Nightwatch w-1

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  It was charged to full capacity. Made out of a shinbone with intricate carvings and a small ruby crystal on the tip. Even if I dodged or shielded myself, a discharge of Power like that would bring every Other in the area running.

  I raised my shadow from the floor and entered the second level of the Twilight.

  Cold.

  Swirling mist, or rather, clouds. Damp, heavy clouds rushing along high above the ground. There was no Ostankino tower here; this world had shed its final resemblance to the human one. I took a step forward through the damp cotton wool, along an invisible path through the droplets of water. The movement of time had slowed—I was actually falling, but so slowly that it didn’t matter yet. High above me the curtain of cloud was pierced by the light of three moons—white, yellow, and blood-red. A bolt of lightning appeared ahead of me and grew, sprouting branches that crept slowly through the clouds, burning out a jagged channel.

  I moved close to the vague shadow that was reaching for its belt with such painful slowness. I grabbed the arm. It was heavy, unyielding, as cold as ice. I couldn’t stop it. I’d have to burst back out into the first level of the Twilight and take him on face to face. At least I’d have a chance.

  Light and Darkness, I’m no field operative! I never wanted to end up in the front line! Give me the work I enjoy, the work I’m good at!

  But the Light and the Darkness didn’t answer. They never do when you call on them. There was only that quiet, mocking voice that speaks sometimes in every heart, whispering: «Who promised you an easy life?»

  I looked down at my feet. They were already about ten centimeters below the Dark Magician’s. I was falling; there was nothing to support me in this reality; there were no TV towers or anything of the sort here—there are no cliffs that shape or trees that tall.

  How I wished I had clean hands, a passionate heart, and a cool head. But somehow these three qualities don’t seem to get along too well. The wolf, the goat, and the cabbage—what crazy ferryman would think of sticking them all in the same boat?

  And when he’d eaten the goat for starters, what wolf wouldn’t like to try the ferryman?

  «God only knows,» I said. My voice was lost in the clouds. I put my hand down and grabbed hold of the Dark Magician’s shadow—a limp rag, a blur in space. I jerked the shadow upward, threw it over his body, and tugged the Dark One into the second level of the Twilight.

  He screamed when the world suddenly became completely unrecognizable. He’d probably never been any lower than the first level before. The energy required for his first trip came from me, but all the sensations were quite new to him.

  I braced myself on the Dark One’s shoulders and pushed him downward, while I crept upward, stamping my feet down hard on his hunched back. I «Great magicians climb their way up over other people’s backs.»

  «You bastard, Anton! You bastard!»

  The Dark Magician still hadn’t realized who I was. He didn’t realize it until the moment he turned over onto his back, still providing support for my feet, and saw my face. Here, on the second level of the Twilight, my crude disguise didn’t work, of course. His eyes opened wide; he gave a short gasp and howled, clutching at my leg.

  But he still didn’t understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. I kicked him over and over again, trampling his i fingers and his face with my heels. It wouldn’t really hurt an Other, but I wasn’t trying to do him any physical damage. I wanted him lower; I wanted him to fall, move downward on all levels of reality, through the human world and the Twilight, through the shifting fabric of space. I didn’t have the time or the skill to fight a full-scale duel with him according to all the laws of the Watches, according to all the rules that had been invented for young Light Ones who still had their faith in Good and Evil, the absolute truth of dogma and the inevitability of retribution.

  When I decided I’d trampled the Dark Magician down low enough, I pushed off from the spread-eagled body, leapt up into the cold, damp mist, and jerked myself out of the Twilight.

  Straight out into the human world. Straight onto the observation platform.

  I appeared squatting on my haunches on a slab of glass, soaking wet from head to foot, choking in an effort to suppress a sudden cough. The rain of that other world smelled of ammonia and ashes.

  A faint gasp ran around the room and people staggered back, trying to get away from me.

  «It’s all right,» I croaked. «Do you hear? It’s all right.»

  Their eyes told me they didn’t agree. A man in uniform by the wall, a security guard, one of the TV tower’s faithful retainers, stared at me stony-faced and reached for his pistol holster.

  «It’s for your own good,» I said, choking in a new fit of coughing. «Do you understand?»

  I let my Power break free and touch the people’s minds. Their faces started looking more relaxed and calm. They slowly turned away and pressed their faces against the windows. The security guard froze with his hand resting on his unbuttoned holster.

  Only then did I look down at my feet. And I froze in amazement.

  The Dark Magician was there, under the glass. He was screaming. His eyes had turned into round black patches, forced wide open by his pain and terror. The fingertips of one hand were imbedded in the glass and he was hanging by them, with his body swaying like a pendulum in the gusts of wind. The sleeve of his white shirt was soaked in blood. The wand was still there on the magician’s belt, but he’d forgotten about it. I was the only thing that existed for him right now, on the other side of that triple-reinforced glass, inside the dry, warm, bright shell of the observation platform, beyond Good and Evil. A Light Magician, sitting above him and gazing into those eyes crazy with pain and terror.

  «Well, did you think we always fight fair?» I asked. Somehow I thought he might be able to hear me, even through the thick glass and the roar of the wind. I stood up and stamped my heel on the glass. Once, twice, three times—it didn’t matter that the blow wouldn’t reach the fingers fused into the glass.

  The Dark Magician jerked, trying to tug his hand out of the way of that crushing heel—a spontaneous, instinctive, irrational reaction.

  The flesh gave way.

  For a moment the glass was covered with a red film of blood, but then the wind swept it away. And all I could see was the vague outline of the Dark Magician’s body, getting smaller and smaller, tumbling over and over in the tower’s turbulent slipstream. He was being carried in the direction of The Three Little Pigs, a fashionable establishment at the foot of the tower.

  The invisible clock ticking away in my mind gave a loud click and instantly cut the time I had left in half.

  I stepped off the glass and walked around the platform in a circle. I wasn’t looking at the people; I was gazing into the Twilight. No, there weren’t any more guards here. Now I had to find out where their headquarters were. Up on top in the service premises, among all the equipment? I didn’t think so. Probably in more comfortable surroundings.

  There was another security guard, a human, standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the restaurants. One glance was enough for me to see that he’d been influenced already, and quite recently. It was a good thing they’d only influenced him superficially.

  And it was a very good thing they’d decided to influence him at all. That was a trick that cut both ways.

  The security guard opened his mouth, getting ready to shout.

  «Quiet! Come this way!» I ordered.

  The security guard followed me without saying a word.

  We went into the restroom—one of the tower’s free attractions, the highest urinal and toilet bowls in Moscow. Please feel free to make your mark among the clouds. I waved my hand through the air. A spotty-faced youth came scurrying out of one cubicle, buttoning up his pants; the man at the urinal grunted, broke off, and went wandering out with a glassy look in his eyes.

  «Take your clothes off,» I ordered the security guard and starting pulling off my wet sweater.


  The holster was half-open, and the Desert Eagle was far older than my Makarov, but that didn’t particularly bother me. The important thing was that the uniform was almost a perfect fit.

  «If you hear shooting,» I told the guard, «go down and carry out your duty. Do you understand?»

  He nodded.

  «I turn you toward the Light,» I said, intoning the words of the enlistment formula. «Renounce the Darkness, defend the Light. I give you the vision to distinguish Good from Evil. I give you the faith to follow the Light. I give you the courage to fight against the Darkness.»

  I used to think I’d never get a chance to use my right to enlist volunteers. How could there be free choice in genuine Darkness? How could I involve anybody in our games when the Watches themselves were established to counterattack that practice?

  But now I was acting without hesitation, exploiting the loophole that the Dark Ones had left me by getting the security man to guard their headquarters, the way some people keep a small dog in their apartment: It can’t bite, but it can yap. What they’d done gave me the right to sway the security man in the opposite direction and get him to follow me. After all, he wasn’t either good or bad; he was a perfectly ordinary man with a wife he loved in moderation, elderly parents whom he didn’t forget to help, a little daughter, and a son from his first marriage who was almost grown up, a weak faith in God, a tangled set of moral principles, and a few standard dreams—an ordinary, decent man.

  A piece of cannon fodder in the war between the armies of Light and Darkness.

  «The Light be with you,» I said. The pathetic little man nodded and his face lit up. There was adoration in his eyes. A few hours earlier he’d gazed in exactly the same way at the Dark Magician who’d given him a casual command and shown him my photograph.

  A moment later the security guard was standing at the top of the stairs in my stinking clothes, and I was walking down the stairs trying to figure out what I was going to do if Zabulon was in the headquarters. Or any other magician of his level, come to that.

  In that case my powers wouldn’t be enough to maintain my disguise for even a second.

  The Bronze Hall. I stepped through the doors and looked at the absurd, ring-shaped «restaurant car.» The ring was slowly rotating, together with the tables standing on it.

  I’d been certain the Dark ones would set up their headquarters in either the Gold Hall or the Silver Hall. And I was quite surprised by the scene that met my eyes.

  The waiters were drifting from table to table like lazy fish, handing out bottles of spirits, which were supposedly forbidden up here. On two tables straight ahead of me computer terminals had been set up, connected to two cell phones. They hadn’t bothered to run a cable to any of the tower’s countless service outlets, which meant the headquarters had been set up to work only for a short while. Three young guys with short hair were working away intently, with their fingers leaping around all over the keyboards while the lines of type scrolled up the monitor screens and their cigarettes smoked in the ashtrays. I’d never seen Dark programmers before, and these were only simple operators, of course. But they didn’t look any different from one of our magicians sitting at a notebook plugged into the network at headquarters. Maybe they even looked a bit more respectable than some I know.

  «Sokolniki’s completely covered,» one of the guys said. His voice wasn’t loud, but it rumbled right around the ring of the restaurant, making the waiters shudder and falter in their stride.

  «The Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya line’s under surveillance,» said another of them. The young guys glanced at each other and laughed. They probably had a little competition going to see who could report fastest on his sectors.

  Go right ahead, keep looking!

  I set off around the restaurant, making for the bar. Take no notice of me. I’m a harmless security man who just happened to be given the role of a lowly guard. And now the security man’s decided he’d like a beer. Has he completely lost all sense of responsibility? Or has he decided to check that his new bosses are safe? A platoon was sent on night patrol on the orders of the king. Trala-la-la, trala-la-la…

  The young woman behind the bar was wiping glasses in a melancholy sort of way. When I stopped, she started pouring me a beer without saying a word. Her eyes were dark and empty; she’d been turned into a puppet, and I had to struggle to suppress an outburst of fury. I couldn’t allow it. I had no right to feelings. I was a robot too. Puppets didn’t have feelings.

  And then I saw the girl sitting on the tall rotating ottoman opposite the bar, and my heart sank again.

  Why hadn’t I thought about that earlier?

  Every field headquarters has to be declared to the other side, and an observer is sent to every field headquarters. It’s part of the Treaty; it’s one of the rules of the game, in the interest, supposedly, of both sides. If we had a field headquarters, then one of the Dark Ones was sitting in it right now.

  The Light One sitting here was Tiger Cub.

  At first her glance slid over me with no sign of curiosity, and I was almost certain everything would be okay.

  Then her eyes came back to me.

  She’d already seen the security man whose appearance I’d assumed. And there was something about me that didn’t match the features stored in her memory, something that bothered her. In an instant she was looking at me through the Twilight.

  I stood still, without trying to shield myself.

  Tiger Cub looked away and turned toward the magician sitting opposite her. He wasn’t actually a weak magician—I estimated his age at about a hundred and his powers as at least grade three. He wasn’t weak, just complacent.

  «The actions you’re taking are still a provocation,» she told him in an even voice. «Night Watch is certain that the Maverick isn’t Anton.»

  «Who, then?»

  «An untrained Light Magician unknown to us. A Light Magician controlled by the Dark Ones.»

  «But what for, my girl?» the magician asked, genuinely surprised. «Explain it to me. Why would we let our own people be killed, even the ones who are less valuable?»

  «Yes, ‘less valuable’ is the key phrase,» Tiger Cub told him in a melancholy tone.

  «Maybe, just maybe, if we had a chance to eliminate the head of the Light Ones in Moscow, but, as usual, he’s above all suspicion. And sacrifice twenty of our own just for one ordinary, average Light One? No way. Or do you think we’re fools?»

  «No, I think you’re very smart. Probably much smarter than I am.» Tiger Cub smiled her dangerous smile. «But I’m only a field operative. The conclusions will be drawn by someone else, and they will be drawn, you can be sure of it!»

  «We’re not demanding immediate execution!» the Dark One said with a smile. «Even now we don’t exclude the possibility of a mistake. A tribunal, a professional, impartial investigation, justice—that’s all we want.»

  «But isn’t it strange that your leader couldn’t hit Anton with Shahab’s Lash?» said the Tiger Cub, tilting a glass of beer with one finger. «It’s amazing. His favorite weapon, one he’s been a master of for hundreds of years. Almost as if the Day Watch doesn’t want to see Anton caught.»

  «My dear girl,» said the Dark Magician, leaning across the table, «you’re flip-flopping! You can’t accuse us of pursuing an innocent, law-abiding Light One and at the same time claim we’re not trying to catch him!»

  «Why not?»

  «Such petty sadism.» The magician giggled. «I’m genuinely enjoying this conversation. Do you really think we’re a band of crazy, bloodthirsty psychopaths?»

  «No, we think you’re a band of cunning creeps.»

  «Let’s try comparing our methods.» I could see the Dark One was mounting his hobbyhorse. «Let’s compare the losses the actions of the two Watches have inflicted on ordinary people, our food base.»

  «It’s only for you that human beings are food.»

  «What about you? Or are Light Ones born to Light Ones now and not picked out of
the crowd?»

  «For us, human beings are our roots. Our roots.»

  «Okay, call them roots. What’s the point of arguing over words? But in that case they’re our roots too, my girl. And it’s no secret that the amount of sap they feed us is on the increase.»

  «It’s no secret that our numbers aren’t declining, either.»

  «Of course. Troubled times, all that stress and tension—people are living on the edge, and it’s easy to fall off. At least we’ve managed to agree on that!» The magician snickered.

  «Yes,» Tiger Cub agreed. She didn’t look in my direction again, and the conversation wandered off onto an eternal, insoluble question that philosophers on both sides have debated in vain, never mind a pair of bored magicians, one Dark and one Light. I realized that Tiger Cub had told me everything she needed to.

  Or everything she felt it was appropriate to tell me.

  I picked up the mug of beer standing in front of me and drank it in several deep, measured swallows. I really had been thirsty.

  So the hunt was just a front?

  Yes, and I’d realized that a long time ago. But it was important for me to know that our side understood that too.

  And the Maverick hadn’t been caught?

  Naturally. Otherwise they would already have contacted me. Either by phone or mentally, that was no problem for the boss. The killer would have been handed over to the Tribunal, Svetlana would no longer be torn between the desire to help and the need to avoid getting drawn into a fight, and I could have laughed in Zabulon’s face.

  But how, how was it possible to find a single man in an immense city like this, when his powers manifested themselves spontaneously? Just flared up and then faded away again. Lying dormant between one killing and the next, one pointless victory over Evil and the next. And if he really was known to the Dark Ones, it was a secret kept by the very top bosses.

  Not by the Dark Ones who were wasting their time up here.

  I looked around in disgust.

  This wasn’t serious!