‘My daughter fell asleep,’ the man said, correcting my mistaken assumption. ‘An extremely interesting device, I must say …’ He took a small sphere woven from strips of metal out of his pocket. ‘The lever shifted and it won’t move back again.’
‘That’s the way it should be,’ said Edgar. ‘It won’t move back again for seventy-something years. So the device is useless to you – leave it here. Take this!’
He tossed a wad of money to the man, who caught it and casually ran his finger over the ends of the notes. But I noticed that he was keeping his left hand behind his back. Oh-oh …
‘All correct,’ the man said with a nod. ‘But I’m a little concerned about the scale of the event … and the devices that you employ. It seems to me that the deal was clearly made on unequal terms.’
‘I told you this would happen,’ Edgar said to Arina. He turned back to the man and asked, ‘What do you want? More money?’
The man shook his head.
‘Take the money and your daughter, and go. That’s my advice to you,’ said Arina.
The man licked his lips and then unbuttoned his shirt.
He turned out not to be fat at all. His torso was encased in something that looked like an orthopaedic corset. Except that it had wires protruding from it.
‘A kilogramme of plastic explosive. The switch works on the “dead hand” principle,’ said the man, raising his left hand. ‘I’m going to take that sphere, all the strange trinkets that I found on these guys’ – he prodded one of the sleeping Others with his foot – ‘and everything you have in your pockets. Is that clear?’
‘As clear as day,’ said Edgar. ‘I said right at the beginning that this would happen. I made the right choice with you.’
I suddenly noticed that Gennady was no longer there with us.
‘And this resolves a certain number of moral difficulties,’ Edgar said, turning away.
The explosives belt suddenly flew into little pieces. It wasn’t an explosion: it looked like the work of a clawed hand moving with unnatural speed – out of the Twilight, for example. Totally confused, the man opened his left hand, and a small switch with an absurd little tail of wire fell out of it. He’d been telling the truth.
The next moment the man screamed, and I too chose to turn away.
‘An exceptionally loathsome character,’ said Edgar. ‘His threat was serious, even though the little girl is his own daughter. But now we have the blood we need, with none of the killing of innocent people that upsets Arina so much.’
‘You’re no better than him,’ I replied.
‘I don’t pretend to be,’ Edgar said, with a shrug. ‘Let’s go. It’s not the first time we’ve entered the Twilight together, is it?’
He even took hold of my hand. I didn’t protest. I found my own shadow on the floor and stepped into it. Through the gust of icy-cold wind, into the frozen, hungry space of the Twilight …
The first level.
We moved on without delay. The second level. The space around us was seething, agitated either by the fresh blood or by the hole that Merlin had made here in the fabric of creation.
Edgar and Arina were still beside me. Intensely focused. A moment later Gennady too appeared, with blood on his lips. On the second level I could barely recognise Saushkin senior, his face was so badly distorted by hideous malice and insane hatred.
The third level. The final eddies of the vortex of Power that had been blocking our way so recently were still raging here. Edgar started looking round and said:
‘Someone’s following us … one of the signs has been activated.’
‘Successfully?’ A cloud of steam escaped from between Arina’s lips as she asked.
‘I don’t know. Let’s go lower!’
The fourth level greeted us with its pink sky and coloured sand. I pulled my hand out of Edgar’s grasp and said:
‘We agreed! I won’t join the fight against the golem!’
‘And nobody’s forcing you to,’ Edgar said, with a toothy grimace. ‘Don’t worry, you can keep out of it. Forward!’
This was the point at which I had planned to start an argument. To drag things out and then run for it, or even stay here and send the ‘Last Watch’ on to a pointless battle against the monster.
But something seemed to urge me on. Something like the insane obsession that had possessed Arina, Edgar and Gennady seemed to take possession of me too. I had to go down to the fifth level… I had to!
If only to lull their vigilance …
‘All right, but I don’t intend to lay my life down for your sake!’ I shouted and stepped down to the fifth level under Edgar’s watchful eye.
They appeared beside me almost instantly. Yes, they had certainly pumped themselves full of Power. Gennady was the only one who was slightly delayed. He had obviously got through at the second attempt.
And this level of the Twilight was so much nicer than the ones above it! Cool, even chilly, but already without that icy wind that sucked the life out of you. And the colours here looked almost natural…
I looked round, trying to spot the golem, and I saw it about two hundred metres away – there were two snakes’ heads sticking up out of the grass, turning this way and that like submarines’ periscopes. Then the golem spotted us. The heads shuddered and reached up higher. There was a loud hissing sound, very much like a real snake’s hiss, except that it was coming from such a long distance away …
A moment later the snake was already slipping towards us, managing to keep both of its heads above the grass at the same time.
‘Head and tail,’ Arina said pensively. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know … Edgar, release Kong.’
I understood what she meant when Edgar took a small jade figurine out of his pocket – it was a long-armed monkey with short pointed horns protruding from its head. The Inquisitor breathed on the figurine and then carefully screwed its head off – the figurine turned out to be hollow – and carefully set it down in the grass. We barely had time to jump back before the vessel started giving out green smoke that coiled into the form of a monster.
The deva that had hunted Alisher in Samarkand was nothing like King Kong. He didn’t have the height for that, since he only stood about three metres at the withers. But the toothy, gaping jaw, muscular limbs with sharp claws, coarse dark green fur and brutish, flaming-orange eyes impressed me far more than the sentimental giant from the old movies.
And King Kong probably never had such a repulsive acrid smell either. How could a golem stink, when it consisted of concentrated Power, not flesh, or even clay, and it had been stored in a magical vessel? I didn’t know. Maybe it was an accidental side effect. Or maybe it was a joke by the deva’s creator?
‘Go and kill it!’ Edgar shouted, pointing to the snake. Kong roared and went dashing towards the snake in huge bounds. The snake slithered towards him, not at all frightened by his sudden appearance, even seeming to liven up at the prospect of a worthy opponent. The earth shuddered under the impact of their feet and coils; the monkey’s thunderous roar and the snake’s deafening hiss fused together into a single mighty rumble.
Now was the time! While they were entranced by the prospect of the forthcoming battle.
I turned round – and froze. Standing behind me was a short old man with a beard, dressed in white. At some moments he looked absolutely real – I could count every last hair in the grey beard and gaze into the weary face furrowed with wrinkles; at others he became a hazy white shadow, through which I could see the grass and the sky.
The old man pointed slowly to the ground at his feet. Then he repeated the gesture.
Did he want me to go down to the sixth level?