out of the darkness. "He can do pretty much whatever he can conjure up the strength within him to do - whatever he dares do. " In the starlight his white hair and beard glittered as if they, like the grass, were touched with frost, his eyes, pits of shadow under the long jut of brows. "I only hope - and you should hope, too, Captain Saltwood - that he makes it back to those stones okay, and that his friends really do pick him up at midnight tomorrow night. " His breath was steam as he spoke, his long hands, wrapped around his arms, colorless as a mummy's against the gray cloth.
"Because if he doesn't - if Paul von Rath gets his hands on that Spiracle again - I'm telling you now the Nazis invading England are going to be the least of everybody's problems. "
"Goddam crazy little bastard. " Saltwood eased the car through the long weeds, overgrown branches of elder and hawthorn slapping wetly against the windscreen, wishing to hell he dared uncover the headlights enough to get a good view of the potholes of the farm track that led back to the main road. But the risk of being stopped was great enough without tampering with blackout regulations, and without Rhion and the Spiracle - whatever it really was - there was little chance a questioner wouldn't notice the bulletholes in Saltwood's uniform jacket, the pile of gear in the backseat, his lack of true resemblance to any of the various i. d. papers he carried, or the startling similarity of all the car's passengers to the descriptions of fugitives undoubtedly being circulated by this time to every corner of the Third Reich.
In addition to the map it rapidly became clear that Rhion seemed to have taken a third of their money and food, and assorted ration books and identity papers, as well. Those last had been stowed in the car. Thinking about that made the hair creep on Saltwood's scalp. How the hell long had he been standing there, gun pointing at nothing, unaware of anything taking place around him?
"Where the hell did they dig him out of?"
"I been trying to figure that out for months. " Sara pulled her knees up under a second field jacket she'd put over them like a blanket, and huddled tighter into the one over her shoulders. Her father, on her other side, still sat ramrod-straight and shivering in his shirts sleeves, his dark gaze turned worriedly out into the frost and blackness of the night.
"My guess," she went on slowly, "is that who he thinks he is is based on some kind of distorted reality, though it's hard to tell what that originally was. And he believes in it one hundred percent himself. "
Saltwood glanced curiously sidelong at her as the car emerged onto the Rathenow road. Instead of turning left, which would have taken them eventually to the Elbe and thence to the Hamburg autobahn, he turned right, eyes straining in the darkness for the crossroad where he'd turn off toward Brandenburg and then swing south of Berlin and head east. Thank God the Germans can't stand anything that isn't neatly labeled. He recalled only too clearly trying to get around in London after its inhabitants - expecting an invasion any hour - had taken down every street and road sign in the city, not that London was ever over-supplied with such things.
"So he told you?"
She nodded and brushed back a tendril of the dark hair which framed her face. "Three, four days after they took us prisoner last June, that bodyguard of his, Horst Eisler, showed up at Kegenwald one night and drove me back to the Schloss. Rhion was still laid up - I don't think he'd have told me some of the things he did if he hadn't been doped up and hurting and scared. He. . . " She paused, and Saltwood felt, rather than saw, the change in the way she sat, the lessening of the reflex tension of her muscles as she forgot where she was, remembering only the darkened room, the pudgy hand desperately gripping her own.
Then she shrugged, rearranging the first thoughts to cut less close to her own heart. "He talked to me then about his woman and his kids back in Oz or wherever the hell he thinks he comes from. About his old master who was supposed to come here with him but died or disappeared on the way through this Void thing he talks about, and about how his parents wrote down in the family Bible that he'd died the day he told them he was going to be a wizard. The whole setup - he claims his woman's father is a Duke or something - makes me think he might be a Hungarian or Austrian Jew from one of the old university towns, except that, when I met him, he claimed he didn't even know what a Jew was. A Freudian would say that's significant in itself.
"But you know," she went on softly, "he didn't have to do what he did. He didn't have to give von Rath that Spiracle in the first place, or let them make him teach them how to use the device it's a control to, if there is one. I mean, Papa and I had no claim on him. He'd only met me about three weeks before, only broke Papa out of the camp because of some magic ceremony he claimed he needed to work down in the cellars under Schloss Torweg. "
"Then he isn't. . . " Tom began, with elaborate casualness, swinging the car to the right and heading down the two-lane strip of asphalt through the dark, tree-sprinkled fields that would eventually lead to the old Prussian capital. "You and he aren't. . . "
He hadn't thought so, watching them together - the physical stiffness, so at odds with the sensuality of her face, was noticeable with him, as well. But though the affection between them seemed casual, it clearly ran very deep. His impression was that she regarded the Professor as an uncle or an older brother. . . only not quite. And in the panic confusion of flight from Berlin, of the bombing and getting through the blockades and out into the open darkness of the countryside, there had been no time for unnecessary words, no way to tell for sure. He felt more relief than he'd have cared to admit when she laughed, startled and tickled, and said "RHION? Oh, Christ. . . " and laughed again.
Good, he thought.
"But you know," she added more quietly, switching to English with a quick glance at her father, who was deep in trying to calculate, with a pencil stub on the back of a ration book, some elaborate kamea regarding the superimposition of the number keys of all of their names over the Seal of Mars, "if I ever do get interested in a man again, it'll be because. . . " Then she shied away from that train of thought, too. "Well. . . Rhion was the first man I've met in - oh, years - who wasn't a bastard. " She spoke a little defensively, seeming to retreat in on herself again, and Tom felt a flash of anger at them, whoever they were: the man or men who had put that wariness in his dark-haired girl's eyes.
She'd been a hostage, a prisoner of the SS - the way she watched him, the way she'd pulled away from the touch of his hand, the grim set to her mouth as she'd gotten back in the car, might, he had thought, have stemmed from that. But now he wasn't so sure. Very carefully, he said, "Be that as it may - whatever happens, I promise you I'm not a bastard. "
Their eyes met, and held; then Tom flicked his gaze back to the dark road unwinding before them. The sinking glow of the fires in Berlin was to their left now and farther off in the darkness. Overhead, the gypsy moon did a fan dance with the clo
uds.
"Thank you," Sara said softly, and after that was silent for some time.
It was a hundred and sixty miles to Kegenwald, eastward toward the Polish border. Beyond that, according to Sara, it was another fifteen or twenty to Schloss Torweg itself. "These stones he's heading for are in a kind of overgrown meadow the other side of the hills from the Schloss - which is just an old hunting lodge from back in Bismarck's time. There's a farm track through the hills. . . Let me borrow the pencil, Papa. "
The old man sniffed and relinquished it. He'd outgrown the back of the ration book and was currently filling up both sides of an envelope he'd unearthed from beneath the seat with abstruse numerical calculations, magical squares, and jotted transliterations between Hebrew and Greek. "Those stones probably started life as an observatory of some kind," he remarked, angling the envelope to what little moonlight filtered through the window. "They're a hundred and fifty kilometers east of the easternmost examples of chambered barrows, let alone stone circle or alignments. I'll have to write my friend Dr. Etheridge in Florida about this. . . We've been corresponding now fifteen years. . . "
"I don't think there was anybody who published anything in an anthropology or linguistics or archaeology journal in the last thirty years Papa didn't correspond with," Sara explained. "Not that he ever got them before they were at least six and usually ten years out of date. "
"If it was real knowledge it never goes out of date. "
"Tell that to all those Newtonian physicists. "
"So Newton wasn't wrong. Gravity still works, nu?"
"Here. " Sara held up the map she'd drawn - Tom risked a glance at it, then went back to concentrating on the road. "That noise better be the tappets knocking," she added after a moment, cocking an ear at the dry rattle the engine had developed.
"Doesn't sound like a valve," Tom replied. "Though God knows how long this baby was driven after grease and oil got scarce. . . Thanks," he added. "If it wasn't for you coming with me, I'd have hell's own time catching up with our Professor. It looks as if he could have picked up a train in any of three places that would get him to Kegenwald by tomorrow afternoon. At least I'll know where to intercept him. "
Sara didn't answer, and he felt her silence, as surely as he felt the vibration of the road through the tires and the engine's choking clink. Her father had gone back to making sigils and demon keys on the back of the envelope.
Hesitantly Saltwood asked, "You do understand that's my first duty, don't you? To find him. To bring him back with me, if I can, but. . . to make sure the Nazis don't get him or his device again, one way or the other. "
She sighed deeply, as if giving up something she knew she never could have. "I understand. It's what you came here to do - I know that. But I think after midnight tomorrow he'll come. He'll have no place else to go. You think I'm riding along just to act as your guide?"
"I hoped it was because you'd fallen desperately in love with me," he said, and she flashed him a wicked grin. "But I still think we should have found a hiding place to leave your father. "
"If you think I'm going to let my daughter go hotzenplotzing around the countryside with some Amerikanischer shaygets, you have another think coming," Leibnitz said resignedly. "And besides, according to these calculations. . . "
"By the way," Tom asked Sara, anxious to avert another spate of numerological abracadabra, "have you ever heard Rhion speak anything other than German?"
"N-no," said Sara. "That is. . . " She hesitated, and a glance sideways in the muted lights of a passing military convoy snowed him a look of bafflement, as if she had suddenly been faced with a memory that did not fit. He eyebrowed for amplification, but after a moment she shook her head, dismissing something for which she could find no words. "No. "
They met no opposition as they drove on eastward in the cold Prussian pines. All the roadblocks, Saltwood guessed, had been set with the assumption that they'd take the westward road: To England, home, and glory, as Hillyard would have said. Obviously no one was counting on the fact that their mad Professor was even madder than they'd thought.
They stopped at eleven in Custrin, the little town sunk in darkness and sleep. While Sara "laid chick," as they said on the East Side, watching out for the local bulls, Saltwood broke the lock on the gas pump in front of the general store, filled the Packard's tank and the jerry cans, then raided the store itself for several quarts of oil and as much bread, cheese, mineral water, and bottled beer as he could cram into his pockets. He left the late Corporal Deitmarr's money in a pile on the counter and, as an afterthought, helped himself to a cheap cloth laborer's cap, which he presented to Rebbe Leibnitz on his return to the car. There was nothing resembling a blanket or jacket in the ranks of tinned food, cheap galoshes, and clothespins, or he would have taken that, too, but the old man greeted the gift of the cap with startled joy, and with thanks and a murmured benediction immediately put it on.
There were, of course, a number of SS uniform caps in the back of the car - Saltwood had needed one, as well as a tie and a belt and various odds and ends to complete his disguise - but he'd guessed the old Jew would rather go bareheaded and disrespectful in the eyes of the Lord than wear one, and no wonder. "I didn't think you cowboys knew about things like that," Sara said softly in English as they pulled away from the darkened store and once more into the sandy pine barrens.
"What's not to know?" Tom shrugged. "Half the agitators in the union were Jewish. We had this Trotskyite Chassidic rabbi who used to come in to play chess with me and argue politics with old Stegler every Saturday as soon as it got dark enough so you couldn't tell a black thread from a white one. He told me that a man of your people would no more walk around without his head covered than he'd walk around without pants. " And, seeing how she still looked at him, half unbelieving, like men he'd seen when a woman turned out to know what a manifold was, he added with a grin, "You been hanging around with Nazis too long. "
She smiled back slowly. "I guess I have. "
"Chas vesholem. "
Even asleep - if the restless doze in which he drifted could be so termed - Saltwood heard the shock in the old man's voice and felt him startle through the worn leather of the Packard's lumpy seats. He came awake at once. Dark pines still flashed past the car's windows, as they had when he'd given the wheel to Sara and tried to get some rest. The rattle in the engine was worse - Just what we need. A ring job in the middle of Germany. The windows were fogged with the outer cold, save for long smears on the front where Sara had wiped them with her sleeve. It was too dark to see his watch - or, more accurately, the late Corporal Dietmarr's watch.
"What's up?"
Leibnitz shook his head. He, too, had clearly been asleep, blinking and startled, like a man waked by an evil dream. "I don't know. " He lifted his cap enough to smooth his rumpled hair and replaced it, looking around him, disoriented, shaken. "Something - some feel in the air. Can't you feel?"
Saltwood shook his head but said softly, "Pull over, Sara, and cut the lights. "
She obeyed. They all had far too much respect for instinct to quibble over the delay. Without asking she got out, and Tom behind her. For a moment they stood listening, the air like bitter steel on their faces, their breath a steam of diamonds in the moonlight filtering down through the black pine branches above. The weeds on the banks above the road were stiff with frost like a white salt rime that would show the smallest track. On such a night noise would carry. But Saltwood heard nothing: no rustle of bracken in the woods all around, no crunch of tires on the ill-tended asphalt. He checked his watch by the moonlight - quarter past two.
Uneasily he got back into the car, taking the wheel once more. Irritated as he had once been by the hooded headlights that kept their speed down in the flat stretches, now they made him feel safer.
"Where are we?" he asked quietly.
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"About twenty miles from Kegenwald. "
"We pass anyone?"
"Not since that motorcyclist an hour ago. . . What's that?" He felt the jerk of her body as she slewed around in the seat. At the same moment light flicked in the corner of his vision and, a second later, gleamed in his rearview mirror. Leibnitz and Sara were both pressed to the side window, their breath misting it again, peering tensely into the dark. "Cut the lights," Sara ordered hoarsely, and Tom obeyed. With the strength of the moonlight there wasn't much difference, except where the pines overgrew the road in pockets of inky shadow. "There," she breathed. "See?"
Blue lights were moving among the pines along the side of the road. Saltwood felt the hair lift on his neck.
They were not lanterns. They were moving too fast, for one thing; for another, some of them floated far too high for a man to be holding. By the eerie glow in the bracken, others were rolling along the ground, though the undergrowth, stiff and brittle with frost, did not rustle, only shone with that skeletal light. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, weaving in and out among the trees, but they were definitely following the course of the car.
Saltwood turned on the headlamps and pressed the accelerator, thankful that these Prussian roads ran straight and flat as a Kansas highway and to hell with the ruts and potholes and teeth-rattling jolts of the chewed and broken paving. Whatever was happening, he wanted no part of it.
In the rearview mirror he saw the lights swirl down the bank onto the road, then pour after the car like bubbles on a river. He pressed the pedal harder, and the lights followed in a bobbing swarm; Saltwood thought they were growing brighter. The car bucked and pitched over the broken road, and he veered, trying to avoid the worst of it. But his eyes kept returning to the mirrors as he sped faster and faster, fear growing within him at what he saw - or thought he saw - or almost saw - behind the lights. Something dark and large, something that ran silent, vibrationless, with a faint glint of metal. Something that moved with level and deadly speed.
He pushed the car for more jolting speed, Sara and her father clinging to the interior straps for all they were worth, knowing to the marrow of his bones that whatever was back there, its black shiny smoothness catching the blue gleams of the lights, he must not let it overtake them. Peripherally he was aware of other lights, a bluish glow powdering the frost-stiff bracken and thin blue discharges like tiny lightning sparking down the trunks of the pines. The granite faces of the old glacial boulders by the road glittered as if laced with diamonds. He barely saw them, his eyes glued now to the mirror.
Why did he have the impression that whatever moved behind those blue lights, metallic, shining, mechanical though it seemed, was alive? More speed, the Packard's old motor clanking hideously. . .
"TOM!"
His eyes flashed back in time to take in a blurred impression of the road's sudden curve, the black masses of boulders looming directly ahead. He hit clutch and brake, the heavy car fish-tailing wildly - they should have plowed straight into those boulders but somehow didn't, and he felt the wheels leave the ground.
The car rolled at least once - Tom wasn't sure - and struck something with a glancing blow before it came to a rocking halt on its side. Sara twisted on top of him, her flat-heeled shoes digging into his thigh as she wrenched her door open like a hatch. Tom remembered the three five-gallon cans of gas in the trunk and was halfway out of the door after Sara before it occurred to him to wonder if the pain in his legs was because one of them might have been broken. Together they dragged open the rear door, in crammed black panic during which his mind registered nothing but the seconds ticking by until the car would go up like a bomb, and dragged the stunned Leibnitz out of the tangled welter of guns, groceries, and papers in the back. Dragging the old man between them, they ran.
The Packard blew up in a fireball of red light, Tom and Sara falling flat with Leibnitz between them, while fragments of metal and stray bullets from all the spare clips exploded like shrapnel and hissed on the frosted ground. Frozen pine needles jabbed Saltwood's stubbled cheeks like splintered glass as he buried his face in his arms. Maybe it'll think we died in the crash.
It?
The blackness moving behind the blue lights, implacable and deadly and. . . real?
As real as the flying demon head that had ripped his arm?
He sat up slowly, his legs stabbing with pain. Now that the fluid in his veins was turning from adrenaline back to blood again, the pain was starting, in his legs, in his back, in his thigh where Sara had stepped on him getting out of the car, and in a dozen other places where he'd hit the framis in the crash or where flying clips of ammo or miscellaneous junk had hit him. . .
Sara, too, was sitting up, shuddering with cold and shock, pine needles sticking in her hair.
The blue lights were gone. Beyond the glare of the burning car, which lay on its side with its front end twisted where it had struck a tree, the road ran straight as an arrow out of sight in both directions under pine-shrouded blackness. Tom could see the black tire lines where he'd hit the brakes and the swerve and jag marking the skid where he'd tried to turn to avoid rocks that weren't there.
Around them in the dark, boots crunched shrilly on the frost.
Tom scrambled to his knees, gun in hand, as metal glinted in the dark of the trees all around. Dozens of them, Jesus. . .
The flames on the car leaped suddenly higher, outlining a single shape before him, thick ivory hair and the face of a scarred angel.
With a dozen guns leveled on him, Saltwood pulled the trigger. The gun clicked harmlessly.
Automatics did jam, of course.
"Throw it down. " Von Rath's voice was still that same soft level, as calm as if he had known all along that it would misfire. They might have been back at the house in the Jungfern Heide - Jesus, had it just been that morning? - getting ready for another "psychological test. " Yet there was a difference. The cold angel face almost glowed, coruscating with a kaleidoscope of emotion - fever, hate, and triumph like the crack of lightning that could burst planets asunder; in the red reflection of the flames, the amulets of bone and jewel seemed to bleed glowing blood.
More Storm Troopers materialized from the woods, fire glinting on the muzzles of their guns. To fight would be hopeless, suicidal. . . Tom wondered how they'd known where the car would go off the road.
"Throw it down," von Rath repeated. "I'm going to give you a demonstration and you might not wish to lose your hand just yet. "
"Throw it down already!" Leibnitz breathed, using his daughter's shoulder to haul himself painfully to his feet.
Though it went violently against the grain to do so, Saltwood obeyed, tossing the weapon onto the frozen pine straw between them and standing up carefully, keeping his hands raised and in view. Von Rath looked down at the gun for a moment and moved his fingers.
With a rending bark, the clip blew up.
Von Rath smiled, and one fine, slender hand came up to stroke the talisman's that rattled and whispered around his neck. "So," he said softly. "I was correct in my guess. Rhion Sligo has come east, bringing the Spiracle with him. The invasion will not have to be postponed after all. I should hate to disappoint Reichsmarshall Goering, after all of this. " The cold gray eyes, no more human now than a snake's, passed over Tom and touched Sara briefly, then came to rest upon her father.
"Very good," he murmured. Two men came up behind him, the bearded wizard Gall and a tall fair Storm Trooper of unbelievable beauty whom Saltwood had the dim impression he'd seen before, but knew he never had. "Just in time for the sacrifice of power, to raise the forces of the equinox to help the invasion of England. There will be, of course, another sacrifice later. . . " His lips stretched a little, as if part of him still remembered about smiling without remembering why, and he spoke to the beautiful youth who came crowding close to his side. "And that, my Baldur, though a little la
te for the equinox, will, I'm sure, give us no less of a yield of talismanic power - and no less gratification in the making of it. Take them away. "