The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2)

The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2) Page 21

"YOU GOTTA REMEMBER I grew up with this stuff." Sara crossed one knee over the other - she had beautiful legs, shapely, strong, and slim-ankled, and to hell with the black stubble that sprinkled them and the white ankle socks of the League of German Maidens - and drew on her cigarette while Saltwood prowled, for the fifth time, from the window to the inner door to the outer door, checking, testing, trying to put something together before it was too late. The guards were always there outside.

"I don't know how many reincarnated ancient Egyptian priests I met when I was a little girl, or travelers from other dimensions or other astral planes, and they were all wizards or used to be, but they couldn't practice in this dimension for one reason or another. You might as well sit down and take a break, cowboy. I've been over this room half a dozen times in the past week or so. You could fill it up with water and it wouldn't leak."

"That's how long you've been here?" After one final glance out the windows at the guards standing around the vehicles, he came back to her, but remained on his feet beside the table where she sat, unable to conquer his restlessness.

She nodded, setting her cigarette to burn itself out on the table's edge. "Eleven days - I kept count, scratching marks on the inside of the dresser drawer in my cell."

Tom had seen the marks when he'd gone over the room where he'd been kept. "Why inside the drawer?"

She shrugged, long black lashes veiling her eyes as if embarrassed at the childishness of her impulse. "If they knew I was keeping track they'd erase them, add to them, or change them when they searched the room, just to make me crazy - to make me - I don't know, feel helpless, feel off guard, like nothing was my own. Papa says they did that a lot in the camp."

"Hell," Tom said, feeling the old anger heat in him. "And I thought the special deputies were bad, the ones the fruit growers hired to chouse the migrants from camp to camp." He settled on the edge of the table, his handcuffed hands folded on his thigh. "Your father's here, too?"

"Yeah. I bunked in his room last night, sleeping on the floor." She glanced up at him, and he saw, in spite of the cynical toughness in her eyes, how close she was to tears of sheer exhaustion, worn down by the bitter grindstone of being always watched, always helpless, and of never knowing what would happen next. Her brows, heavy and unplucked, grew together in a dark down over the bridge of her nose; there was a fine little pen-scratch line on either side of her mobile red mouth that emphasized each wry twist and each smile.

She shrugged again and made her voice offhand. "One more strike against that momzer von Rath. They kept us in the solitary cells at Kegenwald when Rhion was still at Schloss Torweg. They'd bring him in once a week to talk to us, once he was on his feet again. They - hurt him pretty bad after they caught him," she added slowly. "There was a limit to what they could do if they wanted him to go on working for them, but I don't think he ever really got over it. But he insisted on seeing us, talking to us, to make sure we were all right and hadn't been taken away." Her gaze returned to her lap, where her small, hard fingers traced over and over again a seam of her skirt.

Great, Saltwood thought. And after all that, I come along and try to assassinate the poor stiff for being a Nazi. And I may have to yet, he reflected. "So what is it he's doing?" he asked gently. "What is it he's made?"

Her mouth twisted, and the old gleam of ironic humor came back to her eyes. "Like I said." She grinned up at him. "I've met dozens of wizards in my life, and they were all working on some kind of shmegegeleh that let them do magic - or would, once they got it perfected, usually out of the damnedest stuff - cardboard pyramids, 'sympathetic vibrating generators' made out of old colanders and copper wire, hoodoo amulets with stuff I didn't want to know about wadded up and stinking to high heaven inside. But none of them gave me the creeps the way that Spiracle does. Old Pauli'll stand there fingering it, either on the chain around his neck with all his other damn filthy tchotchkes or fixed on the head of a wooden staff, and the look in his eyes is the same as I'd see in the eyes of the real crazy ones, the ones who claimed to hear God or the Devil whispering at them."

She shook her head again, her dark brows pinching together; then she dismissed the fear with a dry chuckle. "Rhion - and Papa, who's just as bad - claims it gives von Rath magic powers."

"Great!" He made a gesture of disgust with his manacled hands. "That gets us exactly nowhere."

"You've got to remember Rhion believes it himself." She swung around at the sudden throb of engines in the driveway below. Tom was already halfway to the window to look - she scrambled leggily down and followed. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched through the bars as Storm Troopers and Luftwaffe bodyguards clambered into cars and truck and mounted the phalanx of motorcycles. Foreshortened almost directly below them, von Rath exchanged crisp Heil Hitlers with Goering and Himmler on the gravel of the drive.

"You heard about the new system of National Socialist weights and measurements?" Sara asked absently. "A 'goering' is the maximum amount of tin a man can pin to his chest without falling over on his face. God knows what's really going on." She turned her head to look up at Saltwood, pale noon sunlight glinting in her coffee-black eyes. "What happened to us could have been nothing more than posthypnotic suggestion..."

"I was never hypnotized!"

"The hell you weren't." She stepped back a pace from the glass and regarded him, hands on hips. "They could have hypnotized you and told you not to remember it - that's one of the oldest ones in the book."

Tom was silent a moment, considering that. He could remember everything clearly, except for a certain patchiness in his recollections immediately preceding Rhion smashing him over the head with the lab stool. At least he thought he could remember everything. "Maybe," he said slowly. "If von Rath was supposedly sending those - those hallucinations - from his h.q. on the other side of town, I suppose Goering's instructions could have been transmitted here by some kind of code words over the phone, the way the carney magicians do. But what would be the point, if they couldn't repeat it in a combat situation? And that invasion starts Wednesday - the day after tomorrow..."

Sara swore in Polish. "You sure?"

"I heard Goering talking about it in the next room. He and von Rath are cutting a deal of some kind. Von Rath claims he can give Goering four days' clear weather, which is a hell of a promise over the English Channel this time of year, plus this hallucination thing, and God knows what else. You don't..." He paused, uncertain. "This is going to sound stupid, but you don't think there's some kind of - of thought-amplification device involved, do you?"

"What the hell do you think magic is supposed to be, if not the action of thought waves on the material world? But I'm here to tell you, cowboy, in four years of analytical chemistry, I have yet to see anybody circumvent the law of conservation of energy, or make two things like hydrogen and ethylene combine without throwing in some platinum as a catalyst. It just doesn't work that way." She frowned. "What scares me is that there obviously is something going on. It doesn't hook up with any of the stuff Heisenberg and Einstein have been doing - or at least not with anything they've published - but once you get unpicking atomic structure, who knows? But there's got to be instrumentality of some kind. Anything else is like trying to change gears without a clutch. And whatever the hell Rhion did come up with - whatever he thought he was doing - von Rath's going to be able to use it."

"I was with the Eleventh Commandos when they hit Boulogne in July," Saltwood said quietly. "I saw the landing barges the Germans have ready. And whatever's going on, I have to get the hell out of here and let London know the balloon's about to go up."

Sara started to reply, but before she could, boots thudded outside the door. Another woman might have edged closer to him, for the illusion of protection if for nothing else; she only set her fragile jaw, but he saw the fear in her eyes.

The door banged open. Von Rath stood framed against a black wall of Storm Troopers, gun muzzles bristling around him. A moment later, guards entered the room, keeping the two prisoners covered. As Sara had said, the German was fingering the Spiracle on its silver chain, absently and yet lovingly, his head tilted a little as if listening for sounds no human should hear. "It is time," he said, "for the second part of our - ah - psychological tests."

Sara folded her arms. "Does that mean I get my room back?"

The opal glance touched her without a shred of humanity. "You are welcome to it for the remainder of the day," he said in his soft, well-bred voice. "But by tonight the question will be academic."

Saltwood saw the impact of that widen her eyes as he was pushed through the door.

Soldiers were everywhere in the wide wire-fenced enclosure that encircled the house in the Jungfern Heide when von Rath's little cavalcade rumbled carefully through the opened wire gate and off the drive. Sitting with half a dozen Storm Troopers in the back of the covered transport, Saltwood got a glimpse through its canvas curtains of the men who closed the gate behind them. They turned to look at him with stony hatred in their blue eyes. Must have found the body of their pal in the downstairs hall. A bad lookout when von Rath was done with him - always provided he survived this round of "psychological tests."

As the truck pulled around he could see Goering, with his gray mob of Luftwaffe bodyguards, walking slowly back and forth across the flat, weedy ground of the field, pausing now and then to stamp the hard-packed earth. "Absolutely no hidden wires, ladies and gentlemen," Saltwood said wryly to no one in particular in the voice of W. C. Fields. "You will observe that there is nothing up my sleeve but my arm." Closer to, Himmler was making a much more cursory examination, which he broke off when von Rath's car braked to a halt and came hurrying to its side.

"It was astounding, Captain," Saltwood heard the little Reichsfuhrer-SS say. "You have completely vindicated the Occult Bureau! Completely vindicated the true purposes of the SS as the spearhead of our Race's destiny. And if you have, as you say, found a method to release the vril, the sacred power bequeathed to the Aryan Race from the root race of Atlantis, we will indeed have nothing further to fear from those who oppose us. I have already put you in for promotion to full Colonel and a position as First Assistant to the head of the Occult Bureau..."

"I am honored," Von Rath inclined his head respectfully to the nervous, bespectacled bureaucrat before him. But by the steely edge of his soft reply, Saltwood guessed that Sara had been right. Completely vindicated Himmler's pet bureau and all he gets out of it is full Colonel? First Assistant? He'd heard Himmler was stingy and jealous of his influence and power. How long would it be, he wondered, before the Reichsfuhrer-SS went diving out a window for fear of something he thought he saw in the middle of the night, leaving the power of the SS like a honed dagger in von Rath's patrician hands?

Did von Rath believe it was magic? Or were the chain of faintly clinking amulets and the concealment of the control mechanism of Sligo's hellish device as an iron circle that, sure enough, he now carried on the head of a bona fide wizard's staff merely cover, a ruse to approach that clever, sneaky, powerful little man on his credulous blind side?

Sara was right about the Spiracle, too. It did give him a faint creeping sensation. Not when he looked at it straight, but a moment ago, glimpsing it from the corner of his eye, he'd seen - he didn't know what he'd seen - a darkness that wasn't really darkness radiating around it, a sense of spider strands of something too fine to see floating in all directions, webbing the air...

A fragmented picture flashed through Saltwood's mind, something driven from his memory by the blow that had knocked him out - maybe only a hallucination itself... Rhion Sligo had been perched in the darkness on his tall-legged stool, watching raptly as a ball of bluish light drifted slowly up from his hand...

But before he could think about it, he was being shoved over the lowered tailgate and walked between four guards to where Paul von Rath, accompanied now by Himmler and Goering as well as the inevitable swarm of bodyguards, stood beside a slightly smaller - maybe two-ton - covered flatbed transport truck.

A man in the clay-colored uniform of the motor pool was holding the hood propped open, and a Luftwaffe Captain reverently held Goering's white gloves as the big Reichsmarshall poked around the engine.

"It hasn't been out of my sight all day, Herr Reichsmarshall," the driver was saying. "You can see yourself there's nothing in the engine..."

The huge man grunted and straightened up, chest ribbons flashing like an unimaginative rainbow in the pale sunlight. Saltwood remembered Sara's joke and grinned. "I'm more familiar with a plane's engine than a car's," Goering said, as the driver shut and latched the hood, "but I'll swear he's right. Very well, then." He slapped the fender. "Let him drive this."

Himmler said nothing, but his dark eyes blazed with suppressed excitement, like a child about to see a show. Saltwood felt his flesh crawl.

Von Rath turned to him, his voice soft and polite, as if he barely remembered striking him - barely remembered, except in a cursory way, who he was. "You will drive the truck around the course marked by those orange flags." They were only scraps of cloth tied to weeds and brambles, and here and there to a stake where the ground was bare. "You may drive inside or outside of them, but if you attempt to crash the fence I can assure you that you will be killed instantly."

There were no guards on the perimeter of the field. Looking back at von Rath's calm smile, Saltwood knew that their absence was not an oversight.

"May I walk the course?"

The Captain - oops, sorry, Colonel now, thank you, Mr. Himmler - considered it for a moment, one hand idly fingering the pale staff of stripped, close-grained greenish wood on which the iron Spiracle was mounted. Then he shook his head. "I assure you it has been examined for hidden devices by men at least as skeptical as yourself."

Saltwood almost asked, Who, for instance? - Himmler and Goering both seemed to have swallowed the whole malarkey hook, line, and sinker. But he knew that particular piece of smartassery would only get him another smack in the mouth. So he shrugged and said in English, "It's your ball game." He turned to the cab of the truck.

The blood pounded in his ears as they handcuffed his left wrist to the steering wheel, leaving his right hand free to work the ignition and gears. Were they counting on him to make a run for it? It would be child's play to crash the fence, a jolting dash to the driveway or, if necessary, cross-country to the Alt-Moabitstrasse - he was pretty sure of his way back to the house on Teglerstrasse where Sara and her father were...

The house on Teglerstrasse? he demanded, aghast at himself. What the hell are you thinking? You'd be GUARANTEEING your capture by going back there. Your first duty is to get your arse to Hamburg and get London word of the invasion. Sara knows that, if anyone does.

And what makes you think you're coming out of this alive anyway?

Dammit, he thought, studying those beautifully smiling lips, those weirdly empty gray eyes, what the hell has he got? Does he believe this crap himself?

"Drive three times around the course," von Rath said, as Tom turned the key in the ignition, "and then return here."

And disregard any fire-breathing monsters that get in your way. He pressed the accelerator, let out the clutch, and jolted toward the first of the orange flags.

On the first half of the circuit he was taken up with getting the feel of the truck over the bumpy, unpaved ground and with scanning the earth all around him, particularly around the stakes and flags for signs that it had been dug up or tampered with. Though of course Goering had had a much better view... At the far end of the field he had a panicky impulse to crash the fence, head like hell toward the Spandau canal, but a second later cold feet overcame him. There was something wrong with the setup. He knew it, smelled it, as he had smelled thunderstorms when he was a kid riding herd and as he had smelled ambush in the dry canyons of the Meseta. He had no doubt that if he tried it, somehow, von Rath would kill him. Or were they counting on that fear?

Rounding the far turn he saw them standing like an official photograph in Das Reich: Goering in white and Himmler in black, with von Rath holding his iron-headed staff like some strange, glittering angel between them. Around the cars and back toward the house a shifting mill of men formed an obscuring backdrop from which an occasional face emerged - he thought he saw the pale flutter of Gall's long beard, the glint of glasses that had to be Baldur's. But he sensed all eyes on him, all attention on the gray truck as it moved and jerked over the rutted ground.

Then Himmler, his glasses gleaming in the wan light, leaned over and said something to von Rath, and the SS Captain lifted his hand, the crystals in the staff-head flashing...

The explosion of light nearly blinded Saltwood, the roaring blast deafening, and for one second he thought, That's it... But with almost comic simultaneity he realized he was still alive and that the only jarring came from the truck bouncing over the field. No blast effect, but only light that turned his vision to a whirling mass of purple spots and a noise like the German ammo dumps at Boulogne going up.

The next second the shooting and yelling started, as if all spectators from Goering on down had simultaneously discovered that their hair was on fire. As Saltwood's vision cleared a little, he saw Storm Troopers dashing from all corners of the field toward the place where the two Reichshonchos were staggering about, half doubled over and holding their eyes. Lights ripped the afternoon brightness like flashbulbs at a Hollywood premiere and someone was running toward the truck, desperately waving the iron-circled magic staff and yelling for him to stop.

He recognized Rhion Sligo.

The truck fishtailed in a cloud of thrown dirt as he hit the brake. Bullets had begun to spatter, but because of the lights still popping with gut-tearing intensity all around them, nobody could aim. Rhion flung himself up on the off-side running board and hooked one arm in a death grip through the frame of the open window - the other hand still firmly hanging onto the staff - and yelled, "Get us out of here FAST!"

Saltwood was already in gear and heading for the fence.

"You know the city?" the little professor panted, as bullets ripsawed the ground a dozen feet away and a few strays pinged off the hood of the truck. "Seven twenty-three Teglerstrasse - it's out past the Weisensee. Don't pay any attention to anything you see or hear..."

Seven twenty-three Teglerstrasse was the Gestapo safe house where Sara and her father were kept.

Wire whipped and sang around the radiator, then ground lumpily under the tires. Saltwood pointed to the right. "Blow the top off that pole."

Rhion shook his head, too out of breath to explain.

"Catch it on fire, then - it's the phone junction." What the hell am I saying? This isn't even REAL.

The pole was in flames as Rhion scrambled through the door and dragged it shut after him, awkwardly because he would not release his hold on von Ram's infernal stick. Things were not helped by the fact that Saltwood had begun to veer and swerve to avoid the hail of bullets now spattering all around them.

"And get down on the floor. I'm Tom Saltwood, American volunteer - British Special Forces."

"Rhion Sligo." He raised his hand in an unsteady Nazi salute and added politely, "Heil Roosevelt."

And at that moment, far off, barely to be heard above the chaos of submachine guns, shouting, and revving engines, rose the long, undulating wail of air-raid sirens. Tom twisted in his seat, scanning the colorless sky. Through the window of the cab he saw them, the black silhouettes of the escorting Hurricanes, the heavier, blunter lines of a phalanx of Wellingtons and Whitleys, swinging in from the northwest.

"It's a raid!" He let out a long rebel yell of delight. "It's a..."

There had been sporadic raids on Berlin for nearly a month, but if Mayfair had known one was due to coincide with his own project, he hadn't said anything about it. Though the main bomber group was still far off, there must have been one overhead he hadn't seen - hadn't heard, either, when he thought of it - for as the first of the swastika-marked cars swung onto the drive to pursue the escaping truck there was a groundshaking roar and every vehicle in the field behind them went up in flames.

"Fast," Rhion whispered, slumped gray-faced and sweating against the grimy cloth of the seat. "For God's sake, get out of here fast."

Like a cow climbing free of a mudhole, the truck heaved itself onto the Alt-Moabitstrasse and ran before the bombers like a stampede before summer lightning.

The first bombs started falling as Saltwood and Sligo hit the outskirts of Berlin. As their truck cut onto See Strasse to avoid the thicker traffic of the city center, a half-dozen yellow-white flares sprang up, dazzling in the waning afternoon light, ahead of them and to their right. "They're going for the railroads," Saltwood guessed, veering sharply around a panicked flock of women dragging children across the road to a shelter. "That'll be the Settiner Station. Those off to the far right will be the Anhalter goods yards... Dammit, lady, look where you're going!" he yelled as a young blond woman, eyes blank with terror, came pelting out of an apartment house with her arms full of something lumpy wrapped in a blanket and dashed almost under his wheels. He missed her with a screeching of tires and, in the rearview mirror, saw two gold-rimmed Meissen teacups fall out of the blanket and shatter on the tarmac of the road.

Another explosion went off close enough to make the ground shudder. "For Chrissake, they're not anywhere near you yet," he muttered, slamming on the horn, then the brakes, and swerving around a panic-stricken elderly couple in the road. "Worse than the goddam Londoners."

The Berliners, of course, were not nearly as used to air raids - yet, he thought grimly - as Londoners. And it was obviously the first time for Sligo, though, locked up in the Jungfern Heide, he might have heard the sound of far-off bombs. The little professor's face was gray with shock, appalled horror in his blue eyes behind their rimless specs as he looked around him at the panic and the rising flames.

"This is... how you people fight wars."

"You oughta see London if you think this is good," Tom muttered savagely, slewing through the intersection of Turm Strasse, the steely waters of the Landwehr Canal winking bleakly through brown and yellow trees. "Or Rotterdam - what the Luftwaffe left of it. Or Guernica and Madrid, for that matter." An explosion to their left jerked the vehicle almost off its wheels. Saltwood flinched at the roar of the blast, the shattering storm of fragments of brick, window glass, and filth that came spitting from the mouth of one of those narrow gray working-class streets that surrounded the canal locks. For a moment, the cloud of plaster dust and dirt was a yellow-gray fog through which nothing was visible, and Tom slowed as much as he dared, knowing by the droning buzz that the Wellies were directly overhead now. "I'm just hoping to hell the bridge across the locks is still standing when we get there - it'll be one of their main targets."

"It will be," Rhion said softly. His hands, chubby, yet curiously skilled-looking, moved along the rune-scratched wood of the staff. His eyes were shut.

"Right," Saltwood muttered, gunning again through the clearing fog of debris, the wheels jerking and bumping over the edge of a vast talus slope of loose bricks, broken lath, twisted pipe, and shattered glass that lay half across the road.

And by some miracle, the bridge over the Landwehr Canal still stood, though the locks themselves were a shambles of burning weirs and floating debris. Looking across that vast span of unguarded concrete, Saltwood felt his stomach curl in on itself. Buildings were burning on all sides here, the heavy gray nineteenth-century warehouses and the massive, six-story tenement warrens of the working-class districts all around. He slowed, feeling safer in the shadows of the buildings.

"There's got to be a tool kit in this thing," he said, twisting his body to grope with his free hand behind the seat. "I want you to hunt for a hacksaw, get me out of this damn handcuff."

"Later!" Rhion said urgently. "After we get across the bridge!"

"Yeah? You're not the one who's gonna be handcuffed to four thousand pounds of internal combustion engine if that bridge takes a hit when we're in the middle of it."

"It won't," Rhion insisted, fixing Tom with a desperate blue stare. "Believe me, it won't! We have to get across now - it could be destroyed while we're trying to get the cuffs off..."

"So we just backtrack to the Turm Strasse and go around. Christ knows the streets are clear." Another blast, very close this time, and both men ducked involuntarily as brick and glass spattered on the side of the cab like a shotgun blast.

"No! Please believe me, I know what I'm talking about, we've got to get across it, put as much distance between ourselves and that house as soon as possible."

Through the clearing dust, Saltwood saw that the bridge still stood. Would it ten minutes from now, always supposing they could find the goddam hacksaw and the blade didn't break?

He let out the clutch. "If we go down I'm taking you with me, pal."

He hit the bridge at fifty and accelerating. Concrete abutments flashed past, a glimpse of fires roaring up out of oil spilled on roiled brown water and of metal snags and cables floating like water weeds. Once clear of the buildings, he saw how many bombers were overhead - the whole sky was crossed with the smoke of rising fires. Like a bird laying eggs on the wing, he saw a Wellington directly above them drop its load, black teardrop shapes drifting leisurely down.

Though Tom would have taken oath the bombs were dead on target, the nearest hit the water thirty yards away. The blast nearly swept the truck off the bridge - he felt the tooth-jarring clatter of the speeding vehicle's door bouncing on the railings and veered, blinded, into the tidal wave of brown water hurled up by the blast. He cut in the windscreen wipers and through a grimy blur glimpsed - impossibly - the concrete span still arrowing before them, and hit the gas as hard as he could. At the same time he screamed, "You crazy Jew!"

A second stick of bombs took out the bridge as the truck slewed onto See Strasse and away through the burning town.

"Right," Tom whispered, braking to a halt. They had passed the big intersection of Muller Chausse and the main force of the bombing lay behind them now, though the streets were still empty as if in a city of the dead. "Now you dig out that tool kit and cut me the hell out of this!"

"How far have we come?" Rhion asked, not moving, though he cast a panicked glance at the streets behind them.

"Six or seven miles, and what the hell difference - "

"More than you think." He fumblingly unfixed the Spiracle from the head of the staff - it was held on with a wrapped iron wire - his hands shaking so he could barely manage it, and shoved the iron circlet into his shirt pocket before he'd set the staff aside and get out of the cab. Bombs were still falling as close as a half mile away in the cramped, sprawling labyrinths of the nineteenth-century factory districts around the canals, and, though Rhion flinched at the sound, he moved swiftly, decisively, as he came around the cab and dug behind the seat for the gray-painted tin box. "I don't know how far the Talismanic Resonator's field extends, for one thing. For another, von Rath's bound to search the house..."

"How the hell did you get out of your cell anyway?" Saltwood looked up from pawing, one-handed, through the tool kit. "I thought they locked you in."

"They did." Rhion grinned shakily. "But you left the key in the lock when you - ah - "

"Uh - yeah," Tom finished. In brief silence they regarded one another. There was a shiny patch of red scar tissue on the inside of the bridge of Rhion's nose, close to his left eye-circular, almost half an inch across, the size of the end of a cigarette. The burn was only a few months old; Saltwood could see another one in the pit of Rhion's throat through the open collar of his shirt. They hurt him pretty bad, Sara had said. The bruise of the garrote was still purple-red and angry under the clipped line of his beard.

"Look," Rhion said awkwardly, starting to saw inexpertly at the handcuff chain. "I'm sorry I knocked you out. I didn't know... I hope they didn't..."

"Nah. They needed me in one piece to blow me up. Here, be careful - there's no replacement blade in that kit. You ever used one of these things before? Put your strength in the pull, and keep it straight..."

"I could have used the power of the Resonator itself to open the lock," Rhion went on matter-of-factly, bending over his work, "but even that little - comparatively little - might not have left me enough power of my own to put on the lightshow that blinded von Rath and his guards long enough to let me grab the Spiracle itself, and Baldur or Gall might have sensed something. Frankly, I don't know whether they could or not. So the keys helped. Surprise was the only edge I had... I was hoping you'd figure out what was going on and pick me up, since I'm not sure I could drive one of these things and I had to get enough distance between the Spiracle and the Resonator to break up the field before von Rath figured out what I'd done."

"Uh-huh," Tom said soothingly, as Rhion glanced behind him again - Tom had seen him look in the truck's side and rear-view mirrors a dozen times on the hellish dash along See Strasse. Not surprisingly, of course. Bombs were still falling to the south and west of them, close enough for the ground to shudder under the nearer blasts. It was typical of the way things were done, Saltwood thought dourly, that it would be these sprawling slums, where two and three families shared windowless and crowded flats, to get the pulping, and the millionaires' houses over in the Grunewald to go untouched. In that way it was London all over again.

"The problem is," Rhion went on, "I don't know how far the field extends, or how far away I have to be to be safe."

"Huh?" said Tom. "What field?"

The Professor raised his head again; behind the rimless glasses, his blue eyes were filled with a growing fear. "Magic field."

Oh, Christ, Sara warned me. "Well," Tom said, "I think we're probably pretty safe."

"The hell we are." For a moment their eyes met, and there was something in the older man's that made Saltwood pause. When he spoke again his voice was low and deadly earnest. "I had to set up a Talismanic Resonator in the temple in that house, it was the only place where there was any kind of stored power at all. It drew on the Void energies coming through the Spiracle. At the level of power available in the temple, you'll get a field if they're within, oh, maybe a mile, two miles of each other..."

Oh, Hillyard's gonna love this. That the crazy little coot had something there, Tom didn't doubt - enough to startle and blind von Rath and his minions sufficiently for Rhion to seize the control mechanism concealed in the Spiracle, at any rate. And it was abundantly clear to him by the Professor's taut voice and desperate eyes that he wholeheartedly believed everything he said.

"But they're not," he pointed out, latching onto the one element of Professor Sligo's discourse he felt he could answer intelligently. "We've got to be five, six miles from the house by this time." The chain was cut almost through. Saltwood took the hacksaw from Rhion, who had begun to shiver with shock and reaction, and worked and twisted at the half-sawn link with a screwdriver from the kit until the chain broke with a loud snap. "Besides, even if von Rath has got some kind of transport by this time, the raid's still going on, and the bridge is out." And by the sound of it, he thought uneasily, the second wave of Wellies was on the way.

"We can't risk it." Rhion hurried around the other side of the cab again and scrambled in as the boom of explosions resumed over the long, shuddering siren wails. "Don't you understand? If von Rath gets within two miles of us - of the Spiracle..." He touched his pocket, where the thing's lumpy outline stood out against the cloth. "...or if he manages to find some kind of power source to increase the potential of the Talismanic Resonator - he's going to be able to use magic."