All right. What was it that had finished off Alisa? She hadn't gathered enough Power in time. She hadn't recognized the Light Other, even though he was so close to her. She hadn't refused a duel that she was certain to lose. And most important of all-she'd given way to her emotions. She'd tried to appeal to a Light One's feelings.

Well, then, Edgar wasn't short of Power, and Zabulon had even given him some of his own. His two amulets were a real treasure house of Power, especially the one charged with the Transylvanian Mist. If Edgar used that one, every Other in Europe would sense the monstrous discharge of energy. Plus the battle wand-a highly specialized weapon, but it was fast and reliable. Shahab's Lash was n.o.body's i.e. of a joke!

That meant Edgar had to keep as close an eye as possible on the Light Ones. Oh yes, about the Light Ones...

Just at that moment there were three of them in Sheremetievo. First, there was his old friend from previous operations, Anton Gorodetsky, who the lower-level Dark Ones had nicknamed "Zabulon's favorite." In that business with the Mirror he'd done just what Zabulon wanted for some reason, and helped the Dark Ones... Or had he just made everyone think he helped the Dark Ones? Probably that was it-otherwise how could he have stayed on in the Night Watch?

Second, there was a middle-aged female healer who had no connection with the Night Watch, thoughtfully sniffing perfumes in the duty-free shop. She probably just happened to be traveling that day by coincidence.

Third, there was a militiaman who was an Other on duty at the checkin, as there was supposed to be in any airport.

Apart from Edgar himself, there were four Dark Ones in the international terminal of Sheremetievo-2. First, his charges, the trio of Regin Brothers, who kept staring guardedly by turns at Edgar and Anton, who had installed himself in the bar at the far end of the hall. Plus a weak magician over by the gambling machines who was paying no attention to anything; he seemed to be trying to earn a bit of extra cash by getting the mechanism to pay out the maximum winnings. His kind was perfectly described by the phrase "cheap trash."

The basic situation couldn't have been clearer.

Checkin and pa.s.sport control went quickly; no visas were required for the Czech Republic. In fact, just in case, Edgar was carrying Estonian and Argentinian pa.s.sports, both perfectly legal-Argentina was a wonderful country that traded its own citizenship quite freely.

Edgar spent the rest of the time until boarding in one of the bars. Naturally, not the one where Zabulon's favorite, the Light magician Gorodetsky, had installed himself. Edgar's glance and his had met just once-I know you're here and you know I'm here, and both of us know that the other knows his opponent... and we're on similar missions. To defend our own at the trial and rout our enemies...

To Gorodetsky's credit, he'd made his position perfectly clear: When the trial starts, that's when we'll get to grips.

Meanwhile, let's just enjoy the flight and not get in each other's way.

Strange, how easily they understood each other. Maybe it was just a hangover from those ancient times before the Others were divided into Dark Ones and Light Ones, when they simply stood up together against fate and the vicissitudes of life. Back then, of course, any healer was closer to a vampire than he was to any simple, luckless human being in the faceless ma.s.s of other people like him. The Twilight can bring you together.

But the Twilight could separate you too. In fact, the Twilight was pretty good at it-nowadays you simply couldn't find more irreconcilable enemies anywhere on earth than Dark Ones and Light Ones. The puny conflict between the USA and the Islamic world was nothing in comparison... Even the old Cold War between the USA and the USSR that was now a part of history hadn't come close to the war of the Watches. They were just childish games for foolish human beings.

Edgar drank coffee that was extremely black, but not very good, thinking about everything at once and nothing in particular. For instance, why all these airport bars that were so expensive and didn't seem to be skimping on the ingredients of their food and drink managed to brew lousy coffee, pour bad beer, and make absolutely inedible sandwiches. Plenty of the problems of human life could be attributed to the struggle between the Watches, but this certainly wasn't one of them.

His charges-the entire ill-a.s.sorted trio of them-were peering at him disapprovingly from the waiting hall. Of course, the Regin Brothers regarded him as just another cop. Let them. They were boneheads. Brainless, heedless boneheads. And since that was what they were, they could be used to serve the cause of Darkness. Zabulon had been quite right to decide to make use of them. That business with Fafnir's Talon had certainly put the Light Ones off their stride during Rogoza the Mirror's visit. Without even knowing it, the Regin Brothers had taken one of the blows intended for the Day Watch and allowed the Mirror, who had already grown strong, to top himself right up with Power. That was really what had made certain that Zabulon and his cohorts would win out in the latest clash with the Light Ones.

And serve them right.

Edgar watched without the slightest sympathy as the courteous customs officers led away a furious gent in a prim, formal suit and expensive raincoat. It was his place that Edgar would be occupying on the flight to Prague.

When they were already on their way, Edgar waited until one of the Regin Brothers left his seat and then sat down next to the one who seemed to be the most sensible-the white one.

"Greetings, brother," Edgar said warmly.

The Finn looked at him with big round eyes. A cautious look.

"We are Dark Ones," Edgar went on quietly. "We don't abandon our own. I've been sent to protect you, if necessary. And we'll be able to defend you at the Tribunal-trust me. So hold your heads high, servants of the Darkness. Our hour will come very soon now."

Having said that, Edgar got up and went back to his place without looking back even once.

There. Now let them rack their brains over that.

How dramatic he had been! He'd really had to work hard to keep a solemn, stony face and avoid cracking a smile.

But the expression in the Finn's big round eyes had been the opposite of a smile-he'd been really frightened and worried.

"I really shouldn't have," Edgar muttered to himself. "They're like children... And I mock them."

Edgar sighed regretfully and opened his magazine. It was a nice short flight to Prague, not like flying to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, for instance. You were there before you knew it, without any other stops on the way or that h.e.l.lish nightmare of having to sleep in your seat. But then, if you really thought about it, the most convenient form of transport was a Dark portal. Only setting up a portal from Moscow to Prague would be an unjustifiable extravagance. So he had to fly, like ordinary human beings.

But not quite like ordinary human beings... at least Others didn't have any problems with tickets.

Chapter two.

-?- Anton loved Prague. In fact, he simply couldn't understand how it was possible not to love the place. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the very first moment, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you. Moscow, unfortunately, did not belong in either category. But Prague was like an old, wise enchantress who knew how to pretend to be young, but did not see any need for it, since she remained beautiful at any age.

And if you really thought about it, Prague ought to have become the abode of Dark Ones. A city saturated to overflowing with Gothic buildings, a city full of plague pillars-monuments to the medieval pestilence of the Black Death-a city that had a ghetto during the Second World War, a city that witnessed the opposition of the two superpowers during the Cold War... where could all those emanations of Darkness, the nutritional substratum of the Dark Ones, have gone to? How had they been scattered, where to, and why had they been converted into memory, but not into malice?

It was a mystery...

Anton didn't know any members of the Prague Night Watch in person. They had occasionally exchanged information by courier or email when something in the archives needed clarification. And at Christmas and the New Year it was traditional to send greetings to all the Night Watches... but n.o.body made any distinction between the Prague Night Watch (active staff-130 Others, operational reserve-76) and the Night Watch of some small American town (active staff-1 Other, operational reserve-0).

Anton had been to Prague twice on vacation. Simply wandering aimlessly around the city from one beer bar to the next, buying cheap little souvenirs on the Charles Bridge, traveling out to Karlovy Vary to swim in the pool filled with hot mineral water and try the hot wafers in the cafe.

But now he was flying to Prague on business. Really serious business...

Anton stretched out in his chair, as far as the s.p.a.ce in the Boeing 737's economy cla.s.s would allow-the comfort level wasn't much different from an old Soviet Tupolev-and examined the backs of the Regin Brothers' heads. They looked tense-the Dark Ones' auras were full of fear and impatience. They knew Anton was there and they were dreaming of getting as far away from him as possible, as soon as possible...

If it wasn't for that incident at Sheremetievo airport, Anton might even have felt sorry for the luckless magicians.

But once Anton had gone into combat with an enemy, he was an enemy forever.

As if he could read Anton's thoughts-although, of course, that was beyond his power-one of the Regin Brothers, the tall, strong black guy, turned around, glanced warily at Anton, and hastily averted his gaze. Raivo-Anton remembered his name. From somewhere in Senegal... no, from Burkina Faso, that was it. Picked up by one of the Regin Brothers' families and raised in the spirit of devotion to the great Fafnir...

Just how had the Regin Brothers come up with all this nonsense?

Once, long, long ago, something had happened, something that often happened among the Others. A Dark magician and a Light magician fought to the death. The Light magician was called Sigurd... Siegfried, if you p.r.o.nounced it in the German manner. The Dark magician was killed... and he died in his Twilight form of a dragon.

He was called Fafnir. Later Sigurd was killed as well... Anton wondered if Gesar had known him?

After that, things took a rather unusual turn. The Dark magician's disciples didn't scatter, as often happened, and they didn't fight among themselves, as happened even more often. Instead they decided to resurrect their master.

They banded together to form a sect known as the Regin Brothers and withdrew almost completely from the usual struggle between Light and Darkness... which suited the Light Ones very well, of course. The brothers lovingly preserved the Talon torn from the Twilight body of the Dark magician. Later the Talon was confiscated by the Inquisition-just before the Second World War the Light Ones had lodged a successful protest against such an extremely powerful artifact remaining in the hands of Dark Ones. The Regin Brothers hadn't really argued about it, but they handed over the Talon with the words, "Fafnir's time has not yet come..." And then suddenly the European office of the Inquisition had been attacked! There had been a battle in which almost all the magicians in the small sect had been killed, together with a substantial number of the Inquisition's bodyguards, who had grown idle and lazy. Then the remnants of the sect had made their absurd appearance in Moscow.

It was a well-known fact that human beings didn't have a monopoly on idiots...

But then... were they really idiots?

Anton remembered what an intense charge of Power the Talon had given off. In part it was the Power acc.u.mulated in the Talon as a result of the Regin Brothers' efforts over many years. In part it was the Power of the Dark magician himself.

Others didn't die in the same way as ordinary people. They receded into the Twilight, losing their physical form and with it their ability to return to the world of human beings. But there was something left behind-Anton had seen vague shadows and a quivering mist that sometimes appeared in the Twilight, marking out the path taken by dead Others. Once he had even met a dead Other... It wasn't one of his most pleasant memories. But there was something left, even there...

Was it possible to bring a dead Other back to life?

The answer was probably somewhere. In the labyrinth of the archives, cla.s.sified as top secret, sealed by the Night and Day Watches, with access banned by the Inquisition. The Higher Magicians were bound to have wondered about where Others went when they died, the path that they themselves would eventually follow...

But Anton wasn't supposed to know the answer.

He looked through the window at the clouds stretching out below, at the weak glimmering of thousands of auras merged together that indicated cities. The plane was already flying over some part of Poland.

Just supposing it was possible to bring Fafnir back to life...

So what? Maybe he had been a powerful magician, maybe even a Higher Magician, a magician beyond cla.s.sification... his resurrection wouldn't change anything in the global balance of power, especially since he would be estranged from human life. He wouldn't understand modern reality... and if he was stupid enough to set off around Europe in his Twilight form, he'd be torn to pieces by rockets, shot with lasers from satellites. They'd use tactical nuclear weapons... while the j.a.panese howled woefully that G.o.dzilla had come back to life and been killed again...

What was it the Dark Ones wanted? Disorder, panic, people screaming about the Apocalypse?

Anton squirmed in his chair. He took the plastic cup and the small, two-hundred-gram bottle of dry Hungarian wine from the smiling stewardess. It was all right for Edgar... Like any Dark One, he was flying business cla.s.s, so he had a crystal gla.s.s and superior wine...

There was something to that last idea. Fafnir... the Apocalypse... At least it made some sense of Gesar's remark about ma.s.s hysteria over the year 2000. But why would the Dark Ones want to stage the end of the world? And what about all the other things? The witch Alisa... the Chalk of Destiny...

Anton regretted that he didn't have his laptop. It would have been interesting to lay the situation out on the screen, shuffle the variants around and see what fitted with what. There was a standard program called Mazarini for a.n.a.lyzing intrigues, and it would have helped him understand a few things.

The Chalk of Destiny...

He took a gulp of wine, and it turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. Then he frowned. Gesar and Zabulon. They were really the two determining factors in the entire business. They were far more mysterious and complicated than ancient artifacts like the Chalk of Destiny and Fafnir's Talon, or Others like the Mirror and Alisa. They probably understood everything that was going on... and they were trying to outwit each other. As usual.

Gesar.

Zabulon.

The starting point for the a.n.a.lysis probably ought to be the Chalk of Destiny. When Svetlana, the new Great Enchantress, had appeared and joined the Night Watch, Gesar had tried to carry through yet another intervention on a global scale. Svetlana had been provided with the Chalk of Destiny-an ancient and extremely powerful artifact that could be used to rewrite the Book of Destiny and change human life. At first glance it had appeared that Svetlana was supposed to rewrite the destiny of the boy Egor, an Other with an indeterminate aura, inclined equally to the Darkness and the Light, and make him into either a future prophet or a future leader. But, with some a.s.sistance from Anton, Svetlana had failed to do this. All she had done was to bring Egor's destiny into equilibrium by removing all the influences exerted on him by the Watches in their struggle against each other.

But of course, there had been more than one level to Gesar's plan, and at the second level another Great Enchantress, his longtime girlfriend Olga, recently rehabilitated after being punished by the leadership of the Light Ones, had recovered her magical abilities and used the other half of the Chalk of Destiny to rewrite someone else's destiny-while all the Dark Ones of Moscow were watching Svetlana.

That was the truth that Anton knew. The second level of truth. But maybe there was a third one?

Okay he'd have to put that on hold for the time being. What had come next? Alisa Donnikova, a capable witch and member of the Day Watch, although she wasn't one of the elite. Following a fight between Dark Ones and Light Ones that had obviously been engineered by Zabulon, she completely lost her magical powers. Then she'd been sent on vacation to the Artek Young Pioneers' camp to recuperate... and Gesar had sent Igor, who had suffered a similar trauma, to the same place. A pa.s.sionate love had sprung up between them-a terrible, deadly love between a Light magician and a Dark witch. And the outcome was that Alisa was dead, killed by Igor, and Igor himself was on the verge of dematerialization, weighed down by his violation of the Treaty and the burden of his own guilt. Then there was the boy who had accidentally drowned because of him...

This wasn't one of Gesar's intrigues. Its ruthless and cynical style bore the signature of the Day Watch. Zabulon had sacrificed his girlfriend... but what had he sacrificed her for? To get Igor out of the way? That seemed strange.

It had been almost a straight swap. Alisa Donnikova had been a powerful witch.

So it was one intrigue in response to another...

Then there was the appearance of the Mirror. Gesar was certain it had been impossible to predict, so it must have been a coincidence. But no doubt Gesar and Zabulon had both immediately decided to exploit it... each for his own ends.

Anton suppressed the desire to swear out loud. There just wasn't enough data for an a.n.a.lysis. Nothing but conjectures, blanks, a.s.sumptions...

And not much was certain about the Regin Brothers either. They'd been lured to Moscow by Zabulon. Had he wanted to spread panic among the members of the Night Watch? Or feed the Mirror with Power? The only thing that could have lured the Dark magicians into their insane attack on the Inquisition was a promise to resurrect Fafnir. Naturally, the old magicians, who had seen Fafnir when he was alive, had agreed-it was just about their last chance of victory. Naturally, the young magicians had followed... all those young Finns of African and Asian origin who had been collected one at a time-they were too isolated in their own little world. They thought of what was happening as a game, not an outrageous crime.

But what had Zabulon been after?

No. Anton didn't understand a thing. He shook his head and accepted his inability to figure out what was going on. Well then... he'd just have to do the job he'd been given to do. Try to save Igor.

Try to make the charges against the Day Watch stick.

The plane was already making its approach for landing...

The latest issue of National Geographic didn't help Edgar relax. He just couldn't get into the article about the Italian custom of throwing old things out of the window at New Year and other amusing European New Year rituals. The only thing Edgar took away from the leading paragraphs was a firm determination not to go strolling around any narrow old streets in Italy at New Year.

The smooth hum of the turbine engines set his thoughts vibrating in sympathy. And despite himself, Edgar began thinking once again about his mission and the current situation of constant conflict between the Light and the Darkness in the persons of the Others.

All right, he thought. Let's take it from the beginning.

In recent times the Day Watch had significantly strengthened its position and struck several substantial blows against the Light Ones, inflicting losses that could not be made good on the spot. It would take time-not even years, but decades. Zabulon's natural move should be to build on success right now, without waiting for the Light Ones to gather strength again. To dash to victory while the enemy was still stunned.

What could weaken the Light Ones and strengthen the Dark Ones right now? After the Night Watch had lost a very powerful and highly promising enchantress? An attempt to take someone else out of the game?

Edgar pondered for a moment and regretted he hadn't brought his laptop with him. He could have weighed up the possible variants, run through all the White magicians with any real skills and tried to identify their weak sides...

There was even a special program for that, called Richelieu-the Day Watch wasn't short of qualified programmers.

He would have to rely on his own natural computer-powerful but imperfect.

Who? Gesar was obviously not a candidate; he had already crossed that line beyond which an Other becomes almost invulnerable to his colleagues.

Objectively speaking, number two in the Night Watch hierarchy ought to be Svetlana Nazarova, but she would be out of the game for a long time, so Edgar had to award that honor either to the tricky Olga, an old specialist in combat operations, who had only just come back from being out of the game herself, or to Ilya, a first-level magician. In fact, Edgar suspected that was not the limit of Ilya's abilities. Eventually, he could quite easily develop his powers and become a Great Magician, but metamorphoses like that required time and colossal effort, primarily from the magician himself, and Ilya was still too young to abandon many of the simple, almost human, pleasures of life.

Who then? Olga or Ilya? Which of them should they go for now?

Like Stirlitz, the Russian spy at n.a.z.i HQ in the cult film of the '70s, Edgar pulled down his little table and calmly sketched two symbolic portraits on napkins-a shapely female silhouette and a narrow face in spectacles. Olga or Ilya?

Olga. Intelligent, experienced, perceptive, worldly-wise, and cynical. Edgar didn't know her exact age, but it was reasonable to suspect that she was at least twice as old as he was. Edgar didn't know her true Power-he'd never had a chance to test it to make sure. And to be quite honest, he didn't really want to try... To deprive her of her powers again would certainly be incredibly difficult-if you've just been released from jail, you value your freedom very highly. Olga wouldn't just think twice, she'd think a thousand times before taking another risk and ending up in front of a Tribunal. Apart from that, she was Gesar's longtime love, and the boss of the Night Watch would certainly take great pains to protect her. In Zabulon's place Edgar would be wary of offending Olga, for an enraged Gesar was a far more dangerous enemy than the ordinary Gesar.

Edgar scratched his nose thoughtfully with the end of his felt-tip pen and drew a cross through the female portrait on the napkin.

Ilya. A very powerful magician with the face of a refined intellectual, who wore spectacles for some reason, although he could easily have corrected his own sight. At the moment he wasn't in Moscow, or even in Europe.

He was somewhere in Ceylon. As a matter of fact, for the last five years or so Light Ones from the Moscow Night Watch had been making trips to Ceylon with suspicious frequency. Edgar wondered what they got up to there.

He made a mental note of that-he ought to pa.s.s the information on to the a.n.a.lytical section, let them rack their brains over it... Although most likely they were already monitoring this anomaly. But what if they weren't? Edgar would do better to play it safe, even if he did make himself look stupid, than to feel sorry later, if no one had paid any attention to the Ceylon business...

Ye-es. But if Zabulon was plotting something against Ilya, he would hardly be likely to choose Prague to carry out his plans at any time in the near future, unless he could lure him there somehow.

Edgar pushed the napkin away without crossing the portrait out and pulled a clean one toward him. The last one.