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  “Purely theoretical,” laughed Zabulon. “Don’t bother your head about it.”

  “No one lives in the Twilight,” I said.

  “If no one lives there, then they don’t,” the Dark One agreed simply, and I realized I wouldn’t get any more information out of him.

  “So okay,” I said, launching my cigarette end into flight from the balcony with a flick of my finger and incinerating it in midair with a second flick. “Thanks at least for helping. And for not laying claim to the kid.”

  “If he’d been a Battle Magician, I would have laid claim to him all right,” Zabulon chuckled. “The boy isn’t ours, of course, but there are always opportunities . . . . And if he’d been a Clairvoyant, I’d have fought for him then. But a Prophet? No, thank you.”

  “You value a Clairvoyant more than a Prophet?” I asked, amazed.

  “Of course. A Clairvoyant speaks of what might happen—and the future can be changed. A Prophet pronounces the Truth. That which is inevitable. Why would we want to know the inevitable, Anton? If the inevitable is bad, there’s no point in upsetting yourself sooner than necessary. And if it’s good—then let it come as a pleasant surprise. With great wisdom comes great sorrow.” Zabulon looked at the cigarette in his hand. “Be seeing you, Light One . . .”

  The cigarette flared up in his fingers with a somber crimson flame. The fire leapt onto his fingers, ran up his arm, and engulfed his entire body. Zabulon smiled at me through the flames—and disappeared.

  The smoldering cigarette fell at my feet.

  “Poser,” I said. “Cheap ham . . . swell-headed freak!”

  Zabulon’s demonstrative refusal to fight for the boy-Prophet frightened me. Maybe he was just trying to put a good face on things, but something told me that the Dark One meant exactly what he had said.

  But no way had he told me everything he knew.

  Had he really had so little contact with Prophets, did he understand so little about who this tiger was?

  And what was a “Twilight Creature” anyway?

  Zabulon had spoken as if Gesar ought to understand him perfectly well. Which meant that Gesar knew too . . .

  But, naturally, I didn’t ask the boss about it. Boris Ignatievich has his own opinion about what he ought to let his subordinates know so that they can discharge their obligations successfully.

  Our visit to the Tolkovs’ flat ended exactly as I had assumed it would. The boy’s mother was put in the SUV and sent off to the airport, accompanied by Igor, Alisher, and Jermenson—to board a regular flight to Barcelona and enjoy a holiday at a seaside resort. She was clearly a good mother, judging from the fact that Semyon had had to use two sixth-level suggestions to persuade her to leave her child in our charge while she relaxed on the beaches of Catalonia. And for us Gesar opened a portal directly to the office of the Watch.

  And he even initiated the boy in person there and then, as we were traversing the Twilight. You could have said that was a great honor, if not for the fact that the boy was a genuine Prophet.

  The rooms for overnight stays were located on the semi-basement level of the office. It’s the right place for them. In reality hardly anyone ever stays there—usually it’s only the duty staff or Others from out of town who are here on business.

  There are other levels below that, starting with the artifacts repository and archives and ending with the holding cells. But that’s a whole different story: there’s a different staircase for accessing those levels and it’s not that easy to get down there.

  Kesha was allocated a room that was usually occupied by non-smokers. They dragged in a huge flat-screen TV set, two games consoles, a heap of DVDs, and two sacks of toys that had been bought in the nearest branch of Children’s World. From the look of things, the staff member sent to buy the toys had no children of his own, otherwise the heap wouldn’t have been such a jumble of stuffed animals, Lego sets, remote-controlled cars and helicopters, board games that could only be played in a group, and wooden toys for developing the skills of kindergarten-age tots. Kesha stood with his hands braced against his well-fed sides, gazing at the chaotic heap in mild fright.

  “Semyon, make sure that he’s fed by someone with a family, who has children,” I said. “And preferably with a child less than a hundred years old. Or else they’ll bring the boy shish kebabs, beer, and smoked sausage.”

  “It’s too early for him to have beer, that I understand,” Semyon said with a nod. “But what’s wrong with sausage and shish kebabs? I remember one time during the Civil War, I picked up this street kid at the station—he turned out to be a Light Other. You know him, by the way, it’s . . . well, never mind that. He was skinny as hell. Anyway, I fed him up with sausage for a month! It happened in the Ukraine, they make good sausage there . . . if you fry it . . .”

  “Okay, I get the idea,” I said, also nodding. “Then definitely ask one of the women to take care of the boy. Okay?”

  “I will,” Semyon chuckled. “Only the boy won’t see his supper for a long time yet—the boss wanted to start teaching him the basics of magic immediately.”

  I shrugged. What was all the hurry about? The child was under the protection of the entire Night Watch now. We could take our time to work out what he was capable of.

  “I’ll be off,” I told Semyon. “I’ll collect my family and go home. Svetlana promised me borscht.”

  “Borscht—that’s great!” said Semyon, breaking into a broad smile. “I reckon I’ll go to the canteen. I’ll get something to eat and ask the cook to knock something up for the kid.”

  Our cook was a woman about forty years old. As an Other she was pretty weak, but as a cook she was outstanding. The only difference between the food in our canteen and food in Michelin-listed restaurants was the price.

  “Now that’s a good idea,” I told him approvingly.

  In the car Nadka babbled away incessantly. Firstly, she was in raptures over the portal that Gesar had opened. She knew how to open portals herself all right, but in the first place she was strictly forbidden to do it, and in the second place there was something different about Gesar’s portal. Some kind of “subtle energy structure” and “personal selectivity.” Basically, Gesar had spent a tenth of the usual energy on opening it, and only those who were allowed could pass through it.

  Secondly, Nadya felt very sorry for the little boy-Prophet. Because he lived with his mummy, but without a daddy. Because he hadn’t gone to the seaside. Because he was in the boring office without his mummy . . . although they had brought him some interesting toys—could she borrow the little helicopter to play with? Because he was too fat to be good at sports and they probably laughed at him at school.

  Thirdly, Nadya was very proud that she’d given Gesar the right advice. No, she didn’t boast about it straight out, but she kept coming back to that moment . . .

  Svetlana smiled gently as she listened to the chatter from the backseat. Then she said in a low voice: “I was very worried about you.”

  “There was a whole army of us.”

  “And what good did that do you? I don’t like these magical mystery thingamajigs.”

  “That’s pure human atavism,” I sighed. “Others are supposed to love magic in all its manifestations. By the way, do you know what a Twilight Creature is?”

  “It’s the first time I ever heard of it,” said Svetlana, shaking her head.

  “Me too . . .”

  “But I know!” Nadya exclaimed from behind us—that incredible ability children have to hear everything interesting, even if they never shut their own mouths for a second!

  “Well?” I asked, pricking up my ears.

  “If there are plants in the Twilight . . .”

  “What plants?”

  “Blue moss! Then there must be someone who eats it.”

  “And who generally eats moss?” asked Sveta.

  “Deer,” I replied automatically. “But this guy . . . he wasn’t anything like a deer. A bit of a maggot, maybe, but not a deer,
no way . . .”

  “Anton!”

  “Now what have I said?” I growled. Nadya started giggling. “We’ve got a critical situation here,” I went on.

  “It’s not critical any longer! Someone’s hunting the boy-Prophet. Well, so what? No one can stand up against the entire Watch, especially if the Dark Ones help too. Gesar will contact the Inquisition now, if he hasn’t done it already. They’ll scour the archives and find out what’s going on. It might possibly be some kind of sect. Like the Regina Brothers, remember? You’d better decide what you’d rather do—finish cooking the borscht or do Nadya’s maths with her,” said Sveta.

  “I choose the maths,” I replied. “I don’t know how to cook borscht.”

  A sect . . . Maybe it really could be. One that had been sitting quietly, doing nothing for a couple of centuries, waiting for a prophet. Maybe they wanted him to reveal the meaning of life to them. Sitting there, waiting . . . Pumping artifacts full of energy, training a hunter . . .

  A good theory. Exotic, but coherent. I’d have liked to hope that was the way it really was.

  Chapter 7

  NADYA AND MATHS DIDN’T GET ALONG. LANGUAGES WERE fine, and she did the work herself on principle, without using magic. History was excellent: she found it all very interesting, both human history and Other history. She also read a lot and enjoyed it.

  But she had trouble with maths.

  We just about scraped through the quadratic equations (you can call me a sadist and bring in the children’s ombudsman, but she went to a school where the program differed from the one approved by the ministry of education). My daughter closed her exercise book with a sigh of relief and climbed onto the bed with a book. I glanced quickly at the cover and decided it must be some kind of Harry Potter clone—it showed an inspired-looking boy working spells (well, that is, with his hands wreathed in blue glowing mist and his forehead wrinkled up grimly). And I went into the sitting room, picked out a Terry Pratchett book, and lay down on the sofa with it.

  What more could a middle-aged magician with a family want for perfect contentment at the end of a hectic day? Read about invented magicians while his wife cooks the borscht and his daughter’s doing something quiet and peaceful . . .

  “Daddy, so there really are Twilight Creatures after all?”

  I looked at Nadya. What was stopping her from reading?

  “Probably. I don’t know.”

  “And they chase after Prophets?”

  “Don’t believe everything it says in fairy tales,” I replied, turning a page. The magician Rincewind had just got himself into yet another scrape, which he would wriggle his way out of, of course. Heroes always wriggle their way out of scrapes, if the author loves them . . . and if he’s not sick of them.

  “But they’re not fairy tales!”

  “What?” I took the book out of my daughter’s hands and opened it at the publisher’s imprint page. Aha . . . they certainly weren’t fairy tales. The Other Word publishing house. They publish books and various printed materials for Others. For Light Ones and Dark Ones, indiscriminately. Of course, they don’t produce anything really serious: genuine spells are either too secret to be printed, or they can’t survive the mechanical application of the text to paper. Some things can only be conveyed by the spoken word and by example. They print the very basics—secrecy isn’t particularly important here: if a book like this finds its way into an ordinary shop (as sometimes happens), people will think it’s a children’s book or a fantasy penned by some graphomaniac. The book was called The Childhood of Remarkable Others.

  “Is this some kind of textbook?”

  “For reading out of class. Stories about the childhood of great magicians.”

  I didn’t get to study in the magician’s classes. In those years they didn’t find so many Others, and setting up special classes for them was regarded as impractical. So I did my learning on the job . . .

  I leafed through the chapters about Merlin, Karl Cemius, Michel Lefroid, and Pan Chang. I stumbled across a chapter about Gesar and smiled when I read the first lines: “When the Great Gesar was a little boy, he lived in the mountains of Tibet. He was an unattractive, sickly child, he often caught cold and was even given the offensive name Djoru, or ‘Snotty.’ No one knew that Gesar was really an Other, one of the most powerful magicians in the world. The only one who did know was a Dark Other, Soton, who dreamed of making Gesar a Dark One . . .”

  “Look further on,” Nadya begged me impatiently. “About Erasmus . . .”

  “Was Erasmus of Rotterdam really a Prophet?” I asked in surprise, opening the book at the page that had been marked. The bookmark was pink, with little fairies out of some Disney cartoon on it. “Ah, Erasmus Darwin . . .”

  The author certainly didn’t make a great effort to vary the introductions for his young readers. But that actually lent the narrative a certain epic quality.

  “When the great prophet Erasmus Darwin was a little boy, he lived in the small village of Elton in Ireland. He was always a dreamy and romantic child. He often used to run out of the house and lie in a field of blossoming clover, examining the little flowers. Erasmus was convinced that plants could love like people, that they even had their own sex life. He wrote his remarkable poem The Loves of the Plants about this. But that was later . . .”

  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 realized that the Twilight Creature was on his trail, he went to his favorite 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 realized 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 fueled 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.