Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

Apart, that is, from certain Others who will sooner or later earn the legitimate title of Battle Magician.

They are the ones who eventually fathom a most important truth – it’s easy enough to put on an impressive show, battering each other with fireballs or trying to crush each other with the Press. And it also carries on for a very long time. Because that’s what your adversary is expecting from you. And he protects himself with the Barrier of Will, the Sphere of Negation, the Magician’s Shield… There they stand, facing each other – a Light Other and a Dark Other, hammering at each other with spells, defending themselves against spells, sometimes even finding time to abuse each other verbally in the process. Maybe this is a good thing. After all, the majority of magical duels are not fought to the death but until one of the adversaries surrenders or withdraws from the field of battle. Otherwise we would have wiped ourselves out ages ago.

But if a genuine Battle Magician enters the fray – then everything goes very differently. He employs the good old healing spell Willow Bark or its jolly Dark variant, Aspirin. And the unsuspecting enemy suddenly finds that his body temperature has fallen to that of the ambient environment. A Battle Magician doesn’t fling the Triple Blade, he applies the simple little Grater, which Svetlana uses when she makes vitamin salads for Nadya out of apples and carrots, and I use to clean off the saucepans if something gets burnt on… And his adversary suddenly becomes a millimetre or two slimmer. Instantly, from all sides. Usually no one can continue the battle after that.

I, of course, am very far from being a genuine Battle Magician. But it was still a long time since I’d flung any fireballs.

That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three metres.

It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself!

‘Fuck your fucking mother!’ Gesar howled, twisting the wheel round. In a moment of genuine terror only the Russian language could convey the true depths of his feelings. It made me feel proud of our great Russian culture!

The Rolls-Royce jerked to the left – like any driver, Gesar automatically turned so as to place the person beside him in the line of fire instead of himself. Nothing personal, just a pure reflex response.

I produced one too – I struck the windscreen with both hands, surprising myself by knocking it out completely, and held my open palms out towards the blazing sphere flying at us. I didn’t even have time to think what I was going to use – the Sphere of Negation or the Magician’s Shield. Because it turned out that I was already instinctively using the Press – striking at the bundle of flame with pure Power.

And the instinctive response worked. Whether or not a Shield could have withstood the impact of such a prodigious fireball is open to question. Whether Gesar could have dodged out of the way in time was not clear either. A good fireball vectors in on its target, like a modern missile.

But the pure Power strike did the trick. The fireball burst, splashing in all directions like hot oil. Some small gobbets of flame even hit the car, but Olga had her wits about her too and we were covered with the semi-transparent scales of some cunning form of defence. The car itself was clearly pretty much pumped full of spells too. The flames streamed downwards, under the wheels, and we bounded straight through the roaring, raging firestorm.

Just in time to catch sight of our adversary.

To me he didn’t look anything like the descriptions that the policemen had given.

Very young, a little over twenty years old.

Slim, with blond hair.

A pleasant face, very genial, almost noble-looking somehow.

Light-coloured clothes (you can’t make out more than that on the second level of the Twilight) and a cloak. Honestly, I swear, a cloak! A genuine one, fluttering behind his shoulders, as if he was some kind of comic-book Superman!

The young man stood there and gazed at the car thoughtfully. Not exactly looking disappointed, but certainly rather surprised.

‘Come on,’ said Gesar, switching off the ignition and slipping out from behind the steering wheel. Olga and I followed him. Outside the car the cold of the Twilight seized us in its vicelike grip. There was a steady, freezing wind blowing, the eternal wind of the second level.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’ shouted Gesar.

The young man didn’t answer. He seemed to be pondering something.

‘Night Watch! Leave the Twilight!’ I said, not quite raising my voice to a shout but in a loud, impressive tone.

‘Otherwise we shall use force,’ Olga put in, backing me up.

The young man started to smile. And Gesar said in a low voice:

‘Now, I wouldn’t have said that. What if he—’

And then he did. I don’t know what Gesar was about to say, but the young stranger certainly needed no prompting. He spread his hands – I thought he was moulding another fireball out of the air, a little bit smaller than the first one, but there wasn’t any bright glow, although Power of some kind was glimmering in the palms of his hands, something was being prepared…

‘Freeze!’ shouted Olga, and I responded to the word as if it were a command – I struck at the stranger, with all the Power I had, with a localised time halt.

And why not? If you think about it, it’s humane and it’s reliable. The enemy is immobilised but entirely unharmed. We have time to figure out what to do, he has no time of any kind.

Only Olga wasn’t asking me to use a freeze: she was warning me what the stranger was about to do.

Gesar suddenly disappeared – it looked as if he’d skipped down or up a level in the Twilight. Olga flew off about ten metres to one side with a gigantic leap that an Olympic champion, or even a hungry vampire, would have envied. But I stayed standing there like a fool, right in the path of the freeze that was advancing towards me…

Only I wasn’t fated to end up suspended in the Twilight, stuck like a fly in the amber of halted time. My own freeze – far, far weaker than my adversary’s – crashed into the spell hurtling towards it. And, as often happens with spells, they immediately interacted.

A faceted form like a precious stone suddenly appeared, suspended above the middle of the sombre grey road that was hemmed in by the grotesque wooden buildings. It rotated slowly, sinking down into the ground. Looking through it, I saw our adversary fragmented into a host of tiny little figures.

‘Old fool!’ bellowed Gesar, appearing beside me. He waved his arms – and there was a flash of green flame beyond the transparent crystal.

‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, boss,’ I told him, unable to resist.

I caught Gesar’s baffled glance.

‘I’m glad you’re still able to joke, but I meant him,’ said Gesar, nodding in the direction of the green fire. ‘And you, Anton, have clearly used up all your reserves of good luck for today. Shooting down a Freeze with a Freeze is no easy task.’

‘You meant him?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the young man. I looked at the green fire that was gradually fading away. ‘What is that?’

‘It will slow him down,’ Gesar said evasively, but very confidently.

The green fire went out.

The young man shook some strange, sticky green sparks off his cloak and looked at us. This time his expression was far from friendly.

‘Oho,’ said Olga, coming back to us. ‘So we couldn’t give a damn for Gesar’s Taiga…’