Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (38 page)

‘She’s asleep,’ said Svetlana.

After that we didn’t need any magic.

In the dead of night I lay in bed, listening to my wife’s breathing and thinking about prophecies.

There were two of them – and something about them didn’t add up . . .

No, there weren’t just two of them. That was my mistake.

There was a third one, too. The prophecy that Svetlana would have a daughter, who would become an Absolute Enchantress. An Other of boundless Power. Someone who could alter the balance of Light and Darkness, change the entire existing order of things.

Somehow I’d almost forgotten about that. But after all, it was a prophecy that had come true. Olga had rewritten Svetlana’s destiny for its sake, and for its sake Gesar had brought us together, intrigued, taken risks, got involved in confrontations with Zabulon and the Inquisition. The stakes were monstrously high – and now suddenly it was all over? Zabulon had resigned himself to defeat?

But that could never happen . . .

So that game wasn’t over yet. It was still going on. The prophecy had been realised: Nadya was an Absolute Enchantress, but the prophecy hadn’t specified what that would lead to.

All right. Let’s hold that fact in our memory, it’s obviously important. Nadya is one of the pieces on the chessboard. Maybe the most important figure – the White Queen.

What was next?

The boy Kesha’s prophecy. Arina already knew it – so the Tiger was after her . . . Or was he? According to the classical theory, the Tiger tried to eliminate the Prophet in order to prevent a prophecy from being pronounced and realised. And that fitted perfectly with what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. When he stormed the Night Watch office, the Tiger had said: ‘The prophecy must not be heard.’

Right? Right.

But in the old Chinese magician’s opinion, that wasn’t the goal that the Tiger pursued at all. His goal was to ‘shake up’ the prophets, urge them on to declare their prophecies to humans, so that the prophecies would come true – and change human life in one way or another, make sure that the human anthill didn’t stop developing. A coherent theory that was confirmed by Fan Wen-yan’s own story . . . The Tiger ‘hassled’ the prophets until they performed their duty – or firmly decided never to proclaim the prophecy. Clearly, the prophecy that Wen-yan had heard foretold something very bad for China – and the magician had been prepared to die in order to save his country. The Tiger had realised that and had left – he didn’t need any pointless sacrifices.

But then why, in Kesha’s case, had the Tiger said that ‘the prophecy must not be heard’? So was it special in some way? Something that went beyond those that brought the world Sputniks, miniskirts or rock music? And at the same time, if Arina could be trusted, it concerned my daughter.

A riddle.

So, let’s start from the other end. Who is the Tiger? Once again, in Wen-yan’s opinion – and apparently he had studied this question more thoroughly than all our European sages – the Tiger was not simply an Other, changed and guided by the Twilight. He was more complicated than that. He was . . . well, to a certain extent, you could say that he was alive. Alive and intelligent.

Like the Twilight itself.

Basically, he
was
the Twilight, in a form accessible to our eyes . . .

I felt a frosty chill creep across my skin. Someone was walking over my grave, as the Americans say.

Someone . . . A Tiger in a coat!

The Twilight . . .

There it was all around me. Accessible to Others, but barely even capable of being sensed by humans. The source of Power – and simultaneously its consumer.

And, if Wen-yan could be believed, alive and intelligent.

How was that possible? How could a nothingness be intelligent? A matryoshka doll with seven dimensions, one of which is our world, with the others ranging from a cold desert to a pale copy of the real world. Intelligence had to have some material vehicle.

Or did it really have to have anything?

After all, we didn’t even know what the magical Power that we used was. Our scientists were all, to a man, poor magicians, but with wise heads, and they had investigated this matter throughout the twentieth century and carried on in the twenty-first. Our scientists – meaning not only Light Ones and not only Russians. Others throughout the world had sought to understand their own nature, when necessary even involving human scientists and feeding precisely calculated crumbs of information to the Pentagon, the CIA and secret Soviet research institutes. Specially trained Others had collaborated with human scientists, demonstrating certain facets of their abilities – too little for them to be taken with unconditional seriousness, but enough to inflame curiosity and get entire laboratories with multimillion budgets set to work.

Nothing.

There is a Power that we can sense. It is emitted by all living things, but to the greatest extent by humans. (They are followed by whales, dolphins, pigs, dogs and rats – as it happens, monkeys don’t even make the top ten.) Others can sense Power, see it as an aura, they can assess it and record it. And also consume it, naturally – amass it within themselves. So that later, by entering the Twilight, or simply summoning up its mental image, they can perform magical actions.

How? The Chinese magician was quite right – how did the Twilight, which was non-material, transform Power, which was not registered by any instruments, into a perfectly material fireball or a Triple Blade that sliced through metal and stone? Our thoughts and desires were only the switches. Or, to use computer terminology, the commands. But all the invisible work that allowed us to work miracles took place beyond our awareness and beyond our control. It was carried out by the Twilight. So, the Twilight was either an inconceivable non-material computer, tuned to carry out the desires of Others – but then that raised the question of who created it and programmed it – or an inconceivable non-material rational being. A superbeing . . .

In principle, there wasn’t really any great difference here. A machine consisting of energy fields, say, or an equally exotic supermind. Was it all-powerful?

Probably not. By definition, only God was omnipotent and omnipresent. I wasn’t prepared to believe that if the Supreme Being existed, He was concerned with realising the desires of a bunch of Others. That contradicted both theology and common sense. And the facts that we had at our disposal, too. The Tiger or a Mirror, for instance, were not like a manifestation of divine will, almighty and omnipotent. But they
were
like the behaviour of a very powerful and intelligent being. The behaviour of God? No, not by a long way.

And what was it that every living creature feared?

That was an easy one.

Death.

So . . . that meant that one way or another, the boy Kesha’s prophecy was dangerous for the Twilight. And that was why the Tiger didn’t want it to be heard.

Logical?

Yes.

Then we could take that as a starting point.

Now for the other prophecy. The one that was shouted into a hollow tree by a quite different boy who lived in Britain a long, long time ago. A prophecy that had been slumbering, stored away in a wooden chalice for almost three hundred years.

Did it have anything to do with me?

Or did it announce the independence of the United States of North America, the discovery of penicillin or the sinking of the
Titanic
?

No. In matters such as prophecy, there was no such thing as coincidence. If it had come into my hands, if I had guessed – of course, if I really had guessed . . . how I could hear it . . .

These were two links in a single chain.

But between them was a third link, the prophecy about the Absolute Enchantress Nadezhda . . .

And I didn’t have any options. I was a cat who had been smeared with mustard under his tail – and I was going to lick it off, with passion and with gusto.

Because my daughter’s fate was at stake.

And because I really didn’t like the dream that I had had, about Nadya screaming at me with hate in her voice: ‘Daddy, what have you done to us?’ And it wasn’t just a dream generated by nervous stress, a drop of strong drink and a song about a magician who was a poor student of his art that had surfaced from my subconscious. It was a case of precognition, what ordinary people call a ‘prophetic dream’.

I got out of bed quietly, so as not to wake Svetlana. The bed creaked treacherously and I froze, but my wife didn’t wake up. I went to the sitting room, closed the door to the bedroom and switched on a dim standard lamp.

In a modern home, if you don’t happen to be a fanatical opponent of progress, and especially if you’re keen on gadgets, there are many electronic devices capable of carrying information. All of them at my home had been checked. The desk PC and the laptop. And Nadya’s netbook. And Svetlana’s tablet. And the mobile phones. And the alarm clock, on which you could record your own music to wake you up. And all the flash sticks. And the answering machine on the landline phone. Even the teddy bear that had a chip in it with the phrase ‘I love you, Nadenka’ recorded on it by Svetlana had been checked – with apologies. They hadn’t forgotten my MP3 player, either.

Many Others, especially those who have been alive for more than a hundred years, have a pretty poor grasp of electronics and modern technology in general. In this respect, Gesar is a sophisticated Other, a smart guy who tries to get some idea of what’s what.

And that was why, for this supremely polite search, he had sent really young Others who weren’t powerful magicians but who understood very well where a microchip with the recording of the prophecy could be hidden.

These young guys had checked everything but had not found anything, although they had special instruments that I’d only seen in the movies, capable of identifying any memory card at a distance even if it wasn’t plugged into anything. I had thanked them – they’d found a couple of flash sticks that I’d lost around the flat a long time ago . . .

But they didn’t find the prophecy.

Naturally. I hadn’t made a copy on an electronic medium. I’m not an idiot.

I opened the drawer of the sideboard, crammed with all sorts of old electronic junk, and took out an old Sony minidisc player. A dead-end branch in the development of electronics, the kind of thing that no one uses now except people who are especially fond of shocking the public (or who are exceptionally thrifty). The battery in it had died a long time ago.

But there was a separate container that could be attached, and I stuck a battery in that, then screwed the container to the player (all fair and square, a sound, reliable screw, not some kind of flimsy clip-on fastening) and pressed the play button. Vysotsky’s hoarse voice started sounding in my earphones:

In remote Murom’s dark, secret, forested parts,

Evil spirits sow fear in all travellers’ hearts.

Like wandering corpses, they wail and they howl,

And the birds there don’t sing, they mutter and growl.

I didn’t really have to listen, but I did. Right to the end of the song. To the final couplet.

Then I pressed the stop button and glanced round furtively. The doors of the bedroom and the nursery were closed. Naturally, I couldn’t check the Twilight right now but our home was surrounded by such powerful defensive spells that even Gesar and Zabulon working together would have taken hours to break through them. The spells were an entitlement of my rank – and since Nadya lived here . . .

Did I want to hear the prophecy?

I knew now for certain that it existed. Arina had said as much. There was no point in hoping that Kesha hadn’t pressed the button on the toy phone. Or that the prophecy was about the price of oil or the presidential elections . . .

I sighed, closed my eyes and pressed the button.

Silence. With crackling, like from an old-fashioned record.

‘You are Anton Gorodetsky, Higher Light Magician . . .’ a childish voice said quietly. My hands started trembling as they clutched the minidisc player – someone wasn’t just walking over my grave, they were dancing jigs and reels on it. ‘Because of you . . . all of us will be released . . .’

Released? What did that mean?

‘The Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming,’ said Kesha, suddenly speaking rapidly, almost incoherently . . . ‘A long time. A long, long time . . . Nadya Gorodetskaya! Nadya can do it, Nadya can . . .’

I actually jerked up off my chair when the hasty muttering was interrupted by my daughter’s name.

‘You can’t divide anything by zero, you can’t divide anything by zero . . .’ the voice reminded me like the feverish ravings of some star pupil. ‘Anything multiplied by zero is zero, anything multiplied . . . Kill the Tiger! Kill the Tiger and you kill the Twilight! Kill the Tig—’

The recording came to an end. The toy phone only had a small memory chip.

A few seconds of silence – and Vysotsky started singing again in mid-line . . .