And also, of course, I put my hope in Svetlana’s common sense. When her phone rang and then stopped again, she had to use magic, not try calling back. Arina and Edgar were far older than me. But for them a cellphone would always be a portable version of a cumbersome apparatus into which you had to shout: ‘Young lady! Young lady! Give me the Smolny Institute!’
‘She suspected something,’ Edgar said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that with the bomb … it didn’t have to be detonated, but at least we would have had a trump card in reserve!’
‘Never mind,’ said Arina. ‘Even if she did suspect something, they don’t have any time. Anton, give me that phone.’
A glint of suspicion had appeared in her eyes. I gave her the cell without saying anything, handing it to her fastidiously with the tips of my fingers without touching the keys.
Arina looked at the phone and saw that it was in waiting mode. She shrugged and switched it off completely.
‘Let’s do without any calls, all right? If you need to call anyone, you can ask me for my phone.’
‘I won’t bankrupt you?’
‘No, you won’t.’ Arina took out her own phone and dialled a number – not from the phone book, but the old way, pressing every key. She raised the phone to her ear and waited for an answer. When it came she said quietly: ‘It’s time. Go to work.’
‘Still haven’t run out of accomplices, then?’
‘They’re not accomplices, Anton, they’re hired hands. People can be perfectly effective allies if you equip them with a small number of amulets. Especially the kind that Edgar has.’
I looked at the royal castle towering up in state above the city, crowning the remains of an ancient volcano now for ever extinct. Well, well, this was the second time I’d ended up in Edinburgh, and I still didn’t have time to visit its main tourist attraction …
‘And what have you prepared this time?’ I asked
There was an idea flickering on the edge of my consciousness, scratching away at it like Schrödinger’s Cat. Something very important.
‘Funnily enough, I’ve actually prepared one of Merlin’s artefacts,’ Edgar said. He had already recovered from my ungentlemanly blow. ‘It’s called Merlin’s Sleep.’
‘Ah, yes, he was rather uninventive with his names for things,’ I said, nodding. ‘Sleep?’
‘Just sleep,’ Edgar said, shrugging. ‘Arina was very upset about the high number of casualties the last time. This time it will all be very … cultured.’
‘Ah, and there’s the first little spark of culture,’ I said, looking at the smoke rising from a taxi in front of us. The driver had clearly fallen asleep as he took a bend, and his car had run up onto the sidewalk and crashed into an old building. But the most terrible thing was not the smoke coming from under the taxi’s hood, or the motionless bodies inside it. The sidewalks were covered with the corpses of local people and tourists – one young woman had clearly been knocked aside by the taxi’s radiator and then crushed against the wall by its old-fashioned black box of a body. She was probably dying. The only thing I could be glad about was that she was dying in her sleep.
This was not the humane Morpheus that we learned in the Night Watch, the spell that gave people several seconds before they lost consciousness. Merlin’s Sleep acted instantly. And it was very precisely localised – I could see the boundary line of the artefact’s influence. Two adults stepped inside it and fell to the ground, instantly overcome by sleep. But the seven- or eight-year-old boy who was walking a few steps behind them was still awake and he cried as he shook his motionless parents. He had little prospect of help – those people who had not entered the zone of sleep were running away from it with remarkable alacrity. I could understand why. To someone who didn’t know the truth it all looked like the effect of some highly poisonous gas. And somehow the sight of this little boy trying to get his parents to their feet on the other side of the scattering crowd was almost as tragic as the sight of the young woman killed in the crash.
Edgar continued gazing fixedly at the smoking taxi after we had driven past it. That would probably have been a good moment to escape … if I had been intending to escape.
‘Does that remind you of something?’ I asked.
‘Incidental casualties are inevitable,’ Edgar said in a voice that had turned flat and hoarse. ‘I knew what I was getting into.’
‘What a pity they didn’t,’ I said. And I looked at Edgar through the Twilight.
This was bad, very bad. He was hung all over with amulets: dozens of charms had been applied to him and there were spells trembling on the ends of his fingers, ready to dart off at any moment. He was positively glowing with Power waiting to be used. Arina and Gennady looked exactly the same. Even the vampire had not scorned the magical trinkets.
I wouldn’t be able to manage by using force.
We drove to the Dungeons in total silence, past sidewalks strewn with bodies and motionless vehicles (I saw three that were burning). We got out of the car.
On Princess Street, on the other side of the ravine, everything had stopped dead too, but I could already hear a siren howling somewhere. People always recover from a panic. Even if they don’t know what it is that they’re up against.
‘Let’s go,’ said Edgar, pushing me gently in the back.
We set off down the stairs. I looked back for a moment at the stone crown of the castle above the roofs of the buildings.
Why yes. Of course. You only had to think for a moment and put it all together. Merlin had been most magnanimous when he’d composed his little verse …
‘What are you dawdling for?’ Edgar shouted at me. His nerves were on edge, and no wonder. He was anticipating a meeting with the one he loved.
We walked past motionless bodies. There were people and Others – Merlin’s Sleep didn’t differentiate between them. I noticed several sleeping Inquisitors. Behind the fake dividing walls everything was lit up brightly by the glow of auras. They had been waiting, and the ambush could not have been prepared better.
Only no one had known the full Power of the artefact that had been used.
‘You haven’t forgotten about the barrier on the third level, I suppose?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Arina.
I noticed that as we walked along first Edgar and then Arina left perfectly innocent-looking objects charged with magic on the floor and the walls: scraps of paper, sticks of chewing gum, bits of string. In one place Edgar rapidly sketched several strange symbols on the wall in red chalk – the chalk crumbled into dust as soon as he had traced out the final sign. In another place Arina smiled as she scattered a box of matches across the floor. The ‘Last Watch’ was clearly afraid of pursuit.
Eventually we entered the room with the guillotine, which for some reason the ‘Last Watch’ had chosen as its point of entry into the Twilight. This was probably the exact centre of the vortex, the precise focus of Power.
And here, as well as two first-level magicians who were asleep, there was one person who was wide awake.
He was a young man, short and plump, wearing spectacles on his cultured-looking face. He looked very peaceful and unaggressive in his jeans and bright-coloured shirt. In the corner of the room I noticed a girl about ten years old, sleeping with her head resting on a bag that had considerately been placed under it. Had they decided to open the way through with the blood of a child, then?