The Day Watch (43 page)

Second, there was a middle-aged female healer who had no connection with the Night Watch, thoughtfully sniffing perfumes in the duty-free shop. She probably just happened to be traveling that day by coincidence.

Third, there was a militiaman who was an Other on duty at the checkin, as there was supposed to be in any airport.

Apart from Edgar himself, there were four Dark Ones in the international terminal of Sheremetievo-2. First, his charges, the trio of Regin Brothers, who kept staring guardedly by turns at Edgar and Anton, who had installed himself in the bar at the far end of the hall. Plus a weak magician over by the gambling machines who was paying no attention to anything; he seemed to be trying to earn a bit of extra cash by getting the mechanism to pay out the maximum winnings. His kind was perfectly described by the phrase “cheap trash.”

The basic situation couldn’t have been clearer.

Checkin and passport control went quickly; no visas were required for the Czech Republic. In fact, just in case, Edgar was carrying Estonian and Argentinian passports, both perfectly legal-Argentina was a wonderful country that traded its own citizenship quite freely.

Edgar spent the rest of the time until boarding in one of the bars. Naturally, not the one where Zabulon’s favorite, the Light magician Gorodetsky, had installed himself. Edgar’s glance and his had met just once-I know you’re here and you know I’m here, and both of us know that the other knows his opponent… and we’re on similar missions. To defend our own at the trial and rout our enemies…

To Gorodetsky’s credit, he’d made his position perfectly clear: When the trial starts, that’s when we’ll get to grips.

Meanwhile, let’s just enjoy the flight and not get in each other’s way.

Strange, how easily they understood each other. Maybe it was just a hangover from those ancient times before the Others were divided into Dark Ones and Light Ones, when they simply stood up together against fate and the vicissitudes of life. Back then, of course, any healer was closer to a vampire than he was to any simple, luckless human being in the faceless mass of other people like him. The Twilight can bring you together.

But the Twilight could separate you too. In fact, the Twilight was pretty good at it-nowadays you simply couldn’t find more irreconcilable enemies anywhere on earth than Dark Ones and Light Ones. The puny conflict between the USA and the Islamic world was nothing in comparison… Even the old Cold War between the USA and the USSR that was now a part of history hadn’t come close to the war of the Watches. They were just childish games for foolish human beings.

Edgar drank coffee that was extremely black, but not very good, thinking about everything at once and nothing in particular. For instance, why all these airport bars that were so expensive and didn’t seem to be skimping on the ingredients of their food and drink managed to brew lousy coffee, pour bad beer, and make absolutely inedible sandwiches. Plenty of the problems of human life could be attributed to the struggle between the Watches, but this certainly wasn’t one of them.

His charges-the entire ill-assorted trio of them-were peering at him disapprovingly from the waiting hall. Of course, the Regin Brothers regarded him as just another cop. Let them. They were boneheads. Brainless, heedless boneheads. And since that was what they were, they could be used to serve the cause of Darkness. Zabulon had been quite right to decide to make use of them. That business with Fafnir’s Talon had certainly put the Light Ones off their stride during Rogoza the Mirror’s visit. Without even knowing it, the Regin Brothers had taken one of the blows intended for the Day Watch and allowed the Mirror, who had already grown strong, to top himself right up

with Power. That was really what had made certain that Zabulon and his cohorts would win out in the latest clash with the Light Ones.

And serve them right.

Edgar watched without the slightest sympathy as the courteous customs officers led away a furious gent in a prim, formal suit and expensive raincoat. It was his place that Edgar would be occupying on the flight to Prague.

When they were already on their way, Edgar waited until one of the Regin Brothers left his seat and then sat down next to the one who seemed to be the most sensible-the white one.

“Greetings, brother,” Edgar said warmly.

The Finn looked at him with big round eyes. A cautious look.

“We are Dark Ones,” Edgar went on quietly. “We don’t abandon our own. I’ve been sent to protect you, if necessary. And we’ll be able to defend you at the Tribunal-trust me. So hold your heads high, servants of the Darkness. Our hour will come very soon now.”

Having said that, Edgar got up and went back to his place without looking back even once.

There. Now let them rack their brains over that.

How dramatic he had been! He’d really had to work hard to keep a solemn, stony face and avoid cracking a smile.

But the expression in the Finn’s big round eyes had been the opposite of a smile-he’d been really frightened and worried.

“I really shouldn’t have,” Edgar muttered to himself. “They’re like children… And I mock them.”

Edgar sighed regretfully and opened his magazine. It was a nice short flight to Prague, not like flying to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, for instance. You were there before you knew it, without any other stops on the way or that hellish nightmare of having to sleep in your seat. But then, if you really thought about it, the most convenient form of transport was a Dark portal. Only setting up a portal from Moscow to Prague would be an unjustifiable extravagance. So he had to fly, like ordinary human beings.

But not quite like ordinary human beings… at least Others didn’t have any problems with tickets.

Chapter two

-«?»—

Anton loved Prague. In fact, he simply couldn’t understand how it was possible not to love the place. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the very first moment, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you. Moscow, unfortunately, did not belong in either category. But Prague was like an old, wise enchantress who knew how to pretend to be young, but did not see any need for it, since she remained beautiful at any age.

And if you really thought about it, Prague ought to have become the abode of Dark Ones. A city saturated to overflowing with Gothic buildings, a city full of plague pillars-monuments to the medieval pestilence of the Black Death-a city that had a ghetto during the Second World War, a city that witnessed the opposition of the two superpowers during the Cold War… where could all those emanations of Darkness, the nutritional substratum of the Dark Ones, have gone to? How had they been scattered, where to, and why had they been converted into memory, but not into malice?

It was a mystery…

Anton didn’t know any members of the Prague Night Watch in person. They had occasionally exchanged information by courier or email when something in the archives needed clarification. And at Christmas and the New Year it was traditional to send greetings to all the Night Watches… but nobody made any distinction between the Prague Night Watch (active staff-130 Others, operational reserve-76) and the Night Watch of some small American town (active staff-1 Other, operational reserve-0).

Anton had been to Prague twice on vacation. Simply wandering aimlessly around the city from one beer bar to the next, buying cheap little souvenirs on the Charles Bridge, traveling out to Karlovy Vary to swim in the pool filled with hot mineral water and try the hot wafers in the cafe.

But now he was flying to Prague on business. Really serious business…

Anton stretched out in his chair, as far as the space in the Boeing 737’s economy class would allow-the comfort level wasn’t much different from an old Soviet Tupolev-and examined the backs of the Regin Brothers’ heads. They looked tense-the Dark Ones’ auras were full of fear and impatience. They knew Anton was there and they were dreaming of getting as far away from him as possible, as soon as possible…

If it wasn’t for that incident at Sheremetievo airport, Anton might even have felt sorry for the luckless magicians.

But once Anton had gone into combat with an enemy, he was an enemy forever.

As if he could read Anton’s thoughts-although, of course, that was beyond his power-one of the Regin Brothers, the tall, strong black guy, turned around, glanced warily at Anton, and hastily averted his gaze. Raivo-Anton remembered his name. From somewhere in Senegal… no, from Burkina Faso, that was it. Picked up by one of

the Regin Brothers’ families and raised in the spirit of devotion to the great Fafnir…

Just how had the Regin Brothers come up with all this nonsense?

Once, long, long ago, something had happened, something that often happened among the Others. A Dark magician and a Light magician fought to the death. The Light magician was called Sigurd… Siegfried, if you pronounced it in the German manner. The Dark magician was killed… and he died in his Twilight form of a dragon.

He was called Fafnir. Later Sigurd was killed as well… Anton wondered if Gesar had known him?

After that, things took a rather unusual turn. The Dark magician’s disciples didn’t scatter, as often happened, and they didn’t fight among themselves, as happened even more often. Instead they decided to resurrect their master.

They banded together to form a sect known as the Regin Brothers and withdrew almost completely from the usual struggle between Light and Darkness… which suited the Light Ones very well, of course. The brothers lovingly preserved the Talon torn from the Twilight body of the Dark magician. Later the Talon was confiscated by the Inquisition-just before the Second World War the Light Ones had lodged a successful protest against such an extremely powerful artifact remaining in the hands of Dark Ones. The Regin Brothers hadn’t really argued about it, but they handed over the Talon with the words, “Fafnir’s time has not yet come…” And then suddenly the European office of the Inquisition had been attacked! There had been a battle in which almost all the magicians in the small sect had been killed, together with a substantial number of the Inquisition’s bodyguards, who had grown idle and lazy. Then the remnants of the sect had made their absurd appearance in Moscow.

It was a well-known fact that human beings didn’t have a monopoly on idiots…

But then… were they really idiots?

Anton remembered what an intense charge of Power the Talon had given off. In part it was the Power accumulated in the Talon as a result of the Regin Brothers’ efforts over many years. In part it was the Power of the Dark magician himself.

Others didn’t die in the same way as ordinary people. They receded into the Twilight, losing their physical form and with it their ability to return to the world of human beings. But there was something left behind-Anton had seen vague shadows and a quivering mist that sometimes appeared in the Twilight, marking out the path taken by dead Others. Once he had even met a dead Other… It wasn’t one of his most pleasant memories. But there was something left, even there…

Was it possible to bring a dead Other back to life?

The answer was probably somewhere. In the labyrinth of the archives, classified as top secret, sealed by the Night and Day Watches, with access banned by the Inquisition. The Higher Magicians were bound to have wondered about where Others went when they died, the path that they themselves would eventually follow…

But Anton wasn’t supposed to know the answer.

He looked through the window at the clouds stretching out below, at the weak glimmering of thousands of auras merged together that indicated cities. The plane was already flying over some part of Poland.

Just supposing it was possible to bring Fafnir back to life…

So what? Maybe he had been a powerful magician, maybe even a Higher Magician, a magician beyond classification… his resurrection wouldn’t change anything in the global balance of power, especially since he would be estranged from human life. He wouldn’t understand modern reality… and if he was stupid enough to set off around Europe in his Twilight form, he’d be torn to pieces by rockets, shot with lasers from satellites. They’d use tactical nuclear weapons… while the Japanese howled woefully that Godzilla had come back to life and been killed again…

What was it the Dark Ones wanted? Disorder, panic, people screaming about the Apocalypse?

Anton squirmed in his chair. He took the plastic cup and the small, two-hundred-gram bottle of dry Hungarian wine from the smiling stewardess. It was all right for Edgar… Like any Dark One, he was flying business class, so he had a crystal glass and superior wine…

There was something to that last idea. Fafnir… the Apocalypse… At least it made some sense of Gesar’s remark about mass hysteria over the year 2000. But why would the Dark Ones want to stage the end of the world? And what about all the other things? The witch Alisa… the Chalk of Destiny…

Anton regretted that he didn’t have his laptop. It would have been interesting to lay the situation out on the screen, shuffle the variants around and see what fitted with what. There was a standard program called Mazarini for analyzing intrigues, and it would have helped him understand a few things.

The Chalk of Destiny…

He took a gulp of wine, and it turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. Then he frowned. Gesar and Zabulon. They were really the two determining factors in the entire business. They were far more mysterious and complicated than ancient artifacts like the Chalk of Destiny and Fafnir’s Talon, or Others like the Mirror and Alisa. They probably understood everything that was going on… and they were trying to outwit each other. As usual.

Gesar.

Zabulon.

The starting point for the analysis probably ought to be the Chalk of Destiny. When Svetlana, the new Great Enchantress, had appeared and joined the Night Watch, Gesar had tried to carry through yet another intervention on a global scale. Svetlana had been provided with the Chalk of Destiny-an ancient and extremely powerful artifact that could be used to rewrite the Book of Destiny and change human life. At first glance it had appeared that Svetlana was supposed to rewrite the destiny of the boy Egor, an Other with an indeterminate aura, inclined equally to the Darkness and the Light, and make him into either a future prophet or a future leader. But, with some assistance from Anton, Svetlana had failed to do this. All she had done was to bring Egor’s destiny into equilibrium by removing all the influences exerted on him by the Watches in their struggle against each other.