Things were very, very bad.
Anton had cursed himself over and over again for not realising the need to conduct a detailed analysis of the circumstances in which the Mirror had appeared. After all, there were similar cases in the secret archives – the appearance of a magician who evaded classification, a rapid increase in his powers, a decisive skirmish – and then he disappeared. Everything fitted. Right down to the final moment, when Vitaly Rogoza had melted into thin air, dematerialised and vanished into the depths of the Twilight that had given birth to him.
But never mind Anton, never mind even Garik or Semyon. For them a Mirror was just one of those numerous exotic occurrences they’d only heard about in lectures or read about in the archives. Why hadn’t Gesar or Olga, with all their experience, realised what was going on immediately? They’d run into Mirrors before, after all.
Things were bad. Nothing was going right. As if the Dark had been infuriated by the Night Watch’s recent successes and was striking blow after blow. And very successfully too, it had to be admitted.
Anton shook his head to refuse the second cup of coffee that Semyon offered him. He carefully cleaned out his pipe, casting an involuntary sideways glance at Bear.
He was cleaning out his pipe too. The little pipe with a long, thin stem that had belonged to Tiger Cub. She had only smoked it occasionally, mostly to keep her friends company. But now that Tiger Cub was gone, Bear smoked his own pipe and hers in turn. It was probably the only way he had expressed his feelings since Tiger Cub’s death – the gentle way he handled that pipe … and perhaps that fixed stare when Vitaly Rogoza had begun to de materialise. A gaze full of regret: Bear hadn’t had a chance to get his hands on Rogoza, he hadn’t been able to satisfy his thirst for revenge.
Like Alisher, the Light One from Uzbekistan, whose father had been killed a year earlier by Alisa.
Anton had his own accounts to settle with the Day Watch and its chief, too. But of course the accounts would never be paid. The Treaty shackled both Watches, the Inquisition made sure it was observed, and the only way round it was to get straight to the point and challenge an enemy to a duel, which was what Igor had done, for instance. And what was the result? The witch was dead, but now the magician was facing dematerialisation, waiting for the judgement of the European Office of the Tribunal. And it wasn’t hard to guess what it would be.
Anton got up, nodded to his friends and made for the boss’s office on the third floor.
He was feeling really sick at heart, not looking forward at all to the New Year festivities that people everywhere round the planet were awaiting so eagerly, as if the number 2000 could change anything. What did it all really matter? But when Anton reached the door of the office, he felt a faint stirring of interest.
The magical defences there were very strong. The Night Watch building itself was protected against observation, and the employees’ offices and conference rooms had additional screening. But today it seemed as though Gesar had put in a lot of extra effort to ensure confidentiality: the air in the corridor was still and stifling, saturated with energy. And this invisible wall extended into the Twilight, much deeper than the first two levels that were accessible to Anton.
He walked into the office and closed the door firmly behind him. He sensed a slight movement behind his back as the defensive field closed up after having been torn for a moment.
‘Sit down, Anton,’ said Gesar, and asked in a perfectly friendly voice: ‘Tea, coffee?’
‘Thanks, Boris Ignatievich,’ Anton replied, calling Gesar by his human name, ‘but I’ve just had one.’
‘A mug of beer then?’ Gesar asked unexpectedly.
Anton had to stop himself rubbing his eyes or even pinching his arm. Gesar had never shunned life’s pleasures. He could leap about with the young people at a club, flirt a bit with the silly young girls and even take off with one of them for the night. And he enjoyed sitting in a restaurant over dishes of exotic food, driving the waiters backwards and forwards and unnerving the cooks with his international culinary knowledge. He could even go out with his staff, acting like one of the lads and drinking beer with smoked bream, vodka with freshly salted pickles and wine with fruit.
But there was one thing Gesar never did, and that was to have parties in the office. The ten members of the analytical section who drank a bottle of cognac to celebrate the birthday of Yulia, the Watch’s youngest enchantress and a universal favourite, had been punished with genuinely brilliant originality. Not even an intercession by Olga, who had been involved in the misdemeanour along with the Others, had helped. The punishments had been individually devised for them, and each had been the most hurtful possible. Yulia, for instance, had been made to stay away from the Watch offices for a week and attend an ordinary school with teenagers of her own age, go for ice-cream with the girls in her class and to films and clubs with the boys. Yulia had returned to the Watch, fuming with indignation, and for ages she’d kept repeating: ‘God, if you only knew how stupid they all are. I hate them.’
For those three words, ‘I hate them,’ she received another day’s penalty and a long lecture from Gesar on the subject of ‘Can a Light Enchantress entertain negative feelings for people?’
So now Anton was standing there in front of Gesar, frozen over the chair he’d been about to sit down in. He’d forgotten what he was doing.
‘Sit down, will you,’ Gesar prompted him. ‘No point in standing. So will you have a beer?’
‘It’s not quite the weather for it,’ Anton replied, indicating the window with his eyes. Outside large, heavy flakes of snow were swirling through the air. A genuine Christmas blizzard. ‘Not the right weather … and not the right place?’
He surprised himself by making the last phrase sound like a question.
Gesar thought for a moment.
‘Yes, we could go out to some amusing little place,’ he said, with a note of real interest in his voice. ‘For instance, that little café in the South-West district, where all the dentists go. Can you imagine it? The favourite café of Moscow’s tooth-pullers? And there’s a little pizzeria at the Belorussian station that’s a real blast.’
‘Boris Ignatievich,’ Anton asked, unable to resist, ‘where do you dig all these places up from? The mountain-skiers’ restaurant, the lesbian bar, the plumbers’ snack bar, the philatelists’ pelmeni joint …’
Gesar shrugged and spread his arms:
‘Anton, my dear fellow, let me remind you once again what we work with. We work with—’
‘The Dark Ones,’ Gorodetsky blurted out and sat down in the chair.
‘No, my boy, you’re wrong. We work with people. And people are not a flock of cloned sheep chewing their grass in unison and all farting at the same time. Every human being is an individual. That is our gift, because it makes the work of the Dark Ones harder. And it’s also our misfortune, because it makes our work harder too. And in order to understand these people, whose souls, after all, are what the endless battle between the Watches is fought over, we have to know them all. It’s not just that I have to, you understand. We have to! And we have to understand every one of them – from the kid with acne who swallows ecstasy in a club to the ancient professor who’s the last in a dying line of blue-bloods and spends all his time growing cacti … Oh, by the way, the bar where cactus-lovers get together has rather interesting cuisine and highly original décor. But you and I can’t go anywhere just now. Did you sense the defences?’