‘Did I frighten you?’ Lera asked. She laughed nervously and opened her eyes, but it was still dark, although the howling had begun to fade away. ‘All right … I won’t bite you. And we don’t have to have a wedding!’
Victor still didn’t say anything.
A mechanism creaked and the iron boat floated another five metres along the narrow concrete channel. The clamouring kids piled out onto the shore. A three- or four-year-old girl who was holding on to mummy with one hand and sucking one finger of the other kept turning her head and staring straight at Lera. What could have caught her attention? A young woman talking in an unfamiliar language? No, that couldn’t be it, they were in Europe …
Lera sighed and looked at Victor.
He really was asleep! His eyes were closed and his lips were set in a smile.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Lera asked and gave him a gentle shove. Victor started slowly slumping over, with his head falling straight towards the iron side of the boat. Lera squealed and managed to grab hold of him (what was happening, why was he so limp and flabby?) and lay him down on the wooden bench. An attendant immediately appeared in response to her cry – black cloak, rubber fangs, cheeks daubed with black and red make-up. He jumped down agilely into the boat.
‘Has something happened to your friend, miss?’ The boy was very young, probably the same age as Lera.
‘Yes… no … I don’t know.’ She looked into the attendant’s eyes, but he was bewildered too. ‘Help me! We have to get him out of the boat!’
‘Maybe it’s his heart?’ The lad leaned down and tried to take hold of Victor’s shoulders – then he jerked his hands away, as if he had taken hold of something hot. ‘What’s this? What kind of stupid joke is this? Light! We need light!’
He kept shaking his hands, and there were drops of something thick and dark falling from them. But Lera was petrified, staring at Victor’s pale face. The lights came on, bright and white, burning out the shadows, transforming the frightening tourist attraction into the setting for a sordid farce.
But the farce was over, vanished with the tourist ride. There were two open wounds with raised edges on Victor’s neck. Blood was oozing from the wounds slowly, like the last drops of ketchup from an upturned bottle. The thin spurts of blood-drops were even more terrifying because the wounds were so deep. Right above the artery … as if they’d been made with two razors … or two sharp teeth …
And then Lera started screaming. A thin, terrible scream, with her eyes closed, waving her arms around in the air in front of her, like a little girl who has just seen her favourite kitten smeared across the surface of the road by a dump truck.
After all, inside every woman, no matter how grown-up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.
CHAPTER 1
‘HOW COME I could do it?’ Geser asked. ‘And why couldn’t you?’
We were standing in the middle of a boundless grey plain. My eyes could not make out any bright colours at all in the overall picture, but I only had to look closely at an individual grain of sand and it would flare up in tones of gold, purple, azure and green. The sky over our heads was a frozen swirl of white and pink, as if a river of milk had mingled with its fruit-jelly banks and then been splashed out across the heavens.
There was a wind blowing too, and it was cold. I always feel cold down on the fourth level of the Twilight, but that’s an individual reaction. Geser, on the other hand, was feeling hot: his face had turned red and there were beads of sweat trickling down his forehead.
‘I haven’t got enough Power,’ I said.
Geser’s face turned deep crimson.
‘Wrong answer! You are a Higher Magician. It happened by accident, but you are still a Higher One. Why are Higher Magicians also known as magicians beyond classification?’
‘Because the differences between their levels of Power are so insignificant that they cannot be calculated, and it is impossible to determine who is stronger and who is weaker …’ I muttered. ‘Boris Ignatievich, I understand that. But I haven’t got enough Power. I can’t get to the fifth level.’
Geser looked down at his feet. He hooked up some sand with the toe of his shoe and tossed it into the air. Then he took a step forward – and disappeared.
What was that, a piece of advice?
I tossed some sand up in front of myself. Took a step forward and tried in vain to raise my shadow.
There was no shadow.
Nothing changed.
I was still where I had been, on the fourth level. And it was getting even colder – the steam of my breath no longer drifted away in a little white cloud, it fell on the sand in a sprinkling of sharp frosty needles. I turned round – in psychological terms I always found it easier to look for the way out behind myself – and took a step forward, emerging onto the third level of the Twilight. A colourless maze of stone slabs corroded by time, lying beneath a low, motionless grey sky. In places the desiccated stems of plants trailed across the stone, looking like oversized bindweed killed by the frost.
Another step. The second level of the Twilight. The stony labyrinth was covered with a carpet of interwoven branches …
And another one. The first level. Not stone any longer. Walls with windows. The familiar walls of the Moscow office of the Night Watch – in its Twilight version.
With a final effort, I tumbled out of the Twilight into the real world. Straight into Geser’s office.
Naturally, the boss was already sitting in his chair. I stood there, swaying, in front of him.
How on earth had he managed to overtake me? After all, he had gone on to the fifth level, and then I had started making my way out of the Twilight!
‘When I saw you were getting nowhere,’ Geser said, without even looking at me, ‘I came straight out of the Twilight.’
‘From the fifth level into the real world?’ I asked, unable to conceal my amazement.
‘Yes. What do you find so surprising?’
I shrugged. There was nothing really surprising about it. If Geser wanted to present me with a surprise he always had a huge range to choose from. There’s an awful lot that I don’t know. And this…
‘It’s annoying,’ said Geser. ‘Sit down, Gorodetsky.’
I sat down facing Geser, folded my hands on my knees and even lowered my head, as if I felt guilty about something.
‘Anton, a good magician always finds his powers when he needs them,’ said the boss. ‘Until you become wiser, you won’t become more powerful. Until you become more powerful, you won’t master higher magic. Until you master higher magic, you won’t go into places that are dangerous. Your situation is unique. You were affected by’ – he frowned – ‘the spell of the Fuaran. You became a Higher Magician when you weren’t ready for it. Yes, you do have the Power. Yes, you do know how to control it… and what you used to find hard to do is no problem at all to you now. How long were you down on the fourth level of the Twilight? And now you’re sitting there as if it was nothing special. But the things that you couldn’t do before …’
Geser stopped.
‘I’ll learn, Boris Ignatievich,’ I said. ‘After all, everyone says I’m making good progress. Olga, Svetlana …’
‘You are,’ Geser admitted willingly. ‘You’re not a total idiot, you’re bound to develop. But right now you remind me of an inexperienced driver, someone who has driven a Lada around for six months and then suddenly finds himself at the wheel of a Ferrari racing car! No, worse than that, a dump truck in a quarry. A huge BELAZ truck weighing two hundred tonnes, creeping up round a spiral road on its way out of the quarry … with a hundred-metre drop at one side! And there are other dump trucks driving down below it. If you make one false move, turn the wheel too sharply, or let your foot slip on the pedal – then everyone’s in trouble.’