Chapter Twenty-Seven
"BRING THEM DOWN. "
Saltwood had already heard the men come up behind him, crowding out of the shadows of the trees. With a bitter oath Sara turned, bringing up her rifle, but the range was already too close. A Trooper tore it out of her hand and shoved her backward over the edge of the bank. Saltwood, hampered by Leibnitz' full weight, was only starting to turn when three rifle barrels thrust into his back and then he was falling, too, rolling down a slide of desiccated ivy and fern in a tangle of arms and legs.
He landed hard in a cold puddle of water, started to rise, and was struck over the back of the head by somebody's gun butt, driving him to his hands and knees. Gun and dagger were ripped from his belt before he recovered enough to think about committing suicide by putting up a fight.
"Put the Jew in the truck," went on that calm, soft voice, shaking now with an inner core of blinding rage. "Bind him, gag him, blindfold him. Baldur, remain with him, since he seems to be able to twist the powers we have released to his own corrupt and dirty spells. "
Raising his head, Tom could see the golden youth and three or four Storm Troopers cross to where Leibnitz lay facedown in the wet yellow leaves of the roadside ditch. They picked the old man up, a broken scarecrow with his patched gray clothing and emaciated limbs. Only when they were halfway to one of the covered trucks did Leibnitz show by the feeble, disoriented movements of returning consciousness that he was still alive. Baldur struck him.
"You goddam Nazi coward!" Sara flung herself toward them but was caught, easily, by two Storm Troopers - Saltwood lunged to his feet more to protect her than to go after Baldur, and the men behind him had been waiting for that. The struggle wasn't long.
"Bind the whore and put her in the other truck," von Rath said calmly, still standing in the backseat of the open Mercedes, Satan in uniform, the thick chain of talismans lying like a hellish emblem of office over shoulders and breast. Those that had been made of jewels seemed to burn in the shadowless blue magelight that flickered all around him, and even those wrought of bone and skin and twisted hair pulsed in that strange radiance, with something that might have been a kind of light but was more probably, Saltwood thought distractedly, a reflection sparked from the jewels, or the silver on his uniform, or something. . . some rational explanation. . . In some odd way those dead and mounted mementos of past sacrifices seemed more living than von Rath's eyes.
The wizard went on, "We have just time to reach Witches Hill, if we drive fast. Gall is waiting there already, but, with our hostage guaranteed, now we should have no trouble. So the night will not be totally lost. But you. . . " He turned to Saltwood, and a spiteful vindictiveness crept into his voice. "By leading this escape you have cost me the power I could have raised through an equinox sacrifice. You have almost cost me what I could have gotten from a second sacrifice, the sacrifice of a wizard, for without his Jewish whore as hostage, he would not have let himself be taken alive. You will pay for that. "
Saltwood felt something twist inside of him, a sharp stab of pain in his entrails, like the appendicitis he'd had as a kid. He bit his lip, gasping, trying not to cry out, but the pain grew, turning his knees to water. For a moment the men who were holding him took his weight; then they dropped him to the icy and broken pavement of the road.
Christ, he thought, what is this? all the while curling tighter over himself, tighter, retching as red claws ripped at him inside, like taking a bayonet in the gut, worse. . . He heard Sara cursing, was dimly aware of her fighting like a wildcat against the men who held her, men who were staring from him to von Rath's cool face and back with growing uneasy horror. He tasted blood and bile in his mouth, blood trickling from his nose, and his teeth shut on a scream, fighting to keep himself from screaming Stop it! STOP IT! PLEASE!! and thinking Bastard, I won't give that to you. Powder trails of pain and fire ignited along every nerve, burning up his flesh. It was all he could do not to scream, and he could feel that, too, coming. . .
Then the pain was over and he was lying on the wet gravel, weak and shaking and scared as he had never been scared before. Cloudily he was aware of a man swearing, "Bite me, you Jew bitch!" and von Rath's voice, querulous and peremptory, commanding, "NO!"
Looking up, Tom saw one of the guards who'd been holding Sara shaking his bloodied hand, the other still gripping her, his fist frozen in middraw.
Von Rath shook his head, his brows pulling slightly together, the expression of a man puzzled by something he has done flickering, very briefly, to life in his inhuman eyes. His soft voice had a halting note. "We - we have no time for this. " He passed his hand across his eyes and then the expression was gone, but for a moment Tom had the impression the SS wizard had been too involved in his own display of power to remember even the necessity of capturing Sligo alive. As if, for the moment of the exercise of his power, he had forgotten, literally, everything.
Then he looked back at Saltwood, the inhuman calm returning to his eyes. "I must. . . " A last fragment of uncertainty flawed his voice, then was gone. "I must try this again with someone of equal strength. " His glance shifted to the guards. "Kill him. "
Saltwood felt the barrel of an automatic press the back of his neck and heard the trigger pull.
Only the silence after Sara's scream "TOM!" made it possible to hear the flat click of the hammer coming down.
As if he didn't quite believe that nothing had happened, the guard pulled the trigger twice more, the clicks very loud now in the growing silence that spread among the men garnered beneath the cold umbrella of phosphor light, and all heads turned, not to von Rath, but to the dark of the road beyond.
Beyond the range of the corpse-candle glow, feral starlight caught in the lenses of glasses, in the five crystals of the Spiracle at the head of a staff. Then darkness fell, blinding and total, and Saltwood whipped one leg behind him and jerked down the guard with the gun, smashing the man's head on the pavement and ripping the dagger from his belt while noise erupted all around him, a chaos of shouts, curses, the crunch of boots, and the slap of bodies running head-foremost into the sides of trucks.
Then the darkness split, lightning tearing down in splattering flame as the bolts hit the road where Rhion had stood. In the white-purple glare, Tom saw Sara standing still a foot or so away and grabbed her wrist as darkness slammed down on them again, some instinct telling him to pull her away from the truck behind her. An instant later the vehicle burst into flames that illuminated a milling chaos of black- and gray-uniformed men surging all around them.
"Papa!" Sara yelled as the bushes on both sides of the road went up, and lunged for the second truck. For the first time Saltwood noticed that she, too, had acquired a dagger. At the same moment he almost tripped over the body of the Storm Trooper whom von Rath had stopped in the act of striking her. The beautiful Baldur met her in the dark arch of the truck's canvas cover, his own dagger held point-down for the overhead stab favored by Hollywood directors - Saltwood hurled him easily aside into the path of another advancing Trooper. Sara was already dragging her stunned father from the back of the truck; Tom kicked another attacker in the groin, grabbed the old man's arm, and, as the second truck burst into flames, bolted for the dark of the road cut where Rhion had last been seen.
Underfoot the potholed pavement heaved and split, hurling the three of them to their knees. Its center buckled upward, pulling apart to spew forth what seemed, for a hideous second in the holocaust of shadows, to be black things, shining, living, glittering, and crawling among a sticky ooze of glowing greenish slime. The next instant fire swept across it and the things were still - pebbles, Saltwood thought dimly, scrambling back into the shelter of a granite boulder that projected from the tall road bank - only pebbles and water after all, but burning, burning in impossible flame. . .
Lightning struck the bracken of the opposite bank, the dry brush roaring up in a screen of incandescent gold. A dark figure broke from it
a second before it flared, darting across the lowering flames that still flickered on the pavement as if every crack and pothole were filled with gasoline. Another levin bolt cracked, tearing the road to pieces behind them, and then Rhion rolled into the shelter of the boulder, face streaming sweat as if he'd plunged it into a sink.
"They took that Resonator you made to the Schloss," Saltwood gasped. "Whatever the hell it does. . . "
"He still thinks it's a Flash Gordon deathray," Leibnitz chipped in, as were-light exploded around them and Rhion flinched and gasped.
"Yeah, I figured that out. " He was holding himself upright on the staff, his face drawn with pain - Saltwood remembered as if from a nightmare the gut-rending agony von Rath had. . . willed on him? But that was impossible. Then Rhion drew a deep breath, and the pain seemed to ease. But in his blue eyes the haunted look of darkness remained, of grief and hopeless loss.
It was, Saltwood realized, only minutes short of midnight. Quite quietly, he said, "Sorry we made you miss your bus. "
"Not your fault. " Lightning flashed again, striking at the boulder behind which they crouched and seeming to shatter off it, splattering in all directions and running down the stone in lapis rivulets of fire.
"Gall's waiting for you up there, you know - or at least he was. He's probably hot-footing it back here as fast as he can to cut us off. "
Rhion nodded. Beneath the brown tangle of his beard his face was ashy and taut with pain, his breathing a ragged gasp.
"We couldn't warn you. . . "
"This flat-footed, goyischer shlemiel stepped on the Tree of Life before I could tell you. . . "
"It's all right. I'd hoped. . . " He gasped, averting his face for a moment, his whole body shuddering under the renewed onslaught of pain. Leibnitz reached quickly up, his bony, age-spotted hands folding over the smooth pudgy ones where they clung to the wood of the staff. For an instant Saltwood felt a burn of heat on his back, smelled scorching wool - then with a cry he saw spots of flame spring up on the back of Sara's jacket. He struck them out, panicked and disoriented, feeling heat breathe on his face, his hair. . .
Then it was gone, and Rhion was straightening up again, shaking, as if his strength had gone with it. "I can't. . . " he whispered. "He has the talismans. . . all their power, drawn into himself. . . Poincelles and the strength of the summer solstice. All the sacrifices they did. . . " He shook his head. In a small voice he added, "And he was stronger than me from the start. "
Slowly, between the surface of the rock and Sara's shoulder, Leibnitz levered himself to his feet. "It will be midnight soon," he said softly, and Rhion nodded. Under the scratched spectacles and the sweaty points of his hair his eyes were shut. Sara's image sprang to Saltwood's mind again, the mad Professor standing on his magic stones, arms outspread, waiting to be taken away by wizards and enchantments that never came.
Dimly, from down the road beyond them, the growl of truck motors could be heard. A moment later hooded headlights flashed into view, and standing up in the lead truck's open cab Saltwood made out the long white mane and silvery beard of the wizard Gall, cutting them off from any hope of flight.
On their other side von Rath had stepped forth into the roadway. The blazes that still flickered, impossibly, on the riven asphalt sank; the ranks of Storm Troopers formed up behind him like a wing of darkness and steel. A nimbus of shadow seemed to surround the Nazi wizard himself, that queer, eldritch, spider-shot aura that Saltwood had once or twice thought he'd seen from the corner of his eye floating near the Spiracle. But this darkness was growing, spreading, lifting like a column of smoke around a core of lightless flame.
"Can you run for it?" Rhion asked quietly.
"Are you kidding? With Gall and his stooges behind us and von Rath able to zap us the minute we. . . "
Rhion shook his head, and for an instant, from the corner of his eye, Saltwood had the same strange sense he'd had before about the Spiracle - that the shadow-twin of the darkness which surrounded von Rath gathered there like a veil of impossibly fine black silk, shot through with invisible silver. Its crystals seemed to have caught the cold glitter of the stars, but no stars at all could be seen now, through the center of its iron ring. Saltwood wasn't sure what it was that he did see there, in that terrible, shining abyss.
"No. " Rhion's voice was barely audible, his eyes not on Saltwood, but on von Rath's advancing form. "No. It will be all right. It was my fault - my doing. . . But it will be all right. "
His face like chalk, Rhion stepped from cover and walked to the center of the charred and rutted ruin of the road. Gall called out something and men sprang down from the truck and started to run forward, but something about that solitary brown figure made them hesitate and stumble to a halt.
In the silence of midnight, Rhion held up the staff in both his hands.
It seemed to Saltwood that the lightning came down from five separate points of the heavens - heavens deep and star-powdered and impossibly clear. They hit the head of the staff and for one second he thought the darkness - the veil - the whatever-it-was that had always seemed to hang there invisibly - was illuminated with a horrible electric limmerance that speared out in all directions along those silver spider strands.
Von Rath shouted "No!" in a voice of rage and disbelief and inhuman despair.
And the very air seemed to explode.
Von Rath screamed.
It was like twenty men screaming, a hundred - dunked into acid, eaten by rats, rolled in fire that wouldn't die. The chain of amulets around his neck burst simultaneously into - not flame, but something else, something worse, something Saltwood had never seen before - something that sheathed the Nazi wizard in searing brightness even as it sank into his flesh, eating into him as fire streamed back out of every orifice of his body, as if he had been ignited by that lightning from within. The screaming seemed to go on for minutes but couldn't have lasted for more than twenty seconds or so, while Rhion stood braced, the glare of the lightning that never ceased to pour like water down into the head of the staff blazing off his glasses, and von Rath screaming, screaming like the damned in their long plunge to hell.
Then silence, and the dying crackle of flame. The Spiracle at the head of the staff was gone, the staff itself burned down to within inches of Rhion's hands. The troops on both sides stood back in frozen horror, staring at the crumbling, burning thing in the SS uniform slowly folding itself down to the blackened ground.
A voice shrieked "Pauli, NO!" There was the flat crack of an automatic, and Rhion twisted, his body buckling over, and fell without a cry.
Baldur Twisselpeck, short and fat - And where the hell did he come from? - stood in front of von Rath's Mercedes, clothed in a straining SS uniform to which he couldn't possibly have had any right and clutching an automatic, tears pouring down his pimply cheeks.
Ashen-faced, the men started to move forward in the sinking illumination that came from the fires along the roadbed and the two burning trucks, toward Rhion's body and what was left of Paul von Rath. None of them seemed to notice Baldur, who had fallen to his knees, sobbing hysterically, clutching his gun to him and groaning "Paul. . . Paul. . . "
"Let's go," Saltwood breathed, turning to Sara - and found her gone.
The first spattering burst of machine-gun fire from the abandoned Mercedes cut Baldur nearly in half. The second sustained volley took out both Gall and the gas tank of the truck in which he stood, and as men scattered in all directions the Mercedes jumped forward, bounding like a stallion over the chewed-up pavement to screech to a stop a few feet from the boulder where Saltwood and Rebbe Leibnitz still crouched.
Sara yelled "Get in, goddammit!" from behind the wheel.
Saltwood heaved Leibnitz into the backseat, which contained all the guns Sara could collect, grabbed a Schmeisser, and sent raking bursts in both directions at the men who were already starting to
run towards them. Bullets panged noisily off the fenders and hood, and Saltwood felt one of them sting the back of his calf as he bent down to haul Rhion's body out of the way of the wheels.
How much of that HAD been real? he wondered, looking down at the slack face, the broken glasses, the black bruise of the garrote across the throat. If they got out of this alive, there'd be time to mourn. But he was acutely aware that Rhion had done what he himself had refused, for expediency's sake, to do: he'd come back for them, and to hell with what it cost.
Then he saw Rhion's eyelids flinch. One of those chubby hands tried to close around his wrist, then loosened again, but by that time Saltwood was hauling him into the backseat of the Mercedes, heedless of the rifle bullets whining like angry flies around him. "Drive like hell!" he yelled as Sara hit the gas. "He's still with us!"
"How bad?" she yelled back, as Storm Troopers scattered before the big car's radiator like leaves in a gutter. The burning truck with Gall's half-roasted body still hanging out of it flashed past; a last bullet sang off the fender and Sara swore. Then there was darkness, and the remote white light of the cold half-moon.
There was an entry wound between the two middle ribs; the exit wound, gaping and messy with splintered bone, was just under the shoulder blade, and hissed faintly with every gasping breath. Behind the rimless glasses Rhion's eyes were open now, staring with a curious, terrible bitterness into the midnight sky. "Bad. "
With a small sigh that broke off sharply in a wince of pain Rhion turned his head, beard and eyebrows standing out blackly with shock in the moonlight. "Can you get me to the Stones?" His voice sounded normal but very quiet.
"Oh, for Chrissake!" Sara groaned, exasperated. "We've got enough of a head start to make it to Danzig. "
"Please. "
"It's too goddam late! You said midnight, and midnight is over! Do we need to keep on with this?"
"Saraleh," Leibnitz said gently, "the reason it's too late is because he came back to help us. "
The fires had vanished into the darkness behind them. On the other side of the hills another glare of orange flame and rising smoke marked where Schloss Torweg would be, and Saltwood was so numbed, so exhausted, so shaken that he didn't bother trying to think up a reasonable explanation for that.
The big car rocked and jolted over the sorry road, and, beyond the spiky black of the pines, the wheel of the stars moved calmly past its point of balance, down the long road to the next solstice at the dead heart of winter, three months away. The cinnamon tips of her hair flicking back under the fingers of the night wind, Sara continued to expostulate, "We're gonna get frigging caught! This is our chance, our last chance. . . There'll be search parties all over the goddam countryside. . . "
Rhion, teeth shut hard now, said nothing, but Saltwood said, "Get us there, Sara, okay?" and felt Rhion's hand tighten on his own.
"He's not gonna make it," Sara said softly, "is he?"
Around them, the countryside was deeply silent. They had found the Stones deserted, though ringed with plentiful evidence of Gall's earlier ambuscade - cigarette butts, tramplings in the wet grass, and an occasional puddle of urine behind a tree. That no one had been there since they'd departed shortly before midnight was obvious; dew had formed already on the grass, and would hold the slightest mark. In the deepening cold it was already turning to frost.
Saltwood looked back at the form lying on the fallen stone in the cold starlight, which picked out in chilly relief the lenses of his glasses, the silver swastikas and buttons of the SS greatcoat they'd put over him. "Not the way we'd have to be traveling. "
Like a bent, gray stork in the wavery shadows, Rebbe Leibnitz sat on the edge of the stone at Rhion's side, sketching the arcane circles of the Sephiroth and writing all the Angelic Names he knew in the last crumbling fragments of the chalk he'd had in his pockets. The Hebrew letters formed a pale shroud of spiderweb, draped over the ancient stone of sacrifice and trailing away into shadow. In its center Rhion lay without moving, his breathing agonizing to hear.
Hesitantly Sara said, "The Nazis would probably patch him up if they found him. With von Rath gone they're going to need him. . . "
"No!" Rhion half raised himself from where he lay on the stone, then sank back with a gasp, his hand pressed to the makeshift bandages on his side. As they strode back to him Saltwood could see the track of blood glittering in his beard, and the dark seep dripping through his fingers. "Don't let them. . . " Then his eyes met Saltwood's, and he managed a faint grin. "Oh, hell, it's your job not to let them, isn't it?"
" 'Fraid so," His voice was gentle.
Rhion coughed, fighting hard not to. When he was twelve, Saltwood remembered, he'd been chousing cows out of the edges of the badlands twenty miles from the ranch when his horse Mickey had broken a leg. He'd known that to leave the animal alive would be to condemn it to being brought down and torn to pieces by coyotes. The hurt had lasted in him till he'd left the ranch completely. . . and enough of it remained even now to make him remember as he unholstered his gun.
Glancing up, he could see the echo of his thoughts in Sara's eyes. It was after three in the morning of the first day of the long slide of autumn to winter. It would be a cold drive to Danzig.
Hesitantly Sara said, "We - we don't need to travel that fast. I mean, with von Rath dead and the Spiracle gone, that puts the kibosh on whatever secret plan they had for the invasion of England. As Rhion said, even a week's delay to figure out something else is going to put them into winter. We could keep ahead of them. . . "
"It wouldn't do us any good," Saltwood said gently. "He needs a doctor, and he needs care; long before we could get him either of those, he'd be dead in a lot of pain and we'd have put ourselves in a concentration camp for nothing. "
He looked back at the stone, where Leibnitz, draped like a Roman patriarch in the carriage rug that had been in the back of the Mercedes, was inscribing the pyramids of power over the numerological squares of the planets, scribbling the Names of the 1,746 Angels in charge of the Cosmos and all its myriad doings. Saltwood still wasn't entirely certain what had gone on back there on the road. Whatever the device had been - radio-controlled explosives or clairvoyant hallucinogens or whatever - Rhion had somehow caused it to backfire on itself badly, that was clear. That he'd done so under the impression that he was destroying his only means of returning to his fantasy home lent a quixotic heroism to the little madman that dragged on some corner of Tom's heart he thought he'd left in a Spanish prison.
And Rhion had saved their lives - and bought England and the world time - at the cost of his own.
Sara walked back to the altar stone, her Schmeisser tucked under one arm. Her breath was a ghostly cloud in the moonlight as she said, "Papa, you should be back in the car. " The open vehicle wouldn't be much warmer, but Leibnitz was clearly at the end of his strength. "You can't do anything further here. "
Saltwood half expected the old man to protest, but he didn't. He stepped back, holding the blanket around his skinny shoulders with one hand.
"No," the old scholar said softly, and the moonlight glimmered on the steam of his breath, the silky stiffness of his ragged beard, like quicksilver frost. "I have summoned it back, all the power that went forth from their meeting; summoned it back from the energy tracks along which it dispersed to all the corners of this sorry earth. "
He turned his head to look down at the still, dark shape lying upon the altar, and in the emaciated wrinkles of his face Saltwood could see the glint of tears. "It is sacrifice that gives power, you see, Saraleh," the old man whispered. "Not death, but the willingness to give up everything, to burn the future to ashes, and all that it could have been, and to let it go. That is what they did not and could not understand, wanting power only for what it could give to them. That is what raises the great power from the earth and the air and the leys bene
ath the ground, that thunderclap of power that went forth; that is why he conquered,"
His hand sketched a magic sign in the air; then, bending, he kissed the tangled hair that lay over Rhion's forehead. "The Lord go with you, my friend - to wherever it is that you will go. "
Rhion made no response. Sara stepped forward and kissed him in her turn. Then she turned quickly away, hitching the machine gun under her arm. Taking her father's elbow, she walked slowly back toward the car, the tracks of their footprints dark and broken in the first glitter of the frost.
Saltwood walked over to the Stone. In the moonlight the chalked Kabbalistic symbols seemed to glimmer on the close-grained dolomite of the ancient altar. The night was still, but with the passage of shadows across their ice-powdered faces the other two Stones did, in fact, seem ready to begin dancing, as soon as no one remained to see.
His automatic felt like lead in his hand.
Rhion raised his head a little, propping himself on one elbow. His hand, pressed to his side, was black with blood. "I know you have to get moving if you're going to make it to Danzig ahead of the pursuit," he said, his breath a blur of whiteness in the freezing air, slow and ragged as if he fought for every lift of his ribs. His eyes were sunk back into hollows of shadow behind the broken spectacles, his forehead creased with pain. "But can you give me till dawn?"
For what? Saltwood thought. For your magic friends to get their act together and show up with the fiery chariot after all?
But something told him Rhion didn't really expect that to happen anymore. A rime of frost glittered already on the coarse wool of the greatcoat draped over him - its hems and sleeves, even, scribbled with the Seals of Solomon, the Tetragrammaton and the Angelic Names - and turned the weeds around the stone to a frail lace of ice, and the night promised colder yet.
With any luck, Saltwood thought, cold as it was, by dawn Rhion would be dead.
He put the automatic back in its holster. "Hell," he said softly, "you gave us till spring. "
Rhion shook his head, his strength leaving him as he sank back down onto the bloody stone. "When I came here," he said quietly, "it was because I couldn't imagine anything worse than a world where magic no longer existed. But I've seen. . . " He coughed again, pressing his hand to his side. "I've seen what is worse - a world where even the concept that other human beings are as human as you are is disappearing. . . and I see now, too, that this - this kind of lie - is what was starting in my own world, was being used like a weapon for whoever cared to wield it. That is how it starts. . . " He was silent for a moment, his face tense with the struggle against agony, and Tom saw the dark threads of blood creep from beneath him to mingle with the pale signs of the chalk.
Then he whispered, "I couldn't let them have it. But when I went back. . . it wasn't for that. "
"I know," Saltwood said.
"Take care of her. "
He grinned wryly. "You think she'll let me?"
A sharp spatter of gunfire crackled on the edge of the woods. Saltwood ducked instinctively, turned and ran back along the black track of footprints in the palely shining grass toward the red flash of Sara's gun barrel. It was a party of Storm Troopers from Kegenwald. The whole countryside was probably alive with them, either seeking vengeance for the somewhat confused events of the night or still hunting for Rhion, unaware of what had gone on in the road cut. It really didn't matter. The results would be the same.
The skirmish was sharp but protracted, a cat-and-mouse game of quick firefights and long waiting in the deepening cold, of slipping and stalking painstakingly through the absolute darkness of the pine woods, of waiting for a whisper, a breath, the movement of a shape against the slightly paler gleam of the frozen pine mast. Saltwood had done it a hundred times over the last few years, in the mountains of Spain and in training in the hills of Scotland, and upon occasion, more recently, in the wet fields of France. He had fought colder, fought hungrier, fought in worse physical shape, but when he came back to the car with the thin dawnlight streaking the sky above the trees he didn't remember ever being this tired, this bone-weary of fighting, this fed up with the expediency of killing men to make the world a better place.
Since he'd gotten into the unions in his early twenties, it seemed to him that he'd always been fighting somebody to make the world a better place to live in. One day, he thought, if he survived the war, it would be good simply to live in it for a change.
Like Rhion, he wanted to go home.
Sara came out of the woods, an officer's greatcoat slung over one arm and three more submachine guns hanging by their straps from her other shoulder. With characteristic practicality she had been looting the bodies of the slain. In the frame of her dark hair, her face was gray with strain and exhaustion, and blood smeared her hands and her knees, and tipped the ends of her hair. She stood for a long moment in the deep, frozen grass looking at Tom, and in her face, in the tired stoop of her body, he saw the sickness of utter weariness, of nausea with everything she had done from the day she had set out for Germany to rescue her father. She did not move toward him, but when he crossed to her, his feet crunching in the brittle weeds, she held out her arms, and they stood pressed together, locked in each other's warmth for a long time while she wept.
"I'm sorry," she whispered finally, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, a schoolgirl gesture that touched his heart. "I don't. . . I'm not usually this stupid. . . " Her arms tightened around his waist, and he felt her shivering. 'I'm really not - not like you've seen me at all. It's just. . . "
"I hope you're not too different when things are quiet," Tom said, and kissed her gently on the lips.
She shook her head, holding him closer, her face pressed to the old, dry bullet holes and bloodstains of his jacket. "I don't know what I'm like anymore. Like I've been torn apart and haven't been put back together yet. That's - that's the worst of this. "
"Well," he said softly, "I'll be there, if you want me to stick around, while you're figuring it out. There's no hurry. Warm up the car. " From the tail of his eye he could see her father crawling stiffly out from under the Mercedes where he'd taken refuge during the shooting, picking frozen weed stems out of his car rug and beard. "I'll be back," Tom promised gently. "And then I'll take you home. "
He climbed the sloping meadow in the pewter twilight of dawn, the frost-thick grass crunching under his boots, his automatic in his hand. He'd been afraid the Storm Troopers had gotten to Rhion, but a glance at the stiffened carpet of the grass told him otherwise - it would have held the mark of a butterfly's foot. It shimmered eerily, like powdered silver, in the light of the moon that hung like a baroque pearl above the hill where the old holy place had been. The frost there was thicker, all but covering the tracks he, Sara, and her father had left a few hours ago. It furred the ancient altar of sacrifice, half obscuring the crooked abracadabra that Leibnitz had written there in the hopeless hope of attracting the attention of some mythical convocation of wizards gathered in the Emerald City of Rhion's deranged dreams.
But the odd thing was that it seemed to have worked.
The black greatcoat lay flung back, stiff with rime and patched with blood, and blood lay in congealing puddles on the age-pitted surface of the enchanted stone itself, mixing with the Kabbalistic nonsense of signs. But of Rhion himself there was no trace, nor did any track but Saltwood's own cut the frost that glittered in a carpet of fragile ice in every direction.
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