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I wondered how he'd managed to catch up with me. Had he requisitioned a motorbike as well?
I stood there, waiting. Anton looked at me, as if he were pondering some thought, and waited too.
After a little pause, I pressed the button. The doors of the elevator closed and I went up. But not all the way to the very top right away, only about two-thirds of the way up the building. It turned out that the only way I could go higher was on a different elevator that served the upper floors. And then the only way to get where I needed to go was to follow a wide marble stairway with old blotches of whitewash on it. The stairway led to a door that was open in the Twilight but, naturally, firmly closed and locked in the ordinary world.
Just before the stairway, Picnic's ritual performance came to an end and the player selected another song at random:
I dream of dogs and of wild beasts,
I dream that animals with eyes like lamps
Bit into my wings high in the heavens,
And I fell clumsily, like a fallen angel…
I'd only heard snatches of this song by Nautilus Pompilius before, but now it suddenly struck an echo in my very soul. As I walked up toward the locked door and dived into the Twilight, I sang along together with Butusov.
I don't remember the fall, I only remember
The impact as I struck the cold stones.
How could I have flown so high and then
Tumbled down so cruelly, like a fallen angel?
Straight back down into the place that we
Had left behind, hoping for a new life.
Straight back down into the place from where
We stared avidly up into the blue heavens.
Straight down…
Any Other could have heard me and Butusov, even though the only real sound was coming from the little button earphones and faded away completely only one step away from me.
We entered the chamber where the Tribunal was taking place together. Me and the fallen angel.
I tried to be just and kind,
And I wasn't frightened or surprised
By the people gathering down on the Earth
To watch an angel fall…
Gesar. Zabulon. The Inquisitor Maxim. The Dark Ones I'd been drinking coffee with and talking to for the last few days: Edgar, Yura, Kolya, A
And a light enchantress with a face contorted in grief. People and Others have expressions like that when they've just lost loved ones.
And the wind swirls into their open mouths,
Filling them with white snow, or sweet ma
Or simply feathers flying down after
The one who has fallen, like a fallen angel…
And then I was dragged irresistibly up the transparent stairway, to the top of the mysterious pyramid I had been climbing all this time; at almost the very same moment, the two Inquisitors in robes rescinded the prohibition on higher magic. Svetlana hit me with that cloud I had seen, which had been ready to burst and explode at any moment. A field of Power that made a multi-megaton explosion seem tiny and insignificant.
Time stopped
And I understood everything. Everything that had happened. Everything that was happening now and everything that was destined to happen in the immediate future. I understood, and swallowed hard to keep down the lump that had suddenly risen in my cramped throat.
I had become the most powerful magician on Earth. A magician beyond classification. A Caliph for an hour… no, only for an instant… The only one in this dilapidated round hall who had no future.
There are some Others who have no future…
A Mirror! I was nothing but a Mirror. The Mirror of the World. A weight cast into the dangling pan of the scales when the balance between the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness is disrupted.
The Light had acquired a new Great Enchantress, but the Darkness had not been given an equally strong adept. The Light had been granted a chance to settle accounts with the Darkness once and for all.
But there is no Light without Darkness. And so the Twilight had produced me. It had found a strange Other who had not yet inclined to one side or the other, an Other with a pristine, pure aura, and then colored that aura Dark. It had taken away my former memories and given me the ability to reflect and absorb others' Power. The more powerfully I was struck, the more powerful I had become, jumping up onto the next step. And when there was nowhere left to jump, that was the summit, and beyond that there was only eternity and the Twilight-the Mirror was no longer needed. Because the Mirror had itself become capable of disrupting the equilibrium.
The Twilight was waiting for me. Eternal Twilight. I didn't know what would happen to the body of Vitaly Rogoza, who until only recently had been an Other with no destiny. I didn't know what would happen to his memory and his personality- it all happens differently every time a Mirror comes. I only knew that the one who had become aware of himself in that frozen park in Nikolaev on his way to catch a train to Moscow would disappear forever, be transformed into an incorporeal, powerless shadow, a ghostly inhabitant of the Twilight.
Or simply into a part of the Twilight… the Twilight that is not as inert as we are all used to thinking…
I understood all this in the brief instant before I drew in all of Svetlana's Power. She imagined that she had lost Anton Gorodetsky. And she imagined it because of a freak coincidence, because I walked into the Tribunal hall with a mini-disk player exactly like Anton's, with a copy of his disk in the player and with Anton's favorite song in my ears and my soul. I also understood that the Inquisition knew the truth. But none of the Inquisitors would say a word to reassure the Others of Moscow, who believed I'd had a skirmish with Anton and Anton had been killed.
The Light Ones knew his favorite songs.
"Die!"
No, I won't die, Svetlana. Or rather, I will, but not right now. I am a Mirror. In trying to destroy me, you grow weaker, and I only grow stronger. I can already see what lies ahead of you-thirty or fifty years spent on slowly restoring all the Power you've squandered so insanely. You'll have to collect together what you've lost, crumb by crumb. For three, or maybe more, decades-long enough for the Darkness to prepare for another attempt to disrupt the equilibrium by whichever side it happens to be. You have long years ahead of you to find happiness with Anton, or not to find it.
But in any case, throughout those years you will be equals.
Maybe you have lost your powers, but I'm giving you a chance… a chance that I don't have.
The music stopped. The magical blow had been too much for the player-technology reacts badly in general to powerful magic-and it shattered into shards of plastic. My cap went flying toward the door, and my jacket split in several places at once.
I was barely able to keep my feet, but I managed it.
"A Mirror!" Gesar exclaimed, his voice filled with an entire gamut of indescribable feelings and intonations. "The third time, and the third time for the Dark Ones!"
"Well, we don't set up global social experiments, my dear colleague!" said Zabulon, the head of the Day Watch, making no effort to conceal his triumph. Today he was one of the victors. And the Light Ones had suffered a defeat.
But just how many times had this already happened-or the exact opposite?