After a long speech like that, nobody in the car said anything for a minute, Semyon had presented the facts of his stormy biography so eloquently.
Ilya was the first to gather his wits.
“Why didn’t you use your rain in the taiga?”
“What a comparison,” Semyon snorted. “A collector’s item from nineteen thirteen and a standard spring cloudburst collected in Moscow. It smelled of gasoline, would you believe!”
“I believe it.”
“Well, there you are. There’s a time and place for everything. The evening I just recalled was pleasant enough, but not really outstanding. Just about right for your old jalopy.”
Svetlana laughed quietly. The faint air of tension in the car was dispelled.
The Night Watch had been working feverishly all week long. Not that there’d been anything unusual happening in Moscow; it was just routine. The city was in the grip of a heat wave unprecedented for June, and reports of incidents had dropped to an all-time low. Neither the Light Ones nor the Dark Ones were enjoying it too much.
Our analysts spent about twenty-four hours working on the theory that the unexpectedly hot weather had been caused by some move the Dark Ones were planning. No doubt at the same time the Day Watch was investigating whether the Light Magicians had interfered with the climate. When both sides became convinced the anomalous weather was due to natural causes, they were left with absolutely nothing to do.
The Dark Ones had turned as quiet as flies pinned down by rain. Despite all the doctors’ forecasts, the number of accidents and natural deaths across the city fell. The Light Ones didn’t feel much like working either; the magicians quarreled over unimportant trivia; it took half the day to get the simplest documents out of the archives; and when the analysts were asked to forecast the weather they replied spitefully with some eighteenth-century gibberish like: “The water is dark in the clouds.” Boris Ignatievich wandered around the office in a total stupor: Even with his oriental origins and rich experience of the East, he was floored by the heat, Moscow style. The previous morning, on Thursday, he’d called all the staff together, appointed two volunteers from the Watch to assist him and told everyone else to clear out of the city. To go anywhere, to the Maldives or Greece if they wanted, down to the devil’s kitchen in hell if they liked—even that would be more comfortable. Or just to a summerhouse outside town. We were told not to show up in the office again until lunchtime on Monday.
The boss waited for exactly a minute, until the happy smiles had spread across all the faces there, then added that it would be only fair to earn this unexpected bounty with a burst of intensive work. That way we wouldn’t end up feeling ashamed of wasting away the days. The title of the old literary classic was true, he said—“Monday starts on Saturday.” So having been granted three extra days of vacation, we had to get through all the routine work in the time we had left.
And that’s what we’d been doing—getting through it, some of us almost until the morning. We’d checked on the Dark Ones who were still in town and under special observation: vampires, werewolves, incubuses and succubuses, active witches, all sorts of troublesome riffraff from the lower levels. Everything was in order. What the vampires wanted right now wasn’t hot blood but cold beer. Instead of trying to cast bad spells on their neighbors, the witches were all trying to summon up a little rain over Moscow.
But now we were on our way to relax. Not as far as the Maldives, of course—the boss had been too optimistic about the finance office’s generosity. But even two or three days out of town would be great. We felt sorry for the poor volunteers who’d stayed behind in the capital to keep watch with the boss.
“I’ve got to call home,” said Yulia. She’d really livened up after Semyon swapped the damp heat in the car for cool sea air. “Sveta, lend me your cell.”
I was enjoying the coolness too. I glanced into the cars we were overtaking: in most of them the windows were rolled down, and the people glared at us with envy, assuming, of course, our ancient automobile had a powerful air-conditioning system.
“The turn’s coming up soon,” I said to Ilya.
“I remember. I drove here once before.”
“Quiet!” Yulia hissed fiercely, and started jabbering into the cell phone. “Mom, it’s me! Yes, I’m here already. Of course, it’s great! There’s a lake here. No, it’s shallow. Mom, I can’t talk for long, Sveta’s dad lent me his cell. No, there’s no one else. Sveta? Just a moment.”
Svetlana sighed and took the phone from the young girl. She gave me a dark look and I tried to put on a serious expression.
“Hello, aunty Natasha,” Svetlana said in a squeaky child’s voice. “Yes, very pleased. Yes. No, with the grown-ups. Mom’s a long way off, shall I call her? Okay, I’ll tell her. Definitely. Goodbye.”
She switched off the phone and spoke into empty space:
“So tell me, my girl, what’s going to happen when your mom asks the real Sveta how the vacation went?”
“Sveta will tell her we had a great time.”
Svetlana sighed and glanced at Semyon as if she were looking for support.
“Using magical powers for personal goals leads to unexpected consequences,” Semyon declared in a dry, official voice. “I remember one time . . .”
“What magical powers?” Yulia asked, genuinely surprised. “I told my friend Sveta I was going off for a party with some guys and asked her to cover for me. She was staggered, but of course she agreed.”
Ilya giggled in the driving seat.
“What would I want with a party like that?” Yulia asked indignantly, clearly not understanding what was so funny. “That’s the way the human kids amuse themselves. So what are you laughing at?”
For every member of our Watch, work takes up the greater part of our lives. Not because we’re wild workaholics—who in his right mind wouldn’t rather relax than work? And not because the work is so very interesting—we spend most of our time on boring patrol duty or polishing the seats of our pants in our offices. It’s simply that there aren’t enough of us. It’s much easier to keep the Day Watch up to strength; any Dark One is only too keen for a chance to wield power. But our situation’s quite different.
Outside work, though, every one of us has his own little piece of life that we won’t give up to anyone: not to the Light and not to the Darkness. It’s all ours . . . A little piece of life that we don’t hide, but we don’t put it out on display either. What’s left of our original, basic human nature.
Some travel every time they get a chance. Ilya, for instance, prefers standard tour packages, but Semyon likes basic hitchhiking. He once traveled from Moscow to Vladivostok without a single kopeck in record time, but he didn’t register his achievement with the League of Free Travelers, because he used his magical powers twice on the way.
For Ignat—and he’s not the only one—vacation always means sexual adventures. It’s a stage almost everyone goes through, because life offers Others far more opportunities than it does to human beings. It’s a well-known fact that people feel a powerful attraction to Others, even though they may not realize it.
There are plenty of collectors among us too. From modest collectors of penknives, key rings, stamps, and cigarette lighters to collectors of weather, smells, auras, and spells. I used to collect model automobiles, paying really big money on rare models that only had any value for a few thousand idiots. I dumped the entire collection into two cardboard boxes ages ago. I ought to take them out in the yard and tip them into the sandbox for the little kids to enjoy.
The number of hunters and fishermen is pretty high. Igor and Garik enjoy extreme parachute jumping. Our useless programmer Galya, a sweet girl, grows bonsai trees. I guess we cover pretty much the entire range of amusements that the human race has invented.
But what Tiger Cub did for amusement, I had no idea, although we were on our way to her place. I was almost as eager to find out as I had been to escape the scorching heat in town. When you spend a bit o
f time at someone’s place, it doesn’t take too long to find out what their special little quirk is.
“Are we almost there yet?” Yulia asked in a whining voice. We’d already turned off the main highway and traveled about five kilometers along a dirt road, past a little summerhouse settlement and over a little river.
“Yes, we’re almost there,” I answered, checking the image of the route that Tiger Cub had left us.
“In fact, we are there already,” said Ilya, swerving the car off the road, straight at the trees. Yulia gasped out loud and covered her face with her hands. Svetlana reacted more calmly, but even she put her hands out, expecting a crash.
The car hurtled through the thick bushes and over the fallen branches, and crashed into the solid wall of trees. But, of course, there was no impact. We leapt straight through the magical mirage and landed upon a well-surfaced road. Straight ahead there was a little lake glinting like a bright mirror in the sun, with a two-story brick house standing by the shore, surrounded by a tall fence.
“What always amazes me about shape-shifters,” said Svetlana, “is how devoted they are to secrecy. Not only does she hide behind a mirage, she has a fence too.”
“Tiger Cub’s not a shape-shifter!” young Yulia objected. “She’s a transformer magician.”
“That’s the same thing,” Sveta said gently.
Yulia looked at Semyon, clearly expecting him to back her up.
“In essential terms, Sveta’s right. Highly specialized combat magicians are like any other shape-shifters. But with a plus sign instead of a minus. If Tiger Cub had been in a slightly different mood when she first entered the Twilight, she’d have turned into a Dark shape-shifter. There are very few people whose path is completely determined in advance. There’s usually a struggle during the preparation for initiation.”
“And how did it go with me?” asked Yulia.
“I’ve told you before,” Semyon growled. “It was pretty easy.”
“A mild remoralization of your teachers and parents,” Ilya said with a laugh as he stopped the car in front of the gates. “And the little girl was immediately filled with love and kindness for the whole world.”
“Ilya!” Semyon said sharply. He was Yulia’s mentor, a rather lazy mentor who almost never got involved in the young sorceress’s development, but he obviously didn’t like Ilya’s wisecracks.
Yulia was a talented young girl, and the Watch had high hopes for her. But not so high that she had to be driven through the tortuous labyrinth of moral logic at the same speed as Svetlana, a future Great Sorceress.
Sveta and I must have had the same thought at the same time—we looked at each other. And after we looked, we turned our eyes away.
We could feel an invisible pressure bearing down on us, forcing us apart. I’d be a grade-three magician forever. Any moment now Sveta would outgrow me, and in a short while—a very short while, because the Watch’s management thought it necessary—she would become a sorceress beyond classification.
And then all we’d have left would be friendly handshakes when we met and an exchange of greeting cards for birthdays and Christmas.
“Are they asleep in there, or what?” Ilya asked indignantly. His mind wasn’t distracted by the kind of problems we had. He stuck his head out the window, and the car immediately filled up with hot air, but at least it was clean. He waved his hand, staring into the TV camera attached to the gates. He sounded his horn.
The gates started opening slowly.
“That’s a bit better,” the magician snorted as he drove the car into the yard.
It was a large plot of land, thickly planted with trees. The amazing thing was that they’d managed to build the house without damaging the giant pines and firs. Apart from a small flowerbed beside a little fountain that wasn’t working, there were no other signs of cultivation. There were five cars already standing on the concrete apron in front of the house. I recognized the old Niva that Danila used out of a stubborn sense of patriotism, and Olga’s sports model—how had she managed to drive over the dirt road in that? Standing between them was the battered station wagon that Tolik drove about in and two other cars I’d seen at the office, but I didn’t know whose they were.
“They didn’t bother to wait for us,” Ilya said indignantly. “They’re already partying, getting it on while the best people in the Watch are still bouncing over the country roads.”
He switched off the motor and Yulia immediately screeched in delight:
“Tiger Cub!”
She scrambled straight over me, opened the door, and jumped out of the car.
Semyon swore and followed her out, moving incredibly fast. Just in time.
I don’t know where those dogs had been hiding. In any case, they were still camouflaged until the moment Yulia got out of the car. But the moment her feet touched the ground, the light-brown shadows closed in on her from all sides.
The young girl shrieked. She was more than powerful enough to deal with a pack of wolves, never mind five or six dogs, but she’d never actually been in a genuine fight, and she lost her head. To be quite honest, even I hadn’t been expecting an attack—not here. And especially not this kind. Dogs never attack Others. They’re afraid of the Dark Ones. They like the Light Ones. You have to train an animal really long and hard in order to suppress its natural fear of a walking source of magic.
Svetlana, Ilya, and I scrambled out of the car. But Semyon beat us all to the punch. He grabbed hold of the girl with one hand and made a pass in the air with the other. I thought he would use fright magic, or withdraw into the twilight, or reduce the dogs to dust on the spot. A reflex response usually relies on the simplest spells.
But Semyon used the temporal freeze. He caught two of the dogs in the air: Their bodies were left hanging there, enveloped in a blue glow, with their narrow, snarling muzzles reaching forward, the drops of saliva falling from their fangs like gleaming blue hail.
The three dogs who’d been frozen on the ground weren’t quite so impressive.
Tiger Cub came running over to us. Her face was white and her eyes were wide open. She looked at Yulia for a moment. The girl was still whining, but she was getting quieter, through sheer inertia.
“Everyone okay?” she asked eventually.
“Fortunately,” mumbled Ilya, lowering his wand. “What kind of animals are you keeping here?”
“They wouldn’t have done anything,” Tiger Cub said guiltily.
“Oh yeah?” Semyon took Yulia out from under his arm and set her down on the ground. He ran one finger thoughtfully over the bared fang of a dog hanging in mid-air. The film of the time freeze was springy and elastic under his hand.
“I swear!” said Tiger Cub, pressing her hand to her heart. “Guys, Sveta, Yulia, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance to stop them. The dogs are trained to knock strangers down and restrain them.”
“Even Others?”
“Yes.”
“Even Light Ones?” There was a note of dubious admiration in Semyon’s voice.
Tiger Cub dropped her eyes and nodded.
Yulia went over, snuggled up to her, and said in a more or less calm voice:
“I wasn’t frightened. Just taken by surprise, that’s all.”
“It’s a good thing I was slow to react too,” Ilya commented gloomily, putting his weapon away. “Roast dog’s too exotic a dish for me. But your dogs know me, Tiger Cub!”
“They wouldn’t have touched you.”
The tension slowly eased. Of course, nothing too serious would have happened; we know how to heal each other, but it would have put a damper on the picnic.
“I’m sorry,” Tiger Cub repeated. She looked at us all imploringly.
“But listen, why do you need all this?” asked Sveta, with a glance at the dogs. “Can you explain that to me? Your powers are strong enough to beat off a platoon of Green Berets. What do you need Rottweilers for?”
“They’re not Rottweilers; they’re Staffordshire bull terriers.??
?
“What difference does that make?”
“They caught a burglar once. I’m only here two days a week, I can’t go back and forth to town all the time.”
The explanation wasn’t all that convincing. A simple frightening spell would have kept any normal people from coming anywhere near the place. But no one got a chance to say it—Tiger Cub got in first:
“It’s just the way I am, okay.”
“How long are the dogs going to stay hanging there like that?” asked Yulia, snuggling up against Tiger Cub again. “I want to make friends with them. Otherwise I’ll be left with a latent psychological complex that’s bound to have an effect on my personality and my sexual preferences.”
Semyon snorted. Yulia’s crack had finally defused the conflict—but it was anybody’s guess how spontaneous or how calculated it had been.
“They’ll start moving again before the evening. Well, hostess, are you going to invite us in?”
We left the dogs hanging and standing around the car and walked toward the house.
“What a great place you have, Tiger Cub!” said Yulia. She was ignoring the rest of us completely now, clinging to the young woman. As if the sorceress were her idol and she could be forgiven for anything, even over-vigilant guard dogs.
Why is it that the powers we can’t develop are always the ones that obsess us?
Yulia’s a magnificent analytical sorceress. She can untangle the threads of reality and reveal the concealed magical causes of events that seem ordinary. She’s really smart, and everyone in the department loves her, not just as a cute little girl, but as a comrade-in-arms, a valued and sometimes quite irreplaceable colleague. But her idol is Tiger Cub, a shape-shifting sorceress, a combat magician. Why couldn’t she decide to imitate good-hearted old Polina Vasilievna, who worked in the analytical department half-time, or fall in love with the head of the department, the impressive, middle-aged lady-killer Edik.
But no, she’d chosen Tiger Cub as her idol.
I started whistling a tune, as I walked along at the back of the procession. I caught Svetlana’s eye and gave her a quick nod. Everything was fine. We had whole days of doing nothing ahead of us. No Dark Ones or Light Ones, no intrigues and plots, no confrontations. Just swimming in the lake, sunbathing, eating kebabs from the barbecue, and washing them down with red wine. And in the evening—the bathhouse. A big house like this had to have a good bathhouse. And then Semyon and I could take a couple of bottles of vodka and a jar of pickled mushrooms, get as far away as possible from the rest of the crowd, and drink ourselves stupid, gazing up at the stars and making philosophical conversation.