I wondered if there were any Others among the sages? Or maybe the question should be the other way round – were there any human beings among them?
It would be interesting to find out.
I managed to adjust the security guards’ minds – clearly the simplest, ‘everyday’ spells were permitted even during a session of the Tribunal.
I walked across to the lifts – the lobby was strangely deserted. Maybe subconsciously people had sensed the presence nearby of all the most powerful Others in Moscow and were avoiding this place? I pressed the call button and the doors of one of the lifts opened immediately. I got in automatically looking round to see if anyone else was hurrying for the lift.
And I saw Anton. He’d just walked past the security guards, who were still out of action.
I wondered how he’d managed to catch up with me. Had he requisitioned a moped or a motorbike as well?
I stood there, waiting. Anton looked at me, as if he were pondering some thought, and waited too.
After a brief pause, I pressed the button, the lift doors closed, and I went up. But not all the way to the top of the building straight away, only about two thirds of the way up. It turned out that the only way I could go higher was on another lift that just served the upper floors. And then the only way to get where I needed to go was to follow a wide marble stairway covered in old blotches of whitewash. The stairs led to a door that was open in the Twilight but, naturally, firmly closed and locked in the ordinary world.
Just before the stairs the Picnic song came to an end and the player selected another at random:
I’d only heard snatches of this Nautilus Pompilius song before, but now it suddenly struck an echo in my very soul. As I walked up towards the locked door and slipped into the Twilight, I sang along with Butusov.
Any Other could have heard me and Butusov, even though the only real sound was coming from the earphones and faded away completely only one step away from me.
We entered the chamber where the Tribunal was taking place together. Me and the fallen angel.
Gesar. Zabulon. The Inquisitor Maxim. The Dark Ones I’d been drinking coffee with and talking to over the last few days: Edgar, Yury, Kolya, Anna Tikhonovna … The Light Ones I had been sparring and fighting with recently, bending the rules almost to breaking: Ilya, Garik, Tolik, the shape-shifter bear. Others I didn’t know, both Dark and Light, including some who were obviously not connected with the Watches. Two in loose robes – Inquisitors, I supposed.
And a Light Enchantress with a face contorted in grief. Both people and Others have expressions like that when they’ve just lost someone they love.
And then I was dragged, unable to resist, up the invisible steps, to the top of the mysterious pyramid I had been climbing all this time; and at almost the same moment, the two Inquisitors in robes rescinded the prohibition on higher magic. And Svetlana hit me with that cloud I had seen, which had been ready to burst and explode at any moment. A field of power that made a multi-megaton explosion seem tiny and insignificant.
Time stopped.
And I understood everything. Everything that had happened. Everything that was happening now and everything that was destined to happen in the immediate future. I understood, and swallowed hard to keep down the lump that had suddenly risen in my cramped throat.
I had become the most powerful magician on Earth. A magician beyond classification. A Caliph for an hour – no, only for an instant – the only one in this dilapidated round hall who had no future.
There are some Others who have no future …
A mirror! I was nothing but a mirror. The Mirror of the World. A weight cast into the dangling pan of the scales when the balance between the Powers of Light and the Powers of Dark is disrupted.
The Light had acquired a new Great Enchantress, but the Dark had not been granted an equally powerful adept. The Light had been given a chance to settle accounts with the Darkness once and for all.
But there is no Light without Dark. And so the Twilight had produced me. It had found a strange Other who had not yet inclined to one side or the other, an Other with a pristine, pure aura, and then coloured that aura Dark. It had taken away my former memories and given me the ability to reflect and absorb others’ power. The more powerfully I was struck, the more powerful I had become, each time jumping up onto the next step. And when there was nowhere left to go, that was the summit, and beyond that there was only eternity and the Twilight – the Mirror was no longer needed. Because the Mirror had itself become capable of disrupting the equilibrium.
The Twilight was waiting for me. Eternal Twilight. I didn’t know what would happen to the body of Vitaly Rogoza, who until only recently had been an Other with no destiny. I didn’t know what would happen to his memory and his personality, it all happens differently every time a Mirror comes. I only knew that the one who had become aware of himself in that frozen park in Nikolaev on his way to catch a train to Moscow would disappear for ever, be transformed into an incorporeal, powerless shadow, a ghostly inhabitant of the Twilight.
Or simply into a part of the Twilight … the Twilight that is not as inert as we are all used to thinking.
I understood all this in the brief instant before I drew in all of Sveltana’s power. She imagined that she had lost Anton Gorodetsky. And she imagined it because of a freak coincidence, because I walked into the Tribunal hall with a minidisc player exactly like Anton’s, with a copy of his disc in the player and with Anton’s favourite song in my ears and my soul. And I also understood that the Inquisition knew the truth. But none of the Inquisitors would say a word to reassure the Others of Moscow, who believed I’d had a skirmish with Anton and Anton had been killed.
The Light Ones knew his favourite songs.
‘Die!’