Hmm. Well, whoever made that didn’t know too much about shape-shifting Others. Just as the unfailingly hip Pelevin didn’t know much about real gluttonous, dirty werewolves. But the video was well done, you couldn’t deny that. The werewolves must all have chipped in to pay the producer and influenced the musicians – and what they’d got was a slick, romantic video about themselves. The Russian vampires had done the same thing only just recently.
I remembered the name of the group – Rammstein – for future reference, so that I’d be able to find the song and listen to it more carefully.
I ordered a beer and a couple of hamburgers and then sat at one side near the television, with my back to the room. My stomach already thought my throat had been cut, and I was determined to do something about that.
I sensed the Light Ones when I’d just started my second hamburger, literally felt them with my back. And I immediately screened myself off – I knew how to do that already, and I knew for certain that they hadn’t sensed me.
I was a powerful Other, after all, even if I was inexperienced. And these two were still apprentices at best. A weak magician of about twenty or twenty-two and a novice soothsayer. I figured I could see the future a lot more clearly than the soothsayer – the whole gamut of possibilities – and I could predict more precisely which of them were more probable too.
The two Light Ones were talking in low voices: both of them were concealed by a skilful spell of inattention – a fairly exotic variety, in fact. It had been cast by someone who was very powerful indeed.
I listened.
‘… already here. The boss says things could get rough,’ the magician said quietly.
‘They’ll stick us in the security cordon anyway,’ the soothsayer objected wearily. ‘Especially after Tiger Cub and Andrei.’
‘Oleg, we’ll need all our power, you understand. All of it. Every last drop. The Dark Ones mustn’t get their hands on the Talon – that would be the end of everything. The end of the Light.’
‘Ah, come on,’ the soothsayer objected sceptically. ‘How can it be the end?’
The magician corrected himself:
‘Well, the end of our superiority. We wouldn’t be able to put the Dark Ones under any pressure for the foreseeable future.’
‘But is it really possible to do that anyway?’ There was a note of very healthy, frank scepticism in the soothsayer’s words. ‘The Light Ones and the Dark Ones have existed alongside each other for thousands of years. They’ve been fighting for thousands of years. Look at how long the Watches have been competing with each other. And then there’s the Inquisition, it doesn’t allow any violations of the balance of power …’
The Light Ones broke off their conversation for a moment, walked to the front of the queue at the bar and gently clouded everyone’s minds, including the barman’s:
‘Twenty hamburgers and a carton of juice,’ the magician said and then turned back to his companion.
I pretended my mind was clouded too. Others are basically pretty happy-go-lucky. Especially young ones. The feeling of their own superiority over ordinary people is fairly intoxicating, and it takes years before they can understand that sometimes being human is much simpler and better than being an Other.
‘Anyway, there’s going to be a fight. Anton told me the Dark Ones have got some sorcerer from out of town, and he laid out Farid and Danila with an easy sucker punch. And he killed Tiger Cub. The bastard.’
‘She had no business attacking a peaceable Dark One,’ I thought, feeling annoyed. ‘I wasn’t chasing her, she was the one who was after me.’
But the Light Ones were wrong about the sucker punch. I’d paid a heavy price for that fight.
A moment later I realised that something was happening. As if on command, the Light Ones turned their faces towards the airfield and immediately withdrew into the Twilight. A second later, so did I.
Outside the building, one of the Dark Ones was standing on a snow-covered runway with his wand held out in front of him. A long tongue of flame licked at the frozen concrete. Once, twice. The magician was drying out the runway before the plane from Odessa landed. But Light Ones were hurrying towards him from the terminal building, sinking into the snowdrifts as they ran.
The magician launched a few more tongues of flame and then shifted deeper into the Twilight.
It looked to me like Kolya.
My two Light chatterboxes hastily tipped their food supplies into white-and-green plastic bags and set off at a fast trot, trampling over the ever-hungry blue moss.
It had an easy life here. All those people, all those emotions … A single passenger who was late for a plane was enough to feed this entire ravenous carpet for a day.
I hopped off my stool too, leaving my unfinished beer on the bar. I could barely make out what was happening through the wall of the terminal building – all I could see were the vague shadows of Others with the coloured patches of auras above their heads and viscid bursts of discharged power. At the same time, I could still see the inside of the terminal hall and the people sitting in plastic chairs, patiently waiting for their flights.
Low, rumbling sounds threaded themselves through the Twilight – it was a woman’s voice announcing that ‘flight fifteen zero zero from Odessa has landed’. I went hurtling down the stairs, manoeuvring between the people who were hardly even moving.
Down. Ahead. And now to the right.
I leapt over the turnstile and found myself facing the exit to the airfield.
There was a full-scale battle going on out there – I could sense the discharges of energy on my skin. All that amulet power, all the magicians’ skill – and it could all have been used for other purposes, instead of fighting each other. The Light Ones were so rigidly dedicated to their righteous struggle! It hadn’t even entered their heads simply to reach an agreement with us – they’d rushed straight into the attack.
I could sense that the Dark Ones were having a tough time of it. It looked as though the chief of the Night Watch, Gesar, had got involved. And there were at least a further two very powerful magicians out there now, beside the plane that was taxiing to its stand.
And then four figures burst in through the wall of the terminal. They were all Others, of course. All tall, with broad shoulders, blond hair and blue eyes. As if they’d been specially selected – a matching set of twentieth-or twenty-first-century Vikings. All wearing identical warm winter parkas and carrying identical bags. They weren’t wearing hats and their hair looked dishevelled, but something told me it wasn’t the wind that was responsible for that.
I couldn’t understand at first why they had remained in human form. But then I looked at them in the human world and laughed in surprise when I got the idea: an Other’s image in the Twilight – his subconscious dream – can take all sorts of forms …
They walked quickly across the hall, almost running, towards me and the exit. Towards the bright patch of light in front of the terminal that was the airport car park.
Walking past me.
But just as they drew level, a dark-blue flower, the size of a heavy Ural construction truck, sprang up to the right of them. Everyone in the Twilight was thrown to the ground.
As I lay there on my back, I raised my head and saw a blue veil shimmering in mid-air, looking like a gigantic Aurelia jellyfish. But I could sense that something was about to happen behind that transparent curtain.