‘Do you mean to say that you already have tickets?’ I asked.
‘I mean to say that I checked us into the flight yesterday evening. The lack of a visa won’t bother you too much, will it? You can buy clean underclothes at the airport, if we have time, and if not – in Taipei.’
‘I suppose the taxi’s already waiting?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Arina said. ‘The meter’s running. Well, how about it? What’s your decision?’
I spread some butter on a slice of bread and put a piece of cheese on top. I took a bite and chewed it before I said: ‘I don’t need to buy any underclothes. I don’t even need socks. Sveta packed my bag for a week.’
I watched London slipping away beneath the plane and thought about what I was doing now.
Our entire life is an endless sequence of choices. Stay home or go out for a walk. Go to the cinema or watch TV. Drink tea or water.
Even these insignificant decisions can change a life completely, let alone the more serious alternatives! Get married or wait a while. Change your job or stay in the old one. Move to a different city or country.
I had had to make choices too, and I still didn’t know if I had always made the right one. But the action I had just taken could well be the most serious choice in my life. Not, of course, because I hadn’t rushed in to arrest Arina, as demanded by the regulations of the Night Watch and the circulars from the Inquisition. As a Magician Beyond Classification, even if my rank was rather doubtful and reflected my potential rather than the experience and wisdom that still had to be added to my Power, I had sufficient freedom of action.
I could, for instance, state that I did not consider myself capable of detaining Arina (which was the truth!) and had decided to play for time.
Or – and this would also not have required me to offend against veracity – I could justify my actions by the need to acquire additional information and clarify who was capable of resisting the Tiger, and how. After all, recent events at our office had demonstrated that this was a matter of priority!
And then the very existence of the two prophecies and my own strange dream positively demanded further investigation.
Of course, to be fair, I ought to have told people what was happening … at least Gesar. But even here I had a convincing excuse – a Higher Witch, let alone the former Head of the Conclave, was quite capable of intercepting practically any kind of message, even a pupil’s communications with his mentor.
So, from the official point of view, I was more or less in the clear. I could find a wagonload of excuses for my actions.
And I wasn’t really concerned about my own safety, either. I hadn’t required Arina to swear an oath not to harm me, but I had no grounds for suspecting her of anything bad. If I’d been able to work with Zabulon, I should be able to get along with a former Witch who was now a Light One.
So what was bothering me?
A pretty Chinese hostess was handing out glasses of champagne. Arina had lashed out on first-class tickets – but then, why would an experienced Witch be short of funds? Arina, in the seat beside me, took a glass. I declined and, after a moment’s hesitation, asked for a cognac. A fourteen-hour flight – there would be plenty time to have a drink and then sober up.
The morning was starting to come together.
‘Will you show me the chalice?’ Arina asked.
I got my bag down without any objections and took out the artefact that Erasmus had made. Arina held it in her hands for a while, then shook her head.
‘I can’t sense any magic.’
‘Neither can I, but not everything can be sensed.’
‘That’s true.’
Arina poured her champagne into the chalice and drank it. She shrugged. She raised the vessel to her ear and listened to it, as if it was a seashell.
‘I’ve tried that,’ I said. ‘I drank out of it, and listened to it. It seemed to me that Erasmus knew how to awaken the prophecy – but he didn’t think it necessary to explain.’
‘How did you manage to persuade him to part with the chalice?’ Arina asked curiously.
‘A present from Gesar helped,’ I said and told her about our office bonsai tree that had found a new home with Darwin.
‘Riddle upon riddle,’ Arina said, and shrugged. ‘Everyone knows Gesar is a sly old fox, but I have no idea what he’s thought up this time …’
‘Information for information,’ I said. ‘Tell me about this Other we’re going to see.’
‘He’s called Fan Wen-yan,’ Arina replied. ‘Actually, he has plenty of different names, but that’s the one he uses now for living among human beings. He’s about three hundred years old. A Light Other, but he has never been a member of any Watches.’
‘What rank is he?’ I asked.
‘Fourth.’
‘Is that all?’ I asked, amazed.
Of course, fourth rank is pretty serious, not just the ability to perform petty magic tricks, like seventh rank. But in three hundred years even a weak Other hauls himself up two or three levels from his original level. Did that mean Fan had been a total weakling when he was initiated?
‘Why so snobbish?’ Arina snorted. ‘Weren’t you a fourth-ranker once upon a time?’
‘Fifteen years ago,’ I admitted. ‘But I was initiated as a Fourth-Level Other.’
‘Well, he started right at the very bottom,’ said Arina, confirming my surmise. ‘From the Seventh-Level. And he climbed patiently … In 1925 he was appointed curator of the Gugun Palace Museum in Beijing. Great Others were not required there, the Chinese respect the authorities, no one attempted to steal the treasures. Even when the Xinhai Revolution took place’ – Arina gave me a glance and took pity on me – ‘and that was in 1911, the imperial treasures weren’t plundered seriously … Fan Wen-yan would have had a quiet life, but in 1930 something strange happened. Fan Wen-yan had a friend, a Prophet. A weak one, but a Prophet nonetheless. I don’t know the details – maybe he was more than just his friend …’ Arina laughed. ‘Anyway, the young man prophesied something or other, and the only witness to it was Fan. For some reason he didn’t like the prophecy and he didn’t want to reveal it to the human population. And so the Tiger came for Fan and his friend. That wasn’t what they called him but, from all the descriptions, it was the Tiger.’
I waited.
‘His friend was killed. But Fan managed to do something … either he destroyed the Tiger …’
‘How could he have destroyed him?’ I exclaimed in surprise. ‘The Tiger has only just been in Moscow …’
‘But are you sure that there’s only one Tiger?’ Arina asked with a smile. ‘Anyway, Fan managed to do something. Killed it, drove it away, frightened it off, bought it off – I don’t know what. But the prophecy wasn’t proclaimed, and later, under interrogation in the Night Watch, Fan said that he “would rather cut himself into pieces and feed them to the tigers in the Beijing zoo than utter what had been revealed to him”. When we put everything together and realised that a weak Chinese magician had managed to drive away the Tiger, it was decided to find him and clarify the details. Not for any specific requirement … but additional knowledge never does any harm.’
‘So what stopped you?’
‘Infighting, Anton. For us Russian Witches the World War and the Revolution were far greater calamities than they were for Others in general …’
‘Why?’
‘We Witches are closer to the earth. To the country where we grew up, where we acquired our powers. In 1914 it was already difficult for us to gather in the Conclave – for a Russian Witch to sit beside a German one, an English Witch beside an Austrian one – and then after the Revolution, with the USSR on one side and everyone else on the other, reaching an agreement about anything at all became quite impossible. Then I went to sleep, hid away from my friends, left the Conclave … and it fell apart anyway: its time had obviously come. So we didn’t do anything about this. It’s a pity … I didn’t have Fan’s fortitude when my friend prophesied in 1915 – I told people everything.’