Last Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненков

  “What are you doing, Light One?” howled the one who was a bit older. “Why did you bring these men here?”

  “Quiet,” I said, raising my hand. “Shut up!”

  He had enough sense to do as I said. “This situation comes under point one of the Appendix to the Great Treaty,” I said and Afandi grunted loudly. I gave him an angry sideways glance, but the old man had just swallowed an entire glass of cognac, and now he was breathing rapidly and pressing his hand to his mouth. I continued, “In this situation, under the terms of the Convention of Prague, as the most powerful magician here, I assume general command of all Others here present. All Others here present!”

  The young Dark One looked at his elder, who frowned, but nodded and said, “We await your orders, Higher One.”

  “Total evacuation of the Watches,” I said. “All documents and artifacts to be destroyed. Get to it.”

  “How are we going to get out?” the young Dark One asked. “Put up Shields?”

  I shook my head. ”I’m afraid they have charmed bullets. We have to leave via the Twilight.”

  “Oh, Afandi has been in the Twilight!” the old man declared loudly. “Afandi can walk in the Twilight!”

  “Afandi, you will go with me and Alisher,” I ordered. “The others-”

  Alisher looked at me in alarm and moved his lips soundlessly: “The deva…”

  “The others will cover us,” I ordered.

  “Why should we?” the young Dark One protested. “We-”

  I waved my hand, and the Dark One squirmed and squealed in agony, pressing his hands against his stomach.

  “Because I order it,” I explained, removing the pain. “Because I am a Higher Magician and you are fifth-level. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Appallingly enough, there wasn’t even a hint of indignation in the Dark One’s voice. He had tried to throw his weight about, been punished, and accepted my right to command because I was more powerful. Later, of course, he would write a whole bunch of complaints to the Inquisition. But for now he would obey.

  Meanwhile the other Watch members were destroying their offices. The older Dark One was working alone, but he seemed to have everything under control, the destruction spells having been applied to the safe in advance-there was smoke pouring out of the keyhole. And they had been applied to all the documents, too-the ones on the desk were curling up, turning yellow, and crumbling to pieces. The Light Ones were burning everything by hand, and they were doing it with real enthusiasm. I watched as Timur drove a deftly rolled Fireball straight through the metal wall of the safe and it exploded inside.

  “They’ve gone very quiet,” Alisher said anxiously, glancing out of the window. “They’ll see the smoke any minute…”

  They saw it, all right. A voice with a strong accent addressed us in Russian through a megaphone: “Terrorists! Lay down your weapons and leave the building one at a time! You are surrounded! If you do not comply, we will storm the building!”

  “What crazy nonsense!” Valentina Ilinichna exclaimed indignantly. “Terrorists, would you believe it!”

  A second later Alisher leaped back from the window and the glass shattered with a tinkling sound. A small metal cylinder fell to the floor, spinning around its axis.

  “Let’s leave!” I shouted, diving into the Twilight. After the heat of Samarkand, the coolness of the first level was actually quite pleasant.

  That very moment the gray gloom around me was lit up brightly. I didn’t even want to think about how blinding the flash must have been in the human world. Fortunately, from down there in the Twilight I couldn’t hear the earsplitting screech.

  I’d never thought that the Special Services’ light-and-sound grenades could be so devastating against Others. Only Valentina Ilinichna had managed to withdraw into the Twilight with me-in here she looked like a slim young woman no more than thirty years old.

  The other Watch members were still blundering helplessly around the office. Some were rubbing at their eyes, some were holding their ears. A light-and-sound grenade blinds you for ten to twenty seconds, so they couldn’t withdraw into the Twilight.

  “Help the boys!” I shouted to Valentina, and rushed to the doors. I flung them open in the Twilight, not the ordinary world, and looked outside.

  Yes, of course, they were already storming us. Clumsily and stupidly, en masse-there were dozens of Special Services men running toward the entrance, and the soldiers on the other side of the fence had started firing at the windows. The assault was uncoordinated, as it always is whenever somebody gets the clever idea of creating a joint unit of militiamen, common soldiers, and Special Services. I saw one of the Special Services men throw his hands up in the air and fall: He had taken a bullet in the back. He probably wouldn’t have anything worse than bruising; the troops in the assault wave were wearing bulletproof vests.

  But the fact that several marksmen started aiming their shots directly at me was very bad news. That was either Clear Gaze or True Vision. Which was very, very serious indeed. And the bullets really were charmed to the maximum. Not only did they exist in the real world and the first level of the Twilight at the same time, they were packed with deadly magic!

  I ducked. Fortunately, our enemies had not been accelerated and the advantage of speed remained with me. I waved my hand, allowing the Power to flow from my fingertips. A rain of fire fell on the earth and a wall of smoke and flame sprang up in front of the attackers. Right now, lads, are you ready to jump into the fire?

  They weren’t. They stopped (one was moving too fast and he stuck his face into the flames and jumped back with a howl), then they drew back and started raising their automatic rifles.

  Naturally, I didn’t wait for them to fire. I burst back into the house, on the way reducing the dubious Night Watch sign to cinders with a Fireball. The adrenaline was coursing through my veins.

  War games? All right, then, let’s play war games!

  I hung the Absolute Lock spell on the door (actually there are two of these spells, but the other one wouldn’t have had any effect if it was applied to an inanimate object). I hung a light Shield right across the walls, one that would hold against automatic fire for about five minutes. Of course, the attackers would notice that something was wrong. But there was no way that we could leave secretly now.

  The two Dark Ones entered the Twilight one after the other. They had been standing with their backs to the grenade when it exploded. The older one was about to strike the window with something, but I caught hold of his arm. “What have you got there?”

  He bared his long, crooked teeth in a grin. Well, well, an ordinary weak Dark Magician, but what a jaw he had sprouted now!

  “They’ll shit themselves. Just a little bit.”

  “Go ahead,” I agreed. “Only, not here. Cover your side!”

  Timur entered the Twilight, followed by Alisher, who was dragging Murat after him. Only Nodir was still rubbing his eyes, unable to recover his senses: He had been blinded worst of all.

  “Alisher, let’s get Afandi!” I shouted.

  We walked over to the old man, who was still sitting at the table, trying to suck on the mouth of a fresh bottle of cognac.

  “On the count of two,” I said. “One, two…”

  We leaped out of the Twilight, grabbed Afandi under the arms, and lifted him off his chair. With my free hand I managed to grab the bag with all my personal items and throw the strap across my shoulder. The bursts of automatic fire thundered in my ears and the bullets jangled as they ricocheted off the Shield, the crimson flames flickering outside the windows. With a deft movement, the old man managed to get one suck at the bottle-just at the moment when we dragged him into the Twilight.

  “Ai!” he exclaimed in disappointment. The bottle was left behind in the normal world, and Afandi’s hand closed on emptiness. “Ai, the drink’s disappearing.”

  “Granddad, we haven’t got any time for drink,” Alisher told him with incredible patience. “Enemies have attacked
us, we’re leaving!”

  “No surrender to the enemies!” Afandi exclaimed gleefully. “Into battle!”

  At long last Nodir also entered the Twilight. I looked around at my improvised army: four weak Light Ones, two weak Dark Ones, Alisher, who had been tested on the streets of Moscow, and Afandi as ballast. Well, it could have been worse. Even if those Higher Ones who had been in Scotland were hiding somewhere around here, we could give them a fight for their money.

  “Let’s leave!” I commanded. “Alisher, you take Afandi. Valentina, Timur-you go first. Everybody erect the Magician’s Shield!”

  We left straight through the wall. On the second level of the Twilight it wouldn’t have existed at all. On the first level it did exist, and it even seemed to slow down our movements. But if you took a running start, it was possible to pass through almost any material object down here.

  And we did pass through it. Only Afandi got one leg stuck, and he jerked it about in the wall for a long time before he broke free, leaving one sneaker behind. It would stay hanging there on the first level of the Twilight, slowly fading away over a period of several months. A few particularly sensitive people would even notice it out of the corner of their eye…provided, of course, that the building survived.

  On the side we broke out through, the cordon was thinner. Five men with submachine guns were staring at the blank wall, obviously puzzled about why they had been stationed there. But two of them turned out to be charmed, and they saw us. I don’t know what we looked like-ordinary people who leaped out through the wall or spectral shadows. In any case, there was no goodwill evident in the soldiers’ faces, only fear and the readiness to shoot. Valentina did the right thing: Her spell had no visible effect, but the fail-proof Kalashnikov in one soldier’s hands refused to fire. And then Timur hurled a Fireball through the Twilight and burned off the barrel of the other soldier’s automatic rifle.

  That was a mistake!

  Sure, those two couldn’t fire anymore. But their comrades, who couldn’t locate us themselves, saw the ball of flame come flying out of nowhere-and they started firing. Either out of sheer fright or because they had been trained to do it.

  At first I thought Timur hadn’t put up a Shield. The burst of fire literally cut straight through him: I saw the bullets leave holes in his back, one after another. He fell over on his back, and then I saw that he did have a Shield after all. A weak one, only at the front, but it was there.

  The enchanted bullets had pierced straight through his magical armor. It was the very same technique as in Edinburgh!

  “Tim!” Nodir shouted, bending down over his friend.

  That was what saved him-several bursts of fire from the soldiers blazing away erratically with their automatic weapons went right over his head.

  The next moment, before I could do anything to stop him, Murat struck back.

  The members of my group didn’t have a very wide choice of spells. As provincial magicians unused to combat and not naturally very powerful, they were quite unprepared for this skirmish with human beings who could kill Others.

  Murat used some version of the White Sword that I didn’t know. In theory this spell should only kill Dark Others and people who are totally given over to evil. In practice, you have to be a monk who spends his days in prayer and self-mortification for the remorseless blow not to cause you any harm. Any trace of aggression or fear makes a man vulnerable to the blade of pure Light.

  Those young Uzbek lads in military uniform had a limitless amount of fear and aggression in them.

  The white blade cut straight through four soldiers like a sharp scythe mowing down wheat. It literally sliced them in half, with fountains of blood and other unmentionable sights. The fifth soldier dropped his automatic weapon and took to his heels, screaming wildly. Even seen from the Twilight he seemed to be moving fast, he put on such a burst of speed!

  Murat was frozen to the spot. I walked around in front of him. The white blade was still fading away in his hand and he looked very calm, almost sleepy. I looked into his eyes and found the answer to my unasked question.

  It was over. He was already withdrawing. The death of four humans was too great a burden for his Light nature to bear.

  I squatted down beside Nodir and shook him by the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  He turned his face toward me and said in a surprised voice, “They killed Timur. They shot him!”

  “I can see. Let’s go.”

  Nodir started shaking his head. “No! We can’t leave him here…”

  “We can and we will! Our enemies won’t get their hands on the body, it will dissolve in the Twilight. We’ll all go that way sooner or later. Get up.”

  He shook his head again.

  “Get up. The Light needs you.”

  Nodir groaned, but he got up. And then his eyes fell on Murat. He shook his head again, as if he was trying to shake out the sudden overload of dark impressions. He dashed over to Murat and tried to grab hold of his arm.

  His fingers clutched nothing but air. Murat was melting away, dissolving into the Twilight. Far more quickly than Timur’s dead body would disappear. A Light Magician has to have a lot of experience in life in order to convince himself that he had the right to kill four people. I could probably have held out. Murat couldn’t.

  “Let’s go!” I ordered, giving Nodir a slap across the face. “Let’s go!”

  Somehow he managed to pull himself together and plod along behind me-away from the office, which was still being stormed, away from two comrades, one dead and one dying. Valentina walked in front, with the Dark Ones beside her. Alisher was dragging along Afandi, who had sobered up and calmed down. Nodir and I brought up the rear of the procession.

  They started firing after us again-the screams of the soldier who had survived the White Sword had attracted attention. I raised another Wall of Flame and, unable to resist, flung a small Fireball at the old Peugeot by the fence. The car flared up in a jolly blaze, adding a little French charm to the Central Asian landscape.

  The confusion that had set in made it easier for us to retreat. Moreover, in the Twilight there were gaping holes in the low fence, and the next building didn’t exist at all. We ran down the deserted street as far as the crossroads and turned onto another narrow street that led to the market. It seemed that sooner or later every street here led to the market… Nodir was sobbing and swearing by turns. Afandi kept looking back, gazing in amazement at the battle raging around the empty building. It looked as if the attackers had started firing at one another in their confusion.

  The Dark Ones were holding up better. Valentina Ilinichna was walking in the center, and they were providing perfectly competent lateral protection. I actually thought that we had already escaped pursuit. And that was an unforgivable mistake for a Higher Magician to make. Or almost unforgivable.

  After all, I had never really believed that devas existed.

  The European tradition is golems-creatures created out of clay, wood, or even metal. In Russia the wooden ones are known affectionately as pinocchios, although the last actual operational pinocchio rotted away sometime in the eighteenth century. We don’t know what their contemporaries used to call them. We were taught to create pinocchios in our classes and that was both amusing and instructive-the wooden doll that came to life could walk, perform simple work, even talk…and it crumbled into dust after only a few minutes. For a wooden golem to last even a few days, the magician has to be very powerful and very skillful, and experienced magicians don’t really have much use for dimwitted pinocchios. Bringing metal to life, making a creature of metal, is even harder. I remember that Sveta once made a walking doll out of paper clips for little Nadya, but it took exactly three steps, and then froze forever. Clay is remarkably malleable and amenable to animation; it holds the magic for a long time, but even clay golems are not made very often nowadays.

  In the East, though, there were devas. Or rather, it was believed that there were. Essentially, they’re golems to
o, only without any material basis-animated clumps of the Twilight, intertwined vortices of Power. According to legend, creating such a deva (the Arabs usually called them genies) was regarded as an examination that a magician had to pass to be acknowledged as Higher Level. First you had to create the deva, then you had to subordinate it to your will. Some were eliminated at the first stage, but a far sadder fate awaited those who screwed things up at the second.

  I thought devas were creatures of legend. Or, at the very most, an extremely rare experiment that one of the greatest magicians of antiquity had managed to pull off once or twice. And even less did I imagine that devas still existed in our own times. However, the members of the local Watches seemed to believe in them.

  Only, they didn’t have the Power to spot a deva approaching.

  The young Dark One-I never did learn his name-screamed and started flailing his arms about, as if he was trying to fight off something invisible. He was lifted up off the ground and carried through the air until he stopped, shouting and squirming, from as high up as a two-story house. I shuddered as I watched the Dark One’s sides collapse as if from the pressure of a gigantic hand, and his clothes start to char. His scream became a feeble wheeze.

  And then a bloody streak appeared on the Dark One’s body in the form of an arc. A moment later the dead body fell to the ground, cut-or rather, bitten-right through.

  “Shields!” Alisher shouted.

  I didn’t increase the strength of my own Shield. In the first place, I didn’t know if it would be any use to me against the deva. And in the second, I was the only one who could stand up to the creature.

  I instantly sank down to the second level of the Twilight.

  And immediately I saw the deva.

  The flexible body woven out of plumes of fire and smoke really did resemble a mythical genie. The predominant color was gray-even the petals of flame were blackish-gray, with just the faintest hint of crimson. The deva didn’t have any legs; its torso narrowed and became a snake’s body that writhed as it moved along. The ground underneath it steamed like damp laundry under an iron. The head, the arms, and even the genitals that protruded absurdly from the serpentine half appeared completely human. But they were huge-the deva stood five or five and a half meters tall-and they were made of smoke and flame. The eyes blazed with a scarlet fire-the only bright detail on its body-or in the entire second level of the Twilight.