From her seat in the front, Svetlana shot Yulia an anxious look.
Then she shot Semyon a look of extreme disapproval. The imperturbable magician almost choked on his Yava cigarette. He breathed in and all the cigarette smoke drifting around inside the car was drawn into his lungs. He flicked the butt out the window. The Yava was already a concession to popular opinion—until just recently Semyon had preferred to smoke Flight and other repulsive tobacco products.
«Close the windows,» said Semyon.
A moment later it suddenly started getting cold. A subtle, salty smell of the sea filled the air. I could even tell that it was the sea at night, and quite close—the typical smell of the Crimean shoreline. Iodine, seaweed, a subtle hint of wormwood. The Black Sea. Koktebel.
«Koktebel?» I asked.
«Yalta,» Semyon replied. «September tenth, nineteen seventy-two, about three a.m. After a small storm.»
Ilya clicked his tongue enviously.
«Pretty good! How come you haven't used up a set of sensations like that in all this time?»
Yulia gave Semyon a guilty look. Climate conservation wasn't something every magician found easy, and the sensations Semyon had just used would have been a hit at any party.
«Thank you, Semyon Pavlovich,» she said. For some reason Yulia was as shy of Semyon as she was of the boss, and she always called him by his first name and patronymic.
«Oh, that's nothing,» Semyon replied calmly. «My collection includes rain in the taiga in nineteen thirteen, and I've got the nineteen forty typhoon, a spring morning in Jurmaala in fifty-six, and I think I've got a winter evening in Gagry.»
Ilya laughed:
«Forget the winter evening in Gagry. But rain in the taiga…«
«I won't swap,» Semyon warned him. «I know your collection; you haven't got anything nearly that good.»
«What about two, no, three for one…«
«I could give you it as a present,» Semyon suggested.
«Go take a hike,» said Ilya, jerking on the steering wheel. «What could I give you that would match that?»
«Then I'll invite you when I unseal it.»
«I suppose I should be grateful for that.»
He started sulking, naturally. I always thought of them as more or less equal in their powers, maybe Ilya was even a bit stronger. But Semyon had a flair for spotting the moment that was worth recording with magic. And he didn't waste his collection without good reason.
Of course, some people might have thought what he'd just done was a waste: brightening up the last half hour of our journey with such a precious set of sensations.
«Nectar like that should be breathed in the evening, with kebabs on the barbecue,» said Ilya. He could be incredibly thick-skinned sometimes. Yulia went tense.
«I remember one time in Yemen,» Semyon said unexpectedly. «Our helicopter… anyway, never mind that… we set out on foot. Our communications equipment had been destroyed, and using magic would have been calling way too much attention to ourselves. We set out on foot, across the Hadramawt desert. We had hardly any distance left to go to get to our regional agent, maybe a hundred kilometers. But we were all exhausted. And we had no water. And then Alyoshka—he's a nice young guy who works in the Maritime Region now—said: 'I can't take any more, Semyon Pavlovich; I've got a wife and two children at home, I want to get back alive.' He lay down on the sand and unsealed his special stash. He had rain in it. A cloudburst, twenty minutes of it. We drank all we needed, and filled our canteens, and recovered our strength. I felt like punching him in the face for not telling us sooner, but I took pity on him.»
After a long speech like that, nobody in the car said anything for a minute, Semyon had presented the facts of his stormy biography so eloquently.
Ilya was the first to gather his wits.
«Why didn't you use your rain in the taiga?»
«What a comparison,» Semyon snorted. «A collector's item from nineteen-thirteen and a standard spring cloudburst collected in Moscow. It smelled of gasoline, would you believe!»
«I believe it.»
«Well, there you are. There's a time and place for everything. The evening I just recalled was pleasant enough, but not really outstanding. Just about right for your old jalopy.»
Svetlana laughed quietly. The faint air of tension in the car was dispelled.
The Night Watch had been working feverishly all week long. Not that there'd been anything unusual happening in Moscow; it was just routine. The city was in the grip of a heat wave unprecedented for June, and reports of incidents had dropped to an all-time low. Neither the Light Ones nor the Dark Ones were enjoying it too much.
Our analysts spent about twenty-four hours working on the theory that the unexpectedly hot weather had been caused by some move the Dark Ones were planning. No doubt at the same time the Day Watch was investigating whether the Light Magicians had interfered with the climate. When both sides became convinced the anomalous weather was due to natural causes, they were left with absolutely nothing to do.
The Dark Ones had turned as quiet as flies pinned down by rain. Despite all the doctors' forecasts, the number of accidents and natural deaths across the city fell. The Light Ones didn't feel much like working either; the magicians quarreled over unimportant trivia; it took half the day to get the simplest documents out of the archives; and when the analysts were asked to forecast the weather they replied spitefully with some eighteenth-century gibberish like: «The water is dark in the clouds.» Boris Ignatievich wandered around the office in a total stupor: Even with his oriental origins and rich experience of the East, he was floored by the heat, Moscow style. The previous morning, on Thursday, he'd called all the staff together, appointed two volunteers from the Watch to assist him and told everyone else to clear out of the city. To go anywhere, to the Maldives or Greece if they wanted, down to the devil's kitchen in hell if they liked—even that would be more comfortable. Or just to a summerhouse outside town. We were told not to show up in the office again until lunchtime on Monday.
The boss waited for exactly a minute, until the happy smiles had spread across all the faces there, then added that it would be only fair to earn this unexpected bounty with a burst of intensive work. That way we wouldn't end up feeling ashamed of wasting away the days. The title of the old literary classic was true, he said—«Monday starts on Saturday.» So having been granted three extra days of vacation, we had to get through all the routine work in the time we had left.
And that's what we'd been doing—getting through it, some of us almost until the morning. We'd checked on the Dark Ones who were still in town and under special observation: vampires, werewolves, incubuses and succubuses, active witches, all sorts of troublesome riffraff from the lower levels. Everything was in order. What the vampires wanted right now wasn't hot blood but cold beer. Instead of trying to cast bad spells on their neighbors, the witches were all trying to summon up a little rain over Moscow.
But now we were on our way to relax. Not as far as the Maldives, of course—the boss had been too optimistic about the finance office's generosity. But even two or three days out of town would be great. We felt sorry for the poor volunteers who'd stayed behind in the capital to keep watch with the boss.
«I've got to call home,» said Yulia. She'd really livened up after Semyon swapped the damp heat in the car for cool sea air. «Sveta, lend me your cell.»
I was enjoying the coolness too. I glanced into the cars we were overtaking: in most of them the windows were rolled down, and the people glared at us with envy, assuming, of course, our ancient automobile had a powerful air-conditioning system.