“And if you can’t? Or if I can’t save you?”
“I have no doubt you’re smart enough to figure out a way to save me from anything.”
Teresa suddenly laughed. “Anything but yourself.”
Gabriel laughed, as well, because it was probably true.
“I love you.”
They stared into each other’s eyes. Who had spoken first? Had they spoken at the same time?
They kissed again, and such questions ceased to matter.
Later that night, he sat alone in his room, staring at the flickering shadows cast by a small candle on a weathered nightstand beside the bed. He let his mind wander, flitting from thought to thought with no particular purpose. While exhausted from the day’s events, his brain could not relax enough to sleep. He assumed it had something to do with kissing Teresa. And the next day’s mission. And the knowledge that Windsor Castle lay partially in ruins. He sighed and leaned over to blow out the candle. Thinking about things never helped him sleep. He’d probably dream about them, anyway, so what was the point?
As he inhaled to blow out the flame, he noticed the drawer of the nightstand setting slightly ajar. Curious, and looking for any excuse to postpone slumber, he pulled the drawer open, examining its contents by candlelight. The drawer held few treasures — a couple of old coat buttons, three coins from the 1960s, a length of string, and an old photo. Out of habit, he used his space-time sense to probe the objects from the drawer. He did this now whenever encountering possible relics for time travel. One never knew when a forgotten or lost object might lead to an interesting time period or turn out to be a powerfully imprinted artifact.
Disappointingly, the buttons, coins, and string all seemed to have remained near the house for most of their existence. In contrast, the small, frayed, black-and-white photo of a woman in a white dress kissing a young soldier had traveled far. A handwritten inscription on the back read All my love, forever. Harriet. 1916.
By the look of the soldier’s uniform, Gabriel guessed the photo had accompanied the man to the French front lines of World War I. The images flooding his mind as he probed the photo’s timeline confirmed his suspicions. Wood-lined trenches. Barbed wire. Mud and smoke. Fallen soldiers. He had spent enough time studying the major battles of history to guess the location. The Battle of the Somme in the late summer of 1916. The rest of the photo’s timeline focused on Paris, then London, and finally the abandoned house in Maine. It had probably been passed from one family member to another, ultimately ending up in the bedside drawer. Oddly, for an object carried during a war, it held few Grace or Malignant imprints.
Gabriel sat the photo next to the watch on the nightstand. It never hurt to have an extra relic in his pocket. Blowing the candle out, he let his head sink into the pillow. It smelled a bit musty, like the rest the house, but he found something about the odor comforting. An earthiness that reminded him of simpler aspects of life, far removed from wars of time and magic.
He fell asleep far quicker than he anticipated, and any dreams he had mercifully faded away when he awoke the next morning. One of the first to rise, he found Sema in the kitchen and helped her prepare a simple oatmeal breakfast for the team.
“Dreams?” Sema stirred the oatmeal while Gabriel provided a constant magical flame beneath the pot.
“None I remember.” Gabriel added a little water to thin the rapidly congealing oatmeal.
“Still no more dreams of Vicaquirao?” Sema asked. She asked a similar question nearly every morning.
Gabriel shook his head.
Sema frowned. Then sighed. Stopped stirring. Then started again.
“I…hmmm.” Sema looked at Gabriel. Then back to the pot.
Gabriel stared at her. She seemed flustered. Gabriel had never seen Sema anything less than composed, even when fighting a horde of Malignancy Mages.
“It’s not really my place to say, or to ask, but…” The spoon in Sema’s hand paused again. “Have you considered the consequences of a…relationship with Teresa?”
Now Gabriel felt flustered. “I…well…you mean if something bad happens.”
“Something bad?” Sema turned to Gabriel.
“Like if one of us gets killed,” Gabriel said.
“No.” Sema looked horrified at the thought. “No, I meant if one of you…loses interest. We’d still be a team. It’s hard to imagine what would happen to the team if one of you left because of…what would happen to you… or to her, or…it would be devastating, really…and you know change is very difficult for some of us and…this is all…
“You see, when I was a girl, there was a boy…before the boy who became my husband…but this other boy, he came from a family my father didn’t approve of…I saw him in the market…but it was impossible…that’s what I told myself…he asked me to run away with him…but how could I? What would have happened if a year passed and my heart changed? Things can never go backward. The egg breaks, but is never remade. So you see…no, you don’t. How could you? I barely see myself. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”
“Morning.” Marcus sauntered into the kitchen. “I see I’ve been replaced as the kitchen help today.”
Sema glanced over her shoulder at Marcus and focused intently on the mushy oatmeal beneath her spoon.
“Morning.” Her voice seemed strained. She tasted the oatmeal and silently shook her head.
“Morning,” Gabriel said to Marcus. In a lower voice, he turned back to Sema. “It’s all fine.”
“Forget I said anything,” Sema said.
“Forgotten.” Gabriel sighed, glad for the awkward conversation to be at an end. Receiving romantic advice from Sema made him profoundly uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as Sema seemed giving it.
“What did I forget now?” Marcus asked as he took clean bowls from the dish rack and headed to the dining room to set the table.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said, suddenly reminded of the uncomfortable romantic advice he’d received from Marcus not long ago. He wondered if anyone ever followed their own advice. And he wondered who’d be offering it next. The thought of talking about his love life with Ling or Rajan or Ohin nearly eliminated his hunger.
After breakfast, the team assembled in the living room, ready for departure. Everyone carried a backpack of supplies. They had raided the remaining provisions stashed at the house and had come up with nearly a week’s worth of food. It might take a few days to locate the Apollyons, assuming they were really there.
“Ready?” Ohin asked. He held up a tiny sliver of wood. He had taken a trip the night before with Sema and Ling to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. to procure a relic capable of transporting them to their destination. They had found a book published in D.C. at the local library and used it as a relic to take them to the city. They had taken the sliver of wood from a reconstructed exhibit of the barracks the Jewish captives of Auschwitz had been crammed into. It would lead them through time to the camps.
Everyone voiced their assent to Ohin’s query, and the blackness of time travel swirled around them, depositing the team with a flash of white outside the fences of the main Auschwitz camp in the spring of 1945.
Chapter 20: Reconnaissance
Their methodical searches of the Auschwitz camps lasted longer than anticipated. They tried to focus on the land near the railway between the two main concentration camps, but the amount of effort required to cover the entire area proved time consuming. They were less worried than usual about alerting any potential Apollyon twins to their presence by warping space with time travel. The Apollyons would be aware that an outpost team from the castle might be observing the area. That team would normally have focused on the camps themselves, but following Gabriel and Teresa’s suspicions, the Chimera team looked for places and times where the Apollyons might hide in plain sight.
They broke into two groups, the first consisting of Ohin, Sema, Ling, and Marcus while Gabriel, Teresa, Aurelius, and Rajan comprised the second. Gabriel and Ohin scanned th
e timelines of houses and buildings near the camps looking for any sign of the Apollyons. It turned out to be a fruitless search, taking days to complete. Most of the buildings were now occupied either by former Jewish prisoners or the Soviet Russian soldiers who had liberated them.
After seeing the physical state of many of the victims of the camps, Gabriel felt profoundly thankful their searches did not need to take place while the mass executions of Auschwitz had been occurring. His grandmother’s stories of family members, those who had escaped death in the camps, as well as those who hadn’t, came back to him, adding an extra poignancy to the painful emotions elicited by being near that hateful place.
Finally, after three days with no results, Gabriel suggested a daring plan. As the team gathered for dinner around a table in one of the few unoccupied houses in the fields near the camps, he explained his idea by the light of an oil lantern.
“Ridiculous.” Ling’s grip on her spoon tightened.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Gabriel said in his most reassuring voice.
“Will not happen.” Ling tapped the table with her spoon to emphasize her words.
“We’re the only two who can fly.” Gabriel tried to sound placating. He hadn’t realized how deeply Ling feared heights.
“I’ll gladly fly a volunteer.” Ling looked around the table as though expecting someone to eagerly raise a hand. No one did. “No volunteers? See? No one wants to fly.”
“It’s not that we don’t want to fly,” Teresa said in an overly sweet voice. “It’s that we don’t want you flying us. We’re not kites.”
“Same thing.” Ling glared at Teresa. “Either way, I’m staying on the ground.”
“I’ll fly alone then.” Gabriel sighed in resignation. “It’ll still be quicker than searching on foot the way we have been.”
“You’ll still be visible if someone looks up.” Aurelius hadn’t yet touched his food. He never seemed to eat when an important discussion erupted over dinner.
“Not a problem,” Gabriel said. “I can bend the light around myself.” Gabriel gave a brief demonstration using Wind Magic to force the light from the oil lantern to curve around his body.
It took him a moment. It wasn’t the kind of magic he’d become most proficient in. After a few seconds, he seemed to shimmer and disappear. His outline could still be seen if looked for carefully, but to all appearances, he had vanished. Aurelius gasped, and Teresa applauded enthusiastically.
“You’re getting better at that.” Ling waved her spoon appreciatively.
“Not nearly as good as you.” Gabriel released the magic and reappeared. “I can cloak myself, but I can’t manage to do it for anything else yet. It’s too complicated to figure out how to bend the light with gravity. Especially if there’s more than one light source.”
“Anyone else have any crazy ideas?” Ohin looked around the table.
“What could be crazier than trying to fly while invisible?” Rajan laughed as he took a sip of water from a canteen.
“It’s not crazy, it’s ingenious.” Teresa gave Gabriel a peck on the cheek and threw her arm around his shoulder. Gabriel felt his face grow warm as he tried to hide the pleasure elicited by Teresa’s words and affection.
“There were times I wished I could have made myself invisible.” Marcus took another bite of soup from his can.
“There were a number of times I wished I could have made you invisible, as well,” Sema said with a straight face. Marcus glowered sideways at her, but then burst out laughing, coughing as he tried to keep soup from shooting out of his nose. Sema chuckled and patted him gently on the back as the others laughed along.
As no one had a better idea than Gabriel’s, which he preferred to think of as a subtle combination of Superman’s flying and Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, they decided to try it the following morning. While Teresa took her turn clearing the table and cleaning up after dinner, Gabriel retreated to the small yard behind the abandoned Polish house. They had sealed the house from any escaping light to prevent being noticed by the patrolling Russian soldiers, so only starlight illuminated the backyard. He waited a moment to allow his eyes to acclimate to the darkness. As he crossed the yard in search of a place to sit, he tripped over something large in the grass and fell to the ground.
“Ouch!” Rajan sat up, rubbing his head.
“Sorry.” Gabriel rolled off his stomach and sat beside Rajan. “Didn’t see you.”
“You’re not the only one who likes to watch the stars.” Rajan tipped his head back to gaze upward. “It’s strange to think about all that beauty hovering endlessly above all this ugliness below.”
“It’s not all ugly.” Gabriel could feel Grace imprints among the overwhelming Malignancy imprints in the surrounding land. “There’s some beauty down here, too.”
“What does it feel like?” Rajan asked. “We can only feel what’s left behind from the best of human impulses. I can’t imagine what it must be like to sense the imprints of the worst that humanity is capable of.”
“I haven’t touched the imprints here,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want to. Unless I need to. I can feel them. Like a swarm of bees buzzing nearby. That’s more than enough. It’s overwhelming to touch them directly. Depressing.”
“No wonder so many Malignancy Mages go mad.” Rajan glanced at Gabriel. “You’re not going to go mad on us, are you?”
“I’ll try not to.” Gabriel attempted to match the levity in Rajan’s voice, but failed. The concern that came with touching negative imprints always clung to him.
“I was teasing.”
“I know. But it’s possible.”
“I don’t think so. Not you.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. Sometimes I feel…” Gabriel faltered as he tried to express it in words. “Back at the castle, during the battle, I could feel the two imprints warring, even when I used them together. It’s easier to create or heal with Grace imprints. Easier to destroy with Malignant imprints.”
“Choices.” Rajan’s voice sounded soft, nearly a whisper. “It’s always about our choices. Whether they are conscious. Whether they reflect our conscience.”
“Like Auschwitz.” Gabriel could see the high fences and walls of Birkenau from where they sat.
“Yes.” Rajan followed Gabriel’s eyes to the camps. “How could so many people do so much evil? A few evil people we can cope with. That we can understand. There’s always someone with a dead soul, but for so many people to do so much evil, that’s something else. How do so many people close themselves off from the part of them screaming out what is right and just and humane? Is it fear of the few truly evil people? Fear of turning back after they’ve started down the path of destruction?”
“I thought one of your philosophy books would have answered that question by now.” Gabriel’s tone teased, but his question felt serious.
“Plenty have tried.” Rajan looked back to the stars.
“Philosophers. Psychologists. Theologians. Whatever the explanations, it always comes down to choices. You will face greater choices than any of the rest of us. You already made the choice to use Malignant imprints. I don’t know what those choices must feel like. I can’t imagine.”
Rajan paused for a moment.
“When I was around your age, during the civil strife in India after independence from the British, there were so many people making so many choices. And so much suffering. I chose not to take sides. This wasn’t a choice anyone liked, even me.
“One day, I was being chased by a gang of boys. I was always being chased by a gang of boys. Hindu boys on that particular day. I hid, but one of them found me. We fought, and surprisingly, I knocked him down. He hit his head and fell unconscious. As he lay there, I felt this overpowering desire to hit him again. To kick him. At the same time, a part of me wanted to comfort him. To make sure he was uninjured. These two sides fought within, and a choice sat between them.”
“What did you do?”
“The other
boys returned, and I chose to run.” Rajan laughed.
“I wish I could run sometimes.” Gabriel wanted to join Rajan’s laughter, but couldn’t.
“We’re all glad you don’t.” Rajan turned to Gabriel. “I trust your choices, no matter what imprints might influence you. You’ll make mistakes and bad decisions. We all do. But you’ll regret it. That’s why you’ll never become like the Dark Mages, no matter what happens.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m always right. Didn’t Teresa tell you?”
That did make Gabriel laugh. They were still laughing when Teresa stepped from the house to find them in the yard, which only made them laugh harder.
The next day, Gabriel soared above the camps, cloaked in a wave of gravity, bending light around his body and rendering him nearly invisible. He used a pair of binoculars to scan the woods, fields, and buildings between the main camps for any sign of the Apollyons. He focused his mind to clear any possible Soul Magic the Dark Mages might have used to conceal their location.
The results from the first few hours of searching proved uninspiring. Gabriel returned to the ground frequently, using the farmhouse the team had appropriated as a relic to jump through time by days and sometimes weeks. Ohin insisted the team accompany him on each jump. Although restricted to the ground, they could monitor his progress and come to his aid if something went wrong.
Near sundown, six months along the timeline from the liberation of the camps, on a sultry summer night, Gabriel spotted something at the edge of his vision. Closer examination revealed a large canvas tent pitched beneath the shadowing branches of a small stand of trees near the railway lines. The tent resembled the ones he had seen Soviet Russian soldiers use to store supplies.
He noticed a man in a Russian commander’s uniform walking toward the tent. Gabriel recognized the Apollyon even from where he floated several hundred feet above the ground. He watched the Apollyon in Russian uniform open the tent flap. An identical man in uniform greeted him.
A good disguise. The observation teams from the castle would be looking for signs of magic, but the Apollyons, pretending to be Russian soldiers, hid in plain view. If one of the Russian troops questioned them, a simple cover story and a small amount of Soul Magic would protect them, and likely cause no disturbance to the Primary Continuum.
The Sword of Unmaking (The Wizard of Time - Book 2) Page 20
