“Will this car be OK for us?” I asked Afandi.
“It’s a good car,” Afandi said.
I glanced around once again-there were no Others to be seen anywhere nearby. No enemies, no allies, no ordinary Others living among the ordinary human beings. So that was fine.
I emerged from the Twilight and looked hard at the owner of the 4x4. I touched him gently with Power and then waited until he turned to face me, knitting his thick brows in bewilderment. I smiled and sent him two spells with names that are much too flowery to bother with here. They’re usually referred to as Haven’t Seen You for Ages and Bosom Buddies.
The modern-day bey’s face dissolved into a broad smile.
The two young guys accompanying him-either bodyguards or distant relatives-stared at me suspiciously. In the Twilight my hastily applied mask as Timur had fallen away, and this unfamiliar Russian who was walking toward their boss with his arms held out wide naturally made them wary.
“Ah, how long it’s been!” I shouted. “My father’s old friend!”
Unfortunately, he was about twenty years older than me. Otherwise I could have gotten away with the “old school friend” line, or “Remember our times in the army, brother!” But then, in recent years, the “times in the army” approach had worked less and less often: The mark was simply unable to figure out how he could possibly have served in the army with you when he had “honestly” bought his way out of military service with a bundle of greenbacks from the good old USA. Some people had even developed a serious neurosis as a result.
“Son of my old friend!” the man howled, opening his arms wide to embrace me. “Where have you been all this time?”
The important thing at this point is to give the other person just a little bit of information. He’ll invent the rest for himself.
“Me? I’ve been living in Mariupol with my grandmother!” I told him. “Oh, how glad I am to see you! You’re such a big man here now!”
We hugged each other. The man had a delicious smell of shashlik and eau de cologne. Except that there was rather too much eau de cologne.
“And what a fine car you have!” I added with a glance of approval at the Toyota jeep. “Is that the one you wanted to sell me?”
A melancholy expression appeared in the man’s eyes, but Bosom Buddies gave him no choice. Never mind, he ought to have been happy that Gesar had equipped us so generously for our journey. Otherwise I would have asked him to give me the Toyota.
“But…it’s…” he protested sadly.
“Here!” I opened my bag, took out four wads of dollars, and thrust them into his hand. “Now, the keys, please, if you don’t mind. I’m really in a hurry!”
“It…it’s worth more than that…,” the man said in a wretched voice.
“But I’m taking it secondhand!” I explained. “Right?”
“That’s right,” he admitted, speaking slowly.
“Uncle Farhad!” one of the young men exclaimed in bewilderment.
Farhad gave him a strict glance, and the youth fell silent.
“Don’t interrupt when your elders are talking, don’t shame me in front of the son of my old friend!” Farhad barked. “What will the son of my old friend think?”
The young guys were in a panic, but they kept quiet.
I took the keys out of the man’s hands and got into the driver’s seat. I breathed in the fresh smell of the leather upholstery and glanced at the dashboard. Yes, the car was definitely secondhand. According to the odometer, it had traveled three hundred kilometers.
I waved to the three men who had been left with forty thousand dollars instead of their means of transport. Then I drove out onto the road and said, “Everybody leave the Twilight!”
Alisher and Afandi appeared on the empty backseat.
“I would have given him a little more happiness,” said Alisher. “So he wouldn’t suffer too much afterward. He looks pretty spiteful, not a very good man, but even so…”
“More spells only make a screwup all the more likely,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s all right. I paid him fair and square. He’ll survive.”
“Are we going to wait for Edgar?” Alisher asked. “Or look for the Light Ones?”
I’d already thought about these choices and rejected them.
“No, there’s no point. Let’s make straight for the hills. The farther we are from people, the quieter it’ll be.”
Alisher took my place at the wheel when it started getting dark. We had been driving south from Samarkand, toward the Afghan border, for three hours. Just as twilight fell, the asphalt road had given way to an appallingly bad dirt track. I moved to the backseat, where Afandi was snoring peacefully, and decided to follow the old man’s example. But before I dozed off, I took several battle amulets out of my bag.
Novices are often fond of all sorts of magical wands, crystals, and knives, either made by their own hand or charged by a more powerful magician. Even a weak and inexperienced magician can achieve a quite astounding effect if he prepares an artifact with loving care and pumps it full of Power. The problem is that this effect-powerful, prolonged, and precise-is a one-off. You can’t attach two different spells to the same object. A magic wand intended to belch out flame will cope magnificently with its task, even in the hands of a weak Other. But if his opponent guesses what is happening and raises a defense against fire, the wand and its miraculous flames are useless. It can’t freeze, dry, or stand someone on his head. You can either use the fire that’s available, or hammer away with the wand as if it were a club. It’s no accident that weak magicians who have dealings with people (and it’s precisely the weak magicians who interfere in human affairs or involve people in their own) have always used a magical staff-a hybrid of the usual wand and a long club. Some of them, to be honest, have been far more skillful with the club than at using magic. I remember how all of us in the Watch went to the Pushkin movie theater for the premiere of Lord of the Rings. Everything was fine until the Light Gandalf and the Dark Saruman started fighting each other with their magic staffs. The two rows filled with Others broke into genuinely Homeric laughter. Especially the trainees, who had it drilled into them every day that a magician who relied on artifacts was simply an idle show-off, more interested in appearances than efficiency. A magician’s power lies in his skill in using the Twilight and spells.
But of course there are exceptions to every rule. If an experienced magician has managed to foretell the future, no matter how-by skillful analysis of the lines of probability, or simply from his own experience-then a charged artifact is quite indispensable. Are you certain that your opponent is a werewolf, who cannot manipulate Power directly and relies on physical strength and speed? One accelerating amulet, one pendant with a Shield that is activated at close quarters, one simple wand (many prefer to charm an ordinary pencil-wood and graphite make an excellent accumulator for Power) with a freezing spell. And there you are! You can quite confidently send a seventh-level magician off to hunt down a Higher Werewolf. The Shield will repulse the attack, the amulet will lend the magician’s movement quite incredible speed, and the temporal Freeze will transform the enemy into a motionless bundle of fur and fury. Call for transport, and he’s ready for shipping to the Inquisition.
The artifacts in my bag were far more valuable than the money lying beside them. And they had been prepared by Gesar in person…well, perhaps not prepared, but at least selected from the special stores in the armory. I could be sure that they were powerful and that they would be useful. I suddenly remembered an old Australian cartoon film that I had seen when I was a kid, Around the World in Eighty Days. In that cartoon, the coolheaded English gentleman Phileas Fogg, who was attempting to set a new record for traveling around the world, seemed like a cunning fortune-teller who always knew what he would need in the hours ahead. If he took a wrench, a stuffed opossum, and a bunch of bananas with him in the morning, then by the time evening came, the stuffed animal had plugged a leak in the side of a ship, the wrench had braced shut a door that his enemies were trying to break down, and the bananas had been given to a monkey in exchange for a ticket on a steamship. All in all, it was very much like a computer game in the “quest” genre, where you find you have an effective use for every item.