You can create a coc.o.o.n that Gesar couldn't see into without special preparation, you can steal energy from an enchantress who's very probably going to be a great enchantress-that's all pure childish mischief and it will only work once. But it's a bit too soon for you, Vitaly Rogoza, Dark Other, to get involved in an open fight with the chief of the Night Watch.

Just say "thank you" that got you away in one piece.

I said "thank you" and fell straight into a snowdrift from a height of several meters. It was dark all around. Or almost dark. Just the moon overhead. With a forest stretching out on both sides.

I was in a clearing in the forest, a clearing as straight as Lenin Prospect in Nikolaev and very wide, about fifteen meters across. There was a blank wall of forest on my right and a blank wall of forest on my left, and straight ahead, hanging above the silvery strip of untouched snow, there was the moon. Almost full.

It was beautiful, incredibly beautiful-the moonlit clearing, the night, the snow... I could have just laid there and admired it.

But I started feeling cold.

I scrambled out of the snowdrift with a struggle and looked around. The snow still looked untouched. But somewhere in the distance I could hear the distinctive hammering rhythm of the wheels of a commuter train.

Hmm. Some great magician I was. Lord of the Dark portals.

I'd opened a portal all right, but I hadn't bothered about where it would end. And this was the result: Here I was all alone in the winter forest in nothing but my sweater-no jacket or hat.

Furious with myself, I felt the long, hard object under my sweater, decided not to remove the coc.o.o.n yet, and set off toward the moon, across the miraculous virgin snow of the moonlit forest clearing.

I soon realized that walking through snowdrifts was a very dubious pleasure, so I veered toward the forest, having sensibly decided that there ought to be less snow near the trees.

To my own amazement, I was proved right twice over. First, there were indeed no snow drifts at the e.g. of the forest, and second, I found a narrow path, pretty well trodden. I simply hadn't noticed it before in the shadow.

One of the ancients once said that roads always lead to the people who built them. And anyway, I had no other option. I set off along the path. First I walked, and then I started running to warm myself up.

"I'll run until I get tired," I decided. "And then I'll enter the Twilight... to warm up."

I just hoped I'd have enough strength for running and the Twilight.

I ran for about fifteen minutes: There was absolutely no wind, so I actually did manage to warm myself up a bit.

The clearing went on and on, an unbroken stretch of silvery, glittering snow. I wasn't the one who should have been running here; it should have been some knight of old in a doublet with fur on the outside and his enchanted sword on his belt, his faithful tame wolf running a few steps ahead...

Almost as soon as I thought about the wolf, I heard barking from somewhere on my left. Dogs. A wolf's bark is different. And they don't bark in winter.

I stopped and looked. There was a warm orange glow flickering through the trees. In addition to the barking I could hear voices-people's voices.

I didn't waste much time thinking. I walked forward a bit until I reached the path branching off toward the campfire and turned onto it.

Soon two dogs came bounding toward me-a white Karelian Laika with a tight coil of a tail, almost invisible against the background of the snow, and a s.h.a.ggy Newfoundland terrier, as black as pitch. The Laika was yelping in a voice that rang like a sleigh-bell and the Newfoundland was barking gruffly: "Booff! Booff!"

"Petro! Is that you?" someone asked from the campfire.

"No," I replied regretfully. "It's not Petro. But can I warm myself up a bit?"

To be quite honest, the first thing I wanted to do wasn't warm myself up, but find out where I was, so I wouldn't have to go wandering through the forest at random, but could go straight to the suburban railroad.

"Come on over here! Don't worry about the dogs, they won't touch you."

And the dogs didn't touch me. The little Laika ran around me cautiously at a constant distance of about four meters, and the Newfoundland simply came skipping up to my feet, sniffed my shoes, snorted, and ran back to the campfire.

There were more than ten people sitting by the campfire. Hanging on a long chain, thrown over a thick horizontal branch of the nearest pine tree, there was a big pot, with something bubbling promisingly inside it. The people were sitting on two logs. I could see metal mugs in most of their hands and somebody was just opening a new bottle of vodka.

"Oh, look at that!" a young, bearded guy who looked like a geologist said when I emerged from the darkness into the light. "Just a light sweater!"

"I'm sorry," I sighed. "I've got a few little problems."

"Sit down!" said someone who had come over to me. They sat me down almost by force and immediately thrust a mug of vodka into my hand.

"Drink that!"

I didn't dare disobey. It burned my throat, but a few seconds later I'd already forgotten it was the middle of winter.

"Styopa! Didn't you have a spare jacket somewhere?" the bearded guy asked, still giving the orders.

"Yes," someone answered from the opposite log, and then ran off briskly to one side, where there were dark tents pitched in the gaps between the trees.

"And I've got a hat," said a plump girl with braids like a schoolgirl's. "Just a moment..."

"Been out in the cold long?" the bearded guy asked me.

"Not very. Only about twenty minutes. Just don't ask how I got here."

"We won't," he replied. "We'll find a place for you to sleep, and a spare sleeping bag too. And tomorrow we're going to Moscow. You can come with us, if you like."

"Thanks," I said. "I'd be glad to."

"We've got a birthday here," Styopa explained as he came up to me, holding a bluish-green ski jacket. "Here, take this."

"Thanks a lot, guys," I said sincerely, thanking them mostly not for the hospitality, but for not asking any unnecessary questions.

The jacket was warm. Warmer than it looked.

"And whose birthday is it?" I asked.

One of the girls stopped kissing her latest bearded admirer.

"Mine," she told me. "My name's Tamara."

"Happy birthday," I said. It sounded a bit flat. I felt genuinely sorry that I had nothing to give her as a present, and I felt ashamed to hand her a hundred-dollar bill. It would have been too much like my generous tipping in the hotel.

"What's your name?" the first bearded guy asked me. "I'm Matvei."

"Vitaly." I shook the hand that he held out. "A birthday party in the forest in the middle of winter-I've never been at one of those before."

"There's a first time for everything," Matvei remarked philosophically.

The dogs started barking again and dashed off into the dark night.

"Well, is it Petro this time at last?" the birthday girl asked hopefully.

"Is that you, Petro?" Styopa roared in a surprisingly resonant baritone quite unlike his normal speaking voice.

"Yes," said a voice in the forest.

"And have you brought the champagne?"

"Yes," Petro confirmed happily.

"Hoo-ray," all the girls shouted together. "Hooray for Petro, our savior!"

I felt stealthily under my jacket for the case that must conceal the mysterious Fafnir's Talon. I thought that I could relax until morning and soak in the relaxed atmosphere of somebody else's celebration. The people around the campfire made a point of not singling me out-they filled my mug with vodka as if I were one of them, then handed me a plate of steaming pilaff, as if the light of their fire attracted underdressed travelers out of the forest every day of the week.

It was a great pity there wasn't a single Other among them. Not even an uninitiated one.

Chapter four.

-?- Semyon walked into Gesar's office, froze for a moment just inside the door, and shook his head very slightly.

"He's not in Moscow. Definitely not."

"That's kind of stupid," Ignat snorted from his armchair. "If he's supposed to do something with the Talon in Moscow, then what's the point of opening a portal to somewhere outside the city?"

Gesar glanced sideways at Ignat. There was something mysterious in his glance: The first name that came to mind for it was "higher knowledge."

"Maybe not so stupid," he objected quietly. "The Dark One had no choice. Either stay in Moscow and lose the Talon, or clear out and take the Talon with him, and then try to break back in again. What's bad about all this is that the Brothers managed to get the Talon to this Dark One from Ukraine, and he managed to trick us."

Gesar sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, and corrected himself: "No, not us, of course... It was me he tricked. Me."

Svetlana was huddling miserably in the corner of the divan by the window. She started sobbing again. "I'm sorry, Boris Ignatievich..."

So far Anton had been sitting as straight as a ramrod, but now he moved close to her and put his arm around her shoulders without speaking.

"Don't cry, Svetlana. It's not your fault. If I couldn't guess what the Dark One was going to do, then you can't possibly be blamed for anything." Gesar's voice was cool, but basically neutral. The chief of the Night Watch really didn't have anything to reproach Svetlana with-what had happened was simply beyond the range of her present knowledge and skills.

"There's just one thing I don't understand," Olga said abruptly. She was sitting on the pouffe between Gesar's desk and the window, smoking nervously. "If the Dark One's actions couldn't be read in advance at all, doesn't that mean he was acting on intuition? Without planning or thinking anything through in advance?"

"Yes, it does," Gesar agreed. "He prefers to create probabilities, rather than choose from the ones that already exist. It's a pretty bold way of doing things, but it has its dangers. Intuition can be deceptive. And that's how we'll get him."

There was a brief silence; Semyon walked silently across the office and sat on the divan, a little distance away from Anton and Svetlana.

"Actually, there's something else bothering me," Gesar said darkly, reaching into his pocket and taking out a pack of Pall Malls. He looked at it in surprise, put it back in his pocket, and took out a Cuban cigar in a metal tube, a clipper to cut off its tip, and a huge tabletop ashtray. But he didn't open the cigar. "Something quite different."

"The fact that the Dark One had no trouble using the energy of the portal and some of Svetlana's too?" Semyon asked, guessing immediately. "But that was to be expected."

"Why was it?" Gesar asked cautiously.

Semyon shrugged.

"It seems to me that he's more powerful than we think. He simply disguises the fact. In principle Ilya and I, and even Garik, can make use of the Dark Ones' Power. Under certain circ.u.mstances. And with certain consequences for ourselves."

"But not so brazenly and not so quickly," Gesar said with a shake of his head. "Remember Spain. When Avvak.u.m tried to draw Power from the Dark portal. Remember how that ended?"

"I remember," said Semyon, not fazed in the least. "All that means is that our Dark One is significantly more powerful than Avvak.u.m. And nothing else."

Gesar looked at Semyon for a few seconds, then shook his head and turned his gaze to Svetlana.

"Sveta," he said in a voice that was noticeably gentler. "Try once again to remember everything that you felt at the time. But don't hurry. And please, don't get upset. You did everything right, the trouble is it just turned out not to be enough."

Semyon glanced in surprise at Svetlana, with the expression of someone who has missed the most interesting thing. "What do you mean, try to remember? Create the image and the job's done," he advised them.

"The image won't materialize," Gesar growled. "That's the whole problem. What does materialize is some kind of gibberish, not an image."

"And have you tried creating a different one?" Semyon asked eagerly. "An abstract image, not connected with the Dark One?"

"She has," Gesar answered for Svetlana. "Any other image is okay, but this one just doesn't work."

"Hmm," Semyon muttered. "Maybe the impressions are too vivid, too oppressive. Remember how I tried for twenty years to recreate the image of the Inferno vortex over the Reichstag when Hitler was speaking. But I just couldn't get it to look real..."

"We're not talking here about trying to get it to look real," said Gesar. "There isn't any picture at all. Just a gray blur, as if Svetlana's trying to remember the Twilight world."

Anton, who still hadn't uttered a single word, glanced hopefully at Sveta.

"Well, then," she began. "At first I didn't notice anything at all. When you left to follow the Brother who made a run for it, Boris Ignatievich, I stayed with the portal. Then I noticed that the Dark Ones on the floor had started moving and I fed some Power into your Net. The Dark Ones were pressed flat against the floor again; then you came back. And almost immediately-it was like a fainting fit, everything went black, I felt weak... And then there's a blank. I came around on the floor when Anton splashed water in my face. The memories are all I have left... And I can't even remember anything properly." The enchantress bit her lip, as if she were about to burst into tears. Anton looked at her as if he hoped just his look would be enough to calm her down.

"I have no rational explanation," Ilya put in. "There's simply nothing to go on-too little data."

"There's more than enough data," Gesar snorted. "But I don't have any explanation either... Not in the sense of a hundred percent correct explanation. I have a few suspicions of my own, but they need to be checked out. Olga?"

Olga shrugged. "If you have nothing to say, I won't even try. Either he's a top-flight magician who's never been registered anywhere by anyone, or someone's messing with our heads. For instance, I still can't understand why Zabulon hasn't got involved. You'd think smuggling in the Talon was an operation of supreme importance. But he hasn't raised a finger to help his rabble."

"That's right," Gesar drawled thoughtfully and finally took the cigar out of its tube, looked at it carefully, breathed in the aroma of its tobacco with obvious delight, and put it away again. "The Moscow Day Watch might have nothing at all to do with the operation to smuggle in Fafnir's Talon. The Regin Brothers could easily have been acting on their own initiative. In that case we have absolutely no claims against Zabulon. His rabble appears to have been acting independently. And not all that effectively, either, otherwise they'd never have allowed us to intercept the Brothers."

"What good are the Brothers to us, boss?" Ignat said in annoyance, getting up. "If the Dark One from Ukraine really is predestined for the Talon, then the Dark Ones won the fight at the airport."

"If the Dark One from Ukraine was predestined for the Talon," Gesar said in a quiet voice, "we'd all be settling into spending the rest of eternity in the Twilight. Even I wouldn't have been able to save any of you. Not any of you. Is that clear, Ignat?"

"Is that right?" Semyon asked calmly. "It's that serious?"

"It's exactly right, Semyon. I have only one hope: The Dark One doesn't even understand his own role in all this yet. That's why he's thrashing about like this. Our only chance is to outguess him and take the Talon. And in principle that would balance out the odds."