Just how had the Regin Brothers come up with all this nonsense?
Once, long, long ago, something had happened, something that often happened among the Others. A Dark Magician and a Light Magician fought to the death. The Light Magician was called Sigurd, Siegfried in German. The Dark Magician was killed … and he died in his Twilight form of a dragon. He was called Fáfnir. Later Sigurd was killed as well. Anton wondered if Gesar had known him.
After that, things took an unusual turn. The Dark Magician’s disciples didn’t scatter, as often happened, and they didn’t fight among themselves, as happened even more often. Instead they decided to resurrect their master. They banded together to form a sect known as the Regin Brothers and withdrew almost completely from the usual struggle between Light and Dark, which suited the Light Ones very well, of course. They lovingly preserved the Talon, torn from the Twilight body of the Dark Magician. Later the Talon was confiscated by the Inquisition – just before the Second World War the Light Ones had lodged a successful protest against such an extremely powerful artefact remaining in the hands of Dark Ones. The Regin Brothers hadn’t really argued about it, but they handed over the Talon with the words ‘Fáfnir’s time has not yet come …’ And then the European Office of the Inquisition had suddenly been attacked. There had been a battle, in which almost all the magicians of the small sect had been killed, along with a substantial number of the Inquisition’s bodyguards, who had grown idle and lazy. And then the remnants of the sect had made their bizarre arrival in Moscow.
It was well known that human beings didn’t have a monopoly on idiots.
But then, were they really idiots?
Anton remembered what an intense charge of power the Talon had emitted. In part it was the power accumulated in the Talon as a result of the Regin Brothers’ efforts over many years. In part it was the Power of the Dark Magician himself.
Others didn’t die in the same way as ordinary people. They receded into the Twilight, losing their physical form and with it their ability to return to the world of human beings. But something was left behind – Anton had seen vague shadows and a quivering mist that sometimes appeared in the Twilight, marking the paths taken by dead Others. And once he had even met a dead Other. It wasn’t one of his most pleasant memories. But there was something left, even there.
Was it possible to bring a dead Other back to life?
The answer was probably somewhere. In the labyrinth of the archives, classified as top secret, sealed by the Night and Day Watches, with access banned by the Inquisition. The higher magicians were bound to have wondered about where Others went when they died, the path that they themselves would eventually follow.
But Anton wasn’t supposed to know the answer.
He looked through the window at the clouds stretching out below, at the faint glimmering of thousands of merged auras that indicated cities. The plane was already flying over some part of Poland.
Just supposing it was possible to bring Fáfnir back to life …
So what? Maybe he had been a powerful magician, maybe even a Higher Magician, a magician beyond classification … His resurrection wouldn’t change the global balance of power. Especially since he would be estranged from human life; he wouldn’t understand modern reality. And if he was stupid enough to set off round Europe in his Twilight form, he’d be torn to pieces by rockets, shot with lasers from satellites, they’d use tactical nuclear weapons … while the Japanese howled woefully that Godzilla had come back to life and been killed again.
What was it the Dark Ones wanted? Disorder, panic, people screaming about the Apocalypse?
Anton squirmed in his seat. He took the plastic cup and the two-hundred-gram bottle of dry Hungarian wine from the smiling stewardess. It was all very well for Edgar. Like any Dark One he was flying business class, so he had a crystal glass, and superior wine.
There was something to that last thought. Fáfnir … the Apocalypse. At least it made some sense of Gesar’s remark about mass hysteria over the millennium. But why would the Dark Ones want to stage the end of the world? And what about everything else? The witch Alisa … The Chalk of Destiny …
Anton was sorry that he didn’t have his laptop. It would have been interesting to lay it all out on the screen, shuffle the variants around and see what fitted with what. There was a standard program called Mazarini for analysing intrigues and it could have helped him understand a few things.
The Chalk of Destiny.
He took a gulp of wine, and it turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. Then he frowned. Gesar and Zabulon. They were really the two who would determine the whole business. They were far more mysterious and complex than ancient artefacts like the Chalk of Destiny and Fáfnir’s Talon, or Others like the Mirror and Alisa. They probably understood everything that was going on … and were trying to outwit each other. As usual.
Gesar.
Zabulon.
The starting point for an analysis probably ought to be the Chalk of Destiny. When Svetlana, the new Great Enchantress, had appeared and joined the Night Watch, Gesar had attempted yet another intervention on a global scale. Svetlana had been provided with the Chalk of Destiny – an ancient and extremely powerful artefact that could be used to rewrite the Book of Destiny and alter human life. At first glance it had appeared that Svetlana was supposed to rewrite the destiny of the boy Egor – an Other with an indeterminate aura, inclined equally to the Dark and the Light – and make of him either a future prophet or a future leader. But, with some assistance from Anton, Svetlana had failed. All she had done was to bring Egor’s destiny into equilibrium by removing all the influences exerted on him by the Watches in their struggle against each other.
But, of course, there had been more than one level to Gesar’s plan. At a second level another Great Enchan tress, his long-time lover Olga, recently rehabilitated after being punished by the leader ship of the Light Ones, had recovered her magical abilities and used the other half of the Chalk of Destiny to rewrite someone else’s destiny – while all the Dark Ones of Moscow were watching Svetlana.
That was the truth that Anton knew. The second level of truth.
But maybe there was a third.
He’d have to put that on hold for the time being. What had happened next? Alisa Donnikova, a capable witch and member of the Day Watch, if not one of the elite. Following a skirmish between Dark Ones and Light Ones that had obviously been engineered by Zabulon, she completely lost her magical powers. Then she’d been sent on holiday to the Artek young pioneers’ camp to recuperate … and Gesar had sent Igor, who had suffered a comparable trauma, to the same place. A passionate love had sprung up between them – a terrible, deadly love between a Light Magician and a Dark Witch. And the outcome was that Alisa was dead, killed by Igor; and Igor himself was under threat of dematerialisation, brought down by his violation of the Treaty and the burden of his own guilt. And then there was the boy who had accidentally drowned because of him.
This wasn’t one of Gesar’s intrigues. Its ruthless and cynical style bore the signature of the Day Watch. Zabulon had sacrificed his lover, – but what had he sacrificed her for? To get Igor out of the way? That seemed odd. It had been almost a straight swap. Alisa Donnikova had been a powerful witch.
So it was one intrigue in response to another …
Then there was the appearance of the Mirror. Gesar was certain it had been impossible to predict, so it must have been a matter of chance. But no doubt Gesar and Zabulon had both immediately decided to exploit it, each for his own ends.