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“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve tried to cast a spell on you three times now. Oblivion spell, aversion spell, and even a disappearance spell. And yet there you are, holding your little gun and telling me we won’t leave Gwen Arcana behind. How? You have no magic.”
I shrugged. “We won’t leave Gwen behind,” I said.
He opened his hands. “So be it,” he said.
Ten minutes later, he was walking ahead of me-far enough ahead that I judged he couldn’t just turn around and take my gun. He’d deactivated the spells in the hallway and walked me down it, till the floor changed to dark red tile, the far-off roof of the warehouse to a rounded brick tu
I must have looked blank because he added, “Sangre Dios. Are you stupid? Even if we wake the commander and he tells us the hexes needed to immobilize the centaurs long enough to get Gwen we won’t be able to translate it on our own. Maria will understand the language, at least, even if ancient magic is not one of her specialties.”
“And will she cooperate?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “If she can’t spell you,” he said. “And if I can’t, I don’t see why she should be able to.”
But Maria couldn’t. Or at least I’ll assume so from the fact that she fell in, next to Lyon. Her incongruous pink robe was only slightly less strange than her pink, fluffy slippers. Not exactly what one expected the most powerful witch in the world to wear at night. She shuffled along, her small, peaked face showing above the pink robe with an expression like an angry bantam hen. She muttered things-mostly, I think, curses at Lyon, who gave back as good as he got. The source of her anger seemed to lie in the fact that he couldn’t spell me. “Well, why can’t you?” she said, at one point and, to his shrug, “All Spanish men are impotent.”
“You can’t either,” he said and I realized part of the reason he’d insisted on her presence was that he hoped she would be able to spell me.
“I’m a woman,” she said darkly-as if that explained everything.
“We must get the commander to speak,” I said. “And tell us how to get Gwen. Until you do, I’ll be holding both of you at gunpoint.”
This started another round of bickering, but in the middle of it several rational facts emerged: we didn’t have the commander’s body, so spelling near his body or ashes, or even thinking of reanimating him was pointless. However, we did have his portrait in the grand gallery. And Lyon said the portrait would help his concentration. “Candles,” he said. “We need candles. There will be some in the larder.”
A few minutes later, after what seemed like much too long a trudge through bits of headquarters located in several other countries, we found ourselves in the gallery, the candles lit in a complex pattern on the floor.
For a minute or so, I was accidentally in the middle of the central pattern of candles, but when Lyon started muttering incantations, I stepped out. He looked a little surprised, making me wonder whether he’d been trying something magical again. I really had no idea why it wasn’t working, if he was.
And then I started worrying that the same raid in which Gwen had been lost had, somehow, damaged Lyon ’s powers and that he wouldn’t be able to summon Lars Oktober.
I shouldn’t have worried. After a few words and half a dozen incantations, the commander appeared. He was, or rather he’d been, a tall man, spare and blond, with the sort of features that speak of fjords and ships departing through ice-choked waters.
He wore his hair very short and he always dressed in black. I knew, because I had access to his file, that he’d come to the Legion after his youthful enthusiasms had made him the right-hand man to the dark Lord that controlled most of the magical world of Europe for seventy years-and, incidentally, by the principle of sympathetic reflection, made the Soviet Union possible. However, as I’d known him, he’d seemed like a totally different person, one always ready to fight for justice and proper treatment for his legionaries-one who’d managed to keep even the smoldering rivalry between Lyon and Maria in check.
Even now, as his form spiraled out of thin air, seeming to assemble pale hair, long face and square shoulders from the shadows and the scant light of candles, Maria and Lyon stopped their bickering.
“You dared summon me,” Commander Oktober spoke. It wasn’t so much a voice, as a normal thing, made of sounds. It was a whisper of dark, and intimation of shadows, the sound light would make rubbing on dark, if either of those could be heard. And yet it was his voice, down to the Eastern German accent. His pale blue eyes-not really there but looking as substantial as a reflection in a clear mirror-stared at Maria and Lyon.
I cleared my throat. “I made him summon you,” I said.
He turned to me. Did I imagine that a smile creased his lips? We’d always gotten along. He’d told me I could stay in the Legion even if I wasn’t a true wizard. He’d told me I fitted in better than I thought. I hadn’t understood him, but I appreciated his acceptance.
“Ah, George,” he said. “And why would you interrupt my well-deserved rest?”
“Gwen Arcana was left behind in a raid on centaurs,” I said.
“It was just a magical eruption,” Lyon said. “We didn’t know what it was.”
“In Italy, it’s more likely to be an out-of-control saint these days,” Maria put in.
“And we didn’t have the knowledge to deal with centaurs,” Lyon said.
“We were retreating,” Maria said. “Well, not us personally, of course, but the small raiding party that we’d sent.”
“And they grabbed Gwen and galloped away with her.”
“And it wasn’t worth it to try to rescue her,” Maria said. “The whole party could have died. And if we’d sent people after her, they could have died.”
Lars looked toward me, “And yet you woke me?” he asked gravely.
“A legionary doesn’t leave a legionary behind,” I said. “We’re all rogues or orphans.” In my case an orphan since my mother had died when I was a child and my father just before I joined the Legion. “Or both. We’re all the other one has. We have to stand up for each other, because no one else will.”
“Well, Lyon,” Commander Oktober asked.
“The young man is clearly a romantic,” Lyon said.
“An armed romantic,” Commander Oktober said and again the not quite a smile crossed his ghostly lips. “And I’d say you’d best do as he wishes, or he will not let any of us rest. What you need,” he said, “is the Apollo invocation, Maria. Done properly, to break through their magical defenses. I can’t give you anything to bring them down physically, though. They are almost pure magical creatures, and amazingly strong ones, to have survived these last two mille
“We can’t use time travel,” she said virtuously.
“Oh, really?” Commander Oktober asked and looked first at her and then at him. I knew his room was in violation of that statute, but I wouldn’t even guess at what she had done. “Right,” he said. And then he started talking in what was, in effect, a foreign language, giving Maria instructions on how to deal with centaur magic.