Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (44 page)

And he smiled – sadly and understandingly.

We were all still in the poses in which the prophecy had caught us. Me with my hand stretched out to the blazing chalice. Nadya huddled up against the fridge, Kesha valiantly protecting her with his body. Arina off at one side, giggling quietly and tramping her feet on the spot. Had the old witch really gone out of her mind?

‘Was that a prophecy?’ asked Kesha.

I didn’t answer. I touched my face – it was wet with tears. I looked down at my feet – they were covered in dust.

Very slick. So had this not been simply an illusion, but something like a journey in time?

‘I think I said something like that too, only I’ve forgotten it . . .’ Kesha added quietly. ‘But that was about the Tiger . . .’

‘The chip in the toy was too small,’ I replied. ‘Not everything was recorded.’

‘I never did trust technology,’ said Arina. And she cackled with laughter.

‘Daddy, am I going to have to fight someone?’ Nadya asked. ‘And kill him?’

I looked at Arina. The witch was as happy as if she had stuffed herself with her own witch’s toadstools in toad sauce.

‘What are you so delighted about?’ I asked. ‘Do you realise what’s happened? We’ve heard the prophecy for which the Tiger killed Erasmus Darwin today.’

‘Killed him?’ Arina asked, knitting her brows. But the smile remained on her face. ‘I’m sorry for the old alcoholic, I really am. But I’m glad that everything has been settled. Now we can get this over and done with, Anton! You and me – or rather, your daughter. But we’ll help. The Tiger will come and Nadya will destroy him.’

‘I think you didn’t hear the prophecy clearly,’ I said. ‘It’s for me to decide. Do you understand?’

I stepped towards my daughter and put my arms round her.

‘It’s for me to decide whether Nadya kills the Tiger.’

‘I don’t want to kill anyone,’ Nadya said quickly. ‘Daddy, I don’t want to!’

‘I’m afraid you don’t have any choice any more,’ Arina said calmly. ‘The Executioner will die and magic will quit our world. It has been said! If we tell the prophecy to humans – it will come true.’

‘And what if we don’t tell them?’ I asked.

‘Then the Tiger will come and kill all the Others who know the prophecy,’ Arina said, smiling. ‘I’m ready. I’ll die anyway when the Twilight disappears, as you already know: ordinary people don’t live as long as I have.’

‘You’re the one to blame,’ I said. ‘You’re involved in this somehow. You knew how to activate the prophecy, didn’t you? Had you known for a long time?’

‘I suspected,’ Arina said calmly. ‘It’s basically an old witch’s method, to make a spell dependent on the destruction of some valuable item. Then you can hope it will only be used in a case of extreme need. But you were absolutely right, Anton, I couldn’t have influenced your daughter. I couldn’t have enchanted an Absolute Enchantress. I had to make sure that she had no choice and you didn’t either.’

‘There’s always a choice,’ said Nadya, slipping out from under my arm and giving Arina an angry look. ‘I won’t kill anyone! Not even if I get killed!’

‘But your daddy will be killed too,’ Arina said. ‘And Kesha also, as it happens. Will you be able just to watch the Tiger kill them?’

Nadya’s face fell.

‘So you couldn’t have influenced Nadya,’ I said. ‘But what about Erasmus?’

Arina lowered her eyes for a moment.

‘It was only curiosity . . . As you know, it killed the cat. And that old Irish drunkard, too.’

‘Why?’

‘To give you a nudge. Erasmus had foretold that you would hear his final prophecy. So he had to get in touch with you. And you had to panic. And make up your mind to destroy the chalice.’

‘All you needed to do after that was make sure Nadya got home in time,’ I said, nodding. ‘And not alone – so that I would feel responsibility for someone else’s child as well. I won’t even ask if Anna Tikhonovna’s illness was a coincidence.’

‘At our age, Anton, your health gets so frail!’ Arina exclaimed. ‘Well, I’m sorry! Forgive an old witch! You understand it’s not for myself! It’s for a higher goal!’

‘What goal?’

‘To put an end to all this! No more feeding the Twilight! No more paying for our Power with human suffering!’

‘Arina, you don’t even know if that prophecy is active – and what it really said! Maybe all those disasters have already overtaken our country and they’re over now!’

Arina shrugged and said in a firm voice: ‘Even so. What we do is repugnant in the sight of God. And if we can put an end to it, then we must.’

I suddenly felt a pricking in the tips of my fingers. A sharp sensation, just for a second.

The sentry spells around our building had been triggered, the spells that had been cast a long, long time ago by Gesar and – as I now realised – by Zabulon. The spells guarding the Absolute Enchantress. The Enchantress that the Great Ones were holding in reserve as a Doomsday weapon.

I looked out of the window. And saw the Tiger walking towards our building from a side street.

It was very easy to see him – he wasn’t trying to hide, he wasn’t trying to walk round the defences or remove them. He was simply breaking through them – probably in exactly the same way as he had broken through the defences of our office when he came for Kesha. The Tiger looked like a man cast out of white-hot metal. As he walked along, a firestorm raged around him. Branches of trees burst into flames. Parked cars overturned with their alarms screeching. A stray tomcat driven crazy by what was happening started dashing about in front of the advancing Tiger, as if it couldn’t decide which way to run.

Cats see on all levels of the Twilight. Maybe right then it was seeing something inconceivable even for a cat that could follow the stealthy movements of werewolves in the night and observe the flights of witches in the twilight sky.

The Tiger stopped, facing the cat. Leaned down and stroked it. Then walked on.

The cat instantly forgot about its panic, sat down in the middle of the courtyard and started licking itself.

And the Tiger moved on towards our entrance.

‘Daddy, I’m afraid,’ Nadya told me. She and Kesha were standing at the window, watching the Tiger.

‘You have to hit him,’ Arina said hastily. ‘Just hit him. With pure energy. A Press. But with all your strength! Do you understand?’

A bolt of lightning from the sky struck the Tiger. It was good that there were clouds in the sky: people would at least find some kind of explanation for themselves . . .

The Tiger froze at the centre of a crater of smoking, shattered asphalt. He shook his head. Clambered out. And walked on.

‘Daddy, your phone . . . it’s ringing . . .’ said Nadya.

I slapped at my pockets and took out my mobile. Without taking my eyes off the Tiger, I said: ‘Yes, Gesar.’

‘What are you up to now!’ the boss howled.

‘I’m sorry, I was duped. I . . . I’ve found out Erasmus’s prophecy.’

Gesar swore.

‘Open a portal, boss,’ I told him. ‘I just need a little bit of time to decide what to do . . .’

‘I can’t open a portal,’ Gesar said in a quiet voice. ‘I’m sorry, Anton. But . . . it’s as if the Twilight has gone absolutely crazy. I can’t do anything.’

‘But what should we do?’ I asked. ‘Erasmus’s prophecy . . .’

‘No, don’t tell me,’ Gesar interrupted. ‘Don’t do that! Although . . . no. If everything’s the way I was afraid it would be . . .’

‘It probably is,’ I said, pressing up against the glass to see the Tiger opening the door of our stairwell. Something glinted down there too and the floor shuddered under my feet. But I was under no illusions about the Tiger being vulnerable to Gesar’s and Zabulon’s traps.

‘You have to decide for yourself, Anton,’ Gesar said eventually. And I sensed how his voice had changed. How old it had become. Ancient. I would have called it an Old Testament voice if Gesar had had even the slightest connection with Christianity. ‘You have more right to do that than I do.’

‘Why? Because I’m more of a human being?’ I asked.

The seconds still left to me were ticking away, but I couldn’t make a decision. And it was very important for me to hear Gesar’s answer.

‘Because I have wronged you very badly and I’m tired of feeling guilty.’

‘What is it about today? Everybody keeps apologising to me,’ I said and broke off the connection.

I looked at Arina. The witch kept glancing warily at the hallway and then looking back greedily at me.

‘What have you decided, Anton? There’s no more time.’

‘There’s always time,’ I said and held out my hand.

The Minoan Sphere shot out from under the shoe locker like a bullet and landed softly in my hand. Oho, it was really heavy!

And then the doorbell rang!

He was being very proper today, our Executioner-Tiger!

‘Nadya, Kesha, hold on tight to me!’ I ordered. The children clung to me and I put my arms round them, just to be sure.

‘You bastard!’ Arina squealed and leapt at me.

How could I activate the Sphere? Probably just wish: the energy was pumped into it beforehand, and the route too, probably . . .

I squeezed the cold little marble sphere in my palm and wished, wished desperately, to be as far away from there as possible.

And at that very second Arina grabbed my shoulder so tightly that it hurt.

WITH A
PORTAL,
you simply step through it. And you get the illusion of being in total control of what’s happening, even of being personally involved in it all. Lift a foot . . . take a step . . . stick your head out in a different place. Drag everything else through . . . half in Moscow, half in the Seychelles, and no problems . . . except that it’s all a bit creepy.

The Dark Ones’ paths through the lower levels of the Twilight are hard and dangerous. I don’t really know why – after all, no one lives there – but a couple of times I’ve seen Dark Ones emerge from journeys like that battered and bleeding. I don’t know, maybe they do battle with their own internal phantoms down there.

But the Minoan Sphere dragged us through space unceremoniously, in one single mighty jerk of power. It wasn’t painful, or disgusting, no one was sick or even felt queasy. But it did leave an unpleasant kind of sensation behind, as if just for a moment I had been Gulliver in Brobdingnag, a living toy in the hands of giants.

By and large and on the whole, I liked aeroplanes better.

We couldn’t keep our feet at the end of the journey. I tumbled over onto Arina and Nadya landed on Kesha. I got up and offered the witch my hand without saying a word.

‘Ah, you saucy thing!’ Arina exclaimed skittishly as she got up. ‘Whatever happens, a man only ever has one thing on his mind!’

I really did like her, after all. Despite her witchy nature . . .

Beside me Nadya had already jumped off Kesha, her entire manner demonstrating that she would rather have fallen into a heap of rubbish than land on some boy or other.

But overall, no one was actually hurt.

‘Daddy, where are we?’ asked Nadya.

I looked round.

A little wooden-walled house with one room. Walls covered with wallpaper that had faded with age. Furnished with a table and a couple of chairs, a sideboard, an iron bedstead with little nickel balls on the headboard – the kind that used to be all the fashion in the 1930s – a ponderous ancient television, bookshelves . . . but almost no books.

That was right, the Inquisition had taken them all away when it cleaned out Arina’s home.

It was strange that they hadn’t burnt the house down.

I said so out loud.

‘Strange that the Inquisition didn’t burn the house. I thought that was standard procedure for a fugitive witch’s home.’

‘They set fire to it. Only it’s not that easy to burn my house,’ Arina replied, straightening her dress. ‘This is my land. The village I come from used to stand here. I was born here and apparently I’ll die here. Burn the house, do whatever you like to it – it will just spring back up out of the ground.’

I believed her.

The house had a well-lived-in feel to it. Apparently Arina must have made her base here, wisely deciding that no one would bother to check the site of her burnt-out home. There was an open packet of cheap sweets on the table, and in the sideboard a carton of milk and half a loaf of white bread, carefully wrapped in a clean rag.

‘But they carried off all the books,’ Arina sighed. ‘I’ve begun restoring my library little by little, but I don’t know myself what for. After all, I won’t have time to finish the job.’

I stepped towards the bookshelves and touched the spine of one of the books.

Aliada Ansata
.

The Witch’s Herbal.

None of the others had anything to do with magic. Ten volumes of Pushkin, including two or three volumes printed in his lifetime. The fourth volume of Harry Potter, a collection of Ralph Stout’s detective stories and a little volume of Bunin’s verse,
Leaf Fall
– also an old pre-revolutionary edition. Apparently witches sometimes simply wanted something to read.

‘I’m sorry, Arina,’ I said sincerely. ‘For your house – and for you.’

‘No need to feel sorry for me,’ she replied calmly. ‘My day is done. Either the Tiger will polish me off or old age will get me, as soon as the magic dries up. It’s easier for you Magicians. You’ll just start to age like everyone else. You’re still young.’

‘Arina, I don’t want to destroy the Twilight,’ I said.

The witch said nothing for a moment. Then she asked: ‘Why not?’

‘For numerous reasons. In short, I don’t believe that the Twilight works evil . . . or only evil,’ I corrected myself.

‘Did the Tiger seem benign to you?’ Arina asked me.

‘None of us are benign when someone’s trying to destroy us.’

‘That’s not what’s bothering you,’ Arina said calmly. ‘It’s something else. What you’ll tell your daughter when she grows up and realises that she could have been a supremely powerful Enchantress, but has become an ordinary human being. The fact that your wife will get old and wrinkles will cover her face and behind every glance there’ll be the question: “Why this?” And you’ll be old and sick too, doddery and gasping for breath, with a stabbing pain in your side, struggling to make ends meet on a meagre pension and groaning over the injustice of the world . . . no longer able to defend yourself, let alone help anyone else. You’ve tried what it’s like living without magic for one evening. And it frightened you.’