The Last Watch (30 page)

‘Decided to take a rest, did you? It's too soon for resting – we'll have a rest after the pilaf.'

‘I'm not so sure,' I muttered as I sat down.

‘Ah, what a fine thing civilisation is!' Afandi went on, as if he hadn't heard me. ‘You're both young, you don't know what blessings civilisation has brought to the world.'

‘Was the light bulb in there actually working, then?' I murmured. ‘Alisher, ask that waiter to get a move on with the pilaf, will you?'

Alisher frowned.

‘You're in a hurry …'

He got up, but just at that moment a young man appeared bearing a large dish. Naturally, one plate for everyone, just as it should be: reddish, crumbly rice, orange carrots, a generous amount of meat, a whole head of garlic on the top.

‘I told you the food here was good,' Alisher said delightedly.

But I looked at the man who had brought the pilaf and wondered where the young boy had got to. And why this waiter was acting so nervous.

I took a handful of rice and raised it to my face. Then I looked at the waiter. He started nodding and smiling eagerly.

‘Mutton in garlic sauce,' I said.

‘What sauce?' Alisher asked in amazement.

‘I was just remembering the wise Holmes and the naive Watson,' I replied, no longer concerned that my Russian might seem out of place. ‘The garlic is to cover the smell of the arsenic. You told me yourself – in the East you have to trust your nose, not your eyes … My dear fellow, take a little pilaf with us!'

The waiter shook his head and backed away slowly. Out of curiosity I took a look at him through the Twilight – the predominant colours in his aura were yellow and green. Fear. He was no professional killer. And he, instead of his younger brother, had brought the poisoned pilaf himself, because he was afraid for him. It's amazing what abominable things people will do out of love for their nearest and dearest.

Basically, it was all pure improvisation. Some filthy substance with arsenic had been found in the
chaikhana
, some kind of rat poison. And someone had given the order to feed us poisoned pilaf. It's not possible to kill a powerful Other that way, but they could easily have weakened and distracted us.

‘I'll make
lagman
noodles out of you,' I promised the waiter. ‘And feed them to your little brother. Is the
chaikhana
being watched?'

‘I … I don't know …' The waiter had realised that, despite the way I looked, he ought to speak Russian. ‘I don't know, they ordered me to do it!'

‘Get out!' I said, standing up. ‘There won't be any tip.'

The waiter dashed for the door of the kitchen. And the customers started leaving the
chaikhana
, deciding to take the opportunity not to pay. What had frightened them so badly? What I said, or the way I said it?

‘Anton, don't burn a hole in your trousers,' said Alisher.

I looked down – there was a hissing fireball spinning in my hand. I had got so furious that the spell had slipped off the tips of my fingers into the launch stage.

‘I ought to burn down this nest of vipers, just to teach them a lesson,' I hissed through my teeth.

Alisher didn't say anything. He smiled awkwardly and frowned by turns. I understood exactly what he wanted to say. That these people were not to blame. They had been ordered to do it, and
they
couldn't refuse. That this modest
chaikhana
was all that they had. That it fed two or three large families with little children and old grandparents. But he didn't say anything, because in this case I had a right to start a little fire. A man who tries to poison three Light Magicians deserves to be shown what's what, to teach him and other people a lesson. We're Light Ones, not saints …

‘The
shurpa
was good …' Alisher said quietly.

‘Let's leave via the Twilight,' I said, transforming the fireball into a thin plume of flame and directing it at the dish of pilaf. The rice and meat were reduced to glowing ashes, together with the arsenic. ‘I don't want to show myself in the doorway. These bastards work too quickly.'

Alisher nodded gratefully and got up, stamped on the embers in the dish and emptied two teapots on them just to be sure.

‘The green tea was good too,' I agreed. ‘Listen, the tea looks pretty ordinary. Pretty poor stuff, to be honest. But it tastes really good!'

‘The important thing is to brew it right,' Alisher replied, relieved by the change of subject. ‘When a teapot is fifty years old and it hasn't been washed once …' He paused, but when he didn't see an expression of disgust on my face, he went on. ‘That's the cunning part! This clever crust forms on the inside – tannins, essential oils, flavonoids …'

‘Are there really flavonoids in tea?' I asked in surprise, hanging the bag over my shoulder again. I'd almost forgotten it. The underwear wouldn't have mattered, but the bag also contained the selection of battle amulets that Gesar had given me and five thick wads of dollars!

‘Well, maybe I'm confusing things …' Alisher admitted. ‘But it's the crust that does it, it's like brewing tea inside a shell of tea …'

Taking Afandi under the arms in the way that had already
become
a habit, we entered the Twilight. The cunning old man didn't argue: on the contrary, he pulled up his legs and dangled between us, giggling repulsively and crying out: ‘Hup! Hup!' I thought that if, despite what Gesar's memories told me, Afandi really was Rustam, I wouldn't let his age prevent me from giving him an earful of good old vernacular.

¹
This story is told in the third part of the book
The Twilight Watch
.

CHAPTER 5

TO BE QUITE
honest, I would have preferred a Russian ‘Uaz' or ‘Niva'. Not out of patriotic considerations, but because the Toyota jeep was by no means the most common car in Uzbekistan and disguising it with magic would have been like unfurling a flag over my head and howling: ‘Here we are. Come and get us!'

However, Afandi had told me very definitely that the road ahead was bad. Very bad. And the only Niva we had come across near the
chaikhana
had been in such terrible condition that it would have been shameful to subject the old lady to such mockery and humiliation.

But the Toyota was new and kitted out with all the gear, the way they do things in Asia – if you can afford to buy an expensive car, then let it have the works! A sports silencer, a bicycle rack (although the pot-bellied owner had never got up on a bike since he was a child), a CD-changer, a tow-bar and facings on the door-sills – pretty much all the glittering trash that the manufacturers invent to hike up the basic price by an extra fifty per cent.

The owner of the car was apparently also the owner of the local market. He looked like a standard Uzbek
bey
, the way they're always shown in the cartoons. In other words, about as credible as the fat
capitalist
with the eternal cigar clutched in his teeth. The irony of the situation was that this young man had probably derived all his ideas about how a rich man ought to look from children's cartoons and fashionable European magazines. He was fat. He had an Uzbek skullcap embroidered with gold thread on his head. He was wearing a very expensive suit that was clearly too tight. And an equally expensive tie that had definitely been splattered with fatty food more than once and then run through a washing machine. He wore a pair of polished shoes that were quite out of place in the dusty street. And gold rings with huge artificial gemstones or ‘dopealines' as the jewellery traders spitefully refer to them. The skullcap was supposed to symbolise his closeness to the people, and all the rest symbolised his European gloss. He was clutching a cellphone in one hand – an expensive one, but the kind that ought to belong to a rich young dope, not to a respectable businessman.

‘Will this car be okay for us?' I asked Afandi.

‘It's a good car,' Afandi said.

I glanced around once again – there were no Others to be seen anywhere nearby. No enemies, no allies, no ordinary Others living among the ordinary human beings. So that was fine.

I emerged from the Twilight and looked hard at the owner of the four-by-four. I touched him gently with Power and then waited until he turned to face me, knitting his thick brows in bewilderment. I smiled and sent him two spells with names that are much too flowery to bother with here. They're usually referred to as ‘Haven't Seen You for Ages' and ‘Bosom Buddies'.

The modern-day
bey
's face dissolved into a broad smile.

The two young guys accompanying him – either bodyguards or distant relatives – stared at me suspiciously. In the Twilight my hastily applied Timur mask had fallen away, and this unfamiliar Russian who was walking towards their boss with his arms held out wide naturally made them suspicious.

‘Ah, how long it's been!' I shouted. ‘My father's old friend!'

Unfortunately, he was about twenty years older than me. Otherwise I could have got away with the ‘old-school-friend' line, or ‘Remember our times in the army, brother!' But then, recently, the ‘times in the army' approach had failed to work more and more often – the mark was simply unable to figure out how he could possibly have served in the army with you when he had honestly bought his way out of military service with a bundle of greenbacks from the good old USA. Some people had even developed a serious neurosis as a result.

‘Son of my old friend!' the man howled, opening his arms wide to embrace me. ‘Where have you been all this time?'

The important thing at this point is to give the other person just a little bit of information, He'll invent the rest for himself.

‘Me? I've been living in Mariupol with my grandmother!' I told him. ‘Oh, how glad I am to see you! You're such a big man here now!'

We hugged each other. The man had about him a delicious smell of
shashlik
and eau de cologne. Except that there was rather too much eau de cologne.

‘And what a fine car you have!' I added, with a glance of approval at the Toyota jeep. ‘Is that the one you wanted to sell me?'

A melancholy expression appeared in the man's eyes, but ‘Bosom Buddies' gave him no choice. Never mind – he ought to have been happy that Gesar had equipped us so generously for our journey. Otherwise I would have asked him to
give
me the Toyota.

‘But … it's …' he exclaimed sadly.

‘Here!' I opened my bag, took out four wads of dollars and thrust then into his hand. ‘Now the keys, please, if you don't mind – I'm really in a hurry!'

‘It … it's worth more than that …' the man said in a wretched voice.

‘But I'm taking it second-hand!' I explained. ‘Right?'

‘That's right,' he admitted, speaking slowly.

‘Uncle Farhad!' one of the young men exclaimed in bewilderment.

Farhad gave him a strict glance, and the youth fell silent.

‘Don't interrupt when your elders are talking. Don't shame me in front of the son of my old friend!' Farhad barked. ‘What will the son of my old friend think?'

The young guys were in a panic, but they kept quiet.

I took the keys out of the man's hands and got into the Toyota's driving seat. I breathed in the fresh smell of the leather upholstery and glanced at the dashboard. Yes, the car was definitely second-hand. According to the odometer, it had only travelled three hundred kilometres.

I waved to the three men who had been left with forty thousand dollars instead of their means of transport. Then I drove out onto the road and said: ‘Everybody leave the Twilight!'

Alisher and Afandi appeared on the empty back seat.

‘I would have given him a little more happiness,' said Alisher. ‘So he wouldn't suffer too much afterwards. He looks pretty spiteful, not a very good man, but even so.'

‘More spells only make a screw-up all the more likely,' I said, shaking my head. ‘It's all right. I paid him fair and square. He'll survive.'

‘Are we going to wait for Edgar?' Alisher asked. ‘Or look for the Light Ones?'

But I'd already thought about these choices and rejected them.

‘No, there's no point. Let's make straight for the hills. The further we are from people, the quieter it'll be.'

Alisher took my place at the wheel when it started getting dark. We had been driving south from Samarkand, towards the Afghan
border
, for three hours. Just as twilight fell the asphalt-surfaced road had given way to an appallingly bad dirt track. I moved to the back seat, where Afandi was snoring peacefully, and decided to follow the old man's example. But before I dozed off I took several battle amulets out of my bag.

Novices are often fond of all sorts of magical wands, crystals and knives, either made by themselves or charged by a more powerful magician. Even a weak and inexperienced magician can achieve a quite astounding effect if he prepares an artefact with loving care and pumps it full of Power. The problem is that this effect – powerful, prolonged and precise – is a one-off. You can't attach two different spells to the same object. A magic wand intended to belch out flame will cope magnificently with its task, even in the hands of a weak Other. But if his opponent guesses what is happening and raises a defence against fire, the wand and its miraculous flames are useless. It can't freeze, dry, or stand someone on his head. You can either use the fire that's available, or hammer away with the wand like a club. It's no accident that weak magicians who have dealings with people (and it's precisely the weak magicians who interfere in human affairs or involve people in their own) have always used a magical staff – a hybrid of the usual wand and a long club. Some of them, to be honest, have been far more skilful with the club than at using magic. I remember how all of us in the Watch went to the ‘Pushkin' movie theatre for the premiere of
The Lord of the Rings
. Everything was fine until the Light Gandalf and the Dark Saruman started fighting each other with their magic staffs. The two rows filled with Others broke into genuinely Homeric laughter. Especially the trainees, who had it drilled into them every day that a magician who relied on artefacts was simply an idle show-off, more interested in appearances than efficiency. A magician's true power lies in his skill in using the Twilight and spells.