Oh, something bad was going on around here . . .
Bisat Iskenderov was lying on the made-up bed in just his shorts and singlet, watching the TV hanging on the wall facing the bed. Everything in the place was in average Moscow style, with almost no national character at all, absolutely no personal touch: furniture from IKEA, a carpet at the head of the bed (I thought they didn’t hang them up like that any longer, that the tradition had died out with the old, stagnant Brezhnev days), a women’s magazine on one of the night tables, an anthology of detective stories on the other. A bedroom like that could have been in any Russian town or city. The man lying on the bed could have been Ivan the manager or Rinat the builder.
I don’t like flats that don’t bear the stamp of their owner.
‘Hello, Bisat,’ I said. ‘We’re from the department. What happened to you? Are you ill?’
Bisat looked at me and shifted his gaze back to the screen. It was showing a popular programme – a young female doctor with kind eyes was telling people about periproctitis. ‘And now we’ll ask someone wearing a T-shirt or a shirt without a collar to come up on stage from the audience . . .’
‘Hello,’ Bisat replied. ‘Nothing happened. I’m fine.’
‘But you abandoned your watch . . .’ I said.
And I looked at him through the Twilight.
At first I thought there must be something wrong with me.
Then I realised it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t reassuring at all.
‘Las, take a peek at his aura . . .’ I said quietly.
Las wrinkled up his forehead and answered: ‘I can’t seem to see it . . .’
‘That’s because it isn’t there,’ I confirmed.
Bisat waited patiently while we talked. Then he answered: ‘I abandoned the watch because there was no point in staying on duty.’
‘Tell me about the man you talked to before you left,’ I said.
‘I don’t get this,’ Las said thoughtfully. ‘Are there really people who don’t have any aura?’
‘Now, imagine that the neck of the T-shirt is really . . .’ the female presenter told us from the screen.
‘Before I left I talked to Dima Pastukhov,’ said Bisat. ‘He’s a decent man . . .’
‘Before that!’ I told him. ‘Before Dima!’
‘Before Dima I talked to the woman in the tobacco kiosk,’ said Bisat. ‘She’s quite an attractive woman, but very thin . . .’
‘No, wait,’ I told him. ‘Bisat, when Pastukhov got stomach cramps and he went into the airport building – remember? You stopped a man coming out of the arrivals hall . . .’
‘But he wasn’t a man,’ Bisat objected very calmly.
‘Then who was he?’ I exclaimed.
‘I don’t know,’ Bisat said as imperturbably as ever. ‘But not a man. There aren’t any people like that.’
‘All right, tell me what this not-man looked like,’ I told him. ‘And what you talked about.’
‘He . . .’ For the first time Bisat thought about his answer. He even displayed a certain degree of animation, reaching out his hand and scratching his stomach. ‘He had light hair. Very tall. A short beard. Blue eyes. I asked him for his ID. He said there was no need for that. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I . . . I was going to ask him what he thought he was doing. But I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘Your partner Dima described this . . . not-man . . . differently.’
‘I don’t know how he described him,’ Bisat replied calmly.
I sighed, gathered together a little Power in my hand and cast the Socrates spell – a temporary but irresistible desire to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth – in the policeman’s direction.
Hurtling through the Twilight, the hazy blob of the spell passed straight through Bisat and carried on through the wall out into the street. Oh-oh, now someone was in for it . . .
‘Try the “Dominant”,’ suggested Las.
I shook my head, looking at the man lying on the bed. A normal man, who couldn’t care less about anything now. He had no aura. And spells passed clean through him.
‘That won’t help. Let’s go, Las.’
‘But . . .’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
Bisat turned back to the screen again. The presenter was happily explaining: ‘And so, in these delicate folds and wrinkles . . .’
The policeman’s wife was waiting for us in the hallway. The music was still playing, only more quietly now.
Howl if you like, it won’t change a thing,
You must pay the price for your luck.
Water won’t save a shrivelled-up garden
And money won’t buy my life back.
‘We’ll be going,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You know . . . you’ll probably get more phone calls. And people will call round . . . from work.’
‘I want to take him away,’ the woman said suddenly.
‘Where to?’
‘Home . . . To Azerbaijan. There’s an otachi there – Yusuf. He cures people with herbs. He cures everything. He’s not just a herb doctor, he’s a gam.’
‘A wizard?’ I asked.
The woman nodded and pursed her lips tightly.
‘Take him,’ I said. ‘Only first show him to our healer, all right?’
The woman looked at me suspiciously.
‘He’ll come to see you today,’ I said. ‘A good healer. Believe me.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘It’s like he’s lost his soul,’ said the woman.
‘Wait for the healer,’ I told her.
We walked out of the flat. I looked into the Twilight – the blue moss had crept even further away from the door. It didn’t like what was going on in there.
‘Come on, Las,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to see Gesar, and quick.’
But we had to stop for a minute outside the building. Standing in front of the entrance was a young couple – a girl with an expression of simultaneous fury and bewilderment on her face and a young man who was declaring enthusiastically: ‘And I only kissed your sister, and that was when I was drunk. But I slept with Lenka once, she came round when you were out . . .’
‘We have to tidy things up here,’ I decided. ‘I’ll deal with the girl, and you remove the Socrates from the guy and make him forget everything.’
‘Do we really have to?’ Las asked pensively. ‘It’s his own fault – let him take the consequences.’
‘Mistakes have to be corrected,’ I said. ‘At least, those that can be corrected.’
Las obviously thinks that I already understand something and the reason we’re in such a rush to get back to Gesar is because he definitely understands everything – who this tiger is, why a living man has no aura (and at the same time has lost all interest in life), why spells aimed at him pass straight through him. But in actual fact, I don’t understand a thing. And I expect Gesar will be just as dumbfounded as I am.
Just what is an aura, if you think about it?
It’s Power. The same Power that people produce all the time, but can’t use. The Power flows out of them into space and blankets the whole Earth. We Others produce far less of it – which means we can absorb it from the ambient environment. (The blue moss does pretty much the same thing, only we’re far more efficient – and we can think too!) If there’s no aura, it means there’s no Power . . . no life energy . . . the man or Other is already dead.
No, what kind of nonsense is this I’m thinking? No aura? Vampires are dead, they’re in a state of ‘afterlife’, but they have an aura. Their own special vampire aura, but they have it. And my Nadiushka – an absolute enchantress with a ‘zero magical temperature’ – she has an aura, too, and boy, what an aura that is!
I wiped my forehead. I’d never really attempted to come to grips with all the fine details of our existence. I’d always preferre
d to let the research team rack their brains over that . . . All these theories are infinitely distant from real life in any case.
So . . . why do beings who are dead have an aura? And those who don’t radiate any ‘life energy’ at all? And why are they alive . . . horrifying as it was to put vampires and Nadya in the same category, I forced myself to do it and tried to view the question in the abstract. Without life energy, it’s impossible to live . . . but the dead and ‘zero-temperature magicians’ don’t produce it . . .
Stop! It’s all very elementary. They don’t radiate it, but they consume it. Other beings’ Power is what allows vampires to exist after death. So it turns out that’s what keeps Nadya alive too. To refine the analogy . . . my daughter is like a person whose body doesn’t produce blood. And she lives on constant, continuous transfusions . . .
I winced and squirmed in my seat. Even just thinking about it was unpleasant. Maybe that was why I’d never gone into the details of how Power, aura and life were interconnected?
Okay, that was all idle conjecture. So Nadya lived on other people’s life energy. She was alive and she was just fine. But how was it possible to take away a man’s Power and still leave him alive? Not kill him, not turn him into a vampire – but transform him into a strange kind of talking puppet?
I didn’t know
‘You’re lost in thought,’ said Las.
‘Uh-huh,’ I confirmed.
‘Listen, I’ve got a question . . . Higher Others – can they see the soul fly out of the body?’
‘The soul?’ I asked, mystified. ‘Fly out?’
‘Well, yeah. The aura’s the soul, right? So when someone dies, can you see where the aura flies off to? What I’m getting at is that you could figure out where heaven and hell are. If you take two people dying simultaneously at opposite ends of the globe and pinpoint the direction the souls fly off in, then you could triangulate—’
‘Las, the aura is not the soul!’ I objected. ‘The aura is life energy.’
‘Ah, and I thought it was the soul,’ said Las, upset. ‘So the soul can’t be seen?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘And when someone dies, the aura doesn’t go flying off anywhere, it just stops glowing.’
But there was something to all of this. Las’s question, my answer . . .
But I couldn’t understand what it was, and I ran out of time. We drove under the boom that had risen obligingly to allow us into our car park – and stopped right in front of Gesar.
That’s the difference between a real magician and a beginner like me – experience. And the ability to do a whole heap of things all at the same time. If I’d sent someone off to do a job, and then been keeping close tabs on the action, I could probably have sensed that he was hurrying back with something important to report. Only I would have had to do that deliberately. But Gesar seemed simply to have sensed my approach in between doing everything else – and he felt so concerned that he’d come out to meet me.
‘Tell me,’ he ordered curtly as I started clambering out of the car. ‘And quick!’
All right, then, quick it is . . . I looked into his eyes and played back the conversation with Pastukhov and the visit to Iskenderov.
‘Let’s go to my office,’ said Gesar and swung round. Putting up a portal from that distance would simply have looked flashy. ‘Call Svetlana.’
‘What for?’ I asked, taking out my mobile.
‘I’ll open a portal to your flat. Tell her to come here and bring Nadya.’
A repulsive, chilly tremor of fear ran down my spine.
‘No, I don’t see any immediate threat,’ said Gesar, without turning round. ‘But I don’t like what’s happening one little bit. And I need all the Higher Ones in Moscow.’
As he walked along, Gesar seemed to falter every now and then, not stopping completely but slowing down for an instant. It looked to me as if he was communicating with the other Higher Ones.
But then – what others? I was calling Svetlana . . . why wasn’t she answering? . . . there was Olga, too . . . and that was the entire complement of the Night Watch’s ‘Magicians Beyond Classification’. The Day Watch only had Zabulon on active service now – they had lots of First-and Second-Level Magicians, but recently things hadn’t gone so well for them with Higher Ones . . .
‘And what shall I do?’ Las shouted after us resentfully.
‘Call into the science department and have them send Innokentii to me!’ Gesar told him. He liked everyone around him to have some task to perform.
Svetlana finally answered.
‘Anton?’
‘Sveta, Gesar’s going to put up a portal to our flat . . .’
‘It’s already up,’ Svetlana answered calmly.
‘Grab Nadka and get over here, quick.’
‘Is there some kind of rush?’ asked Sveta.
‘Say they can bring things for a day or two,’ Gesar responded briskly. ‘But they mustn’t dawdle.’
I didn’t like that comment at all. Gesar was acting as if Sveta and Nadya were going to be under siege. But we were talking about a Higher Enchantress here (Svetlana might specialise in healing, but everyone knows that any healing spell can be used just as effectively for attack) and an Absolute Enchantress as well. (The fact that she was only ten years old didn’t make Nadya defenceless. She could set up a perfectly standard Sphere of Negation, but pack so much Power into it that you couldn’t breach it with a cannon.) ‘I heard,’ said Sveta. ‘Right now I’m throwing clean underclothes into a bag . . . Shall I bring anything for you?’
‘Er . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Well, a pair of socks, a couple of pairs of shorts . . .’
‘I’ll take a risk and grab a clean shirt as well,’ Svetlana decided.
When we had almost reached Gesar’s office I decided to speak up after all – the boss wasn’t faltering as he walked along any more, he’d obviously contacted everyone he needed to . . .
‘Boris Ignatievich, I can see you already understand what’s going on . . .’
‘I don’t understand a damn thing, Anton,’ answered Gesar. ‘Not a damn thing. I’ve never even heard of anything like this. And it . . .’ He chewed on his lips, trying to choose the right words. ‘It frightens me.’
He swung the door open and we walked into his office.
CHAPTER 4
THE FIRST THING I noticed were the portals hanging in the air. The Higher Others summoned by Gesar certainly weren’t wasting any time.
Then I counted the portals. One of them, with a thin, glittering frame, was waiting for my girls to pass through it. And three portals were already slowly fading away.
Three?
I gazed at the people sitting there at the table.
Olga. Clear enough. I nodded to her automatically.
And this quiet little old man with the tousled grey hair, wearing a threadbare suit and wide, old-fashioned tie, looking like an aged professor or doctor?
And this sturdy man with a beard, whose face seemed familiar to me somehow – not from the life of the Watch, but from human life? I’d seen his face on TV, or maybe in the newspapers . . .
We didn’t have anyone like these two in the Watch.
‘Thank you for not delaying,’ said Gesar, walking over to his chair. ‘Let me introduce you. This is Anton Gorodetsky. You must have heard of him.’
‘Who doesn’t know Anton Gorodetsky?’ the little old man said, with a smile.
‘This is Mark Emmanuilovich Jermenson,’ said Gesar. ‘Higher Light One and Battle Magician.’
‘Sergei,’ said the second man, introducing himself. ‘Sergei Glyba. Higher Light One.’
‘I know you,’ I said, finally remembering. ‘You’re . . . you’re that—’
‘Clairvoyant!’ he confirmed delightedly.
He really was a clairvoyant. One of those who are published regularly in the yellow press and equally yellow magazines, who appear on TV and sit among ‘the invited guests’ in the front row at countless talk shows. He had forecast
the financial crisis, when it was almost over already; the strengthening of the rouble, just before it fell; the replacement of dollars in the US by some weird kind of ‘ameros’; an asteroid shower; a landing by aliens from space; an epidemic of goat flu; unprecedented growth in the Russian economy; typhoons and earthquakes.
If it had always been the exact opposite of what he forecast that happened, his prophecies would have made some kind of sense. But it was the usual clairvoyant’s babble, a matter of random sensationalism. Sometimes he was mocked in the press, but his imposing appearance and slick tongue made him a favourite with the readers (especially the women) and he was never out of work.
‘You’re a clairvoyant?’ I enquired dubiously.
‘Anton, surely you don’t think I would do serious forecasts for humans?’ Sergei replied, smiling.
‘I’ve never seen you in the Watch,’ I said.
‘They aren’t in the Watch,’ Gesar said morosely. ‘You could say that Mark Emmanuilovich is retired.’
‘Following injury,’ Jermenson added with a jolly smile.
‘And Sergei simply doesn’t want to serve,’ said Gesar.
‘It’s my right,’ replied Glyba. ‘I want to live like a human being.’
Sveta emerged from the final portal, holding Nadya by the hand. The portal immediately faded away.
‘Hello,’ Nadya said very politely. ‘Hello, Uncle Gesar and Aunty Olya.’
Seeing Mark and Sergei gazing at my daughter with undisguised curiosity, I laughed.
‘So everyone’s here – excellent,’ said Gesar. ‘Let’s get down to work. You are all aware of what Anton has found out . . .’
Oho – he’d moved really fast. Not only summoned them, but briefed them too.
‘We have an emergency situation,’ Gesar went on.
‘An extreme emergency, is it?’ Mark Emmanuilovich enquired.
‘Quite extreme,’ Glyba said unexpectedly, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. ‘Gesar . . . thank you for getting everyone together.’
‘What do you see?’ Gesar asked, without looking at the clairvoyant.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why such a panic?’
‘I don’t see anything, Gesar.’ Sergei mopped his forehead and gave a crooked smile. ‘That’s why the panic. You know that I can always see something . . .’