‘Anything sacred? Of course there is! The Chicago Bulls.’
‘It’s like a game of chess, you get it?’ Edgar explained. ‘The bosses are just moving their helpless pieces – that’s you and me – around the board.’
The waiter’s face grew longer and longer, the more beer Anton and Edgar drank. The number of those big glass mugs he’d brought to this table would have been enough to get the entire American air squadron drunk, and the Chicago Bulls as well. But the two Russians just carried on sitting there, even though it was obvious they were finding it harder and harder to control their tongues.
‘Take you and me, for instance,’ Edgar went on. ‘You’re going to be the defender in this trial. I’m going to be the prosecutor. But we still don’t carry any real weight. We’re just figures on the board. If it suits them, they’ll throw us into the thick of it. If it suits them, they’ll set us aside for better times. If they want to, they’ll exchange us. After all, what is this trial, really? It’s a song and dance over a trivial exchange of pieces. Your Igor’s been swapped for our Alisa. And that’s all. They just set them on each other, like two spiders in a jar, and took them off the board. In the name of higher goals that are beyond us.’
‘No, you’re wrong,’ Anton said sternly, wagging his finger at Edgar. ‘Gesar had no idea that Igor would run into Alisa. It was one of Zabulon’s intrigues!’
‘And how can you be so sure of that?’ Edgar asked derisively. ‘Are you so powerful you can read Gesar’s soul like an open book? As far as I know, the head of the Light Ones isn’t too fond of letting his subordinates into his most important plans either. It’s the high politics of the higher powers!’ he said, loudly and insistently.
Anton really wanted to object. But unfortunately he didn’t have any convincing arguments.
‘Or take that latest clash, in Moscow University. Zabulon used you – I’m sorry, you probably don’t like to hear me say that, but now that we’ve started … Anyway Zabulon used you. Zabulon! Your sworn enemy.’
‘He didn’t use me.’ Anton hesitated, but then went on anyway. ‘He tried to use me. And I tried to use the situation to our advantage. You understand – after all, this is war.’
‘Okay so you tried to use the situation too,’ Edgar agreed dismissively ‘Let’s assume that. But Gesar did nothing – nothing! – to protect you. Why should he try to keep his pawns safe? It’s wasteful and pointless.’
‘You treat your pawns even worse,’ Anton remarked morosely. ‘You don’t even regard the lower Others, the vampires and shape-shifters, as equals. They’re just cannon fodder.’
‘But they are cannon fodder, Anton. They’re less valuable than us magicians. And anyway, it’s pointless for you and me to talk about things and try to understand. We’re puppets. Nothing but puppets. And we don’t have a chance to become puppet-masters, because for that you need the powers of a Gesar or a Zabulon, and that kind of power doesn’t come along very often. And anyway, the places at the chessboards are already taken. None of the players will give his place away to a mere piece – not even to a queen or a king.’
Anton drained his large mug sullenly and put it back down on the glass stand with the restaurant’s logo.
He was no longer the same young magician who had gone out into the field for the first time to track down a poaching vampire. He had changed, even in such a short time. Since that first mission he’d had plenty of opportunities to observe just how much Dark there was in the Light. He was actually rather impressed by the gloomy position adopted by the Dark Magician Edgar – they were only grains caught between the millwheels as the big players settled accounts with each other, so the best thing to do was drink your beer and keep quiet. And once again Anton thought that sometimes the Dark Ones, with their apparent simplicity, were more human than the Light Ones, with their struggle for exalted ideals.
‘But even so, you’re wrong, Edgar,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s one fundamental difference about us. We live for others. We serve, we don’t rule.’
‘That’s what all the human leaders have said,’ Edgar replied, obligingly falling into the trap. ‘The Party is the servant of the people, remember?’
‘But there’s one thing that distinguishes us from human leaders,’ said Anton, looking Edgar in the eye. ‘Dematerialisation. You understand? A Light One cannot choose the path of Evil. If he realises that he has increased the amount of Evil in the world, he withdraws into the Twilight. Disappears. And it’s happened plenty of times, whenever a Light One has made a mistake or given way even slightly to the influence of the Dark.’
Edgar giggled quietly.
‘Anton, you’ve rebutted your own point. “If he realises …” What if he doesn’t realise? Do you remember the case of that maniac healer? Twelve years ago, I think it was.’
Anton remembered. He hadn’t been initiated at the time, but he’d discussed and analysed the unprecedented case with every member of the Watch, with every Light One.
A Light healer with a powerful gift of foresight. He lived outside Moscow and wasn’t an active member of the Night Watch, but he was listed in the reserve. He worked as a doctor, and used Light magic in his practice. His patients adored him – after all, he could literally work miracles.
But he also killed young women who were his patients. Not by using magic; he simply killed them. Sometimes he killed them using acupuncture – he had a perfect knowledge of the body’s energy points.
The Night Watch discovered what he was doing almost by accident. One of the analysts started wondering about the sharp rise in deaths among young women in a small town just outside Moscow. One especially alarming factor was that most of the victims were pregnant. They also noticed a remarkably high number of miscarriages, abortions and stillbirths. They suspected the Dark Ones, they suspected vampires and werewolves, Satanists, witches. They looked into absolutely everyone.
Then Gesar himself got involved in the case, and the murderer was caught. The murderer who was a Light Magician.
The charming and imposing healer simply saw the future too clearly. Sometimes, when he received a patient, he could see the future of her unborn child, who was almost certain to grow into a murderer, a maniac or a criminal. Sometimes he saw that his patient would commit some monstrous crime or accidentally cause the deaths of large numbers of people. So he decided to fight back any way he could.
At his trial the healer had explained ardently that Light magical intervention wouldn’t have been any use – in that case the Dark Ones would have been granted the right to an equal intervention in response, and the quantity of Evil in the world wouldn’t have been reduced. But all he had done was ‘pull up the weeds’. And he had been prevented from sinking into the Twilight by the firm conviction that the amount of Good he had brought into the world was far greater than the Evil he had done.
Gesar had had to dematerialise him in person.
‘He was a psychopath,’ Anton explained. ‘Just a psychopath. With their typical deranged way of thinking. You get cases like that, unfortunately.’
‘Like that sword-bearer of Joan of Arc’s, the Marquis Jules de Rey,’ Edgar prompted eagerly. ‘He was a Light One too, wasn’t he? And then he started killing women and children in order to extract the elixir of youth from their bodies, conquer death and bring happiness to all humanity.’
‘Edgar, nobody’s insured against insanity. Not even Others. But if you take the most ordinary witch,’ Anton began, fuming.
‘I accept that,’ said Edgar, spreading his hands in a reconciliatory shrug. ‘But we’re not talking about extreme cases here. Just about the fact that it’s possible, and the defence mechanism you’re so proud of, dematerialisation … let’s call it simply conscience … can fail. And now think – what if Gesar decides that if you die it will do immense good for the cause of the Light in the future? If the scales are balanced between Anton Gorodetsky on one side and millions of human lives on the other?’