Astronomy (17 page)

“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.

“They’re all right,” he said. “We have to go get the Navy.”

Susan held back one more moment. The dead were already losing interest in the vans. They were noticing her.

“Okay,” she said, “I believe you.” They took off at a dead run across the amphitheater. The roar of the dead rose behind them. They made their way up the cliffs. Their rock ledge was lit by a couple hundred web designs, glowing under the influence of Azathoth.

They paused at the perimeter of a million overlapping lines. Which ones returned them to Kiel? Which ones took them to the burning landscape outside?

Charley pointed to a set of webs off in the corner. There must have been a hundred painted over the top of each other. All were identical to the one he had seen in the warehouses of Kiel.

“That’s our way back,” he said.

“You remember the spell? Good, I’ll wait for you to go through; make sure you’ve got it right.”

Charley paused. “What are you doing?” He looked in her eyes. “Where are you going?” She really was a lousy liar.

“I can’t leave three hundred people like this,” she said. “I can’t walk out again.” She shoved him forward. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Charley looked at her, Right you’ll be right behind me. He started to argue. A scraping sound at the top of the stair turned them both around.

A voice from the gloom said, “It breaks my heart to see you like this.” Red eyes narrowed at her in a slanting smile of hunger. “You would have been so delicious.”

More eyes appeared behind his. Susan and Charley stepped close to cover each other’s back. Susan wasn’t sure what sort of hand-to-hand combat she could use against a seven-foot-tall, four-hundred-pound opponent. Just the smell of them was unbearable.

She picked out the littlest one—little, meaning six feet instead of seven feet tall. She would kick him over the edge of the cliff and then it would be three against two. And then, who could say? She and Charley might get lucky. It could happen, sure.

She went into her wind-up, looked over her shoulder, picturing her foot connecting to the little one’s snout in a neat, nasty arc. But something was happening. The phalanx of monsters was stepping aside, like a chorus line in a Busby Berkeley musical.

And here was Krzysztof Malmagden, striding out before them with all the quiet probity of Ruby Keeler. He looked astounded and dismayed. “Why are you two still here?” he demanded. “You must leave the island at once. Everyone left alive on this island will die if you remain here.”

He sent his monsters back down the stairs to placate the throng of dead on the next landing.

Susan came back around, feeling all trembly in the knees and breathless. How many times had she almost died in the last twenty-four hours? Whatever novelty the experience had held for her was long since gone. “Call it my Berlin disease,” she said. “I have a hard time leaving anyone behind these days.”

“There is a bunker in the lowest sub-levels of this island. It was designed for the storage of certain artworks of mostly historical value.”

Susan nodded; she’d heard it described to her this very evening.

“It is hermetically sealed, perfectly temperature controlled. Herr Kriene was planning to ride out the coming of Azathoth down there, but, as you see—”

Malmagden extended his hand toward a red slick in the center of the floor below—“a change of plans for Herr Kriene. My fellows and I shall park the vans down there and wait upon your Navy to rescue the people within.”

Charley tugged at her hand. “Come on,” he said. That was good enough for him.

“What about Azathoth?” she said. Azathoth, she knew, was going to roll over this place like a lawnmower over a dog turd.

“Azathoth has missed the souls It was promised. As you must have gathered from my histrionic associate, Azathoth’s fury will be spent on this island. The wake of Its majestic bulk is formed of energetic plasmas and atomic particles accelerated to relativistic speeds. That wake is already making its way down the fracture zone as we speak. I give it fifteen hours, maximum, before the first wave front arrives overhead. Whatever deserving souls remain on this island have to be gone by then. Sixteen hours hence, Totenburgen Island, the Vergeltungswerke #16 Plant—all will be no more than a slick of ocean between Gotland Island and the Swedish coast.”

Charley was tugging at her hand. “Come on, Red. You were in the Navy. Fifteen hours is not a lot of time to get those boys moving.”

But Susan could not leave without knowing one more thing.

“The boy,” she said, “Karel—in some way he was the cause of this whole thing between you and Kriene.”

Malmagden laughed out loud. “What do you take me for? Some sort of pederast? Some sort of—”

“I take you for a heartbroken lover,” Susan said.

Malmagden looked away. He was still smiling his terribly amused smile, but he could not meet her eyes. “He died terribly, didn’t he? Without courage or honor.”

Susan could think of nothing to say. Inexplicably, she found her hand on Malmagden’s shoulder.

“Is it true? Faulkenberg Reservoir, Berlin—this all started as Karel played you off against each other?”

Malmagden shook his head. “This must seem terribly petty for a person of honor such as you.”

“All those people died over some crush?”

“No,” Malmagden shook his head angrily. “They died for their Fatherland. They died for a cause. Only . . .” Malmagden looked back at her for one moment, as if measuring his redemption in her eyes. “Causes are sterile things in warfare. One finds that one cannot love one’s country enough to die for such an abstract thing as patriotism. One cannot hate one’s enemy enough to bomb his wife and child. Sometimes one does terrible things, not out of hatred, but for other reasons, harder to explain to God.”

He became brusque. He showed her his watch. Ten minutes had passed; they were losing time. Susan shoved Charley into the nearest Angle Web bound for Kiel. This time he went; he knew she was coming right behind him.

She listened as he recited the spells. In a moment, he was gone and she was stepping up to follow him.

“Tell me,” Malmagden called after her, in a voice too embarrassed to hope. “If I save these people, if you bring the Navy and they are rescued, is there redemption for me?”

“Redemption is not my department,” she said. “I don’t know.” It was as close as she’d ever come to a decent lie. Any other time she would have been proud.

Malmagden laughed. He made a gesture as if to say it was an inconsequential matter anyway.

“Will you be here when the ship comes?”

“I missed my chance to greet Azathoth at Faulkenberg Reservoir. Maybe I’ll stay here awhile, yes?”

Susan turned and stepped through the Web.

* * *

This last passage through the Web was almost too easy. The repulsive fascination that had chased her each of the previous times she’d traversed it was strangely absent. The darkness seemed less suffocating. Perhaps Azathoth was preoccupied making its way down to Totenburgen Island. She would never know.

Susan felt the warmth of sunlight just ahead of her—Kiel, she realized. Malmagden had made it sound as if the Angle Webs were on the verge of being impassable. But here she was, within sight of home.

Warmth and sunlight touched her face. She had the impression of a street, cloaked in long shadows. She stepped forward, and space collapsed upon her. An ear-splitting concussion she had never heard before attended her passing through the barrier.

She slammed into something hard. She clamped her eyes shut, holding the innocence close for just one more moment. She knew if she opened her eyes she would find herself entombed in granite deep in the earth, or the interior of a steel girder, or maybe find herself nowhere at all.

She felt water on her face. She drew a breath and water filled her mouth and nose.

Panic overwhelmed her. So that was it—the ocean! She clawed for the surface thousands of fathoms over her head.

—And reared back into cool evening air. The sweet, coarse smell of smoke filled her nostrils. A building fire had attracted the attention of a local fire brigade. Water from their hoses had turned the gutter into a cascade.

A fireman from one of Kiel’s local engine companies spotted them lying on the curb. He instructed them to sit still; medical attention was coming. He addressed them in German. He referred to Charley as “Oberstürmführer.”

Susan didn’t understand at first. Then she looked down at the uniform she wore.

Oh, yes.

“Somebody’s going to shoot us,” Shrieve said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

They took each other’s arms and wobbled to their feet.

The wave front pushed out by the collapsing Angle Web caught them from behind.

Susan felt the longing winds of eternity blow across her soul. She saw Yuggoth—
Pluto
(she had to get used to that name)—spinning cold and wild at the edge of the void. Beyond Pluto awaited Sirius, brilliant and jewel-like.

People in the west called it the Dog Star. The Ancient Greeks called it “Scorcher”; in their time, it came up with the sun, during the Dog Days of summer.

Immediately east of Sirius flowed the Milky Way. Just a few degrees south, and 2,300 light years distant, lay the star cluster that would someday be known as M-41.

Something out there was aware of her. She could feel it coming this way. Its hunger raged and roiled—but not for Susan. Just a whiff of Its appetite made its way across the universe to brush at her collar like a spring zephyr.

The water in the gutter slowed, became languid. A Gauloises wrapper drifted across, then a crudely printed Nazi propaganda leaflet. Beneath the garbage, the water was mirror-still.

Charley pointed from the sky behind them to the sky’s reflection at their feet. “What do you make of that?”

The sky behind them was full of white smoke. The fire crew was inside the smoldering ruin that had been the Four Winds Bar. Smoke and steam boiled up through the blackened beams, filling the evening air.

Susan turned back to the water running in the gutter. She stared down in amazement. “I don’t know,” she said.

The gutter at her feet reflected stars.

A sky full of stars.