Last Watch

Chapter 6

GENNADY WAS DRIVING. APPARENTLY EDGAR AND ARINA THOUGHT THAT they could restrain me better if I attempted to escape or attack them. I was sitting in the backseat with Edgar on my left and Arina on my right.

But I didn’t attempt to attack or to escape, they had too many trump cards up their sleeves. Now that they had taken the Cat off my neck, the skin where the fluffy strap had been was scratched and itchy.

“They’re guarding the Crown much more seriously now,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid of a massacre, Arina? Will your conscience be able to handle it?”

“We’ll manage without bloodshed,” Arina replied confidently. “As far as that’s possible.”

I doubted very much that it was possible, but I didn’t try to argue. I looked out in silence at the suburbs we were driving through, as if I was hoping to see Lermont or his deputy and at least be able to warn them with a look or a gesture…

If I tried to get away, they would almost certainly catch me. I had to wait.

The day was just declining into evening; it was the busiest time for tourists, but today Edinburgh seemed quite different from two weeks earlier. The people on the streets seemed somehow muted and joyless, the sky was obscured by a light haze, and the birds circling overhead seemed alarmed by something.

So, apparently everything in the world could sense the approaching cataclysm, including people and birds…

The cell phone in my pocket jangled. Edgar was startled and tensed up. I looked inquiringly at Arina.

“Answer it, but be discreet,” she said.

I looked at the phone. It was Svetlana. “Hello.”

As ill luck would have it, the connection was excellent. You would never have suspected that we were thousands of kilometers apart.

“Are you still working, Anton?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m driving in the car.”

Arina was watching me closely. She was bound to be able to hear every word that Svetlana said.

“I deliberately didn’t call. They told me something had happened…some terrorists or other, pumped full of magic…is that why you’re late?”

A faint spark of hope began to glimmer in my breast. I wasn’t late yet! Svetlana couldn’t have been expecting me home from work so early.

“Yes, of course, that’s why,” I said.

Come on, now, guess! Use magic! You can find out where I am now. Raise the alarm. Warn Gesar, and he’ll get in touch with Lermont. If the Edinburgh Night Watch are expecting an attack, that will be the end of the Last Watch.

“Make sure you don’t get stuck for too long,” Svetlana told me. “Surely you have enough people working for you to manage all these things? Don’t take everything on yourself. OK?”

“Of course I won’t,” I said.

“Is Semyon with you?” Svetlana asked casually.

Before I could answer, Arina shook her head. Of course, if Svetlana suspected something, she could phone Semyon after I said yes.

“No,” I said, “I’m on my own. I’ve got a separate job to do.”

“Do you want me to help? I’m getting a bit bored sitting at home,” Svetlana said, and laughed.

Arina was alarmed and tense now.

“Don’t be silly, this is nothing special,” I said. “Just an inspection visit.”

“As long as you’re sure,” said Svetlana, sounding a bit disappointed. “Call me if you get completely stuck. Oi, Nadya’s trundling something around. Bye…”

She cut off the call and I started to put the phone away in my pocket. Trying to keep cool while looking straight into Arina’s relaxed face, I pressed three buttons on the phone: Incoming Calls-Call Last Number-Off.

That was all. I couldn’t risk leaving the phone switched on. Arina might hear the ringing tone from inside my pocket. Had the call gone through? Had the international telephone network managed to process it before it was canceled? I didn’t know. I could only put my hope in the greed of the cell phone network operators-it was more profitable for them to put the call through and debit my account.

And also, of course, I put my hope in Svetlana’s common sense. When her phone rang and then stopped again, she would have to use magic instead of trying to call me back. Arina and Edgar were far older than me. For them a cell phone would always be a portable version of a cumbersome apparatus into which one had to shout, “Young lady! Young lady! Give me the Smolny Institute!”

“She suspected something,” Edgar said to Arina. “You shouldn’t have done that with the bomb…it didn’t have to be detonated, but at least we would have had a trump card in reserve!”

“Never mind,” said Arina. “Even if she did suspect something, they don’t have any time. Anton, give me that phone.”

A glint of suspicion had appeared in her eyes. I gave her the cell without saying anything, handing it to her gingerly with the tips of my fingers and not touching the keys.

Arina looked at the phone and saw that it was in waiting mode. She shrugged and switched it off completely.

“Let’s do without any calls, all right? If you need to call anyone, you can ask me for my phone.”

“I won’t bankrupt you?”

“No, you won’t.” Arina took out her own phone and dialed a number-not from the contacts list, but the old way, pressing every key. She raised the phone to her ear and waited for an answer. When it came she said quietly, “It’s time. Go to work.”

“Still haven’t run out of accomplices, then?”

“They’re not accomplices, Anton, they’re hired hands. People can be perfectly effective allies if you equip them with a small number of amulets. Especially the kind that Edgar has.”

I looked at the stately royal castle towering above the city, crowning the remains of an ancient volcano now forever extinct. Well, well, this was the second time I’d ended up in Edinburgh, and I still didn’t have time to visit its main tourist attraction…

“And what have you prepared this time?” I asked. There was an idea flickering on the edge of my consciousness, scratching away at it like Schrodinger’s Cat. Something very important.

“Funnily enough, I’ve actually prepared one of Merlin’s artifacts,” Edgar said. He had by now recovered from my un-gentlemanly blow. “It’s called Merlin’s Sleep.”

“Ah, yes, he was rather uninventive with his names for things,” I said with a nod. “‘Sleep’?”

“Just Sleep,” Edgar said, shrugging. “Arina was very upset about the high number of casualties the last time. This time it will all be very…civilized.”

“Ah, and there’s the first little spark of civilization,” I said, looking at the smoke rising from a taxi stopped in front of us. The driver had clearly fallen asleep as he took a curve, and his car had run up onto the sidewalk and crashed into an old building. But the most terrible thing was not the smoke coming from under the taxi’s hood, or even the motionless bodies inside it. The sidewalks were covered with the motionless bodies of locals and tourists-and one young woman had clearly been knocked aside by the taxi’s radiator and then crushed against the wall by its old-fashioned black box of a body. She was probably dying. The only thing I could be glad about was that she was dying in her sleep.

This was not the humane Morpheus spell that we learned in the Night Watch, the one that gave people several seconds before they lost consciousness. Merlin’s Sleep acted instantly. And it was very precisely localized: I could see the boundary line of the artifact’s influence. Two adults stepped inside it and fell to the ground, instantly overcome by sleep. But the seven-or eight-year-old boy who had been walking a few steps behind them was still awake, and now he was crying as he tugged his motionless parents from just over the zone. He had little prospect of help-those people who had not yet entered the zone of sleep were running away from it with remarkable alacrity. I could understand why. To someone who didn’t know the truth, it all looked like the effect of some highly poisonous gas. And somehow, the sight of this little boy trying to get his parents to their feet on the other side of the scattering crowd was almost as tragic as the sight of the young woman killed in the crash.

Edgar continued gazing fixedly at the smoking taxi after we had driven past it. That would probably have been a good moment to escape…if I had been intending to escape.

“Does that remind you of something?” I asked.

“Incidental casualties are inevitable,” Edgar said in a voice that had turned flat and hoarse. “I knew what I was getting into.”

“What a pity they didn’t,” I said. And I looked at Edgar through the Twilight.

This was bad, very bad. He was hung all over with amulets, dozens of charms had been applied to him, and there were spells trembling on the tips of his fingers, ready to dart off at any moment. He was positively glowing with Power waiting to be used. Arina and Gennady looked exactly the same. Even the vampire had not scorned the magical trinkets.

I wouldn’t be able to manage by using force.

We drove to the Dungeons in total silence, past sidewalks strewn with bodies and motionless vehicles (I saw three that were burning). We got out of the car.

On Princes Street, on the other side of the ravine, everything had stopped dead too, but I could already hear a siren howling somewhere. People always recover from a panic. Even if they don’t know what it is they’re up against.

“Let’s go,” said Edgar, pushing me gently in the back.

We set off down the stairs. I looked back for a moment at the stone crown of the castle above the roofs of the buildings.

Why, yes! Of course. You only had to think for a moment and put it all together. Merlin had been most magnanimous when he composed his little verse…

“What are you dawdling for?” Edgar shouted at me. His nerves were on edge, and no wonder. He was anticipating a meeting with the one he loved.

We walked past more motionless bodies. There were people and Others; Merlin’s Sleep didn’t differentiate between them. I noticed several sleeping Inquisitors. Behind the fake dividing walls everything was lit up brightly by the glow of auras. They had been waiting, and the ambush could not have been prepared any better.

Only, no one had known the full power of the artifact that had been used.

“You haven’t forgotten about the barrier on the third level, I suppose?” I asked.

“No,” said Arina.

I noticed that, as we walked along, first Edgar and then Arina left perfectly innocent-looking objects charged with magic on the floor and the walls: scraps of paper, sticks of chewing gum, bits of string. In one place Edgar rapidly sketched several strange symbols on the wall in red chalk-the chalk crumbling into dust as soon as he had traced out the final sign. In another place Arina smiled as she scattered a box of matches across the floor. The Last Watch was clearly afraid of being pursued.

Eventually we entered the room with the guillotine, which for some reason the Last Watch had chosen as its point of entry into the Twilight. This was probably the exact center of the vortex, the precise focus of Power.

And here, in addition to the two first-level magicians who were asleep, there was one person who was wide awake.

He was a young man, short and plump, wearing spectacles on his cultured-looking face. He looked very peaceful and nonaggressive in his jeans and bright-colored shirt. In the corner of the room I noticed a girl about ten years old, sleeping with her head resting on a bag that had been considerately placed underneath it. Had they decided to open the way through with the blood of a child, then?

“My daughter fell asleep,” the man said, correcting my mistaken assumption. “An extremely interesting device, I must say…” He took out a small sphere woven out of strips of metal from his pocket. “The lever shifted, and it won’t move back again.”

“That’s the way it should be,” said Edgar. “It won’t move back again for seventy-something years. So the device is useless to you; leave it here. Take this!”

He tossed a wad of money to the man, who caught it and casually ran his finger over the ends of the notes. But I noticed that he was keeping his left hand behind his back. Uh-oh…

“All correct,” the man said with a nod. “But I’m a little concerned about the scale of the event…and the devices that you employ. It seems to me that the deal was clearly made on unequal terms.”

“I told you this would happen,” Edgar said to Arina. He turned back to the man and asked, “What do you want? More money?”

The man shook his head.

“Take the money and your daughter, and go. That’s my advice to you,” said Arina.

The man licked his lips and then unbuttoned his shirt.

He turned out not to be fat at all. His torso was encased in something that looked like a back brace. Except that it had wires protruding from it.

“A kilogram of plastic explosive. The switch works on the ‘dead hand’ principle,” said the man, raising his left hand. “I’m going to take that sphere, all the strange trinkets that I found on these guys”-he prodded one of the sleeping Others with his foot-“and everything you have in your pockets. Is that clear?”

“As clear as day,” said Edgar. “I said right at the beginning that this would happen. I made the right choice with you.”

I suddenly noticed that Gennady was no longer there with us.

“And this resolves a certain number of moral difficulties,” Edgar continued, turning away.

The explosives belt suddenly flew into little pieces. It wasn’t an explosion; it looked like the work of a clawed hand moving with unnatural speed…out of the Twilight, for example. Totally confused, the man opened his left hand, and a small switch with an absurd little tail of wire fell out of it. He’d been telling the truth.

The next moment, the man screamed, and I chose to turn away.

“An exceptionally loathsome character,” said Edgar. “His threat was serious, even though the little girl is his own daughter. But now we have the blood we need, with none of the killing of innocent people that upsets Arina so much.”

“You’re no better than him,” I replied.

“I don’t pretend to be,” Edgar said with a shrug. “Let’s go. It’s not the first time we’ve entered the Twilight together, is it?”

Edgar even took hold of my hand. I didn’t protest. I found my own shadow on the floor and stepped into it. Through the gust of icy cold wind, into the frozen, hungry space of the Twilight…

The first level.

We moved on without delay. The second level. The space around us was seething, agitated either by the fresh blood or the hole that Merlin had made here in the fabric of creation.

Edgar and Arina were still beside me. Intensely focused. A moment later Gennady also appeared, with blood on his lips. On the second level I could barely recognize Saushkin senior, his face was so badly distorted by hideous malice and insane hatred.

The third level. The final eddies of the vortex of Power that had been blocking our way so recently were still raging here.

Edgar started looking around and said, “Someone’s following us…one of the signs has been activated.”

“Successfully?” A cloud of steam escaped from between Arina’s lips as she asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go lower!”

The fourth level greeted us with its pink sky and colored sand. I pulled my hand out of Edgar’s grasp and said, “We agreed! I won’t join the fight against the golem!”

“And nobody’s forcing you to,” Edgar said with a toothy grimace. “Don’t worry, you can keep out of it. Forward!”

This was the point at which I had planned to start an argument. To drag things out and then run for it, or even stay on the fourth level and send the Last Watch on to a pointless battle against the monster.

But something seemed to urge me on. Something like the insane obsession that had possessed Arina, Edgar, and Gennady seemed to take possession of me, too. I had to go down to the fifth level…I had to!

If only to distract them from their vigilance…

“All right, but I don’t intend to lay down my life for your sake!” I shouted, and stepped down to the fifth level under Edgar’s watchful eye.

They appeared beside me almost instantly. Yes, they had certainly pumped themselves full of Power. Gennady was the only one who was slightly delayed. He had obviously got through at the second attempt.

And this level of the Twilight was so much nicer than the ones above it! Cool, even chilly, but already without that icy wind that sucked the life out of you. And the colors here looked almost natural…

I looked around, trying to spot the golem, and I saw it about two hundred meters away: There were two snake’s heads sticking up out of the grass, turning this way and that like submarine periscopes. Then the golem spotted us. The heads shuddered and reached up higher. There was a loud hissing sound-very much like a real snake’s hiss, except that it was coming from such a long distance away…

A moment later the snake was already slipping toward us, managing to keep both of its heads above the grass at the same time.

“‘Head and tail,’” Arina said pensively. “I don’t know, I don’t know…Edgar, release Kong.”

I understood what she meant when I saw Edgar take a small jade figurine out of his pocket. It was a long-armed monkey with short, pointed horns protruding from its head. The Inquisitor breathed on the figurine and then unscrewed its head-the figurine turned out to be hollow-and carefully set it down in the grass. We barely had time to jump back before the vessel started giving out green smoke that coiled into the form of a monster.

The deva that had hunted Alisher in Samarkand was nothing like King Kong. He didn’t have the height for that, since he only stood about three meters at the withers. But the toothy, gaping jaw, muscular limbs with sharp claws, coarse dark-green fur, and brutish, flaming-orange eyes impressed me far more than the sentimental giant from the old movies.

And the movie King Kong probably never had such a repulsive, acrid smell, either. How can a golem stink when it consists of concentrated Power, not flesh, or even clay, and it has been stored in a magical vessel? I didn’t know. Maybe it was an accidental side effect. Or maybe it was a joke played by the monster’s creator?

“Go and kill it!” Edgar shouted, pointing to the snake. Kong roared and went dashing toward the snake in huge bounds. The snake slithered toward him, not at all frightened by his sudden appearance, even seeming to liven up at the prospect of a worthy opponent. The earth shuddered under their feet and coils, the monkey’s thunderous roar and the snake’s deafening hiss fusing together into a single mighty rumble.

Now was the time! While they were entranced by the prospect of the forthcoming battle.

I turned around-and froze. Standing behind me was a short old man with a beard, dressed in white. At some moments he looked absolutely real, I could count every last hair in the gray beard and gaze into the weary face furrowed with wrinkles; at others he became a hazy white shadow through which I could see the grass and the sky.

The old man slowly pointed to the ground at his feet. Then he repeated the gesture.

Did he want me to go down to the sixth level?

I mimicked the gesture and jabbed my hand downward. The old man nodded, and an expression of relief appeared on his face.

He began melting away into the air.

There was no time to hesitate. At any moment one of the Last Watch might turn around and realize that I was preparing to make my escape.

The Power is within me! I can go down to the sixth level.

The Power is within me! I can see it always.

I must do this! Therefore I will do it.

I felt a blast of icy wind.

As I stepped through the barrier I heard Arina’s voice. “Somebody really is-”

The voice fell silent, cut off at the border of the sixth level. At the border that protected the world of Others who had withdrawn.

“Thank you for coming,” the old man said. And he smiled.

Before I answered, I looked around me.

Daytime. A blue sky with white fluffy clouds and a sun. A meadow of green grass, birds twittering in the trees.

An ancient, gray-haired old man standing in front of me. His clothes had probably never been white-the coarse, grayish sackcloth had only appeared to be white at first glance. And he was barefoot, too…but the cumulative effect was not one of a pastoral, sentimental closeness to nature. He was simply a man who went barefoot, who didn’t think it was worth wasting time on making shoes.

“I greet you, Great One,” I said, bowing my head. “It is an honor for me…to see the Great Merlin.”

The old man looked into my face curiously. As if this wasn’t the first time he had seen me, but he’d never had a chance to look at me properly before.

“An honor? How much do you know of my life, Light One?”

“I know about some things,” I said with a shrug. “I know about the ship with the little children.”

“And even so it is ‘an honor’?”

“It seems to me that you have already paid for many things. And in addition, for millions of people you are a wise defender of good and justice. That also counts for something.”

“There were only nine of them…,” Merlin muttered. “Legends-they always exaggerate. The bad things, and the good things…”

“But they did exist.”

“They did,” Merlin confirmed. “Why do you think that I have already paid? Do you not like the heaven that awaits Others after death?”

Instead of answering I bent down and plucked a stalk of grass. I put it in my mouth and bit it. The juice was bitter…only not quite bitter enough. I squinted and looked at the sun. It was shining in the sky, but its light was not blinding. I clapped my hands-the sound was very slightly muted. I breathed in, filling my lungs with air-the air was fresh…and yet there was something lacking in it. It left a slight musty odor, like the one in Saushkin’s apartment…

“Everything here is not quite genuine,” I said. “It lacks life.”

“Well done,” said Merlin, nodding. “Many do not notice that straightaway. Many live here for years, or centuries, before they realize that they have been deceived.”

“Can’t you get used to it?” I asked.

Merlin smiled. “No. It is impossible to get used to this.”

“Remember the joke about the fake Christmas tree decorations, Anton?” someone asked from behind me. I looked around.

Tiger Cub was standing just five steps away.

There were many of them. Very many of them, standing there and listening to my conversation with Merlin. Igor Teplov and Alisa Donnikova-they were together, holding each other by the hand, but there was no happiness in their faces. The girl werewolf Galya was hiding her eyes. Murat from the Samarkand Watch gave me an embarrassed wave. A Dark One I had once killed by throwing him off the Ostankino Television Tower looked at me with no malice or resentment in his eyes.

There were so many. The trees prevented me from seeing just how many of them were standing there. If not for the forest, the Others would have stretched all the way back to the horizon. They had let the ones I had known come through to the front.

“Yes, Tiger Cub, I remember,” I said.

I didn’t feel any more fear or anger. Only sadness-a calm, weary sadness.

“They look so real,” Tiger Cub said and smiled. “But they bring no joy at all…”

“You’re looking good,” I muttered, for the sake of saying something at least.

Tiger Cub pensively examined her tiger-skin cape. She nodded. “I made an effort. For the sake of this meeting.”

“Hi, Igor!” I said. “Hi, Alisa!”

They nodded. Then Alisa said, “Good for you, Anton. You’re powerful. But don’t get too bigheaded, Light One! Merlin himself has been helping you.”

I looked around at the old man.

“Sometimes,” Merlin admitted tactfully. “Well…besides that outlandish tower escapade of yours. And then when you were fighting that werewolf in the forest…And only just a little bit…”

I wasn’t listening to him any longer. I was gazing around, trying to find the one whose words were most important of all to me.

Kostya pushed aside the Other he had been standing behind and came forward toward me. Of everyone there, he probably looked the best and the most absurd at the same time: He was wearing a tattered space suit that had once been white, but was now blackened and burned through in several places.

“Hello, neighbor,” he said.

“Hi, Kostya,” I replied. “I…I’ve been wanting to say something to you for a long time: Forgive me.”

He frowned. “Will you drop those Light affectations of yours…What is there to forgive?…We fought honestly, and you won honestly. Everything’s fine. I ought to have realized that you weren’t erecting the Shield because you were afraid…”

“Even so,” I said. “You know that I hate my job. I’ve turned into a small screw…a tiny part of a machine that gives no quarter and shows no mercy!”

“And how else could it be, between us?” Kostya suddenly smiled. “Drop that…And you…forgive my father. If you can. He never used to be like that.”

I nodded. “I’ll try. I really will.”

“Tell him that Mom and I are waiting for him.” Kostya paused and then added firmly, “Here.”

“I’ll tell him,” I promised, trying to spot Polina in the crowd.

Kostya suddenly took a step forward, shook my hand awkwardly-and stepped away again.

And in that brief instant when our hands touched, I felt his cold hand turn warm, saw his skin flush pink and his eyes gleam once again. Kostya stood there swaying, looking at his hand.

But my hand was seared by an icy chill…

The ranks of Others shuddered. Slowly, involuntarily, they began moving toward me. There was hunger and envy in their eyes-in all of their eyes, even Tiger Cub’s, even Igor’s. Even Murat’s…

“Stop!” Merlin shouted. He darted forward and stood between me and the withdrawn Others, raising his hands high in the air. I noticed that he carefully skirted around me to avoid touching me.

“Stop, you mad fools! A few minutes of life…that is not what we want, not what we have been waiting for!”

They stopped and looked at one another with embarrassment. Then they moved back. But the hungry fire was still blazing in their eyes.

“Leave now, Anton,” Merlin said. “You understand everything and you know what you have to do. Go!”

“I can’t get through. The Last Watch is up there,” I said. “Unless your golem has stopped them…”

Merlin looked straight through me at something. Then he sighed. “The golem is dead. Both golems are dead. A pity, I used to go up to the fifth level sometimes and play with the snake. But it was sad and lonely too.”

“Can you take me through?” I asked.

Merlin shook his head. “Not many of us are capable of going up to the fifth level. Only a very few can reach the first level, and even so we are powerless there.”

“I won’t be able to get past them,” I said. “And I can’t go straight forward to the seventh level either.”

We smiled at each other.

“You will be helped,” Merlin said. “Only, do everything right, I beg of you.”

I nodded.

I didn’t know if it would work. All I could do was try.

The next moment the air around me started to vibrate as if something seething with a huge excess of Power had broken through the Twilight. What levels, what distances? What did these mean in the face of this Power resonating in awareness of its own self?

Little Nadya stepped down onto the grass. She waved her arms about but couldn’t keep her balance and plopped down onto her bottom, looking up at me.

“Get up,” I said strictly. “It’s damp!”

Nadya jumped to her feet, dusted off her velvet jumpsuit, and jabbered, “Mommy taught me how to walk into the shadow! That’s one! And there was a monkey and a snake fighting, and they both beat each other. That’s two! Two men and a woman were watching the snake and saying very bad words. That’s three! And Mommy told me to bring you straight back home for supper! That’s four!”

She gulped when she saw the huge crowd around her, then lowered her eyes in embarrassment and said in a polite little girl’s voice, “Hello…”

“Hello,” said Merlin, squatting down in front of her. “Are you Nadezhda?”

“Yes,” Nadya said proudly.

“I’m glad I’ve seen you,” said Merlin. “Take your daddy home. Only not straight home. First go back to the sleeping people. And then home.”

“Backward means forward?” Nadya asked.

“That’s right.”

“You look like a wizard from a cartoon,” Nadya said suspiciously. Just to be on the safe side, she took hold of my hand, and that clearly made her feel more confident.

“I used to be a wizard,” Merlin confessed.

“A good one or a bad one?”

“All kinds,” he said with a sad smile. “Go now, Nadezhda.”

Nadya cast a wary look at Merlin and asked me, “Shall we go, Daddy?”

“Yes, let’s go,” I said.

I turned around and nodded to Merlin, who was watching us silently, in sad anticipation. The first to raise her hand and wave good-bye was Tiger Cub. Then Alisa. And then they were all waving to us…waving good-bye forever.

And when my daughter, the newly initiated Absolute Enchantress, took a step forward, I stepped after her, holding her hand in order not to lose my way in the swirling vortex of Power that had completed its circle and was returning us to our world.

Because the Twilight, of course, has no end, just as no ring or circle has an end.

Because the warmth of human love and the cold of human hate, the running of beasts and the singing of birds, the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings and the sprouting of a grain through the earth do not pass away, leaving no trace. Because the universal stream of living Power out of which parasites like the blue moss and the Others greedily snatch their crumbs does not disappear without a trace-it returns to the world that is awaiting rebirth.

Because we all live on the seventh level of the Twilight.