Сергей Лукьяненков - Last Watch

“She suspected something,” Edgar said to Arina. “You shouldn’t have done that with the bomb…it didn’t have to be detonated, but at least we would have had a trump card in reserve!”

“Never mind,” said Arina. “Even if she did suspect something, they don’t have any time. Anton, give me that phone.”

A glint of suspicion had appeared in her eyes. I gave her the cell without saying anything, handing it to her gingerly with the tips of my fingers and not touching the keys.

Arina looked at the phone and saw that it was in waiting mode. She shrugged and switched it off completely.

“Let’s do without any calls, all right? If you need to call anyone, you can ask me for my phone.”

“I won’t bankrupt you?”

“No, you won’t.” Arina took out her own phone and dialed a number-not from the contacts list, but the old way, pressing every key. She raised the phone to her ear and waited for an answer. When it came she said quietly, “It’s time. Go to work.”

“Still haven’t run out of accomplices, then?”

“They’re not accomplices, Anton, they’re hired hands. People can be perfectly effective allies if you equip them with a small number of amulets. Especially the kind that Edgar has.”

I looked at the stately royal castle towering above the city, crowning the remains of an ancient volcano now forever extinct. Well, well, this was the second time I’d ended up in Edinburgh, and I still didn’t have time to visit its main tourist attraction…

“And what have you prepared this time?” I asked. There was an idea flickering on the edge of my consciousness, scratching away at it like Schrodinger’s Cat. Something very important.

“Funnily enough, I’ve actually prepared one of Merlin’s artifacts,” Edgar said. He had by now recovered from my un-gentlemanly blow. “It’s called Merlin’s Sleep.”

“Ah, yes, he was rather uninventive with his names for things,” I said with a nod. “‘Sleep’?”

“Just Sleep,” Edgar said, shrugging. “Arina was very upset about the high number of casualties the last time. This time it will all be very…civilized.”

“Ah, and there’s the first little spark of civilization,” I said, looking at the smoke rising from a taxi stopped in front of us. The driver had clearly fallen asleep as he took a curve, and his car had run up onto the sidewalk and crashed into an old building. But the most terrible thing was not the smoke coming from under the taxi’s hood, or even the motionless bodies inside it. The sidewalks were covered with the motionless bodies of locals and tourists-and one young woman had clearly been knocked aside by the taxi’s radiator and then crushed against the wall by its old-fashioned black box of a body. She was probably dying. The only thing I could be glad about was that she was dying in her sleep.

This was not the humane Morpheus spell that we learned in the Night Watch, the one that gave people several seconds before they lost consciousness. Merlin’s Sleep acted instantly. And it was very precisely localized: I could see the boundary line of the artifact’s influence. Two adults stepped inside it and fell to the ground, instantly overcome by sleep. But the seven-or eight-year-old boy who had been walking a few steps behind them was still awake, and now he was crying as he tugged his motionless parents from just over the zone. He had little prospect of help-those people who had not yet entered the zone of sleep were running away from it with remarkable alacrity. I could understand why. To someone who didn’t know the truth, it all looked like the effect of some highly poisonous gas. And somehow, the sight of this little boy trying to get his parents to their feet on the other side of the scattering crowd was almost as tragic as the sight of the young woman killed in the crash.

Edgar continued gazing fixedly at the smoking taxi after we had driven past it. That would probably have been a good moment to escape…if I had been intending to escape.

“Does that remind you of something?” I asked.

“Incidental casualties are inevitable,” Edgar said in a voice that had turned flat and hoarse. “I knew what I was getting into.”

“What a pity they didn’t,” I said. And I looked at Edgar through the Twilight.

This was bad, very bad. He was hung all over with amulets, dozens of charms had been applied to him, and there were spells trembling on the tips of his fingers, ready to dart off at any moment. He was positively glowing with Power waiting to be used. Arina and Gennady looked exactly the same. Even the vampire had not scorned the magical trinkets.

I wouldn’t be able to manage by using force.

We drove to the Dungeons in total silence, past sidewalks strewn with bodies and motionless vehicles (I saw three that were burning). We got out of the car.

On Princes Street, on the other side of the ravine, everything had stopped dead too, but I could already hear a siren howling somewhere. People always recover from a panic. Even if they don’t know what it is they’re up against.

“Let’s go,” said Edgar, pushing me gently in the back.

We set off down the stairs. I looked back for a moment at the stone crown of the castle above the roofs of the buildings.

Why, yes! Of course. You only had to think for a moment and put it all together. Merlin had been most magnanimous when he composed his little verse…

“What are you dawdling for?” Edgar shouted at me. His nerves were on edge, and no wonder. He was anticipating a meeting with the one he loved.

We walked past more motionless bodies. There were people and Others; Merlin’s Sleep didn’t differentiate between them. I noticed several sleeping Inquisitors. Behind the fake dividing walls everything was lit up brightly by the glow of auras. They had been waiting, and the ambush could not have been prepared any better.

Only, no one had known the full power of the artifact that had been used.

“You haven’t forgotten about the barrier on the third level, I suppose?” I asked.

“No,” said Arina.

I noticed that, as we walked along, first Edgar and then Arina left perfectly innocent-looking objects charged with magic on the floor and the walls: scraps of paper, sticks of chewing gum, bits of string. In one place Edgar rapidly sketched several strange symbols on the wall in red chalk-the chalk crumbling into dust as soon as he had traced out the final sign. In another place Arina smiled as she scattered a box of matches across the floor. The Last Watch was clearly afraid of being pursued.

Eventually we entered the room with the guillotine, which for some reason the Last Watch had chosen as its point of entry into the Twilight. This was probably the exact center of the vortex, the precise focus of Power.

And here, in addition to the two first-level magicians who were asleep, there was one person who was wide awake.

He was a young man, short and plump, wearing spectacles on his cultured-looking face. He looked very peaceful and nonaggressive in his jeans and bright-colored shirt. In the corner of the room I noticed a girl about ten years old, sleeping with her head resting on a bag that had been considerately placed underneath it. Had they decided to open the way through with the blood of a child, then?

“My daughter fell asleep,” the man said, correcting my mistaken assumption. “An extremely interesting device, I must say…” He took out a small sphere woven out of strips of metal from his pocket. “The lever shifted, and it won’t move back again.”

“That’s the way it should be,” said Edgar. “It won’t move back again for seventy-something years. So the device is useless to you; leave it here. Take this!”

He tossed a wad of money to the man, who caught it and casually ran his finger over the ends of the notes. But I noticed that he was keeping his left hand behind his back. Uh-oh…