Twilight Watch

The pin was pulled out. Somewhere inside the grenade the fuse was burning away with agonizing slowness, and in the human world three or four seconds had already gone by…

The casualty range was 200 yards.

If it had exploded inside the shields, there would have been nothing left of Nadiushka but a bloody pulp…

I leaned down and picked up the grenade. It's very difficult to work with objects of the real world when you are in the Twilight. At least the grenade had a distinct Twilight double-the same ribs and ridges, smeared with mud and rust…

Should I throw it away?

No.

In the Twilight it wouldn't go far. And if I took it into the human world-it would explode instantly.

I couldn't think of anything better to do than slice the grenade in half-as if I were trying to remove the stone from an avocado pear. Then I sliced it again into several pieces… searching for the small, glowing string of the slow fuse among the metal and explosive. My phantom knife, a blade of pure Power, chopped through the grenade like a ripe tomato.

Finally I found it-a tiny little spark already creeping close to the detonator. I extinguished it with my fingers.

And then I tumbled out into the human world. Soaked and sweaty, barely able to stand, my legs were trembling so badly, shaking my hand-my burnt fingers were stinging.

"Just give a man a chance to tinker with anything mechanical," Arina said scathingly when she appeared after me. I ought to have shut her inside the shield and let her be blown to pieces! Or I could have cast a frost on her and left her frozen solid until the next day…

"Daddy, teach me how to hide like that," said Nadiushka, none the worse for her adventure. Then she spotted Arina and said indignantly, "Aunty, don't be silly! You can't walk around with no clothes on!"

"How many times have I told you not to talk to grown-ups like that!" Svetlana exclaimed. Then she grabbed hold of Nadiushka's hands and started kissing her.

A scene from a madhouse…

If my mother-in-law had been there, she'd have had a few things to say…

I sat down on the edge of the trench, longing for a smoke. And I wanted a drink. And something to eat. And a sleep. At least a smoke.

"I won't do it again," Nadya babbled. "Look, wolfie's hurt!"

It was only then that I remembered about the werewolves and looked around.

The wolf was lying on the ground with his paws twitching feebly.

"I'm sorry, sorcerer," said Arina. "I threw your death spell at the wolf. There was no time to think."

I looked at Svetlana. Thanatos doesn't necessarily mean certain death. The spell can be removed.

"I'm drained…" Svetlana said in a low voice. "I've no strength left."

"I'll save the filthy creature if you like," Arina suggested. "It's not hard for me to do."

We looked at each other.

"Why did you tell us about the grenade?" I asked.

"What good will it do me if she dies?" Arina replied indifferently.

"She'll be a Great Light One," said Svetlana. "The Greatest of all!"

"Well, let her." Arina smiled. "Maybe she'll remember her Aunty Arina, who told her about the herbs and the flowers… Don't you worry. No one will ever make her into a Dark One. She's no simple child, there was magic involved there… What shall I do with the wolf?"

"Save him," Svetlana said simply.

Arina nodded. Then suddenly she said to me, "There's a bag over there in the trench… with cigarettes and food. I prepared this hideaway a long time ago."

The witch worked on Igor for about ten minutes. First she drove away the growling cubs, who ran off to one side and tried to change back into children, but couldn't, so they lay down in the bushes. Then she started whispering something, all the while plucking first one plant, then another. She shouted at the cubs and they ran off and came back with twigs and roots in their teeth.

Svetlana and I looked at each other without speaking. Everything was perfectly clear anyway. I finished my second cigarette, rolled a third between my hands to soften it, and took a block of chocolate out of the black fabric bag. Apart from cigarettes, chocolate, and a wad of English pounds-what a prudent witch!- the bag was empty.

Somehow I'd been hoping to find the Fuaran.

"Witch," Svetlana shouted when the werewolf got to his feet, still trembling. "Come here!"

Arina came back to us, swinging her hips daintily, and not even slightly embarrassed at being naked. The werewolf lay down close to us too. He was breathing heavily, and the cubs crowded around and started licking him. Svetlana winced at the sight, then turned to look at Arina. "What are you accused of?"

"On the instructions of an unidentified Light One I modified the recipe for a potion and so ruined a joint experiment by the Inquisition, the Night Watch, and the Day Watch."

"Did you do it?"

"Yes," Arina admitted blithely.

"What for?"

"Ever since the Revolution I'd been dreaming of doing real damage to the Reds."

"Don't lie," said Svetlana, frowning. "You couldn't give a damn for the Reds or the Whites. Why did you take the risk?"

"What difference does that make, sorceress?" Arina sighed.

"A big one. And in the first place, for you."

The witch threw her head back and looked up at me, then at Svetlana. Her eyelids were trembling.

"Aunty Arina, are you feeling sad?" Nadiushka asked. Then she glanced sideways at her mother and put her hands over her own mouth.

"Yes," the witch replied.

At that moment I really, really didn't want Arina to fall into the clutches of the Inquisition.

"The experiment was supported by all the Others," Arina said. "The Dark Ones believed that the appearance of thousands of convinced communists in the leadership of the country-the bread plant's output mostly went to the Kremlin and the People's Commissariats-wouldn't improve anything. On the contrary, it would only provoke hostility to the Soviets in the rest of the world. But the Light Ones believed that after a hard, but victorious war against Germany-the likelihood of that was already clear to the clairvoyants by then-the Soviet Union could become a genuinely attractive society. There was a secret report… basically, people would have built communism by 1980…"

"And made corn the basic animal-feed crop," Svetlana snorted.

"Don't talk drivel, sorceress," the witch retorted calmly. "I don't remember about any corn, but they were supposed to have built a city on the moon in the '70s. And fly to Mars, and something else. The whole of Europe would have been communist. And not under constraint either. And by now here on earth we'd have had a huge Soviet Union, a huge United States… I think Britain, Canada, and Australia were part of it… And there was China left on its own."

"So the Light Ones miscalculated?" I asked.

"No." Arina shook her head. "They didn't miscalculate. Of course, the blood would have flowed in rivers. But what came at the end of it all wouldn't have been too bad. Far better than all the regimes we have now… The Light Ones overlooked something else. If things had gone that way, then around about now people would have learned that the Others existed."

"I see," said Svetlana. Nadiushka was squirming restlessly on her knees-she was bored of sitting and she wanted to go to the "wolfie."

"And that's why the… unidentified Light One…"-Arina smiled-"who had the wits to calculate the future more thoroughly than all the rest, came to me. We met a few times and discussed the situation. The problem was that the experiment had not just been pla