‘Just tell me one thing: how do I get out of here?’
‘That way,’ said Matvei, waving his hand in the direction of the path I’d followed to get there. ‘The trains are already running.’
‘And is there a main road over there? I’d rather hitch.’
‘There’s a main road. Right behind the railway.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, pleased. ‘Okay be seeing you! Thanks again. Give the birthday girl my congratulations … and I tell you what, give her this.’
It was remarkable how easily I managed the simple but unfamiliar spell. I put my hand behind my back, touched a frozen twig, broke it off … and held out a living rose, only just cut from the bush. There were drops of dew glistening on the small green leaves and the petals were flame-red. A fresh rose looks very beautiful in a snowy forest.
‘A-a-a,’ Matvei mumbled as he automatically took the rose. I wondered if he’d give it to the birthday girl or just bury it in a snowdrift to avoid the hassle of long, awkward explanations.
But I didn’t ask. I withdrew into the Twilight again. I certainly didn’t want to drag myself over the frozen snow again. And what had been good for the previous day, when I thought I was running away from Gesar, was no good today, when I was rested and full of fresh power.
There was something else I’d forgotten … Ah, yes, the hat. That wasn’t mine either, and I was still wearing it. I tossed it onto the jacket, and set off.
I moved in leaps of a hundred or two hundred metres, opening weak little portals at the limit of my visibility and stepping through them, eating up the distance like a giant.
By day the cutting looked perfectly ordinary, all of its magical charm had completely disappeared. It was obviously no accident that the genuine romantics and lovers of freedom – the Dark Ones – had chosen the night as their time, and not the day, when all the dirt and rubbish of the world assaults your eyes, when you can see how un attractive and cluttered our cities are, when the streets are full of stupid people and the roads are full of stinking cars. Day is the time of bonds and chains, of duty and rules, but night is the time of freedom.
And for a genuine Other, nothing can take the place of that freedom. Neither ephemeral duty, nor service to cheap, fuzzy ideals invented by someone else long before you were even born. That’s all a myth, a fiction, ‘ucho od sledzia’ as our Slav brothers the Poles say. There is only freedom, for everyone alike, and there is only one limitation: no one has the right to limit the freedom of others. And let the cunning and hypocritical Light Ones seek apparent paradoxes and contradictions in this – everyone who is free gets along just fine with others who are just as free, and they don’t get in each other’s way at all.
I had to use my Other powers to stop a car – for some reason no one wanted to pick up a man without jacket or coat. I had to touch the mind of a driver in his dolled-up Zhiguli 9 the colour of ‘wet tarmac’.
Naturally, he stopped.
The driver was a young guy of about twenty-five with cropped hair and absolutely no neck. His head was simply attached, in a very natural way, directly to his body, and his eyes were blank. But his reflexes turned out to be quite fantastic. I seriously suspected that he could have driven the car even if he was unconscious.
‘Eh?’ he said to me when I’d made myself comfortable in the back, beside his huge leather jacket.
‘Straight on, straight on. To Moscow. You’ll let me out on Tverskaya Street.’
And I touched him gently, again through the Twilight.
‘Ah,’ the young guy said, and got his Zhiguli moving. Despite the slippery road and the trance he’d been put in, he drove at over a hundred kilometres an hour. The car held the road so superbly, I wondered if he had special tyres on it.
We drove into Moscow from the north-west after turning onto the Volokolamsk Highway, which meant we sliced through half of the megalopolis very quickly, driving in a straight line almost the entire time. Straight to the Day Watch office on Tverskaya Street.
I was lucky to have found such a remarkable driver, and the Highway encouraged him to put his foot down. And on top of that, we rode a wave of green lights.
As we were driving past the Sokol metro station, I realised they’d spotted me.
Me and the Talon.
But in the middle of Moscow it’s almost impossible to catch a Zhiguli 9 hurtling along in a straight line without changing lanes.
I got out on Tverskaya Street and handed the neck-less driver a hundred. Roubles, not dollars.
‘Eh?’ he gasped and started gazing around. Of course, he didn’t remember a thing and now he was straining his meagre intellect to solve the almost insoluble puzzle of how he’d got from a suburban Moscow motorway to the very centre of the city.
I didn’t interfere and left him alone with his unsolved mystery.
He had really first-rate reflexes: the Zhiguli set off almost immediately. But the young guy’s face was turned towards the side window, his jaw hanging open. It was still like that as he drove out of sight. I crossed the street and headed for the entrance.
The lobby was full of cigarette smoke and a tape-deck – a Phillips ‘boom-box’ – was quietly playing some song with a laid-back, powerful melody. The voice was so hoarse and low I didn’t realise at first that it was Butusov:
The young vampire was blissfully mouthing the words of the song with his eyes half-closed. At the sight of me he was struck dumb. But the other guard on duty, an equally young alchemist-magician, was already gabbling into the phone.
‘They’re waiting for you,’ he told me. ‘Ninth floor.’
Even though he was dumbstruck, the vampire had managed to call the lift.
But I suddenly got the feeling I shouldn’t get in, and I certainly shouldn’t go up in it. I just shouldn’t, and that was all.
‘Tell them I’m alive and everything’s okay,’ said that something inside me.
I went back out onto the street.
I was being guided again. Without the slightest hesitation I turned left – towards Red Square.
I still didn’t know what was leading me there and what for. But I could only obey the power inside me. And I could also feel that Fáfnir’s Talon had come to life, it was breathing.
Every metre of ground here, every square centimetre of tarmac, was saturated with magic. Old magic that had eaten its way into the stone of the buildings and the dust on the street.
The massive shape of the Historical Museum towered up on my right. I didn’t even know if it was still open or whether it had been transformed into a casino by the latest sea change in the history of long-suffering Russia. But in any case, I had no time to find out. I walked on.
The cobblestones of Red Square, which remembered the leisurely paces of the tsars, the tramping boots of revolutionary soldiers, the caterpillar tracks of Soviet armoured monsters and the columns of May Day demonstrations, seemed to embody Moscow’s unshakeable permanence. The city had stood here through the ages, it would always stand here, and nothing – not the squabbles of ordinary human beings, or even the eternal altercations between the Watches – could shake its calm grandeur.