The Day Watch Part 24

The Talon is controlling him, or the person who now possesses it. And the Dark One has definitely become more powerful since our clash with him last Sat.u.r.day in the alley near the All-Union Exhibition."

"Then shouldn't we be following him?" Tolik suggested. "If he's connected with the Talon, isn't he bound to lead us to the thieves?"

"If he is connected, he'll lead us to them."

"And if he doesn't?"

Ilya sighed. "Then we'll have more surprises and emergencies. And that Dark One will be there all the time, just on the e.g. of our field of vision. He's bound to be."

"Wait," Garik said tensely. "What if he's predestined for the Talon?"

"That's what I'm afraid of..."

Anton shook his head sharply. After the events of a year and a half earlier, for a while he'd thought he could regard himself as an experienced and hardened watchman. But now he felt like an apprentice among virtuosos again. And he didn't like having to admit it.

The phone rang-the local hotel phone. It felt strange to hear the ring of an ordinary phone after the trilling of all the cells.

"h.e.l.lo?" Tolik picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, and turned to Ilya. "For you. It's Semyon."

Ilya took the receiver and held it to his ear, then immediately ran a piercing glance over all of them.

"Mount up, guys. The boss is already in the office."

Anton thought with a vague feeling of weariness that now he would see Svetlana again. And again he would feel the gulf between them widening with every second.

I didn't stay in the Day Watch office for long after it livened up. I was dozing off where I sat, so I was simply sent off to catch up on my sleep. I didn't object, because I'd been on my feet for more than twenty-four hours and I couldn't keep my eyes open. As I slipped into sleep I could hear the faint strains of Kipelov's singing coming from somewhere: Hey, you inhabitants of the skies!

Which of you hasn't plumbed the depths?

Chapter three.

-?- I WOKE UP WHEN I REALIZED I WAS BEING CALLED. CALLED THE SAME WAY that vampires call their prey. Still not fully awake, I got up and fumbled for my clothes on the chair.

The Call was sweet and alluring, it enveloped me-caressing and urging me, it was impossible, absolutely impossible to resist it. Sometimes it sounded like music, sometimes like singing, sometimes like whispering, and in every form it was perfection, the reflection of my own soul.

And then, like a sudden blow just below the knees, came the jerk up onto the next step.

The Call instantly lost its power over me, although it hadn't stopped. I dropped the trousers I was holding and gave my head a quick shake...

Oh, that hurt...

The sweet hypnotic syrup slowly drained out of me. Drained out and disappeared somewhere under the floor.

Spent Light energy, faded Power.

I suddenly understood very clearly why vampires' victims smile as they present their necks to be bitten. When the call sounds, they're happy. This is the sweet moment they have been waiting for all their lives, and compared with this, life is as empty and gray as the world of the Twilight.

The Call is a kind of gift. A liberation. Only it was still too soon for me to be set free.

I had no i.e. why, but this time the new ability I acquired was immunity to the magical Call. I could hear it and understand it, but I remained completely in control of myself. And naturally, I screened my mind off from the caller, so that he wouldn't suspect his victim had been transformed from a sleepwalker into a hunter...

"A hunter?" I asked myself curiously. "Hmm..."

So I was going hunting. Well now, that was interesting.

The Call continued.

"Well, well," I thought. "This is the residence of the Day Watch. Everything here is saturated with magic. The defenses here are quite incredible. But the Call is still effective... was effective?"

The Light Ones had invested a lot of effort in this trick. And in concealing it from prying eyes. It was their good luck that the chief of the Day Watch was out of Moscow-the Light Ones would never have been able to trick him, no matter how hard they tried.

Meanwhile I calmly got dressed, thinking sadly that my dream of visiting a restaurant and grabbing a bowl of hot, spicy soup and a plate of something like duck in cherry sauce would be postponed again for an indefinite period. I set two or three weak protective spells and left my suite... I mean, my apartment. If they called them apartments here, I might as well maintain the tradition. I had the flat bread-cake of my mini disk-player attached to my belt, of course; I stuck the little beads of the earphones into my ears and pulled my cap down tight onto my head.

"Why not set it on random selection?" I thought, manipulating the controls. "Play a little game with fate."

And once again fate chose me a song from the alb.u.m by Kipelov and Mavrin. A different one this time.

There is silence above me, A sky full of rain, The rain goes straight through me, But there's no more pain.

While stars whispered coldly, We burned our final bridge.

And everything has tumbled into the abyss I shall be free From evil and good, My soul's been walking the razor's edge.

Mm... well. A rather gloomy prophecy. Just when was it that I burned my final bridge? Or maybe that was what I'd just left my apartment to do, instead of going up to the next floor and inquiring after the fate of some extremely powerful Talon or other? But I was being urged to follow the Call by that certain something that had already been lying concealed somewhere deep inside me for a while.

I'm free! Like a bird in the heavens.

I'm free! I've forgotten the meaning of fear.

I'm free! I am the wild wind's equal.

I'm free! In the real world, not in a dream.

Kipelov's voice was no less enchanting than the Call. It had a hypnotic resonance; it was as convincing as truth itself. And I suddenly realized I was listening to a hymn of the Dark Ones. An embodiment of their ideal of rebellious souls who acknowledge no boundaries or rules; There is silence above me, The sky full of fire, The light goes straight through me, But I'm free once again, Free from love, Free from hate and from rumors, From a fate foretold in advance And from earthly shackles, From evil and from good.

My soul no longer holds a place for you.

Freedom. The only thing that genuinely interests us. Freedom from everything. Even from domination of the world, and it's incredibly sad that the Light Ones just can't understand that and believe it; they just carry on spinning their interminable intrigues, and just to maintain the status quo we have no choice but to obstruct them.

The elevator slid smoothly downward, past the Twilight floors and the ordinary ones. I'm free...

If Kipelov was an Other, he had to be Dark. No one else could sing about freedom like that. And no one but the Dark Ones would hear the song's most profound, true meaning!

The two taciturn warlocks on watch below let me out without any trouble-Edgar had done well to have the image of my registration seal entered in the operational database. I walked out onto Tverskaya Street, into the thickening dusk of another Moscow evening, and set out toward the Call, but free from it. And from everything in the world.

Who wanted me so badly? There are no vampires among the Light Ones-no ordinary vampires, that is. All Others are energy vampires-they can all draw Power from people. From their fears, from their joys, from their sufferings.

The only fundamental difference between us and the Twilight moss is that we're able to think and move about.

And we don't use acc.u.mulated Power simply for nourishment.

The Call led me along Tverskaya Street, away from the Kremlin, toward the Belorussian railroad station. I walked along, all alone in the evening crowd, as if I'd been singled out, chosen. And I had been chosen-by the Call.

n.o.body saw me, n.o.body noticed me. n.o.body was interested in me-not the girls warming themselves up in the automobiles, not their pimps, not the tough-looking young guys in the foreign cars pulled up at the curb. n.o.body.

A right turn. Onto Strastnoi Boulevard.

The Call was getting stronger. I could feel it-that meant the encounter would be soon.

The herds of automobiles tore through the driving, sticky snow, the fine snowflakes dancing whimsical roundelays in the beams of their headlights.

Cold and dusk. Moscow in winter.

The snow settled in an even layer on the paths of the boulevard and on the benches that were empty at this time of year, and on the bushes, and on the railings that separated the roadway from the pedestrian park area.

They tried to grab me halfway toward Karetny Ryad.

The spell of isolation seemed to fall from the sky-ordinary people just lost interest in what fate had in store for the boulevard, the cars carried on rus.h.i.+ng past, minding their own business, the small number of pedestrians who were nearby faltered for a moment and then wandered away, even if they had been moving toward me.

The Light Ones slid out of the Twilight one after another. Four of them. Two magicians and two shape-s.h.i.+fters, already in battle form. A ma.s.sive polar bear as white as snow and a tigress with bright ginger stripes.

I was almost flattened when the magicians struck together from both sides. But they had underestimated their quarry-the blow had been calculated for the old me, the one that would have submitted to the Call.

I had already become someone else.

Mentally parting my hands, I halted the walls that were about to come together and envelop me. I halted them, drew in Power, and pushed them away from myself. Not very hard.

I don't know what a tsunami looks like-I've never seen one-but it was the first thing that came to mind when I examined the result.

The Light magicians' walls, which had appeared so monolithic and impregnable only a second earlier, crumpled like rice-paper part.i.tions. Both magicians were swept away, tossed onto the snow, and dragged about ten meters across the ground, and only the railings fencing the park off from the road prevented them from falling under the wheels of the cars. A cloud of powdery snow flew up into the air.

The Light Ones probably realized that they couldn't take me with just magic, so then the shape-s.h.i.+fters came rus.h.i.+ng at me in their animal forms.

I hurriedly drew more Power from wherever I could, and immediately there was a dull thud on the road, followed by the tinkle of broken gla.s.s, then another thud, followed by the ear-splitting screech of car horns.

I took the bear's impact on a Concave s.h.i.+eld and sent him tumbling away along the boulevard. At first I simply dodged the tigress.

I'd taken a dislike to her from the very beginning.

I don't know where shape-s.h.i.+fting magicians get the ma.s.s for transformation. In her human form this girl couldn't have weighed more than forty-five or fifty kilos. But now she was at least a hundred and fifty kilos of muscles, sinews, claws, and teeth. A genuine combat-killing machine.

The Light Ones like that.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Wait. Maybe we can talk?"

The magicians were back on their feet, and they made another attempt to snare me, but it didn't cost me much of an effort to tie the greedy, trembling threads of energy into knots and fling them back at their owners. Both shots. .h.i.t their targets again, but this time no one was sent skidding onto his back-I had simply returned their own energy. The bear stood on one side, s.h.i.+fting his weight menacingly from one foot to the other. He was hunching up, as if he were about to stand on his hind legs.

"I wouldn't advise it," I told him, and struck at the attacking tigress.

Not too hard. I didn't want to kill her.

"Just what is the d.a.m.n problem?" I shouted angrily. "Or is this just the way things are done in Moscow?"

Calling the Night Watch would have been stupid-my attackers served in the Watch themselves. Maybe I should get help from the Day Watch? Especially since it was no real distance-their office was very near and I could be there in a flash. But would it do me any good?

The magicians weren't about to give up; one was holding a flaming wand charged up to the hilt, and the other had some kind of restraining amulet that looked pretty powerful too.

It took an entire two seconds to deal with the amulet-I had to tear apart the net that was cast over me with an ordinary Triple Dagger-but the amount of Power that went into that extremely simple spell was enough to reduce the entire center of Moscow to ashes. Then the second Light magician hit me with the Fire of Bethlehem, but his blow only made me angry and, I think, even stronger.

I froze his wand. Simply turned it into a long icicle and put a spell of rejection on it. Fragments of ice spurted out of the Light One's hands like some weird, cold firework display, and at the same time the liberated energy went soaring up into the heavens.

I couldn't really dump on the people around us, could I? I'd already done enough damage with those collisions on the nearby intersections...

The bear stayed put. Apparently he'd realized that, despite their numerical superiority, the balance of Power was far from equal. But the tigress just wouldn't stop. She came for me with all the aggression of a crazed female animal when an enemy gets too close to her young. Her eyes blazed with unconcealed hatred, as yellow as the flames on church candles.

The tigress was taking revenge. Taking revenge on me, a Dark One, for all her old grudges and losses. For Andrei, who had been killed by me. And who knows for what else... And she didn't intend to stop for anything.

I don't want to say she had nothing to avenge-the Watches have always fought, and I'm not in the habit of mincing words. But I didn't intend to die.

I'm free. Free to punish anyone who gets in my way and refuses to resolve things peacefully. Wasn't that what the song had been trying to tell me?

I struck out at her with the Transylvanian Mist.

The tigress's body was twisted and stretched, and even above the roar of engines and the piercing beeping of horns I heard the crunching of bones quite clearly. The spell crumpled the shape-s.h.i.+fter the same way a child crumples a plasticine figure. The broken ribs tore through the skin and their b.l.o.o.d.y ends thrust into the snow. The head was squashed into a flat, striped pancake. In an instant the beautiful beast was transformed into a tangled mess of b.l.o.o.d.y flesh.

With a final, calculated blow, I consigned the tigress's soul to the Twilight.

Once I'd begun, I had no right to stop.

The Light Ones froze. Even the bear stopped stamping his feet.

And what now? I thought wearily.

Maybe I would have had to kill them all, but thank heaven-or h.e.l.l-it didn't come to that.

"Day Watch!" I heard a familiar voice say. "An attack on a Dark One has been registered. Leave the Twilight!"

Edgar spoke sternly and without any Baltic accent.

But he needn't have said that about the Twilight. Those who were alive hadn't been fighting in the Twilight, and the tigress had nowhere to come back to.