The Day Watch (28 page)

The only fundamental difference between us and the Twilight moss is that we’re able to think and move about.

And we don’t use accumulated Power simply for nourishment.

The Call led me along Tverskaya Street, away from the Kremlin, toward the Belorussian railroad station. I walked along, all alone in the evening crowd, as if I’d been singled out, chosen. And I had been chosen-by the Call.

Nobody saw me, nobody noticed me. Nobody was interested in me-not the girls warming themselves up in the automobiles, not their pimps, not the tough-looking young guys in the foreign cars pulled up at the curb. Nobody.

A right turn. Onto Strastnoi Boulevard.

The Call was getting stronger. I could feel it-that meant the encounter would be soon.

The herds of automobiles tore through the driving, sticky snow, the fine snowflakes dancing whimsical roundelays in the beams of their headlights.

Cold and dusk. Moscow in winter.

The snow settled in an even layer on the paths of the boulevard and on the benches that were empty at this time of year, and on the bushes, and on the railings that separated the roadway from the pedestrian park area.

They tried to grab me halfway toward Karetny Ryad.

The spell of isolation seemed to fall from the sky-ordinary people just lost interest in what fate had in store for the boulevard, the cars carried on rushing past, minding their own business, the small number of pedestrians who were nearby faltered for a moment and then wandered away, even if they had been moving toward me.

The Light Ones slid out of the Twilight one after another. Four of them. Two magicians and two shape-shifters, already in battle form. A massive polar bear as white as snow and a tigress with bright ginger stripes.

I was almost flattened when the magicians struck together from both sides. But they had underestimated their quarry-the blow had been calculated for the old me, the one that would have submitted to the Call.

I had already become someone else.

Mentally parting my hands, I halted the walls that were about to come together and envelop me. I halted them, drew in Power, and pushed them away from myself. Not very hard.

I don’t know what a tsunami looks like-I’ve never seen one-but it was the first thing that came to mind when I examined the result.

The Light magicians’ walls, which had appeared so monolithic and impregnable only a second earlier, crumpled like rice-paper partitions. Both magicians were swept away, tossed onto the snow, and dragged about ten meters across the ground, and only the railings fencing the park off from the road prevented them from falling under the wheels of the cars. A cloud of powdery snow flew up into the air.

The Light Ones probably realized that they couldn’t take me with just magic, so then the shape-shifters came rushing at me in their animal forms.

I hurriedly drew more Power from wherever I could, and immediately there was a dull thud on the road, followed by the tinkle of broken glass, then another thud, followed by the ear-splitting screech of car horns.

I took the bear’s impact on a Concave Shield and sent him tumbling away along the boulevard. At first I simply dodged the tigress.

I’d taken a dislike to her from the very beginning.

I don’t know where shape-shifting magicians get the mass for transformation. In her human form this girl couldn’t have weighed more than forty-five or fifty kilos. But now she was at least a hundred and fifty kilos of muscles, sinews, claws, and teeth. A genuine combat-killing machine.

The Light Ones like that.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Wait. Maybe we can talk?”

The magicians were back on their feet, and they made another attempt to snare me, but it didn’t cost me much of an effort to tie the greedy, trembling threads of energy into knots and fling them back at their owners. Both shots hit their targets again, but this time no one was sent skidding onto his back-I had simply returned their own energy. The bear stood on one side, shifting his weight menacingly from one foot to the other. He was hunching up, as if he were about to stand on his hind legs.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” I told him, and struck at the attacking tigress.

Not too hard. I didn’t want to kill her.

“Just what is the damn problem?” I shouted angrily. “Or is this just the way things are done in Moscow?”

Calling the Night Watch would have been stupid-my attackers served in the Watch themselves. Maybe I should get help from the Day Watch? Especially since it was no real distance-their office was very near and I could be there in a flash. But would it do me any good?

The magicians weren’t about to give up; one was holding a flaming wand charged up to the hilt, and the other had some kind of restraining amulet that looked pretty powerful too.

It took an entire two seconds to deal with the amulet-I had to tear apart the net that was cast over me with an ordinary Triple Dagger-but the amount of Power that went into that extremely simple spell was enough to reduce the entire center of Moscow to ashes. Then the second Light magician hit me with the Fire of Bethlehem, but his blow only made me angry and, I think, even stronger.

I froze his wand. Simply turned it into a long icicle and put a spell of rejection on it. Fragments of ice spurted out of the Light One’s hands like some weird, cold firework display, and at the same time the liberated energy went soaring up into the heavens.

I couldn’t really dump on the people around us, could I? I’d already done enough damage with those collisions on the nearby intersections…

The bear stayed put. Apparently he’d realized that, despite their numerical superiority, the balance of Power was far from equal. But the tigress just wouldn’t stop. She came for me with all the aggression of a crazed female animal when an enemy gets too close to her young. Her eyes blazed with unconcealed hatred, as yellow as the flames on church candles.

The tigress was taking revenge. Taking revenge on me, a Dark One, for all her old grudges and losses. For Andrei, who had been killed by me. And who knows for what else… And she didn’t intend to stop for anything.

I don’t want to say she had nothing to avenge-the Watches have always fought, and I’m not in the habit of mincing words. But I didn’t intend to die.

I’m free. Free to punish anyone who gets in my way and refuses to resolve things peacefully. Wasn’t that what the song had been trying to tell me?

I struck out at her with the Transylvanian Mist.

The tigress’s body was twisted and stretched, and even above the roar of engines and the piercing beeping of horns I heard the crunching of bones quite clearly. The spell crumpled the shape-shifter the same way a child crumples a plasticine figure. The broken ribs tore through the skin and their bloody ends thrust into the snow. The head was squashed into a flat, striped pancake. In an instant the beautiful beast was transformed into a tangled mess of bloody flesh.

With a final, calculated blow, I consigned the tigress’s soul to the Twilight.

Once I’d begun, I had no right to stop.

The Light Ones froze. Even the bear stopped stamping his feet.

And what now? I thought wearily.

Maybe I would have had to kill them all, but thank heaven-or hell-it didn’t come to that.

“Day Watch!” I heard a familiar voice say. “An attack on a Dark One has been registered. Leave the Twilight!”

Edgar spoke sternly and without any Baltic accent.

But he needn’t have said that about the Twilight. Those who were alive hadn’t been fighting in the Twilight, and the tigress had nowhere to come back to.

“The Day Watch demands that a tribunal be convened immediately,” Edgar said ominously. “And in the meantime be so good as to summon the chief of the Night Watch.”

“Why, he’ll scatter all of you like kittens,” one of the Light magicians said angrily.

“No, he won’t,” Edgar snapped and pointed at me. “Not with him here. Or haven’t you got the point yet?”

I just barely caught the movement as someone shuffled Power in space. Then a swarthy man with pointed features appeared nearby. He was wearing a colorful Eastern robe and he looked totally absurd in the middle of the snowy boulevard.

“I’m already here,” he barked, mournfully surveying the scene of the recent battle.

“Gesar!” Edgar said in a more lively voice. “Hello. In the chiefs absence you will have to explain yourself to me.”

“To you?” said Gesar, glancing sideways at the Estonian. “You’re not worthy.”

“Then to him,” said Edgar, shrugging his shoulders and shuddering as if he felt cold. “Or is he not worthy either?”

“No, I’ll explain myself to him,” Gesar said coolly and turned toward me. His gaze was as bottomless as eternity.

“Get out of Moscow,” he said with almost no emotion at all. “Right now. Catch a train or ride a broomstick, but just clear out. You’ve already killed twice.”

“As I see it,” I remarked as amicably as I could, “certain other individuals have attempted to kill me. And all I did was defend myself.”

Gesar turned his back to me-he didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to speak to a Dark One who had dispatched one of his best warriors into the Twilight forever.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to his people.

“Hey, hey!” Edgar protested angrily. “They’re criminals, they’re not going anywhere, in the name of the Treaty I forbid it!”

Gesar turned back toward the Estonian. “Yes they are. And you can’t do anything about it. They’re under my protection.”

I was seriously expecting a hike up onto the next step because the powers that I already had were enough for me to realize I couldn’t go head to head with Gesar yet. He’d crush me. Not without an effort-after all, I’d already come a long way up the invisible stairway. My powers were pretty strong. But he’d still crush me.

But nothing happened. Probably the time hadn’t come yet for me to fight Gesar.

Edgar gave me a plaintive glance-apparently he’d been hoping for great things from me.

The Light Ones slipped away into the Twilight, taking with them the remains of their dead sister-in-arms, and then they dived deeper, to the second level. It was over.

“I really can’t stop him,” I admitted guiltily. “Sorry, Edgar.”

“A pity,” the Estonian said, with just his lips.

They took me to the Day Watch office in the trusty BMW-for the first time in Moscow I was feeling tired.

But still as free as before.

I paid the price for using so much Power-I can barely remember how they drove me back, urged me toward the elevator, led me to the office, sat me in an armchair and stuck a cup of coffee in my hand. I had a painful ache in my overworked muscles, an ache in my entire being, which just a short while ago had been commanding the

powers of the Twilight. I’d beaten them off with convincing skill-it would be a long time before the Light Ones forgot this battle. And my attackers hadn’t been young novices either-I reckoned that both Light Ones had been first-level magicians at least.

“Give the analysts a kick up the backside,” Edgar ordered one of his subordinates. “I want to find out at last what’s going on.”

I glanced at him, and Edgar realized I was coming around.

“Talk to me!” he said.

“A Call!” I said in a hoarse voice and started to cough. I tried to take a sip of coffee, burned myself, and hissed in pain. “A Call,” I said when I could talk again. “They caught me while I was sleeping.”

“A Call?” Shagron echoed in surprise. He was sitting in an armchair like mine at the next desk. “The Light Ones haven’t used that for about thirty years…”

“They caught you with a Call in the Day Watch building?” Edgar asked suspiciously. “That’s really something!

And you mean no one else noticed anything?”

“No. It was a very subtle call, aimed with masterly precision and camouflaged as natural background noise from the residential floors.”

“And you submitted to it?”

“Of course not.” I made another attempt to take a sip of coffee, this time successfully. “But I decided to investigate what the Light Ones were up to.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Edgar was balancing halfway between disbelief and annoyance. “That was a crazy risk…”

“If I’d gone trailing after the Call with backup, they’d have spotted it in a moment,” I explained. “No, I had to go alone and without cover. So I did. They tried to grab me on Strastnoi Boulevard and I had to fight them off. I knocked the tigress down two or three times and tried to persuade her to stop, and it was only after that I hit her really hard.”

Edgar stared at me without blinking.

“You’re a dark horse, Vitaly,” he said.

“Yes, Dark,” I confirmed happily. “They don’t come any Darker.”

“Are you a magician beyond classification?” he asked.

“Alas, no,” I said, spreading my hands-but slowly, so as not to spill the coffee. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have let Gesar go.”

Edgar drummed his fingers on the desk, squinting sideways impatiently at the door.

“What are those analysts doing…” he muttered.

The door opened and a brisk middle-aged woman, a witch, appeared in the doorway, with two men, both magicians.

“Hello, Anna Tikhonovna,” Shagron greeted her hastily. He ought to have been more powerful than the witch, but he seemed to be afraid of her. And he was right, of course. A witch’s Power is slightly different in nature from a magician’s. And a witch can easily screw things up even for a very powerful magician.

Edgar just nodded.

“Is this him?” one of the magicians asked, looking at me.

“Yes, Yura.”

Yura was an old and powerful magician-I realized that straightaway. I also realized that Yura wasn’t his real name. Magicians like that keep their real names hidden so incredibly deep, there’s no way you can ever get to them.

And that’s the right way. If you’re really following the path of freedom.

“Have a seat, Anna Tikhonovna,” said Shagron, giving up his armchair and going across to join the magicians, who had occupied the broad windowsill.

“Edgar,” said the witch. “The Light Ones went for broke. They haven’t pulled anything as wild as this since ‘49.