How I wished I had clean hands, a passionate heart and a cool head. But somehow these three qualities don’t seem to get along too well. The wolf, the goat and the cabbage – what crazy ferryman would think of sticking them all in the same boat?
And when he’d eaten the goat for starters, what wolf wouldn’t like to try the ferryman?
‘God only knows,’ I said. My voice was lost in the clouds. I lowered my hand and grabbed hold of the Dark Magician’s shadow – a limp rag, a blur in space. I jerked the shadow upwards, threw it over his body and tugged the Dark One into the second level of the Twilight.
He screamed when the world suddenly became unrecognisable. He’d probably never been any lower than the first level before. The energy required for his first trip came from me, but all the sensations were quite new to him.
I braced myself on the Dark One’s shoulders and pushed him downwards, while I crept upwards, pressing my feet down hard on his hunched back.
‘Great Magicians climb their way up over other people’s backs.’
‘You bastard, Anton! You bastard!’
The Dark Magician still hadn’t realised who I was. He didn’t realise it until the moment he turned over on to his back, still providing support for my feet, and saw my face. Here, in the second level of the Twilight, my crude disguise didn’t work, of course. His eyes opened wide, he gave a short gasp and howled, clutching at my leg.
But he still didn’t understand what I was doing and why. I kicked him over and over again, trampling his fingers and his face with my heels. It wouldn’t really hurt an Other, but I wasn’t trying to do him any physical damage. I wanted him lower, I wanted him to fall, move downwards on all levels of reality, through the human world and the Twilight, through the shifting fabric of space. I didn’t have the time or the skill to fight a full-scale duel with him according to all the laws of the Watches, according to all the rules that had been invented for young Light Ones who still retained their faith in Good and Evil, the absolute truth of dogma and the inevitability of retribution.
When I decided I’d trampled the Dark Magician down low enough, I pushed off from his spreadeagled body, leapt up into the cold, damp mist and jerked myself out of the Twilight.
Straight out into the human world. Straight on to the observation platform.
I appeared squatting on my haunches on a slab of glass, soaking wet from head to foot, choking in an effort to suppress a sudden cough. The rain of that other world smelled of ammonia and ashes.
A faint gasp ran round the room and people staggered back, trying to get away from me.
‘It’s all right,’ I croaked. ‘Do you hear? It’s all right.’
Their eyes told me they didn’t agree. A man in uniform by the wall, a security guard, one of the TV Tower’s faithful retainers, stared at me stony-faced and reached for his pistol holster.
‘It’s for your own good,’ I said, choking in a new fit of coughing. ‘Do you understand?’
I let my power break free and touch the people’s minds. Their faces started looking more relaxed and calm. They slowly turned away and pressed their faces against the windows. The security guard froze with his hand resting on his unbuttoned holster.
Only then did I look down at my feet. And I too froze in shock.
The Dark Magician was there, under the glass. He was screaming. His eyes had turned into round black patches, forced wide open by his pain and terror. The fingertips of one hand were imbedded in the glass and he was hanging by them, with his body swaying like a pendulum in the gusts of wind. The sleeve of his white shirt was soaked in blood. The wand was still there on the magician’s belt, but he’d forgotten about it. I was the only thing that existed for him right now, on the other side of that triple-reinforced glass, inside the dry, warm, bright shell of the observation platform, beyond Good and Evil. A Light Magician, sitting above him and gazing into those eyes crazy with pain and terror.
‘Well, did you think we always fight fair?’ I asked. Somehow I thought he might be able to hear me, even through the thick glass and the roar of the wind. I stood up and stamped my heel on the glass. Once, twice, three times – it didn’t matter that the blow wouldn’t reach the fingers fused into the glass.
The Dark Magician jerked, trying to tug his hand out of the way of that crushing heel – a spontaneous, instinctive, irrational reaction.
The flesh gave way.
For a moment the glass was covered with a red film of blood, but then the wind swept it away. And all I could see was the vague outline of the Dark Magician’s body, getting smaller and smaller, tumbling over and over in the tower’s turbulent slipstream. He was being carried in the direction of The Three Little Pigs, a fashionable establishment at the foot of the tower.
The clock ticking away in my mind gave a loud click and instantly halved the time I had left.
I stepped off the glass and walked round the platform in a circle. I wasn’t looking at the people, I was gazing into the Twilight. No, there weren’t any more guards here. Now I had to find out where their headquarters were. Up on top in the service area, among all the equipment? I didn’t think so. Probably somewhere more comfortable.
There was another security guard, a human, standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the restaurant. One glance was enough for me to see that he’d been influenced already, and quite recently. It was a good thing they’d only influenced him superficially.
And it was a very good thing they’d decided to influence him at all. That was a trick that cut both ways.
The security guard opened his mouth, getting ready to shout.
‘Quiet! Come this way!’ I ordered.
The security guard followed me without saying a word.
We went into the gents’ – one of the tower’s free attractions, the highest urinal and toilet bowls in Moscow. Please feel free to make your mark among the clouds. I waved my hand through the air. A spotty-faced youth came scurrying out of one cubicle, zipping up his trousers, another man at the urinal grunted, broke off and went wandering out with a glassy look in his eyes.
‘Take your clothes off,’ I ordered the security guard and starting pulling off my wet sweater.
The guard’s holster was half open, and his Desert Eagle was far older than my Makarov, but that didn’t bother me. The important thing was that the uniform was almost a perfect fit.
‘If you hear shooting,’ I told the guard, ‘go down and do your duty Do you understand?’
He nodded.
‘I turn you towards the Light,’ I said, intoning the words of the enlistment formula. ‘Renounce the Dark, defend the Light. I give you the vision to distinguish Good from Evil. I give you the faith to follow the Light. I give you the courage to fight against the Dark.’
I used to think I’d never get a chance to use my right to enlist volunteers. How could there be free choice in genuine Dark? How could I involve anybody in our games when the Watches themselves were established to counterattack that practice?
But now I was acting without hesitation, exploiting the loophole that the Dark Ones had left me by getting the security man to guard their headquarters, the way some people keep a small dog in their apartment: it can’t bite, but it can yap. What they’d done gave me the right to sway the security man in the opposite direction and get him to follow me. After all, he wasn’t either good or bad, he was a perfectly ordinary man with a wife he loved in moderation, elderly parents whom he remembered to support, a young daughter and a son from his first marriage who was almost grown up, a weak faith in God, a tangled set of moral principles and a few standard dreams – an ordinary, decent man.