'So you wanted to play a game against the Dark? Play, then. You have everything you need. Enemies, friends, love, hate. Choose your weapon. Any of them. You already know what the outcome will be.'
Maybe I imagined the voice. Or maybe I really did hear it.
'You're killing yourself too!' I shouted. The holster was flapping against my body, begging to be noticed, begging me to take the pistol out and fire a swarm of little silver wasps at Maxim. As easily as I'd done it with my namesake.
He didn't hear me – he wasn't able to hear me.
Svetlana, you wanted so much to know where our barriers are, where the line runs that we mustn't cross when we fight the Dark. Why aren't you here now? You could have seen for yourself.
But there was no one anywhere near. No Dark Ones to revel in the sight of our duel. No Light Ones to help me, to jump on Maxim and pin him down, to put an end to our deadly dance in the Twilight. No one but a young kid and future Dark Magician, getting up clumsily off the ground, and an implacable executioner with a face of stone – a self-appointed paladin of the Light who'd sown as much Evil as a dozen werewolves or vampires.
I raked my fingers through the cold mist, gathering it into my hand, letting it soak into my fingers. And directed a little more power into my right hand.
A blade of white fire sprouted from it. The Twilight hissed and burned. I raised the white sword, a simple weapon, reliable. Maxim froze.
'Good or Evil,' I said, feeling a wry grin appear on my face. 'Come to me. Come, and I'll kill you. You might be lighter than Light, but that's not the point.'
With anybody else it would have worked. No doubt about it. I can imagine how it must feel to see a sword of fire appear out of nowhere for the first time. But Maxim came for me.
He took those five steps across the space between us. Calmly, not even frowning, without looking at the white sword. And I stood there, repeating to myself the words that I'd spoken so confidently out loud.
Then the wooden dagger slid in under my ribs.
In his lair somewhere far, far away, the head of the Day Watch burst out laughing.
I collapsed on to my knees, then fell on my back. I pressed my palm against my chest. It hurt, but so far that was all. The Twilight squealed indignantly at the scent of living blood and began to thin out.
This was terrible!
Or was this my only way out? To die?
Svetlana wouldn't have anyone to save now. She'd travel on along her long and glorious road, but some day even she would have to enter the Twilight for ever.
Did you know this was going to happen, Gesar? Is this what you were hoping for?
The colours came back into the world. The dark colours of night. The Twilight had rejected me, spat me out in disgust. I was half sitting, half lying on the ground, squeezing the bleeding wound with my hand.
'Why are you still alive?' Maxim asked.
That note of resentment was back in his voice, he was almost pouting. I felt like smiling, but the pain stopped me. He looked at the dagger and raised it again, uncertainly this time. The next moment Egor was there, standing between us, shielding me from Maxim. This time even the pain couldn't stop me from laughing.
A future Dark Magician saving a Light One from another Light One!
'I'm alive because your weapon is only good against the Dark,' I said. I heard an ominous gurgling sound in my chest. The dagger hadn't reached my heart, but it had punctured a lung. 'I don't know who gave it to you, but it's a weapon of the Dark. Against me it's just a sliver of wood, but even that hurts.'
'You're a Light One,' said Maxim.
'Yes.'
'He's a Dark One.' The dagger slowly turned to point at Egor.
I nodded and tried to tug the boy out of the way. He shook his head stubbornly and stayed where he was.
'Why?' asked Maxim. 'Tell me why, eh? You're Light, he's Dark . . .'
And then even he smiled for the first time, though it wasn't a very happy smile.
'Then who am I? Tell me that.'
'I'd say you're a future Inquisitor,' said a voice behind me. 'I'm almost certain of it. A talented, implacable, incorruptible Inquisitor.'
I smiled ironically and said:
'Good evening, Gesar.'
The boss gave me a nod of sympathy. Svetlana was standing behind him, and her face was as white as chalk.
'Can you hold on for five minutes?' the boss asked. 'Then I'll deal with your little scratch.'
'Sure I can,' I agreed.
Maxim was staring at the boss with crazy eyes.
'I don't think you need to worry,' the boss said to him. 'If you were an ordinary poacher, the tribunal would have you executed – you've got too much blood on your hands, and the tribunal is obliged to maintain a balance. But you're magnificent, Maxim. They can't afford to just toss someone like you away. You'll be set above us, above Light and Dark, and it won't even matter which side you came from. But don't get excited. That isn't power. It's hard labour. Drop the dagger!'
Maxim flung the weapon to the ground as if it was burning his fingers. This was a real magician, well beyond the likes of me.
'Svetlana, you passed the test,' the boss said, looking at her. 'What can I say? Grade three for self-control and restraint. No question.'
Using Egor for support, I tried to get up. I wanted to shake the boss's hand. He'd played the game his own way again. By using everybody who was there to be used. And he'd outplayed Zabulon – what a pity the Dark Magician wasn't there to see it! How I'd have liked to see his face, the face of the demon who'd turned my first day of spring into a nightmare.
'But. . .' Maxim started to say something, then stopped. He was overwhelmed by too many new impressions. I knew just how he was feeling.
'Anton, I was certain, absolutely certain that you and Svetlana could handle this,' the boss said gently. 'The most dangerous thing of all for a sorceress with the kind of power she's been given is to lose self-control. To lose sight of the fundamental criteria of the fight against the Dark, to act in haste or to hesitate for too long. And this is one stage of the training that should never be put off.'
Svetlana finally stepped towards me and took me gently by the arm. She looked at Gesar, and just for a moment her face was a mask of fury.
'Stop it,' I said. 'Sveta, don't. He's right. Today, for the very first time, I understood where the boundary runs in our fight. Don't be angry. This is only a scratch.' I took my hand away from my wound. 'We're not like ordinary people, we're a lot tougher.'
'Thank you, Anton,' said the boss. Then he looked at Egor: 'And thank you, too, kid. I really hate the idea that you'll be on the other side of the barricades, but I was sure you'd stand up for Anton.'
The boy tried to move towards Gesar, but I kept hold of his shoulder. It would be awkward if he blurted out his resentment. He didn't understand that everything Gesar had done was only a counter-move.
'There's one thing I regret, Gesar,' I said. 'Just one. That Zabulon isn't here. That I didn't see his face when the whole box of tricks fell apart.'
The boss didn't answer right away.
It must have been hard for him to say it. And I wasn't too pleased to hear it, either.
'But Zabulon had nothing to do with it, Anton. I'm sorry. He really didn't have anything to do with it at all. It was exclusively a Night Watch operation.'
Story Three
ALL FOR MY OWN
KIND
PROLOGUE
THE LITTLE man had swarthy skin and narrow eyes. He was the ideal prey for any militiaman in the capital, with his confused, slightly guilty smile and a glance that was both naïve and shifty at the same time. Despite the killing heat, he was wearing a dark suit, old-fashioned but hardly even worn, and as a finishing touch an ancient tie from the Soviet period. In one hand he was carrying a shabby, bulging briefcase, the kind agronomists and chairmen of progressive collective farms used to carry around in old Soviet movies, and in the other a string bag holding a long Central Asian melon.
The little man emerged from his second-class sleeper carriage with a smile, and he kept on smiling: at the female conductor, at his fellow travellers, at the porter who jostled him, at the stallholder selling lemonade and cigarettes. He raised his eyes and gazed in delight at the roof of Kazan Station. He wandered along the platform, occasionally stopping to adjust his grip on the melon. He might have been thirty years old or he might have been fifty. It was hard for a European eye to tell.
A minute later a young man got out of a first-class sleeper carriage in the same Tashkent–Moscow train, probably one of the dirtiest and most run-down trains in the world. He looked like the little man's complete opposite. Another Central Asian type, perhaps Uzbek, but his clothes were more in the modern Moscow style: shorts and a t-shirt, with a small leather bag and a mobile phone attached to his belt. No baggage and no provincial manners. He didn't stare at everything, trying to spot the fabled letter 'M' for 'Metro'. After a quick nod to the conductor of his carriage and a gentle shake of his head in response to the offers from taxi-drivers, two more steps saw him slipping through the bustling crowd of new arrivals, with an expression of mild distaste and alienation on his face. But a moment later he was entirely part of the crowd, indistinguishable from any of the healthy cells in the organism, attracting no interest from the phagocyte militiamen or the other cells beside him.
Meanwhile, the little man with the melon and the briefcase was pushing his way through the crowd, muttering countless apologies in rather poor Russian, looking this way and that with his head hunched between his shoulders. He walked past one underpass, shook his head and set off towards a different one, then stopped in front of an advertising hoarding where the crush was less fierce. Clutching his things clumsily against his chest, he took out a crumpled piece of paper and started to study it closely. From the look on his face he knew perfectly well he was being followed.
The three people standing next to a wall nearby were quite okay with that: a strikingly beautiful redhead in a slinky, clinging silk dress, a young man in punk clothes with a bored expression in eyes that looked surprisingly old, and a rather more mature, sleek-looking man with a camp manner and long hair.
'It doesn't look like him,' the young man with the old eyes said doubtfully. 'Not like him at all. I didn't see him for very long, and it was a long time ago, but. . .'
'Perhaps you'd like to ask Djoru, just to make sure?' the girl asked derisively. 'I can see it's him.'
'You accept responsibility?' There was no surprise or wish to argue in the young man's voice. He was just checking.
'Yes,' said the girl, keeping her eyes fixed on the little man. 'Let's go. We'll take him in the underpass.'
They set out unhurriedly, walking in step. Then they separated and the girl carried on walking straight ahead, while the men went off to each side.
The little man folded up his piece of paper and set off uncertainly for the underpass.
The sudden absence of other people would have surprised a Muscovite or a frequent visitor to the capital. After all, this was the shortest and easiest route from the metro to the platform of the mainline station. But the little man took no notice. He paid no attention to the people who stopped behind him as if they'd run into an invisible barrier and walked off to the other underpasses. And there was no way he could have seen that the same thing was happening at the other end of the underpass, inside the railway station.
The sleek man came towards him, smiling. The attractive young woman and the young man with an earring and torn jeans closed in on him from behind.
The little man carried on walking.
'Hang on, Grandpa,' the sleek man said in a friendly voice that matched his appearance – high-pitched, affected. 'Don't be in such a hurry.'
The Central Asian smiled and nodded, but he didn't stop.