Сергей Лукьяненков - Last Watch

Who had sent Egor, who never became an Other, on the same route as me? What for?

Whose game was it, whose rules, and-most important of all-how many figures would there be on the board?

I took Zabulon’s present out of my pocket. The bone was a dull yellow, but somehow I knew that the carver had depicted a black wolf. A large, mature black wolf with its head thrown back in a long, dreary howl.

Contact, help, advice…

The figure looked perfectly ordinary, you could find hundreds and thousands like it in souvenir kiosks. But I could feel the magic that permeated it. I only had to take it in my hand…and wish. That was all.

Did I want help from the Dark Ones?

I resisted the desire to flush the little figure down the toilet, and I put it back in my pocket.

There were no observers to appreciate the pathetic gesture.

I rummaged in my pocket and found a pack of cigarettes. I don’t smoke so much that I suffer during a four-hour flight, but right then I felt like indulging some simple human weaknesses. All Others are like that: The older we get, the more petty bad habits we acquire, as if we are clinging to the slightest manifestation of our natural being-and there is no anchor more reliable than vice.

But then, having realized that my lighter was in my jacket pocket, without the slightest hesitation I ignited a high-temperature discharge arc between my finger and thumb-and lit up from the magic fire.

Rookie Others try to do everything with magic.

They shave with a Crystal Blade, until they lop off half a cheek or the lobe of their ear. They heat their lunch with Fireballs, splashing soup all over the walls and scraping their meat-balls off the ceiling. They check the probability lines before they get into a slow-moving trolley.

They enjoy the very process of using magic. They’d use it to wipe their backsides if they could.

Then Others get older and wiser and start getting more economical, too. They realize that energy is always energy and it’s better to get up out of your chair and walk across to a switch than reach out to the buttons with a stream of pure Power, that electricity will cook your steak a lot better than magic fire, and it’s better to cover a scratch with a Band-Aid and only use the Avicenna spell for serious injuries.

And then later, of course, unless an Other is doomed to stay at the very lowest levels of Power, genuine mastery arrives. And you no longer pay any attention to how you light your cigarette-with gas or with magic.

I breathed out a stream of smoke.

Gesar?

Zabulon?

All right, it was useless to guess. I just had to do one thing: Remember once and for all that everything was going to be a lot more complicated than I thought at the beginning. That, and go back to my seat-we would soon be landing.

Over the English Channel we were thrown about a little, as usual. But we landed softly and went through the EU passport control in the blink of an eye. The other passengers moved to collect their luggage (apart from the uninitiated Egor, I was the only Other on the plane), but I dropped back a bit and found my shadow on the floor. I gazed into the gray silhouette, forcing it to assume volume and rise up toward me. I stepped into my own shadow-and entered the Twilight.

Everything here was almost exactly the same. Walls, windows, doors. Only everything was gray, colorless. Ordinary people in the real world drifted by like slow-moving shadows. Without knowing why, they carefully skirted around an entirely unremarkable section of the corridor and even started walking faster to avoid it.

It was best to approach the customs post for Others in the Twilight, in order not to make people nervous. It was shielded by a simple spell, the Circle of Inattention, and people tried very hard not to see it. But they might spot me talking to empty space.

So I approached the desk in the Twilight and only emerged into the real world when I was protected by the spell.

There were two customs officers-a Light One and a Dark One. Just the way there ought to be.

Monitoring Others when they cross borders doesn’t seem very logical to me. Vampires and werewolves are obliged to register with the local branch of the Watch if they stay in a town overnight. The justification for this is that lower Dark Ones too often give way to the animal side of their nature. That’s true enough, but any magician, whether he’s Dark or Light, is capable of things that would send a vampire running for his coffin in horror. Well, anyway, the tradition exists, and no one anywhere wants to change it-despite all the protests from vampires and werewolves. But I do wonder what the point is in monitoring the movements of Others from one country to another. That’s important for people-illegal immigration, smuggling, narcotics…even spies, if it comes to that. But it’s fifty years now since spies used to walk through border-control zones with elk hooves tied to their feet, and they don’t parachute into enemy territory at night now either. A self-respecting spy flies in on a plane and checks into a good hotel. And as for Others, we have no immigration restrictions, and even a weak magician can obtain the citizenship of any country without the slightest problem. So what was this absurd counter doing here?

It was probably for the Inquisition. Formally speaking, the customs posts belonged to the local Night and Day Watches. But another copy of the report was sent off every day to the Inquisition. And they probably studied it more carefully there.

And drew conclusions.

“Hello. My name is Anton Gorodetsky,” I said, stopping in front of the counter. We don’t use identity documents, and that’s a good thing. There are always rumors going around that they’re going to start putting a magical tag on everyone, the way they do with vampires now, or else make an invisible entry in the ordinary human passports.

But so far we still manage without bureaucracy.

“A Light One,” declared the Dark Magician. He was a weak magician, sixth-level at the very most. And physically very feeble: short, skinny, and pale, with narrow shoulders and sparse blond hair.

“A Light One,” I agreed.

My colleague from the London Night Watch was a fat, cheerful black guy. The only things he had in common with his duty partner were that he was also young and also weak, only sixth-or seventh-level.

“Hi there, bro!” he said happily. “Anton Gorodetsky. Serve in a Watch?”

“ Night Watch, Russia, city of Moscow.”

“Level?”

I suddenly realized that they couldn’t read my aura. They could have read it up to the fourth or fifth level. But after that, everything was just a blurred glow to them.

“Higher.”

The Dark One straightened up a bit. Of course, they’re all egotists and individualists. But they do admire their superiors.

The Light One opened his eyes wide and said, “Oh! Higher! Coming for long?”

“Passing through. On my way to Edinburgh. I fly out in three hours.”

“ Holiday or business?”

“An assignment,” I said without any further explanation.

Light Ones, of course, are liberal and democratic. But they too respect Higher Others.

“Did you enter the Twilight there?” the Dark One asked with a nod toward the human customs area.

“Yes. Will it be caught on the cameras?”

The Dark One shook his head. “No, we monitor everything here. But in town I recommend you to be more careful. There are plenty of cameras. Lots of them. Every now and then people notice us disappearing and reappearing; we have to cover our tracks.”

“I’m not even leaving the airport.”

“There are cameras in Edinburgh, too,” the Light One put in. “Not so many, but even so…Do you have the contact details for the Edinburgh Watch?”