Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (43 page)

‘Where are you going?’ Olga shouted after me.

‘Home. Consider me on leave.’ As I closed the door, I couldn’t resist adding: ‘Indefinitely’.

ONE BAD THING
about an ordinary city flat is that it’s hard to burn a large object in it. Especially if the object’s magical, which means that in order to avoid unpleasant consequences it’s best to burn it with ordinary fire.

Now, if only I’d had a flat with a fireplace in it! Then I’d have tossed the wooden chalice into the blazing heap of wood, closed down the damper of the hearth a bit and watched as the prophecy for which Erasmus had died disappeared for ever.

But just what was this prophecy? And why had Arina and I both got away scot-free with listening to Kesha’s prophecy, which the Tiger had wanted so badly to prevent that he had even spoken in human language? And in any case, it was strange, preposterous: not a prophecy, but an information bulletin – it could have been included in Wikipedia . . .

I glanced round the balcony. Maybe I could light a little fire here? I could handle the fire brigade if I had to . . .

But we had a good balcony, glassed-in, with an insulated wood-laminate floor. Svetlana would bite my head off if a burnt spot appeared on that wood. If only there had been some ceramic tiles left over after the renovation work . . . but we’d used up every last one.

After I’d wasted enough time trying to come up with something, I went back into the flat, through into the kitchen, opened the oven and took out the steel baking tray. That would do the job.

But then, why go back out onto the balcony? Erasmus’s wooden chalice wasn’t very big, it fitted into the oven perfectly.

I held it in my hands again for a moment. It was made very precisely, lovingly. Perhaps not with any special skill, but with genuine care and application.

So there had been two of them. It was a pity to do this, of course. Quite apart from the cunningly concealed magical filling, the chalice was interesting in its own right. An ancient relic . . .

But the prophecy concealed in the chalices had already killed its owner.

Oh no. Enough sacrifices. Down with prophecies. I put the chalice on the baking tray and went to get a bottle of lighter fluid. (I’d been using those cheap gas lighters for ages, but the bottle had been standing in the cupboard, waiting for its time to come.)

‘May you rest easy in the Twilight, Erasmus,’ I said, dousing the chalice generously with petrol.

The front door slammed.

‘Daddy! I’m home!’ Nadya shouted. ‘Anna Tikhonovna fell ill and let us off the last lesson!’

Sveta had been going to collect Nadya from school that day.

‘Okay,’ I shouted back, squatting down in front of the oven with a box of matches in my hand.

‘I’ve brought visitors.’

‘Yes?’ I asked, looking round.

Nadya appeared in the doorway. Then Kesha appeared awkwardly behind her.

‘Hi, Innokentii,’ I said. For some reason I wasn’t surprised by his visit. ‘How are things?’

‘Fine . . .’ he said and hesitated, not looking up. ‘The lessons are interesting.’

‘That’s great,’ I said in the vigorous tone that grown-ups use for talking to children.

‘Kesha’s mum is working late,’ Nadya explained. ‘I invited him over to our place. Mummy promised to take him home afterwards.’

‘But where is mummy?’

‘She drove us to the entrance and then went to get some toilet paper,’ Nadya said, with a giggle. There’s an age at which the very words ‘toilet paper’ sound remarkably funny, especially if you say them in front of someone the same age as you.

‘Yes, I forgot to buy any yesterday,’ I said in a repentant voice.

Nadya looked round and shouted into the hallway: ‘No, those are mummy’s slippers, the green ones are for visitors!’

‘Have we got lots of visitors, then?’ I asked, getting up.

‘Not really lots,’ said Nadya, slightly embarrassed. ‘Just Aunty Arina as well. We met her in the entrance. She was coming to see us.’

I took a couple of swift strides and positioned myself between the children and the hallway. My left hand was still holding the box of matches. But the fingers of my right hand were already folded into the Shield sign.

‘Anton,’ Arina shouted from the hallway. ‘Peace, friendship, chewing gum!’

She glanced in cautiously from the corridor.

‘I come in peace!’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘No evil here. You can see that the children are fine!’

Nadya seemed to have realised that she had acted rashly. She didn’t make a sound, but she grabbed hold of Kesha’s hand and dragged him in further behind me.

And I felt a bottomless well of Power seething and brimming over just a metre away from me.

‘Nadya,’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘You know perfectly well that you shouldn’t bring strange . . . people back home.’

‘But she’s not an ordinary person,’ said Nadya, trying to make excuses. ‘She’s an Other . . . a Light One.’

‘She used to be a Dark One,’ I said. ‘But that’s not the point: there are some Light Ones who don’t have a single white spot left on them.’

‘Anton, you’re being insulting!’ Arina exclaimed indignantly.

She looked entirely peaceable. A long dress, long hair arranged in a bun, looking like an elderly village school teacher. The large fluffy slippers on her feet completed the picture.

‘What have you come for?’ I asked.

I wasn’t really afraid. Svetlana would arrive in a moment. I was in my own flat – and at home the very walls lend you strength, every Other knows that. And in addition, I had my daughter beside me. Not very skilful, but infinitely powerful. And if she struck out – with anything at all – Arina would go flying out through the wall.

‘As I understand it, you’ve decided to do away with the chalice,’ Arina said. ‘I’d like to watch that. May I?’

‘I’m going to burn it,’ I said. ‘And don’t try to change my mind.’

Something elusive glinted for a moment in her eyes. Could it really have been relief?

‘I swear that I won’t! But can I just watch? And then I’ll leave! I swear—’

‘I’ve had enough of your oaths!’ I growled. ‘You should be thankful that the children are here. Nadya, Kesha! Stand over there, in the corner! I’m just going to burn this lump of wood, then Arina will say bye-bye and leave. Okay?’

‘Can I say “See you later, alligator”?’ Arina asked, smiling sweetly.

‘How come you have such a good knowledge of 1950s slang?’ I asked. ‘You were asleep then!’

‘I’ve been watching a lot of movies just recently,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the modern ones very much, they’re spiteful. But fifty years ago people knew how to make good-hearted films.’

‘A good-hearted Baba-Yaga,’ I snorted and prepared to strike the match. Arina watched me attentively, not looking as if she wanted to interfere. But one of her hands was tightly clenched on something. ‘The Minoan Sphere!’ I said, realising what it was. ‘Put it on the floor and take a couple of steps back!’

She didn’t argue. That should probably have put me on my guard. She opened her hand, showed me the small sphere of white marble . . . so that’s what you look like, you famous Minoan Sphere, the Inquisition’s headache number one. Then she squatted down, carefully placed the sphere on the floor and set it rolling in my direction. Either the floor of the flat wasn’t very even, or Arina’s hand trembled, but the sphere rolled under the shoe locker.

‘Anton, I’m playing fair and square.’

Oh, but I don’t believe in honest Witches at all – and not very much in honest Others . . .

‘No sudden movements,’ I said, just in case. I lit the match and threw it into the oven, trying to keep my eyes on Arina.

There was a flash of flame. Quiet a powerful one – the concentration of petrol fumes must have built up. Nadya even cried out – but, like the fine young fellow he was, Kesha stepped forward towards the stove, to face up to the danger.

‘That’s it,’ I said to Arina. ‘Happy now?’

Arina was gazing intently into the oven.

‘So, you made up your mind after all, daddy?’ Nadya asked in a deliberately loud voice, evidently ashamed of being frightened.

‘Yes. No one should hear this prophecy,’ I said. ‘It has already . . . done enough damage today.’

Arina suddenly laughed.

‘Ah, Anton,’ she said. ‘Straight, honest, simple and naive. So you still haven’t realised?’

‘Daddy, I think the prophecy is revealed when the chalice is destroyed . . .’ whispered Nadya.

I managed to turn round in time. I even managed to take a step towards the open oven, towards the wooden chalice blazing with a bluish flame . . .

But the next second the threshold of destruction that Erasmus had implanted in his handiwork was reached.

And I was on the edge of a dark forest at night.

About five metres away from me I could just barely make out a village track running through the darkness. Beyond it were fields, and beyond the fields were dim lights that I guessed at rather than saw with my eyes. Yes, the electricity supply wasn’t so good back then – or rather, there wasn’t any.

There were two shadows darting about in silence on the track. One was almost incorporeal and moved with incredible speed. The other was moving fast, too, but was far more material – and it was carrying a glowing blue whip in its hand. The blows of the whip occasionally connected with its adversary, but didn’t seem to cause him any serious injury at all.

I suddenly realised that I was starting to respect Zabulon. He hadn’t abandoned his underage pupil to be torn to pieces by the Tiger. The Great Dark Magician had accepted the challenge of a combat that should have been his last.

I heard strange sounds beside me, as if someone was being sick. I dragged my eyes away from the magical duel, and saw a thick old oak tree. There was a hole in the oak at about the level of my chest, and protruding from the hole were Erasmus Darwin’s legs. He ought to have been fourteen years old but he seemed to be only the same height as Kesha, and he had only half as much bulk as the modern young Prophet. So the idea of historically increasing rates of development was clearly no myth after all.

‘He’s coming for us,’ I heard suddenly in a barely audible whisper from the hollow tree. I took a step closer and leaned down towards Erasmus’s back. The illusion of the world around me was complete – I even caught a faint smell of sweat and fear coming from the boy. ‘The Executioner’s coming to make you talk, the Executioner’s coming to make you keep quiet . . .’

Yes, that was right. They used to call him the Executioner then.

‘The Executioner needs blood, the Executioner needs flesh . . .’ Erasmus muttered. ‘The Executioner will drink the blood, the Executioner will eat the flesh, the Executioner will take the soul . . . Not enough, not enough, not enough blood, flesh, souls . . . Never enough, never enough, never enough . . . the Executioner is falling asleep . . .’

That night, separated from me by an abyss of time, was warm. But I was shivering violently.

He was saying almost the same thing as Kesha!

Only in different words . . . the words of his own time . . .

‘The Executioner will come, the Executioner will never stop, the Executioner doesn’t sleep, the Executioner is ready for work . . . Only a maiden, born through deception, the daughter of a Great Enchantress who has rejected her Power, the daughter of a Great Magician who has taken Power that is not his own, only a girl, a girl will be able to kill the Executioner . . . the girl Elpis, the daughter of deception, the girl Elpis, the Executioner’s sister . . .’

Feeling as if I was about to black out, I noted that Erasmus had received a good classical education. In Greek, Elpis means the same as Nadezhda means in Russian: Hope.

I had to leave. Turn away. Plug my ears. Not listen.

But I couldn’t do it.

And what good would it do anyway, when my daughter Nadya, the boy-prophet Kesha and the old witch Arina were there, like disembodied shadows beside me, listening to Erasmus’s mutterings?

But not a single human being . . .

‘The Executioner is all the Power of the world,’ Erasmus continued, making his confession to the tree. ‘The Executioner is all the magic of the world. The girl can kill the Executioner. The girl can kill magic. Kill the Executioner and you kill magic! Kill the Executioner and you kill magic . . .’

But no, after all there was nothing really terrible happening. It was the same prophecy. The same one that Kesha had spoken. It hadn’t frightened the Tiger, so what was the meaning of this situation?

It was a preamble.

An introduction.

A harbinger of the real prophecy.

I flung my hands up and covered my ears. But the world around me was only an illusion, living according to its own laws, and I carried on hearing everything.

First – Zabulon’s despairing cry. And then his strangled howl: ‘Mercy! I will leave, Executioner! Spare me!’

If he ever learned that I had witnessed his shame I was done for. No treaties or obligations would ever stop Zabulon from thirsting for my death a hundred times more keenly than before . . .

And then I heard Erasmus’s voice. Slower and more powerful. No longer a frightened boy’s voice, but the voice of a maturing man.

‘You, magician from a harsh northern country, who heard not what you should have heard at the proper time, but have come here as a disembodied shadow and learned what you did not wish to know . . . The Executioner will die and magic will quit our world. Your choice. Her Power. His fate. The Executioner will come and you will have to decide. But whatever you may decide, you will never know peace again.’

‘I’ve never known it anyway!’ I shouted. I wanted to grab hold of Erasmus, drag him out of the hollow tree and lash him hard across the cheeks – to make him shut up. But I knew that my hands would pass straight through the Prophet’s body.

‘I pity you – and forgive me,’ Erasmus said and fell silent. The legs protruding from the hole in the tree twitched and went limp. He had clearly lost consciousness.

As I stood there, I didn’t realise immediately that I was sobbing and tears were running down my cheeks. Zabulon was groaning somewhere close by. The Tiger walked up to the tree unhurriedly. He stood there, looking at the part of Erasmus that was visible. He was the same as in our time – young, with a genial, serene face. Only the clothes he was wearing were old-fashioned and terribly uncomfortable, to my way of thinking. The Tiger looked at Erasmus for a few seconds. Then he turned his head and looked at me. As if he could see me.