I had to wait for them, but not for very long.
Like many other Dark Ones, I turned out to be an inveterate night owl. Since I was living among ordinary people, I couldn’t completely ignore the day, but I didn’t feel like resisting the call of the night either. I rose late, about midday or even later, and I only returned to the hotel at dawn.
My fourth night in Moscow was already streaked with the first pale hints of sunrise; the blackness had already admitted the first shades of dark grey when I ran smack into the next upward step. I was strolling along a deserted Izmailovsky Boulevard when I suddenly sensed a powerful magical discharge somewhere in among the buildings in the distance.
When I say ‘discharge’, I don’t mean that uncontrolled energy had simply escaped. No. The energy was discharged and then immediately absorbed, otherwise the result would have been a banal explosion. Others transform themselves, and the world, and energy. But in the final analysis the balance of the energy emitted and absorbed always amounts to zero, otherwise …
Otherwise the world simply couldn’t exist. And we couldn’t exist in it.
I felt something urging me on. Go!
So I had to.
I walked for about twenty minutes, confidently turning corners at crossroads and taking shortcuts through courtyards. When I was almost there I sensed Others – they were approaching rapidly from two different directions; and at the same time I heard the sound of several cars. Then almost immediately I picked out the building and the apartment I needed out of the featureless palisade of high-rises. That was where the event had taken place that had caught the attention of the Other me, still hidden somewhere inside my ordinary being.
A standard five-storey Khrushchev-period building on Thirteenth Park Street. Rubbish bins standing along the end wall, though no sign of the kiosks I was so used to seeing in the south.
There were three cars at the entrance: a Zhiguli, a humble, very shabby station wagon and a pampered BMW. There were actually plenty of other cars around, but they were obviously parked for the night, while these had just arrived in a hurry and been dumped.
The fifth floor. At the entrance to the stairwell (the metal door was standing wide open) I sensed powerful magical blocks, and they made me draw my shadow up from the ground and enter the Twilight.
I think the Twilight draws power out of Others. If they don’t know how to resist it, of course. Nobody told me what to do, I just started doing it instinctively, as if I’d always known how. Maybe I always had, and I just remembered when I needed to.
The blue moss that inhabits the first level of the Twilight had spread in luxurious abundance over the walls and the stairs, even the banisters. The people living on this staircase must be highly emotional if it was flourishing so well.
Here was the apartment I wanted. Even more powerful blocks, and the door locked even in the Twilight.
And at that point I was hurled up another two steps. Overcoming a momentary weakness, I raised my own shadow from the floor again and went in deeper.
I could immediately tell that this was a place where not many came. There was no building. There was almost nothing at all except a dense, dark-grey mist and the moons that I could vaguely make out through it. All three of them. There ought to have been a bitter wind – the wind doesn’t recognise any distinction between the ordinary world and the Twilight – but at this level time flowed so slowly that I could hardly feel it at all.
I began slowly falling, sinking into this mist, but I held myself up. Apparently I knew how to do that. A particular effort – hard to describe and more instinctive than conscious – and I moved forward. Another effort, and I glanced back into the previous level of the Twilight.
Everything was happening in glutinous slow motion, as if the world had sunk into a layer of transparent grey tar, and at first sounds seemed like deep, distant peals of thunder, but I managed to adjust to their slowness. I must have set my rate of perception to the same pace, attuned myself to this new reality, and from that moment on everything began to remind me again of the ordinary world – the world of human beings.
A narrow hallway, as they all are in those buildings. Two doors on the left – the bathroom and the kitchen. One room further along on the left and one on the right. The room on the right was empty. In the room on the left there were five Others and a body lying on a dishevelled bed. The body of a guy of about thirty: he had several jagged wounds in the area of his crotch and stomach that immediately put paid to any idea that he could be saved. The wounds were covered by a crumpled, bloody bed-sheet.
There were three Light Others and two Dark Ones. The Light Ones were a skinny young guy with a rather asymmetrical face and the two new acquaintances of mine – the music-lover Gorodetsky and the girl shape-shifter. The Dark Ones were a chubby magician with a keen, intense expression and a gloomy guy who looked to me like an unsuccessful parody of a lizard – he was wearing clothes, but his hands and face were green and scaly.
The Others were arguing.
‘It’s the second incident this week, Shagron. And another murder. I’m sorry, but it’s beginning to look like you’ve thrown the Treaty out the window.’
The Light One I didn’t know was talking.
The Dark One glanced involuntarily at the corpse.
‘We can’t keep track of everybody, you know that perfectly well,’ he blurted out, but I didn’t hear any trace of guilt or regret in his voice.
‘But you said you would warn all the Dark Ones about Clean Week. Your chief made an official commitment.’
‘We did warn them.’
‘Well, thank you!’ The Light One clapped his hands in theatrical applause. ‘The result is impressive. I repeat: we, the agents of the Night Watch, officially request your co-operation. Call your chief out!’
‘The chief isn’t in Moscow right now,’ the magician replied morosely. ‘And, by the way, your boss knows that perfectly well, so he needn’t have bothered to authorise you to request our co-operation.’
‘Does that mean,’ Gorodetsky asked with the hint of threat in his voice, ‘that you are refusing to co-operate?’
The Dark Magician shook his head rather more quickly than he need have.
‘What do you mean, refusing? No. We’re not refusing. I just don’t understand what we can do to help.’
That seemed to fill the Light Ones with righteous fury. The magician I didn’t know spoke again.
‘What you can do? Some shape-shifting tart rips the balls off a client – an uninitiated Other, by the way – and gets clean away! Who knows all your countless low-life best – you or us?’
‘Sometimes I think you do,’ the Dark Magician retorted glancing at the girl. ‘If you remember the conversation in the Seventh Heaven when they caught the Inquisitor and him …’ He nodded at Gorodetsky and paused, as if he was thinking about something.