‘I believe you and accept your oath,’ I said.
The small sphere shrank to a blindingly black point and disappeared.
‘So, Head of the Supreme Conclave,’ I mused. ‘And the Watches tried so hard to guess who that was and where she had disappeared to . . .’
Arina shrugged.
‘I’m simply choosing the lesser evil,’ I added.
‘Even when choosing the lesser evil, never forget that you’re still choosing evil,’ Arina said seriously.
‘But in choosing nothing, we choose both the greater and the lesser evil at once,’ I replied.
‘Then we understand each other,’ she said, nodding – the final Supreme Witch of the Conclave that had been disbanded a hundred years earlier.
‘But that still leaves one little problem,’ I said. ‘The Tiger. As I understand it, the prophecies are not active at the moment.’
‘They’re sleeping,’ said Arina.
‘If we learn what they are – the Tiger will come for us.’
‘But if we reveal them to humans – the Tiger will leave us in peace.’
‘And what if the prophecies are bad? Are you suggesting we should die a heroic death? Or open Pandora’s box, and to hell with human beings?’
‘No and no again. Witches have always preferred to choose a third way.’
I looked at her questioningly.
‘We have tried to understand the nature of the Tiger,’ said Arina. ‘As you have no doubt already realised, in certain areas the Conclave possessed knowledge that equalled the knowledge of the Watches. We did not succeed, but . . .’ She paused. ‘We did find an Other who knows how to defeat the Tiger. He is still alive. I suggest that we meet him, to obtain this information – and open the prophecies after that.’
I sat there for a while, digesting what I’d just heard. Then I asked: ‘Where is he? Somehow I get the feeling it’s not London and not Moscow.’
‘Formosa,’ Arina said, nodding.
It took me a few seconds to recall what used to be called Formosa in Arina’s time.
‘Taiwan?’ The globe that I had given Nadya a year earlier to further her general education appeared in front of my eyes. ‘That’s . . . How far is that?’
‘Almost ten thousand kilometres. Fourteen hours. Fortunately, there’s a direct flight,’ said Arina, looking at her watch, an elegant timepiece of pink gold – probably with a diamond mechanism, I thought. ‘It’s half past seven now. The flight’s in one hour and forty minutes. Do you need long to pack?
‘Do you mean to say that you already have tickets?’ I asked.
‘I mean to say that I checked us into the flight yesterday evening. The lack of a visa won’t bother you too much, will it? You can buy clean underclothes at the airport, if we have time, and if not – in Taipei.’
‘I suppose the taxi’s already waiting?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Arina said. ‘The meter’s running. Well, how about it? What’s your decision?’
I spread some butter on a slice of bread and put a piece of cheese on top. I took a bite and chewed it before I said: ‘I don’t need to buy any underclothes. I don’t even need socks. Sveta packed my bag for a week.’
I watched London slipping away beneath the plane and thought about what I was doing now.
Our entire life is an endless sequence of choices. Stay home or go out for a walk. Go to the cinema or watch TV. Drink tea or water.
Even these insignificant decisions can change a life completely, let alone the more serious alternatives! Get married or wait a while. Change your job or stay in the old one. Move to a different city or country.
I had had to make choices too, and I still didn’t know if I had always made the right one. But the action I had just taken could well be the most serious choice in my life. Not, of course, because I hadn’t rushed in to arrest Arina, as demanded by the regulations of the Night Watch and the circulars from the Inquisition. As a Magician Beyond Classification, even if my rank was rather doubtful and reflected my potential rather than the experience and wisdom that still had to be added to my Power, I had sufficient freedom of action.
I could, for instance, state that I did not consider myself capable of detaining Arina (which was the truth!) and had decided to play for time.
Or – and this would also not have required me to offend against veracity – I could justify my actions by the need to acquire additional information and clarify who was capable of resisting the Tiger, and how. After all, recent events at our office had demonstrated that this was a matter of priority!
And then the very existence of the two prophecies and my own strange dream positively demanded further investigation.
Of course, to be fair, I ought to have told people what was happening . . . at least Gesar. But even here I had a convincing excuse – a Higher Witch, let alone the former Head of the Conclave, was quite capable of intercepting practically any kind of message, even a pupil’s communications with his mentor.
So, from the official point of view, I was more or less in the clear. I could find a wagonload of excuses for my actions.
And I wasn’t really concerned about my own safety, either. I hadn’t required Arina to swear an oath not to harm me, but I had no grounds for suspecting her of anything bad. If I’d been able to work with Zabulon, I should be able to get along with a former Witch who was now a Light One.
So what was bothering me?
A pretty Chinese hostess was handing out glasses of champagne. Arina had lashed out on first-class tickets – but then, why would an experienced Witch be short of funds? Arina, in the seat beside me, took a glass. I declined and, after a moment’s hesitation, asked for a cognac. A fourteen-hour flight – there would be plenty time to have a drink and then sober up.
The morning was starting to come together.
‘Will you show me the chalice?’ Arina asked.
I got my bag down without any objections and took out the artefact that Erasmus had made. Arina held it in her hands for a while, then shook her head.
‘I can’t sense any magic.’
‘Neither can I, but not everything can be sensed.’
‘That’s true.’
Arina poured her champagne into the chalice and drank it. She shrugged. She raised the vessel to her ear and listened to it, as if it was a seashell.
‘I’ve tried that,’ I said. ‘I drank out of it, and listened to it. It seemed to me that Erasmus knew how to awaken the prophecy – but he didn’t think it necessary to explain.’
‘How did you manage to persuade him to part with the chalice?’ Arina asked curiously.
‘A present from Gesar helped,’ I said and told her about our office bonsai tree that had found a new home with Darwin.
‘Riddle upon riddle,’ Arina said, and shrugged. ‘Everyone knows Gesar is a sly old fox, but I have no idea what he’s thought up this time . . .’
‘Information for information,’ I said. ‘Tell me about this Other we’re going to see.’
‘He’s called Fan Wen-yan,’ Arina replied. ‘Actually, he has plenty of different names, but that’s the one he uses now for living among human beings. He’s about three hundred years old. A Light Other, but he has never been a member of any Watches.’
‘What rank is he?’ I asked.
‘Fourth.’
‘Is that all?’ I asked, amazed.
Of course, fourth rank is pretty serious, not just the ability to perform petty magic tricks, like seventh rank. But in three hundred years even a weak Other hauls himself up two or three levels from his original level. Did that mean Fan had been a total weakling when he was initiated?
‘Why so snobbish?’ Arina snorted. ‘Weren’t you a fourth-ranker once upon a time?’
‘Fifteen years ago,’ I admitted. ‘But I was initiated as a Fourth-Level Other.’
‘Well, he started right at the very bottom,’ said Arina, confirming my surmise. ‘From the Seventh-Level. And he climbed patiently . . . In 1925 he was appointe
d curator of the Gugun Palace Museum in Beijing. Great Others were not required there, the Chinese respect the authorities, no one attempted to steal the treasures. Even when the Xinhai Revolution took place’ – Arina gave me a glance and took pity on me – ‘and that was in 1911, the imperial treasures weren’t plundered seriously . . . Fan Wen-yan would have had a quiet life, but in 1930 something strange happened. Fan Wen-yan had a friend, a Prophet. A weak one, but a Prophet nonetheless. I don’t know the details – maybe he was more than just his friend . . .’ Arina laughed. ‘Anyway, the young man prophesied something or other, and the only witness to it was Fan. For some reason he didn’t like the prophecy and he didn’t want to reveal it to the human population. And so the Tiger came for Fan and his friend. That wasn’t what they called him but, from all the descriptions, it was the Tiger.’
I waited.
‘His friend was killed. But Fan managed to do something . . . either he destroyed the Tiger . . .’
‘How could he have destroyed him?’ I exclaimed in surprise. ‘The Tiger has only just been in Moscow . . .’
‘But are you sure that there’s only one Tiger?’ Arina asked with a smile. ‘Anyway, Fan managed to do something. Killed it, drove it away, frightened it off, bought it off – I don’t know what. But the prophecy wasn’t proclaimed, and later, under interrogation in the Night Watch, Fan said that he “would rather cut himself into pieces and feed them to the tigers in the Beijing zoo than utter what had been revealed to him”. When we put everything together and realised that a weak Chinese magician had managed to drive away the Tiger, it was decided to find him and clarify the details. Not for any specific requirement . . . but additional knowledge never does any harm.’
‘So what stopped you?’
‘Infighting, Anton. For us Russian Witches the World War and the Revolution were far greater calamities than they were for Others in general . . .’
‘Why?’
‘We Witches are closer to the earth. To the country where we grew up, where we acquired our powers. In 1914 it was already difficult for us to gather in the Conclave – for a Russian Witch to sit beside a German one, an English Witch beside an Austrian one – and then after the Revolution, with the USSR on one side and everyone else on the other, reaching an agreement about anything at all became quite impossible. Then I went to sleep, hid away from my friends, left the Conclave . . . and it fell apart anyway: its time had obviously come. So we didn’t do anything about this. It’s a pity . . . I didn’t have Fan’s fortitude when my friend prophesied in 1915 – I told people everything.’
‘But you did it your own way,’ I said, nodding.
‘Yes, I managed to get around the prophecy and save the country. Her prophecy became inaccurate, it became just one more false prediction. It seemed like I’d done well . . . but then I heard about Fan, and I couldn’t get his story out of my mind. So when I came back to the world, I started looking for him. And I found him.’
‘What’s he doing in Taiwan? Did he flee from the communists?’
‘Of course not. He’s indifferent to human ideology, just as we are. But he was the curator of an imperial museum, you understand? And when the Chinese who weren’t communists started withdrawing to Taiwan in 1948, they took the museum treasures along. And they took Fan with them . . . what else could he do? So now he works in the Gugun National Imperial Museum.’
‘But that’s in Beijing.’
‘No, that’s just the Gugun Imperial Museum. This is the National one.’
‘But will he tell us everything?’ I asked.
Arina shrugged.
‘Any pressure or force is out of the question,’ I said, just to be quite clear. ‘I’m not going to quarrel with the Chinese Others.’
‘I haven’t gone insane either,’ Arina said with a nod. ‘Only better say “Taiwanese”, and not “Chinese”. It’s more polite and more correct.’
‘Any other pieces of advice?’
‘Perfectly elementary ones. Never raise the subject of the two Chinas in conversation. Praise Taiwan, but don’t abuse China! Even if the subject does come up, avoid offering any opinions. It’s their internal problem and foreigners shouldn’t interfere in it. By the way, you should behave the same way in mainland China, if you end up there.’
‘I get it,’ I said.
‘Refrain from any bodily contact. I don’t mean sex, simply try not to invade their personal space, don’t touch anyone when you talk to them, don’t slap them on the shoulders, don’t hug them. It’s impolite.’
‘You’ve done all your homework,’ I said.
‘What else does an old-age pensioner have to do?’ Arina said, smiling. ‘On the other hand, you can feel quite safe on the streets, the crime rate there is very low. And you can eat anything at all anywhere at all, no matter what the food’s made of. The Taiwanese are very strict when it comes to hygiene. A chef whose hygiene certificate is out of date, or who breaks certain rules, goes to jail for several years. Regardless of whether anyone was poisoned by his cooking or not.’
‘I like that,’ I said, recalling the Moscow kebab stalls where ‘chefs’ in filthy overall coats sliced meat of unknown origin off a revolving grill. ‘How did they manage it?’
‘Harsh dictatorship,’ Arina laughed. ‘You’re a big boy, you ought to understand that punctual transport, public order and safe streets, polite people and good medical services are all the achievements of dictatorship.’
‘Oh, sure. London’s a good example,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Of course. It’s just that in England the period of dictatorship is over already. They don’t enclose the land and drive peasants out of their homes any longer, and they don’t hang children for stealing pocket handkerchiefs. They don’t sell opium to China, using gunboat diplomacy, and get a quarter of the country’s population addicted to it. They don’t loot the colonies for treasures any more. The Brits worked hard for their dictatorship and they earned the right to democracy, tolerance and pluralism.’
‘An interesting view of the world,’ I said.
‘An honest one,’ Arina parried. ‘You know yourself that “a gentleman to the west of Suez is not answerable for what a gentleman does to the east of Suez . . .” And the Brits aren’t so special. Tell me what you can feel proud of in the history of our own country. Military victories? The annexation of territory? Space flights? Factories and power stations? A mighty army and a world-famous culture? All of it was created under tyrants and dictators, Antoshka! St Petersburg and Baikonur. Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, nuclear weapons and the Bolshoi Theatre, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Plant and the Baikal-Amur Railway.’
‘Haven’t become a communist in your old age, have you?’ I growled.
‘What for?’ Arina snorted. ‘I’m talking about firm-handed power, harsh power, if necessary. I’m not interested in political posturing.’
‘Then what’s the point of all these achievements, if St Petersburg was built on bones and you couldn’t buy toilet paper in the Soviet Union?’
Arina smiled.
‘It’s the same as with the European colonies in Africa and Asia, the English enclosures that ruined the peasants, the American slaves in the cotton fields . . . and the never-ending bloody wars all around the planet. First a country gets fat and flourishes – don’t confuse that with the people, it’s the country we’re talking about! Then the rulers mellow a bit, the people relax – and life gets free and easy. The Roman legions no longer march on the orders of Rome, but stagnate somewhere like Judea. The aristocracy devotes itself to its vices, the people to theirs . . . the only differences are the price of the whores and the types of gastronomical delicacies. And somewhere not far away the numbers of resentful, hungry people bound together by a single, inflexible will are already multiplying, and they regard the former mighty power as a tasty lunch. And then there are two possibilities – either the country will rouse itself and start to live again, even though that will be really tough on the people . . . or the coun
try will die. And the people with it, of course. It will become a part of the dictatorship that it had left behind and to which it didn’t wish to return. The eternal cycle of strength and weakness, harshness and flabbiness, fanaticism and tolerance. People are lucky if they’re born at the beginning of an age of peace, when an aristocrat can no longer hunt down a commoner with his dogs and the commoner doesn’t yet insist on his right to be an idle drone. That’s what they call a golden age . . . only it doesn’t last long, not even a century.’
‘And can a society where this balance has been achieved be happy?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ Arina said. ‘Only the balance can’t be achieved for long. I once argued about that with a student in St Petersburg – he was a bright young man. I explained to him that society balances on a razor’s edge. On one side there is inertia, apathy and death, on the other there is harshness, severity and life, and it would be good to walk the path through the middle – but you can’t balance on a razor for long. He didn’t agree, though: he was stubborn and he believed strongly in communism.’
‘Yes, as far as I know, he never did agree,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘All right, Arina, I’m not willing to argue.’
‘You don’t agree either,’ she said, nodding. ‘I understand. It’s youth, Anton. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.’
CHAPTER 6
I HALF-SAT, half-lay on the spacious seat, looking through the plane’s window at the white mantle of clouds and listening to music. I used to have a minidisc player that I crammed all my favourite songs onto. Unfortunately, minidiscs died the death . . . or rather, they’re in the process of dying out now, having become the exclusive preference of retro types, romantics, skinflints and conservative journalists. Their place has been taken by MP3s, simply files without any external medium. Download what you like from the freebooting piratical expanses of the Internet and listen to your heart’s content . . .
So there I was, listening, as usual, in random-selection mode. The electronics selected the group Orgy of the Righteous. Sometimes it seems to me that I affect the choice involuntarily: the songs are simply too much in tune with my own thoughts . . .