Okay so that was usual enough. Sphere operators see space in its totality there’s no way to hide anything from them.
The boss was reclining on the bed, propped up with pillows. He was wearing a bright-coloured robe, soft oriental slippers and an embroidered skullcap. The room was filled with the sweet fumes of a portable hookah. The owl was sitting in front of him. It looked as if they were communicating silently.
That was all usual enough too. In moments of exceptional stress, the boss always reverted to the habits he’d picked up in Central Asia. He’d worked there at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, first disguised as a mufti, then as a Muslim guerrilla leader, and then as a red commissar, and finally he spent ten years as the secretary of a district party committee.
Danila and Farid were standing by the window. Even with my powers I could make out the purple glimmer of the wands hidden in their sleeves.
A perfectly standard arrangement. At moments like this the headquarters was never left unprotected. Danila and Farid weren’t the strongest fighters we had, but they were experienced, and that was often more important than crude strength.
But what was I supposed to make of the last Other in the room?
He was squatting modestly and unobtrusively in the corner. As thin as a rake with sunken cheeks, black hair cut short, military style, and big, sad eyes. It was impossible to tell how old he was, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred. He was dressed in a dark, loose-fitting suit. A human would probably have taken the stranger for a member of some obscure sect. And he would have been half right.
He was a Dark Magician. And a powerful one too. When he glanced briefly at me, I felt my protective shell – which wasn’t installed by me – crack and start to buckle.
I took an involuntary step backwards. But the magician had already lowered his eyes to the floor as if to show me that the momentary probing had been accidental …
‘Boris Ignatievich.’ I could hear my voice wheezing slightly.
The boss nodded curtly, then he turned to the Dark Magician, who immediately fixed his eyes on him.
‘Give him an amulet,’ the boss ordered brusquely.
The Dark Magician’s voice was sad and quiet, the voice of someone burdened with all the woes of the world.
‘I’m not doing anything forbidden by the Treaty …’
‘Neither am I. My colleagues must be immune against observers.’
So that was it! We had an observer from the Dark Side in our headquarters. That meant Day Watch had a headquarters somewhere close by, and one of us was there.
The Dark Magician put his hand in his jacket pocket. He took out a carved ivory medallion on a copper chain and held it out to me.
‘Throw it,’ I said.
The magician smiled gently with the same air of melancholy sympathy and flicked his hand. I caught the medallion. The boss nodded approvingly.
‘Your name?’ I asked.
‘Zabulon.’
I hadn’t heard the name before. Either he wasn’t that well known, or he was somewhere right up at the top of the Day Watch.
‘Zabulon …’ I repeated, glancing at the amulet. ‘You no longer have any power over me.’
The medallion grew warm in my hand. I put it on over my shirt, nodded to the Dark Magician and walked over to the boss.
‘You can see how things are, Anton,’ the boss said, mumbling slightly, because he hadn’t taken the mouthpiece of the hookah out of his mouth. ‘There you are, look.’
I looked out the window and nodded.
The black vortex sprouted out of a nine-storey block just like the one we were in. Its slim, flexible stalk ended somewhere around the first-floor level. By reaching out through the Twilight, I could locate the precise apartment.
‘How could this have happened, Boris Ignatievich?’ I asked. ‘This is a lot more serious than a brick falling on someone’s head, or even a gas explosion in a hallway.’
‘We’re doing everything we can.’ The boss seemed to think he had to justify himself to me. ‘All the missile silos are under our control, the same measures have been taken in the US and France, and they’re just being put in place in China. Things are a bit trickier with the tactical nuclear weapons. We’re having big problems locating all the operational laser satellites. The city’s full of all sorts of bacterial garbage … an hour ago there was almost a leak from the Virological Research Institute.’
‘You can’t cheat destiny,’ I said guardedly.
‘Exactly We’re plugging the holes in the bottom of the ship, and the ship’s already breaking in half.’
I suddenly noticed that everyone – the Dark Magician, and Olga, and Lena, and the warriors – was looking at me. I began to feel uncomfortable.
‘Boris Ignatievich?’
‘You’re linked to her.’
‘What?’
The boss sighed and took the hookah tube from his mouth. The cold opium smoke streamed out on to the floor.
‘You, Anton Gorodetsky a programmer, unmarried, of average abilities, are linked to the girl with that vile black filth hanging over her head.’
The Dark Magician in the corner sighed softly. I couldn’t think of anything better to say than ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. We sent Ignat to her, and he did a good job. You know he can seduce anyone.’
‘But it didn’t work with her?’
‘It did. Only the vortex started to grow. They spent half an hour together and the vortex grew from a metre and a half to twenty-five metres. We had to call him off … quickly.’
I glanced sideways at the Dark Magician. Zabulon appeared to be looking at the floor, but he immediately raised his head. This time my defensive shield didn’t react: the amulet gave me secure protection.
‘We don’t need this,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Only a savage would kill an elephant to get a small steak for his breakfast.’
The comparison shocked me. But he seemed to be telling the truth.
‘We don’t require destruction on this scale very often,’ the Dark Magician continued. ‘At the moment we don’t have any ongoing projects that require such a large-scale discharge of energy.’
‘I really hope you don’t …’ said the boss, in a strange, grating voice. ‘Zabulon, what you have to understand is that if this disaster does happen, we’ll squeeze everything we can out of it too.’
The shadow of a smile appeared on the Dark Magician’s face.
‘The number of people who will be horrified by what has happened, who will spill tears of sympathy with others’ grief, will be very great. But there will be more, infinitely more, who will sit with their eyes glued greedily to their TV screens, who will take pleasure in other people’s suffering, feel glad that it passed their city by and make jokes about the retribution meted out to the Third Rome … retribution from on high. You know that, my enemy.’
He wasn’t gloating, the highest-ranking Dark Ones don’t react in such primitive ways. He was stating a fact.
‘Nonetheless, we’re ready,’ said Boris Ignatievich. ‘You know that.’
‘I know, but we are in a more advantageous position. Unless you have a pair of aces up your sleeve, Boris.’
‘You know I always have all four.’
The boss turned towards me as if he’d completely lost interest in the Dark Magician.
‘Anton, the vortex isn’t being nourished by the Day Watch. Whoever created it is working on his own. An unknown Dark Magician of terrible power. He sensed Ignat’s presence and accelerated the pace of events. Now you’re our only hope.’