Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

I didn’t know

‘You’re lost in thought,’ said Las.

‘Uh-huh,’ I confirmed.

‘Listen, I’ve got a question… Higher Others – can they see the soul fly out of the body?’

‘The soul?’ I asked, mystified. ‘Fly out?’

‘Well, yeah. The aura’s the soul, right? So when someone dies, can you see where the aura flies off to? What I’m getting at is that you could figure out where heaven and hell are. If you take two people dying simultaneously at opposite ends of the globe and pinpoint the direction the souls fly off in, then you could triangulate—’

‘Las, the aura is not the soul!’ I objected. ‘The aura is life energy.’

‘Ah, and I thought it was the soul,’ said Las, upset. ‘So the soul can’t be seen?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘And when someone dies, the aura doesn’t go flying off anywhere, it just stops glowing.’

But there was something to all of this. Las’s question, my answer…

But I couldn’t understand what it was, and I ran out of time. We drove under the boom that had risen obligingly to allow us into our car park – and stopped right in front of Gesar.

That’s the difference between a real magician and a beginner like me – experience. And the ability to do a whole heap of things all at the same time. If I’d sent someone off to do a job, and then been keeping close tabs on the action, I could probably have sensed that he was hurrying back with something important to report. Only I would have had to do that deliberately. But Gesar seemed simply to have sensed my approach in between doing everything else – and he felt so concerned that he’d come out to meet me.

‘Tell me,’ he ordered curtly as I started clambering out of the car. ‘And quick!’

All right, then, quick it is… I looked into his eyes and played back the conversation with Pastukhov and the visit to Iskenderov.

‘Let’s go to my office,’ said Gesar and swung round. Putting up a portal from that distance would simply have looked flashy. ‘Call Svetlana.’

‘What for?’ I asked, taking out my mobile.

‘I’ll open a portal to your flat. Tell her to come here and bring Nadya.’

A repulsive, chilly tremor of fear ran down my spine.

‘No, I don’t see any immediate threat,’ said Gesar, without turning round. ‘But I don’t like what’s happening one little bit. And I need all the Higher Ones in Moscow.’

As he walked along, Gesar seemed to falter every now and then, not stopping completely but slowing down for an instant. It looked to me as if he was communicating with the other Higher Ones.

But then – what others? I was calling Svetlana… why wasn’t she answering?… there was Olga, too… and that was the entire complement of the Night Watch’s ‘Magicians Beyond Classification’. The Day Watch only had Zabulon on active service now – they had lots of First-and Second-Level Magicians, but recently things hadn’t gone so well for them with Higher Ones…

‘And what shall I do?’ Las shouted after us resentfully.

‘Call into the science department and have them send Innokentii to me!’ Gesar told him. He liked everyone around him to have some task to perform.

Svetlana finally answered.

‘Anton?’

‘Sveta, Gesar’s going to put up a portal to our flat…’

‘It’s already up,’ Svetlana answered calmly.

‘Grab Nadka and get over here, quick.’

‘Is there some kind of rush?’ asked Sveta.

‘Say they can bring things for a day or two,’ Gesar responded briskly. ‘But they mustn’t dawdle.’

I didn’t like that comment at all. Gesar was acting as if Sveta and Nadya were going to be under siege. But we were talking about a Higher Enchantress here (Svetlana might specialise in healing, but everyone knows that any healing spell can be used just as effectively for attack) and an Absolute Enchantress as well. (The fact that she was only ten years old didn’t make Nadya defenceless. She could set up a perfectly standard Sphere of Negation, but pack so much Power into it that you couldn’t breach it with a cannon.) ‘I heard,’ said Sveta. ‘Right now I’m throwing clean underclothes into a bag… Shall I bring anything for you?’

‘Er…’ I hesitated. ‘Well, a pair of socks, a couple of pairs of shorts…’

‘I’ll take a risk and grab a clean shirt as well,’ Svetlana decided.

When we had almost reached Gesar’s office I decided to speak up after all – the boss wasn’t faltering as he walked along any more, he’d obviously contacted everyone he needed to…

‘Boris Ignatievich, I can see you already understand what’s going on…’

‘I don’t understand a damn thing, Anton,’ answered Gesar. ‘Not a damn thing. I’ve never even heard of anything like this. And it…’ He chewed on his lips, trying to choose the right words. ‘It frightens me.’

He swung the door open and we walked into his office.

THE FIRST THING I noticed were the portals hanging in the air. The Higher Others summoned by Gesar certainly weren’t wasting any time.

Then I counted the portals. One of them, with a thin, glittering frame, was waiting for my girls to pass through it. And three portals were already slowly fading away.

Three?

I gazed at the people sitting there at the table.

Olga. Clear enough. I nodded to her automatically.

And this quiet little old man with the tousled grey hair, wearing a threadbare suit and wide, old-fashioned tie, looking like an aged professor or doctor?

And this sturdy man with a beard, whose face seemed familiar to me somehow – not from the life of the Watch, but from human life? I’d seen his face on TV, or maybe in the newspapers…

We didn’t have anyone like these two in the Watch.

‘Thank you for not delaying,’ said Gesar, walking over to his chair. ‘Let me introduce you. This is Anton Gorodetsky. You must have heard of him.’

‘Who doesn’t know Anton Gorodetsky?’ the little old man said, with a smile.

‘This is Mark Emmanuilovich Jermenson,’ said Gesar. ‘Higher Light One and Battle Magician.’

‘Sergei,’ said the second man, introducing himself. ‘Sergei Glyba. Higher Light One.’

‘I know you,’ I said, finally remembering. ‘You’re… you’re that—’

‘Clairvoyant!’ he confirmed delightedly.

He really was a clairvoyant. One of those who are published regularly in the yellow press and equally yellow magazines, who appear on TV and sit among ‘the invited guests’ in the front row at countless talk shows. He had forecast the financial crisis, when it was almost over already; the strengthening of the rouble, just before it fell; the replacement of dollars in the US by some weird kind of ‘ameros’; an asteroid shower; a landing by aliens from space; an epidemic of goat flu; unprecedented growth in the Russian economy; typhoons and earthquakes.

If it had always been the exact opposite of what he forecast that happened, his prophecies would have made some kind of sense. But it was the usual clairvoyant’s babble, a matter of random sensationalism. Sometimes he was mocked in the press, but his imposing appearance and slick tongue made him a favourite with the readers (especially the women) and he was never out of work.

‘You’re a clairvoyant?’ I enquired dubiously.

‘Anton, surely you don’t think I would do serious forecasts for humans?’ Sergei replied, smiling.

‘I’ve never seen you in the Watch,’ I said.

‘They aren’t in the Watch,’ Gesar said morosely. ‘You could say that Mark Emmanuilovich is retired.’

‘Following injury,’ Jermenson added with a jolly smile.

‘And Sergei simply doesn’t want to serve,’ said Gesar.