“I blocked what I could,” I said morosely. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do?”
“Me?” Arina asked in genuine surprise. “I’ll see you home, to make sure no one hurts you. We’ll have a talk on the way—I swear not to work any evil! You won’t attack me, will you?”
Naturally, I could have removed the magical block that I had set up myself. But that would have taken a few minutes and Arina would have sensed it.
“Until I get home—no, I won’t.”
“Great,” the witch said delightedly. “Let’s get a move on. It’s getting dark already and the forces of evil are coming out to hunt!”
It occurred to me that the sight of Arina would be enough to make any force of evil who had the slightest inkling about magic fill his pants, but I didn’t verbalize this banal thought. Smiling at each other, we walked out of the supermarket and headed for my apartment block.
I wasn’t at all surprised that Arina knew exactly where I lived.
“What do you make of the prophecy?” Arina asked casually as soon as we were a few steps away from the shop.
“Nothing. You stole the flash stick.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to apologize for that bit of petty larceny,” Arina replied, not embarrassed in the least. “But I can’t believe that a computer specialist didn’t keep a copy.”
“Gesar didn’t believe that, either,” I sighed. “They turned the whole place upside down, checked my PC and my laptop . . . took away the toy . . .”
“Oh, don’t play the hypocrite,” Arina snorted. “As if you didn’t keep a copy, and somewhere where they wouldn’t find it! You could have sent it to an e-mail address, for instance.”
“I did think about that,” I said. “But that’s dead easy to trace too.”
“All the same, you have that file,” Arina said confidently. “By the way . . . would you like me just to give you back the flash stick? I don’t need it anymore.”
“I’ll destroy it, Arina. You can take it to Gesar, he was interested.”
“Oh, woe is me, I don’t want to go to Gesar,” said Arina, fluttering her hands. “It’s you I’m interested in. What are we going to do?”
“I already told you—I haven’t heard the prophecy!” I replied irritably. “I haven’t heard it! And I don’t want to hear it!”
Arina walked along for a while in silence, thinking about something. Then she said: “You’ll have to listen to it. It’s important, Anton. Believe me.”
“And then the Tiger will come for me? And I’ll have to choose between revealing the prophecy to humans or dying? Thank you kindly! I’ll leave that choice to you!”
“Anton, it’s all much more complicated than you think.”
“Life is always more complicated than we imagine. Stop this! I’m sick of it, do you understand? I’m sick of deciding for other people! I’m sick of defending the Night Watch! I’m sick of fighting for good! I’m sick of everything!”
I didn’t realize at first that I was standing there shouting and the infrequent passersby were keeping well away from us. Arina stopped too and looked at me somberly. Then she said: “Anton, I understand you. And I’m not exactly overjoyed at what’s happening, either. But you must hear this prophecy. And you will hear it.”
“And how will you make that happen?” I asked. “Will you force me? Will you break your oaths again?”
“Again?” Arina asked in surprise. “I didn’t break anything. I didn’t swear that I wouldn’t purloin your trousers and the flash stick.” She giggled, then turned serious. “No, Anton, and I don’t intend to exploit your temporary helplessness to force you to listen to the prophecy. You’ll do that yourself.”
I laughed, and lengthened my stride. Arina hurried after me.
“Anton, do you remember the joke about how to make a cat lick itself under its tail?”
“No.”
“You should: it may be a child’s joke, but it demonstrates various approaches to solving a problem. As usual, representatives of three different nationalities were involved. The American hypnotized the cat. The Frenchman spent ages training it painstakingly—”
“I think it was the Chinese who trained it,” I said without stopping.
“That’s not important. And the Russian rubbed mustard on the cat, after which it started licking itself voluntarily with passion and gusto. You’ll listen to the prophecy yourself, Anton—with passion and gusto!”
“And what’s going to be the mustard?” I asked.
“Your daughter. The boy’s prophecy concerns Nadya.”
“What?” I exclaimed, looking round.
Arina spread her hands expressively.
“You heard what. And don’t look at me like that, it’s not my fault. See you, Anton! When you want to talk to me about the prophecy, summon me. Just summon me through the Twilight—I’ll hear you.”
She waved her hand to give me a glimpse of the Minoan Sphere and disappeared.
Lousy old witch, crazy senile schemer . . .
Yes, of course.
But she’d given me a good slathering of mustard. No mistaking that professional touch.
I only remembered that I’d forgotten to buy the toilet paper after I got off the elevator.
Chapter 4
APPARENTLY SVETLANA HAD UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING THE moment I walked in the door. But she only asked the question late in the evening, when we were already in bed.
“Have you blocked your magic?”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t attempt to deny it, but I tried not to get involved in explanations. “The block will run out tomorrow.”
“I see. For a dare?”
“For a dare.”
Svetlana put down the book that she was reading in bed for the second evening in a row and glanced into my eyes. I tensed up, expecting some ironic comment or at least the question “What the hell for?”
“Was it hard, Anton?” Svetlana asked.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I never realized before that I’m always doing something with magic—little bits and pieces, but I do them . . .”
“I understand.”
“It’s hard to understand,” I said, smiling to soften the unintended harshness of my words. “Until you try, it looks dead easy.”
“Anton, I haven’t used magic outside the home for four years now.”
“What!” I sat up on the bed. “But that’s stupid!”
“Yes, I know,” said Svetlana, nodding.
“But why?”
“I felt like I was becoming less and less human,” Svetlana replied. “Almost imperceptibly. At first it seemed miraculous—solving every problem with a single movement, only worrying about the balance between good and evil . . . Then I realized that I never solved any problems but my own. I started trying to reassure myself that there was nothing wrong with that. That the Night Watch couldn’t exterminate evil . . . that that wasn’t its job in any case: all we can do is not allow good to be defeated, humans have to strive for all the rest themselves. Well, you know . . . And the things they teach young Others in school—the ones with the most passionate hearts join the Watch afterwards, and the ones with cool heads simply live as Others among humans. And then it started making me feel . . .” She paused, trying to find the right word.
“Sick?” I asked with avid curiosity.
“Uncomfortable.” Svetlana shook her head: “Not sick. We really do try to do good, after all. But . . . uncomfortable. You know, it’s . . . Rumata Estorsky probably felt that way just before he took out his swords and stood facing the door that the storm troopers were breaking down.”
“I understand,” I said with a nod.
“I love you precisely because you do understand and I don’t have to explain to you who Rumata was,” Svetlana said seriously, and smiled. “And then . . . I realized that I would end up like he did.”
“I went through something like that,” I said.
“You coped. You’re a man, you react differently. If push comes to shove, you can
always get drunk and abuse Gesar. But I realized that I would just fly off the handle and run wild, create a real mess . . . And I stopped using magic. Well—apart from at home. I hate ironing the laundry!”
“Why didn’t you say anything to me?” I asked.
“You were busy. You were saving the world.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt unbearably ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“For being a blind, self-satisfied ass. For not seeing . . .”
“You couldn’t have seen anything, I didn’t put up a block. I just stopped using magic.”
I looked into Svetlana’s eyes. Then I glanced at the bedroom door.
“She’s asleep,” said Svetlana.
After that we didn’t need any magic.
In the dead of night I lay in bed, listening to my wife’s breathing and thinking about prophecies.
There were two of them—and something about them didn’t add up . . .
No, there weren’t just two of them. That was my mistake.
There was a third one, too. The prophecy that Svetlana would have a daughter, who would become an Absolute Enchantress. An Other of boundless Power. Someone who could alter the balance of Light and Darkness, change the entire existing order of things.
Somehow I’d almost forgotten about that. But after all, it was a prophecy that had come true. Olga had rewritten Svetlana’s destiny for its sake, and for its sake Gesar had brought us together, intrigued, taken risks, got involved in confrontations with Zabulon and the Inquisition. The stakes were monstrously high—and now suddenly it was all over? Zabulon had resigned himself to defeat?
But that could never happen . . .
So that game wasn’t over yet. It was still going on. The prophecy had been realized: Nadya was an Absolute Enchantress, but the prophecy hadn’t specified what that would lead to.
All right. Let’s hold that fact in our memory, it’s obviously important. Nadya is one of the pieces on the chessboard. Maybe the most important figure—the White Queen.
What was next?
The boy Kesha’s prophecy. Arina already knew it—so the Tiger was after her . . . Or was he? According to the classical theory, the Tiger tried to eliminate the Prophet in order to prevent a prophecy from being pronounced and realized. And that fitted perfectly with what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. When he stormed the Night Watch office, the Tiger had said: “The prophecy must not be heard.”
Right? Right.
But in the old Chinese magician’s opinion, that wasn’t the goal that the Tiger pursued at all. His goal was to “shake up” the prophets, urge them on to declare their prophecies to humans, so that the prophecies would come true—and change human life in one way or another, make sure that the human anthill didn’t stop developing. A coherent theory that was confirmed by Fan Wen-yan’s own story . . . The Tiger “hassled” the prophets until they performed their duty—or firmly decided never to proclaim the prophecy. Clearly, the prophecy that Wen-yan had heard foretold something very bad for China—and the magician had been prepared to die in order to save his country. The Tiger had realized that and had left—he didn’t need any pointless sacrifices.
But then why, in Kesha’s case, had the Tiger said that “the prophecy must not be heard”? So was it special in some way? Something that went beyond those that brought the world Sputniks, miniskirts, or rock music? And at the same time, if Arina could be trusted, it concerned my daughter.
A riddle.
So, let’s start from the other end. Who is the Tiger? Once again, in Wen-yan’s opinion—and apparently he had studied this question more thoroughly than all our European sages—the Tiger was not simply an Other, changed and guided by the Twilight. He was more complicated than that. He was . . . well, to a certain extent, you could say that he was alive. Alive and intelligent.
Like the Twilight itself.
Basically, he was the Twilight, in a form accessible to our eyes . . .
I felt a frosty chill creep across my skin. Someone was walking over my grave, as the Americans say.
Someone . . . A Tiger in a coat!
The Twilight . . .
There it was all around me. Accessible to Others, but barely even capable of being sensed by humans. The source of Power—and simultaneously its consumer.
And, if Wen-yan could be believed, alive and intelligent.
How was that possible? How could a nothingness be intelligent? A matryoshka doll with seven dimensions, one of which is our world, with the others ranging from a cold desert to a pale copy of the real world. Intelligence had to have some material vehicle.
Or did it really have to have anything?
After all, we didn’t even know what the magical Power that we used was. Our scientists were all, to a man, poor magicians, but with wise heads, and they had investigated this matter throughout the twentieth century and carried on in the twenty-first. Our scientists—meaning not only Light Ones and not only Russians. Others throughout the world had sought to understand their own nature, when necessary even involving human scientists and feeding precisely calculated crumbs of information to the Pentagon, the CIA and secret Soviet research institutes. Specially trained Others had collaborated with human scientists, demonstrating certain facets of their abilities—too little for them to be taken with unconditional seriousness, but enough to inflame curiosity and get entire laboratories with multimillion-dollar budgets set to work.
Nothing.
There is a Power that we can sense. It is emitted by all living things, but to the greatest extent by humans. (They are followed by whales, dolphins, pigs, dogs, and rats—as it happens, monkeys don’t even make the top ten.) Others can sense Power, see it as an aura, they can assess it and record it. And also consume it, naturally—amass it within themselves. So that later, by entering the Twilight, or simply summoning up its mental image, they can perform magical actions.
How? The Chinese magician was quite right—how did the Twilight, which was nonmaterial, transform Power, which was not registered by any instruments, into a perfectly material fireball or a Triple Blade that sliced through metal and stone? Our thoughts and desires were only the switches. Or, to use computer terminology, the commands. But all the invisible work that allowed us to work miracles took place beyond our awareness and beyond our control. It was carried out by the Twilight. So, the Twilight was either an inconceivable nonmaterial computer, tuned to carry out the desires of Others—but then that raised the question of who created it and programmed it—or an inconceivable nonmaterial rational being. A superbeing . . .
In principle, there wasn’t really any great difference here. A machine consisting of energy fields, say, or an equally exotic supermind. Was it all-powerful?
Probably not. By definition, only God was omnipotent and omnipresent. I wasn’t prepared to believe that if the Supreme Being existed, He was concerned with realizing the desires of a bunch of Others. That contradicted both theology and common sense. And the facts that we had at our disposal, too. The Tiger or a Mirror, for instance, were not like a manifestation of divine will, almighty and omnipotent. But they were like the behaviour of a very powerful and intelligent being. The behavior of God? No, not by a long way.
And what was it that every living creature feared?
That was an easy one.
Death.
So . . . that meant that one way or another, the boy Kesha’s prophecy was dangerous for the Twilight. And that was why the Tiger didn’t want it to be heard.
Logical?
Yes.
Then we could take that as a starting point.
Now for the other prophecy. The one that was shouted into a hollow tree by a quite different boy who lived in Britain a long, long time ago. A prophecy that had been slumbering, stored away in a wooden chalice for almost three hundred years.
Did it have anything to do with me?
Or did it announce the independence of the United States of North Ameri
ca, the discovery of penicillin, or the sinking of the Titanic?
No. In matters such as prophecy, there was no such thing as coincidence. If it had come into my hands, if I had guessed—of course, if I really had guessed . . . how I could hear it . . .
These were two links in a single chain.
But between them was a third link, the prophecy about the Absolute Enchantress Nadezhda . . .
And I didn’t have any options. I was a cat who had been smeared with mustard under his tail—and I was going to lick it off, with passion and with gusto.
Because my daughter’s fate was at stake.
And because I really didn’t like the dream that I had had, about Nadya screaming at me with hate in her voice: “Daddy, what have you done to us?” And it wasn’t just a dream generated by nervous stress, a drop of strong drink, and a song about a magician who was a poor student of his art that had surfaced from my subconscious. It was a case of precognition, what ordinary people call a “prophetic dream.”
I got out of bed quietly, so as not to wake Svetlana. The bed creaked treacherously and I froze, but my wife didn’t wake up. I went to the sitting room, closed the door to the bedroom, and switched on a dim standard lamp.
In a modern home, if you don’t happen to be a fanatical opponent of progress, and especially if you’re keen on gadgets, there are many electronic devices capable of carrying information. All of them at my home had been checked. The desk PC and the laptop. And Nadya’s netbook. And Svetlana’s tablet. And the mobile phones. And the alarm clock, on which you could record your own music to wake you up. And all the flash sticks. And the answering machine on the landline phone. Even the teddy bear that had a chip in it with the phrase “I love you, Nadenka” recorded on it by Svetlana had been checked—with apologies. They hadn’t forgotten my MP3 player, either.
Many Others, especially those who have been alive for more than a hundred years, have a pretty poor grasp of electronics and modern technology in general. In this respect, Gesar is a sophisticated Other, a smart guy who tries to get some idea of what’s what.
And that was why, for this supremely polite search, he had sent really young Others who weren’t powerful magicians but who understood very well where a microchip with the recording of the prophecy could be hidden.