‘Right, then,’ Edgar thought. ‘What have we got? We need to sort everything out neatly. Right down to the final detail.’
What could Zabulon squeeze out of the present situation? Edgar needed to construct a mental model of his boss.
A Tribunal that had drawn its forces from both Watches. Not the most powerful, but by no means the lowest either. Two magicians, both from the elite. Edgar and Anton. There would be observers too. There was no doubt of that. And there was no doubt that during the actual session of the Tribunal neither side would make a move – they would be manoeuvring to extract some advantage for themselves from the indifferent and disinterested Inquisition.
But was it indifferent? Edgar had no doubts about its being unbiased. He’d lived a long time as an Other, and never, not once, had he had even the shadow of a doubt over the actions of the Inquisition. The servants of the Treaty had always been both cool and decisive. Someone had once said that the Inquisition didn’t judge who was in the right and who was in the wrong, but who had violated the Treaty. That was the essential worldview of any Inquisitor. Edgar had matured enough to understand that, but he still didn’t understand what it was that made the Inquisition act that way and not any other.
He wondered if the higher magicians understood it. Gesar and Zabulon.
So, the Tribunal. The Light Magician Igor Teplov could either be acquitted (which was undesirable), or found guilty. In the first case, the Night Watch would keep a third-grade magician who was temporarily unfit for combat, but still powerful and, more important, highly experienced. Edgar had come up against Teplov before that battle in North Butovo, although only in passing. Immediately after the war, in the memorable ‘Ashes of Belozersk’ operation. Back then the Moscow and Tallinn Watches had operated in the most unlikely places, such as the Vologda region. They didn’t have enough men … Or rather, Others. The Dark Ones and the Light Ones were both short of numbers.
The other option was that the Night Watch would lose the magician for ever. The question was: so what? Igor Teplov was clearly not who he seemed to be. Or rather, there was something about him that was only obvious to the senior magicians. All in all, it looked very much as if Zabulon was stubbornly and consistently aiming at two goals in the enemy’s camp: Igor Teplov and Svetlana Nazarova. And in doing so he had been quite willing to sacrifice his own lover, Alisa. Edgar still hadn’t made out any logical connection between the skirmish in Butovo, the duel at the Artek camp and the rather confused events that had accompanied the appearance of the Dark Mirror. But for him it was enough to sense very clearly that there was one. There was definitely a single thread running through all these skirmishes and intrigues, connecting them all together, and it led straight back into Zabulon’s hand.
Of course, any attempt to eliminate a future Great Enchantress was quite justified and understandable. But why had Zabulon begun to intrigue against the magician Igor? Why him in particular? And why right now, and not earlier, when he was weaker and more careless?
There was only one answer that fitted: Igor had only become dangerous after Svetlana had joined the ranks of the Night Watch.
Okay. Let’s move on.
The resurrection of Fáfnir. You couldn’t imagine a better time and place: the eve of the millennium, the heart of European necromancy. But how was this connected to the Tribunal and the Teplov – Donnikova case?
That was the problem!
Edgar sipped glumly at his champagne, thinking that he was very short of time – he only had until the evening. So he took the only possible decision: to pay an immediate visit to the local Day Watch office and request all available information about the duel between Siegfried and Fáfnir, and also study the relevant section of the Necronomicon.
Edgar was a powerful enough magician to know of the mechanism for the resurrection of a Great Dark One and to understand which of the necessary conditions could currently be met and which couldn’t.
The German girl was still sleeping serenely: Edgar took pity on her and didn’t wake her up. He washed, shaved and dressed, gently touched her sleeping mind and went out into the morning snow of Prague.
The Day Watch office was located on Vysêhradská, right beside the Vltava, in a three-storey brick building that was a private house with a water pump that clearly still worked even though it was so old. The handle of the pump was like a twisted pointing finger. Following tradition, Edgar got out of his taxi some distance away, to give his colleagues a chance to identify him and decide what to do, if anything.
His colleagues were on the ball – they spotted Edgar about three hundred metres from the door. He felt a light touch on his aura and opened himself up – exactly enough for the magician who was scanning him to realise that a Dark One was approaching, a Dark Magician, a second-grade Dark Magician, coming on business. Just like that, a further level of information each time.
Of course, Prague was a European capital, but it wasn’t Moscow. The beskud on duty – the only guard, as it happened – gave Edgar a toothy smile.
‘Another beskud,’ Edgar thought, surprised. ‘Are they more common in Prague then? This is already the second one.’
There were only six beskuds registered on the territory of the former USSR: two in Turkmenistan and one each in the Crimea, Belarus, Yakutia and Kamchatka. Edgar knew that for certain, because fifteen years earlier he had had a case outside Estonia in which all six of them had testified as witnesses.
The beskud’s Twilight form was almost classical.
‘Greetings, colleague!’
‘Good morning.’
Of course, in the Twilight there were no language barriers.
‘What brings you to our bastion? Business? Or simply a courtesy visit?’
‘Business. Where’s your archive here?’
‘The second floor down, and then you’ll see for yourself?’
‘The second floor down,’ thought Edgar. ‘So they have a multilevel basement.’
‘Thank you. So I can go on down?’
‘Of course. A Dark One is free to go wherever he wants, isn’t that so?’
Edgar sighed. That was so all right, but not entirely.
‘The lift’s over that way,’ the beskud told him.
‘Thank you,’ Edgar repeated and set off as directed.
A very, very old lift took him down to two floors below street level. And that wasn’t the deepest leveclass="underline" there were another five hidden further below. The Prague Watch was certainly firmly established.
The lift lobby was absolutely tiny: four metres by four. There was a door on the left and one on the right: the sign on one read ‘Library’, the other ‘Computer Room’.
‘Let’s start with the library,’ thought Edgar. ‘In Fáfnir’s and Al-Hazred’s time there weren’t any computers … at least not in the modern meaning of the word.’
Edgar stepped towards the door on his left. It was closed, but not locked.
It was a classical library: a large hall with about ten tables and long rows of shelves with books. One glance at their spines was enough to understand that these venerable tomes remembered more than many of the Others.
Edgar stopped, and just at that moment a strikingly thin Other emerged from behind the shelves. A vampire. And a higher vampire – Edgar realised that immediately.
The ordinary vampires that were quite common in Moscow were the junior members of the team, the cannon fodder that Anton Gorodetsky had mentioned. They had hardly any magic, and even a degenerate Dark Magician was still more powerful than they were. But higher vampires were a quite different matter, although for some reason there were none in Moscow, or anywhere in Eastern Europe – with the exceptions of the Czech Republic and Romania.