Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

‘You were busy. You were saving the world.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt unbearably ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For being a blind, self-satisfied ass. For not seeing…’

‘You couldn’t have seen anything, I didn’t put up a block. I just stopped using magic.’

I looked into Svetlana’s eyes. Then I glanced at the bedroom door.

‘She’s asleep,’ said Svetlana.

After that we didn’t need any magic.

In the dead of night I lay in bed, listening to my wife’s breathing and thinking about prophecies.

There were two of them – and something about them didn’t add up…

No, there weren’t just two of them. That was my mistake.

There was a third one, too. The prophecy that Svetlana would have a daughter, who would become an Absolute Enchantress. An Other of boundless Power. Someone who could alter the balance of Light and Darkness, change the entire existing order of things.

Somehow I’d almost forgotten about that. But after all, it was a prophecy that had come true. Olga had rewritten Svetlana’s destiny for its sake, and for its sake Gesar had brought us together, intrigued, taken risks, got involved in confrontations with Zabulon and the Inquisition. The stakes were monstrously high – and now suddenly it was all over? Zabulon had resigned himself to defeat?

But that could never happen…

So that game wasn’t over yet. It was still going on. The prophecy had been realised: Nadya was an Absolute Enchantress, but the prophecy hadn’t specified what that would lead to.

All right. Let’s hold that fact in our memory, it’s obviously important. Nadya is one of the pieces on the chessboard. Maybe the most important figure – the White Queen.

What was next?

The boy Kesha’s prophecy. Arina already knew it – so the Tiger was after her… Or was he? According to the classical theory, the Tiger tried to eliminate the Prophet in order to prevent a prophecy from being pronounced and realised. And that fitted perfectly with what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. When he stormed the Night Watch office, the Tiger had said: ‘The prophecy must not be heard.’

Right? Right.

But in the old Chinese magician’s opinion, that wasn’t the goal that the Tiger pursued at all. His goal was to ‘shake up’ the prophets, urge them on to declare their prophecies to humans, so that the prophecies would come true – and change human life in one way or another, make sure that the human anthill didn’t stop developing. A coherent theory that was confirmed by Fan Wen-yan’s own story… The Tiger ‘hassled’ the prophets until they performed their duty – or firmly decided never to proclaim the prophecy. Clearly, the prophecy that Wen-yan had heard foretold something very bad for China – and the magician had been prepared to die in order to save his country. The Tiger had realised that and had left – he didn’t need any pointless sacrifices.

But then why, in Kesha’s case, had the Tiger said that ‘the prophecy must not be heard’? So was it special in some way? Something that went beyond those that brought the world Sputniks, miniskirts or rock music? And at the same time, if Arina could be trusted, it concerned my daughter.

A riddle.

So, let’s start from the other end. Who is the Tiger? Once again, in Wen-yan’s opinion – and apparently he had studied this question more thoroughly than all our European sages – the Tiger was not simply an Other, changed and guided by the Twilight. He was more complicated than that. He was… well, to a certain extent, you could say that he was alive. Alive and intelligent.

Like the Twilight itself.

Basically, he was the Twilight, in a form accessible to our eyes…

I felt a frosty chill creep across my skin. Someone was walking over my grave, as the Americans say.

Someone… A Tiger in a coat!

The Twilight…

There it was all around me. Accessible to Others, but barely even capable of being sensed by humans. The source of Power – and simultaneously its consumer.

And, if Wen-yan could be believed, alive and intelligent.

How was that possible? How could a nothingness be intelligent? A matryoshka doll with seven dimensions, one of which is our world, with the others ranging from a cold desert to a pale copy of the real world. Intelligence had to have some material vehicle.

Or did it really have to have anything?

After all, we didn’t even know what the magical Power that we used was. Our scientists were all, to a man, poor magicians, but with wise heads, and they had investigated this matter throughout the twentieth century and carried on in the twenty-first. Our scientists – meaning not only Light Ones and not only Russians. Others throughout the world had sought to understand their own nature, when necessary even involving human scientists and feeding precisely calculated crumbs of information to the Pentagon, the CIA and secret Soviet research institutes. Specially trained Others had collaborated with human scientists, demonstrating certain facets of their abilities – too little for them to be taken with unconditional seriousness, but enough to inflame curiosity and get entire laboratories with multimillion budgets set to work.

Nothing.

There is a Power that we can sense. It is emitted by all living things, but to the greatest extent by humans. (They are followed by whales, dolphins, pigs, dogs and rats – as it happens, monkeys don’t even make the top ten.) Others can sense Power, see it as an aura, they can assess it and record it. And also consume it, naturally – amass it within themselves. So that later, by entering the Twilight, or simply summoning up its mental image, they can perform magical actions.

How? The Chinese magician was quite right – how did the Twilight, which was non-material, transform Power, which was not registered by any instruments, into a perfectly material fireball or a Triple Blade that sliced through metal and stone? Our thoughts and desires were only the switches. Or, to use computer terminology, the commands. But all the invisible work that allowed us to work miracles took place beyond our awareness and beyond our control. It was carried out by the Twilight. So, the Twilight was either an inconceivable non-material computer, tuned to carry out the desires of Others – but then that raised the question of who created it and programmed it – or an inconceivable non-material rational being. A superbeing…

In principle, there wasn’t really any great difference here. A machine consisting of energy fields, say, or an equally exotic supermind. Was it all-powerful?

Probably not. By definition, only God was omnipotent and omnipresent. I wasn’t prepared to believe that if the Supreme Being existed, He was concerned with realising the desires of a bunch of Others. That contradicted both theology and common sense. And the facts that we had at our disposal, too. The Tiger or a Mirror, for instance, were not like a manifestation of divine will, almighty and omnipotent. But they were like the behaviour of a very powerful and intelligent being. The behaviour of God? No, not by a long way.

And what was it that every living creature feared?

That was an easy one.

Death.

So… that meant that one way or another, the boy Kesha’s prophecy was dangerous for the Twilight. And that was why the Tiger didn’t want it to be heard.

Logical?

Yes.

Then we could take that as a starting point.

Now for the other prophecy. The one that was shouted into a hollow tree by a quite different boy who lived in Britain a long, long time ago. A prophecy that had been slumbering, stored away in a wooden chalice for almost three hundred years.

Did it have anything to do with me?