"D'YOU THINK HE made it?"
The drone of the DC-3's engines steadied as they reached cruising speed; Tom Saltwood turned away from the icy window glass through which could be seen a fumy, tossing ocean of cloud, ink and pewter meringued with the icy white of the late-rising moon. Pillars and columns of vapor loomed around them, solid-seeming as the mountains of some fantastic landscape. Tom hoped the gangly Yorkshireman in the cockpit knew what the hell he was doing, because at black and freezing three A.M., he wasn't even sure he himself could have said which way England lay under all that cloud cover, much less how to get there without crashing. He also hoped the Freedom Fighters in Danzig had gotten their radio message through to England, and that they weren't going to be met by a squad of Spitfires, after all the long, exhausting journey to Danzig and two days of hiding out in the radio man's cellar, living on canned beans.
But at the moment, he scarcely cared. They were airborne. The Luftwaffe, being largely occupied elsewhere, hadn't sent a plane after them beyond one or two cursory shots as they'd passed over Danzig.
It was over.
He felt as he had felt jammed in a corner of the destroyer Codrington's gun deck, grimy and exhausted, amid stinks of oil and cordite, sweat and vomit, and feeling glad to be there with all of his soul that was still awake enough to feel anything...
It was over. He was heading home.
The DC-3 had been stripped for conversion to a cargo carrier, and rattled like an empty boxcar. Curled on the cleated wood decking at his side, Sara lay wrapped in a couple of gray Army blankets, her crazy red-and-black hair glinting every now and then when the jogging gleams of the dim cockpit lights struck it. Other than that, the narrow hold was in darkness, Rebbe Leibnitz hawklike face no more than a pale blur and a liquid gleam of eyes.
"Made it?" the old man asked, the lift of his eyebrow audible as a note in his voice.
Shadow blotted the dim glow of the cockpit lights; a voice with a soft Somersetshire burr said, "We're leveled off - will you have a cigarette, Captain?"
"Yes - thanks," Tom said, and the copilot leaned in to extend a pack. "Mind if I take another for Miss Leibnitz when she wakes up? She'll kill me if I don't ask."
The man laughed. "By all means. By the way, we got word just before we left England, a message for you from a Mr. Mayfair. He said he'd put through special immigration papers for Mr. Leibnitz - as a former prisoner of the SS there'll be no problem."
"When I was just somebody Hitler wanted to have starved and beaten to death it was 'Well, everybody's got their troubles,' " Leibnitz muttered under his breath as the copilot's dark form vanished once more behind the cockpit curtain. "But let them think I can be of some use to them, and they're baking me a cake. Made it where?"
Tom glanced down at Sara's sleeping form, tucked one cigarette behind his ear, and busied himself with lighting the other. The gold glow of the match outlined his cupped hands in light, sparkled in the silky whiteness of Leibnitz' beard. He lowered his voice, as if fearful that even in her sleep, Sara would sigh and roll her eyes in disgust. "Made it back to where he came from."
The smell of burnt sulfur whiffed a little in the cold air of the cabin, then a draft dispersed the thin ribbon of smoke to nothing again.
Leibnitz' voice spoke out of the dark. "There was a lot of power released that night - in the battle, in the destruction of the Spiracle, in the implosion of the field and the rising-up in rage of all those talismans von Rath had made for himself... All that power channeled to magic, picked up by the net of the leys, spread out to the corners of the world and brought back again. Power far beyond the power of the equinoxes, the power of the heavens... power such as this world has not known in along time."
By daylight, Tom thought - when they stumbled off this flying sardine can onto the tarmac of Coventry Field in the gray fog of an English morning - he wouldn't believe this anymore, either. He knew he'd start to wonder if he'd looked closely enough at the frost around the standing stones, or if Rhion had been less badly wounded than he'd seemed. But now he remembered only the glint of the five jewels in that last pouring stream of lightning, and the way Rhion's upturned glasses had picked up the glare of it, and the dark blood mingling with the scribbled spiderweb of chalk upon the stone, with no body in the center where a body had lain before.
Months later, long after it had become obvious that the cross-Channel invasion had, in fact, been canceled for that year, on one of his trips down to London, he was to stop in at the Red Cow again and encounter Alec Mayfair, grizzled and slow and cautious as ever...
And because of their conversation on that occasion Mayfair lent him a copy of a dossier, a folder filled with copies of Intelligence reports not considered secret enough or important enough to rate special classification. The reports spoke of a massive series of escapes from concentration camps and labor camps throughout Germany: during an outbreak of inexplicable fires at Dachau that kept the guards too busy to notice the departure of eighty-seven Jews led by three of von Rath's "specially designated" Kabbalists; unexplained quarrels among the guards at Buchenwald that amounted to a campwide riot during which fifty-four Polish, Jewish, and gypsy children vanished from the camp along with a "specially designated" gypsy witch; the execution of three guards at Gross Rosen for neglect of duty in allowing twelve Jewish and Polish occultists apparently to cut the wires literally under their noses and walk out; and others; many others... all, apparently, at or about midnight on the night of September 23.
There were other matters in the file, too: notes of a British coven raising a visible cone of white light that was seen by a number of witnesses to stretch eastward through the black overcast of the skies toward Germany; a copy of a Gestapo report of the collapse of scaffolding supporting landing barges destined for the invasion at Brest pinned to a local newspaper clipping from the village of Carnac on the Quiburon Peninsula forty miles to the south telling of "lights" seen among the long rows of standing stones at the very hour of the scaffolding's collapse - midnight of the twenty-third - and of the strange things found in the morning among cold ashes at the foot of a menhir known as Le Manio.
An article from the Indian Hill, Massachusetts, Intelligencer describing the onstage heart attack of a vaudeville magician during the six P.M. show on the twenty-third, when, as he later said, he'd looked out over the audience and actually seen around each patron a halo of colors, filled with pictures of their pasts, their hopes, their dreams...
An article from the Sentinel of Rattlesnake Mound, Mississippi, was about a sixteen-year-old Negro girl who'd found $8,000 worth of long-buried Indian artifacts by placing three pieces of brass in her hand and walking along the ridge where pirate treasure was said to be buried, late in the afternoon of that same day.
There was an account of a near-riot at the San Francisco Chronicle when representatives of eight prominent Chinatown families came demanding information on an alleged Japanese dawn offensive against Chinese nationalist forces around the Szechwan village of Weihsien in western China, about which they had heard from a geomancer making feng-shui calculations on Mt. Diablo in Berkeley... and an intelligence report, dated two weeks later, regarding such an offensive at dawn of the twenty-fourth - or two in the afternoon on the twenty-third in Berkeley - or midnight in Germany...
There were other reports: the death of a planter in Haiti when he inexplicably swerved his car into one of his own gateposts while going down his drive; rumors of werewolves among the Navajo and rumors of shamanic activity in Siberia against the marching Japanese; an unexplained fire in the barracks of occupying German forces in Denmark, and the discovery the following morning of a horse's skull, inscribed with runes of hatred and defiance, close by.
And annotated in a woman's hand, calculations backward and forward through time zones: all of these incidents had taken place at, or about, the twenty-third of September, at the hour when it was midnight on the sunken backroad in Germany that led to Witches Hill.
There was no explanation appended to any of them. Nor did Mayfair offer any, when he took the folder back.
But that lay in the future. Now Tom only sat, weary in all his bones with Sara's head pillowed against his thigh, tasting the welcome bitterness of nicotine and watching the unsteady movement of the chill edge of starlight on Leibnitz' face as he spoke.
"Oh, he made it, all right," Leibnitz said softly. "But as to what his stay in this world made of him - as to what power will cling to him from the magic of sacrifice - it is hard to say. And those wizards who brought him back - I don't think they quite know what they have."
It will be all right, Rhion had said. It will be all right.
Tom blew a stream of smoke and reached down with his free hand to touch Sara's hair. It was far from over yet...
Due to Mayfair's good offices he knew Sara would be staying in London with her father, while he himself would be going back to the Commandos at Lochailort... But London wasn't so far.
He glanced back up at the old man, already feeling that he'd known him and his daughter half his life and rather looking forward to knowing them for the other half. "We'll never know."
And in the faint gleam of the cockpit light he saw the old scholar smile as he folded bony hands about his knee. "And what makes you think one day we won't?"
"Will he live?"
Rhion heard the words from deep in darkness - a darkness that flashed with pain at every breath he drew despite the cloudy blur of what he dimly recognized as poppy syrup and spells, a darkness safe and warm after the soul-fraying chaotic night of the Void. A darkness that beckoned deeper, and to which he wanted, more than anything, to retreat forever.
The Gray Lady's voice said, "I don't know."
No, thought Rhion, drawing further back into that darkness. He didn't know.
Soul and body he felt empty and broken, as he had when von Rath's men had finished with him. The sweetness of the Lady's voice-spells, like the scent of roses carried over water in the night, had drawn his spirit back to his shattered flesh, had given him something to hold to... if he chose to hold.
But he had had enough. And the voices he heard around him in that darkness, drifting nearer and then away again, were not encouraging.
"The Cult of Agon has to have wizards of its own in its employ," someone said at one point, a young man's voice that Rhion dimly recognized as belonging to one of the Ebiatic novices he'd occasionally met at the Duke's court. "Powerful wizards..."
"It would explain how the Town Council of Imber was able to enter our House to make its arrests," someone else agreed, and in a half-forgotten chamber of Rhion's mind the ghost of a former self smiled, for it was Chelfrednig of Imber, who'd once had him and Jaldis run out of town for practicing magic in the territory of the Selarnist wizards. "I was only fortunate that I was gathering herbs that evening..."
"It explains the arrests of Mernac and Agacinthos in Nerriok, and the Blood-Mages in the In Islands last week," added Cuffy Rifkin, an Earth-witch from up the Marshes whom Rhion knew well.
"And it certainly makes clear how they managed to get the better of Shavus and the other Morkensiks at the turning of summer."
So that's what happened...
But it was still apart from him, still distant. More near, more important, were the smells of peat smoke, herbs, and water, the smells of the Drowned Lands: wet fern, mossed stone, and bread. The gray curtain of sound that rustled like silk in a darkened room was the stirring of rain on the ivy of the walls of his own house and in the long cattail beds below the terrace.
He was home.
Something would have stirred within him at that, he thought, only it had not the strength.
"What I'm saying," the witch Cuffy's voice went on, "is that, though he's the only Morkensik we've got, he's not what you'd call a powerful mage."
"I don't know," the Gray Lady said softly. "The magic that carried him across the Void - the strength I felt out there on the Holy Isle - was not the magic of sun-tide or star-tide or anything else I have felt. I don't know what he is now, what he has become."
Lying in darkness, Rhion knew. Beneath the drugs, beneath the drained exhaustion left by the traversing of the Void, beneath the agony of splintered ribs and torn flesh, he knew. Power lay in him like a fist of light, sleeping in the core of pain that lay at the center of his being. He could open that fist, and the power would radiate forth from his hands...
If he was willing to do it. But he knew what it would mean.
It would mean taking responsibility for this ragtag of mages who had gathered here. It would mean putting himself against the might of the Cult of the Veiled God, and against the men who found it increasingly convenient to use its lies. It would mean enduring what that responsibility, that leadership, would cost.
The power was in him, willed to him by those murdered Kabbalists, by the gypsy woman whose body he'd seen, by the old runemasters and young psychics, and even by the darkly grinning Poincelles - fragments of power that could never have been power in the world to which it had been born, fused now in darkness and in light.
But to use that power...
Dying would be easier. And no one could say he hadn't earned that right.
A hand brushed his hair, touched his beardr and his hands. Someone whispered, "Rhion?"
And it wasn't any thought of power, or responsibility, of sacrificial shoulds or future ifs that made him open his eyes. Only that hearing her voice, he couldn't do otherwise - couldn't imagine doing otherwise, though he knew that the choice was between that sweet, dark peace and going through all that he had gone through again...
But this time he would go through it with her beside him.
Tally had cut her hair. Without the sugar-brown silk cloak of it, her head looked small and delicate, like a bird's.
He wondered how he could ever possibly have considered dying.
"The boys?" he asked, after their mouths parted again. His voice was inaudible and the two words left him as breathless as if he'd lifted them, like huge rocks. She had to bend close to hear.
"They're safe. The Lady's keeping an eye on them through her Mirror - we're bringing them here as soon as we can figure out how to do it safely."
The mages gathered round: the Lady, with her long hair graying where it hung over the lilies embroidered on her dress; Gyzan, touching his forehead with spells of healing and ease in his mutilated hand; Cuffy Rifkin in rags and necklaces of spell-bones; Chelfrednig and his Selarnist companion Niane, their white robes stained and patched; a couple of Ebiatics in black; a scrawny, chinless Hand-Pricker with a big gray cat in his arms; and others.
Rhion thought that, if there'd been a concerted roundup of wizards by the authorities, it had clearly gone after the powerful ones - aside from the Lady and Gyzan there was no one here of any great strength. It was the first time he'd seen mages of so many different orders working together, something that probably wouldn't have happened, he thought, if any of them had been very powerful alone.
He whispered, "Thank you," and the effort of it took all he had. He closed his eyes and for a time heard nothing but the voice of the rain.
"Rhion, I'm sorry."
He looked up again. The room was empty but for Tally, still sitting on the low stool at the side of his bed. The single candle made a halo of her short-cropped hair. He moved his hand a little to touch it, then whispered in mock severity, "I won't beat you this time, but you'd better grow it back," and it surprised her into laughing, as he'd hoped it would.
"No," she said, her gray eyes growing somber again. "I'm sorry that after all you've been through to come home, home isn't... isn't..."
"Isn't what I left?" He looked around him, at the age-bleached stone of the walls, dyed amber where the candle flame touched, and at the half-opened shutters and the glisten of green-black ivy in the rain beyond. Her fingers over his were cool, as they always had been; he knew that his own hands had lost the chill of death.
"But it is, you know," he said. "I just didn't know it at the time. What did Jaldis say? We can afford to think neither of the future nor of the past we leave behind... He was wrong." He sighed. "He was wrong."
"Tally?" The door curtain at the far end of the room moved aside; framed in the darkness were two dark blurs of shadow, one his own height, the other tall. "Vyla of Wellhaven says she has seen in her crystal the armies of Bragenmere moving down the passes toward Fel," Gyzan's voice said. "They will be besieging that city in the morning."
The Gray Lady added, "If the worshippers of Agon don't open the gates to them, under the impression that doing so would please the Veiled God."
"So," Rhion said, as Tally's fingers closed involuntarily tighter over his. "It's started here." As if at a great distance, he thought he saw peace and darkness beckon to him, like a tiny figure at the crown of a far-off hill. But he turned from it, as he had turned from the Dancing Stones, and said softly, "There's work to do."
"Now?" Tally looked down at him worriedly, as the dark figures melted back into the shadow of the door, leaving the whispering, rainy stillness of the night to close them round.
Rhion smiled and drew her down to him. "In the morning." And he fell asleep with his head on her arm.