Day Watch

How dramatic he had been! He'd really had to work hard to keep a solemn, stony face and avoid cracking a smile. But the expression in the Fi

"I really shouldn't have," Edgar muttered to himself. "They're like children… And I mock them."

Edgar sighed regretfully and opened his magazine. It was a nice short flight to Prague, not like flying to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, for instance. You were there before you knew it, without any other stops on the way or that hellish nightmare of having to sleep in your seat. But then, if you really thought about it, the most convenient form of transport was a Dark portal. Only setting up a portal from Moscow to Prague would be an unjustifiable extravagance. So he had to fly, like ordinary human beings.

But not quite like ordinary human beings… at least Others didn't have any problems with tickets.

Chapter two

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Anton loved Prague. In fact, he simply couldn't understand how it was possible not to love the place. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the very first moment, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you. Moscow, unfortunately, did not belong in either category. But Prague was like an old, wise enchantress who knew how to pretend to be young, but did not see any need for it, since she remained beautiful at any age.

And if you really thought about it, Prague ought to have become the abode of Dark Ones. A city saturated to overflowing with Gothic buildings, a city full of plague pillars-monuments to the medieval pestilence of the Black Death-a city that had a ghetto during the Second World War, a city that witnessed the opposition of the two superpowers during the Cold War… where could all those emanations of Darkness, the nutritional substratum of the Dark Ones, have gone to? How had they been scattered, where to, and why had they been converted into memory, but not into malice?

It was a mystery…

Anton didn't know any members of the Prague Night Watch in person. They had occasionally exchanged information by courier or email when something in the archives needed clarification. And at Christmas and the New Year it was traditional to send greetings to all the Night Watches… but nobody made any distinction between the Prague Night Watch (active staff- 130 Others, operational reserve-76) and the Night Watch of some small American town (active staff-1 Other, operational reserve-0).

Anton had been to Prague twice on vacation. Simply wandering aimlessly around the city from one beer bar to the next, buying cheap little souvenirs on the Charles Bridge, traveling out to Karlovy Vary to swim in the pool filled with hot mineral water and try the hot wafers in the cafe.

But now he was flying to Prague on business. Really serious business…

Anton stretched out in his chair, as far as the space in the Boeing 737's economy class would allow-the comfort level wasn't much different from an old Soviet Tupolev-and examined the backs of the Regin Brothers' heads. They looked tense- the Dark Ones' auras were full of fear and impatience. They knew Anton was there and they were dreaming of getting as far away from him as possible, as soon as possible…

If it wasn't for that incident at Sheremetievo airport, Anton might even have felt sorry for the luckless magicians. But once Anton had gone into combat with an enemy, he was an enemy forever.

As if he could read Anton's thoughts-although, of course, that was beyond his power-one of the Regin Brothers, the tall, strong black guy, turned around, glanced warily at Anton, and hastily averted his gaze. Raivo-Anton remembered his name. From somewhere in Senegal… no, from Burkina Faso, that was it. Picked up by one of the Regin Brothers' families and raised in the spirit of devotion to the great Fafnir…

Just how had the Regin Brothers come up with all this nonsense?

Once, long, long ago, something had happened, something that often happened among the Others. A Dark magician and a Light magician fought to the death. The Light magician was called Sigurd… Siegfried, if you pronounced it in the German ma

After that, things took a rather unusual turn. The Dark magician's disciples didn't scatter, as often happened, and they didn't fight among themselves, as happened even more often. Instead they decided to resurrect their master. They banded together to form a sect known as the Regin Brothers and withdrew almost completely from the usual struggle between Light and Darkness… which suited the Light Ones very well, of course. The brothers lovingly preserved the Talon torn from the Twilight body of the Dark magician. Later the Talon was confiscated by the Inquisition-just before the Second World War the Light Ones had lodged a successful protest against such an extremely powerful artifact remaining in the hands of Dark Ones. The Regin Brothers hadn't really argued about it, but they handed over the Talon with the words, "Fafnir's time has not yet come…" And then suddenly the European office of the Inquisition had been attacked! There had been a battle in which almost all the magicians in the small sect had been killed, together with a substantial number of the Inquisition's bodyguards, who had grown idle and lazy. Then the remnants of the sect had made their absurd appearance in Moscow.

It was a well-known fact that human beings didn't have a monopoly on idiots…

But then… were they really idiots?

Anton remembered what an intense charge of Power the Talon had given off. In part it was the Power accumulated in the Talon as a result of the Regin Brothers' efforts over many years. In part it was the Power of the Dark magician himself.

Others didn't die in the same way as ordinary people. They receded into the Twilight, losing their physical form and with it their ability to return to the world of human beings. But there was something left behind-Anton had seen vague shadows and a quivering mist that sometimes appeared in the Twilight, marking out the path taken by dead Others. Once he had even met a dead Other… It wasn't one of his most pleasant memories. But there was something left, even there…

Was it possible to bring a dead Other back to life?

The answer was probably somewhere. In the labyrinth of the archives, classified as top secret, sealed by the Night and Day Watches, with access ba

But Anton wasn't supposed to know the answer.

He looked through the window at the clouds stretching out below, at the weak glimmering of thousands of auras merged together that indicated cities. The plane was already flying over some part of Poland.

Just supposing it was possible to bring Fafnir back to life…

So what? Maybe he had been a powerful magician, maybe even a Higher Magician, a magician beyond classification… his resurrection wouldn't change anything in the global balance of power, especially since he would be estranged from human life. He wouldn't understand modern reality… and if he was stupid enough to set off around Europe in his Twilight form, he'd be torn to pieces by rockets, shot with lasers from satellites. They'd use tactical nuclear weapons… while the Japanese howled woefully that Godzilla had come back to life and been killed again…

What was it the Dark Ones wanted? Disorder, panic, people screaming about the Apocalypse?

Anton squirmed in his chair. He took the plastic cup and the small, two-hundred-gram bottle of dry Hungarian wine from the smiling stewardess. It was all right for Edgar… Like any Dark One, he was flying business class, so he had a crystal glass and superior wine…