Last Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  The modern-day bey’s face dissolved into a broad smile.

  The two young guys accompanying him—either bodyguards or distant relatives—stared at me suspiciously. In the Twilight my hastily applied mask as Timur had fallen away, and this unfamiliar Russian who was walking toward their boss with his arms held out wide naturally made them wary.

  “Ah, how long it’s been!” I shouted. “My father’s old friend!”

  Unfortunately, he was about twenty years older than me. Otherwise I could have gotten away with the “old school friend” line, or “Remember our times in the army, brother!” But then, in recent years, the “times in the army” approach had worked less and less often: The mark was simply unable to figure out how he could possibly have served in the army with you when he had “honestly” bought his way out of military service with a bundle of greenbacks from the good old USA. Some people had even developed a serious neurosis as a result.

  “Son of my old friend!” the man howled, opening his arms wide to embrace me. “Where have you been all this time?”

  The important thing at this point is to give the other person just a little bit of information. He’ll invent the rest for himself.

  “Me? I’ve been living in Mariupol with my grandmother!” I told him. “Oh, how glad I am to see you! You’re such a big man here now!”

  We hugged each other. The man had a delicious smell of shashlik and eau de cologne. Except that there was rather too much eau de cologne.

  “And what a fine car you have!” I added with a glance of approval at the Toyota jeep. “Is that the one you wanted to sell me?”

  A melancholy expression appeared in the man’s eyes, but Bosom Buddies gave him no choice. Never mind, he ought to have been happy that Gesar had equipped us so generously for our journey. Otherwise I would have asked him to give me the Toyota.

  “But... it’s...” he protested sadly.

  “Here!” I opened my bag, took out four wads of dollars, and thrust them into his hand. “Now, the keys, please, if you don’t mind. I’m really in a hurry!”

  “It... it’s worth more than that... ,” the man said in a wretched voice.

  “But I’m taking it secondhand!” I explained. “Right?”

  “That’s right,” he admitted, speaking slowly.

  “Uncle Farhad!” one of the young men exclaimed in bewilderment.

  Farhad gave him a strict glance, and the youth fell silent.

  “Don’t interrupt when your elders are talking, don’t shame me in front of the son of my old friend!” Farhad barked. “What will the son of my old friend think?”

  The young guys were in a panic, but they kept quiet.

  I took the keys out of the man’s hands and got into the driver’s seat. I breathed in the fresh smell of the leather upholstery and glanced at the dashboard. Yes, the car was definitely secondhand. According to the odometer, it had traveled three hundred kilometers.

  I waved to the three men who had been left with forty thousand dollars instead of their means of transport. Then I drove out onto the road and said, “Everybody leave the Twilight!”

  Alisher and Afandi appeared on the empty backseat.

  “I would have given him a little more happiness,” said Alisher. “So he wouldn’t suffer too much afterward. He looks pretty spiteful, not a very good man, but even so...”

  “More spells only make a screwup all the more likely,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s all right. I paid him fair and square. He’ll survive.”

  “Are we going to wait for Edgar?” Alisher asked. “Or look for the Light Ones?”

  I’d already thought about these choices and rejected them.

  “No, there’s no point. Let’s make straight for the hills. The farther we are from people, the quieter it’ll be.”

  Alisher took my place at the wheel when it started getting dark. We had been driving south from Samarkand, toward the Afghan border, for three hours. Just as twilight fell, the asphalt road had given way to an appallingly bad dirt track. I moved to the backseat, where Afandi was snoring peacefully, and decided to follow the old man’s example. But before I dozed off, I took several battle amulets out of my bag.

  Novices are often fond of all sorts of magical wands, crystals, and knives, either made by their own hand or charged by a more powerful magician. Even a weak and inexperienced magician can achieve a quite astounding effect if he prepares an artifact with loving care and pumps it full of Power. The problem is that this effect—powerful, prolonged, and precise—is a one-off. You can’t attach two different spells to the same object. A magic wand intended to belch out flame will cope magnificently with its task, even in the hands of a weak Other. But if his opponent guesses what is happening and raises a defense against fire, the wand and its miraculous flames are useless. It can’t freeze, dry, or stand someone on his head. You can either use the fire that’s available, or hammer away with the wand as if it were a club. It’s no accident that weak magicians who have dealings with people (and it’s precisely the weak magicians who interfere in human affairs or involve people in their own) have always used a magical staff—a hybrid of the usual wand and a long club. Some of them, to be honest, have been far more skillful with the club than at using magic. I remember how all of us in the Watch went to the Pushkin movie theater for the premiere of Lord of the Rings. Everything was fine until the Light Gandalf and the Dark Saruman started fighting each other with their magic staffs. The two rows filled with Others broke into genuinely Homeric laughter. Especially the trainees, who had it drilled into them every day that a magician who relied on artifacts was simply an idle show-off, more interested in appearances than efficiency. A magician’s power lies in his skill in using the Twilight and spells.

  But of course there are exceptions to every rule. If an experienced magician has managed to foretell the future, no matter how—by skillful analysis of the lines of probability, or simply from his own experience—then a charged artifact is quite indispensable. Are you certain that your opponent is a werewolf, who cannot manipulate Power directly and relies on physical strength and speed? One accelerating amulet, one pendant with a Shield that is activated at close quarters, one simple wand (many prefer to charm an ordinary pencil—wood and graphite make an excellent accumulator for Power) with a freezing spell. And there you are! You can quite confidently send a seventh-level magician off to hunt down a Higher Werewolf. The Shield will repulse the attack, the amulet will lend the magician’s movement quite incredible speed, and the temporal Freeze will transform the enemy into a motionless bundle of fur and fury. Call for transport, and he’s ready for shipping to the Inquisition.

  The artifacts in my bag were far more valuable than the money lying beside them. And they had been prepared by Gesar in person... well, perhaps not prepared, but at least selected from the special stores in the armory. I could be sure that they were powerful and that they would be useful. I suddenly remembered an old Australian cartoon film that I had seen when I was a kid, Around the World in Eighty Days. In that cartoon, the coolheaded English gentleman Phileas Fogg, who was attempting to set a new record for traveling around the world, seemed like a cunning fortune-teller who always knew what he would need in the hours ahead. If he took a wrench, a stuffed opossum, and a bunch of bananas with him in the morning, then by the time evening came, the stuffed animal had plugged a leak in the side of a ship, the wrench had braced shut a door that his enemies were trying to break down, and the bananas had been given to a monkey in exchange for a ticket on a steamship. All in all, it was very much like a computer game in the “quest” genre, where you find you have an effective use for every item.

  Artifacts from Gesar could be used for their designated purpose or in some entirely unexpected way. But whatever happened, some use was usually found for them.

  I laid the twelve items out on the seat between me and the sn
oring Afandi, and I studied them carefully. I should have done this earlier, but I hadn’t taken them out at home because I didn’t want to attract Nadya’s attention. I hadn’t felt like fiddling with magical artifacts on the plane, either, and after that there simply hadn’t been time. Wouldn’t it be annoying if I discovered one of the amulets was a weapon against golems!

  Two portable battle wands, each no longer than ten centimeters. The first was made out of ebony—fire. The second was made out of a walrus tusk—ice. Well, they were both commonplace and useful. I’d managed without them so far, but anything could happen.

  Four silver rings with protective spells. That was a very strange set! The standard magician’s Shield protected against everything, you just had to feed it with energy. An Other didn’t often need protective rings. And here I had specific protection against fire, ice, acid... and vacuum. At first I couldn’t believe what I’d seen through the Twilight. I studied the last ring carefully. No, I was right! If the pressure suddenly dropped, the ring started to work and held the air around the person wearing it.

  That was strange. Of course, there were several battle spells that suffocated the enemy, some by removing the air from around him. The things that had been thought up in thousands of years of warfare! But as far as I knew, nobody actually used these whimsical and slow spells in battle.

  Four bracelets. At least it was quite clear what they were for! Four different spells that forced a man or an Other to tell the truth. If Rustam got really stubborn, all I had to do was say “Tell me the truth,” and the ancient magician would be struck with a blow of absolutely monstrous Power. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  The final two amulets were rather less ordinary, both in appearance and content, and had quite clearly been prepared by Gesar himself for this mission of ours. The first was a SIM card for a cell phone, in a little plastic box. An ordinary card, but pumped full of magic. I studied it for a while, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then I decided to experiment: I took my own card out of my phone and put the one charged with magic in its place.

  It didn’t make any sense! It was a copy of my own SIM card! But what for? So I wouldn’t have to waste money on calls to Moscow? What raving nonsense!

  I thought for a while and then asked Alisher to call my number. Strangely enough, the phone still worked there.

  My phone rang immediately. Everything was OK, it really was a copy of my SIM, but it had been treated with magic for some reason... I shrugged and decided to leave the card in my phone. Maybe it coded the calls in some clever magical way? But I’d never heard of any magic like that before.

  The final amulet was a small stone rolled smooth by the sea, with a hole in it—something I’d once heard was called a “chicken god.” Human superstition believes it brings good luck. A cunningly woven silver chain that looked like a thick, twisted thread ran through the hole.

  In itself, of course, a “chicken god” doesn’t bring any good luck, but that doesn’t stop children from searching enthusiastically for them on the seashore and then wearing them on a string around their necks. This stone, however, had been enchanted with a complex spell that partially resembled the Domination. Was that for the conversation with Rustam too? I thought about it for a while and then hung the chain around my neck. It couldn’t do any harm... .

  All I still had to do was distribute the rings and the wands. I didn’t think about that for too long either. I nudged Afandi awake and asked him to put on the rings. He exclaimed “Ah!” in delight, put the rings on his left hand, admired them—and nodded off again.

  I gave the wands to Alisher, and he put them in the breast pocket of his shirt without saying a word. They stuck out like Parker or Mont Blanc ball-point pens, no less elegant and almost as deadly. I say almost because a single stroke of a boss’s pen could kill more people than those battle wands ever could.

  “I’ll get some sleep,” I told Alisher.

  He didn’t say anything for a while. The jeep was slowly making its way up the rocky track, which had been climbed by donkeys far more often than by four wheels. The beams of the headlights swung from left to right and right to left, alternately picking out a steep rocky cliff and a sheer drop with a river roaring at the bottom.

  “Sleep,” said Alisher. “But take a look at the probability lines first. The road’s really bad.”

  “I wouldn’t even call it a road,” I said. I closed my eyes and looked into the Twilight. Into the immediate future, where the sinuous, interwoven lines of probability led.

  I didn’t like the picture I saw. There were too many lines that broke off abruptly and ended at the bottom of the ravine.

  “Alisher, stop. You’re too exhausted to drive through the mountains in the dark. Let’s wait until morning.”

  Alisher shook his head stubbornly. “No, I can sense that we have to hurry.”

  I could sense that too, so I didn’t argue.

  “Shall I drive?” I suggested.

  “I don’t think you’re any wider awake than I am, Anton. Give me a blast, will you?”

  I sighed. I don’t like using magic to drive away sleep and tiredness, to sharpen the senses. Not because of the negative consequences (there aren’t any; get a good sleep afterward, and you’re fine). That’s not the problem. The problem is that very soon you stop relying on your usual senses and start using a constant feed of magical energy, walking around hyped-up all the time, like a manic-depressive in the manic phase. Everything you do goes well, and you’re a welcome guest in any company, a bright spark, a jester. But sooner or later you get used to it, you want to be even livelier, even wittier, have even more energy. You increase the flow of Power stimulating your nerves. And so it goes, until you discover that you’re spending all the Power that you are capable of processing on maintaining an artificial level of vivacity. And you are simply afraid to stop.

  Addiction to magic is no different from ordinary drug addiction. Except that only Others suffer from it.

  “Give me a blast,” Alisher asked me again. He stopped the car, put on the hand brake, threw his head back, and closed his eyes.

  I put one hand on his face and the other on the short-cropped top of his head and concentrated. I imagined the stream of Power moving through my body and starting to seep out through my palms, soaking into Alisher’s head, running along his nerves like cold fire, sparking across the synapses, jolting every neuron... No special spells were needed, I was working with pure Power. The most important thing here was a clear understanding of the physiological process.

  “That’s enough,” Alisher said in a fresher voice. “That feels really good. I’d just like a bite to eat.”

  “Just a moment.” I leaned over the seat into the hatchback. My instincts had not misled me: There were two boxes of cola in plastic bottles and several boxes of chocolate bars. “Will you have some cola?”

  “What?” Alisher exclaimed. “Cola? Sure! And I’ll have some of those bars too! God bless America!”

  “Isn’t that a bit too much just for inventing a sickly sweet lemonade substitute and highly calorific candy?”

  Instead of answering, Alisher pressed a button on the stereo console and a second later the speakers started playing a rhythmic sequence of chords.

  “It’s for the rock-and-roll, too,” he said imperturbably.

  We sat there awhile eating chocolate bars and washing them down with cola. All Others have a sweet tooth. Still snoring, Afandi smacked his lips and reached out his hand. I put a chocolate bar in his fingers that were now decorated with the rings. Afandi munched the candy bar without waking up. He carried on snoring.

  “We’ll be there at three o’clock,” Alisher told me. “Are we going to wait until morning?”

  “The night is our time,” I replied. “We’ll wake old man Rustam up. He doesn’t work very hard anyway.”

&nb
sp; “It’s strange,” said Alisher. “Odd. Does he live there like a hermit, in a cave?”

  “Why do you think that?” I asked, and pondered for a moment. “Maybe he grazes goats or sheep. Or he keeps bees up in the mountains. Or he has a weather station.”

  “Or an observatory for watching the stars... What was that strange ring you put on Afandi’s hand?”

  “You mean the one with the ruby? Protection against a vacuum.”

  “Very exotic,” said Alisher, sucking on his plastic bottle. “I can’t remember a case of an Other being killed in a vacuum.”

  “I can.”

  Alisher said nothing for a few seconds, then he nodded and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Does it still bother you?”

  “We were friends... almost. As far as a Light One and a Dark One can be.”

  “Not just a Dark One. Kostya was a vampire.”

  “He never killed anyone,” I said simply. “And it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t grow up as a human being. Gennady made him a vampire.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His father.”

  “What a bastard.”

  “Don’t be so quick to judge. The boy wasn’t even a year old when he ended up in the hospital. Double pneumonia and allergies to antibiotics. Basically, the parents were told that their son wouldn’t survive. You know, there are some wonderful doctors who shouldn’t even be allowed to practice as vets, for the poor cows’ sake: ‘Your little boy’s going to die, prepare yourselves for that. You’re still young, you can have another child... .’ Of course, they couldn’t have another. Kostya was Gennady’s posthumous child. After initiation, vampires retain the ability to impregnate and conceive for quite a long time; it’s one of nature’s strange jokes. But they can only have one child. After that, the vampire becomes sterile.”