Twilight Watch

Edgar was also watching the compass carefully. Then he asked, "Anton, how accurate is the device?"

"Not very, I'm afraid," I admitted. "The trace left by the book was very weak."

"How accurate?" Edgar repeated.

"Within about a hundred yards," I suggested. "Maybe fifty. If I'm right, when the target's close, the pointer will start to swing about chaotically. I'm sorry."

"Don't let it bother you, Anton, you did everything right," Gesar praised me. "No one could have done better with such a weak trace to work on. A hundred meters it is… can you determine the distance to the target?"

"Roughly, from how brightly the pointer glows… About seventy, seventy-five miles."

Gesar frowned. "The book's already in Moscow. We're wasting time, gentlemen. Edgar!"

The Inquisitor put one hand in his pocket and took out a small yellowish-white sphere. It looked like an ordinary pool ball, only a little smaller, and it had incomprehensible pictograms engraved haphazardly on its surface. Edgar squeezed the sphere tightly in his hand and concentrated.

A moment later I felt something changing. As if there had been a shroud hanging in the air-invisible to the eye, but palpable nonetheless-and now it was disappearing, being sucked into the small sphere of ivory…

"I didn't know the Inquisition still had Minoan spheres," said Gesar.

"No comment," said Edgar. He smiled, pleased at the effect he had produced. "That's it, the barrier has been removed. Put up a portal, Great Ones!"

Of course. A direct portal, without any reference points in place at "the other end," was a riddle for Great Ones to solve. Edgar either couldn't do it, or he was saving his strength…

Gesar squinted at Zabulon. "Will you trust me to do it again?" he asked.

Zabulon made a pass with his hand without speaking-and a gap opened up in midair, oozing darkness. Zabulon stepped into it first, then Gesar, gesturing for us to follow him. I picked up Arina's precious note, together with the invisible magical compass, and stepped in after Svetlana.

Despite the difference in external appearances, inside the portal was exactly the same. Milky-white mist, a sensation of rapid movement, total loss of any sense of time. I tried to concentrate-soon we would find ourselves near the criminal who had killed a Higher Vampire. Of course, we had Gesar and Zabulon leading us; Svetlana was just as powerful, if less experienced; Kostya was young, but he was still a Higher Vampire; and there was Edgar and his team with their pockets full of Inquisitors' artifacts. Even so, the fight could turn out to be deadly dangerous.

But a moment later I realized there wasn't going to be any fight.

At least, not right away.

We were standing on a platform at Moscow's Kazan railroad station. There was no one really close to us-people sense when a portal is opening nearby and they spontaneously move out of the way. But all around us there was the kind of crush that even in Moscow you can only find at a railroad station in summer.

People walking to their suburban trains, people getting off trains and carting baggage along, people smoking in front of the mechanical notice boards, waiting for their train to be a

I looked at the spectral compass-the pointer was spi

"We need Cinderella here at once," said Zabulon, gazing around. "We have to find a poppy seed in a sack of millet."

One by one the Inquisitors appeared beside us. The expression of readiness for fierce battle on Edgar's face was suddenly replaced by confusion.

"He's trying to hide," said Zabulon. "Excellent, excellent…"

But his expression didn't look too happy either.

An agitated woman pushed a trolley full of striped canvas bags up to our group. Her red, sweating face was set in an expression of firm determination that could only be mustered by a Russian woman who works as a "shuttle trader" to feed her idle, useless husband and three or four children.

"Haven't a

Svetlana closed her eyes for a moment and replied, "It will arrive at platform one in six minutes and leave with a delay of three minutes."

"Thank you," the woman said, not surprised in the least by such a precise answer. She set off for platform one.

"That's all very nice, Svetlana," Gesar muttered. "But what suggestions do you have concerning the search for the book?"

Svetlana just shrugged.

The cafe was as cozy and clean as a railroad station cafe can be. Maybe because it was in such a strange place-the basement level, beside the baggage rooms. The countless station bums obviously didn't stick their faces in here-the owners had cured them of that habit. There was a middle-aged Russian woman standing behind the counter, and the food was carried out from the kitchen by taciturn, polite men from the Caucasus.

A strange place.

I took two glasses of dry wine from a three-liter box for Svetlana and myself. It was surprisingly cheap and also-to my great amazement-pretty good. I went back to the table where we were sitting.

"It's still here," said Svetlana, nodding at Arina's note. The pointer in the compass was spi

"Maybe the book's hidden in the baggage rooms?" I suggested.

Svetlana took a sip of her wine and nodded, either agreeing with my suggestion or expressing approval of the Krasnodar merlot.

"Is something bothering you?" I asked cautiously.

"Why the station?" Svetlana asked in return.

"To make a getaway. To hide. The thief must have realized he'd be followed."

"The airport. A plane. Any plane," Svetlana replied laconically, taking small sips of her wine.

I shrugged.

It really was strange. Once he had the Fuaran, the renegade Other, whoever he might be, could have tried either to hide or make a run for it. He'd chosen the second option. But why a train? A train as a means of escape-in the twenty-first century?

"Maybe he's afraid of flying?" Svetlana suggested.

I just snorted. Of course, even an Other didn't have much chance of surviving a plane crash. But even the very weakest Other was capable of examining the lines of probability for the next three or four hours and figuring out if there was any danger of a plane crashing.

And Witezslav's killer was anything but weak.

"He needs to get somewhere the planes don't go," I suggested.

"But at least he could have flown out of Moscow to shake off the pursuit."

"No," I said, enjoying the feeling of putting Svetlana right. "That wouldn't be any good. We would have identified the thief's approximate location, worked out which plane he'd taken, questioned the passengers, taken information from the surveillance cameras at the airport and discovered his identity. Then Gesar or Zabulon would have opened a portal… they could open one to any place he happened to go. And we'd all be right back where we are now. Except that we'd know what our enemy looks like."

Svetlana nodded. She looked at her watch and shook her head. She closed her eyes for an instant, then smiled calmly.

That meant Nadiushka was okay.

"Why does he have to try to get away at all," Svetlana said thoughtfully. "I doubt if the ritual described in the Fuaran requires much time. The witch turned a lot of her servants into Others when she was attacked. It would be much easier for the killer to use the book and become a Great One… the Greatest of all. And then either take us on or destroy the Fuaran and hide. If he becomes more powerful than we are, we simply won't be able to unmask him."

"Perhaps he has already become more powerful," I remarked. "Since Gesar raised the subject of initiating Nadya…"