Last Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненков

  All I could do was shake my head.

  “Ah, screw them anyway,” Galya declared. And she began slowly leaning down, reaching out for my lips with her own, giving Jean a chance to stare…I daren’t even think at what!

  But he stared.

  “Get ready,” Galya whispered. The girl’s eyes were serious and tense. But she still touched my lips-and sparks of mischief glinted in her eyes.

  She transformed instantly into a she-wolf. Crudely, horribly, scattering drops of blood and scraps of skin around her, wasting no time on morphing properly. Then she flung herself around and leaped at the killer like a shaggy black shadow.

  He started to shoot at the same moment that I flung two Triple Blades, one after another.

  The first cut off the hand that had been holding the gun and also gouged out a chunk of his body. I didn’t realize where the second blade had gone at first. I leaped to my feet and jumped toward the she-wolf writhing on the floor. Her body had taken all the bullets that were intended for me. Not very many-only five or six. If only they hadn’t been charmed.

  Jean stood up, swaying on his feet. He looked at me with wild, insane eyes.

  “Who sent you?” I shouted, hitting him with a Domination, the spell of absolute obedience.

  Jean shuddered and tried to open his mouth-and his head flew apart into three pieces. So now I knew where my second blade had hit him.

  The body swayed and slumped to the floor beside the wolf-girl. Blood pulsed out of its arteries.

  If she had been a vampire, and not a werewolf…

  I leaned down over her and saw that she was transforming back into a human being.

  “Don’t you dare! You’ll die!”

  “I’ll die anyway,” she said in a clear voice. “I don’t want to die…as an animal…”

  “You’re not…”

  Instantly there was a note of irony in her voice. “Silly…Light One…”

  I stood up. My hands were covered in blood and there was blood squelching under my feet. The killer’s headless body was shuddering convulsively.

  “What’s happening here-” Semyon froze in the doorway. He ran his hand over his face and swore.

  His other hand was holding two plastic bags. One had bottles in it. The other probably had scarves.

  “What’s happening? Nothing,” I said, looking at the dead girl. “It’s all over.”

  I bought the magnet for Zabulon in Edinburgh Airport while Lermont and Semyon were rebooking the tickets. We now only needed two seats in the cabin of the plane and one ticket for an item of nonstandard freight-a long wooden box that had been treated with spells. One of them was to protect the contents against decomposition. Another was to persuade the customs men that there was no need to check the box, since it was being used to transport harmless skis.

  The magnet was banal but beautiful: a Scotsman in a kilt, with bagpipes. I put it in my pocket, then stood in front of the display of postcards for a while. I chose one with a photograph of the castle and put it in my guidebook to Great Britain. I didn’t have any reason to send it to Lera-yet. But I hoped very much that sooner or later I would be able to keep the promise I had made to Victor’s girlfriend.

  Semyon was unusually quiet. He didn’t reminisce about the way airplanes used to look at the dawn of the aviation industry, he didn’t crack any jokes. We walked through the customs and passport checks and took our seats on the plane. Semyon took out a flask of whisky and glanced at me inquiringly. I nodded. We each took a mouthful straight from the flask, earning ourselves a disapproving glance from the flight attendant. She immediately went off to her little cubbyhole and came back with glasses and a few little bottles, which she handed to Semyon without saying a word.

  “Don’t feel sorry for her,” Semyon said gently. “Dark Ones will always be Dark Ones. She would have grown up into a monster. Most likely.”

  I nodded. He was right, of course. Even a “silly Light One” like me had to understand that…

  I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I realized that I’d even forgotten to check the probabilities to see if the plane was in any danger of crashing. Ah…what difference did it make? People flew all the time without worrying if anything bad was going to happen. I could try that too.

  “I checked the probability lines,” Semyon said. “We leave ten minutes late, but we arrive on time. There’s a tail wind. Lucky, that, isn’t it?”

  I opened the little plastic bag, put the disposable earphones in my ears, and stuck the jack into the socket hidden in the arm of my seat. I pressed the buttons to select a channel and stopped when I heard a familiar song:

  Do not lose what has been given,

  Do not regret what has been lost.

  This boy at the doorway to heaven

  Is weary of sighing and tears.

  But he can see straight through you,

  And he won’t sing us any psalms.

  He will ask us only one question—

  Did we live and did we love…

  Did we live and did we love…

  Did we live and did we love…

  Story Two

  A Common Enemy

  Prologue

  THE FIRE SAFETY INSPECTOR JABBED HIS FINGER IN THE DIRECTION OF THE incense stick smoking in its stand.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Opium,” the young woman replied dreamily.

  There was a sudden silence in the accounts office. The inspector’s face broke out in red blotches.

  “I’m not joking. What is it?”

  “A joss stick. It’s Indian. It’s called opium.” The young woman looked around at her colleagues and added self-consciously: “But that’s only a name, you mustn’t think…There isn’t really any opium in it!”

  “At home you can smoke opium or cannabis, or anything else you like,” said the inspector, ostentatiously nipping his fingers together and extinguishing the small smoldering stick. “But here…you’re surrounded on all sides by nothing but paper.”

  “I keep an eye on it,” the young woman objected resentfully. “And it’s in a special stand, see? The ash falls on the ceramic base. It’s a nice smell, everyone likes it…” she went on in a gentle, reassuring voice, in the same tone adults use when talking to a little child.

  The inspector was about to say something else, but just then the middle-aged woman who was sitting facing all the other bookkeepers intervened. “Vera, I’m sorry, but the inspector is quite right. It’s a very sickly smell. By the time evening comes, it gives you a headache.”

  “In India the windows are probably always kept wide open,” a third woman put in. “And they burn their fragrances all the time. It’s terribly dirty there; there are always cesspits somewhere close by, and everything rots very quickly, because of the climate. They have to smother the stench somehow. But what do we need it for?”

  A fourth girl, the same age as Vera, giggled and stuck her face in the screen of her computer.

  “Well…you should have said!” Vera exclaimed. Her voice sounded tearful. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t want to offend you,” the older woman replied.

  Vera jumped to her feet, covered her face with her hands, and ran out into the corridor. Her heels clattered on the parquet flooring, and the door of the restroom slammed in the distance.

  “We had to tell her sooner or later,” the middle-aged woman said with a sigh. “I’m really sick of smelling those sticks of hers. It’s always opium, or jasmine, or cinnamon…”

  “Do you remember the chilis and cardamom?” the young girl exclaimed. “That was really horrible!”

  “Don’t make fun of your friend. You’d better go and bring Vera back; she’s much too upset.”

  The young girl willingly got to her feet and left the room.

  The inspector gazed around at the women with a wild expression. Then he glanced at the man beside him-a young, plump individual wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Beside the inspector in his respectable unifor
m, the man looked very untidy.

  “This is a madhouse,” the inspector declared. “Nothing but breaches of the fire safety code everywhere I look. Why haven’t you been closed down yet?”

  “I’m surprised at that myself,” the other man agreed. “Sometimes when I’m walking to work, I wonder, What if it’s all over now? What if they’ve put an end to the whole mess and from now on we’re going to work according to the fire safety regulations, without breaking a single rule-”

  “Show me the fire-safety board on the second floor,” the inspector interrupted, looking at his plan of the building.

  “Gladly,” said the man, opening the door for the inspector and winking at the women they were leaving behind in the office.

  The inspector’s indignation was lessened a bit by the sight of the board. It was brand-new and very neat and tidy, painted red. Two fire extinguishers, a bucket of sand, an empty conical-shaped bucket, a spade, a gaff, and a crowbar.

  “Well, well. Well, well, well,” the inspector murmured as he glanced at the buckets and checked the date when the extinguishers were last refilled. “The good old-fashioned kind. I didn’t really expect that.”

  “We make an effort,” said his guide. “When I was still in school, we had one just like that on the wall.”

  The inspector turned his plan around and thought for a moment.

  “And now let’s take a look at…at your programmers.”

  “Yes, let’s,” the other man said brightly. “That’s upstairs, follow me…”

  At the foot of the stairs he stepped aside to let the inspector go first. He turned back and glanced at the fire safety board, which faded and then dissolved into thin air. Something fell to the floor with a quiet sound. The man smiled.

  The visit to the programmers gave the inspector another reason to be indignant. The programmers (two young women and one young guy) were blithely smoking at their workstations, and the wires from the computers were twisted into terrible tangles (the inspector even crawled under one desk and checked that the sockets were grounded). When they came back down to the first floor fifteen minutes later, the inspector walked into an office with the strange title DUTY POINTSMAN on the door and laid his papers out on the desk. The young man acting as his guide sat down facing him and watched with a smile as the inspector filled in his report form.

  “What sort of nonsensical title is that you have on the door?” the inspector asked without looking up from what he was doing.

  “Duty pointsman? He has to deal with anything that turns up. If some inspector or other calls, if the drains burst, if someone delivers pizza or drinking water-he has to handle everything. Something between a receptionist and an office manager. It’s a boring job; we take turns to do it.”

  “And just what is it that you do here?”

  “Is that really any business of the fire safety service?” the man asked thoughtfully. “Well…we guard Moscow against manifestations of evil.”

  “You’re joking!” said the inspector, giving the duty pointsman a dour look.

  “Not at all.”

  A middle-aged, Eastern-looking man walked in without knocking on the door. The duty pointsman quickly got to his feet as he entered.

  “Well, now, what have we got here?” the newcomer asked.

  “One item left in the accounts office, one in the toilet, one in the fire safety board on the second floor,” the duty pointsman replied eagerly. “Everything’s in order, Boris Ignatievich.”

  The inspector turned pale.

  “Las, we haven’t got a fire safety board on the second floor,” Boris Ignatievich observed.

  “I created an illusion,” Las replied boastfully. “It was very realistic.”

  Boris Ignatievich nodded and said, “All right. But you didn’t notice the other two bugs in the programmers’ room. I think this is not the first time our guest has combined the duties of fire inspector and spy…am I right?”

  “What do you think you’re-” the man began, and then stopped.

  “You feel very ashamed of carrying out industrial espionage,” said Boris Ignatievich. “It’s disgusting! And you used to be an honest man…once. Do you remember how you went to help build the Baikal-Amur Railroad? And not just for the money. You wanted the romantic dream, you wanted to be part of some great effort.”

  Tears began running down the inspector’s cheeks. He nodded.

  “And do you remember when you were accepted into the Young Pioneers?” Las asked cheerfully. “How you stood in line, thinking about how you would devote all your strength to the victory of Communism? And when the group leader tied your tie for you, she almost touched you with her big, bouncy tits…”

  “Las,” Boris Ignatievich said in an icy voice. “I am constantly amazed at how you ever became a Light One.”

  “I was in a good mood that day,” Las declared. “I dreamed I was still a little boy, riding a pony…”

  “Las!” Boris Ignatievich repeated ominously.

  The duty pointsman fell silent.

  The silence that followed was broken by the fire safety inspector’s sobbing. “I…I’ll tell you everything… I went to the Baikal-Amur Railroad to avoid paying alimony…”

  “Never mind that,” Boris Ignatievich said gently. “Tell us about being asked to plant bugs in our office.”

  Chapter 1

  “I THINK YOU CAN GUESS WHY I’VE GATHERED YOU ALL TOGETHER,” Gesar said.

  There were five of us in the boss’s office. Gesar himself, Olga, Ilya, Semyon, and me.

  “What’s to guess,” Semyon muttered. “You’ve gathered all the Higher and first-level Others. Svetlana’s the only one missing.”

  “Svetlana’s not here because she’s not on the staff of the Night Watch,” Gesar said, and frowned. “I’ve no doubt that Anton will tell her everything. I won’t even attempt to forbid it. But I won’t connive at breaches of the rules, either… This is a meeting of the Night Watch top management. Ilya, I have to warn you straightaway that some of what you hear will be new to you, and under normal circumstances you would never have heard it. So you must not talk about it. Not to anyone.”

  “What exactly is ‘it’?” Ilya asked, adjusting his spectacles.

  “Probably…probably everything that you are about to hear.”

  “A bit more than just ‘some of it,’” Ilya said with a nod. “Whatever you say. If you like, I’m willing to accept the mark of the Avenging Fire.”

  “We can dispense with the formalities,” said Gesar. He took a small metal box out of his desk and began rummaging in it. Meanwhile I carried on looking around with my usual curiosity. What made the boss’s office so interesting was the huge number of little items that he kept because he needed them for his work or simply as souvenirs-though it was hard to say which was which. Something like Pliushkin’s bins in Gogol’s book Dead Souls, or a child’s box in which he keeps his most cherished “treasures,” or the apartment of some absentminded collector who’s always forgetting what it is he actually collects. And the most amazing thing was that nothing ever disappeared; even though there was almost no space left in the cabinets, new exhibits were added all the time.

  This time my attention was caught by a small terrarium. It didn’t have a lid, and there was a piece of paper glued to its side, bearing the letters “OOO” (or the numbers 000). Standing inside the terrarium was a stupid little toy made in China -a small plastic toilet, with a tarantula squatting on it in a regal pose. At first I thought the spider was dead or made of plastic, but then I noticed its eyes glinting and its mandibles moving. There was another spider crawling across the glass walls-fat and round, looking like a hairy ball with legs. Every now and then the spider stopped and spat a drop of green venom onto the glass, clearly aiming at something outside. At the same time something showered down off the spider into the terrarium. There were some other spiders moving around on the bottom, greedily reaching out their legs to catch the treat. The fortunate ones who managed to grab something beg
an jumping up and down for joy.

  “Interested?” Gesar asked, without looking up.

  “Uh-huh… What is it?”

  “A simulation. You know I like to study self-contained social groups.”

  “And what does this simulation represent?”

  “A very interesting social structure,” Gesar said evasively. “In its basic form it should have become the traditional jar of spiders. But here we have two principal spiders, one of whom has taken up a dominant position by climbing onto a high point, while the other is acting as if he is providing protection against external aggression and caring for the members of the community. As long as the dominant spiders remain active, this simulation can continue to function with minimal internal aggression. I just have to spray the inhabitants with beer every now and then to relax them.”

  “But doesn’t anyone ever try to climb out?” Ilya asked. “There’s no lid…”

  “Only very rarely. And only the ones who get fed up with being a spider in a jar. In the first place, the illusion of conflict is constantly maintained. And in the second place, the experimental subjects regard being in the jar as something out of the ordinary.” Gesar finally took some object out of his box and said, “All right, that’s enough of the small talk. Here is the first thing for you to think about. What is it?”

  We stared in silence at the gray lump of concrete that looked as if it had been chipped out of a wall.

  “Don’t use magic!” Gesar warned us.

  “I know,” Semyon said guiltily. “I remember that incident. A radio microphone. They tried to put it in here in the fifties…or was it the sixties? When we were the ‘Nonferrous Mining Equipment Assembly Trust.’ Some bright guys from the KGB, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Gesar. “Back then they were very keen on looking for spies, and on a sudden impulse they decided to check us. We had provoked certain suspicions…It was a good thing that we had our own eyes and ears in the KGB. We organized a campaign of misinformation, certain vigilant comrades managed to get others rebuked for the pointless squandering of expensive equipment…and what about this?”