Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

Our cook was a woman about forty years old. As an Other she was pretty weak, but as a cook she was outstanding. The only difference between the food in our canteen and food in Michelin-listed restaurants was the price.

‘Now that’s a good idea,’ I told him approvingly.

In the car Nadka babbled away incessantly. Firstly, she was in raptures over the portal that Gesar had opened. She knew how to open portals herself all right, but in the first place she was strictly forbidden to do it, and in the second place there was something different about Gesar’s portal. Some kind of ‘subtle energy structure’ and ‘personal selectivity’. Basically, Gesar had spent a tenth of the usual energy on opening it, and only those who were allowed could pass through it.

Secondly, Nadya felt very sorry for the little boy-Prophet. Because he lived with his mummy, but without a daddy. Because he hadn’t gone to the seaside. Because he was in the boring office without his mummy… although they had brought him some interesting toys – could she borrow the little helicopter to play with? Because he was too fat to be good at sports and they probably laughed at him at school.

Thirdly, Nadya was very proud that she’d given Gesar the right advice. No, she didn’t boast about it straight out, but she kept coming back to that moment…

Svetlana smiled gently as she listened to the chatter from the back seat. Then she said in a low voice: ‘I was very worried about you.’

‘There was a whole army of us.’

‘And what good did that do you? I don’t like these magical mystery thingamajigs.’

‘That’s pure human atavism,’ I sighed. ‘Others are supposed to love magic in all its manifestations. By the way, do you know what a Twilight Creature is?’

‘It’s the first time I ever heard of it,’ said Svetlana, shaking her head.

‘Me too…’

‘But I know!’ Nadya exclaimed from behind us – that incredible ability children have to hear everything interesting, even if they never shut their own mouths for a second!

‘Well?’ I asked, pricking up my ears.

‘If there are plants in the Twilight…’

‘What plants?’

‘Blue moss! Then there must be someone who eats it.’

‘And who generally eats moss?’ asked Sveta.

‘Deer,’ I replied automatically. ‘But this guy… he wasn’t anything like a deer. A bit of a maggot, maybe, but not a deer, no way…’

‘Anton!’

‘Now what have I said?’ I growled. Nadya started giggling. ‘We’ve got a critical situation here,’ I went on.

‘It’s not critical any longer! Someone’s hunting the boy-prophet. Well, so what? No one can stand up against the entire Watch, especially if the Dark Ones help too. Gesar will contact the Inquisition now, if he hasn’t done it already. They’ll scour the archives and find out what’s going on. It might possibly be some kind of sect. Like the Regina Brothers, remember? You’d better decide what you’d rather do – finish cooking the borsch or do Nadya’s maths with her,’ said Sveta.

‘I choose the maths,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know how to cook borsch.’

A sect… Maybe it really could be. One that had been sitting quietly, doing nothing for a couple of centuries, waiting for a prophet. Maybe they wanted him to reveal the meaning of life to them. Sitting there, waiting… Pumping artefacts full of energy, training a hunter…

A good theory. Exotic, but coherent. I’d have liked to hope that was the way it really was.

NADYA AND MATHS didn’t get along. Languages were fine, and she did the work herself on principle, without using magic. History was excellent: she found it all very interesting, both human history and Other history. She also read a lot and enjoyed it.

But she had trouble with maths.

We just about scraped through the quadratic equations (you can call me a sadist and bring in the children’s ombudsman, but she went to a school where the programme differed from the one approved by the ministry of education). My daughter closed her exercise book with a sigh of relief and climbed onto the bed with a book. I glanced quickly at the cover and decided it must be some kind of Harry Potter clone – it showed an inspired-looking boy working spells (well, that is, with his hands wreathed in blue glowing mist and his forehead wrinkled up grimly). And I went into the sitting room, picked out a Terry Pratchett book and lay down on the sofa with it.

What more could a middle-aged magician with a family want for perfect contentment at the end of a hectic day? Read about invented magicians while his wife cooks the borsch and his daughter’s doing something quiet and peaceful…

‘Daddy, so there really are Twilight Creatures after all?’

I looked at Nadya. What was stopping her from reading?

‘Probably. I don’t know.’

‘And they chase after Prophets?’

‘Don’t believe everything it says in fairy tales,’ I replied, turning a page. The magician Rincewind had just got himself into yet another scrape, which he would wriggle his way out of, of course. Heroes always wriggle their way out of scrapes, if the author loves them… and if he’s not sick of them.

‘But they’re not fairy tales!’

‘What?’ I took the book out of my daughter’s hands and opened it at the publisher’s imprint page. Aha… they certainly weren’t fairy tales. The Other Word publishing house. They publish books and various printed materials for Others. For Light Ones and Dark Ones, indiscriminately. Of course, they don’t produce anything really serious: genuine spells are either too secret to be printed, or they can’t survive the mechanical application of the text to paper. Some things can only be conveyed by the spoken word and by example. They print the very basics – secrecy isn’t particularly important here: if a book like this finds its way into an ordinary shop (as sometimes happens), people will think it’s a children’s book or a fantasy penned by some graphomaniac. The book was called The Childhood of Remarkable Others .

‘Is this some kind of textbook?’

‘For reading out of class. Stories about the childhood of great magicians.’

I didn’t get to study in the magician’s classes. In those years they didn’t find so many Others, and setting up special classes for them was regarded as impractical. So I did my learning on the job…

I leafed through the chapters about Merlin, Karl Cemius, Michel Lefroid and Pan Chang. I stumbled across a chapter about Gesar and smiled when I read the first lines: ‘When the Great Gesar was a little boy, he lived in the mountains of Tibet. He was an unattractive, sickly child, he often caught cold and was even given the offensive name Djoru, or “snotty”. No one knew that Gesar was really an Other, one of the most powerful magicians in the world. The only one who did know was a Dark Other, Soton, who dreamed of making Gesar a Dark One…’

‘Look further on,’ Nadya begged me impatiently. ‘About Erasmus…’

‘Was Erasmus of Rotterdam really a Prophet?’ I asked in surprise, opening the book at the page that had been marked. The bookmark was pink, with little fairies out of some Disney cartoon on it. ‘Ah, Erasmus Darwin…’

The author certainly didn’t make a great effort to vary the introductions for his young readers. But that actually lent the narrative a certain epic quality.

‘When the great prophet Erasmus Darwin was a little boy, he lived in the small village of Elton in Ireland. He was always a dreamy and romantic child. He often used to run out of the house and lie in a field of blossoming clover, examining the little flowers. Erasmus was convinced that plants could love like people, that they even had their own sex life. He wrote his remarkable poem The Love of Plants about this. But that was later…’