Sergei Lukyanenko - The New Watch

Or did it announce the independence of the United States of North America, the discovery of penicillin or the sinking of the Titanic ?

No. In matters such as prophecy, there was no such thing as coincidence. If it had come into my hands, if I had guessed – of course, if I really had guessed… how I could hear it…

These were two links in a single chain.

But between them was a third link, the prophecy about the Absolute Enchantress Nadezhda…

And I didn’t have any options. I was a cat who had been smeared with mustard under his tail – and I was going to lick it off, with passion and with gusto.

Because my daughter’s fate was at stake.

And because I really didn’t like the dream that I had had, about Nadya screaming at me with hate in her voice: ‘Daddy, what have you done to us?’ And it wasn’t just a dream generated by nervous stress, a drop of strong drink and a song about a magician who was a poor student of his art that had surfaced from my subconscious. It was a case of precognition, what ordinary people call a ‘prophetic dream’.

I got out of bed quietly, so as not to wake Svetlana. The bed creaked treacherously and I froze, but my wife didn’t wake up. I went to the sitting room, closed the door to the bedroom and switched on a dim standard lamp.

In a modern home, if you don’t happen to be a fanatical opponent of progress, and especially if you’re keen on gadgets, there are many electronic devices capable of carrying information. All of them at my home had been checked. The desk PC and the laptop. And Nadya’s netbook. And Svetlana’s tablet. And the mobile phones. And the alarm clock, on which you could record your own music to wake you up. And all the flash sticks. And the answering machine on the landline phone. Even the teddy bear that had a chip in it with the phrase ‘I love you, Nadenka’ recorded on it by Svetlana had been checked – with apologies. They hadn’t forgotten my MP3 player, either.

Many Others, especially those who have been alive for more than a hundred years, have a pretty poor grasp of electronics and modern technology in general. In this respect, Gesar is a sophisticated Other, a smart guy who tries to get some idea of what’s what.

And that was why, for this supremely polite search, he had sent really young Others who weren’t powerful magicians but who understood very well where a microchip with the recording of the prophecy could be hidden.

These young guys had checked everything but had not found anything, although they had special instruments that I’d only seen in the movies, capable of identifying any memory card at a distance even if it wasn’t plugged into anything. I had thanked them – they’d found a couple of flash sticks that I’d lost around the flat a long time ago…

But they didn’t find the prophecy.

Naturally. I hadn’t made a copy on an electronic medium. I’m not an idiot.

I opened the drawer of the sideboard, crammed with all sorts of old electronic junk, and took out an old Sony minidisc player. A dead-end branch in the development of electronics, the kind of thing that no one uses now except people who are especially fond of shocking the public (or who are exceptionally thrifty). The battery in it had died a long time ago.

But there was a separate container that could be attached, and I stuck a battery in that, then screwed the container to the player (all fair and square, a sound, reliable screw, not some kind of flimsy clip-on fastening) and pressed the play button. Vysotsky’s hoarse voice started sounding in my earphones:

I didn’t really have to listen, but I did. Right to the end of the song. To the final couplet.

Then I pressed the stop button and glanced round furtively. The doors of the bedroom and the nursery were closed. Naturally, I couldn’t check the Twilight right now but our home was surrounded by such powerful defensive spells that even Gesar and Zabulon working together would have taken hours to break through them. The spells were an entitlement of my rank – and since Nadya lived here…

Did I want to hear the prophecy?

I knew now for certain that it existed. Arina had said as much. There was no point in hoping that Kesha hadn’t pressed the button on the toy phone. Or that the prophecy was about the price of oil or the presidential elections…

I sighed, closed my eyes and pressed the button.

Silence. With crackling, like from an old-fashioned record.

‘You are Anton Gorodetsky, Higher Light Magician…’ a childish voice said quietly. My hands started trembling as they clutched the minidisc player – someone wasn’t just walking over my grave, they were dancing jigs and reels on it. ‘Because of you… all of us will be released…’

Released? What did that mean?

‘The Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming,’ said Kesha, suddenly speaking rapidly, almost incoherently… ‘A long time. A long, long time… Nadya Gorodetskaya! Nadya can do it, Nadya can…’

I actually jerked up off my chair when the hasty muttering was interrupted by my daughter’s name.

‘You can’t divide anything by zero, you can’t divide anything by zero…’ the voice reminded me like the feverish ravings of some star pupil. ‘Anything multiplied by zero is zero, anything multiplied… Kill the Tiger! Kill the Tiger and you kill the Twilight! Kill the Tig—’

The recording came to an end. The toy phone only had a small memory chip.

A few seconds of silence – and Vysotsky started singing again in mid-line…

I took off the headphones, turned the player off and tossed it back into the drawer.

Basically, I’d understood quite a lot.

‘The Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming for you…’ No comment required.

‘The Twilight is falling asleep… not enough Power, not enough, not enough… the prophecies have been waiting… A long time. A long, long time.’ The Twilight was short of Power? That was kind of strange. Was there really not enough grief and joy in the world? Well – let’s just accept it. ‘The prophecies have been waiting…’ Which prophecies did that mean? The one that Wen-yan had not made known? The one that Arina had ‘retarded’? Possibly.

I imagined the flood of emotions that would be precipitated by the destruction of Russia – or China… It wouldn’t be a momentary thing, it would last for years, decades. It would be insanity. The world was imperfect enough already, it was full of conflicts, torn apart by small wars and global crises. And even if peace and prosperity were established throughout the world, human beings were such brutes, they’d always find some reason to suffer!