Alisher was still driving. I was dozing on the back seat and thinking about Edgar.
What had made him go against the Watches and the Inquisition? Why had he broken every possible taboo and involved human beings in his machinations?
I couldn’t understand it. Edgar was a careerist, like all Dark Ones, of course he was. He could kill if necessary. He could do absolutely anything at alclass="underline" Dark Ones had no moral prohibit ions. But to do something that set him in opposition to all Others – that could only be explained by insanity or a thirst for power. And then, Edgar had so much Baltic restraint and reserve. Spending decades crawling up the career ladder was easy. But staking everything on a single throw of the dice?
What had he found out about the Crown of All Things? What information had he dug up in the archives of the Inquisition? Who else had he managed to involve? The Dark vampire and the Light Healer – who were they? Where were they from? Why had they conspired with an Inquisitor? What goals could a Dark One, a Light One and an Inquisitor have in common?
But then, the goal wasn’t too hard to figure out. The goal was always one and the same. Power. Power in all its forms. You could say that we Light Ones were different. That we didn’t need Power for Power’s sake, but only in order to help people. And that was probably true. But we still needed Power. Every Other is familiar with that sweet temptation, that delicious sensation of his own strength: the vampire, sucking on a young girl’s throat; the healer, saving a dying child with a wave of his hand. What difference did it make what it was for? Every Other would find a way to apply the might that he acquired.
I was far more concerned about another point. Edgar had been involved in the business with the Fuaran. He had been in contact with Kostya Saushkin.
And that brought me back to that unfortunate youth, Victor Prokhorov. The boy Vitya, who had been friends with the boy Kostya …
Again and again everything pointed to Kostya Saushkin. What if he had managed to survive somehow? If he’d used his final scraps of Power to erect some kind of vampire Shield round himself and lived long enough to set up a portal and disappear from his burning spacesuit? And then he’d got in touch with Edgar?
No, it was impossible, of course. The Inquisition had checked the matter very carefully. But then, what if Edgar had already been playing a double game, even then? And he had falsified the results of the investigation?
But even so, it still didn’t add up. Why would he save a vampire he had just been hunting? Save him and then conspire with him? What could Kostya do for him? Without the Fuaran – nothing! And the book had been destroyed, that was absolutely certain. It had been observed just as carefully as Kostya. And its destruction had been confirmed by magical means. The discharge of energy when such a powerful and ancient artefact is destroyed is quite impossible to confuse with anything else.
Basically, there was no way that Edgar could have saved Kostya – that was the first conclusion. And he didn’t have any need to save him – that was the second.
But even so, even so …
Alisher stopped the jeep and switched off the engine. The silence that fell was deafening.
‘I think we’re here,’ he said. He stroked the steering wheel and added: ‘A good little vehicle. I didn’t think we’d make it.’
I turned back towards Afandi, but he was no longer asleep. He was looking at the freakish stone figures scattered around in front of us. His lips were pressed tightly together.
‘Still standing there,’ I said.
Afandi glanced at me in genuine fright.
‘I know about it,’ I explained.
‘It was a bad business,’ Afandi said, with a sigh. ‘Ugly Not worthy of a Light One.’
‘Afandi, are you Rustam?’
Afandi shook his head.
‘No, Anton. I’m not Rustam. I’m his pupil.’
He opened the door and climbed out of the jeep. After a pausing for a second, he murmured:
‘I am not Rustam, but I will be Rustam …’
Alisher and I glanced at each other and got out of the jeep too.
It was quiet and cool – it’s always cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. And it was just starting to get light. The plateau that I knew from Geser’s memories had changed hardly at all. Except perhaps that the outlines of the stone figures had been softened by the wind and the rare showers of rain: they were less clearly defined but were still recognisable. A group of magicians with their hands raised in invocatory spells, a werewolf, a magician running …
I started to shiver.
‘What is this …?’ Alisher whispered. ‘What happened here …?’
He reached into his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
‘Give me one too,’ I said.
We lit up. The air around us was so pure that the sharp smell of tobacco seemed like a memory of home, a reminder of the smog of the city.
‘These … were they people?’ Alisher asked, pointing to the blocks of stone.
‘Others,’ I told him.
‘And they …’
‘They didn’t die. They turned to stone. Lost all their external senses. But their reason remained, attached to the lumps of rock.’ I looked at Afandi, but he was still standing there, pensively examining the field of the ancient battle, or watching the eastern horizon where the sky had turned slightly pink.
Then I looked at the plateau through the Twilight.
The sight was genuinely blood-curdling.
What Geser had seen two thousand years ago had made him feel fear and revulsion. But what I saw now made me feel pity and pain.
Almost all the Dark Ones who had been turned to stone by the White Mist were insane. Their reason had not been able to withstand being incarcerated in total isolation from any sense organs. The fluttering coloured auras around the stones blazed with the brown and reddish-green fire of madness. If I try to think of something to compare this sight with, I would say it looked like a hundred total lunatics whirling around on the spot, or rather standing there absolutely motionless: screaming, giggling, groaning, weeping, muttering, drooling, scratching their faces or trying to poke their own eyes out.
There were only a few auras that retained some remnants of reason. Their owners were either distinguished by quite incredible willpower, or they were blazing with the thirst for revenge. There was not much madness in them, but they were overflowing with fury, hatred and the desire to annihilate everyone and everything.
I stopped looking through the Twilight and looked at Alisher instead. The young magician was still smoking, and he hadn’t noticed that his cigarette had already burned down to the filter. He only dropped the butt when it scorched his fingers. And then he said.
‘The Dark Ones got what they deserved.’
‘Don’t you feel any pity for them?’ I asked.
‘They abuse our pity.’
‘But if you have no pity in you, how do we differ from them?’
‘In our colour,’ said Alisher. He looked at Afandi and asked: ‘Where should we seek the Great Rustam, Afandi?’
‘You have found him, Light One with a heart of stone,’ Afandi replied in a quiet voice. And he turned to face us.
He had transformed with the speed of a mature shape-shifter. He was a whole head taller and much wider in the shoulders – his shirt had split and the upper button had been torn out, together with a piece of cloth. To my surprise, his skin had turned lighter, and his eyes had become bright blue. I had to remind myself that two thousand years earlier the inhabitants of this part of Asia had looked quite different from they way they did now. Nowadays a Russian will smile when someone from Central Asia tells him that his ancestors had light brown hair and blue eyes. But there is a lot more truth in these words than modern-day Russians realise.