Sixth Watch Read online

  He was basically a simple guy, with an uncluttered mind—after serving his time in the army, he had kept working in it under contract for another five years, and then he was discharged. For the army changes as the country does, which means there are fewer and fewer jobs in it for simple guys like him.

  You’d like to know how I know all this?

  Well, I could give you a detailed biographical note on every single one of Nadya’s teachers.

  So right now this clueless, ugly, dimwitted guy, with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, was lying by the wall, having smashed into it with such great force that the plaster had fallen off in places. The school is an old building, soundly built to last, no plasterboard or plywood here—if the century-old plaster does break off, it takes part of a brick with it.

  The guard had been flung with such great force that the brickwork had cracked. And so had his skull—there was a small puddle of dark blood under his head. If vampires don’t bite or use spells, they prefer the simplest resolution to all conflicts—brute force.

  “He’s alive,” Svetlana said. She made a short magical pass with her hand—sending some spell in the poor wretch’s direction. “It looks worse than it really is. Even the spine is undamaged.”

  Although Svetlana walked behind, she directed me with either her movements or subtle mental instructions. The Twilight inside the school was absolutely pure, no traces of a battle and no auras of Others, including our daughter. Only the auras of sleeping children and teachers, as well as the dim, barely visible aura of the unconscious guard.

  It wasn’t the right moment to reflect on all this. But nonetheless, it occurred to me that this unattractive and rather stupid man hadn’t stepped aside for the infuriated vampire who had just killed the Inquisitor. How many intelligent, beautiful, strong individuals would be capable of that? I didn’t know.

  But at that very moment the quiet, spiteful little voice that sometimes speaks in our souls to muffle the voice of our conscience whispered: “So perhaps the reason he didn’t step aside is that he’s a fool?”

  I nodded to the voice.

  Yes, maybe that’s exactly right. Since I hear this voice in my soul, it means I’ve become a genuine Other. But I still don’t agree with this voice—after all, I am a Light One.

  CHAPTER 3

  EVEN AS A CHILD, LEAVING THE CLASSROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF a lesson, you sense that special school atmosphere. It’s not really all that alarming. It’s more that you feel out of place—how come everyone else is in the classroom, and here you are, walking along the corridor? It’s just not right!

  When you grow up, this feeling only gets stronger.

  “Third floor,” Sveta said quietly behind me.

  “I can’t sense her,” I complained as I walked up the steps.

  “Neither can I.” My wife’s voice was perfectly calm. Too calm for this situation, and that meant serious unpleasantness ahead for someone. But I did remember Nadya’s timetable: math in room 306 and English in 308.

  The third-floor corridor was completely deserted. I glanced bleakly out the window, wondering if Night Watch operatives (or even Day Watch operatives, for that matter) had cordoned off the school, if Gesar the Great and Terrible was stalking around in the yard.

  No.

  Nothing there.

  Except for the Inquisitor’s body.

  And incidentally, where was the bodyguard from the Night Watch and the bodyguard from the Day Watch?

  Most likely they were dead and we simply hadn’t come across them yet.

  First we glanced into room 306. The math teacher, Lyubov Yegorovna, was asleep at her desk. A red-haired boy was sleeping beside the blackboard with his head slumped against it. The rest of the class was asleep at their desks too. All of them were tranquil, obviously having good dreams. Only this was the wrong class, either a parallel one or a year younger.

  Svetlana quietly closed the door and we moved on along the corridor to room 308. Dead silence filled the air; even the city seemed to have frozen all around us. I suddenly thought that the silence was far too deep . . . maybe some kind of magical noise reducer had been used?

  But even if the enemy had done that for reasons of his own, it was to our advantage now.

  We reached the door. Exchanged glances. Svetlana nodded, and I opened the door smoothly—I wasn’t exactly expecting to run into an ambush, simply playing it safe. You can burst into a room by kicking down the door. Or you can try to ease your way in slowly, opening the door inch by inch.

  But the effect is just as good if you simply open the door calmly and confidently, like someone who has a perfect right to do it.

  I opened the door—and my wife and I breathed a joint sigh of relief when we spotted Nadya.

  The “final line of defense” consisted of three spells that were all activated at exactly the same moment.

  The first visited “Morpheus” on everyone in the vicinity. With luck, it could snare attackers too, but its primary purpose was to get people out of harm’s way.

  The second spell sent an alarm signal to the offices of the Watches and to Svetlana and me. I hadn’t really been counting on this particular spell and, as it turned out, the signal hadn’t got through.

  And the third spell—that imposed a “Freeze” on Nadya herself.

  The Freeze had always been regarded as a mild attacking spell. It halted time—and the enemy froze like a fly in amber, giving you time to think over what to do with him and what spell to serve up for him next.

  But there were certain disadvantages to a Freeze. First, an Other could defend himself or herself against it quite easily, so it was mostly used against ordinary people or animals. Second, while the opponent was under the influence of the Freeze, it was impossible to do anything to him—absolutely anything at all—because for our world he had ceased to exist. A target hit with a temporal freeze was clearly visible, he was surrounded by a faint blue glow, and if you touched him, it felt like he was wrapped in a tight, elastic membrane. But nothing could tear through this membrane; it was impossible, no magical or material means could do it. As the scientists explained: “although the object appears accessible to our sense organs, in reality we are observing a mere projection, and the object itself does not exist in our time.” Third, a Freeze required a long setup time: it either had to be there “on your fingertips” in advance or else inscribed on an artifact.

  In our case all the disadvantages had been converted into advantages. The Freeze applied to Nadya had put her completely out of her enemies’ reach.

  Nadya had frozen at the window, and judging from her pose, she’d been running, intending to jump out. Straight through the glass. From the third floor.

  For an Absolute Enchantress already capable of controlling her powers, this wasn’t very typical. I took a second to examine Nadya’s silhouette, enveloped in that bluish radiance, and decided that she wasn’t running away, but chasing after someone.

  I didn’t like the alternative.

  And then my mind took in the whole picture and I relaxed completely.

  Denis was there, standing beside Nadya. He was a Light Battle Magician from somewhere in Siberia, either Tomsk or Omsk—as a typical Muscovite, I was always getting them confused, which brought a grin to Denis’s face. He was a young lad, very promising. I didn’t know he was guarding Nadya, but I thought it was a very good choice.

  I’d never met the Dark Magician from the Day Watch. But it looked like he was another ambitious young guy who’d been glad to accept the job of security guard for “the Absolute girl.” If anything, he was rather too young and good-looking for me to view him without feeling suspicious. The young schoolgirls walking around here were all so naive, later on in life they’d start falling in love with Dark Ones. I hate all these human stupidities, like the cult of vampires and all sorts of other evil. It starts off with a couple of stupid jokes, tittering and snickering, “Draco Malfoy’s such a sweetie,” “Edward’s a real dreamboat,” and then they start s
trangling kittens in basements and reciting prayers backward . . .

  “I haven’t used this spell very often,” said Denis—he and the Dark One hadn’t noticed our presence yet. “The Freeze, it stops time. There’s no way to break through it, unless you know the code. And then, there might not be any code, and we’ll have to wait for it to dissipate on its own.”

  “There’s no time,” the Dark One said anxiously. “Can we shift her?”

  He set one hand firmly against the back of Nadya’s head and the other against her waist and pushed with all his might. I realized that nothing would happen to my daughter, that they were simply trying to evacuate her quickly to somewhere safe, but I found his offhand manner offensive. These Dark Ones!

  “Can we lift her?” Denis asked, and tried to hoist Nadya up by her backside. With the same result.

  “She has to be attached to some kind of anchor points,” the Dark One reasoned. “Something’s coming back to me . . . The center of the earth, maybe?”

  “A Freeze is attached to arbitrary spatial vectors, you dunce,” Svetlana said behind me with surprising venom.

  The Watchmen swung around.

  “What went down here, guys?” I asked as amiably as I could, trying to smooth over my wife’s severity. “There’s a dead Inquisitor in the yard . . .”

  Without even glancing at each other, the Watchmen threw their hands out toward me. Denis flung out his left hand and the Dark Magician flung out his right. With their free hands they grabbed hold of each other.

  Suddenly it dawned on me.

  It wasn’t the female vampire who had killed the Inquisitor, wounded the guard, and frightened Nadya so badly that she’d tried to jump out the window.

  It was the two Watchmen!

  The Light One and the Dark One.

  The Watchmen were traitors!

  I could see their auras, and Denis was Light, absolutely, immaculately Light, and the young guy from the Day Watch was Dark, but they were standing there holding hands like a couple in love, all set to zap us with the same spell that had killed the Inquisitor . . .

  A surge of hellfire and a blast of cosmic cold shattered against the Shield put up by Svetlana. It was definitely a Magician’s Shield, but some version of it that I didn’t know.

  The Shield held.

  Well, that’s only natural; a Magician’s Shield pumped full of energy can withstand anything at all. I’ve tested that myself.

  And it’s only natural for a Shield constructed by a Great Enchantress to withstand a blow from two ordinary, rank-and-file Others.

  But this blow was so powerful that for an instant I thought the Shield was going to burst.

  The door frame on my right didn’t just catch fire, it simply crumbled into ashes, and part of the wall collapsed into dust. A deep black trench ran across the floor—as if a stream of lava had flowed over it. The heat started baking my feet through the soles of my shoes.

  On Svetlana’s left the wall gave out a shrill, sad ringing note and started splitting into pieces. I don’t know if it had been chilled down to absolute zero or not, but the builders clearly hadn’t anticipated a temperature drop like this.

  The Watchmen slowly lowered their hands. Apparently they hadn’t expected us still to be alive. They weren’t the only ones—I hadn’t expected that either.

  “I think,” Svetlana said in a quiet voice, “that for safety’s sake I’ll have to kill one of you. And then the other one can tell us what happened here. The only thing you can do if you want to survive is surrender immediately.”

  What she said was good, those were the right words. And what’s more, entirely sincere—I could sense that Svetlana really felt like killing someone right now. In the wayward Watchmen’s place, I’d have surrendered.

  The Light Watchman and the Dark Watchman looked at each other.

  And then I realized—no, they weren’t going to surrender.

  Apparently, dumbfounded as they were by our resilience, they weren’t frightened in the least. They didn’t think they’d really given it their best shot yet.

  They were all set to continue.

  But where was Gesar?

  I struck out at both of them together. To hell with Denis being one of ours—this was no time for trying to figure out if he was a traitor or under some kind of spell.

  A whole series of small spells tore into the Watchmen. The spells’ main virtue was their variety—battle-magic classics: the Fireball; the Triple Blade, as old as the hills—it chops into a man like an axe into firewood; the White Spear, a stream of energy; Opium—even though Morpheus hadn’t worked; and the Grater, which I kept because it was so nonstandard. Opponents don’t usually expect an attack with everyday magic, and after the Grater has rasped over their skin, they don’t usually feel up to working magic anymore.

  My calculation was simple: The diverse range of attacks would overload the Watchmen’s defenses, which would give us time for a proper attack. Not many Others who don’t belong to the Higher level are capable of attacking with a cascade of four or five spells simultaneously. And repelling an attack like that is no piece of cake either.

  I was expecting anything at all.

  Maybe success—in that case our opponents would collapse, pierced through by invisible blades, scorched by a jet of fire, enveloped in flames, with their skin scraped off, and sound asleep.

  That’s right—a truly appalling sight!

  Or maybe failure—our colleagues were no fools, they had to have a Magician’s Shield around them, and some kind of protective amulet, all ready to set up a Crystal Sphere or a Sphere of Negation.

  That’s the way it usually goes in a battle, to be honest. The first attacks fizzle out in Shields. Then the energy of the protective spells runs out and the enemy . . .

  Usually the enemy surrenders.

  But I could never, ever have imagined what did happen.

  All the spells hit the target.

  I saw Denis’s jacket split apart as three invisible blades sank into it; I saw the Dark One’s coat burst into flames as it was pierced by the White Spear and he staggered from the blow. I saw them both engulfed in flames and the Grater scraping over them.

  It meant nothing to them.

  Denis started brushing flames, mingled with blood, off his face (a good fireball sticks to the skin, like napalm). He took no notice of his wounds at all. And the Dark One started weaving some spell of his own.

  Logic had let me down.

  There was only one way what I had seen could have happened—if both Denis and the Dark Magician were already dead. Either transformed into vampires, or raised from the dead.

  Then they wouldn’t give a damn about the flames and the wounds.

  So I put all the power I had available to me right then into the Gray Prayer, the simplest, most reliable, fail-safe spell against the undead.

  The only thing that determines if the Gray Prayer will work is the Power behind the spell.

  I struck so hard that it would have disembodied any vampires within twenty inches or twenty miles in the direction of the spell. I’d only ever struck that hard once before, in Saratov, when I tried to destroy my friend and enemy Kostya. No, to be honest, I struck even harder that time—I’d been pumped full of Power by Gesar and Zabulon. On that occasion I think I really did disembody several perfectly law-abiding vampires.

  But I was much less experienced then. This time I didn’t splash the Gray Prayer out in all directions; I compressed it into a beam, directed at the Watchmen, and angled it slightly upward, so that the spell would rise as it traveled over the ground, moving up into the sky.

  If there were any vampires flying by in a plane at that moment, I wasn’t to blame.

  When you use the Gray Prayer, the world seems to turn colorless—that’s the Twilight showing through into our reality. Undead creatures can’t take that, I was told once—they all exist by virtue of the difference in magical potential between our world and the Twilight.

  This time too, t
he world turned as colorless as an old cinefilm and a gray tide flooded over the Watchmen. They seemed to notice it and exchanged glances.

  But they had no intention of crumbling into dust.

  They stood there, bloodied, pierced through and through, and on fire. They couldn’t be alive. But they couldn’t be dead.

  So what was going on here?

  And that was when Svetlana made her mistake. A perfectly understandable mistake. As Sherlock Holmes said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” She saw everything that I did. And she drew the logical conclusion—the Watchmen were alive, but they were under the influence of a “Dominant,” a spell of unconditional obedience. That was why they’d killed the Inquisitor. And that was why they’d attacked us. And that was why wounds and pain didn’t bother them.

  Svetlana cast three spells on them at once, and what’s more, they were spells that hadn’t been prepared in advance. “Remoralization”—the Watchmen were supposed to be liberated from any imposed behavioral paradigm and return to their primary morality. “Barrier of Will”—if they were being controlled directly, like marionettes, the contact should have been broken. And “Sphere of Calm”—a reliable spell of reason and rationality.

  If the Watchmen were obeying some powerful Other, they would recover their wits now.

  But they laughed! That was the most offensive thing—they understood Svetlana’s attack and their response to it was merry laughter. They stood there with blood pouring out of them, their clothes blazing like bonfires—and they laughed, laughed heartily, even with a kind of benevolent condescension—like grown-ups showing their appreciation for children’s attempts to recite poems and dance at a kindergarten matinee performance.

  And at that moment I felt afraid. Apparently we Higher Magicians didn’t frighten these guys one little bit.