The Night Watch (35 page)

T
HE OLDSMOBILE
was ancient, which was why I liked it. But the open windows were no help against the insane heat rising from the road after the sun had been scorching it all day long. What was needed was an air conditioner.

Ilya was probably thinking the same thing. He was driving with one hand on the wheel, glancing round all the time and chatting to everyone. I knew a magician of his level could identify probabilities ten minutes in advance and there wasn't going to be any crash, but I was still feeling rather uneasy.

'I was thinking about putting in an air conditioner,' he told Yulia apologetically. The young girl was suffering worse than anyone from the heat, her face had come out in nasty red blotches and her eyes were glazed. I was just hoping she wasn't going to be sick. 'But it would have ruined the entire car, it wasn't meant to have one. No air conditioner, no mobile phone, no on-board computer.'

'Uhuh?' said Yulia, with a feeble smile. We'd all been working late the day before. No one had got to bed at all, we'd been working in the office until five a.m. and then stayed there for the rest of the night. I suppose it's unfair to make a thirteen-year-old girl slave away like that with the grown-ups. But it was what she'd wanted, no one had forced her.

From her seat in the front, Svetlana shot Yulia an anxious look. Then she looked at Semyon disapprovingly. The imperturbable magician almost choked on his Yava cigarette. He breathed in and all the smoke drifting around inside the car was drawn into his lungs. He flicked the butt out of the window. The Yava was already a concession to popular opinion – until just recently Semyon had preferred to smoke Flight and other equally repulsive tobacco products.

'Close the windows,' said Semyon.

A moment later it suddenly started getting cold. There was a subtle, salty sea smell in the air. I could even tell that it was the sea at night, and quite close – the typical smell of the Crimean shore. Iodine, seaweed, a subtle hint of wormwood. The Black Sea. Koktebel.

'Koktebel?' I asked.

'Yalta,' Semyon replied. 'September tenth, 1972, about three in the morning. After a minor storm.'

Ilya clicked his tongue enviously.

'Pretty good! How come you haven't used up a set of sensations like that in all this time?'

Yulia gave Semyon a guilty look. Climate conservation wasn't something every magician found easy, and the sensations Semyon had just used would have been a hit at any party.

'Thank you, Semyon Pavlovich,' she said. For some reason Yulia was as shy of Semyon as she was of the boss, and she always called him by both his first name and his patronymic.

'Oh, that's nothing,' Semyon replied equably. 'My collection includes rain in the taiga in 1913, and I've got the 1940 typhoon, a spring morning in Jurmaala in '56, and I think there's a winter evening in Gagry.'

Ilya laughed:

'Forget the winter evening in Gagry. But rain in the taiga . . .'

'I won't swap,' Semyon warned him. 'I know your collection, you haven't got anything nearly that good.'

'What about two, no, three for one . . .'

'I could give it to you as a present,' Semyon suggested.

'Forget it,' said Ilya, jerking on the steering wheel. 'What could I give you that would compare with that?'

'Then I'll invite you when I unseal it.'

'I suppose I should be grateful for that.'

He started sulking, naturally. I always thought of them as more or less equal in power, maybe Ilya was somewhat stronger. But Semyon had a talent for spotting the moment that was worth recording magically. And he didn't use his collection without good reason.

Of course, some people might have thought what he'd just done was a waste: brightening up the last half-hour of our journey with such a precious set of sensations.

'Nectar like that should be breathed in the evening, with kebabs on the barbecue,' said Ilya. He could be incredibly thick-skinned sometimes. Yulia tensed.

'I remember one time in the Middle East,' Semyon said unexpectedly. 'Our helicopter . . . anyway, never mind that. . . we set out on foot. Our communications equipment had been destroyed, and using magic would have been like walking through Harlem with a placard saying "Beat the niggers!" We set out on foot, across the Hadramaut. We had hardly any distance left to go to get to our regional agent, maybe a hundred kilometres. But we were all exhausted. And we had no water. And then Alyoshka – he's a nice guy who works in the Maritime Region now – said: "I can't take any more, Semyon Pavlovich, I've got a wife and two children at home, I want to get back alive." He lay down on the sand and unsealed his special stash. He had rain in it. A cloudburst, twenty minutes of it. We drank all we needed, and filled our canteens, and recovered our strength. I felt like punching him in the face for not telling us sooner, but I took pity on him.'

Nobody in the car said anything for a minute, savouring Semyon's story.

Ilya was the first to gather his wits.

'Why didn't you use your rain in the taiga?'

'What a comparison,' Semyon snorted. A collector's item from 1913 and a standard spring cloudburst collected in Moscow. It smelled of gasoline, would you believe!'

'I do.'

'Well, there you are. There's a time and place for everything. The evening I just recalled was pleasant enough, but not really outstanding. Just about right for your old jalopy.'

Svetlana laughed quietly. The faint air of tension was dispelled.

The Night Watch had been working feverishly all week long. Not that there'd been anything unusual happening in Moscow, it was just routine. The city was in the grip of a heatwave unprecedented for June, and reports of incidents had dropped to an all-time low. Neither the Light Ones nor the Dark Ones were enjoying it too much.

Our analysts spent about twenty-four hours working on the theory that the unexpectedly hot weather had been caused by some move the Dark Ones were planning. No doubt at the same time the Day Watch were investigating whether we Light Magicians had interfered with the climate. When both sides became convinced the anomalous weather was due to natural causes, we were all left with absolutely nothing to do.

The Dark Ones had turned as quiet as flies pinned down by rain. Despite all the doctors' forecasts, the number of accidents and natural deaths across the city fell. The Light Ones didn't much feel like working either, magicians squabbled over unimportant trivia, it took half a day to get the simplest documents out of the archives, and when the analysts were asked to forecast the weather they replied acidly with eighteenth-century gibberish such as: 'The water is dark in the clouds.' Boris Ignatievich wandered round the office in a stupor: even with his oriental origins and great experience of the East, he was floored by Moscow's own version of hot weather. The previous morning, Thursday, he'd called all the staff together, appointed two volunteers from the Watch to assist him and told everyone else to clear out of the city. To go anywhere, the Maldives or Greece if we wanted, down to hell's own kitchen if we liked – even that would be more comfortable. Or just to a dacha outside town. We were told not to show up in the office again until Monday lunchtime.

The boss waited for exactly a minute, until happy smiles had spread across everyone's faces, then added that it would be only fair for us to earn this unexpected break with an intensive spell of work. That way we wouldn't end up feeling guilty of having wasted the time. The title of the old classic was to the point, he said – 'Monday starts on Saturday'. So having been granted three extra days of holiday, we had to get through all the routine work in the remaining time.

And that's what we'd been doing – getting through it. Some of us almost until the morning. We'd checked up on the Dark Ones who were still in town and under special observation: vampires, werewolves, incubi and succubi, active witches, all sorts of troublesome low-level riff-raff. Everything was in order. What the vampires wanted right now wasn't hot blood, but cold beer. Instead of trying to cast spells on their neighbours, the witches were all trying to summon up a little rain over Moscow.

But now we were on our way to relax. Not as far as the Maldives, of course – the boss had been too optimistic about the finance office's generosity. But even two or three days out of town would be great. We felt sorry for the poor volunteers who'd stayed behind in the capital to keep watch with the boss.

'I've got to call home,' said Yulia. She'd really livened up after Semyon exchanged the damp heat in the car for the cool sea air. 'Sveta, can I borrow your phone?'

I was enjoying the cool too. I glanced into the cars we were overtaking: in most of them the windows were rolled down, and the people glared at us with loathing, wrongly assuming that our ancient automobile had powerful air conditioning.

'The turn's coming up soon,' I said to Ilya.

'I remember. I drove here once before.'

'Quiet!' Yulia hissed fiercely and started chatting on the phone. 'Mum, it's me! . . . Yes, I'm here already . . . Of course, it's great! There's a lake here . . . No, it's shallow. Mum, I can't talk for long, Sveta's dad lent me his phone .. . No, there's no one else . .. Sveta? Just a moment.'

Svetlana sighed and took the phone from Yulia. She gave me a dark look and I tried to put on a serious expression.

'Hello, Aunty Natasha,' Svetlana said in a squeaky child's voice. '. . . Yes, very pleased . . . Yes. . . No, with the grown-ups. Mum's a long way off, shall I call her? . . . Okay, I'll tell her. Definitely. Goodbye.'

She switched off the phone and spoke into empty space:

'So tell me, young lady, what's going to happen when your mother asks the real Sveta how the holiday went?'

'Sveta will say we had a great time.'

Svetlana sighed and glanced at Semyon as if looking for support.

'Using magical powers for personal goals leads to unexpected consequences,' Semyon declared in a dry, official voice. 'I remember one time—'

'What magic powers?' Yulia asked, genuinely surprised. 'I told my friend Sveta I was going off to a party with some guys and asked her to cover for me. She was shocked, but of course she said yes.'

In the driving seat Ilya laughed.

'Why wouldn't I want to go to a party?' Yulia asked indignantly, clearly not understanding what he found so funny. 'That's the way the human kids amuse themselves. So what are you laughing at?'

For every member of our Watch, work takes up the greater part of our lives. Not because we're workaholics – who wouldn't rather relax than work? And not because the work is so very interesting – we spend most of our time on boring patrol duty or polishing the seats of our trousers in the office. It's simply that there aren't enough of us. It's much easier for the Day Watch to keep up to strength, any Dark One is only too keen for a chance to wield power. But our situation's quite different.

Outside work, though, every one of us has his own little piece of life that he won't give up to anyone: not to the Light and not to the Dark. That's all ours... A little piece of life that we don't hide, and don't put on display either. What's left of our original, essential human nature.

Some go travelling whenever they can. Ilya, for instance, prefers ordinary package holidays, but Semyon likes hitchhiking. He once travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok without a single kopeck and in record time, but he didn't register his achievement with the League of Free Travellers, because he used his magical powers twice on the way.

For Ignat – and he's not the only one – holidays are always about sex. It's a stage almost all of us go through, because Others get far more opportunities than humans do. It's a well-known fact that humans feel a powerful attraction to Others, even though they may not realise it.

There are plenty of collectors among us too. From modest collectors of penknives, key-rings, stamps and cigarette lighters to collectors of weather, smells, auras and spells. I used to collect model cars, spending big money on rare models that only had value to a few thousand idiots. I dumped the entire collection into two cardboard boxes ages ago. I ought to take them out into the courtyard and tip them into the sandpit for the kids to enjoy.

There are lots of hunters and fishermen. Igor and Garik are into extreme parachuting. Our useless programmer Galya, a sweet girl, is into growing bonsai trees. I guess we cover pretty much the entire range of entertainments that the human race has ever invented.

But what Tiger Cub did in her spare time, I had no idea, even though it was her place we were going to. I was almost as keen to find out as I had been to escape from the scorching heat in town. When you spend a bit of time at someone's place, it usually doesn't take too long to find out what their special interest is.

'Are we almost there now?' Yulia asked in a capricious tone. We'd already turned off the main highway and travelled about five kilometres along a dirt road, past a little dacha settlement and over a small river.

'Yes, we're almost there,' I answered, checking the image of the route that Tiger Cub had left with us.

'Actually, we're there already,' said Ilya, swerving the car off the road, straight at the trees. Yulia gasped and covered her face with her hands. Svetlana reacted more calmly, but even she put her hands out, expecting a crash.

The car hurtled through thick bushes, over fallen branches and crashed into a solid wall of trees. But, of course, there was no impact. We leapt straight through the magical mirage and landed on a well-surfaced road. Straight ahead there was a small lake glinting like a bright mirror in the sun, with a two-storey brick house standing by the shore, surrounded by a tall fence.

'What always amazes me about shape-shifters,' said Svetlana, 'is how obsessed they are with secrecy. Not only does she hide behind a mirage, she has a fence too.'

'Tiger Cub's not a shape-shifter!' Yulia objected. 'She's a transformer magician.'

'That's the same thing,' Sveta said gently.

Yulia looked at Semyon, clearly expecting him to back her up.

'Essentially Sveta's right. Highly specialised combat magicians are like any other shape-shifters. But with a plus sign instead of a minus. If Tiger Cub had been in a slightly different mood when she first entered the Twilight, she'd have turned into a Dark shape-shifter. There are very few people whose path is completely determined in advance. There's usually a struggle during the preparation for initiation.'