Nightwatch

«You'll see… let's go.»

We set off along a trampled path, overtaking women with shopping bags rambling home from the supermarket. How strange it is that we have supermarkets now, just like the genuine article. But people still walk the same old tired way, as if they'd spent an hour standing in line for little blue corpses called chickens…

«Is it far?» I asked.

«If it was, we'd have taken a car.»

«How did our playboy make out? Couldn't he handle it?»

«Ignat tried his best,» was all Ilya said. I felt a brief pang of vengeful satisfaction, as if it were in my interest for handsome Ignat to screw up. If a mission required it, he was usually in someone else's bed within two hours after his assignment was set.

«The boss has declared a state of readiness for evacuation,» Ilya suddenly said.

«What?»

«At a moment's notice. If the vortex isn't stabilized, the Others quit Moscow.»

He was walking ahead of me; I couldn't look into his eyes. But what reason would Ilya have to lie…

«And is the vortex still…« I began. Then I stopped. I could see it.

Above the dismal nine-story block facing us, a black tornado was revolving slowly against the background of the dark, snowy sky.

You couldn't call it a twister or a vortex any longer. It was a tornado. It rose up out of the next building, hidden by the one we could see. And judging from the side angle of the dark cone, it started almost down on the ground.

«Damnation…« I whispered.

«Watch what you say,» Ilya snapped. «It could easily come true.»

«It's thirty meters high…«

«Thirty-two. And still growing…«

I cast a hasty glance at my shoulder and saw Olga sitting there. She'd emerged from the Twilight.

Have you ever seen a bird frightened? Frightened like a human being?

The owl looked ruffled. Can feathers really stand on end? There was an orange-yellow flame blazing in her amber eyes.

The shoulder of my poor jacket was torn into tiny shreds, and the claws continued scraping, as if they wanted to scrape right through to my body.

«Olga!»

Ilya turned back and nodded:

«Now you see… The boss says the vortex at Hiroshima wasn't that high.»

The owl flapped its wings and soared smoothly into the air, without a sound. A woman shrieked behind me—I swung around and saw a stupefied face, glazed eyes following the bird's flight in amazement.

«It's a crow,» Ilya said quietly, half-turning his head to glance at the woman. His reactions were far quicker than mine. A moment later the accidental witness was overtaking us, muttering about the narrow path and people who liked to block the way.

«Is it growing fast?» I asked, with a nod at the tornado.

«In bursts. But it's stabilizing now. The boss called Ignat off just in time. Come on…«

The owl made a wide circle around the tornado, then flew lower and over our heads. Olga still looked very self-possessed, but her careless emergence from the twilight showed how agitated she really was.

«Why, what did he do wrong?»

«Nothing really… except for being overconfident. He got to know her. Then he started forcing things along and that made the twister start to grow… and how!»

«I don't understand,» I said, confused. «It can only grow that way if it's being fed with energy by the magician who summoned up the Inferno…«

«That's the whole point. Someone must have tracked Ignat and started shoveling coal in the firebox. This way…«

We went into the entrance of the building that stood between us and the vortex. The owl flew in after us at the last moment. I gave Ilya a puzzled look, but I didn't ask any questions. Anyway, it was clear soon enough what we were there for.

An operations center had been set up in an apartment on the first floor. The heavy steel door, firmly closed in the human world, was standing wide open in the Twilight. Without stopping, Ilya dived into the Twilight and walked through. I fumbled for a few seconds, raising my shadow, and followed him.

It was a large apartment, with four rooms, all very comfortable. But it was also noisy, smoky, and hot.

There were more than twenty Others there, including field operatives and us backroom boys. No one took any notice when I arrived; they just glanced at Olga. I realized that the old Watch members knew her, but no one made any attempt to say hello or smile at the white owl.

What could she have done?

«Go through into the bedroom; the boss is in there,» Ilya said briskly, turning off into the kitchen, where I could hear glasses clinking. Maybe they were drinking tea, or maybe it was something a bit stronger. I glanced in quickly as I passed and saw I was right. They were reanimating Ignat with cognac. Our ladies' man looked completely wiped out, crushed. It was a long time since he'd suffered this kind of failure.

I walked on by, pushed open the first door I came to, and looked inside.

It was the children's room. A child of about five was sleeping on a little bed, and his parents and teenage sister were on the carpet beside it. Clear enough. The owners of the apartment had been put into a sound, healthy sleep so they wouldn't get under our feet. We could have set up the entire operations office in the Twilight, but why waste all that energy?

Someone slapped me on the shoulder and I looked around—it was Semyon.

«The boss is that way,» he told me. «Come on…«

It seemed that everyone knew I was expected.

When I entered the next room, I was taken aback for just a moment.

There couldn't be any more absurd sight than a Night Watch operations center set up in a private apartment.

There was a medium-size magic ball hanging in the air above a dressing table stacked with cosmetics and piled high with costume jewelry. The ball was transmitting a view of the vortex from above. Lena, our best operator, was sitting on an ottoman beside it, silent and intense. Her eyes were closed, but when I came in she raised one hand slightly in greeting.

Okay, so that was normal. Ball 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 brightly colored robe, soft oriental slippers, and an embroidered skullcap. The room was filled with the sweet fumes of a portable hookah. The white owl was sitting in front of him. It looked like they were communicating nonverbally.

That was all normal, too. In moments of exceptional stress, the boss always reverted to the habits he'd picked up in Central Asia. He worked there at the end of the nineteenth century and the start 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 magic wands hidden in their sleeves.

A perfectly standard arrangement. At moments like this the headquarters would never be 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 final Other who was 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 loose-fitting gray suit. A human being would probably have taken the stranger for a member of some small sect. And he would have been half right.

He was a Dark Magician. And a top-flight 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 backward. 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 the boss.

«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 the pocket of his jacket. 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 melancholic 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 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 didn't take 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-story 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 America 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 bacteriological 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, Olga, Lena, and the warriors—was looking at me. I began feeling uncomfortable.