“Wait,” I whispered. The old magician’s words had roused something in my memory. “Wait, Fan. Something’s not right. Something doesn’t fit. I . . . I believe you. Or rather, I believe you are saying what you think is the truth, and it looks like the truth, but . . .”
“But?” Fan repeated, obviously intrigued.
“But if the Tiger hunts Prophets simply in order to induce them to speak, not to make them remain silent . . . why did he want to kill the boy-Prophet in Moscow?”
“He did not want to kill him,” Fan said firmly. “He was trying to urge him on. Make him hurry.”
“When we tried to protect the boy, the Tiger demanded that we leave. And he said . . . he said that the prophecy must not be heard.”
Fan gazed at me unblinkingly. His expression had suddenly shed all its geniality.
“Did he lie?” I asked.
“No, the Tiger cannot lie. You misheard. You didn’t catch what he said.”
I reached into the Twilight, shuddering as I remembered Fan’s words . . . how was I doing this? How did I control energies that I didn’t understand? How did I perform what people called miracles? It wasn’t important, just at the moment it didn’t matter if Fan was right in what he had said about the Twilight . . .
“Here, catch,” I said, tossing a replica of my memory to Fan.
Fan stared into empty space, watching us standing in the Tiger’s path in the basement corridor of the Watch . . .
“Inconceivable,” he said slowly. “The Tiger does not want the prophecy . . .”
“Has that never happened before?” I asked. “Not ever?”
“There have been cases . . . but I thought . . . they were a matter of misunderstanding and stubbornness . . .” Fan looked at me again. “It is good that no one will hear this prophecy.”
“Why?”
“I am frightened by what might have been said.”
“It can still be heard,” murmured Arina. “Anton, the sly dog . . . Anton has preserved the prophecy, I don’t know how, but he kept a recording—I sensed it.”
“Destroy that recording,” Fan said quickly. “Do not toy with the Primordial Power.”
“The Primordial Powers are the Light and the Darkness.”
“The Primordial Power is the Twilight! All the rest are merely its manifestations! Destroy the recording!” Fan jumped to his feet.
“Don’t you dare!” Arina exclaimed, also getting up. “Don’t you dare, Anton! What if . . . if there’s something in it capable of annulling a prophecy? Of destroying the Tiger!”
“Back off, will you, both of you!” I shouted. Fan and Arina were closing in on me, with their eyes blazing so brightly that I was frightened. “I’ll decide for myself what to do! Stop it!”
Fan halted, shook his head, and put his hand to his forehead.
“Please forgive me . . . that news was simply too strange. Please forgive me.”
But Arina didn’t stop. She kept advancing on me with small, mincing steps, until she bumped into me and froze with her face close to mine. Her eyelids were trembling, her eyes were insane.
“Anton . . . Anton, we have to follow this path right to the end. Where’s that recording, Anton? Where’s the prophecy? If we don’t like it, we’ll . . . we’ll do what Fan and Li did. You’ll kill me and the Tiger will calm down . . .”
“He won’t calm down,” I said, shoving Arina away. “Because you’re not my best friend and your death won’t prove a thing to the Tiger! You calm down. There’s no need to hurry, no need to do anything hasty and ill-considered.”
“Do you realize what I did?” Arina whined. “Do you realize that? I destroyed our homeland, Anton! We ought to have died and not let the prophecy out into the world, or let it come true . . . but I put it off! And it turns out that I just stretched the spring tighter! I was blinded by my self-assurance, by my faith in myself . . . I decided to fight. And now everything will be even worse, do you understand that, even worse!”
“Arina, we don’t know anything yet,” I said. “Perhaps your prophecy was actuated in the 1940s. Remember? ‘Little Russia is German land.’ That was what it said, right?”
The insanity in Arina’s eyes faded for a second.
“Yes . . . no . . . But the rest of it hasn’t happened . . . Anton . . .” Her voice became wheedling. “You know I managed to restore a few things from the Fuaran . . . I can increase the powers of Others—that’s very important—and there are lots of other things in there that nobody knows about . . .”
Poor Fan Wen-yan’s eyebrows climbed up onto his forehead. He had only just shared with us his own experiences and his opinion of the Twilight, which contradicted all the fundamental theories of the Others.
And in return he had heard a fragment of an old “postponed” prophecy and learned that the legendary Fuaran was in the possession of a Witch, who had even managed to restore it, and that it could increase an Other’s Power. (I could imagine how he felt hearing that, when it had taken him three hundred years to reach the Fourth-Level!)
“Anton . . . darling . . . you have no idea of what I can do—I can do things for you that no one else can . . .” Arina’s hands were pressed against my chest and she leaned her head to one side, looking into my eyes. “Anton . . . dearest . . . you did keep the prophecy, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding while gazing into Arina’s eyes.
“Anton,” Fan said very calmly and politely. “I’d like to point out that—”
“Anton, how did you keep it?” Arina went on.
“There was this toy there,” I explained. “A toy phone that you can record a few words on. Kesha was holding it in his hand after he uttered the prophecy. He doesn’t remember anything—but there was a recording on the phone. I haven’t listened to it, but I copied it onto a flash stick.”
“And where is that flash stick?” Arina asked.
“In my wallet,” I said.
“I hate to intrude, Anton,” said Fan, taking a step towards us, “but I’d like to point out that the spell Long Tongue has been cast on you.”
Before he even finished speaking I shoved away Arina, who had already lowered her hand into my jacket pocket. The witch was extremely light. She flew several paces through the air and flopped down onto the pillows.
And I desperately checked all the defenses that I had applied to myself.
The Barrier of Will . . . the Rainbow Sphere . . .
Everything was in order, the defenses were sound.
The irony of the situation was that it was an extremely complex and well-structured defensive system, which would easily have repulsed a Dominant or any other attacking spell. It would also have fended off the Long Tongue—a spell that novices play with during their first year of training—except that I myself had removed that element of defense! The Long Tongue was woven into the spell for admiring the landscape, which I had thought was a local Taiwanese spell applied to the pavilion by our courteous hosts. It really did look like an ordinary spell for entertainment . . . right up to the moment when it was allowed access. After that it started working, gradually increasing in power.
No, this wasn’t Fan’s work! The more closely I examined the spell, the more clearly I saw that although the enchantments linked to air, water, and earth seemed to have been crafted in the Chinese manner, they were actually slightly different.
More elegant, more feminine.
More witchlike.
This spell had been cast by Arina. She had cast it almost instantaneously, in the few moments it took us to walk to the pavilion, woven it neatly into our hosts’ sentry and defensive spells, without disturbing them in the slightest, and she had even disguised it as local work!
It probably wasn’t a trap that had been planned in advance just for me. More likely it was for both of us. And probably Arina had deliberately hinted at Fan’s homosexuality, so that if anything went wrong I would take her magic, which bore a clearly feminine imprint, for the magic of an effeminate man—whic
h Fan, of course, was not: the shield he had just thrown up was crude, rough, and effective.
Arina didn’t just think two or three moves ahead, she was ten moves ahead of the game!
Instead of straightening out the old spells, I preferred to cast a new one, the Ice Crust, severing the threads twined around my mind.
“Anton . . .” Arina said plaintively, without even attempting to get up. “Why?”
“Don’t try to creep into my mind, Witch,” I said. “I’ll decide for myself what to do.”
“But, Anton, I only wanted—” she began. Fortunately, this time I was ready for her to try to make me talk, and the thrust of the Dominant dissolved harmlessly in the Rainbow Sphere.
“Stop that!” I exclaimed. “Enough! You lost!”
Fan stood nearby, adding more and more Power to his Magician’s Shield. And apparently summoning someone.
“Give it to me!” Arina shouted. She didn’t get up, but suddenly somehow she was on her feet, as if the earth itself had tossed her up into the air. Arina’s eyes were blazing, her hands were held out towards me—and I could feel the wallet jerking about in my pocket, trying to leap out and fly to the witch.
I struck out with a Press. In any other situation I would have had enough sheer Power to knock the person in Arina’s place off her feet.
But she was a Higher Other too. And while the Fuaran had made me a Magician Beyond Classification by chance, Arina had obviously worked long and hard on her skills. She brushed aside my Press with a wave of her hand: the flowering orchids behind her seemed to explode, and a banister rail went hurtling out of the pavilion. How right Fan had been when he decided not to meet in the museum!
I stood there, bent over slightly, waiting for what would come next.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t exactly an attack. Arina used a Triple Key—but one so powerful that my entire mental defense cracked and gave way.
“Understand me!” Arina screamed.
And I really did understand her. I felt her pain at what she had once done. Her hate for her own self-assurance and her own cowardice. Her reluctance to fight with me—and her readiness to fight to the end.
It all came down to me not wanting to let her have the prophecy without having thought the matter through properly.
“Now you understand me!” I retorted, flinging a Triple Key back at her.
It was the most absurd combat of my life. We stood there facing each other, brimming over with Power, with death-dealing spells trembling on the tips of our fingers—but without feeling the slightest hate for each other, understanding each other to the very depths of our souls . . .
And then the air around us was filled with a loud crackling and Others started pouring out of the portals that had opened up.
Fan had summoned the Inquisition.
Arina called up the situation instantly. A gust of fiery wind swept out in all directions, more as a distraction than a real attempt to delay the Inquisitors. Then I saw Arina smiling, standing in the middle of the ring of fire in a man’s trousers and jacket that were too large for her. With painful slowness, it seemed to me, although it could hardly have taken more than a second, Arina pulled a wallet—my wallet!—out of the jacket’s inside pocket and opened it. The flash stick jumped out onto her palm . . . and Arina disappeared. The wallet hung in the air for a moment, like in a cartoon film, and then fell.
Arina had probably been clutching the Minoan Sphere in her left hand the whole time.
I lowered my eyes to examine myself.
Yes, the long skirt and turquoise blouse had looked better on Arina than on me. And what was worse, her clothes were obviously too small for me and were already coming apart at the seams.
“Halt!” barked one of the Inquisitors when I leaned down to get my wallet.
“Mr. Anton Gorodetsky offered resistance to the criminal and is not guilty in any way,” Fan said quickly. “There should be no charges against him!”
Perhaps Fan possessed incontrovertible authority, or perhaps the Inquisitors were simply obsessed by dreams of catching Arina—but in any case all five or six of them disappeared into the portals that had opened up again.
“It’s useless,” I said, clutching the wallet in my hand. “A Minoan Sphere can’t be traced. There’ll be an entire tree of false trails branching out to eternity.”
“They are obliged to try,” Fan said politely. “It is their job. Can I help with your clothes?”
“I’ll manage,” I said, frowning. “I’ll apply a false appearance, and I have spare clothes at the hotel.”
“A very elegant spell,” Fan said. “I simply can’t imagine for what purpose it was created.”
“Arina’s a great joker,” I said, sitting down and pouring myself some tea. “The old crone—she tricked me after all . . .”
“But she left you your documents and money.”
“What’s true is true,” I agreed. “She always did have style. But that flash stick . . .”
Fan spread his hands helplessly. The shield that he had pumped full of Power, which made the Taiwanese look slightly hazy, was slowly dissolving into the Twilight.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ll probably finish my tea, go back to the hotel, and get changed. And then I’m going home.”
Part Three
Dubious Doings
Prologue
ANTON GORODETSKY WAS WATCHING TV.
He wasn’t one of those people who don’t have a television on principle, or who proudly declare that they haven’t switched it on for years. To tell the truth, he did watch it sometimes—the news almost every day, and even some film or other a couple of times a year, if he came across it on the airwaves by chance.
But right now he was watching TV thoughtfully, with serious intent. And the fact that he was switching from channel to channel every five seconds by no means indicated that he wasn’t concentrating.
Click.
“Accused, why did you go to visit the victim?”
“Well . . . I . . . wanted to have a drink with him . . . And he . . .”
Click.
“. . . the verdict of the court is thirteen years’ imprisonment to be served in a strict-regime penal colony. The defense have already stated that they will appeal, and the guilt of the accused is in no way . . .”
Click.
“. . . went off course and failed to enter orbit. But the specialists emphasize that the satellite was insured . . .”
Click.
“. . . the size of the average pension will increase by eleven percent to five thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four roubles . . .”
Click.
“. . . and those terrible years, the decades of repression and tyranny, did not break the artist’s spirit, he carried on working and exhibiting his works, in defiance of the Communist regime . . .”
Click.
“. . . advanced technologies. The scientists tell us that using them to produce nanotechnological cement will make possible a significant improvement in the quality . . .”
Click.
“. . . it is proposed to remove the children from the family, since the parents’ level of income is inadequate to provide appropriate care . . .”
Click.
“What I say is this, commander: if we try to withdraw, their blocking units will gun us down, but if we surrender, then at least there’s some kind of chance . . .”
Click.
“. . . the largest in Europe! And this is indisputable proof that the policy being pursued is correct . . .”
Click.
“The oysters in this restaurant are the best in Moscow, but the wine really is quite pricey—I couldn’t find anything decent for less than five or six thousand . . .”
Gorodetsky turned the television off, even though he still had ten channels left. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Anyone who said TV wasn’t worth watching was a fool. It was just that you ou
ght to do it once every three or four months. That way it was more than just a blurred flickering in your eyes.
But, of course, if you only watched it every three or four years, that was even more instructive.
He walked over to the window and looked at the low gray sky hanging over the city. Then he slowly rubbed his hand over the cold glass.
The clouds parted and a chink opened up in the sky—a tiny little eye of dark blue. Somewhere behind the shroud of clouds the sun was setting.
Anton shoved his hands into his pockets, took out the little round earphones, and set them in his ears. He clicked the button on the player. The band Picnic came up.
The city’s fierce lights
And harsh neon brightness
Shove from behind and jostle me on,
But I stroll along,
Breathe it all in,
And what is mine it cannot take from me.
One minute more lingering in this breeze,
In this Crooked Kingdom I feel at my ease.
Here money won’t wait
Until it gets burned,
Its power brings happiness, takes it away.
But that’s not for me,
I’m wandering free
And the dark streets are calling my name.
He’s playing his game,
It’s always the same,
And one out of two people pauses to see.
But I’m not that one,
I’m drunk, having fun,
And I’m only just beginning to breathe . . .
The gap in the clouds closed up. Anton raised his hand—and then lowered it again.
It would close over anyway.
He walked through into the kitchen, opened a small cupboard, and took out a bottle of cognac that had already been started. He glanced round stealthily, poured a little into a paunchy glass, and downed it barbarously, in a single gulp.
The bottle gave a despairing sigh. Anton screwed up his eyes and looked at it, trying to determine who had cast that spell.
Svetlana.
Anton poured a second dose, put the sighing bottle away in the cupboard, and walked through into the sitting room. He stood in front of a cupboard with glass doors, studying the wooden chalice standing on one of the shelves.
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