Well, and of course, it turned very cold.
And the car changed again.
Very noticeably and for the better.
The deer, arched over in its leap on the bonnet, was transformed into a young woman with wings.
I gazed for a while at the emblem of two intertwined Rs, then asked:
‘So you prefer Russian automobiles, then, Boris Ignatievich?’
Gesar dove the Rolls-Royce Phantom hard over the empty roads, hurtling nonchalantly straight through the clumps of steam and the human shadows. Most people wouldn’t notice anything. Some would sense a chill on their skin and feel a blank, hopeless yearning for something glorious and enthralling – some experience that life had never granted them. In cases like that Americans say: ‘Someone just walked over my grave.’
But the reality is actually even more chilling – at that instant an Other has just walked or driven straight through you.
‘Everyone lies, Anton,’ Gesar said suddenly. ‘Everyone lies.’
So apparently he did watch TV after all.
And his conservatism wasn’t equivalent to patriotism either.
‘A really fine car,’ he admitted. ‘That’s just between the two of us, of course.’
We travelled through the second level at the same speed as in the ordinary world. Except, of course, that there weren’t any traffic jams blocking our way. But that wasn’t what interested Gesar. The important thing was that time passed far more slowly here than in the real world – we would reach Semyon literally a minute after the phone call.
But then, whoever was on his way to him could also move through the Twilight. And even go a layer or two deeper.
If there was anyone on the way to him, of course.
Suddenly Gesar swore out loud. Technically speaking, I didn’t know the language that he switched into – probably it was the one they spoke in Tibet when he was a child there. But the intonation left no doubt: the boss was swearing.
‘Shame on you, Gesar,’ said Olga, confirming my hunch.
‘Don’t you notice anything unusual?’ asked Gesar.
I looked around and said: ‘The Twilight. Blue moss. The usual.’
‘We’re on the second level,’ Olga said thoughtfully. ‘What’s blue moss doing here?’
To be quite honest, there wasn’t a lot of moss. A few patches here and there on the road. Here and there on the walls. They were barely noticeable, because there are no colours on the second level, but they were definitely there.
Blue moss on the second level of the Twilight!
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ I admitted.
‘The point is that I’ve never seen anything like it either,’ Gesar declared. ‘Except perhaps—’
He wasn’t given a chance to finish – because a fireball flared into life dead ahead of the Rolls-Royce’s windscreen.
CHAPTER 5
IF YOU WISHED to divide all known magic into two parts, the easiest way would be to divide it into battle magic and everyday magic. Despite the opinion common among novice Others, there would be two or even three times as much of the ‘everyday’ variety. This is painstakingly hammered into the heads of the beginners at the very first classes in the Night Watch – magic is not intended for doing harm, for war or killing . . . for every Fireball or Viper’s Kiss you can find five peaceful spells: the Crusher for breaking down refuse, the Iron for ironing clothes, the Awl and the Drill Bit for making holes in domestic conditions, Prometheus for lighting a campfire or barbecue easily and conveniently . . .
Fairly quickly, however, the beginners realise that almost all the domestic spells work in battle conditions too. Their only shortcomings are basically that they are slower or that they consume more Power than specialised battle magic. In the time that it takes a beginner to create and adjust a Drill Bit or apply an Iron to his adversary’s face, you can fling the Triple Blade ten times over.
That’s why, after a brief period of interest in the non-standard applications of the Crusher or the Vent Valve, most Others stop experimenting and begin using everyday magic in everyday life and battle magic in battle.
Apart, that is, from certain Others who will sooner or later earn the legitimate title of Battle Magician.
They are the ones who eventually fathom a most important truth – it’s easy enough to put on an impressive show, battering each other with fireballs or trying to crush each other with the Press. And it also carries on for a very long time. Because that’s what your adversary is expecting from you. And he protects himself with the Barrier of Will, the Sphere of Negation, the Magician’s Shield . . . There they stand, facing each other – a Light Other and a Dark Other, hammering at each other with spells, defending themselves against spells, sometimes even finding time to abuse each other verbally in the process. Maybe this is a good thing. After all, the majority of magical duels are not fought to the death but until one of the adversaries surrenders or withdraws from the field of battle. Otherwise we would have wiped ourselves out ages ago.
But if a genuine Battle Magician enters the fray – then everything goes very differently. He employs the good old healing spell Willow Bark or its jolly Dark variant, Aspirin. And the unsuspecting enemy suddenly finds that his body temperature has fallen to that of the ambient environment. A Battle Magician doesn’t fling the Triple Blade, he applies the simple little Grater, which Svetlana uses when she makes vitamin salads for Nadya out of apples and carrots, and I use to clean off the saucepans if something gets burnt on . . . And his adversary suddenly becomes a millimetre or two slimmer. Instantly, from all sides. Usually no one can continue the battle after that.
I, of course, am very far from being a genuine Battle Magician. But it was still a long time since I’d flung any fireballs.
That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three metres.
It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself!
‘Fuck your fucking mother!’ Gesar howled, twisting the wheel round. In a moment of genuine terror only the Russian language could convey the true depths of his feelings. It made me feel proud of our great Russian culture!
The Rolls-Royce jerked to the left – like any driver, Gesar automatically turned so as to place the person beside him in the line of fire instead of himself. Nothing personal, just a pure reflex response.
I produced one too – I struck the windscreen with both hands, surprising myself by knocking it out completely, and held my open palms out towards the blazing sphere flying at us. I didn’t even have time to think what I was going to use – the Sphere of Negation or the Magician’s Shield. Because it turned out that I was already instinctively using the Press – striking at the bundle of flame with pure Power.
And the instinctive response worked. Whether or not a Shield could have withstood the impact of such a prodigious fireball is open to question. Whether Gesar could have dodged out of the way in time was not clear either. A good fireball vectors in on its target, like a modern missile.
But the pure Power strike did the trick. The fireball burst, splashing in all directions like hot oil. Some small gobbets of flame even hit the car, but Olga had her wits about her too and we were covered with the semi-transparent scales of some cunning form of defence. The car itself was clearly pretty much pumped full of spells too. The flames streamed downwards, under the wheels, and we bounded straight through the roaring, raging firestorm.
Just in time to catch sight of our adversary.
To me he didn’t look anything like the descriptions that the policemen had given.
Very young, a little over twenty years old.
Slim, with blond hair.
A pleasant face, very genial, almost noble-lookin
g somehow.
Light-coloured clothes (you can’t make out more than that on the second level of the Twilight) and a cloak. Honestly, I swear, a cloak! A genuine one, fluttering behind his shoulders, as if he was some kind of comic-book Superman!
The young man stood there and gazed at the car thoughtfully. Not exactly looking disappointed, but certainly rather surprised.
‘Come on,’ said Gesar, switching off the ignition and slipping out from behind the steering wheel. Olga and I followed him. Outside the car the cold of the Twilight seized us in its vicelike grip. There was a steady, freezing wind blowing, the eternal wind of the second level.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ shouted Gesar.
The young man didn’t answer. He seemed to be pondering something.
‘Night Watch! Leave the Twilight!’ I said, not quite raising my voice to a shout but in a loud, impressive tone.
‘Otherwise we shall use force,’ Olga put in, backing me up.
The young man started to smile. And Gesar said in a low voice:
‘Now, I wouldn’t have said that. What if he—’
And then he did. I don’t know what Gesar was about to say, but the young stranger certainly needed no prompting. He spread his hands – I thought he was moulding another fireball out of the air, a little bit smaller than the first one, but there wasn’t any bright glow, although Power of some kind was glimmering in the palms of his hands, something was being prepared . . .
‘Freeze!’ shouted Olga, and I responded to the word as if it were a command – I struck at the stranger, with all the Power I had, with a localised time halt.
And why not? If you think about it, it’s humane and it’s reliable. The enemy is immobilised but entirely unharmed. We have time to figure out what to do, he has no time of any kind.
Only Olga wasn’t asking me to use a freeze: she was warning me what the stranger was about to do.
Gesar suddenly disappeared – it looked as if he’d skipped down or up a level in the Twilight. Olga flew off about ten metres to one side with a gigantic leap that an Olympic champion, or even a hungry vampire, would have envied. But I stayed standing there like a fool, right in the path of the freeze that was advancing towards me . . .
Only I wasn’t fated to end up suspended in the Twilight, stuck like a fly in the amber of halted time. My own freeze – far, far weaker than my adversary’s – crashed into the spell hurtling towards it. And, as often happens with spells, they immediately interacted.
A faceted form like a precious stone suddenly appeared, suspended above the middle of the sombre grey road that was hemmed in by the grotesque wooden buildings. It rotated slowly, sinking down into the ground. Looking through it, I saw our adversary fragmented into a host of tiny little figures.
‘Old fool!’ bellowed Gesar, appearing beside me. He waved his arms – and there was a flash of green flame beyond the transparent crystal.
‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, boss,’ I told him, unable to resist.
I caught Gesar’s baffled glance.
‘I’m glad you’re still able to joke, but I meant him,’ said Gesar, nodding in the direction of the green fire. ‘And you, Anton, have clearly used up all your reserves of good luck for today. Shooting down a Freeze with a Freeze is no easy task.’
‘You meant him?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the young man. I looked at the green fire that was gradually fading away. ‘What is that?’
‘It will slow him down,’ Gesar said evasively, but very confidently.
The green fire went out.
The young man shook some strange, sticky green sparks off his cloak and looked at us. This time his expression was far from friendly.
‘Oho,’ said Olga, coming back to us. ‘So we couldn’t give a damn for Gesar’s Taiga . . .’
‘Something terrible’s about to happen,’ Gesar declared, and then he took off his jacket and threw it down on the ground.
Had he decided to have a fist fight, then?
The young man didn’t seem to have anything against fisticuffs – he moved along an arc, avoiding the section of space frozen in time by the spells. And despite his likeable, attractive appearance, somehow I was reminded only too clearly of what Pastukhov had called him.
A tiger . . .
Just at that moment I heard an engine roaring. Battle Magician Jermenson and the team had finally caught up with us. He leapt out of the SUV before it had even stopped, I think. Garik put up a Magician’s Shield on the run, and to judge from its power he must have used one of the Watch’s amulets. Jermenson moved out in front, Alisher fell in behind him with his head inclined and his hand pressed to his heart – it looked as if he was preparing to work as a reserve power source, pumping Jermenson full of energy.
The blond young man stopped, assessing the disposition of forces. To be quite honest, it wasn’t clear what move he was thinking of making in a situation like that – he was facing four Higher Magicians, as well as a couple of field operatives who might be less powerful but had pretty good battle experience.
Jermenson moved his hand up through the air, as if he was lifting an invisible load. The ground bulged up between him and the stranger, sprouting into a pillar three metres high. The pillar shuddered, taking on the features of a grotesque human figure, beside which the boxer Nikolai Valuev would have looked like a slim, handsome but rather undersized fashion model.
I had come across golems before. Rather more often, perhaps, than I would have liked purely for educational purposes. But this was the first time I had seen a golem created – and so quickly, without any runes embedded in the clay, without any obvious programming.
‘Oh, these sly Jewish tricks!’ said Olga.
The young man was clearly disconcerted by the golem. He made some elusive kind of movement – and a monstrous weight seemed to crash down onto the golem, crumpling it and driving it back into the ground. Only that didn’t bother the golem. It soaked into the ground and immediately oozed out of it at another point, much closer to the stranger, reaching out a massive hand for him.
A rapid flickering of fingers, a brief fluttering of lips – and the arm reaching out to the stranger started falling to pieces, collapsing onto the ground in lumps of clay, as if some invisible meat-slicer was chopping it off as it advanced.
The golem paid no attention to this and simply carried on reaching out its arm. The falling clay wriggled on the ground and was absorbed back into its feet, so it didn’t lose any mass at all.
‘She ilekh adonia nekhbad mi a makom a ze!’ shouted Jermenson.
The young man took a step back. Cast a quick glance in our direction. Then at Jermenson.
And at that precise moment the darkness behind the stranger thickened and condensed into a black ink blot dangling in the air. A spiked leg that looked like a limb of a gigantic praying mantis stepped out of the blot, to be followed by its owner – a demon every bit as large as the golem.
Unfortunately, the cavalry arrived too late for the fight. The young man cast a quick glance at the demon, spread his arms – and disappeared. Without any flashes, glimmers or sparks. Without opening any portals, dissolving into the air or sinking down through the ground. He simply disappeared.
It was only reasonable from his point of view. If the heads of the Night Watch and the Day Watch both attack you, and they have a few Higher Others tagging along – the best thing to do is beat it, and quick.
The golem hesitated for a moment and then soaked back into the ground. Golems created to carry out a single assignment usually crumble into dust. But this one didn’t crumble – it didn’t seem to think that its assignment had been completed.
‘Hello, Zabulon,’ said Gesar.
The demon metamorphosed into a man – an ordinary, rather short man of indeterminate age with an undistinguished face. It had always amazed me that the Dark Others moved through the lower layers of the Twilight in such horrifying forms. I used to think there were dangers that I didn’t know abo
ut lurking down there, but it was a long time now since I’d been an inexperienced novice magician. I’d walked the Twilight through and through, on all its levels, and I knew there weren’t any bloodthirsty beasts in it.
Or was I wrong after all? Maybe the Dark Ones followed their own paths, unlike ours?
‘And hello to you, Gesar,’ Zabulon said with a nod. ‘What kind of loathsome beast was that?’
I laughed. And I kept on laughing until understanding dawned on Gesar’s face.
‘Did you see a repulsive, malicious demon, Zabulon?’ he asked.
The Dark One frowned. And nodded.
‘I saw a cunning, elderly man,’ said Gesar. ‘Anton, I surmise, saw some pleasant, straightforward young guy. Jermenson saw a wise old Jew. Olga saw a wily, guileful woman.’
‘You forgot to add that you didn’t just see a cunning, elderly man, but a very modest, cunning, elderly man,’ said Olga.
‘Yes, and one with a very high opinion of himself,’ snorted Zabulon. ‘But, as it happens, he only disappeared when I showed up.’
‘Maybe he just has a well-developed aesthetic sensibility . . .’ Alisher muttered, but in a low voice. It’s not really a good idea for an ordinary Light Magician to quarrel with Higher Dark Ones.
The three of us – Gesar, Zabulon and I – went up to the flat where the small Tolkov family lived. Zabulon had politely confirmed in advance that the Day Watch did not claim any right to initiate the boy-Prophet, but said that he would be interested in taking a look at the child. Simply out of general interest, because a genuine Prophet only turns up once or twice in a generation, and he had never met a Prophet with a ‘tiger’ hot on his trail.
‘Do you have any ideas about all this?’ Gesar asked him as we were riding up in the lift.