The magician licked his lips—his tongue was long and slightly forked. I suddenly realized what Twilight form he would eventually assume, and I felt sick.
«I throw myself on your mercy, watchman. I demand compassion and justice.»
«If I leave now, you'll be able to contact your base,» I said. «We both know it. Or you'll extract enough strength from people walking by to fix yourself up and get to a phone. Isn't that right?»
The Dark One smiled and repeated.
«I demand compassion and justice, watchman!»
I tossed the pistol from one hand to the other, looking into that smirking face. They were always ready to demand. But never to give.
«I've always had problems understanding our side's dual standard of morality,» I said. «It's a difficult thing to come to terms with. It only comes with time, and I haven't got much of that. Coming up with all those excuses for when you can't protect everybody. When you know that every day someone in a special department signs licenses for people to be handed over to the Dark Side. It's tough, you know.»
The smile disappeared from his face. He repeated the same words, like an incantation.
«I demand compassion and justice, watchman.»
«I'm not in the Watch anymore,» I said.
The pistol jerked and the breech clattered slowly, lazily spitting out the cartridge cases. The bullets zipped through the air like a small swarm of angry wasps.
He screamed only once, then two bullets shattered his skull. When the pistol clicked and fell silent, I reloaded the clip slowly, mechanically.
The body on the ground in front of me was mangled and mutilated. It had already begun to emerge from the Twilight, and the Twilight mask on the young face was dissolving.
I waved my hand through the air, grasping and clutching at an imperceptible something flowing through space. The outside layer of it. A copy of the Dark Magician's human appearance.
Tomorrow they'd find him. The wonderful young man everybody loved. Brutally murdered. How much Evil had I just brought into the world? How many tears, how much bitterness and hate? Where did the chain of future events lead?
And how much Evil had I killed? How many people would live longer and better lives? How many tears would never be spilled, how much malice would never be stored? How much hate would never even be born?
Maybe I'd stepped across the barrier that should never be crossed.
And maybe I'd understood where the next boundary was, the one that had to be crossed.
I put the pistol back in its holster and left the Twilight.
The sharp needle of the Ostankino television tower was still boring into the sky.
«Now let's try playing without any rules,» I said. «Without any at all.»
I managed to stop a car immediately, without even giving the driver an attack of altruism. Maybe that was because now I was wearing such a very charming face, the face of the dead Dark Magician?
«Get me to the TV tower,» I said as I climbed into the battered model 6 Lada. «As fast as you can, before they close the doors.»
«Going out for a bit of fun?» the driver asked with a smile. He was a rather dour-looking man in glasses.
«You bet,» I answered. «You bet.»
Chapter 5
They were still letting people into the tower. I bought a ticket, paying extra so I could go to the restaurant, and set off across the lawn around the tower. The last fifty meters of the path were covered by a puny sort of canopy. I wondered why they'd put it there. Maybe the old building sometimes shed chunks of concrete?
The canopy ended at a booth where they checked ID. I showed my passport and walked through the horseshoe frame of the metal detector—which wasn't working anyway. There were no more checks; that was all the protection this strategic target had.
I was beginning to have serious doubts. I had to admit it was a strange notion to come here. I couldn't sense any concentration of Dark Ones nearby. If they really were here, then they were very well shielded, which meant I'd have to deal with second-and third-grade magicians. And that would be suicide, pure and simple.
The headquarters. The field headquarters of the Day Watch, set up to coordinate the hunt. The hunt for me. Where else could the inexperienced Dark Magician have been expected to report his sighting of the quarry?
But I was walking straight into a setup where there must be at least ten Dark Ones, including experienced guards. I was sticking my own head in the noose, and that was plain stupidity, not heroism—if I still had even the slightest chance of surviving. And I was very much hoping I did.
Seen from down below, under the concrete petals of its supports, the TV tower was far more impressive than it was from a distance. But it was a certainty that most Muscovites had never been up to the observation platform and thought of the tower as just a natural part of the skyline, a utilitarian and symbolic object, but not a place of recreation. The wind felt as strong as if I were standing in the aerodynamic pipe of some complex structure, and right at the very limit of my hearing, I could just catch the low hum that was the voice of the tower.
I stood there for a moment, looking upward at the mesh-covered openings, the shell-shaped hollows corroded into the concrete, the incredibly graceful, flexible silhouette. The tower really is flexible: rings of concrete strung on taut cables. Strength in flexibility.
I went in through the glass doors.
Strange. I'd have expected to find plenty of people wanting to view Moscow by night from a height of three hundred and thirty-seven meters. I was wrong. I even rode up in the elevator all on my own, or rather, with a woman from the tower's service personnel.
«I thought there would be lots of people here,» I said, giving her a friendly smile. «Is it always like this in the evening?»
«No, usually it's busy,» the woman said. She didn't sound very surprised, but I still caught a slightly puzzled note in her voice. She touched a button and the double doors slid together. My ears instantly popped and my feet were pressed down hard against the floor as the elevator went hurtling upward—fast, but incredibly smoothly. «Everyone just disappeared about two hours ago.»
Two hours.
Soon after my escape from the restaurant.
If they set up their field headquarters, then it didn't surprise me that hundreds of people who'd been planning to take a ride up into the restaurant in the sky on this warm, clear spring evening had suddenly changed their plans. Human beings might not be able to see what was going on, but they could sense it.
And even the ones who had nothing to do with this whole business were savvy enough not to go anywhere near the Dark Ones.
Of course, I had the young Dark Magician's appearance to protect me. But I couldn't be sure that kind of disguise would be enough. The security guard would check my appearance against the list implanted in his memory; everything would match up, and he would sense the presence of Power.
But would he dig any deeper than that? Would he check the different kinds of Power, check if I was Dark or Light, what grade I was?
It was fifty-fifty. He was supposed to do all that. But security guards everywhere always skip that kind of thing. Unless they just happen to be dying of boredom or they're new to the job and still very eager.
But a fifty-fifty chance was pretty good, compared to my chances of hiding from the Day Watch on the city streets.
The elevator stopped. I hadn't even had time to think everything through properly; it had taken only about twenty seconds to get up there. That kind of speed in ordinary apartment blocks would really be something.
«Here we are,» the woman said, almost cheerfully. It looked pretty much like I was the Ostankino tower's last visitor of the day.
I stepped out onto the observation platform.
This place was usually full of people. You could tell right away who'd just arrived by the uncertain way they moved; how timidly they approached the panoramic window and the reinforced glass windows set in the floor.
But this time it looked to me like there were no more than twenty visitors. There were no children at all—I could just picture to myself the scenes of hysterics that must have taken place as they approached the tower, the parents' anger and confusion. Children are more sensitive to the Dark Ones.
Even the people who were on the platform seemed confused and depressed. They weren't admiring the view of the city spread out below them, with all its lamps glowing brightly—Moscow in its usual festive mood. Maybe it was a feast in a time of plague, but it was a beautiful feast. Right now, though, no one was enjoying it. Everything was dominated by the atmosphere of Darkness. Even I couldn't see it, but I could feel it choking me like carbon monoxide gas, which has no taste, no color, and no smell.
I looked down at my feet, pulled up my shadow, and stepped into it. The guard was standing near me, just two steps away, on one of the glass windows set in the floor. He glared in a friendly sort of way, looking slightly surprised. He obviously wasn't too comfortable hanging around in the Twilight, and I realized the other side hadn't assigned its best men to guard the field headquarters. He was young and well-built, wearing a plain gray suit and a white shirt with a subdued tie—more like a bank clerk than a servant of the Darkness.
«Ciao, Anton,» the magician said.
That took my breath away for a moment.
Had I really been that stupid? So monstrously, incredibly naive?
They were waiting for me; they'd lured me here, tossed another sacrificed pawn into the scales, and even—God only knew how—drafted someone who'd departed into the Twilight long, long ago.
«What are you doing here?»
My heart thumped and started beating regularly again. It was all very simple, after all.
The dead Dark Magician had been my namesake.
«Just something I spotted. I need some advice on it.»
The guard frowned darkly. Not the right turn of phrase, probably. But he still didn't catch on.
«Spit it out, Anton. Or I won't let you through, you know that.»
«You've got to let me through,» I blurted out at random. In our Watch anyone who knew the location of a field headquarters could enter it.
«Oh yeah, who says?» He was still smiling, but his left hand was already moving down toward the wand hanging on his belt.
It was charged to full capacity. Made out of a shinbone with intricate carvings and a small ruby crystal on the tip. Even if I dodged or shielded myself, a discharge of Power like that would bring every Other in the area running.