The Twilight Watch (27 page)

The German soldiers of the Second World War were going back
into battle.

Four skeletons dressed in tatters – all their flesh had disappeared
long ago and there was earth packed between their bones – stood
in a ring round Arina. Another came staggering blindly towards
me, clumsily waving its fingerless hands – the bones had rotted
clean away. The ludicrous zombie shed pieces of itself at every
step. Three equally wretched monsters started towards Svetlana.
One of them was even holding a black sub-machine gun that had
lost its magazine.

'Think you can raise the Red Army?' Arina taunted Svetlana.

She shouldn't have done that – Svetlana froze as if she had
turned to stone. Then she hissed through her teeth:

'My grandfather fought in the war. Was this supposed to frighten
me?'

I didn't understand what she did next. I would have used the
'grey prayer', but she used something from the higher levels of
magic beyond my reach. The zombies crumbled to dust.

Svetlana and Arina were left staring at each other in silence.

The joking was over.

The enchantress and the witch clashed in a straightforward duel
of Power.

I took advantage of the brief pause to gather my own strength.
If Svetlana faltered, then I would strike.

But it was Arina who faltered.

First of all, her dress was torn off. That might have had a demoralising
effect – on a man.

Then the witch began ageing rapidly. Her luxuriant black hair
shrank to a pitiful grey tuft. Her breasts drooped and stretched,
her arms and legs withered. She was like a monster from a children's
story.

And there were no special effects here.

'Your name!' Svetlana shouted.

Arina didn't hesitate for long.

Her toothless mouth quivered and she mumbled:

'Arina . . . I am in your power, sorceress . . .'

It was only then that Svetlana relaxed – and suddenly seemed
to wilt. I walked round the subdued Arina and took hold of my
wife's arm.

'It's all right . . . I'm okay,' Svetlana said with a smile. 'We did
it.'

The old crone – it was impossible to think of her as Arina –
gazed at us sadly.

'Will you allow her to assume her former shape?' I asked.

'Why, was she more attractive then?' said Svetlana, attempting
to joke.

'She'll die of old age in a moment,' I said. 'She's over two
hundred years old.'

'Let her croak . . .' Svetlana muttered. She glowered at Arina.
'Witch! I grant you the right to become younger!'

Arina's body rapidly straightened up and filled with life. The
witch gulped at the air greedily. She looked at me:

'Thank you, sorcerer . . .'

'Let's get out of here,' Svetlana ordered. 'And no stupid tricks
. . . I grant you only the right to leave the Twilight!'

Now all the witch's power that had not been stripped away
with her clothes and amulets was completely under Svetlana's
control. To coin a phrase, Svetlana had her finger on the trigger.

'Sorcerer . . .' said Arina, keeping her eyes fixed on me. 'First
remove the shield from your daughter. There is a grenade with
the pin drawn lying under her feet. It will explode at any moment.'

Svetlana cried out.

I dashed to the rainbow globe and struck it, breaking through
the Sphere of Negation. Beneath it there were another two shields.
I tore them away crudely, working with raw energy. From the
second level of the Twilight I couldn't see anything.

I found my shadow and shot back up to the first level. Everything
was clear there, not a trace of the blue moss – the raging battle
had burned it away completely.

And almost immediately I saw the old 'pineapple' lying under
Nadiushka's foot. Arina had left it there as she plunged into the
Twilight. Her insurance policy . . .

The pin was pulled out. Somewhere inside the grenade the fuse
was burning away agonisingly slowly, and in the human world
three or four seconds had already elapsed . . .

The casualty range was two hundred metres.

If it exploded inside the shields, there would be nothing left of
Nadiushka but a bloody pulp . . .

I picked up the grenade. It's very difficult to work with objects
of the real world when you are in the Twilight. At least the grenade
had a distinct Twilight double – the same ribs and ridges, smeared
with mud and rust . . .

Should I throw it away?

No.

In the human world it wouldn't go far. And if I took it into
the Twilight, it would explode instantly.

I couldn't think of anything better to do than slice the grenade
in half, as if I was trying to stone an avocado. Then I sliced it again
into several pieces, searching for the small, glowing string of the slow
fuse among the metal and explosive. My phantom knife, a blade of
pure Power, chopped through the grenade like a ripe tomato.

Finally I found it – a tiny little spark already creeping close to
the detonator. I extinguished it with my fingers.

And then I tumbled out into the human world. Soaked in sweat,
my legs trembling so badly that I was barely able to stand. I shook
my hand – the burnt fingers were stinging.

'Just give a man a chance to tinker with anything mechanical,'
Arina said scathingly when she appeared after me. I ought to have
shut her inside the shield and let her be blown to pieces. Or I
could have cast a frost on her and left her frozen solid until the
next day . . .

'Daddy, teach me how to hide like that,' said Nadiushka, none
the worse for her adventure. Then she spotted Arina and said indignantly:'
Aunty, don't be silly! You can't walk around with no clothes
on!'

'How many times have I told you not to talk to grown-ups
like that!' Svetlana exclaimed. Then she grabbed hold of Nadiushka's
hands and started kissing her.

A scene from a madhouse . . .

If my mother-in-law had been there, she'd have had a few things
to say . . .

I sat down on the edge of the trench, longing for a smoke. And
I wanted a drink. And something to eat. And a sleep. But at the
very least, a smoke.

'I won't do it again,' Nadya babbled 'Look, wolfie's poorly!'

It was only then that I remembered about the werewolves, and
looked round.

The wolf was lying on the ground, his paws twitching feebly.

'I'm sorry, sorcerer,' said Arina. 'I threw your death spell at the
wolf. There was no time to think.'

I looked at Svetlana. 'Thanatos' doesn't necessarily mean certain
death. The spell can be removed.

'I'm drained . . .' Svetlana said in a low voice. 'I've no strength
left.'

'I'll save the filthy creature if you like,' Arina suggested. 'It's not
hard for me to do.'

We looked at each other.

'Why did you tell us about the grenade?' I asked.

'What good will it do me if she dies?' Arina replied indifferently.

'She'll be a Great Light One,' said Svetlana. 'The Greatest of
all!'

'Well, let her.' Arina smiled. 'Maybe she'll remember her Aunty
Arina, who told her about herbs and flowers . . . Don't worry. No
one will ever make her into a Dark One. She's no simple child,
the magic in her is too strong . . .What shall I do with the wolf?'

'Save him,' Svetlana said simply.

Arina nodded. Then suddenly she said to me:

'There's a bag over there in the trench . . . with cigarettes and
food. I prepared this hideaway a long time ago.'

The witch worked on Igor for about ten minutes. First she drove
away the growling cubs, who ran off to one side and tried to
change back into children, and when they couldn't they lay down
in the bushes. Then she started whispering something, all the while
plucking first one plant, then another. She shouted at the cubs and
they ran off and came back with twigs and roots in their teeth.

Svetlana and I looked at each other but said nothing. Everything
was perfectly clear anyway. I finished my second cigarette, rolled a
third between my hands to soften it and took a block of chocolate
out of the black fabric bag. Apart from cigarettes, chocolate
and a wad of sterling – what a prudent witch! – the bag was empty.

Somehow I'd been hoping to find the
Fuaran
.

'Witch!' Svetlana shouted when the werewolf got to his feet,
still trembling. 'Come here!'

Arina came back to us, swinging her hips daintily and not even
slightly embarrassed at being naked. The werewolf also lay down
close to us. He was breathing heavily, and the cubs crowded round
and started licking him. Svetlana winced at the sight, then turned
to look at Arina.

'What are you accused of ?'

'On the instructions of an unidentified Light One I modified
the recipe for a potion and so ruined a joint experiment by the
Inquisition, the Night Watch and the Day Watch.'

'Did you do it?'

'Yes,' Arina admitted blithely.

'What for?'

'Ever since the revolution I'd been dreaming of doing real damage
to the reds.'

'Don't lie,' said Svetlana, frowning. 'You couldn't give a damn
for the reds or the whites. Why did you take the risk?'

'What difference does that make, sorceress?' Arina sighed.

'A big one. In the first place, for you.'

The witch threw her head back and looked up at me, then at
Svetlana. Her eyelids were trembling.

'Aunty Arina, are you feeling sad?' Nadiushka asked. Then she
glanced sideways at her mother and put her hands over her own
mouth.

'Yes,' the witch replied.

At that moment I really didn't want Arina to fall into the
clutches of the Inquisition.

'The experiment was supported by all the Others,' Arina said.
'The Dark Ones believed that the appearance of thousands of
convinced communists in the leadership of the country – the
bread plant's output mostly went to the Kremlin and the People's
Commissariats – wouldn't improve anything. On the contrary, it
would provoke hostility towards the Soviets from the rest of the
world. But the Light Ones believed that after a hard but victorious
war against Germany – the likelihood of that was evident
to the clairvoyants by then – the Soviet Union could become a
genuinely attractive society. There was a secret report . . . essentially
people would have built communism by 1980 . . .'

'And made maize the basic animal-feed crop,' Svetlana snorted.

'Don't talk drivel, sorceress,' the witch retorted calmly. 'I don't
remember about any maize, but they were supposed to build a
city on the moon in the 1970s. And fly to Mars, and something
else. The whole of Europe would have been communist. And not
under constraint either. By now here on earth we'd have had a
huge Soviet Union, a huge United States . . . I think Britain,
Canada and Australia were part of it . . . China was left on its
own.'

'So the Light Ones miscalculated?' I asked.

'No.' Arina shook her head. 'They didn't miscalculate. Of course,
the blood would have flowed in rivers. But what came at the end
of it all wouldn't have been too bad. Far better than all the regimes
we have now . . . The Light Ones overlooked something else. If
things had gone that way, then round about now people would
have learned that the Others existed.'

'I see,' said Svetlana. Nadiushka was squirming restlessly on her
knees – bored of sitting, she wanted to go to the 'wolfie'.

'That's why the . . . unidentified Light One . . .' – Arina smiled
– 'who had the wits to calculate the future more thoroughly than
all the rest, came to me. We met a few times and discussed the
situation. The problem was that the experiment had been planned
not just by Higher Others, who could appreciate the danger of
our being exposed, but also by a large number of first- and second-grade
magicians . . . even some third- and fourth-grade ones. The
project was extremely popular . . . in order to cancel it officially,
full information would have had to be given to thousands of
Others. There was no way that could be done.'

'I understand,' said Svetlana.

But I didn't understand a thing!

We conceal our existence from people because we're afraid.
There are too few of us, and no magic is strong enough to guarantee
our survival if a new campaign of 'witch hunts' begins. But
in this wonderful, benign future that Arina said could already have
happened would we really have been in any danger?

'That's why we decided to sabotage the experiment,' Arina
continued. 'It increased the numbers killed in the Second World
War, but reduced the numbers who died in the export of revolution
to Europe and Northern Africa. It came out more or less
even . . . of course, now life in Russia isn't as sweet and easy as it
should have been. But who ever said that happiness is measured
by a full stomach?'

'Oh sure!' I exclaimed, unable to restrain myself. 'Any teacher
in a town on the Volga or miner in Ukraine will agree with you
there.'

'Happiness should be sought in spiritual wealth!' Arina rebuked
me. 'And not in baths filled with bubbles, or a heated privy. And
at least people don't know about the Others!'

I held my tongue. The woman in front of us was not simply
guilty – she ought to have been dragged to the tribunal on a rope
and stoned along the way! A city on the moon? Okay, if we didn't
have a city on the moon, we could do without it. But even our
ordinary cities were barely alive, and the entire world was still
wary of us . . .

'Poor thing,' said Svetlana. 'Did you suffer a lot?'

At first I thought she was mocking Arina.

The witch thought the same.

'Are you sympathising or scoffing?' she asked.

'Sympathising,' Svetlana answered.

'I don't feel sorry for the little people, don't get the wrong idea,'
the witch hissed. 'But I do feel sorry for the country. It's my
country, whatever it's like, all of it! But things turned out for the
best. We'll carry on living, we won't die out. People will give birth
to new people, they'll build cities and plough the fields.'