Last Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненков

  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, looking 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 decor 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 wa
s 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.

  I was lashed by an icy wind-and I fell through to the fifth level of the Twilight.

  And landed facedown in green grass.

  There was a cold, fitful wind blowing. The sunlight filtered through the purple clouds, as heavy as snow clouds, that were drifting across the sky. The rolling plain, covered with tall, prickly grass, extended all the way to the horizon. Somewhere in the distance there was thunder rumbling and lightning flashing-flashing the wrong way, from the earth up into the sky, up into those purple clouds.

  I stood up and swallowed hard-my ears were blocked. The usual oppressive sensation of the Twilight-the creeping weariness, the desire to get back out into the real world as quickly as possible-had disappeared. The fifth layer turned out to be energetically balanced. But when my eyes had adjusted and I looked more closely, it was obvious that the colors around me lacked real vitality. The grass was green, but pale. The clouds were more dove-gray than purple. Even the flashes of lightning were strangely subdued; they didn’t sear the retinas of my eyes.

  But even so…it looked as if it was possible to live here.

  I looked around me. And I saw the Guard in the flattened grass.

  It was a golem-a creature made of clay and brought to life by magic. A rare sort of thing; nobody has made them for a long, long time. A golem was a medieval robot that they sometimes put to work, but more often they were created to guard things.

  Only the classic golem looked like a clay man, and he was brought to life by means of runes inserted in a special opening (when it came to this detail, the magicians’ sense of humor usually plumbed the depths).

  But the golem in front of me was a snake. Something like a clay anaconda ten meters long, as thick as the torso of a grown man, with two rapaciously grinning heads-one at each end of its body. Its skin was reddish-gray, like a badly fired brick. The golem’s eyes were open, and it was the eyes that frightened me most of all. They were absolutely human.

  But then, why shouldn’t they be, if the golem had been made by Merlin?

  Exactly halfway along the snake’s trunk there was a slim section with a small hollow in it, about the size of an open hand. And lying in that hollow was a square, gray stone, covered with half-effaced Celtic writing.

  Yes, a strange golem: The Rune didn’t bring it to life, it killed it.

  Or rather, it rendered the snake motionless-if the baleful glint in its eyes was anything to go by.

  I looked around again. There was no one there apart from me and the motionless golem. The grave-robber had already gone deeper.

  Right, then!

  I summoned the battle spells up out of my memory-all the most powerful things that I had learned and had sufficient Power for-and teed them up for rapid use. I had to be ready to go into battle at any moment. Provided, of course, that I managed to get any deeper…

  “Wait, Anton!”

  Three figures materialized out of the blue-Lermont, Semyon, and a black man I didn’t know. Lermont was literally dragging Semyon and the black man after him, holding them by the arms. Oh, he was powerful, all right!

  “What a lovely place!” Semyon said in delight, gazing around. “Ooh…So this is where…”

  He spotted the golem and stopped. Then he walked across and gave it a cautious kick. He shook his head. “Ooh…what a massive beast… Did you bring it down, Anton?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple to bring down,” I said, pointing to the Rune. Then, turning to Foma, I said, “Shall we move on?”

  “Can you manage it?”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  Lermont shook his head doubtfully. He glanced at his subordinate and said, “You can’t go any further. I brought you along because of this…ugly brute. But there’s no way you can go on. Wait for as long as you can and then go back.” Lermont heaved a deep sigh-and dissolved into thin air.

  I took a step forward.

  Nothing.

  Another step. And another, and another.

  “It’s not working, then?” Semyon asked sympathetically.

  What was this? I’d broken through to the fifth level, and it was absolutely calm here, but I couldn’t get any lower!

  A step. Another step. Where’s that shadow?

  “Anton…,” said Semyon, shaking me by the shoulder. “Anton, stop. Y
ou’re just wasting your strength.”

  “I’ll get through,” I whispered. “I have to…”

  “You don’t have to do anything. Lermont’s got the experience. He’ll handle everything.”

  I shook my head from side to side, trying to relax. I’d gotten to this level using my anger…maybe I could get to the next one if I was calm, peaceful? All I was facing was a kind of watershed: a thin film of surface tension between worlds, a borderline beyond which the vital Power began to increase. The first level was practically dead, dried out, sterile. The second was a little more alive. The third and fourth already began to resemble our world. The fifth…the fifth was almost fit to live in. There were already colors here and although it was cold, it wasn’t so cold that you would freeze. Grass grew here, there was rain and strange, violent storms. What would there be on the sixth level? I had to understand the place I was trying to break into. Was it a glacial world, a dying world? A place where it would be hard to breathe, difficult to walk or talk?

  No. The sixth level wouldn’t be like that. It would be even more colorful than the fifth. Even more alive. Even closer to the real world.

  I nodded along with my thoughts…

  And stepped from the fifth level to the sixth.

  It was night there. Perhaps not a summer night, but it was still warm. I couldn’t see a single star in the sky above my head, but there was a moon. Not a strip of gray dust in the sky, like on the first level. Not the three tiny colored moons that shone on the second level. An absolutely normal moon, perfectly familiar to the human eye.

  But not a single star. The stars are not for Others.

  Under the white spotlight of the moon, the world seemed completely real. The trees were real, alive, with leaves that rustled in the wind. There was a smell of grass and burning… I suddenly realized that this was the first time I had ever smelled anything in the Twilight. No doubt, if I chewed on a grass stalk, I would actually taste the bitter juice…

  But what was burning?

  I turned around and saw Lermont. But I didn’t see him as a stout, middle-aged gentleman. I saw him in his Twilight form.