The monster froze. Its arms strained to reach its head, as if to scratch an itch behind its eyes. Flames exploded from the roof of its skull. It sank into a smoldering heap.
The stench of burning brains and hair filled the basement. Charley and Susan ran out to the kitchen.
She put a bullet into the thing’s ear, just for safety’s sake. It didn’t even shake. She looked a little closer and realized she was wasting ammunition. The hair was gone from the skull, the top of which had burned away. She looked down into an empty brain cavity, lit by the dull light coming through vacant eye sockets.
“I have gained certain skills, certain powers over the mongrel races.” Malmagden looked aside from the mess on the kitchen floor. He adjusted his sleeves, put his cuff links right. He seemed almost embarrassed at the wide-eyed looks on their faces.
“You wish to defend yourselves from ones such as these, it is child’s play. I recommend Cultes des Goules of Comte d’Erloette. Or perhaps the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. That is a thorough text. Written in a somewhat ripe hand, if you catch my meaning, but well-intentioned and detailed.”
“They wanted to kill you,” she said.
Malmagden indicated the stack of books on the floor. “I suspect that is what they were after. Me, I was merely a target of opportunity.”
“The hell’s going on here. They worked for you.” Jesus Christ, she thought, they killed for him.
Malmagden sighed. This was a subject that caused him some personal pain. “You see the power of hate?” Malmagden held out his hand. “We were all of us allies a short time ago, united by our hatred of race contamination and the exaltation of the inferior. Jürgen Kriene and myself, we would have bargained with the ravenous hunger of the void to save the Aryan race, using our very souls as currency. But you see?” He indicated the smoldering corpses around them. “Emotions easily given are cheaply held.”
“You guys had a falling out.”
“We were always more rivals than friends.” Malmagden might have been lamenting this fact. “Now that Kriene is so close to the culmination of the Undertaking, he is sending my personal guard out to tidy up—stealing your Black Books, killing his rivals, ensuring that no one has the resources to stop him.”
“So,” she said, “they’re close to the end.”
“Very close.”
Shrieve toed the nearest monster disconsolately. “They could have told us where this is being carried out,” he said.
“Perhaps they have told us,” Malmagden suggested. “If they were here to steal your library, they will have already planned a means of escape, yes? My guard and their people can travel through dreams. That is something that bears a great deal of explanation, perhaps best left for another time. However, they cannot carry books that way. They must have had another means of escape.”
He pulled the light cord hanging by the stair. The cellar went instantly black.
There—down in the far corner, a phosphorescence emerged. It shaped itself into a pair of diagrams as they descended the stairs.
“Do you recognize the image?”
Shrieve nodded. “It’s the Angle Web we saw in the warehouses on Münterstrasse. How do we go through? Where does it lead?”
Malmagden had the formula to go through, he informed them. It was a common Zentralbund spell. As to where it went? That was problematic. Malmagden had used it going through Angle Webs between Berlin and the laboratories to the south. As he seemed to think of the places this particular Web might go, he wiped his palms on his jacket.
“It doesn’t matter,” Susan said. “Wherever it leads, we have to follow it. We’re out of options.”
“Don’t you wish to call your Naval Intelligence first?”
“Do we have time?”
Malmagden frowned. “How much time will they need to investigate this?”
“Never mind,” Susan answered for both of them. “They’ll take two hours just getting over here. We don’t have time.” She saw the look of worry in Shrieve’s eyes. She laughed. “What does it matter? We’ll probably be dead tomorrow one way or another.”
Shrieve could think of nothing to say to that.
There was some question as to who would go through the Angle Web first. No one knew what awaited them on the other side. Maybe they were walking into Spook Central, a roomful of red-eyed Epicureans waiting around their end of this Web just to see who popped out.
Charley went through first. Seeing as how he had never traveled this way before, Susan watched him as he spoke the spells and made the signs of Voor and Kish, waiting to stop him before he ended up in a mountain somewhere.