Nightwatch w-1

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  «I’ll be back.» He started walking toward the door quickly, hoping to avoid any questions.

  «Maxim! Maxim, wait!»

  The transition from abuse to entreaty was instantaneous. Lena dashed after him, grabbed him by the arm, and looked into his face—wretched, desperate.

  «I’m sorry, forgive me; I was so frightened! I’m sorry for saying all those stupid things, Maxim!»

  He looked at his wife—suddenly deflated, all her aggression spent. She’d give anything now to stop her depraved, lousy husband from leaving the apartment. Could Lena have seen something in his face—something that had frightened her even more than the gangland shoot-out they’d got mixed up in?

  «I won’t let you go! I won’t let you go anywhere! Not at this time of night!»

  «Nothing’s going to happen to me,» Maxim said gently. «Quiet, you’ll wake the kids. I’ll be back soon.»

  «If you won’t think about yourself, then at least think about the children! Think about me!» said Lena, changing her tack. «What if they remembered the number of the car? What if they turn up here looking for that bitch? Then what will I do?»

  «Nobody’s going to turn up here.» Somehow Maxim knew that was true. «And even if they do, it’s a strong door. And you know who to call. Lena, let me past.»

  His wife froze in the middle of the doorway with her arms flung out wide and her head thrown back. Her eyes were screwed up as if she were expecting him to hit her.

  Maxim kissed her gently on the cheek and moved her out of the way. Her expression was totally confused as she watched him go out into the hallway. She could hear terrible, noisy music coming from her daughter’s room. She wasn’t sleeping, she’d turned on her cassette deck to drown out their angry voices, Lena’s voice.

  «Don’t!» his wife whispered imploringly.

  He slipped on his jacket, checking quickly to make sure everything was in place in the inside pocket.

  «You don’t think about us at all!» Lena told him in a choking voice, speaking purely out of inertia, no longer hoping for anything. The music was turned up in her daughter’s room.

  «That’s not true,» Maxim said calmly. «It’s you who I am thinking about now. I’m taking care of you.»

  He didn’t want to wait for the elevator. He’d already walked down one flight of steps when his wife’s final shout came. It was unexpected—she didn’t like to air their dirty laundry in public and she never quarrelled in the entrance.

  «I wish you’d love us, not just take care of us.»

  Maxim shrugged and started walking faster.

  This was where I’d stood in the winter.

  It was all just the same: the lonely alley, the noise of the cars on the road behind me, the pale light from the streetlamps. Only it had been much colder. And everything had seemed so simple and clear, I was like a fresh, young American cop going out on my first patrol.

  Enforce the law. Hunt down Evil. Protect the innocent.

  How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideals of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there’s more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys—carefully, so there are no marks.

  And all for the sake of those simple rules.

  Enforce the law. Hunt down Evil. Protect the innocent.

  I’d had to come to terms with all this too.

  I walked to the end of the narrow brick alley and scuffed a sheet of newsprint with my foot. This was where the unfortunate vampire had been reduced to ashes. He really had been unfortunate; the only thing he’d done wrong was to fall in love. Not with a girl-vampire, not with a human being, but with his victim, his food.

  This was where I’d splashed the vodka out of the bottle and scalded the face of the woman who’d been handed over to feed the vampires by us, the .

  How fond the Dark Ones were of repeating the word «Freedom!» How often we explained to ourselves that freedom has its limits.

  And that’s probably just the way it ought to be. For the Dark Ones and the Light Ones who simply live among ordinary people, possessing greater powers than they have, but with the same desires and ambitions, for those who choose life according to the rules instead of confrontation.

  But once you got to the borderline, the invisible borderline where the watchmen stood between the Darkness and the Light… It was war. And war is always a crime. In every war there will always be a place not only for heroism and self-sacrifice, but for betrayal and backstabbing. It’s just not possible to wage war any other way. If you try, you’ve lost before you even begin.

  And what was this all about, when you got right down to it? What was there worth fighting for? What gave me the right to fight when I was standing on the borderline, in the middle, between the Light and the Darkness? I had neighbors who were vampires! They’d never killed anyone—at least Kostya hadn’t. Other people, ordinary people, think they are decent folks. If you judged them by their deeds, they were a lot more honest than the boss or Olga.

  Where was the boundary line? Where was the justification? Where was the forgiveness? I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t have anything to say, not even to myself. I drifted along, went with the flow, with the old convictions and dogmas. How could they fight all the time, those comrades of mine, the Night Watch field operatives? What explanations did they offer for their actions? I didn’t know that either. But their solutions wouldn’t be any help to me anyway. It was every man for himself here, just like the Dark Ones’ slogans said.

  The worst thing was I could tell that if I failed to understand, if I couldn’t get a fix on that borderline, then I was doomed. And it wasn’t just me. Svetlana would die too. She’d get embroiled in a hopeless attempt to save her boss. The entire structure of the Moscow Watch would collapse.

  If I didn’t get the one thing right.

  I went on standing there for a while, with my hand propped against the dirty brick wall. Obsessing, chewing things over, trying to find an answer. There wasn’t one. That meant it was destiny.

  I walked across the quiet little courtyard to the «house on stilts.» The Soviet skyscraper made me feel strangely despondent. There was no reason for it, but the feeling was very clear. I’d felt the same thing before, riding past abandoned villages and crumbling grain elevators in a train. A sense of wasted effort. A punch flung too hard, connecting with nothing but the air.

  «Zabulon,» I said, «if you can hear me…«

  Calm. The usual calm of a late evening in Moscow—car engines roaring, music playing somewhere behind the windows, empty streets.

  «There’s no way you can have covered every single possibility,» I said, speaking to the empty air. «Just no way. There are always forks in the road. The future isn’t determined. You know that. And so do I.»

  I set out across the road without looking right or left, taking no notice of the traffic. I was on a mission, right?

  The sphere of exclusion.

  A streetcar screeched to a halt on the rails. Cars braked and skirted around an empty space with me at its center. Nothing else existed for me now, only that building where we’d done battle on the roof months before, the darkness, those bright flashes of an energy that human eyes couldn’t see.

  And that power, visible to so few, was on the increase.

  I was right, this was the eye of the hurricane. This was the place they’d been leading me to all this time. Great. Now I’d arrived. So you didn’t forget that shameful little defeat after all, Zabulon? You haven’t forgotten the way you were slapped down in front of your minions.

  Apart from all his exalted g
oals—and I understood that for him they were exalted—the Dark Magician cherished another burning desire. Once it had been a simple human weakness, but now it had been increased immeasurably by the Twilight.

  The desire for revenge. To get even.

  To play the battle out all over again.

  This is a trait all you great magicians have, Light and Dark—you’re bored with ordinary battle, you want to win elegantly . To humiliate your opponent. You’re bored with simple victories; you’ve had plenty of those already. The great confrontation has developed into an endless game of chess. Gesar, the great Light Magician, was playing it when he assumed someone else’s appearance and took such delight in taunting Zabulon.

  But for me the confrontation still hadn’t turned into a game.

  And maybe that was exactly where my chance lay.

  I took the pistol out of its holster and clicked the safety catch off. I took a deep, deep breath as if I were about to dive into the water. It was time.

  Maxim could sense that this time it would all be over quickly.

  He wouldn’t spend all night lying in wait. He wouldn’t spend hours tracking down his prey. This time the flash of inspiration had been too bright. More than just a sense of an alien, hostile presence—a clear direction to the target.

  He drove as far as the intersection of Galushkin Street and Yaroslavskaya Street and parked in the courtyard of a high rise. He watched the black flame glimmering as it slowly moved about inside the building.

  The Dark Magician was in there. Maxim could already feel him as a real person; he could almost see him. A man. His powers were weak. Not a werewolf or a vampire or an incubus. A straightforward Dark Magician. The level of his powers was so low, he wouldn’t cause any problems. The problem was something else.

  Maxim could only hope and pray that this wouldn’t keep happening so often. The strain of killing creatures of Darkness day after day wasn’t just physical. There was also that absolutely terrible moment when the dagger pierced his enemy’s heart. The moment when everything started to shudder and sway, when colors and sounds faded away and everything started moving slowly. What would he do if he ever made a mistake? If he killed someone who wasn’t an enemy of the human race, but just an ordinary person? He didn’t know.

  But there was nothing he could do about that, since he was the only one in the whole wide world who could tell the Dark Ones apart from ordinary people. Since he was the only one who’d been given a weapon—by God, by destiny, by chance.

  Maxim took out his wooden dagger and looked at the toy with a heavy heart, feeling slightly confused. He wasn’t the one who’d whittled this dagger; he wasn’t the one who’d given it the highfalutin name of a «misericord.»

  They were only twelve at the time, he and Petka, his best friend, in fact his only friend when he was a child and—why not admit it?—the only friend he’d ever had. They used to play at knights in battle—not for very long, mind you; they had plenty of other ways to amuse themselves when they were kids, without all these computer games and clubs. All the kids on the block had played the game for just one short summer, whittling swords and daggers, pretending to slice at each other with all their might, but really being careful. They had enough sense to realize that even a wooden sword could take someone’s eye out or draw blood. It was strange how he and Petka had always ended up on opposite sides. Maybe that was because Petka was a bit younger and Maxim felt slightly embarrassed about having him as a friend and the adoring way he gazed at Maxim and trailed around after him as if he were in love. It was just a moment in one of the battles when Maxim knocked Petka’s wooden sword out of his hands—his friend had hardly even tried to resist—and cried: «You’re my prisoner!»

  But then something strange had happened. Petka had handed him this dagger and said that the valiant knight had to take his life with this dagger and not humiliate him by taking him prisoner. It was a game, of course, only a game, but Maxim had shuddered inside when he pretended to strike with the wooden dagger. And there had been one brief, agonizing moment when Petka had looked at Maxim’s hand holding the dagger where it had halted, just short of the grubby white T-shirt, and then glanced into his eyes. And then he’d blurted out: «Keep it, you can have it as a trophy.»

  Maxim had been happy to accept the wooden dagger. As a trophy and as a present. But for some reason he’d never used it in the game again. He’d kept it at home and tried to forget about it, as if he felt ashamed of the unexpected gift and his own sentimentality. But he’d never, ever forgotten about it. Even when he grew up and got married and his own first child had started to grow, he’d never forgotten about it. The toy weapon always lay in the drawer with the albums of children’s photographs, the envelopes with locks of hair, and all the other sentimental nonsense. Until the day Maxim first felt the presence of Darkness in the world.

  It was as if the wooden dagger had summoned him. And it had proved to be a genuine weapon, pitiless, merciless, invincible.

  But Petka was gone now. They’d grown apart when they were still young: A year is a big difference for children, but for teenagers it’s a massive gulf. And then life had separated them. They’d still smiled at each other whenever they met and shaken hands, even enjoyed a drink together a few times and reminisced about their childhood. Then Maxim had got married and moved away and they’d almost completely lost contact. But this winter he’d had news of Petka, purely by chance, from his mother—he phoned her regularly, just like a good son should, in the evening. «Do you remember Petya? You were such good friends when you were children, quite inseparable.»

  He’d remembered. And he’d realized immediately where an introduction like that was leading.

  He’d fallen to his death from the roof of some high rise, though God only knew what he’d been doing up there in the middle of the night. Maybe he’d deliberately committed suicide, or maybe he’d been drunk—only the doctors had said he was sober. Or maybe he’d been murdered. He had a job in some commercial organization that paid well; he used to help his parents and drive around in a good car.

  «He was probably high on drugs,» Maxim had said sternly. So sternly, his mother hadn’t even tried to argue. «I suppose so; he always was strange.»

  His heart hadn’t contracted in sudden pain. But for some reason that evening he’d got drunk and killed a woman he’d been trying to track down for two weeks, a woman whose Dark power forced men to leave the women they loved and go back to their lawful wives, an old witch who forced people together and forced them apart.

  Petka was gone. The boy he’d been friends with had already been gone for many years, and now Pyotr Nesterov, the man he’d seen once a year or even less often, had been gone for three months. But Maxim still had the dagger Petka had given him.

  There must have been some special reason for it, that awkward childhood friendship of theirs.

  Maxim toyed with the wooden dagger, rolling it from one hand to the other. Why was he so alone? Why didn’t he have a friend beside him to lift at least part of the burden off his shoulders? There was so much Darkness all around, and so little Light.

  For some reason Maxim recalled the last thing Lena had shouted at him as he was leaving: «I’d wish you’d love us, not just take care of us.»

  «But isn’t that the same thing?» thought Maxim, mentally parrying the thrust.

  No, it probably wasn’t. But what was a man to do when his love was a battle fought against Evil, not for Good?

  Against the Darkness, not for the Light.

  Not for the Light but against the Darkness.

  «I’m the guardian,» Maxim said to himself in a low voice, as if he were too timid to say it out loud. Only schizos talked to themselves. And he wasn’t a schizo, he was normal. He was better than normal; he could see the ancient Evil creeping and crawling into the world.

  Was it creeping in, or had it already made its home here a long, long time ago?

  But this was madness. He mustn’t, he absolutely mustn’t allo
w himself to doubt. If he lost even a part of his faith, allowed himself to relax or start searching for non-existent allies, then he was finished. The wooden dagger would no longer be a luminous blade driving out the darkness. The next magician would reduce it to ashes with his magic fire, a witch would cast a spell on it, a werewolf would tear it to shreds.

  The guardian and the judge!

  He mustn’t hesitate.

  The patch of Darkness moving about on the ninth floor suddenly started moving downward. His heart started beating faster: The Dark Magician was coming to keep his appointment with destiny. Maxim climbed out of the car and glanced rapidly around him. As usual, some secret thing inside him had driven everyone away from the scene and cleared the battlefield.

  Was it a battlefield? Or a scaffold?

  Guardian and judge?

  Or executioner?

  What difference did it make? He was serving the Light!

  The familiar power flooded into his body. Holding his hand inside the flap of his jacket, Maxim walked toward the entrance, toward the Dark Magician who was coming down in the elevator.

  Quickly, everything had to be done quickly. It still wasn’t quite night yet. Someone might see. And no one would ever believe his story; the best he could possibly hope for would be the madhouse.

  Call out. Give his name. Pull out his weapon.

  Misericord. Mercy. He was the guardian and the judge. The knight of the Light. And not an executioner!

  This courtyard was a battlefield, not a scaffold.

  Maxim stopped outside the door into the building. He heard steps. The lock clicked.

  He felt so wronged; he could have howled out loud in horror and screamed curses at the heavens for his destiny and his great gift.

  The Dark Magician was a child.

  A skinny, dark-haired little boy who looked quite ordinary—except for the quivering halo of Darkness that only Maxim could see.

  But why? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Maxim had killed women and men, young and old, but he’d never come across any children who’d sold their souls to the Darkness. He’d never even thought about it, maybe because he hadn’t wanted to accept the idea that it was possible, or maybe because he’d been avoiding making any decisions in advance. He might have stayed at home if he’d known his next victim would be only twelve years old.