Last Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  We had been attacked by men! Ordinary men, equipped with protective amulets. An act that was not only absolutely unheard of, but also stupid. It’s one thing to shoot a magician from ambush, using a remote-controlled weapon. But like this, face-to-face, three gunmen against three magicians... what were they hoping to achieve?

  Simply to distract our attention?

  I swung around just in time to see the white smoke trail heading in our direction. The rocket had been launched from the roof of a high-rise building standing almost a kilometer away. But it was clearly remote-controlled, and it was coming straight for the arbor.

  “Foma!” I shouted, throwing a Freeze in the direction of the rocket on the off chance it would be effective. But the temporal stasis spell either missed its target or the rocket had also been protected against magic. Nothing happened.

  “Into the Twilight!” Lermont shouted.

  Sometimes it’s better to do as you’re told rather than think up your own original moves. I stepped into the Twilight, sinking down to the second level almost immediately. Lermont was there beside me; he also considered the first level an insufficiently secure defense. But to my surprise, he didn’t stop on the second level. He waved his hand and went down deeper. Perplexed, I followed him down to the third level. What need was there for this? A powerful explosion in the real world might be felt on the first level, but it wouldn’t reach the second... and if Foma suspected the unthinkable, the most terrible thing possible, then a nuclear blast would scorch through the material of all levels of the Twilight...

  The gray gloom was lit up by a white flame. The ground under our feet trembled slightly. Only slightly—but it trembled!

  “Where’s Semyon?” I shouted.

  Lermont merely shrugged. We waited a few more seconds for the splinters to stop flying, the flame to die away, and the smoking fragments of the arbor to stop falling in the real world.

  And then we went back out.

  Lermont’s neat and tidy cottage had lost all the glass in its windows and was covered with a fine sprinkling of debris. A hefty branch torn off the nearest tree by the explosion was protruding from a window on the second floor.

  The small van was lying where it had been tossed onto its side. There were two motionless bodies beside it. A third man, the machine-gunner or perhaps the driver, who had prudently stayed put in his cabin, was slowly crawling away toward the fence, dragging his useless legs behind him.

  I didn’t feel any particular pity for him. He was an ordinary bandit who had been used to distract our attention from the rocket attack. He’d known what he was getting into.

  Where the arbor had stood there was a small crater, strewn with white scraps of wood. The playing cards were soaring and circling above our heads—a capricious chance had tossed them up into the air instead of incinerating them.

  We found Semyon right beside the van. He was inside a transparent, glowing sphere that looked as if it had been carved in crystal. The sphere was slowly rolling along and Semyon, with his arms and legs held out, was turning over and over with it. His pose was such a hilarious parody of the drawing The Golden Section that I giggled stupidly. Squat and short-legged, Semyon looked nothing like the muscular athlete drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

  “A very uncomfortable spell,” Lermont said in relief. “But then, it is reliable.”

  The crystal sphere cracked all over and disintegrated in a cloud of steam. Semyon, who was upside down at that moment, nimbly swung around and landed on his feet. He stuck a finger in his ear and asked, “Do they always do that around here on Saturdays, Mr. Lermont? Or is it just in honor of our arrival?”

  Lermont took no notice of this simple piece of wit. He inclined his head to one side, as if he were listening to someone’s voice, and frowned. And his frown became deeper and deeper.

  Then, with just a couple of gestures, he created the glowing frame of a portal in front of himself and said, “Follow me, gentlemen. I’m afraid all this was merely a diversion.”

  I didn’t get the time to ask what he intended to do about the overturned van, the demolished arbor, and the crawling bandit who was already out in the street, where the neighbors could see him. A second portal opened beside the first, and Others began jumping out of it, one after another.

  They weren’t simply Light Ones from the Night Watch—they were dressed in police uniforms, with bulletproof vests and helmets, and they were holding their machine pistols at the ready!

  Well now, Thomas the Rhymer, aren’t you a fine one for the blather! ‘We have underestimated technology’! I can see just how badly you underestimate it... .

  Lermont stepped into the first portal. I hung back a moment, waiting for Semyon, but he suddenly stopped, with his eyes fixed on a gaunt man with red hair.

  “Kevin! You old fogey!”

  “Simon, you old blockhead!” the redhead shouted in delight. “Where are you going? Hang on!”

  They put their arms around each other and started hammering each other on the back with all the enthusiasm of the crazy rabbit in that commercial for electric batteries.

  “Later, we’ll catch up on everything later,” Semyon muttered, freeing himself from Kevin’s embrace. “Look, the portal’s getting cold. I brought you some wine from Sebastopol, remember it? Sparkling Muscat, here!”

  I spat and shook my head. What sort of thing was that to say—“later, later.” In the movies, any character who said that to an old friend was irrevocably doomed to die soon.

  I could only be glad that we weren’t characters in an action movie.

  I stepped in through the frame of the portal.

  A dense white glow all around. A feeling of lightness that can only be compared with what cosmonauts experience. Mysterious paths inaccessible to human beings.

  What were those Others in police uniforms going to do there? The basic day-to-day routine work of the Watches? Wipe clean the memories of any chance witnesses, remove all traces of the explosion, interrogate the attackers, if they survived.

  But who had dared to do it? Attacking a member of a Watch was already an act of insanity. But to attack the head of a Watch, plus two foreign magicians, was absolutely unheard of. And to use human beings to do it...

  I suddenly realized quite clearly that the Frenchman I had met in the Dungeons had also been a human being, as I’d first thought. Not a Higher Magician who had concealed his true nature from me. Just an ordinary man. But incredibly cunning and cool, a brilliant actor. Not the same sort of pawn as these bandits who had been sent to their death. Perhaps he was the one who had fired the rocket at us?

  And then the vampire. Was it really Kostya? Had he really survived after all?

  And to top everything off, there were the protective amulets on the bandits, which had won them time. Vampires weren’t capable of creating amulets. That was the work of a magician, an enchantress, or a witch!

  Just who were we up against, here? Who was trying to break into the Twilight to get his hands on Merlin’s legacy?

  And was he capable of going down to the seventh level?

  As always, the portal came to an end suddenly. The white glow contracted into a frame, I stepped through it, and I was immediately grabbed by the shoulder and jerked sharply down to the left, onto the floor behind the cover of an improvised barricade consisting of several overturned tables.

  Just in time. A bullet went whistling over my head.

  I was in the Dungeons of Scotland. In one of the first rooms.

  Lermont was beside me, sheltering behind the barricade, and I had been dragged to the floor by a dark-skinned Other. Judging from the number of spells he had teed-up on his fingers, he was a Battle Magician.

  Another shot rang out. The shooting was coming from the open door that led into the next room.

  “Foma, what’s happened?” I asked, loo
king at him in bewilderment. “Why are we lying on the floor? We should put up a Shield... .”

  Lermont didn’t lift a finger, but a barrier appeared at the door, sealing it off. Before I even had time to feel amazed at the Scottish magician’s stupidity and delighted with my own astuteness, there was another shot, and the bullet whistled by overhead. The barrier hadn’t held it back.

  “I beg your pardon, I was a bit hasty there,” I muttered. “How about going through the Twilight?”

  “The same problem as with the rocket,” Lermont explained. “The bullets are enchanted down to the second level.”

  “Let’s go through to the third.”

  “There’s a barrier on the third from here!” Lermont reminded me. I felt ashamed and said no more.

  The dark-skinned magician half-stood and hurled several spells into the corridor. I spotted Opium, Freeze, and Bugaboo. The reply was another shot. With that same precise, mechanical rhythm.

  “Foma, it’s a machine!” I said quickly. “It’s the same kind of machine that fired at me!”

  “So what? It’s protected against minor spells. Do you suggest blazing away with Fireballs, starting a fire, and bringing the bridge down on top of us?”

  No, Thomas the Rhymer wasn’t panicking or falling into despair. He was clearly trying to think of something. And he had to have some kind of plan. Only I didn’t want to hang about.

  Semyon stepped out of the portal that was still hanging in midair. He immediately squatted down and scrambled toward the barrier. Yes... sometimes experience is more important than Power.

  Somewhere far away, behind the walls and the doors, there was a scream that broke off on a high note.

  And sometimes fury is more important than experience.

  I slipped into the Twilight.

  First level. The décor seemed to have become real. The walls of plasterboard and plastic were now stone, there were dried stalks of some kind rustling under my feet. In the Twilight the interior of the building must have been constructed by human fantasy: Too many people had passed this way who sincerely believed in the rules of the game and had made themselves believe in dungeons.

  Dungeons and dragons.

  There was a little dragon with bristling red scales standing in the stone archway and blocking my way. The dragon came up to my shoulder. He was supporting himself on his back legs and a long tail, twisted into a corkscrew. His webbed wings were flickering nervously behind his back. The glowing, faceted eyes glared at me, the mouth opened and spat out a gobbet of flame.

  So that’s what you look like in the Twilight, Shooter I!

  I jumped to one side, tossing a Fireball at the little dragon. A very small fireball, so as not to cause any shocks in the real world.

  Then I went down to the second level.

  The dungeon hadn’t changed. But the dragon here was black and a little bit taller. His eyes were bigger, rounder, and darker, and he had acquired pointed ears that stuck up. The scales had changed into either coarse fur or chitinous spines that were pressed tight against his body. The jaws were extended forward. The wings had been transformed into small trembling legs.

  The mouth opened wide and a bundle of blue sparks flew out in my direction.

  I dodged and took a few more steps. And then, forgetting once again about the barrier, I stepped down on to the third level of the Twilight.

  At first it felt as if I had run into a wall—a flexible, springy, but impenetrable wall. But that sensation only lasted for a second.

  An instant later I found myself on the third level.

  And I immediately realized that this had to be connected with that scream of a dying human being I had heard before entering the Twilight.

  Someone had opened the barrier again. Opened it with someone’s living blood.

  But there wasn’t any little dragon here.

  I ran along the corridor without bothering to destroy the robot shooter. Lermont could handle that himself. The machine wasn’t going anywhere. It was more important for me to catch the killer. Whoever he might be—vampire, magician, sorcerer, a stranger or a former friend...

  This was clearly the central section of the Dungeons. The focus of the Power, the center of the vortex, the keyhole. The River of Blood—only here it looked like a ditch filled with bubbling black liquid as thick as pitch. A gleaming black table. And lying on it—a motionless body in a bloodstained white robe.

  It looked as if this time the person who had lost his life was one of the hired human personnel who worked for the Edinburgh Night Watch. One of the pathologists who did jobs for Lermont.

  Could Lermont really have left the Dungeons with no reliable guards? Without anyone to ambush raiders? Had he abandoned the people who trusted him to the whim of fate?

  A single glance back at the real world told me everything.

  He had left guards. And set up an ambush. But he had underestimated the strength of his enemy.

  I counted six bodies in the room. Three of the dead were raiders—in semi-military uniforms that didn’t belong to anyone’s army, with automatic weapons. The magazines of the guns glittered with the spells applied to the bullets. One of the others was a first-level Light Magician, almost torn in half by bursts of machine-gun fire at point-blank range. The magician’s unexpended Power was slowly oozing out of him in a cloudy white glow. The other two who had been shot were human—employees of the Night Watch. The protective amulets that had failed to save them sparkled brightly on their chests. They had also died with guns in their hands: They were still clutching pistols.

  How many attackers had there been? And how many had gone on past the third level?

  Before I had time to complete the thought, a gray shadow came flitting down through the Twilight from the first level to join me on the third. And Bruce appeared in front of me.

  The Master of the Edinburgh vampires looked in pretty poor shape. His chest had been ripped to shreds by bullets. He was breathing heavily, and his fangs glittered in his mouth.

  “Aha!” I exclaimed with such obvious delight that Bruce understood me straightaway.

  “Stop, Light One!” he howled. “I’m on your side! I came at Lermont’s request!”

  “And who shot you?”

  “The robot in the corridor!”

  I screwed up my eyes, tracing the vampire trail. Yes, the traces of the undead feet passed through the corridor, from the entrance to the Dungeons. He wasn’t responsible for the bloodbath.

  So this was who Lermont was counting on to defeat the automated gunman. It’s hard to kill someone who’s dead, even with charmed bullets.

  “Who is he?” I didn’t specify who I meant, but Bruce understood.

  “I don’t know! Not one of us! A stranger! He had about twenty people with him, but they’re all dead. And Lermont’s guards are dead!”

  “Let’s go after them,” I ordered.

  Bruce hesitated. He glanced at the body oozing blood. Unlike all the others, this man had died very recently, and his body existed on all levels of the Twilight at once. Death is very strong magic.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I warned him.

  “He doesn’t need it anymore,” Bruce muttered. “He doesn’t need it, but who knows who I still have to fight.”

  It was disgusting, and it was also true. But to hand a dead person over to a vampire to feed on...

  “If you drink the blood, the barrier will appear again,” I said, finally finding an argument in my favor. “Let’s go. You can hold out.”

  Bruce pulled a face, but he didn’t object. He hung his head low, as if he was about to ram into some barrier, and went to the fourth level.

  I slipped down after him.

  Bruce was standing there, holding his chest. He was shaking and there was naked fear in his eyes. There
was no one there apart from Bruce. Nobody and nothing—the Dungeons had disappeared. Just sand, gray and colored at the same time, just black boulders scattered about here and there... And a pink-and-white sky with no sun.

  “Anton... I can’t go any deeper.”

  “Have you been on the fifth level?”

  “No!”

  “Neither have I. Let’s go!”

  “I can’t!” the vampire howled. “Damn it, can’t you see that I’m dying!”

  “You’ve been dead for a long time!”

  Bruce shook his head so furiously, it seemed as if he wanted to screw it off his neck.

  If I’d had even the slightest suspicion that he was faking, I would have forced him to go down. Or finished him off forever.

  But going to the fourth level had clearly exhausted his final reserves of strength.

  “Go and get Lermont!” I ordered him.

  Clearly relieved, Bruce went dashing back the way he had come—the way a diver who is choking for breath hurtles upward out of the fatal depths.

  And I started looking for my shadow on the sand.

  It had to be there. I had to cast a shadow. I was going to find it.

  Otherwise something terrible was going to happen.

  For instance—Merlin would rise from the dead. And a Mirror Magician would come to the assistance of the Edinburgh Night Watch, which had already suffered heavy losses. And he would maintain the equilibrium come what may.

  The conjurer Egor.

  And that would be his blinding moment of glory—before he self-destructed, dissolved into the Twilight, and was cast into emptiness by the remorseless will of the Primordial Power.

  We had used plenty of people before, surely?

  I growled, taking a step forward. I shouldn’t be looking for this shadow on the sand. This shadow was inside me.