But just at that moment someone grabbed hold of my elbows. A second earlier there was no one there – then suddenly there was a young couple. An attractive-looking girl with red hair and a solid-looking man with a surly expression on his face.
‘Stop there,’ said the girl. She was the leader, I could tell that straight off. ‘Day Watch.’
Light and Dark!
I shrugged and looked at them.
‘Your name,’ the girl demanded.
There was no point in lying, they’d captured the image of my aura already, and after that identifying the individual is only a matter of time.
‘Anton Gorodetsky.’
They waited.
‘Other,’ I confessed. ‘Night Watch agent.’
They lifted their hands off my elbows, and even took a step back. But they didn’t seem disappointed.
‘Okay, let’s enter the Twilight,’ said the man.
They didn’t look like vampires. That was one good thing. At least I could hope for a certain degree of objectivity. I sighed and shifted from one reality into the other.
The first surprise was that they turned out to be genuinely young. A witch of about twenty-five and a warlock of about thirty, the same age as me. I thought that if I needed to, I could probably even recall their names, there weren’t that many witches and warlocks born in the late 1960s.
The second surprise was that the owl wasn’t there on my shoulder. Or rather, it was: I could feel its claws and I could see it, but only with some effort. It was as if the bird had shifted realities at the same time as I had and moved into a deeper level of the Twilight.
This was getting really interesting!
‘Day Watch,’ the girl repeated. ‘Alisa Donnikova, Other.’
‘Pyotr Nesterov, Other,’ the man muttered.
‘You have some kind of problem?’
The girl drilled me with one of those speciality ‘witch’s glances’. She started to look more attractive and appealing with every moment. Of course, I’m protected against direct influence, it’s not possible to bewitch me, but it certainly looked impressive.
‘We’re not the ones with the problem. Anton Gorodetsky, you have entered into unsanctioned contact with a human.’
‘Yes? And what was that?’
‘Only a seventh-degree intervention,’ the witch admitted reluctantly. ‘But an offence is an offence. And you also urged him towards the Light.’
‘Are we going to draw up a charge report?’ I suddenly found the situation amusing. Seventh degree was next to nothing – a level of influence on the borderline between magic and ordinary conversation.
‘We are.’
‘And what are we going to write? A Night Watch agent slightly increased one human’s aversion to deception?’
‘Thereby disrupting the established balance,’ the warlock barked out.
‘Really? And what harm does it do to the Dark? If the guy stops working as a petty crook, his life is bound to get worse. He’ll be more moral, but unhappier too. Under the terms of the commentaries on the Treaty on the balance of power, that’s not regarded as a violation of the balance.’
‘Sophistry,’ the young woman said curtly. ‘You’re a Night Watch agent. What might be pardonable for an ordinary Other is not acceptable from you.’
She was right. It was still a violation, even if it was petty.
‘He was obstructing me. I have a right to use magical intervention in the course of conducting an investigation.’
‘Are you on duty, Anton?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why during the day?’
‘I have a special assignment. You can direct your enquiry to my superiors. Or rather, you have the right to address your enquiry to your superiors.’
The witch and the warlock exchanged glances. No matter how opposed our goals and moralities might be, the two hierarchies had to collaborate.
Only, to be quite frank, nobody really liked involving the bosses.
‘Very well,’ the witch agreed reluctantly. ‘Anton, we will limit ourselves to a verbal warning.’
I looked around. All round me there were people, moving slowly through the grey gloom. Ordinary people, incapable of moving out of their own little world. We were Others, and though I stood on the Light Side and the other two were on the Dark Side, we had far more in common with each other than with any of those ordinary humans.
‘On what terms?’
You should never try to second-guess the Dark. You should never make any concessions. And it’s even more dangerous to accept any gifts from it. But rules are only made to be broken.
‘No terms.’
Well, that was a surprise!
I looked at Alisa, trying to figure out the catch. Pyotr was obviously indignant at his partner, he was angry, he wanted to expose an adept of the Light as a criminal. That meant I didn’t have to worry about him.
But where was the trap?
‘That’s unacceptable to me,’ I said, with a sigh of relief – I’d spotted the catch. ‘Alisa, thank you for your offer of a peaceful resolution. I can accept it, but in a similar situation I am bound to forgive you a minor magical intervention, up to and including the seventh degree.’
‘Very well, Other,’ Alisa agreed readily. She held out her hand and I automatically shook it. ‘We have a personal agreement.’
The owl on my shoulder flapped its wings. There was a furious screech right in my ear. And a moment later the bird materialised in the Twilight world.
Alisa took a step back and the pupils of her eyes rapidly extended into vertical slits. The young warlock took up a defensive stance.
‘We have an agreement,’ the witch repeated sullenly.
What was going on?
I realised too late that I shouldn’t have entered into an agreement while Olga was there. But then – what was so terrible about what had happened? As if I hadn’t been there when other guys from the Watch had concluded alliances like this, made concessions, agreed terms for co-operating with the Dark Ones, even the boss himself had done it! Sure, it’s undesirable, but sometimes you have to.
Our goal is not to exterminate the Dark Ones. Our goal is to maintain the balance. The Dark Ones will only disappear when people conquer the Evil in themselves. Or we’ll disappear, if people decide they like the Dark better than the Light.
‘The agreement’s been made,’ I told the owl. ‘Cool it. It’s no big deal. Just standard collaboration.’
Alisa smiled and gave me a wave. She took the warlock by the elbow, and they started moving off. A few moments later they were out of the Twilight and setting off along the pavement. An ordinary young couple.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked. ‘Well? Field work has always been built on compromises.’
‘You made a mistake.’
Olga’s voice was strange, it didn’t match her appearance. Soft, velvety, musical. The way werecats talk, not birds.
‘Oh! So you can talk now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why didn’t you say anything before?’
‘Everything was okay before.’
I laughed, remembering the old joke about the child that didn’t speak for years.
‘I’ll leave the Twilight, okay? And meanwhile you can explain what mistake I’ve made. Minor compromises with the Dark Ones are inevitable in this line of work.’
‘You’re not well enough qualified to make compromises.’
The world around me became coloured. It was like switching modes on a video camera, when you change from ‘sepia’ or ‘old movie’ to the standard view. The comparison is really quite apt in some ways: the Twilight is an ‘old movie’. A really old one that humankind has managed to forget. They find it easier to live that way.