That's only the norm for the lower Dark Ones, the vampires and shape-shifters...

It wasn't at all easy for the magicians of the small Finnish sect. They had to scout around the world, searching for Other children they could adopt, educate, and introduce to the great cause of service to Fafnir. As a rule, these children were found in the more underdeveloped and exotic countries.

Raivo, for instance, came from Burkina Faso. The little boy with the bulging eyes, legs bandy from rickets, and a swollen, flabby stomach had been bought from his poor parents for fourteen dollars. He had been cured of his illness, educated, and taught Finnish. And now, no one looking at this handsome, well-built young black guy ever could have guessed how strange his destiny was.

Yari had been found in the slums of Macao. At the age of four, with the help of his magical abilities, he was already a remarkably successful thief, which was how he was discovered by his future adoptive parents. They hadn't even had to pay anything for him. Yari hadn't grown very tall, but the Regin Brothers had been delighted with his sharp, tenacious mind and natural talent for magic.

Then there was Yukha, from Russia. Or rather, from somewhere in the south of Ukraine. He had suffered from wanderl.u.s.t since he was a child, and at the age of seven he had traveled right across the country by jumping freight trains and hitchhiking, then crossed the border on foot, and one day he'd knocked on the door of the small townhouse owned by the Mustajokis, devoted members of the sect. There was no way that could be explained except by magical predestination.

By a wicked irony of fate, only the deceased Ollikainen had been a genuine Finnish boy.

The driver had never had such a strange group of pa.s.sengers before-a young white guy with Ukrainian facial features, a tall guy with skin as black as pitch, and a short Asiatic with slanting eyes. And all three of them were speaking Finnish, or maybe Swedish, absolutely fluently. But then, you saw all sorts of things nowadays...

The first thing the Brothers did at the airport was study the timetable, but even here Russia's muddleheaded cunning had a little snag in store for them: The flight to Prague turned out to have been postponed for the fourth time. True, there was another flight to Duisburg with a stopover in Prague. But the transit flight wasn't in the timetable, of course, while the plane to Madrid, also with a stopover in Prague, left at a very inconvenient time, and they had to redraw their plans right there at the ticket office. This reduced a burly young guy in a track suit, wearing a gold chain as thick as a finger and clutching a cell phone in his ma.s.sive hairy hand, to a state of inexplicable fury. He was on the point of pushing little Yari out of the way, but Raivo concocted a hasty spell of respect, and after that the line that had gathered behind them stopped complaining about the leisurely manner in which the Finns were consulting.

"We'll take the Duisburg plane," Yukha decided at last. "It's more convenient. And we won't have to wait so long.

They'll postpone the Prague flight another three times at least, won't they?"

Of course they would. The reality lines were woven into a tight knot, and the illfated flight wouldn't leave until late that evening.

The almost forgotten sensation of freedom was as intoxicating as their favorite Lapin Kulta beer. While Yukha was talking to the pretty girl at the ticket desk (who was already ha.s.sled out of her mind), Yari and Raivo enjoyed themselves staring around the large hall, looking at the pa.s.sengers walking by, the sales a.s.sistants in the brightly lit aquariums of their little shops, the international airline offices that are always there in any major airport...

It was Yari who spotted the Other.

"Look!"

There was a Light magician standing at a counter near the exit to the boarding gates, drinking coffee from a small, dark green cup. And there was a half-empty travel bag lying beside his tall stool.

Yari and Raivo studied the Light One's aura for a while-he was perfectly composed and completely in control of his emotions. He must have noticed them, but he didn't give any sign.

"When are they ever going to leave us in peace?" Raivo sighed.

"Do you think he's following us?"

"Of course," Raivo said with conviction. "We have to present ourselves at a session of the Tribunal. And the Moscow Night Watch has to be certain that the witnesses they released have left for Prague. You'll see, he'll follow us all the way to the boarding ramp."

"But there's almost five hours left until our flight."

"The Other's in no hurry. He's working."

Yukha joined them with the tickets. There was a faint breath of magic coming from him-of course there hadn't been any tickets left for today's flight, so he'd had some taken from the special reserve by influencing the girl at the desk and the airport manager.

"Here, take them..." he began, but suddenly broke off. He looked closely at the other Brothers and asked, "What's wrong?"

"A spy. Over there at the counter, drinking coffee."

Yukha looked and saw the Light Other.

And just at that moment a murky red stripe cut across the even azure tone of the spy's aura.

"Something's upset him," Yari said "Another One!" said Raivo. "Over there, by the way out!"

There was a dark-haired, stocky man aged thirty-something standing right beside the gla.s.s doors, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief with one hand, and holding a cell phone to his ear with the other. He wasn't saying anything, either, but obviously listening to lengthy instructions from someone. There was a small black briefcase standing beside him.

This Other was a Dark magician.

"And they're following us too," muttered Raivo.

"Why would anyone be interested in us?" Yukha asked doubtfully. "Any number of Others could have business at Moscow's international airport!"

"Remain vigilant, brother!" Yari reminded him. "Fafnir is saddened and alarmed by carelessness."

Yukha thought gloomily that after the hopeless failure of the operation to deliver the Talon to Moscow, the resurrected Fafnir ought to incinerate all four of them. Or at least the three survivors. But, as usual, he didn't say anything out loud.

Meanwhile the Light One finished his coffee, cast a glance of displeasure at the Dark One, and set off in the general direction of the restaurant. His aura had returned to its even azure color, with a barely visible hint of cherry-red where the stripe had been.

The Dark One was still talking on his cell phone. Or rather, listening.

"They want to make sure we leave!" said the shrewd Raivo. "As if we weren't delighted to go-what have we got to do here?"

But Raivo was wrong.

The Light magician wandered around the airport for a while and then settled at the counter again, reading some book and sipping coffee. The Dark magician finished his conversation and walked across to the ticket desk, and the Brothers sensed a trace of magic. Quite strong magic, too-about fourth level.

"What's he doing there?" Raivo asked, getting worried. "Is he getting a ticket too? Eh? Yukha, he's not going to bother us, is he?"

"Why would he?" Yukha asked. "Look!"

The Dark magician walked away from the window in the counter with a ticket in his hand.

"They've canceled a ticket someone had already paid for," Raivo guessed. "Would you believe it? There'll be an uproar..."

And there was an uproar, when the pa.s.sengers were registering for the flight four hours later, when they all found themselves in the same line, including the Light magician. One of the pa.s.sengers was politely informed that his ticket had been sold to him by mistake, that the airline apologized to him and offered him a seat in business cla.s.s on the next flight...

The Dark magician watched the outraged pa.s.senger's complaints as if nothing unusual was happening. He actually seemed to be smiling. But the Regin Brothers had no reason to smile-the Dark magician and the Light magician were flying on the same plane as them.

"They've decided to see us all the way to Prague," Raivo eventually announced. "They're taking this business seriously."

Yukha shook his head. "No, brother. No. Something's not right here. You'll see-they'll come up and want to talk to us..."

Chapter one.

-?- Gesar had summoned Anton in the evening, when the a.n.a.lysts and the technical staff had already gone home, and the field operatives who happened to be on duty that night had only just begun arriving at headquarters. The corridors on the second floor smelled of freshly brewed coffee, hot cinnamon buns, and mild, fragrant tobacco-that year a fashion for smoking pipes had swept through almost the entire Night Watch staff. Even the women hadn't escaped it.

It was about a year already since Anton had worked in the IT department; Tolik had replaced him as boss of the computers and the girls who operated them. A second-level magician-Anton had been cla.s.sed as second level at the beginning of the year-was too important a figure to be spending his time stuck in a chair, tapping away at a keyboard and debugging programs.

"Like some coffee?" Semyon asked. Anton nodded, and just at that moment the phone rang. Silence fell instantly in the little room where the four field operatives-Anton, Semyon, Garik, and Bear-were sitting. They could all sense a call from the boss.

And who it was for.

Anton's colleagues watched closely as he picked up the receiver.

"Come in to see me as soon as you're free," Gesar ordered him without saying h.e.l.lo. "Finish your coffee and then come in."

"Very well," Anton replied in a steady voice. "As you wish, Boris Ignatievich."

He thought for a moment and then lit his pipe. If Gesar hadn't warned him time was short, it meant there was no great hurry.

"You in line for a dressing-down?" Garik inquired. Anton just shrugged. He could be in line for anything, from a charge of betraying the cause of the Night Watch to a promotion, from being told to stay in the office and not stick his nose outside to being ordered to storm the Dark Ones' headquarters. When a magician of the highest level got some i.e. into his head, it was pointless trying to guess his plans. Especially if that magician was in the kind of bad mood that Gesar had been in for the last few months.

Basically they were all feeling pretty lousy. This year had been just one failure after another. It had all started in the summer, when the workaday, humdrum arrest of a witch practicing magic illegally had spilled over into conflict with the Dark Ones. Then the fine young magician Igor Teplov, who had drained his powers in that conflict, had been sent to the Artek children's camp to recover and run foul of a deliberate provocation by the Dark Ones. A witch called Alisa Donnikova had managed to enchant him and make him fall in love with her. She was Zabulon's girlfriend, the same Dark b.i.t.c.h who had interfered time and again in the Night Watch's most complicated intrigues. This time Alisa hadn't gone unpunished-Igor had killed her. But in the process he had exceeded the limits of force permissible in self-defense, and now his fate hung by a thread.

About a month later Vitaly Rogoza had turned up, and that had proved to be a real disaster. At first they'd taken him for an ordinary Dark One, then they'd begun to suspect the visiting Ukrainian was an emissary, sent to a.s.sist the Day Watch. But Rogoza had turned out to be a Mirror-that very rarest of phenomena, which has been recorded less than ten times in the entire history of the Watches. He was a direct creation of the Twilight, a monstrous fighting machine molded out of a quite unexceptional individual, who might not even have been an Other. If only they'd realized that straightaway... but they hadn't. And in the struggle with the Mirror, Tiger Cub had been killed, Svetlana had lost her powers, and several other magicians had suffered to a greater or lesser degree.

Things were very, very bad...

Anton had cursed himself over and over again for not realizing the need to conduct a detailed a.n.a.lysis of the circ.u.mstances in which the Mirror had appeared. After all, there were similar cases in the secret archives-the appearance of a magician who evaded cla.s.sification, a rapid increase in his powers, a decisive skirmish-and then he disappeared. Everything fit. Right down to the final moment, when Vitaly Rogoza had melted into thin air, dematerialized, and vanished into the depths of the Twilight that had given birth to him.

But never mind Anton, never mind even Garik or Semyon. For them a Mirror was one of those numerous exotic occurrences they'd only heard about in lectures or read about in the archives. Why hadn't Gesar or Olga, with all their experience, realized the truth immediately? They'd run into Mirrors before, after all...

Things were bad. Nothing was going right. As if the Darkness had been infuriated by the Night Watch's recent successes and was striking blow after blow. And very successfully too, it had to be admitted.

Anton shook his head to refuse the second cup of coffee that Semyon offered him. He carefully cleaned out his pipe, casting an involuntary sideways glance at Bear.

He was cleaning out his pipe too. The little pipe with a long, thin stem that had belonged to Tiger Cub. The girl had only smoked it occasionally, mostly to keep her friends company. But now that Tiger Cub was gone, Bear smoked his own pipe and hers by turns. It was probably the only way he had expressed his feelings since Tiger Cub's death-the gentle way he handled that pipe... and perhaps that fixed stare when Vitaly Rogoza had begun to dematerialize. A gaze full of regret: Bear hadn't had a chance to get his hands on Rogoza, he hadn't been able to satisfy his thirst for vengeance...

Like Alisher, the Light One from Uzbekistan whose father had been killed a year earlier by Alisa.

Anton had his own accounts to settle with the Day Watch and its chief, too. But of course the accounts would never be paid. The Treaty shackled both Watches, the Inquisition made sure it was observed, and the only way around it was to cut right to the chase and challenge an enemy to a duel... which was what Igor had done, for instance. And what was the result? The witch was dead, but now the magician was facing dematerialization, waiting for the decision of the European office of the Tribunal. And it wasn't hard to guess what it would be...

Anton got up, nodded to his friends, and made for the boss's office on the third floor.

He was feeling really sick at heart, not looking forward at all to the approaching New Year festivities that people everywhere around the planet were antic.i.p.ating so eagerly, as if the number 2000 could change anything. What did it all really matter? But when Anton reached the door of the office, he felt a faint stirring of interest.

The magical defenses there were very strong. The Night Watch building itself was protected against observation, and the employees' offices and conference halls had additional screening. But it seemed like today Gesar had put in a lot of extra effort to ensure confidentiality: The air in the corridor was still and stifling, saturated with energy. And this invisible wall extended into the Twilight, much farther down than the first two levels that were accessible to Anton.

He walked into the office and closed the door firmly behind him. He sensed a slight movement behind his back as the defensive field closed together after being torn for a moment.

"Sit down, Anton," said Gesar, and asked in a perfectly friendly voice: "Tea, coffee?"

"Thanks, Boris Ignatievich," Anton replied, calling Gesar by his human name, "but I've just had one."

"A mug of beer then?" Gesar asked unexpectedly.

Anton had to stop himself rubbing his eyes or even pinching his arm. Gesar had never shunned the joys of life. He could leap about with the young people at a discotheque, flirt a bit with the silly young girls, and even take off with one of them for the whole night. He enjoyed sitting in a restaurant over dishes of exotic food, driving the waiters backward and forward, and setting the cooks trembling with his knowledge of exotic culinary subtleties. He could even go out with his staff, acting like one of the boys and drinking beer with smoked bream, vodka with freshly salted pickles, and wine with fruit.

But there was one thing Gesar never did, and that was to hold parties at the workplace. The ten members of the a.n.a.lytical section who drank a bottle of cognac to celebrate the birthday of Yulia, the watch's youngest enchantress and a universal favorite, had been punished with genuinely brilliant originality. Not even an intercession by Olga, who had been involved in the misdemeanor along with the others, had helped. The punishment had been devised individually for each of them, and it had been the most hurtful possible. Yulia, for instance, had been made to stay away from the Watch offices for a week and instead attend an ordinary school with teenagers her own age, go to the ice-cream parlor with the girls in her cla.s.s, and go to the movies and discotheques with the boys. Yulia had returned to the Watch, fuming with indignation, and for ages she'd kept repeating: "G.o.d, if you only knew how stupid they all are! I hate them."

For those three words "I hate them!" she received another day's penalty and a long lecture from Gesar on the subject of "Can a Light enchantress entertain negative feelings for people?"

So now Anton was standing there in front of Gesar, frozen over the chair he'd been about to sit down in. He'd forgotten what he was doing.

"Sit down, will you?" Gesar prompted him. "No point in standing. So will you have a beer?"

"It's not quite the weather for it," Anton replied, indicating the window with his eyes. Outside there were large, heavy flakes of snow swirling through the air. A genuine Christmas blizzard. "Not the right weather... and not the right place?"

He surprised himself by making the last phrase sound like a question.

Gesar thought for a moment. "Yes, we could go to some amusing little place," he said, with a note of real interest in his voice. "For instance, that little cafe in the South-West district, where all the dentists go. Can you imagine it? The favorite cafe of Moscow's tooth-pullers? And there's a little pizzeria at the Belorussian station, that's a real blast..."

"Boris Ignatievich," Anton asked, unable to resist, "where do you dig all these places up from? The mountain-skiers' restaurant, the lesbians' bar, the plumbers' snack bar, the philatelists' pelmeni joint..."

Gesar shrugged and spread his arms: "Anton, my dear fellow, let me remind you once again what we work with.

We work with..."

"The Dark Ones," Gorodetsky blurted out and sat down in the chair.

"No, my boy, you're wrong. We work with people. And people are not a herd of cloned sheep who chew their gra.s.s in synchronized motion and all fart at the same time. Every human being is an individual. That is our joy, because it makes the work of the Dark Ones harder. And it's also our misfortune, because it makes our work harder too. In order to understand these people, whose souls, after all, are what the endless battle between the Watches is fought over, we have to know them all. It's not just that I have to, you understand. We have to! And we have to understand every one of them-from the pimply-faced kid who chews Ecstasy tabs at the discotheque to the ancient professor who's the last in a dying line of blue-blooded aristocrats and spends all his time growing cacti... Oh, by the way, the bar where cactus-lovers get together has rather interesting cuisine and highly original decor. But you and I can't go anywhere right now. Did you sense the defenses?"

Anton nodded.

"Believe me, I had good reason to install them. And sound security arrangements in a crowded place would be far more complicated. I don't think I can really afford to waste that much Power at the moment..." Gesar rubbed his hand across his face and sighed. He looked really tired, all right. "By the way... take this. A small present."

Anton accepted the small object from his boss's hands with a surprised expression. It was something like a globe: a ball that was made out of thin needles of bone... yes, it was bone... bent into arcs and stuck into two little disks of wood at the poles. The ball was empty... But no, it wasn't. It was full of Power. Power that was sleeping, constrained.

"What is it?" Anton asked, almost in a panic.

"Don't worry. It's not liquefied bliss."

"Er... what's liquefied bliss?"

Gesar sighed: "How should I know? It was a joke. A figure of speech. A turn of phrase. A metaphor. I'm not even sure that bliss exists, let alone whether it can be liquefied. What you're holding in your hands is something like a magical white noise generator. If you need to have an absolutely-let me emphasize that-absolutely secret conversation, one that n.o.body can listen to, no matter what means they use, simply break the ball in your hand.

You'll probably cut your hand, that's just the unavoidable price. But then for the next twelve hours there'll be no way anyone can monitor or check what's happening in a sphere ten meters across, with you at the center, no matter what technical or magical means they use."

"Thanks," Anton said gloomily. "Somehow a present like this fails to inspire me."

"You'll thank me again for it yet. So, will you have a beer or not?"