I smiled ironically and said:
«Good evening, Gesar.»
The boss gave me a nod of sympathy. Svetlana was standing behind him, and her face was as white as chalk.
«Can you hold on for five minutes?» the boss asked. «Then I'll deal with your little scratch.»
«Sure I can,» I agreed.
Maxim was staring at the boss with crazy eyes.
«I don't think you need to worry,» the boss said to him. «If you were an ordinary poacher, the Tribunal would have you executed—you've got too much blood on your hands, and the Tribunal is obliged to maintain a balance. But you're magnificent, Maxim. They can't afford to just toss someone like you away. You'll be set above us, above Light and Darkness, and it won't even matter which side you came from. But don't get your hopes up. That isn't power. It's hard labor. Drop the dagger!»
Maxim flung the weapon to the ground as if it were burning his fingers. This was a real magician, well beyond the likes of me.
«Svetlana, you passed the test,» the boss said, looking at her. «What can I say? Grade three for self-control and restraint. No doubt about it.»
I supported myself on Egor and tried to get up. I wanted to shake the boss's hand. He'd played the game his own way again. By using everybody who was there to be used. And he'd outplayed Zabulon—what a pity the Dark Magician wasn't there to see it! How I'd have liked to see his face, the face of the demon who'd turned my first day of spring into a nightmare.
«But…« Maxim started to say something, then stopped. He was overwhelmed by too many new impressions. I knew just how he was feeling.
«Anton, I was certain, absolutely certain that you and Svetlana could handle it,» the boss said gently. «The most dangerous thing of all for a sorceress with the kind of power she's been given is to lose self-control. To lose sight of the fundamental criteria for the fight against Darkness, to act in haste or to hesitate for too long. And this is one stage of the training that should never be put off.»
Svetlana finally stepped toward me and took me gently by the arm. She looked at Gesar, and just for a moment her face was a mask of fury.
«Stop it,» I said. «Sveta, don't. He's right. Today, for the very first time, I understood where the boundary line runs in our fight. Don't be angry. This is only a scratch,» I said, taking my hand away from my wound. «We're not like ordinary people; we're a lot tougher.»
«Thank you, Anton,» said the boss. Then he looked at Egor: «And thank you too, kid. I really hate the idea that you'll be on the other side of the barricades, but I was sure you'd stand up for Anton.»
The boy tried to move toward Gesar, but I kept hold of his shoulder. It would be awkward if he blurted out his resentment! He didn't understand that everything Gesar had done was only a countermove.
«There's one thing I regret, Gesar,» I said. «Just one. That Zabulon isn't here. That I didn't see his face when the whole box of tricks fell apart.»
The boss didn't answer right away.
It must have been hard for him to say it. And I wasn't too pleased to hear it, either.
«But Zabulon had nothing to do with it, Anton. I'm sorry. He really didn't have anything at all to do with it. It was an exclusive Night Watch operation.»
Story three.
All for My Own Kind
Prologue
The little man had swarthy skin and narrow eyes. He was the ideal prey for any militiaman in the capital city, with a confused, slightly guilty smile and a glance that was naive and shifty at the same time. Despite the killing heat, he was wearing a dark suit, old-fashioned but hardly even worn, and as a finishing touch, an ancient tie from the Soviet period. In one hand he was carrying a shabby, swollen briefcase, the kind agronomists and chairmen of progressive collective farms used to carry around in old Soviet movies, and in the other a string bag holding a long Central Asian melon.
The little man emerged from his second-class sleeper car with a smile, and he kept on smiling: at the female conductor, at his fellow travelers, at the porter who jostled him, at the young guy selling lemonade and cigarettes from a stall. He raised his eyes and gazed in delight at the roof covering Kazan Station. He wandered along the platform, occasionally stopping and adjusting his grip on the melon. He might have been thirty years old or he might have been fifty. It was hard for a European eye to tell.
A minute later a young man got out of a first-class sleeper car in the same Tashkent-Moscow train, probably one of the dirtiest and most run-down trains in the entire world. He looked like the little man's complete opposite. Another Central Asian type, maybe Uzbek, but his clothes were more in the modern Moscow style: shorts and a T-shirt, with a little leather bag and a cell phone hanging on his belt. No baggage and no provincial manners. He didn't gaze around at everything, trying to spot the sacred letter «M» for metro. After a quick nod to the conductor of his car and a gentle shake of his head in reply to the offers from taxi drivers, two more steps saw him slipping through the bustling crowd of new arrivals, with an expression of mild distaste and alienation on his face. But a moment later he was an integral part of the crowd, indistinguishable from any of the healthy cells in the organism, attracting no interest from the phagocyte militiamen or the other cells beside him.
Meanwhile, the little man with the melon and the briefcase was pushing his way through the crowd, muttering countless apologies in rather poor Russian, looking this way and that with his head drawn down. He walked past one underpass, shook his head, and set off toward a different one, then stopped in front of a billboard where the crush was less fierce. Clutching his things clumsily to his chest, he took out a crumpled piece of paper and studied it closely. From the look on his face he knew perfectly well he was being followed.
The three people standing over by the wall were quite happy with that: a strikingly beautiful redhead in a slinky, clinging silk dress, a young guy in punk-style clothes with a bored expression in eyes that looked surprisingly old, and a rather older, sleek-looking man with effete mannerisms.
«It doesn't look like him,» the young guy with the old man's eyes said doubtfully. «Not like him at all. I didn't see him for very long, and it was a long time ago, but…«
«Perhaps you'd like to ask Djoru, just to make sure?» the girl asked dismissively. «I can see it's him.»
«You accept responsibility?» There was no surprise or desire to argue in the young man's voice. He was just checking.
«Yes,» said the girl, keeping her eyes fixed on the little old man. «Let's go. We'll take him in the underpass.»
They set out unhurriedly, walking in step. Then they separated with the girl sauntering straight ahead, while the men went off to each side.
The little man folded up his piece of paper and set off uncertainly for the underpass.
The sudden absence of people would have amazed a Muscovite or a frequent visitor to the capital. After all, this was the shortest and easiest route from the metro to the platform of the mainline station. But the little man took no notice. He paid no attention to the people who were stopped behind his back as if they'd run into an invisible barrier and walked off to the other underpasses. And there was no way he could have seen that the same thing was happening at the other end of the underpass, inside the railroad station.
The sleek man came toward him, smiling. The attractive young woman and the casually dressed young guy with an earring in his ear and torn jeans closed in on him from behind.