Astronomy(62)

Karel turned a lambent gaze over his shoulder. Kriene was in close consultation with a couple of gray-faced men at the edge of the dais. One of the sorcerers looked his way. He might have been smiling.

Karel stepped back. His eyes got a little frozen.

Susan offered a word of advice. “Don’t count on your looks to keep you out of trouble,” she said. “Nothing fades faster than lust.”

Karel sneered. “You mean after you turn twenty-five,” he said.

Spiteful little twerp.

“I mean,” Susan said icily, “after the second morning.”

This had a gratifying impact on the young bravo. That shook the sneer right off his face.

“I’m talking about familiarity, satisfaction . . . boredom.”

Karel reached for some sarcasm worthy of the moment, but nothing funny came to mind. “He destroyed Berlin,” he said, “just to vanquish his rival. He would never . . . not with . . .”

Susan gave him an amicable shrug. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you do mean more to him than the culmination of his life’s work.”

“Hey,” Charley chimed in. “You two have that kind of relationship, I think that’s wonderful. But me, I’d be asking myself what Jürgen Kriene can come up with to beat three hundred human sacrifices. He’s in a lot of trouble if he can’t come up with something real high-quality, real close to hand.”

Karel laughed along with their jibes. His eyes were locked on Jürgen Kriene. Kriene was looking this way. He saw Karel and waved, but his face was a frieze of calculation.

Karel was still laughing as he stepped away from them. Susan heard him laughing all the way across the floor of the amphitheater. He paused once, at a small repair portal near the last of the black vans.

Susan motioned him thataway, toward the west-facing door. She mouthed the words “No guards.”

Charley nudged her. Kriene was on his way back from the lectern. The little Nazi could barely hide his satisfaction. Already, Susan could hear subtle changes in the sorcerers’ invocation.

“What do you know?” She was amazed. “He really was going use the kid.” Susan wasn’t sure what to think about that.

“My sorcerers assure me they can redirect the basic summoning spells without your assistance,” Kriene said. He motioned his SS men forward. “I suppose I do owe you something for your assistance, don’t I?” He was proposing to pay her off with a quick death after all.

Susan saw a pistol go to Charley’s temple. She felt one at her head. She held out her hand to Charley. He took it. It’s over so fast, she thought, so fast.

A scream echoed across the yard. Kriene looked up. The expression of triumph remained frozen across his face.

A second scream—more prolonged and piercing, came from the open door on the west side of the amphitheater.

Kriene grew wide-eyed. “Karel?” He raised his voice, called out again—“Karel?”

No mistaking the lyric contralto of a young man in his death agony. He looked over at Susan and Charley. Somehow, he knew, their hand was in this. But how?

He moved toward the open door. An uneasy guard of SS men assembled around him. Something was coming. Susan could feel it in the ground beneath her.

A scorching wind carried dirt and papers and smoke from the fires beyond the castle wall. Borne on the wind came the mindless roar of seventy-eight German undead, give or take a few.

They poured through the door like seawater into a sinking ship. The SS men around her panicked. She heard the Walther at her temple cocked. She heard a shot, and then a volley. Charley pulled her to the ground as a blanket of fire split the air right over their heads.

Susan turned back once, to see Kriene’s wheelchair upended. Kriene was spilled out and fallen upon by a throng of dead.

Kriene’s assemblage of magicians spared not a thought for him. Whatever dark pact or extortion had bound them to his will was voided by Kriene’s present condition. In a swirl of cloaks and clap of electricity, the thirteen sorcerers left him to his fate.

The SS men fought their way in for him, but they were late. Susan saw body parts come up over the crowd of dead in an unpleasantly familiar fashion. Charley was frozen in horror.

“Time to go,” she said. She had to shake him hard. “Time to go.”

Already, the dead were making their way through the last resisting soldiers. They ran over the dais where the summoning had been coordinated. They dug the head technicians out of their little control pits and devoured them, even as the men pulled away.

They found the black vans filled with mental patients. They hung on the roofs and pulled at the doors and screamed. Susan started to run after them—after Berlin, this was more than she could bear. But the vans were sealed tight against gas leakage. They rocked on their heavy shock absorbers, but withstood the onslaught. Charley grabbed her and motioned toward the rock ledge they had come in on.