Story Three
ANOTHER POWER
PROLOGUE
YUKHA MUSTAIOKI flagged down the car – he was the senior member of their little group now – Yari Kuusinen and Raivo Nikkilya squeezed into the back seat of the old Zhiguli without a word, Yukha took the seat in front.
‘Take us to She-re-me-tie-vo,’ he said, speaking with emphatic clarity. Oddly enough, Russian had been the language of Mustaioki’s childhood, although he’d managed to forget most of it afterwards. But then he’d always had a talent for languages, and now he lived near the Russian border and made regular drinking trips to St Petersburg. The others preferred the ferry to Sweden – on the overnight trip you could get really drunk on spirits from the duty-free shop, sleep it off during the day (who needs Stockholm, anyway?) and then indulge yourself expensively again on the way back. But Mustaioki had stubbornly kept on travelling to St Petersburg. ‘Drive quick-ly and care-ful-ly,’ he said.
The driver drove. Quickly and carefully. Taking foreigners to the airport was a serious bonus for him. An out-of-work engineer making a living as a freelance taxi driver didn’t often land such a plum job. Especially at a time like this, just before the New Year, with the millenium coming up and everybody out working, trying to make sure there’d be food for the festive table and nice presents for the family.
The three Others sitting silently in the car weren’t listening to the driver’s thoughts. Although they could have done, of course.
After they’d already passed the ring road, Yukha turned to his comrades and said:
‘Are we really leaving then, Brothers?’
Yari and Raivo nodded understandingly It really was hard to believe that it was all over – the interrogations by the Night Watch, the visits from sombre members of the Inquisition staff, the exertions of the Day Watch’s adroit female vampire advocate, who was as well known among human beings as she was among Others.
They were free. Free, released from this terrible, cold, inhospitable city of Moscow. Although they couldn’t go home just yet, they were on their way to Prague, where the Inquisition’s European Office had just relocated. But they had been released. With their rights restricted and the obligation to register when they arrived anywhere, but even so …
‘Poor Ollikainen,’ Raivo sighed. ‘He was so fond of Czech beer. He used to say Lapin Kulta was the best beer in the world. He’ll never drink beer again …’
‘We’ll drink a jug of beer for him,’ Yari suggested.
‘Three,’ Yukha added. ‘He was the most worthy of the Regin Brothers.’
‘And what about us?’ Yari asked after a moment’s thought.
‘We are worthy too,’ Yukha agreed. ‘We did our duty.’
For some reason, as he said this all three lowered their eyes.
The small sect of Dark Others that called itself the Regin Brothers had existed in Helsinki for almost five hundred years. They were among the few Others who had not officially accepted the Treaty, but since they never committed any serious violations of its provisions, the Watches turned a blind eye. The Light Ones even seemed to be quite glad that twenty or thirty Dark Ones occupied themselves with harmless rituals, chanting and archaeological exploration. The Dark Ones had made a couple of attempts to involve the Regin Brothers in the work of the Day Watch, but then just given up on them.
Until only recently Yukha and Yari and Raivo and their friend who had been killed, Pasi Ollikainen, had regarded their involvement in the sect as a kind of curious, even amusing, game. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had spent their entire lives as members of the sect, and their children would be Regin Brothers too … Their adopted children, that is. An Other is rarely fortunate enough to have a child who is also born with the abilities of an Other. That’s only the norm for the lower orders of Dark Ones, the vampires and shape-shifters.
It wasn’t at all easy for the magicians of the small Finnish sect. They had to scout round the world, searching for Other children they could adopt, educate and introduce to the great cause of service to Fáfnir. As a rule, these children were found in the more underdeveloped and exotic countries.
Raivo, for instance, came from Burkina Faso. The little boy with the bulging eyes, legs bandy from rickets and swollen, flabby stomach had been bought from his impoverished parents for fourteen dollars. He had been cured of his illness, educated and taught Finnish. And now, no one looking at this handsome, well-built young black guy could ever have guessed how strange his destiny was.
Yari had been found in the slums of Macao. At the age of four, with the help of his magical abilities, he was already a remarkably successful thief, which was how he was discovered by his future adoptive parents. They hadn’t even had to pay for him. Yari hadn’t grown very tall, but the Regin Brothers had been delighted with his sharp, tenacious mind and natural talent for magic.
Then were was Yukha, from Russia. Or rather, from somewhere in the south of Ukraine. He had suffered from wanderlust since he was a child and at the age of seven he had travelled right across the country by jumping goods trains and hitchhiking, then crossed the border on foot, and one day he’d knocked on the door of the small town house owned by the Mustaiokis, devoted members of the sect. There was no way that could be explained except by magical predestination.
Ironically only the deceased Ollikainen had been a genuine Finnish boy.
The driver had never had such an odd group of passengers before – a young white guy with Ukrainian facial features, a tall guy with skin as black as pitch and a short Asiatic with slanting eyes. And all three of them were speaking Finnish, or maybe Swedish, absolutely fluently. But then, you saw all sorts of things nowadays.
The first thing the Brothers did at the airport was study the timetable, but even here Russia’s muddle-headed cunning had a snag in store for them: the flight to Prague had been delayed for the fourth time. True, there was another flight, to Duisburg with a stopover in Prague. But the transit flight wasn’t in the timetable, of course, while the plane to Madrid, also with a stopover in Prague, left at a very inconvenient time, and they had to redraw their plans right there at the ticket office. This reduced a burly young guy in a track suit, wearing a gold chain as thick as a finger and clutching a mobile phone in his massive hairy hand, to a state of inexpressible fury. He was on the point of pushing little Yari out of the way, but Raivo concocted a hasty spell of respect, and after that the line that had grown behind them stopped complaining about the leisurely manner in which the Finns were making their decision.
‘We’ll take the Duisburg plane,’ Yukha decided at last. ‘It’s more convenient. And we won’t have to wait so long. They’ll postpone the Prague flight another three times at least, won’t they?’
Of course they would. The reality lines were woven into a tight knot, and the ill-fated flight wouldn’t leave until late that evening.
The almost forgotten sensation of freedom was as intoxicating as their favourite Lapin Kulta beer. While Yukha talked to the pretty girl at the ticket desk, who was already hassled out of her mind, Yari and Raivo enjoyed themselves staring round the hall, looking at the passengers walking by, the sales assistants in the brightly lit aquariums of their little shops, the international airline offices that are always there in any major airport.