Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

‘Hello,’ Bisat replied. ‘Nothing happened. I’m fine.’

‘But you abandoned your watch…’ I said.

And I looked at him through the Twilight.

At first I thought there must be something wrong with me.

Then I realised it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t reassuring at all.

‘Las, take a peek at his aura…’ I said quietly.

Las wrinkled up his forehead and answered: ‘I can’t seem to see it…’

‘That’s because it isn’t there,’ I confirmed.

Bisat waited patiently while we talked. Then he answered: ‘I abandoned the watch because there was no point in staying on duty.’

‘Tell me about the man you talked to before you left,’ I said.

‘I don’t get this,’ Las said thoughtfully. ‘Are there really people who don’t have any aura?’

‘Now, imagine that the neck of the T-shirt is really…’ the female presenter told us from the screen.

‘Before I left I talked to Dima Pastukhov,’ said Bisat. ‘He’s a decent man…’

‘Before that!’ I told him. ‘Before Dima!’

‘Before Dima I talked to the woman in the tobacco kiosk,’ said Bisat. ‘She’s quite an attractive woman, but very thin…’

‘No, wait,’ I told him. ‘Bisat, when Pastukhov got stomach cramps and he went into the airport building – remember? You stopped a man coming out of the arrivals hall…’

‘But he wasn’t a man,’ Bisat objected very calmly.

‘Then who was he?’ I exclaimed.

‘I don’t know,’ Bisat said as imperturbably as ever. ‘But not a man. There aren’t any people like that.’

‘All right, tell me what this not-man looked like,’ I told him. ‘And what you talked about.’

‘He…’ For the first time Bisat thought about his answer. He even displayed a certain degree of animation, reaching out his hand and scratching his stomach. ‘He had light hair. Very tall. A short beard. Blue eyes. I asked him for his ID. He said there was no need for that. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I… I was going to ask him what he thought he was doing. But I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘Your partner Dima described this… not-man… differently.’

‘I don’t know how he described him,’ Bisat replied calmly.

I sighed, gathered together a little Power in my hand and cast the Socrates spell – a temporary but irresistible desire to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth – in the policeman’s direction.

Hurtling through the Twilight, the hazy blob of the spell passed straight through Bisat and carried on through the wall out into the street. Oh-oh, now someone was in for it…

‘Try the “Dominant”,’ suggested Las.

I shook my head, looking at the man lying on the bed. A normal man, who couldn’t care less about anything now. He had no aura. And spells passed clean through him.

‘That won’t help. Let’s go, Las.’

‘But…’

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

Bisat turned back to the screen again. The presenter was happily explaining: ‘And so, in these delicate folds and wrinkles…’

The policeman’s wife was waiting for us in the hallway. The music was still playing, only more quietly now.

‘We’ll be going,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You know… you’ll probably get more phone calls. And people will call round… from work.’

‘I want to take him away,’ the woman said suddenly.

‘Where to?’

‘Home… To Azerbaijan. There’s an otachi there – Yusuf. He cures people with herbs. He cures everything. He’s not just a herb doctor, he’s a gam .’

‘A wizard?’ I asked.

The woman nodded and pursed her lips tightly.

‘Take him,’ I said. ‘Only first show him to our healer, all right?’

The woman looked at me suspiciously.

‘He’ll come to see you today,’ I said. ‘A good healer. Believe me.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’ the woman asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

‘It’s like he’s lost his soul,’ said the woman.

‘Wait for the healer,’ I told her.

We walked out of the flat. I looked into the Twilight – the blue moss had crept even further away from the door. It didn’t like what was going on in there.

‘Come on, Las,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to see Gesar, and quick.’

But we had to stop for a minute outside the building. Standing in front of the entrance was a young couple – a girl with an expression of simultaneous fury and bewilderment on her face and a young man who was declaring enthusiastically: ‘And I only kissed your sister, and that was when I was drunk. But I slept with Lenka once, she came round when you were out…’

‘We have to tidy things up here,’ I decided. ‘I’ll deal with the girl, and you remove the Socrates from the guy and make him forget everything.’

‘Do we really have to?’ Las asked pensively. ‘It’s his own fault – let him take the consequences.’

‘Mistakes have to be corrected,’ I said. ‘At least, those that can be corrected.’

Las obviously thinks that I already understand something and the reason we’re in such a rush to get back to Gesar is because he definitely understands everything – who this tiger is, why a living man has no aura (and at the same time has lost all interest in life), why spells aimed at him pass straight through him. But in actual fact, I don’t understand a thing. And I expect Gesar will be just as dumbfounded as I am.

Just what is an aura, if you think about it?

It’s Power. The same Power that people produce all the time, but can’t use. The Power flows out of them into space and blankets the whole Earth. We Others produce far less of it – which means we can absorb it from the ambient environment. (The blue moss does pretty much the same thing, only we’re far more efficient – and we can think too!) If there’s no aura, it means there’s no Power… no life energy… the man or Other is already dead.

No, what kind of nonsense is this I’m thinking? No aura? Vampires are dead, they’re in a state of ‘afterlife’, but they have an aura. Their own special vampire aura, but they have it. And my Nadiushka – an absolute enchantress with a ‘zero magical temperature’ – she has an aura, too, and boy, what an aura that is!

I wiped my forehead. I’d never really attempted to come to grips with all the fine details of our existence. I’d always preferred to let the research team rack their brains over that… All these theories are infinitely distant from real life in any case.

So… why do beings who are dead have an aura? And those who don’t radiate any ‘life energy’ at all? And why are they alive… horrifying as it was to put vampires and Nadya in the same category, I forced myself to do it and tried to view the question in the abstract. Without life energy, it’s impossible to live… but the dead and ‘zero-temperature magicians’ don’t produce it…

Stop! It’s all very elementary. They don’t radiate it, but they consume it. Other beings’ Power is what allows vampires to exist after death. So it turns out that’s what keeps Nadya alive too. To refine the analogy… my daughter is like a person whose body doesn’t produce blood. And she lives on constant, continuous transfusions…

I winced and squirmed in my seat. Even just thinking about it was unpleasant. Maybe that was why I’d never gone into the details of how Power, aura and life were interconnected?

Okay, that was all idle conjecture. So Nadya lived on other people’s life energy. She was alive and she was just fine. But how was it possible to take away a man’s Power and still leave him alive? Not kill him, not turn him into a vampire – but transform him into a strange kind of talking puppet?