Nightwatch w-1

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  A gust of wind seemed to ripple through the coils of white mist. The phantom turned, and the outstretched hand—I no longer had any doubt that it was a hand—pointed through the Twilight toward the northeast. I followed the direction. He was pointing to a needle-slim silhouette glimmering in the sky.

  «Yes, the tower, I understand! What does it mean?»

  The mist started to blur and dissolve, and a moment later the Twilight around me was as empty as it usually is.

  I started to shiver. The dead Other had tried to communicate with me. Was he a friend or an enemy? Had he been advising me or warning me?

  There was no way to tell.

  I took another look through the walls of the station building—the Dark Magician had almost reached the top of the escalator, but he was still on it. So I had a moment to try to figure out what the phantom had been trying to say. I hadn’t been intending to go to the Ostankino television tower; I had a different route in mind, rather risky but innovative. So it didn’t make any sense to warn me not to go to the tower.

  Maybe I’d been given directions? But by whom? Friend or foe, that was the important question. I couldn’t really expect all differences to be wiped out beyond the borders of life. Our dead would not abandon us in battle.

  I would have to decide for myself. Only not right now.

  I ran toward the entrance of the metro, taking my pistol out of my shoulder holster as I went.

  Just in time: The Dark Magician came out of the doors and immediately dived into the Twilight. He made it look easy, but I saw how he managed. The auras of people near him flared up, scattering dark sparks in all directions.

  If I’d been in the human world, I’d have seen people’s faces distorted by a sudden pain in their hearts or emotional distress—which is far more painful.

  The Dark Magician peered around, looking for my trail. He knew how to extract power from people around him, but his general technique wasn’t exactly great.

  «Take it easy,» I said, pressing the barrel of the pistol against the magician’s spine. «Take it easy. You’ve already found me. And I bet you’re thrilled.»

  I held his wrist tight with my other hand so that he couldn’t make any passes. All these young magicians use a standard set of spells, the simplest and most powerful. And they require the precise coordination of both hands.

  The magician’s palm was suddenly damp.

  «You, you…« he still couldn’t believe what had happened. «You’re Anton! You’re outside the law!»

  «Maybe so. But what good will that do you now?»

  He turned his head. In the twilight his face was distorted; it had lost that attractive, genial look. He hadn’t reached the stage of the complete Twilight makeover, like Zabulon, but even so, his face was no longer human. The jaw hung down too low, the mouth was wide, like a frog’s, the eyes were close-set and dull.

  «You’re a real ugly specimen, my friend,» I said, forcing the gun barrel into his back again. «This is a pistol. It’s loaded with silver bullets, although that’s not strictly necessary. It’ll work just as well in the Twilight world as in the human one—slower, but that won’t save you. You’ll be able to feel the bullet ripping through the skin and parting the fibers of your muscles, smashing the bone, tearing the nerves apart.»

  «You won’t do that!»

  «Why?»

  «Because then there’d be no way you could beat the rap!»

  «Is that right? But right now there’s still some kind of chance, is there? You know, the urge to squeeze this trigger is getting stronger all the time. Let’s go, scumbag.»

  I helped the magician along with a few kicks as I led him into the narrow passage between two trading kiosks. The thick growth of blue moss covering their walls started twitching. The Twilight flora was keen to taste our emotions—my fury and his fear—but the mindless plants had a strong instinct of self-preservation.

  The Dark Magician had plenty of that too.

  «Listen, what do you want from me?» he shouted. «They gave us a briefing and told us to look for you! I was only following orders! I honor the Treaty, watchman!»

  «I’m not a watchman any longer!» I said, shoving him against the wall, into the tender embrace of the moss. Let it suck out a little bit of his fear, or we wouldn’t be able to have a proper talk. «Who’s leading the hunt?»

  «The Day Watch?»

  «More specifically?»

  «The boss, I don’t know his name.»

  That was almost certainly true. But I knew the name anyway.

  «Were you sent to this particular station?»

  He hesitated.

  «Answer,» I said, aiming the barrel at the magician’s stomach.

  «Yes.»

  «Alone?»

  «Yes.»

  «That’s a lie. But it’s not important. What were you ordered to do you once you found me?»

  «Observe.»

  «Another lie. But an important one this time. Think again and try a different answer.»

  The magician didn’t say anything. The blue moss must have done too good a job.

  I squeezed the trigger and the bullet sang sweetly as it traveled across the meter of space between us. The magician had enough time to see it—his eyes opened wide in terror, which made them look a bit more human—and he jerked away, but too late.

  «That’s just a flesh wound to begin with,» I said. «Not even fatal.»

  He writhed on the ground, pressing his hand against the ragged hole in his stomach. In the Twilight his blood was almost transparent, but maybe that was an optical illusion. Or perhaps it was a just a peculiarity of this magician.

  «Answer the question!»

  I swept my hand through the air and set the blue moss around us on fire. Enough already, now I was going to capitalize on fear, pain, despair. Enough mercy and compassion, enough polite conversation.

  This was the Darkness, after all.

  «We were ordered to report in and if possible to kill you.»

  «Not detain me? Just kill me?»

  «Yes.»

  «I’ll accept that answer. Your means of communication?»

  «By phone, that’s all.»

  «Let me have it.»

  «It’s in my pocket.»

  «Throw it.»

  He reached clumsily into his pocket—the wound wasn’t fatal, and the magician’s resistance was still high, but the pain he was going through was hellish.

  Just the kind he deserved to suffer.

  «What’s the number?» I asked, catching the cell phone.

  «It’s on the emergency call key.»

  I glanced at the screen.

  From the first numbers, the phone could have been absolutely anywhere. It was another cell.

  «Is that the field headquarters? Where is it?»

  «I don’t…« He paused, glancing at the pistol.

  «Remember,» I encouraged him.

  «They told me they’d be here in five minutes.»

  All right!

  I took a look back over my shoulder, at the needle blazing brightly in the sky. It fit perfectly.

  The magician moved.

  No, I hadn’t deliberately provoked him by looking away. But when he took a wand out of his pocket—a short, crude device he obviously hadn’t made himself, some cheap trash he’d bought—I felt relieved.

  «Well?» I asked when he froze, not daring to raise his weapon. «Go for it!»

  The young magician didn’t move; he didn’t say a word.

  He knew if he tried to attack, I’d empty the entire clip into him. And that would be fatal. But they were probably taught how to behave in a conflict with Light Ones. So he also knew it would be hard for me to kill someone who was unarmed and defenseless.

  «Stand up to me,» I said. «Fight! You son of a bitch, it never bothered you to destroy people’s lives or attack defenseless people before, did it? Well? Bring it on!»

  The magician licked his lips—his tongue was long and slightly forked. I
suddenly realized what Twilight form he would eventually assume, and I felt sick.

  «I throw myself on your mercy, watchman. I demand compassion and justice.»

  «If I leave now, you’ll be able to contact your base,» I said. «We both know it. Or you’ll extract enough strength from people walking by to fix yourself up and get to a phone. Isn’t that right?»

  The Dark One smiled and repeated.

  «I demand compassion and justice, watchman!»

  I tossed the pistol from one hand to the other, looking into that smirking face. They were always ready to demand. But never to give.

  «I’ve always had problems understanding our side’s dual standard of morality,» I said. «It’s a difficult thing to come to terms with. It only comes with time, and I haven’t got much of that. Coming up with all those excuses for when you can’t protect everybody. When you know that every day someone in a special department signs licenses for people to be handed over to the Dark Side. It’s tough, you know.»

  The smile disappeared from his face. He repeated the same words, like an incantation.

  «I demand compassion and justice, watchman.»

  «I’m not in the Watch anymore,» I said.

  The pistol jerked and the breech clattered slowly, lazily spitting out the cartridge cases. The bullets zipped through the air like a small swarm of angry wasps.

  He screamed only once, then two bullets shattered his skull. When the pistol clicked and fell silent, I reloaded the clip slowly, mechanically.

  The body on the ground in front of me was mangled and mutilated. It had already begun to emerge from the Twilight, and the Twilight mask on the young face was dissolving.

  I waved my hand through the air, grasping and clutching at an imperceptible something flowing through space. The outside layer of it. A copy of the Dark Magician’s human appearance.

  Tomorrow they’d find him. The wonderful young man everybody loved. Brutally murdered. How much Evil had I just brought into the world? How many tears, how much bitterness and hate? Where did the chain of future events lead?

  And how much Evil had I killed? How many people would live longer and better lives? How many tears would never be spilled, how much malice would never be stored? How much hate would never even be born?

  Maybe I’d stepped across the barrier that should never be crossed.

  And maybe I’d understood where the next boundary was, the one that had to be crossed.

  I put the pistol back in its holster and left the Twilight.

  The sharp needle of the Ostankino television tower was still boring into the sky.

  «Now let’s try playing without any rules,» I said. «Without any at all.»

  I managed to stop a car immediately, without even giving the driver an attack of altruism. Maybe that was because now I was wearing such a very charming face, the face of the dead Dark Magician?

  «Get me to the TV tower,» I said as I climbed into the battered model 6 Lada. «As fast as you can, before they close the doors.»

  «Going out for a bit of fun?» the driver asked with a smile. He was a rather dour-looking man in glasses.

  «You bet,» I answered. «You bet.»

  Chapter 5

  They were still letting people into the tower. I bought a ticket, paying extra so I could go to the restaurant, and set off across the lawn around the tower. The last fifty meters of the path were covered by a puny sort of canopy. I wondered why they’d put it there. Maybe the old building sometimes shed chunks of concrete?

  The canopy ended at a booth where they checked ID. I showed my passport and walked through the horseshoe frame of the metal detector—which wasn’t working anyway. There were no more checks; that was all the protection this strategic target had.

  I was beginning to have serious doubts. I had to admit it was a strange notion to come here. I couldn’t sense any concentration of Dark Ones nearby. If they really were here, then they were very well shielded, which meant I’d have to deal with second-and third-grade magicians. And that would be suicide, pure and simple.

  The headquarters. The field headquarters of the Day Watch, set up to coordinate the hunt. The hunt for me. Where else could the inexperienced Dark Magician have been expected to report his sighting of the quarry?

  But I was walking straight into a setup where there must be at least ten Dark Ones, including experienced guards. I was sticking my own head in the noose, and that was plain stupidity, not heroism—if I still had even the slightest chance of surviving. And I was very much hoping I did.

  Seen from down below, under the concrete petals of its supports, the TV tower was far more impressive than it was from a distance. But it was a certainty that most Muscovites had never been up to the observation platform and thought of the tower as just a natural part of the skyline, a utilitarian and symbolic object, but not a place of recreation. The wind felt as strong as if I were standing in the aerodynamic pipe of some complex structure, and right at the very limit of my hearing, I could just catch the low hum that was the voice of the tower.

  I stood there for a moment, looking upward at the mesh-covered openings, the shell-shaped hollows corroded into the concrete, the incredibly graceful, flexible silhouette. The tower really is flexible: rings of concrete strung on taut cables. Strength in flexibility.

  I went in through the glass doors.

  Strange. I’d have expected to find plenty of people wanting to view Moscow by night from a height of three hundred and thirty-seven meters. I was wrong. I even rode up in the elevator all on my own, or rather, with a woman from the tower’s service personnel.

  «I thought there would be lots of people here,» I said, giving her a friendly smile. «Is it always like this in the evening?»

  «No, usually it’s busy,» the woman said. She didn’t sound very surprised, but I still caught a slightly puzzled note in her voice. She touched a button and the double doors slid together. My ears instantly popped and my feet were pressed down hard against the floor as the elevator went hurtling upward—fast, but incredibly smoothly. «Everyone just disappeared about two hours ago.»

  Two hours.

  Soon after my escape from the restaurant.

  If they set up their field headquarters, then it didn’t surprise me that hundreds of people who’d been planning to take a ride up into the restaurant in the sky on this warm, clear spring evening had suddenly changed their plans. Human beings might not be able to see what was going on, but they could sense it.

  And even the ones who had nothing to do with this whole business were savvy enough not to go anywhere near the Dark Ones.

  Of course, I had the young Dark Magician’s appearance to protect me. But I couldn’t be sure that kind of disguise would be enough. The security guard would check my appearance against the list implanted in his memory; everything would match up, and he would sense the presence of Power.

  But would he dig any deeper than that? Would he check the different kinds of Power, check if I was Dark or Light, what grade I was?

  It was fifty-fifty. He was supposed to do all that. But security guards everywhere always skip that kind of thing. Unless they just happen to be dying of boredom or they’re new to the job and still very eager.

  But a fifty-fifty chance was pretty good, compared to my chances of hiding from the Day Watch on the city streets.

  The elevator stopped. I hadn’t even had time to think everything through properly; it had taken only about twenty seconds to get up there. That kind of speed in ordinary apartment blocks would really be something.

  «Here we are,» the woman said, almost cheerfully. It looked pretty much like I was the Ostankino tower’s last visitor of the day.

  I stepped out onto the observation platform.

  This place was usually full of people. You could tell right away who’d just arrived by the uncertain way they moved; how timidly they approached the panoramic window and the reinforced glass windows set in the floor.

  But this time it looked to me like
there were no more than twenty visitors. There were no children at all—I could just picture to myself the scenes of hysterics that must have taken place as they approached the tower, the parents’ anger and confusion. Children are more sensitive to the Dark Ones.

  Even the people who were on the platform seemed confused and depressed. They weren’t admiring the view of the city spread out below them, with all its lamps glowing brightly—Moscow in its usual festive mood. Maybe it was a feast in a time of plague, but it was a beautiful feast. Right now, though, no one was enjoying it. Everything was dominated by the atmosphere of Darkness. Even I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it choking me like carbon monoxide gas, which has no taste, no color, and no smell.

  I looked down at my feet, pulled up my shadow, and stepped into it. The guard was standing near me, just two steps away, on one of the glass windows set in the floor. He glared in a friendly sort of way, looking slightly surprised. He obviously wasn’t too comfortable hanging around in the Twilight, and I realized the other side hadn’t assigned its best men to guard the field headquarters. He was young and well-built, wearing a plain gray suit and a white shirt with a subdued tie—more like a bank clerk than a servant of the Darkness.

  «Ciao, Anton,» the magician said.

  That took my breath away for a moment.

  Had I really been that stupid? So monstrously, incredibly naive?

  They were waiting for me; they’d lured me here, tossed another sacrificed pawn into the scales, and even—God only knew how—drafted someone who’d departed into the Twilight long, long ago.

  «What are you doing here?»

  My heart thumped and started beating regularly again. It was all very simple, after all.

  The dead Dark Magician had been my namesake.

  «Just something I spotted. I need some advice on it.»

  The guard frowned darkly. Not the right turn of phrase, probably. But he still didn’t catch on.

  «Spit it out, Anton. Or I won’t let you through, you know that.»

  «You’ve got to let me through,» I blurted out at random. In our Watch anyone who knew the location of a field headquarters could enter it.

  «Oh yeah, who says?» He was still smiling, but his left hand was already moving down toward the wand hanging on his belt.