Day Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненко

  It took an entire two seconds to deal with the amulet-I had to tear apart the net that was cast over me with an ordinary Triple Dagger-but the amount of Power that went into that extremely simple spell was enough to reduce the entire center of Moscow to ashes. Then the second Light magician hit me with the Fire of Bethlehem, but his blow only made me angry and, I think, even stronger.

  I froze his wand. Simply turned it into a long icicle and put a spell of rejection on it. Fragments of ice spurted out of the Light One's hands like some weird, cold firework display, and at the same time the liberated energy went soaring up into the heavens.

  I couldn't really dump on the people around us, could I? I'd already done enough damage with those collisions on the nearby intersections…

  The bear stayed put. Apparently he'd realized that, despite their numerical superiority, the balance of Power was far from equal. But the tigress just wouldn't stop. She came for me with all the aggression of a crazed female animal when an enemy gets too close to her young. Her eyes blazed with unconcealed hatred, as yellow as the flames on church candles.

  The tigress was taking revenge. Taking revenge on me, a Dark One, for all her old grudges and losses. For Andrei, who had been killed by me. And who knows for what else… And she didn't intend to stop for anything.

  I don't want to say she had nothing to avenge-the Watches have always fought, and I'm not in the habit of mincing words. But I didn't intend to die.

  I'm free. Free to punish anyone who gets in my way and refuses to resolve things peacefully. Wasn't that what the song had been trying to tell me?

  I struck out at her with the Transylvanian Mist.

  The tigress's body was twisted and stretched, and even above the roar of engines and the piercing beeping of horns I heard the crunching of bones quite clearly. The spell crumpled the shape-shifter the same way a child crumples a plasticine figure. The broken ribs tore through the skin and their bloody ends thrust into the snow. The head was squashed into a flat, striped pancake. In an instant the beautiful beast was transformed into a tangled mess of bloody flesh.

  With a final, calculated blow, I consigned the tigress's soul to the Twilight.

  Once I'd begun, I had no right to stop.

  The Light Ones froze. Even the bear stopped stamping his feet.

  And what now? I thought wearily.

  Maybe I would have had to kill them all, but thank heaven- or hell-it didn't come to that.

  "Day Watch!" I heard a familiar voice say. "An attack on a Dark One has been registered. Leave the Twilight!"

  Edgar spoke sternly and without any Baltic accent.

  But he needn't have said that about the Twilight. Those who were alive hadn't been fighting in the Twilight, and the tigress had nowhere to come back to.

  "The Day Watch demands that a tribunal be convened immediately," Edgar said ominously. "And in the meantime be so good as to summon the chief of the Night Watch."

  "Why, he'll scatter all of you like kittens," one of the Light magicians said angrily.

  "No, he won't," Edgar snapped and pointed at me. "Not with him here. Or haven't you got the point yet?"

  I just barely caught the movement as someone shuffled Power in space. Then a swarthy man with pointed features appeared nearby. He was wearing a colorful Eastern robe and he looked totally absurd in the middle of the snowy boulevard.

  "I'm already here," he barked, mournfully surveying the scene of the recent battle.

  "Gesar!" Edgar said in a more lively voice. "Hello. In the chiefs absence you will have to explain yourself to me."

  "To you?" said Gesar, glancing sideways at the Estonian. "You're not worthy."

  "Then to him," said Edgar, shrugging his shoulders and shuddering as if he felt cold. "Or is he not worthy either?"

  "No, I'll explain myself to him," Gesar said coolly and turned toward me. His gaze was as bottomless as eternity. "Get out of Moscow," he said with almost no emotion at all. "Right now. Catch a train or ride a broomstick, but just clear out. You've already killed twice."

  "As I see it," I remarked as amicably as I could, "certain other individuals have attempted to kill me. And all I did was defend myself."

  Gesar turned his back to me-he didn't want to listen. He didn't want to speak to a Dark One who had dispatched one of his best warriors into the Twilight forever.

  "Let's get out of here," he said to his people.

  "Hey, hey!" Edgar protested angrily. "They're criminals, they're not going anywhere, in the name of the Treaty I forbid it!"

  Gesar turned back toward the Estonian. "Yes they are. And you can't do anything about it. They're under my protection."

  I was seriously expecting a hike up onto the next step because the powers that I already had were enough for me to realize I couldn't go head to head with Gesar yet. He'd crush me. Not without an effort-after all, I'd already come a long way up the invisible stairway. My powers were pretty strong. But he'd still crush me.

  But nothing happened. Probably the time hadn't come yet for me to fight Gesar.

  Edgar gave me a plaintive glance-apparently he'd been hoping for great things from me.

  The Light Ones slipped away into the Twilight, taking with them the remains of their dead sister-in-arms, and then they dived deeper, to the second level. It was over.

  "I really can't stop him," I admitted guiltily. "Sorry, Edgar."

  "A pity," the Estonian said, with just his lips.

  They took me to the Day Watch office in the trusty BMW- for the first time in Moscow I was feeling tired.

  But still as free as before.

  I paid the price for using so much Power-I can barely remember how they drove me back, urged me toward the elevator, led me to the office, sat me in an armchair and stuck a cup of coffee in my hand. I had a painful ache in my overworked muscles, an ache in my entire being, which just a short while ago had been commanding the powers of the Twilight. I'd beaten them off with convincing skill-it would be a long time before the Light Ones forgot this battle. And my attackers hadn't been young novices either-I reckoned that both Light Ones had been first-level magicians at least.

  "Give the analysts a kick up the backside," Edgar ordered one of his subordinates. "I want to find out at last what's going on."

  I glanced at him, and Edgar realized I was coming around.

  "Talk to me!" he said.

  "A Call!" I said in a hoarse voice and started to cough. I tried to take a sip of coffee, burned myself, and hissed in pain. "A Call," I said when I could talk again. "They caught me while I was sleeping."

  "A Call?" Shagron echoed in surprise. He was sitting in an armchair like mine at the next desk. "The Light Ones haven't used that for about thirty years…"

  "They caught you with a Call in the Day Watch building?" Edgar asked suspiciously. "That's really something! And you mean no one else noticed anything?"

  "No. It was a very subtle call, aimed with masterly precision and camouflaged as natural background noise from the residential floors."

  "And you submitted to it?"

  "Of course not." I made another attempt to take a sip of coffee, this time successfully. "But I decided to investigate what the Light Ones were up to."

  "And you didn't tell anyone?" Edgar was balancing halfway between disbelief and annoyance. "That was a crazy risk…"

  "If I'd gone trailing after the Call with backup, they'd have spotted it in a moment," I explained. "No, I had to go alone and without cover. So I did. They tried to grab me on Strastnoi Boulevard and I had to fight them off. I knocked the tigress down two or three times and tried to persuade her to stop, and it was only after that I hit her really hard."

  Edgar stared at me without blinking.

  "You're a dark horse, Vitaly," he said.

  "Yes, Dark," I confirmed happily. "They don't come any Darker."

  "Are you a magician beyond classification?" he asked.

  "Alas, no," I said, spreading my hands-but slowly, so as not to spill the coffee. "Othe
rwise I wouldn't have let Gesar go."

  Edgar drummed his fingers on the desk, squinting sideways impatiently at the door.

  "What are those analysts doing…" he muttered.

  The door opened and a brisk middle-aged woman, a witch, appeared in the doorway, with two men, both magicians.

  "Hello, Anna Tikhonovna," Shagron greeted her hastily. He ought to have been more powerful than the witch, but he seemed to be afraid of her. And he was right, of course. A witch's Power is slightly different in nature from a magician's. And a witch can easily screw things up even for a very powerful magician.

  Edgar just nodded.

  "Is this him?" one of the magicians asked, looking at me.

  "Yes, Yura."

  Yura was an old and powerful magician-I realized that straightaway. I also realized that Yura wasn't his real name. Magicians like that keep their real names hidden so incredibly deep, there's no way you can ever get to them.

  And that's the right way. If you're really following the path of freedom.

  "Have a seat, Anna Tikhonovna," said Shagron, giving up his armchair and going across to join the magicians, who had occupied the broad windowsill.

  "Edgar," said the witch. "The Light Ones went for broke. They haven't pulled anything as wild as this since '49. They must have really serious reasons to violate the Treaty!"

  Edgar shrugged and explained curtly: "Fafnir's Talon."

  "But we haven't got it," the witch declared emphatically, looking around significantly at everyone there. "Or have we? Shagron?"

  Shagron began hastily shaking his head. It looked to me as if he'd had a few run-ins with the witch and not come out on top in them. She was a pretty strong witch.

  "Kolya?"

  The second magician who had come in replied in a calm voice: "No, and it's by no means clear that we want it…"

  "I'm not asking you," the witch barked at Edgar and Yura. And then for the first time she glanced at me.

  "Anna Tikhonovna," I said with feeling. "I only learned that the Talon exists yesterday, and I've been asleep for most of the time since then."

  "Why are you in Moscow?" she asked sternly.

  "I don't know that myself. Something gave me the urge, told me to come, and so I did. And I was barely off the train before I got caught up in that business with the vampire. Off the boat and into the party, as they say…"

  "If I understand anything about anything here," the magician Yura put in, "then this is predestination. That explains everything-the increased powers, and the missing Talon, and the way the Light Ones acted. They're simply trying to eliminate him, or at least isolate him, before he can get his hands on the Talon. Because afterward it will be too late."

  "But why didn't they bring in their enchantress?" Edgar asked, beginning to draw out his vowels slightly again. Apparently his accent only appeared at moments of agitation, when he was concentrating on something apart from what he was saying.

  "And even Gesar only intervened at the critical moment," Shagron remarked. "And then all he did was cover their retreat."

  "Who knows?" The witch pierced me with her sharp glance again. "Maybe they simply can't keep up with him?"

  "My name's Vitaly," I told her. "Pleased to meet you." After all, who likes to hear himself referred to as "this" and "him" all the time?

  The others just seemed to ignore what I'd said. Yura looked into my eyes and instantly probed me. I didn't bother to screen myself-but why not?

  "Good first-level," he declared. "With some gaps, though. Just yesterday I would only have been delighted by the appearance of a magician like this among us."

  "But today it upsets you, does it?" the witch snorted.

  "Today I refrain from drawing any conclusions. The Light Ones have cut loose, and we've been left on our own, without Zabulon. Gesar, plus that enchantress, plus Olga-even if she doesn't have her full powers-and then Igor, Ilya, Garik, Semyon… We can't stand against them."

  "But we have the Talon and this… Vitaly," the witch countered. "And then Zabulon has a habit of appearing just at the crucial moment."

  "We don't have the Talon," Yura remarked. "And what guarantee is there that we will have it? In any case, Kolya's absolutely right: What would we do with the Talon? Of course, I understand, it possesses ancient, mighty Power. But if we don't think carefully before we let it loose… We can't afford to mess things up."

  "Well, we'll try hard not to," the witch said ingratiatingly. "Edgar, what have the analysts got?"

  As if in response, there was a knock at the door and Hellemar, the lord of the notebooks, appeared in the doorway.

  "Got it!" he said triumphantly. "Vnukovo airport! Flight fifteen zero zero from Odessa. It was delayed twice by bad weather conditions, and has only just left. It will land in an hour and twenty minutes. The Talon's on board."

  "Right," said Edgar, leaping to his feet. "Set up field HQ at the airport. Keep track of the weather. Cut off the Light Ones. And they can go whistle for an observer."

  "Chief," Hellemar said with a sour expression, "the Light Ones already set up their field HQ at Vnukovo fifteen minutes ago. Better bear that in mind."

  "We will," the witch promised. "Now let's get moving…"

  Everyone got up; someone grabbed the phone, someone raked the charged amulets out of the safe, someone else started issuing loud orders to the staff…

  And I just wearily set down my empty coffee cup on the desk.

  "Do they at least feed people in your headquarters?" I said to nobody in particular. "I've been running on empty for twenty-four hours now…"

  "You'll survive," I was told sharply by Edgar. "Get downstairs and don't even think of trying any more solo heroics at all."

  But strangely enough, just at that moment I didn't feel the slightest desire to try any heroics.

  We reached Vnukovo with incredible speed. The driver of our comfortable minibus was a lippy young guy the others called Deniska. He was a magician, but he handled a steering wheel even better than Shagron. First we drove around the embankments, then along Ordynka Street and Lenin Prospect, into the South-West district, around the Ring Road… Everything flashed by so fast I barely had time to see anything. Shagron and Edgar had gone off somewhere, Yura and Kolya had disappeared too. I was left with Anna Tikhonovna and a trio of girl witches; every now and then I caught them looking at me curiously. Anna Tikhonovna must have told them to leave me alone, because none of them made any attempt to talk to me. A fat werewolf floundered about heavily in the baggage compartment behind us and growled huskily whenever Deniska threw the minibus into a tight curve as he overtook someone. The tires squealed, the driveshaft groaned, and the engine hummed like an industrious bumblebee in May.

  We were the first to reach the airport. Deniska drove up to the service entrance and two other vehicles came rushing up almost immediately-Shagron's BMW and another minibus carrying the technicians. The Watch members set to work with fantastic co-ordination; they immediately cast information spells that made us empty space as far as ordinary people were concerned, and a line of technicians carrying notebook computers set off for the entrance. Someone had already chosen a place for the HQ-a spacious office with a plaque on the door that said "Accounts." The human employees had been herded into the next room-either an office or a boardroom-and put into a blissful trance. I would have chosen the boardroom for the HQ, but Hellemar said there were more telephone lines in the accounts office.

  Yura appeared, and I wondered irrelevantly why Edgar was carrying out the duties of senior deputy while the chief was away, even though he was only just on the border of the second level. Yura seemed more powerful to me. But the affairs of the Day Watch were none of my business, so I just hunkered down in a corner and tried to figure out if I could make a dash to the restaurant for ten minutes. The young technicians were already scraping away at the touch pads of their notebooks.

  "The flight's making its approach, ETA is twenty minutes plus or minus five."

  "Have you
located the Light Ones?" Anna Tikhonovna asked.

  "Yes. In the overnight transit rooms, beside the lounge. That's in the next building."

  "What are they doing?"

  "Looks like they're tinkering with the weather," someone said.

  "What's the point? To stop the plane landing?"

  "They won't do anything that might kill the passengers," Anna Tikhonovna snorted.

  It seemed to me the simplest thing would have been to bring the plane down, and that would have put an end to the whole business. But Light Ones are Light Ones. Even in a situation like this they worry about ordinary human beings. And then, who knew if a plane crash would even damage the artifact from Berne? Maybe it wouldn't touch it. Power is Power, after all.

  "Who's a weather specialist here?" Anna Tikhonovna inquired.

  "Me!" two witches answered in chorus.

  "Right then, feel out what's going on here…"

  The witches began feeling things out-that is, scanning the immediate area for weather-changing spells. I could sense dense arrays of sensitive energy impulses that were intangible and invisible, even to many Others. It wasn't that the Others couldn't have traced them-most of them simply didn't know how. Weather magic has always been a specialty of witches and a small number of magicians, and like any other specialized field, it involves plenty of subtle points.

  "They're intensifying the cloud cover," one of the witches announced. "We need Power…"

  One of the reserve magicians immediately picked up an amulet and groped for one of the witches' hands. They concentrated for a while, and finally all three of them held hands, closed their eyes and sank into something like a light trance.

  "Everybody, help them if you can," Anna Tikhonovna ordered.

  I was in no state to help them yet. At least the energy I could have put into the effort was insignificant compared to the Power of the amulet. I'd pretty well drained myself back there on Strastnoi Boulevard…

  The Watch continued with its work. The headquarters was really buzzing-nobody seemed to be running, nobody seemed to be agitated, but the air was alive with tension. I even began feeling a bit uncomfortable-I was the only one in the whole headquarters sitting there and doing nothing. And something told me I still wouldn't be able to do anything for quite a few minutes.