The Tiger shook himself and crimson flames and blue chunks of ice fell off him onto the ground. The asphalt under his feet started boiling and swelled up into humps. The snow and ice evaporated into clouds of heavy, bluish mist.
‘No one has any right to violate prophecies!’ the Tiger exclaimed almost joyfully.
He stepped forward, tugging his feet out of the molten asphalt. I could feel the heat, even behind the Shields I had put up.
‘And now I have the right to act!’ the Tiger said, moving towards the Two-in-One.
The Two-in-One dashed at him and the two creatures of the Twilight fused into a single, tangled knot.
They rolled across the ground, embroiled in an ordinary, straightforward fight, not a battle of magic. But perhaps sorcery was involved, after all. When the embodiments of two laws of nature, two functions that have acquired human form, fight each other, it has to be magic – even if the battle is fought with teeth and nails, fangs and talons.
The Two-in-One didn’t change – he fought in his ‘human spider’ form. But the Tiger’s shape shifted. Sometimes I could see flashes of paws and ferociously bared teeth. And sometimes I saw bloodied hands and a human face wearing an equally ferocious grin.
It all seemed to be happening at the same time, as if he were man and beast simultaneously.
At one point the ginger tomcat came flying out of the tangle with its legs splayed out and dashed across the snow towards the doors of the restaurant, miaowing wildly.
I started backing away towards Nadya. There was nothing I could do to help the Tiger. If I struck any kind of blow I risked hitting our only protector.
‘Open a portal!’ I shouted to my daughter.
‘I can’t! The Twilight’s boiling!’ she exclaimed despairingly. ‘Everything’s swirling about…’
I could also sense that something was wrong with the Twilight, without having to glance into it. The ground under my feet started shuddering. Ghostly purple lights appeared on the mountain tops. A low, intense humming sound filled the air.
The Twilight was running a fever.
The Twilight was fighting with itself. Its two incarnations were grappling in mortal combat: the Two-in-One, the ancient destroyer of civilisations, and the Tiger, their ancient protector. Both immensely powerful. Both remorseless.
But the Tiger had only one indisputable right: to ensure that we didn’t die today. To protect the prophecy that had been proclaimed.
‘Let’s run for it, Nadya,’ I said. ‘Come on… this wrestling match is bound to end badly.’
‘Dad, we won’t get away,’ my daughter said, taking hold of my hand. And then she said something I had never heard her say, even when she was a child: ‘Dad, I’m afraid…’
There was a blinding flash, a bright streak of fire and ice, as if something had exploded deep in the tangle of fighting bodies. They fell apart, with the Two-in-One flying off in one direction and the Tiger in the other.
But the Two-in-One got up, and the Tiger just lay there.
The Two-in-One looked at me with his only remaining eye – one of Denis’s. The knife was still protruding from the eye socket beside it. Alexei’s face had been reduced to bloody mush and his head was spinning about wildly.
‘You’re all—’ wheezed the Two-in-One.
At that very moment a snowcat came rumbling across the road on its caterpillar tracks. Its blinking lights and beepers had been switched off and its scoop was lowered.
The snowcat crashed into the Two-in-One, toppling him over and crushing him. It then started spinning round on the spot, pulping the human flesh with its tracks. The Two-in-One howled in two voices and fell silent.
Nadya and I just stood there, dumbstruck.
The snowcat came to a halt and its engine cut out. The door of the cabin opened and Arina clambered out and jumped down onto the snow.
‘I thought you’d run away,’ I said.
‘You can’t run away from destiny, silly,’ Arina replied.
I walked up to the snowcat and looked at a hand protruding from under a caterpillar track. The hand twitched, as if it could sense my gaze, and it grabbed at the frozen ground. The snowcat jerked upwards and the maimed, half-crushed Two-in-One started creeping out from under a machine that weighed tons.
‘You never know when to stop, you brute,’ said Arina, leaning down over the Two-in-One, who had already crept halfway out. She was holding the Shoot – no longer a flowering bush, but a wooden phallus again. Only now, without its pot, the Shoot looked less obscene, at least from one side – and from that side it looked like a wooden dagger.
Arina raised it over her head and swung it down hard and fast, piercing through the body of the Two-in-One. The mutilated monster suddenly disappeared without leaving a trace and the dagger, stuck in the ground, darkened as it clad itself in bark and sprouted a single thin stem.
‘You killed him!’ I said. ‘You killed him!’
‘The Two-in-One’s not that easy to kill,’ Arina said regretfully. ‘I just stopped him for a while.’
‘And where is he?’
‘He withdrew into the Twilight,’ said Arina. ‘To lick his wounds.’
‘Dad!’ Nadya shrieked.
I went dashing to my daughter. She was kneeling beside the Tiger, who was stirring feebly, trying to sit up. I leaned down and held out my hand to help him to his feet.
‘How does it look?’ the Tiger asked, turning towards me.
It looked appalling – half of the Tiger’s head was missing. It had been sliced off neatly from the top down to one ear, leaving a surface with a smooth, glassy crust. Or perhaps the wound was filled with glass.
‘I’d say you’re dead.’
‘What a good thing I’m not human,’ said the Tiger, thrusting his hand into the gap for a moment. Then he shrugged and asked: ‘Have you got any cigarettes?’
‘Won’t that be bad for you?’ I asked, trying not to look at the fearsome wound. I rummaged in my pockets – I’d put those cigarettes that the Tiger had given me in one of them…
‘Nothing’s bad for me any longer,’ the Tiger replied calmly. ‘I’ve only got two minutes left to live.’
‘And what then?’ asked Nadya, bewildered.
‘Then I’ll withdraw into the Twilight, little girl,’ said the Tiger. ‘I broke the rules.’
‘No you didn’t!’ I said. ‘You were protecting the prophecy! Performing your own function!’
‘That’s splitting hairs,’ the Tiger snorted. Taking the pack from me, he pulled out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. It lit up. ‘It worked, though,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, midnight arrived while we were fighting. After that I didn’t have any right to stop the Two-in-One killing you.’
‘But you stopped him anyway!’ Nadya exclaimed.
‘That’s right,’ the Tiger said. ‘Let’s just say I got carried away.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked. ‘Can we help? You’re not a human being…’
‘That’s just the problem. The Twilight has cut me off. Cut off the power, if you like.’
The Tiger blew out a jet of smoke and looked up at the clear night sky. ‘You’re lucky. You have the stars. Some day human beings will stop killing each other with the Two-in-One’s help and reach the stars…’
‘I can give you Power!’ Nadya shouted. ‘I’m an Absolute Other! How much do you need, Tiger?’
The Tiger looked at my daughter and I thought I sensed a rapid, unspoken dialogue between them. Nadya lowered her eyes.
‘Don’t be sad,’ said the Tiger. ‘I told you: I’m not human at all. I won’t even die like you do. Don’t be sad. You have to cope with him. And you have Arina now – she seems to know what to do.’