The Day Watch (25 page)

So you take your time, Vitalik, don’t try to force things along. Better think about what bad things this fading night could bring you. But better not drag things out, lengthen that stride…

I walked quickly, as far as Sholkovskoe Shosse, darted into an underpass, and then started hitching a lift on the opposite side of the road.

What I like about Moscow is that even in the dead of night or early in the morning, all you have to do is raise your hand and an automobile will immediately pull in at the curb. In Nikolaev you can stand there for half an hour and no one will even think of stopping. But here everything is decided by money. Everyone needs it.

The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, fifty rubles. The standard rate.

I got into the sporty Volkswagen and set off toward problems that I could almost feel already.

When I reached the hotel, I immediately sensed that my room’s defenses had been compromised. The defenses had worked just as they were intended to do, and that was my main problem. Without looking at anyone, I went up to the sixth floor, walked to my suite, put the key in the lock, and froze for a moment, looking at the door.

Okay, whatever was about to happen, I had to go through it.

He was lying in the middle of the lounge with his arms flung out to the sides. There was an expression of childish surprise and resentment on his face, as if he’d opened a wrapper and instead of the candy he’d been hoping for he’d found an angry hornet that had instantly sunk its stinger into his carelessly exposed finger.

He had stumbled into my Shahab’s Ring. Not complex magic, but very powerful. And, naturally, he hadn’t known the word that was needed. He was the unfortunate young detective, Andriukha Tiunnikov, a Light One from the Night Watch, who had been trying to prove that I’d murdered the girl on Saturday.

If he’d been more experienced, he would never have stuck his nose into the area enclosed by the Ring. I hadn’t even set it around the whole room-only the safe with the bag in it.

This was the very last thing I needed-the Light Ones regarded the deaths of ordinary people as poaching, but the killing of an Other was a different matter altogether. It already smacked of a tribunal.

But I had simply closed off my own territory, closed it off in a way that Others understood! This is mine! Keep out!

No entry!

Only he hadn’t kept out. And he’d met his end in the Twilight… The infantile booby! Had he been trying to impress his bosses?

I had to own up. Otherwise they’d ask in a way I couldn’t refuse to answer.

I reached for the phone-not my cell, but the ordinary phone that was standing on the table. The number obligingly surfaced from my memory.

“Night Watch? Vitaly Rogoza, Other, Dark. If I’m not mistaken, I have your employee, Andrei Tiunnikov here. He’s dead. You’d better come… Cosmos Hotel, suite six hundred twelve.”

Strangely enough, the Light Ones weren’t the first to arrive. The moment the first Others reached my floor-there were two of them-I felt as if I were suddenly flooded with energy from someone. The pair were Dark magicians and they were both brimful of a Dark Power that reminded me in some ways of the Twilight, except that it was even denser and darker. A long tongue of Twilight ran straight down through the floors of the hotel, gradually growing thinner as it approached the ground and seeming to run on beyond it, to somewhere lower, somewhere underground.

There was a knock at the door, emphatically correct.

“Yes, yes,” I replied, without getting up out of my armchair. “It’s open, come in!”

They came in. My acquaintance from the apartment on Per-vomaiskaya Street, Shagron. And another one, also a magician, as far as I could tell. A bit overweight, like Shagron, with dark hair. And powerful. More powerful than his partner. But even so, despite my expectations, it was Shagron who started talking. It seemed that the accepted thing among members of the Watches was for the most important member of a team to keep quiet-Anton had preferred to listen too.

“Good morning, colleague.”

“What’s good about it? You must be joking, colleague.”

I deliberately pronounced the word “colleague” in the same tone as Shagron. But he wasn’t so easily provoked,

and that was where he had the advantage over me. In experience. All I had to rely on were cheap wisecracks like that, plus moments of sudden illumination and the mystical stairway that obligingly offered me one step after another, and then arranged a kick up the backside at the appropriate moment.

“I’m not joking, colleague, simply greeting you. It’s a pity you didn’t wait for us back there… you know where I mean. I’d been counting on having a word with you.”

“I didn’t want to get in your way,” I confessed, and it was more than half-true. A normal response from an Other-Dark or Light.

“I was counting on help. Help from a brother-in-arms. But you chose to disappear.”

That “I” was strictly a Dark way of speaking. In Shagron’s place, any Light One would definitely have said “We,”

and been perfectly sincere. And he’d have meant exactly what Shagron had meant, no less sincerely, of course.

“Okay. Let me introduce you. This is Edgar, our colleague from Estonia, recently a member of the Moscow Watch. What have you got here?”

“What I’ve got here is yet another body,” I confessed. “A Light Other. A Watch member. But then you already know all about it, don’t you, colleague Edgar?”

“There’s not much time? The Light Ones will be here any minute? Is that what you wanted to say?” Edgar asked, casting aside diplomacy and addressing me in a familiar fashion. I realized there was no point in arguing with this dark-haired Estonian.

“Last Saturday evening, when I’d just arrived, this Light One was in charge of the operation dealing with a poaching vampire…”

“A vampiress,” Edgar corrected me with a frown. “And then?”

“By sheer chance I just happened to be there beside the victim. They found me beside the corpse and recognized me as a Dark One. Clearly out of inexperience-I can’t see any other reason-Tiunnikov accused me of what the vampire… that is, the vampiress… had done. I put him in his place, and I admit I did it quite sharply, but he’d asked for it. And that’s really the whole story… When I left my room today, I left some protective spells. And when I came in, there he was. He was already beyond my help.”

The last phrase simply burst out on its own-I hadn’t been planning to say it. It felt like I was beginning to talk nonsense again.

“This snot-nosed kid was in charge of the operation?” Shagron asked incredulously. “When there were Light Ones with far more experience-the tigress, the magicians…”

“Tiunnikov was in training, that’s perfectly normal,” Edgar barked at his partner, and then suddenly glanced at me.

“But you set up a Shahab’s Ring so strong that it killed the Light Ones’ trainee on the spot?”

The question was almost rhetorical. Apparently I’d cast a simple spell, but put too much Power into it. Maybe…

I sensed the approach of the Light Ones at the same time as Edgar, just as they were nearing the hotel. A few seconds later Shagron picked them up too.

“What did you tell them?” Edgar asked, obviously in a hurry. “But keep it short.”

I sensed that he had covered us with a cowl of invisibility, and quite a powerful one too. Before I said a single word, I added some Power of my own to the cowl, drawn partly from somewhere inside myself, from my own mind, and partly from outside. It happened quite spontaneously, but I read the dumb astonishment in Edgar’s eyes.

“I phoned and said there was a dead Light One in my room. And told them his name. That’s all.”

Edgar gave a barely perceptible nod and glanced significantly at Shagron, who gave the slightest of shrugs.

We stood there in silence until the knock at the door-a far less polite one this time.

The Light Ones didn’t wait to be invited. They just walked straight in.

There were five of them-Tolik, Anton, and the girl shape-shifter could barely have had enough time to get from Pervo-maiskaya Street to their office. Two others had come with them-a cultured-looking young guy wearing spectacles with eighty-dollar frames and another with a suntanned face, as if it weren’t winter in Moscow.

These last two and Tolik carefully examined, probed, and scanned every centimeter of my suite. The walls here had probably never seen such intense magical activity.

Anton and the girl didn’t interfere, but I could clearly sense the aversion emanating from them. Not even hatred-the Light Ones don’t really even know how to hate properly. More like a desire to pin me into the corner, have me condemned and punished. Or simply to hit me with so much Power that I’d be driven into the Twilight forever.

And I also sensed there was at least one more Light One somewhere outside the room. Probably somewhere else on the same floor, or by the lifts. He was obviously covering the others’ backs, and he had shielded himself really well for the job. I only spotted him, you might say, by accident. But I don’t think that Shagron and Edgar had any
i.e.
he was there.

I frowned. The Light Ones had the numerical advantage-there were twice as many of them. And the two of them

that I was seeing for the first time were very powerful magicians, almost certainly first level. In any case, the two of them together would be stronger than Shagron and Edgar. And Anton was no pushover either-he could give Shagron a good fight, or even Edgar. Plus the girl-she was a warrior. And that unknown one somewhere nearby.

The balance of forces was not good at all. They’d grind us to dust, grind us as fine as powdered vanilla…

Meanwhile the Light Ones had finished their scanning. The one in spectacles came up to me and inquired with emphatic indifference: “Tell me, did you really need to use a protective spell of such great Power?”

“Well, why do you think I would have used so much Power?”

The one in spectacles and the other one I didn’t know exchanged a quick glance.

“We demand to see your things.”

“Stop, stop,” Edgar put in hastily. “On what grounds, exactly?”

The one in spectacles smiled bleakly-with just his lips. “The Night Watch has reason to suspect that a forbidden artifact of immense Power has been smuggled into Moscow. You must know that such actions contravene the terms of the Treaty.”

My Dark colleagues looked at me doubtfully. They were apparently expecting some unambiguous response. But what was it? On this occasion my magical internal help-all chose not to prompt me. But on the other hand, I knew perfectly well that there weren’t any forbidden artifacts in my bag. And so I gestured magnanimously and said, “Let them look! All night long if they want.”

“I protest,” Edgar said quietly, and apparently without any great hope. “You don’t have the sanction of your chief.”

“The protest is rejected,” the one in spectacles parried in an inflexible voice. “I’m the chief here. Show us your things, Dark One.”

I didn’t have to be asked twice. I neutralized the remains of the defenses with a single gesture and opened the door of the safe, where my bag was lying in total isolation, apart from a pair of clothes brushes. Part of its logo seemed to gaze out at us reproachfully: Fuj… I imagined a bored, squeaky voice pronouncing it as “phooey…”

I took the bag and tipped its contents out onto the bed. The Light Ones didn’t take much interest in my things, but the sight of the final plastic bag put them on their guard-the second unknown magician even grasped the amulet in the pocket of his jacket.

When I shook the money out onto the bedcover, everybody looked at me. My own side and the Light Ones. As if I were some kind of psycho. An absolutely hopeless case.

“There,” I said. “That’s all I have. A hundred thousand. Actually a bit less now.”

The magician in spectacles stepped toward the bed and rummaged disdainfully through my things, glancing into the plastic bags. But I realized that what he really wanted was tactile contact.

He wasn’t even satisfied with remote scanning!

Good grief, what did they suspect me of? Probably some cretin really had tried to bring something forbidden into Moscow, and since I’d overdone it a bit protecting my miserable heap of bucks, now they suspected me of everything. That was really funny, and it was getting funnier all the time.

The one in spectacles spent about a minute sniffing at my baggage. Then he gave up.

“All right. There’s nothing here. We’re declaring this suite off-limits. You’ll have to change rooms.”

The girl shape-shifter started and gave him a puzzled look. He spread his hands and I understood the meaning of his gesture. There was nothing to charge me with. No grounds. The shape-shifter tensed up, but the other magician put his hand on her shoulder, as if he were warning her not to do anything rash.

“Ye-es?” Edgar drawled insinuatingly, and something Estonian finally came through in that “Ye-es” of his.

“Change rooms? In that case we request official permission for a seventh-level intervention. In order to avoid unnecessary questions from the hotel management.”

The Light Ones were annoyed by that-but then, they were all annoyed already in any case.

“Why? We can influence the staff without any psychic correction.”

“But you have a habit of declaring any influence a violation,” Edgar explained in a very innocent voice.

“I will per…” Ilya drawled slowly and then broke off. “No. I won’t permit it. Anton, you go with them and do it all yourself. Try to make sure they move him as far away from here as possible, so that… Anyway, just do it.”

Edgar sighed in disappointment. “Okay… if you say no, then it’s no. But tell me, dear fellow, do you have any more questions for our colleague?”

Edgar’s tone of voice was so prim and polite that I was afraid the Light Ones might decide he was mocking them.

But they clearly knew Edgar pretty well. And maybe this caustic, biting politeness was the norm of behavior between the two Watches.

“No, we don’t dare detain him any longer. But permit us to remind you that until our investigations are concluded, he is forbidden to leave Moscow, in connection with three cases.”