‘Come on,’ said Gesar, switching off the ignition and slipping out from behind the steering wheel. Olga and I followed him. Outside the car the cold of the Twilight seized us in its vicelike grip. There was a steady, freezing wind blowing, the eternal wind of the second level.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ shouted Gesar.
The young man didn’t answer. He seemed to be pondering something.
‘Night Watch! Leave the Twilight!’ I said, not quite raising my voice to a shout but in a loud, impressive tone.
‘Otherwise we shall use force,’ Olga put in, backing me up.
The young man started to smile. And Gesar said in a low voice:
‘Now, I wouldn’t have said that. What if he—’
And then he did. I don’t know what Gesar was about to say, but the young stranger certainly needed no prompting. He spread his hands – I thought he was moulding another fireball out of the air, a little bit smaller than the first one, but there wasn’t any bright glow, although Power of some kind was glimmering in the palms of his hands, something was being prepared …
‘Freeze!’ shouted Olga, and I responded to the word as if it were a command – I struck at the stranger, with all the Power I had, with a localised time halt.
And why not? If you think about it, it’s humane and it’s reliable. The enemy is immobilised but entirely unharmed. We have time to figure out what to do, he has no time of any kind.
Only Olga wasn’t asking me to use a freeze: she was warning me what the stranger was about to do.
Gesar suddenly disappeared – it looked as if he’d skipped down or up a level in the Twilight. Olga flew off about ten metres to one side with a gigantic leap that an Olympic champion, or even a hungry vampire, would have envied. But I stayed standing there like a fool, right in the path of the freeze that was advancing towards me …
Only I wasn’t fated to end up suspended in the Twilight, stuck like a fly in the amber of halted time. My own freeze – far, far weaker than my adversary’s – crashed into the spell hurtling towards it. And, as often happens with spells, they immediately interacted.
A faceted form like a precious stone suddenly appeared, suspended above the middle of the sombre grey road that was hemmed in by the grotesque wooden buildings. It rotated slowly, sinking down into the ground. Looking through it, I saw our adversary fragmented into a host of tiny little figures.
‘Old fool!’ bellowed Gesar, appearing beside me. He waved his arms – and there was a flash of green flame beyond the transparent crystal.
‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, boss,’ I told him, unable to resist.
I caught Gesar’s baffled glance.
‘I’m glad you’re still able to joke, but I meant him,’ said Gesar, nodding in the direction of the green fire. ‘And you, Anton, have clearly used up all your reserves of good luck for today. Shooting down a Freeze with a Freeze is no easy task.’
‘You meant him?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the young man. I looked at the green fire that was gradually fading away. ‘What is that?’
‘It will slow him down,’ Gesar said evasively, but very confidently.
The green fire went out.
The young man shook some strange, sticky green sparks off his cloak and looked at us. This time his expression was far from friendly.
‘Oho,’ said Olga, coming back to us. ‘So we couldn’t give a damn for Gesar’s Taiga …’
‘Something terrible’s about to happen,’ Gesar declared, and then he took off his jacket and threw it down on the ground.
Had he decided to have a fist fight, then?
The young man didn’t seem to have anything against fisticuffs – he moved along an arc, avoiding the section of space frozen in time by the spells. And despite his likeable, attractive appearance, somehow I was reminded only too clearly of what Pastukhov had called him.
A tiger …
Just at that moment I heard an engine roaring. Battle Magician Jermenson and the team had finally caught up with us. He leapt out of the SUV before it had even stopped, I think. Garik put up a Magician’s Shield on the run, and to judge from its power he must have used one of the Watch’s amulets. Jermenson moved out in front, Alisher fell in behind him with his head inclined and his hand pressed to his heart – it looked as if he was preparing to work as a reserve power source, pumping Jermenson full of energy.
The blond young man stopped, assessing the disposition of forces. To be quite honest, it wasn’t clear what move he was thinking of making in a situation like that – he was facing four Higher Magicians, as well as a couple of field operatives who might be less powerful but had pretty good battle experience.
Jermenson moved his hand up through the air, as if he was lifting an invisible load. The ground bulged up between him and the stranger, sprouting into a pillar three metres high. The pillar shuddered, taking on the features of a grotesque human figure, beside which the boxer Nikolai Valuev would have looked like a slim, handsome but rather undersized fashion model.
I had come across golems before. Rather more often, perhaps, than I would have liked purely for educational purposes. But this was the first time I had seen a golem created – and so quickly, without any runes embedded in the clay, without any obvious programming.
‘Oh, these sly Jewish tricks!’ said Olga.
The young man was clearly disconcerted by the golem. He made some elusive kind of movement – and a monstrous weight seemed to crash down onto the golem, crumpling it and driving it back into the ground. Only that didn’t bother the golem. It soaked into the ground and immediately oozed out of it at another point, much closer to the stranger, reaching out a massive hand for him.
A rapid flickering of fingers, a brief fluttering of lips – and the arm reaching out to the stranger started falling to pieces, collapsing onto the ground in lumps of clay, as if some invisible meat-slicer was chopping it off as it advanced.
The golem paid no attention to this and simply carried on reaching out its arm. The falling clay wriggled on the ground and was absorbed back into its feet, so it didn’t lose any mass at all.
‘She ilekh adonia nekhbad mi a makom a ze!’ shouted Jermenson.
The young man took a step back. Cast a quick glance in our direction. Then at Jermenson.
And at that precise moment the darkness behind the stranger thickened and condensed into a black ink blot dangling in the air. A spiked leg that looked like a limb of a gigantic praying mantis stepped out of the blot, to be followed by its owner – a demon every bit as large as the golem.
Unfortunately, the cavalry arrived too late for the fight. The young man cast a quick glance at the demon, spread his arms – and disappeared. Without any flashes, glimmers or sparks. Without opening any portals, dissolving into the air or sinking down through the ground. He simply disappeared.
It was only reasonable from his point of view. If the heads of the Night Watch and the Day Watch both attack you, and they have a few Higher Others tagging along – the best thing to do is beat it, and quick.
The golem hesitated for a moment and then soaked back into the ground. Golems created to carry out a single assignment usually crumble into dust. But this one didn’t crumble – it didn’t seem to think that its assignment had been completed.
‘Hello, Zabulon,’ said Gesar.
The demon metamorphosed into a man – an ordinary, rather short man of indeterminate age with an undistinguished face. It had always amazed me that the Dark Others moved through the lower layers of the Twilight in such horrifying forms. I used to think there were dangers that I didn’t know about lurking down there, but it was a long time now since I’d been an inexperienced novice magician. I’d walked the Twilight through and through, on all its levels, and I knew there weren’t any bloodthirsty beasts in it.