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WAS THIS SPOT STILL MARKED ON THE MAPS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR? Maybe it was a battlefield well known to historians and celebrated in all the books, a place where two armies had once clashed in a bloody, ernaut of the blitzkrieg had shuddered to a halt and been rolled back?

Or maybe it was one of our obscure, unknown fields of infamy, where the crack German units had trampled into the ainst them? A place only remembered in the archives of the Ministry of Defense?

I didn’t know my history very well, but it was probably the latter This place was too deserted, too bleak and dead An abandoned patch of dirt that not even the collective farms had coveted

In our country they don’t like to erect monuments on battlefields where ere defeated

Maybe that’s because our victories weren’t all that slick either?

I stood on the bank of the little river and looked at the expanse of dead ground It wasn’t all that big: a strip of land between the forest and the river, about a half , 6 miles wide And not so very many people had been killed here More likely hundreds than thousands

But then, how could you really say that wasn’t many?

The field was absolutely deserted I couldn’t see anybody with ht hadn’t revealed anything either

Then I picked upfroht

At the first level the ground was overgroith blue y clureedily at the faint echoes of hu that put s around one particular spot I knew thetoward its food

And in this place there was only one possible reason for it to forray haze The huh it all around raph It was cold and cheerless¡ªI was losing energy with every second I spent here But there was a positive side to that Not even Arina could stay in the Twilight constantly She could glance into the first level from the ordinary world, but even that required Power

And right now she was in no position to be reckless and wasteful hat she had stored up over the years

At the first level the terrain is aled Here too I had earth underelse I could see, or rather, sense the old weapons in the ground Not every one, of course, only those that had actually killed Half-decayed subhtly better preserved rifles There were more rifles

About a hundred yards fro in a squat The spell Svetlana had put on , or I would soon have been out of breath About fifty round was damp, and I was instantly coated with ht the , uncertain what to do¡ªmove closer to

er That was bad Arinathe moss

And then, very close toblack hair began rising slowly into the air froround The trench was so narrow, it looked as if Arina was eht from the earth

I froze

But Arina wasn’t looking inerect¡ªshe see on the bottom of the old trench Then she raised her hand theatrically to shade her eyes, as if she were saluting I realized she was looking through the Twilight

Fortunately, not atclose

How beautifully they ran! Even froht theirin the air too long when they leapt The wise old as leading the ith the cubs behind hihtened

Arina laughed She put her hands on her hips, I swear like a young peasant wo husband approach with his drinking co through the air She was in no hurry to enter the Twilight

I moved back into the human world

" stupid loudh for you?"

The wolves slowed to a walk and stopped about twenty yards away

The leader stepped forward and barked, "Witch! Talk We have to talk"

"Talk away, gray wolf," Arina said aor couldn’t distract the witch for long, I realized that Any ht and take a proper look around her

But where was Nadiushka?

"Give us the little girl" the wolf half-shouted, half-howled "The Light One is on the rairl or it will be worse for you"

"Do you really think you can threaten me?" Arina asked in surprise "Have you coive a child to wolves? Clear out while you still can!"

Strange¡ªshe sees out

"Is the child alive?" the wolf asked in a slightly clearer voice

"Nadenka, are you alive?" Arina asked, looking down soirl out of the trench and set her on the surface

I caught htened or tired at all She see¡ªa lot randma

But she was close to the witch, too close!

"Wolfie!" said Nadya, looking at the olf She reached her little hand out to hiing his tail

It only lasted a few seconds, then Igor tensed up, his fur bristled, and once again atching a wild beast, not a ta But even so, that moment had happened¡ªa olf had fawned on a little two-year-old girl, an uninitiated Other!

"Wolfie," Arina agreed "Nadenka, look to see who else is here Close your eyes and look The way I taught you"

Nadiushka happily put her hands over her eyes And began turning inher!

If Nadiushka really had learned to look through the Twilight

My daughter turned toward me She smiled

"Daddy"

The next s

First¡ªArina knew perfectly well that I was nearby! The witch had been toying with me

Second¡ªNadiushka wasn’t looking through the Twilight! She had parted her fingers and looked through theht I was in such a nervous state that I plunged straight through to the second level¡ªinto that desolate cotton-wool silence and those pale-gray shadows

Arina’s aura was blazing orange and turquoise Nadiushka’s head was surrounded by a glowing, pure white halo¡ªlike a beacon beaht One! With immense Power!

And the olves, who had started to run noere bundles of red and crier and fear

"Svetlana," I shouted, leaping up Into the gray space, into the soft silence "Come!"

I marked the spot for the portal very siht, like stretching out a string of fire, a landing corridor From me to Arina

And at the same time I started to run, so that Nadiushka wouldn’t shield Arina froers spells that I had learned a long tio

Freeze¡ªa localized halt in time

Opium¡ªsleep

Triple Blade¡ªthe crudest and simplest of all the combat spells

Thanatos¡ªdeath

I had no hope any of thes could only be effective when you were facing a very weak opponent An Other with superior poould parry the blohether he was in the Twilight or the human world

All I wanted to do was distract the witch and slow her down Overload her defenses, which had to be based on amulets and talismans All these fireworks were only calculated to identify a breach in those defenses

My Freeze seemed to disappear into nowhere

The Sleep spell ricocheted off and shot up into the sky I hoped there weren’t any airplanes overhead

The Triple Blade struck ho blades sliced into the witch But to her the Triple Blade was a mere scratch

Worst of all was the suood reason to be fond of this piece of erously close to the spells of the Dark Ones But even in the ordinary world, Arina still had tiray mist that paralyzed the will and stopped the heart landed obediently on her open palht, s over Nadiushka’s head, and the gray bundle was slowly oozing between her fingers

I leapt toward them¡ªif I couldn’t turn the blow aside, at least I could take it myself

But Arina was already on the second level of the Twilight now, ly beautiful A ers crumpled my spell, and she casually tossed it at the wolves

"Don’t be in such a hurry" the witch chanted in a singsong voice In the silence of the second level her words were like thunder, and s betrayed me I slumped down onto my knees only one step away from Arina and Nadiushka

"Don’t touch her!" I shouted

"Didn’t I ask you" the witch said in a quiet voice "Why not just help et away what’s one old witch more or less to you?"

"I don’t trust you!"

Arina nodded wearily and bitterly "You’re right not to trust me And nohat am I to do, sorcerer?"

Her hand slid across her skirt and tore a sprig of dried berries off her belt She tossed thehts, black smoke billowed up¡ªand the marker for the portal disappeared

Svetlana was too late!

"You leave rim expression "Do you understand? I’ll have to kill you, and then your daughter’s no use toof, with your second-level?"

At that instant a glittering white sword-blade struck Arina from behind, protruded for an instant from her chest, then drew back in obedience to soroaned, slulooh

The witch seemed to have recovered fro backward and keeping her eyes fixed on Svetlana The slit that had been burned through her dress was s And the look on her face seemed more like admiration than hatred

"My, my Great One" Arina cackled "Did I miscalculate then?"

Svetlana didn’t answer I could never have iined such intense hatred in her face¡ªany man would have died if he just looked in her eyes She was clutching a white sword in her right hand, and the fingers of her left orking the air¡ªas if she were asseht turned a little darker A rainbow sphere sprang up around Nadiushka Svetlana’s next pass was for me¡ªmy body recovered the power ofbehind the witch I was only a bit player in this war

"Which level did you coet?" the witch asked al an eye on the third"

I sensed that the ansas very, very important to her

"From the fifth," Svetlana replied

"That’s really bad" the witch muttered "That’s a mother’s fury for you" she squinted at aze on Svetlana again "Don’t you go gossiping about what you san there"

"You don’t need to tell me," Svetlana said with a nod

The witch nodded and then began working her hands very rapidly, tearing out her hair I didn’t know if Svetlana was expecting this, but I decided it would be a good idea to ju I did¡ªa black blizzard sprang up and began swirling around the witch, as if every hair had been transforan advancing on Svetlana, who tossed her white sword at the witch¡ªthe blades sliced it to pieces and extinguished it, but then a transparent shield appeared, floating in the air in front of Svetlana

I thought it must be Luzhin’s Shield

The blades shattered against the shield almost instantly, without a sound

"Oh, Lordy" Arina wailed It was strange, but I didn’t have the slightest doubt that she was sincere And yet at the sa to her audience

In other words¡ªto me

"Surrender, you wretch," said Svetlana "While I’ll still let you¡ªsurrender!"

"But how about how about this?" Arina declared "Eh?"

This time she didn’t reach for her aerel:

Dust to dust collect and bind, Ar Or you’ll be scattered to the wind

I’d been expecting anything at all from Arina Except this Genuine necro the Dark Ones

The dead were slowly rising out of the earth!

The Ger back into battle!

Four skeletons dressed in tatters¡ªall their flesh had gone a long tio and there was earth packed between their bones¡ª stood in a ring around Arina Another caerless hands¡ªthe bones had rotted clean away The ludicrous zombie shed pieces of itself at every step Three equally wretcheda black subazine

"Think you can raise the Red Army?" Arina taunted Svetlana

She shouldn’t have done that¡ªSvetlana seeh her teeth:

"My grandfather fought in the war Was this supposed to frighten me?"

I didn’t understand what it was she did I would have used the Gray Prayer, but she used soic beyond my reach The zombies crumbled into dust

Svetlana and Arina were left staring at each other in silence

The joking was over

The enchantress and the witch clashed in a straightforward dual of Power

I took advantage of the brief pause to gather th If Svetlana faltered, then I would strike

But it was Arina who faltered

First of all, her dress was torn off Thateffect¡ªon arapidly Her luxuriant black hair shrank to a pitiful gray tuft Her breasts drooped and stretched, her areula from the story for adults

And there were no special effects here

"Your name!" Svetlana shouted

Arina didn’t hesitate for long

Her toothless mouth quivered and she mumbled, "Arina I am in your power, sorceress"

It was only then that Svetlana relaxed¡ªand suddenly seemed to wilt I walked around the subdued Arina and took hold of ht I’m okay," Svetlana said with a smile "We did it"

The old crone¡ªit was iazed at us sadly

"Will you allow her to assume her former shape?" I asked

"Why, was sheto joke

"She’ll die of old age in a moment," I said "She’s over two hundred years old"

"Let her croak" Svetlana ht to becohtened up and filled with life The witch gulped at the air greedily She looked at me "Thank you, sorcerer" she said