The Last Watch:

  The artefacts in my bag were far more valuable than the money lying beside them. And they had been prepared by Gesar in person … well, perhaps not prepared, but at least selected from the special stores in the armoury. I could be sure that they were powerful, and that they would be useful. I suddenly remembered an old Australian cartoon film that I had seen when I was a kid, Around the World in Eighty Days. In that cartoon, the cool-headed English gentleman Phileas Fogg, who was attempting to set a new speed record for travelling round the world, seemed like a cunning fortune-teller who always knew what he would need in the hours ahead. If he took a spanner, a stuffed opossum and a bunch of bananas with him in the morning, then by the time evening came the stuffed animal had plugged a leak in the side of a ship, the spanner had braced shut a door that his enemies were trying to break down, and the bananas had been given to a monkey in exchange for a ticket on a steamship. All in all, it was very much like a computer game in the same genre as Quest, where you have to find an effective use for every item that you collect.

  Artefacts from Gesar could be used for their designated purpose or in some entirely unexpected way. But whatever happened, some use was usually found for them.

  I laid the twelve items out on the seat between myself and the snoring Afandi and studied them carefully. I should have done this earlier, but I hadn’t taken them out at home because I hadn’t wanted to attract Nadya’s attention. I hadn’t felt like fiddling with magical artefacts in the plane either, and after that there simply hadn’t been time. Wouldn’t it be annoying if I found one of the amulets was a weapon against golems!

  Two portable battle wands, each no longer than ten centimetres. The first made out of ebony – fire. The second made out of a walrus tusk – ice. Well, they were both commonplace and useful. I’d managed without them so far, but anything could happen.

  Four silver rings with protective spells. That was a very strange set! The standard magician’s Shield protected against everything: you just had to feed it with energy. An Other didn’t often need protective rings. And here I had specific protection against fire, ice, acid … and vacuum. At first I couldn’t believe what I’d seen through the Twilight. I studied the last ring carefully. No, I was right! If the pressure suddenly dropped, the ring started to work and held the air around the person wearing it.

  That was strange. Of course, there were several battle spells that suffocated the enemy, some by removing the air from around him. The things that had been thought up in thousands of years of warfare! But nobody actually used these whimsical and slow spells in battle.

  Four bracelets. At least it was quite clear what they were for! Four different spells that forced a man or an Other to tell the truth. If Rustam got really stubborn, all I had to do was say ‘Tell me the truth’ and the ancient magician would be struck with a blow of absolutely monstrous power. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  The last two amulets were rather less ordinary, both in appearance and content, and had quite clearly been prepared by Gesar himself for this mission of ours. The first was a cellphone SIM card in a little plastic box. An ordinary card, but pumped full of magic. I studied it for a while, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then I decided to experiment – I took my own card out of my phone and put the one charged with magic in its place.

  It didn’t make any sense! It was a copy of my own SIM card! But what for? So I wouldn’t have to waste money on calls to Moscow? What raving nonsense …

  I thought for a while and then asked Alisher to call my number. Strangely enough, the phone still worked there.

  My phone rang immediately. Everything was okay, it really was a copy of my SIM, but it had been treated with magic for some reason … I shrugged and decided to leave the card in my phone. Maybe it coded the calls in some cunning magical way? But I’d never heard of any magic like that before.

  The final amulet was a small stone rolled smooth by the sea. It had a hole in it, so it was one of those so-called ‘chicken gods’ that human superstition believes bring good luck. A cunningly woven silver chain that looked like a thick twisted thread ran through the hole.

  In itself, of course, a ‘chicken god’ doesn’t bring any good luck, but that doesn’t stop children searching enthusiastically for them on the seashore and then wearing them on a string round their necks. This stone, however, had been enchanted with a complex spell that partially resembled the Dominant. Was that for the conversation with Rustam too? I thought about it for a while and then hung the chain round my neck. It couldn’t do any harm …

  All I still had to do was distribute the rings and the wands. I didn’t think about that for too long, either. I nudged Afandi awake and asked him to put on the rings. He exclaimed ‘Ah!’ in delight, put the rings on his left hand, admired them – and nodded off again.

  I gave the wands to Alisher, and he put them in the breast pocket of his shirt without saying a word. They stuck out like Parker or Mont Blanc ballpoint pens, no less elegant and almost as deadly. Almost – because a single stroke of a boss’s pen could kill more people than those battle wands could.

  ‘I’ll get some sleep,’ I told Alisher.

  He didn’t say anything for a while. The jeep was slowly making its way up the rocky track, which had been climbed by donkeys far more often than by anything on four wheels. The beams of the headlights swung from side to side, alternately picking out a steep rocky cliff and a sheer drop with a river roaring at the bottom.

  ‘Sleep,’ said Alisher. ‘But take a look at the probability lines first. This road’s really bad.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even call it a road,’ I said. I closed my eyes and looked into the Twilight. Into the immediate future, where the sinuous interwoven lines of probability led.

  I didn’t like the picture that I saw. There were too many lines that broke off abruptly and ended at the bottom of the ravine.

  ‘Alisher, stop. You’re too exhausted to drive through the mountains in the dark. Let’s wait until morning.’

  Alisher shook his head stubbornly.

  ‘No – I can sense that we have to hurry.’

  I could sense that too, so I didn’t argue.

  ‘Shall I drive?’ I suggested.

  ‘I don’t think you’re any wider awake than I am, Anton. Give me a blast, will you?’

  I sighed. I don’t like using magic to drive away sleep and tiredness, to sharpen the senses. Not because of the negative consequences: there aren’t any – get a good sleep afterwards and you’re fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is that very soon you stop relying on your usual senses and start using a constant feed of magical energy, walking around hyped up all the time, like a manic-depressive in the manic phase. Everything you do goes well, and you’re a welcome guest in any company, a bright spark, a jester. But sooner or later you get used to it, you want to be even livelier, even wittier, have even more energy. You increase the flow of Power stimulating your nerves. And so it goes on, until you discover that you’re spending all the Power that you are capable of processing on maintaining an artificial level of vivacity. And you are simply afraid to stop.

  Addiction to magic is no different from ordinary drug addiction. Except that only Others suffer from it.

  ‘Give me a blast,’ Alisher asked me again. He stopped the car, put on the handbrake, threw his head back and closed his eyes.

  I put one hand on his face and the other on the top of his short-cropped head and concentrated. I imagined the stream of power moving through my body and starting to seep out through my palms, soaking into Alisher’s head, running along his nerves like cold fire, sparking across the synapses, jolting every neuron … No special spells were needed: I was working with pure Power. The most important thing here was a clear understanding of the physiological process.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Alisher said in a fresher-sounding voice. ‘That feels really good. I’d just like a bite to eat.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ I leaned back over the seat and reached into
the trunk. My instincts had not misled me: there were two boxes of plastic bottles containing cola and several boxes of chocolate bars. ‘Will you have some cola?’

  ‘What?’ Alisher exclaimed. ‘Cola? Sure! And I’ll have some of those chocolate bars too! God bless America!’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit too much adulation just for inventing a sickly-sweet lemonade substitute and some highly calorific candy?’

  Instead of answering, Alisher pressed a button on the in-vehicle music centre. A second later the speakers started playing a rhythmic sequence of chords.

  ‘It’s for the rock and roll too,’ he said imperturbably.

  We sat there for a while, eating chocolate bars and washing them down with cola. All Others have a sweet tooth. Still snoring, Afandi smacked his lips and reached out his fingers that were decorated with the rings. I put a chocolate bar in his hand. Afandi munched it without waking up and carried on snoring.

  ‘We’ll be there at three o’clock,’ Alisher told me. ‘Are we going to wait until morning?’

  ‘The night is our time,’ I replied. ‘We’ll wake old man Rustam up. He doesn’t work very hard anyway.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ said Alisher. ‘Odd. Does he live there like a hermit, in a cave?’

  ‘Why do you think that …’ I started to ask. Then I pondered for a moment. ‘Maybe he grazes goats or sheep. Or he keeps bees up in the mountains. Or he has a weather station.’

  ‘Or an observatory for watching the stars … What was that strange ring you put on Afandi’s hand?’

  ‘You mean the one with the ruby? Protection against a vacuum.’

  ‘Very exotic,’ said Alisher, sucking on his plastic bottle. ‘I can’t remember a case of an Other being killed in a vacuum.’

  ‘I can.’

  Alisher said nothing for a few seconds. Then he nodded and said: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Does it still bother you?’

  ‘We were friends … almost. As far as a Light One and a Dark One can be.’

  ‘Not just a Dark One. Kostya was a vampire.’

  ‘He never killed anyone,’ I said simply. ‘And it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t grow up as a human being. Gennady made him a vampire.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘His father.’

  ‘What a bastard.’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to judge. The boy wasn’t even a year old when he ended up in hospital. Double pneumonia and allergies to antibiotics. Basically, the parents were told that their son wouldn’t survive. You know, there are some wonderful doctors who shouldn’t even be allowed to practise as vets, for the poor cows’ sake … “Your little boy’s going to die, prepare yourselves for that. You’re still young, you can have another child …” Of course, they didn’t have another. Kostya was Gennady’s posthumous child. After initiation vampires retain the ability to impregnate and conceive for quite a long time – it’s one of nature’s strange jokes. But they can only have one child. After that the vampire becomes sterile.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I heard,’ Alisher said, nodding.

  ‘So Gennady had a talk with his wife … She was a human being. She knew her husband was a vampire … there are families like that. But he hadn’t killed anyone, he was a very law-abiding vampire, she loved him … Anyway, he bit her. Initiated her. Their plan was for the mother to initiate the son. But she was still metamorphosing, and the baby started dying. Gennady bit him too, and Kostya got well. That is, he died, of course. Died as a human being. But he recovered from his pneumonia. The doctor started running around, crowing that it was all due to her remarkable talent. Gennady once admitted to me that he almost went for her throat when she started hinting that the right thing to do would be to reward her for the miraculous recovery.’

  Alisher was silent for a while. Then he said: ‘All the same, they’re vampires. It would have been better if the boy had died.’

  ‘Well, he did die,’ I said. I suddenly found this conversation disgusting. Kostya had been a very normal child, except that once a week he had to drink preserved blood. He loved playing football, reading fairy tales and science fiction, and then he had decided to study biology so that he could analyse the nature of vampirism and teach vampires how to manage without human blood.

  But Alisher wouldn’t understand me. He was a true Watchman. A genuine Light One. But I tried to understand even the Dark Ones. Even vampires. To understand and forgive – or at least to understand. Forgiving was the hardest thing. Sometimes the hardest thing in the whole world.

  The phone in my pocket rang and I took it out. Aha. An even grey glow.

  ‘Hi, Edgar,’ I said.

  After a short pause Edgar asked: ‘Has your phone identified my number?’

  ‘No, I guessed.’

  ‘You’re powerful,’ Edgar replied in a strange voice. ‘Anton, I’m already in Samarkand. Where are all of you?’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘You, Alisher and Afandi.’ The Inquisitor clearly hadn’t wasted the last hour or so. ‘Well, you’ve created a fine mess here …’

  ‘We have?’ I protested, outraged.

  ‘All right, maybe not just you,’ Edgar acknowledged. ‘But you too. Why did you take the car from the director of the market?’

  ‘We didn’t take it, we bought it. In accordance with the clauses concerning the need to confiscate means of transport in an emergency. Shall I recite the relevant paragraphs?’

  ‘Anton, cool it,’ Edgar said quickly. ‘No one’s accusing you of anything. But the situation really is pretty bleak. To cover it up, we’ll have to put out a story about the elimination of a large gang of terrorists. And you know how we hate disguising our own … our own failures as human crimes.’

  ‘Edgar, I understand you,’ I said. ‘But what has this got to do with us? I have personal business with an Other who doesn’t serve in the Watches. I flew here unofficially and I have a perfect right to move around the country.’

  ‘By virtue of the emergency situation, only with the knowledge and under the surveillance of a member of a Watch,’ Edgar corrected me.

  ‘Well, Afandi’s with us.’

  Edgar sighed. I thought I heard someone say something in the background.

  ‘Okay, Anton. Deal with your personal business … which the Inquisition will have to deal with afterwards. Only don’t go driving through the mountains at night – you’ll end up at the bottom of a precipice.’

  To be honest, I was actually touched by his concern.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’ll rest until morning.’

  ‘Okay, Anton,’ Edgar repeated. Then he paused, and muttered rather awkwardly: ‘It was good talking to you … despite everything.’

  I put the phone away and said: ‘He’s strange, that Edgar. He was strange as a Dark One, too. But when he became an Inquisitor, he changed completely.’

  ‘You know, I think that sooner or later you’ll end up as an Inquisitor yourself,’ Alisher said in a very subdued voice.

  I thought about what he’d said and shook my head. ‘No, there’s no way. My wife and daughter are Higher Light Ones. They don’t take guys like me into the Inquisition.’

  ‘I’m very glad that’s the case,’ Alisher said seriously. ‘Well then, shall we go?’

  And at that very moment the mountains shook. Gently at first, as if the strength of the rocks was being tested. Then more and more powerfully.

  ‘An earthquake!’ Afandi howled, waking up instantly. ‘Out of the car!’

  When he wanted, he could be very serious indeed. We jumped out of the jeep, walked a bit higher up the track and froze. The mountains were shuddering violently. Small stones began slithering down the slope and showering onto us. Alisher and I automatically erected a joint protective dome. Afandi did his bit too – he set one hand above his eyes and started surveying the night in search of unknown danger.

  And he actually spotted something.

  ‘Look over there!’ he shouted, jumping up and down and reaching out h
is hand. ‘That way! That way!’

  We turned round, keeping the Shield above our heads: the rocks bounced off it with a clatter. We followed Afandi’s gaze and enhanced our night vision. (Actually, after the stimulation I’d given him, Alisher didn’t need to do that.)

  And we saw the next mountain, covered with thick forest, being reduced to rubble.

  It looked as if mighty hammer blows were being struck from within its crest. The mountain was repeatedly jolted and waterfalls of small stones, avalanches of boulders and entire groves of trees showered down off it, rapidly filling up the ravines. In a few minutes the kilometre-high peak was transformed into a plateau of crushed stone and woodchips from the shattered tree trunks.

  Then I got the idea of looking at the mountain through the Twilight.

  And I saw a vortex of Power spinning above the disaster zone.

  It was either the vortex of a curse that had been put on the place, or some special kind of spell that caused an earthquake. I didn’t know which. But there was no doubt at all that the catastrophe had been caused by magic.

  ‘They missed,’ said Alisher. ‘Anton … did you talk to Edgar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure the Inquisition doesn’t have any beefs to settle with you?’

  I gulped to swallow the lump that had risen in my throat. Beefs with the Inquisition were very, very bad news.

  ‘The Inquisition wouldn’t have missed—’ I began and then broke off. I took out my cellphone and looked at it through the Twilight. Inside its cocoon of plastic, metal and silicon, the SIM card was pulsating with a blue light. Typical behaviour for a working amulet

  ‘I think I know what happened,’ I said, keying in a number. ‘And I don’t think it was anything to do with the Inquisition.’

  ‘Hello, Anton,’ Gesar said, as if I hadn’t woken him. But then, it was still evening in Moscow.

  ‘Gesar, I need to have a word with someone from the European tribunal. Immediately.’