Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

I closed the book and looked at the title page. A textbook of extracurricular reading for middle and senior school age . I snorted.

‘Daddy, do you really think I don’t know anything about sex life?’ asked Nadya.

I looked at her. ‘Nadya, you’re ten years old. Yes, I think you don’t know anything about it.’

Nadya blushed slightly and murmured: ‘But I watch television. I know that grown-ups like to kiss and hug…’

‘Stop!’ I exclaimed in panic. ‘Stop. Let’s agree that you’ll talk about this with mummy, okay?’

‘All right,’ Nadya said and nodded.

I tried to hand her book back to her.

‘So is it true about the Twilight?’ Nadya asked again.

‘About the Twilight? Ah, yes…’ I started looking through what came next. Erasmus had learned how to enter the Twilight… Others had decided to take him into the Watch… well, well, into the Day Watch… What?

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the text.

‘…Prophets and Clairvoyants are always highly valued in the Watches, because their gift is only found rarely – especially the gift of a genuine Prophet. And if a Prophet starts working for one of the two forces, it can lead to great disasters. Therefore the Twilight itself tries to prevent this. If a Prophet might say something very, very important that Others ought not to know, a Twilight Creature comes to him. The Twilight Creature is created by the depths of the Twilight and the power of the Twilight Creature is infinite. None of the Others can stop it or defeat it. And either the Watches leave the Prophet alone, or the Twilight Creature kills him – to prevent a great disaster… Little Erasmus was lucky. When he realised that the Twilight Creature was on his trail, he went to his favourite tree – an old hollow ash – and shouted out the prophecy into the hollow. When a Prophet utters the most important prophecy of his life, he doesn’t remember exactly what he has said. The Twilight Creature realised that no one would find out about the prophecy and left Erasmus in peace…’

After that the narrative continued, talking about how the artful Erasmus also persuaded the Watches to leave him in peace and lived a happy life, amusing himself by creating golems and bringing corpses to life, often uttering ordinary predictions for the Others – and sometimes shocking the people around him in the eighteenth century by telling them about the Big Bang or jet engines fuelled by oxygen and hydrogen, or the spontaneous appearance of life in the oceans. There was also a little bit about his grandson Charles, who was far more famous among human beings. In time, Erasmus had retired from any kind of work and staged his own death as Others are in the habit of doing, and now he lived somewhere in Great Britain, not wishing to see anyone…

I quickly leafed through the chapter to the end. And what exactly was so remarkable about this Prophet that I personally had never heard of? Ah… there it was…

‘You will probably ask why Erasmus Darwin is remarkable. Well, it is because he managed to outwit the Twilight Creature. Prophets are usually only able to make their most important prophecy if they utter it immediately after being initiated – even the Twilight Creature needs time to find its prey. But Erasmus guessed how to evade his pursuer when the beast was already dogging his heels. Under the gaze of its eyes, blazing so brightly in the darkness, people seemed little different from the plants that Erasmus loved so much… Never despair, never give up, even an overwhelmingly superior force can be outwitted – that is what the life of the remarkable little Other Erasmus teaches us…’

‘Burning so bright in the darkness…’ I said and rubbed the bridge of my nose. ‘Tiger, tiger…’

‘Quoting poetry now, are you?’ asked Svetlana, glancing out of the kitchen.

‘What do you mean?’

‘“Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?” Blake. William Blake. His poem The Tiger .’

‘You wouldn’t know if he happened to be acquainted with Charles Darwin’s grandfather, would you?’ I asked.

‘Erasmus?’ Svetlana asked brightly. ‘The one who was an Other?’

I nodded and got up off the sofa.

‘He was more than a mere chance acquaintance. Blake even illustrated his books. Something about the love of plants.’

‘So Blake didn’t just write poetry?’

‘Well, actually he illustrated heaps of books and is just as famous as an artist as he is as a poet. And, by the way, he wasn’t an Other in the literal sense of the word, but he did possess the rare ability—’ Svetlana suddenly stopped dead.

‘Well?’ I asked wearily, opening the cupboard that Nadya was strictly forbidden to touch. Locks would be useless against her, unfortunately, but Nadya’s a bright girl and she keeps her word.

‘He could see Others. Dark Ones and Light Ones.’

‘Like my polizei acquaintance,’ I said. ‘Svetlana, I’ve got to go to work.’

‘Are you going to have some borsch?’ my wife asked.

I just sighed as I stuck all sorts of magical trinkets into my various pockets. I was a hundred per cent certain that none of these amulets would actually be any use to me, but the habit was too strong.

‘Anton…’ Svetlana called to me when I was already in the doorway.

‘What?’

‘I once left the Watch, so that we could be together.’

‘I remember.’

‘I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time…’

I looked at her. Svetlana paused for a moment, then lowered her eyes.

‘Take care.’

I raced up to Gesar’s office on the third floor like a lunatic. Considering that I was waving a book on the childhood of outstanding Others in the air, I must have looked like someone who has discovered a coded prophecy for the next two hundred years in Pinocchio , together with a report of an encounter with aliens from another planet, the formula of a cure for the common cold and an obscene acrostic at the beginning of chapter two.

‘Where’s the fire?’ asked Gesar.

He was sitting on the edge of the desk, and the boy-Prophet was lounging in his office chair. The chair was rather spacious for the boy, to put it mildly. Judging from the fact that Kesha was sitting in a clumsy imitation of the simplest meditation pose, Gesar must have been trying to teach him to control his gift. There was no one else there.

‘The Tiger!’ I exclaimed wildly.

‘He’s far away,’ Gesar replied calmly. ‘I believe we’ll be okay until the morning.’

I cited Blake’s poem:

‘You could at least quote the entire poem,’ Gesar replied, and continued: