The basic situation couldn’t have been clearer.
Check-in and passport control were quickly over, no visas were required for the Czech Republic. But just in case, Edgar was carrying Estonian and Argentinian passports, both perfectly legal – Argentina was a wonderful country that traded in its own citizenship quite freely.
Edgar spent the rest of the time until boarding in one of the bars, though naturally not the one where Zabulon’s favourite, the Light Magician Gorodetsky had installed himself. Edgar’s glance and his had met just once – I know you’re here and you know I’m here, and both of us know that the other knows his opponent … and we’re on similar missions. To defend our own at the trial and rout our enemies.
To Gorodetsky’s credit, he’d made his position perfectly clear: when the trial starts, that’s when we’ll get to grips. Meanwhile let’s just enjoy the flight and not get in each other’s way.
Strange, how easily they understood each other. Maybe it was just a hangover from those ancient times before the Others were divided into Dark Ones and Light Ones, when they simply stood together against fate and the vicissitudes of life. Back then, of course, any healer was closer to a vampire than to a simple, luckless human being among the faceless mass of others like him. The Twilight can bring you together.
But the Twilight could separate you too. In fact, the Twilight was pretty good at it – nowadays you couldn’t find more irreconcilable enemies anywhere on earth than Dark Ones and Light Ones. The trivial conflict between the USA and the Islamic world was nothing in comparison. Even the old ‘cold war’ between the USA and the USSR, now history, hadn’t come close to the war of the Watches. They were just childish games for foolish human beings.
Edgar drank coffee that was extremely black, but not very good, thinking about everything at once and nothing in particular. For instance, why all these airport bars, which charged the earth and didn’t seem to be skimping on their raw ingredients, managed to brew lousy coffee, serve bad beer and make absolutely inedible sandwiches. Plenty of the problems of human life could be attributed to the struggle between the Watches, but this wasn’t one of them.
His charges – the entire ill-assorted trio – were peering at him disapprovingly from the waiting hall. Of course, the Regin Brothers regarded him as just another cop. Let them. They were boneheads. Brainless, heedless boneheads. And since that was what they were, they could be used to serve the cause of Darkness. And Zabulon had been quite right to decide to make use of them. That business with Fáfnir’s Talon had certainly put the Light Ones off their stride during Rogoza the Mirror’s appearance. Without even knowing it, the Regin Brothers had taken one of the blows intended for the Day Watch and allowed the Mirror, who had already grown strong, to charge himself up with power to the maximum. That was really what had made certain that Zabulon and his cohorts would win out in the latest clash with the Light Ones.
And serve them right.
Edgar watched without the slightest sympathy as courteous customs officers led away a furious gent in a prim, formal suit and expensive raincoat. It was his seat that Edgar would be occupying on the flight to Prague.
When they had taken off, Edgar waited until one of the Regin Brothers left his seat and then sat down next to the one who seemed to be the most sensible – the white one.
‘Greetings, brother,’ Edgar said warmly.
The Finn looked at him with big round eyes. A cautious look.
‘We are Dark Ones,’ Edgar went on quietly. ‘We don’t abandon our own. I’ve been sent to protect you if necessary. And we’ll be able to defend you at the Tribunal – trust me. So hold your heads high, servants of the Dark. Our hour will come very soon now.’
With that, Edgar got up and went back to his seat without looking back.
There. Now let them rack their brains over that.
Rather dramatic. He’d had to work really hard to keep a solemn, stony face and avoid cracking a smile. But the expression in the Finn’s big round eyes had been the opposite of a smile – he’d been genuinely frightened and concerned.
‘I really shouldn’t have,’ Edgar muttered to himself. ‘They’re like children … And I tease them.’
Edgar sighed regretfully and opened his magazine. It was a nice short flight to Prague, not like flying to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, for instance. You were there before you knew it. Without any stops on the way or the hellish nightmare of having to sleep in your seat. But then, if you really thought about it, the most convenient form of transport was a Dark portal. Only setting up a portal from Moscow to Prague would be an unjustifiable extravagance. So he had to fly, like an ordinary human being.
But not quite like an ordinary human being. At least Others didn’t have problems with tickets.
CHAPTER 2
ANTON LOVED Prague. In fact, he simply couldn’t understand how it was possible not to. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the first, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you. Moscow, unfortunately, did not belong in either category. But Prague was like an old, wise enchantress who knew how to pretend to be young, but did not see any need to, since she remained beautiful at any age.
Prague really ought to have become the abode of Dark Ones. A city overflowing with Gothic buildings, a city full of plague pillars – monuments to the medieval pestilence of the Black Death – a city that had a ghetto during the Second World War, a city that witnessed the opposition of the two superpowers during the ‘cold war’ … where could all those emanations of Dark, the nutritional substratum of the Dark Ones, have gone to? How had they been scattered, where to, and why had they been converted into memory, but not into malice?
It was a mystery.
Anton didn’t know any members of the Prague Night Watch in person. They had occasionally exchanged information by courier or e-mail, when something in the archives needed clarification. And at Christmas and the New Year it was traditional to send greetings to all the Night Watches, but nobody made any distinction between the Prague Night Watch (active staff, one hundred and thirty Others; operational reserve, seventy-six) and the Night Watch of some small American ‘town’ (active staff, one Other; operational reserve, zero).
Anton had been to Prague twice on holiday. Simply wandering aimlessly round the city from one bar to the next, buying cheap little souvenirs on the Charles Bridge, travelling out to Karlovy Vary to swim in the pool filled with hot mineral water and take the hot wafers in the café.
But now he was flying to Prague on business. Really serious business.
Anton stretched out in his seat, as far as economy class in a Boeing-737 would allow – the standard of comfort wasn’t so different from that in an old Soviet Tupolev – and examined the backs of the Regin Brothers’ heads. They looked tense, their auras full of fear and impatience. They knew Anton was there and they were dreaming of getting as far away from him as possible, as soon as possible.
If it hadn’t been for that incident at Sheremetievo, Anton might even have felt sorry for the luckless magicians. But once Anton had gone into combat with an enemy he was an enemy for ever.
As if he could read Anton’s thoughts – although, of course, that was beyond his power – one of the Regin Brothers, the tall, strong black guy, turned round, glanced warily at Anton and hastily averted his eyes. Raivo – Anton remembered his name. From somewhere in Senegal … no, from Burkina Faso, that was it. Picked up by one of the Regin Brothers’ families and raised in the spirit of devotion to the great Fáfnir.