Sixth Watch (30 page)

I could just make out two figures in the cabin.

I didn't waste any time thinking, just swung my hand and severed the cable on which the lump of iron was suspended. It worked. The ball started swinging back, but deprived of support, it slammed down into the floor, smashing halfway through it and blocking the hole in the wall. To add to the fun for our attackers, I flung a Sha'ab's
Ring over it—that's a spell from the arsenal of the Higher Dark Ones. Now it would be very, very difficult to get in through the hole.

If we hadn't been dealing with the Two-in-One, I would have said it was impossible.

I was encouraged by the fact that the vampire god hadn't yet tried to attack our magical defenses, but had set about breaking into the apartment by human means. His powers weren't unlimited after all.

“Anton!”

The door was already open—for the first time in many years—and I darted out into the stairwell after my wife and daughter. Just as I was pulling the door closed behind me, there was a sudden flash; a bright glow surged out through gap around the door and it was slammed hard against the frame.

The Two-in-One hadn't gone for anything fancy, but had just tossed a Fireball into the gap. If the apartment hadn't been an absolutely isolated “box,” protected by magic, the entire stairwell would have been set ablaze.

“I left my handbag behind!” Svetlana shouted indignantly, without looking back as she ran down the steep steps. She was holding Nadya by the hand. I dashed after them, but the door of the next-door apartment opened in front of me so suddenly that I wouldn't have been surprised to see the smirking faces of the Two-in-One.

But instead it was an old lady, with a hooked nose, cataracts in her eyes, and long, tangled gray hair. At a witches' Sabbath or a convention of fantasy fiction fans, she would have been harangued mercilessly for sticking too closely to the traditional image of a witch.

But then the way the old woman was dressed would never have done as a costume for a role-playing convention. No one ever dresses up as a witch in bright-yellow Bermuda shorts down to the knees and a T-shirt bearing a picture of a cat waving its paw. I got the feeling that this granny had either robbed her great-grandson or gone gaga and imagined that she was a young girl again.

But despite everything—the frightening, senile appearance and the inappropriate clothes— she had an incredibly respectable, even
aristocratic air about her. St. Petersburg is probably the only place where you'll see that, in the old buildings in the center, where the most stubborn apartment owners live, the ones who stood up against the bandits in the nineties and the nouveau riche in the aughts . . .

“Young man!” the old woman exclaimed in a surprisingly loud voice. “We don't slam doors around here!”

“I won't do it again,” I promised as I ran by.

“Are you Vera Savvovna's grandnephew?”

“No,” I shouted up from the next floor down.

“It's three years since you attended a Landlord's Future Cooperative meeting,” the old woman shouted after me reproachfully.

But we were on the ground floor already.

We looked at each other for a few seconds, gathering ourselves. Then Svetlana nodded. I swung open the door and walked out of the hallway.

Or rather, out of the front entrance, as they say in St. Petersburg.

Svetlana maintained the shields as usual, and I prepared to attack, although the failure of my previous attempt didn't exactly fill me with confidence. But this time we had Nadya with us—an inexhaustible source of Power . . .

Only there weren't any enemies.

It was an ordinary street in St. Petersburg, covered in snow, enveloped in a light, frosty mist, but also bathed with sunlight for a change. It was incredibly beautiful—the high, clear sky, the blinding sunlight, the powdery snow swirling in the air. A tram went clanking past along its rails. A respectable four-door sedan followed it cautiously, the driver obviously wary of ice. The street was narrow here, with only two lanes, and even the tram line was one way.

“Something's not right,” I said, shuddering from the cold. We could really have done with our coats; it was at least five degrees below freezing out in the street, and the air in St. Petersburg is very damp.

“No one's around,” said Svetlana. “It looks like someone has set up a Sphere of Inattention here. Or something like that . . .”

“That's bad news,” I said. “Let's go!”

I walked off the pavement into the road and raised my hand to stop the rather chic French family car that was struggling to force its way along the snowbound street. Some metropolitan capital this city was, with the snow still uncleared at midday!

The woman driving the car stared at me with obvious suspicion, swung the wheel to move away from me, and sped up.

“Stop her!” Svetlana exclaimed.

“She's got two children in the backseat,” I protested.

But it was too late. My wife made an abrupt gesture, as if she was jerking on something invisible, and the car halted with a squeal of brakes.

“I've got a child here too,” Svetlana declared, and ran toward the car.

The woman had obviously made an intuitive connection between us and her engine cutting out. She grabbed her cell phone and shouted something like: “Go away, I'm calling the police!”

But Svetlana had no intention of discussing anything. She opened the door, which was fortunately unlocked, and a moment later she had dragged the woman out from behind the wheel. To say the woman was dumbfounded would be a gross understatement. It would be fair to assume that this attractive young woman, pampered, well dressed with long legs, clearly wasn't used to situations like this.

But all credit to her, she got her bearings quickly.

“Give me the children!” she howled, “Give me the children, you bastards!”

Svetlana was already in the driver's seat. Nadya ran around the car and flopped into the seat beside her. In any other situation I would have been scandalized, but there was no time for that right now. I opened one of the rear doors: a boy and a girl, both about five years old, were sitting in their car seats. They were frightened, but at least they weren't bawling. They could have been twins.

“Out we get,” I said cheerfully. “Mummy said you have to get out.”

And at that moment a rain of fire descended upon the car.

We all know that comparisons are odious, but this really did look like rain made of fire. The drops appeared somewhere high up in the sky, then fell, almost invisible in the sunlight, until they plunged into the snow with a hiss. As if someone had tipped over a tank of gas up there and set it alight.

The Magician's Shield protected me from above as well as from the sides, but the shield was only two yards wide, and the rest of the street was already ablaze.

“Into the car,” I shouted to the woman before doubling up in order to squeeze through and sit between the two children. Drops of fire drummed loudly on the shield above my head.

The woman dashed around the car, keeping her hands on the hood, as if to prevent it from moving, and sat beside Nadya. My daughter didn't try to argue, she just moved over. It was lucky that she and the woman were both thin.

“Let's move!” I shouted, but Svetlana had already stepped on the accelerator. The car jerked forward with a squeal—it seemed to move even before the engine cut in.

“Cover me!” Svetlana snapped over her shoulder. “Nadya, give your father backup!”

Defense had always been her job. But then, she hadn't coped the last time—so why not swap roles?

I summoned the Clear Gaze and the car around me turned colorless and blurred—its contours became vague and hard to focus on. The woman and the children froze, like dummies. The buildings towering above us were empty and abandoned. The sky glimmered dully, with the transparent belt of dust and asteroids that takes the place of the moon on the first level stretching out across it. My eyes felt cold—not from the cold of the weather, but from the icy chill of the Twilight.

Svetlana was less affected by the changes; her skin simply turned slightly paler and her hair took on an ash-gray tint. Nadya didn't change at all; her movements didn't even slow down like every
one else's do when you look at them from the Twilight. She turned around and nodded to me.

I looked deeper—the car changed shape, becoming something with a high roof, like a London cab, but semitransparent, as if it were made of glass. The sensation of cold grew even more intense, and it was joined by a feeling of pressure on my eyes—even just to look at, the second level of the Twilight wasn't the most comfortable of places. The world changed too. The buildings were rapidly transformed into cliffs. The colors faded away completely and everything was veiled in thick, gray fog.

But three moons suddenly appeared in the sky—a small white one, a large yellow one, and an absolutely tiny one, blazing bright crimson, with faintly visible fountains of lava.

The woman who owned the car disappeared completely and the spectral glow of auras quivered where the children were sitting. Oho, it looked like the little girl had Other potential . . . yes, and the boy had a glimmer of something too . . .

Nadya waved to me. She was as quick and lively as in the real world.

I started looking deeper. The cliffs morphed into gray hills that were covered with streams of monochrome mud. Everything finally turned completely flat and muted, with only occasional weak glimmers of color, hinting at the blueness of the sky, the yellowness of the sun, and the blackness of the earth. Then the process reversed itself, the colors started showing through again, until they became really vivid.

Just looking at the sixth level of the Twilight was hard work. But now I could feel the constant stream of Power flowing into me from my daughter.

“No,” I said. “I don't see anyone!”

“What about the rain?” I heard Svetlana's voice ask from the place where she would have been sitting.

There wasn't any fiery rain either. It took me a moment to realize what that meant.

The Two-in-One wasn't attacking us with magic in its pure form. Maybe he wasn't sure that magic would work, or maybe there was some other reason. The rain of of fire falling on us was actual fiery rain—a suspension of gasoline or some other combustible substance that had been ignited in the air above our heads.

And he had destroyed our refuge in the same convoluted way, hadn't he—by transporting a demolition crane into a tiny enclosed courtyard.

What did that mean?

In the school he had fought us with magic and he was winning. You could say that he actually won. Only the vampiress had scared him off with a straightforward physical attack.

Maybe that was why he had changed his tactics?

Or had he decided that now, when the three of us were together, he might not have the advantage in a battle of magic?

But the most important question was: Where was the Two-in-One? He wasn't on any of the six levels of the Twilight.

But of course.

He was on the seventh level. In our world.

I canceled my Twilight vision and found myself back in the car. A frightened little boy was sitting in the seat on my right. A terrified little girl was sitting in the seat on my left.

“Stop the car, I'll get out and take the children,” the young mother said quickly. “Take the car, take everything. Give me—”

“Don't you see what's happening?” I asked.

Strangely enough, she stopped talking and looked around.

The Renault—I'd finally figured out the car's make—was driving through fiery rain. From above we were protected by the shield, but as we moved along, the fire drifted against the windshield. Svetlana had even switched on the wipers, and they were sweeping off the drops of burning gas. In combination with the powdery snow, which glinted in the sunshine, this produced an enchanting, fairy-tale effect.

We overtook the tram that had rumbled past us earlier. Svetlana
honked the horn to attract the driver's attention and, once she had passed the tram, she turned sharp right directly in front of it.

“What do you think you're doing?” I shouted as we darted past right under the nose of the lumbering heap of metal.

“Taking evasive action!” Svetlana replied.

“Can you see any pursuers?”

“No!”

The boy beside me suddenly broke into merry laughter. There's just no understanding children—they start bawling or laughing at the strangest of times.

“I'll have to customize your car a little bit,” I told the woman. “Did you deliberately buy the model without a sunroof?”

“It's cheaper,” the woman muttered. Her eyes were completely wild.

“We'll fix that right now,” I said.

I raised my hand and pictured an invisible blade growing out of my fingers. Just a little bit of pure Power . . .

Then I traced out a circle above my head.

The woman started howling when I punched out a section of the roof with a single blow. The young boy cheered, “Hooray!”

I pulled myself up and stuck my head out through the hole, raising the Shield above me. The wind lashed at my face with all its might, but it was often worse on the second level of the Twilight.

We were driving along a different street, but there was still almost nobody around. Even though the weather was nice—for St. Petersburg. Even though we were almost in the center of the city. I thought I saw some people hurrying away from us in a small side street that we passed. The few cars that we encountered hurtled past us, gathering speed, and turned off at the first opportunity.

“They're somewhere nearby,” I said. “They're keeping this lousy gas drizzle falling on us, and frightening the people away.”

“Well at least they're doing that,” Svetlana replied. “Forgive us in the name of all that's holy,” she said to the woman, “but they're
trying to kill us and we're hiding. There's no way we can stop right now and let you out. You can see what's going on.”