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abandoned villages and crumbling grain elevators in a train. A sense of wasted effort. A punch flung too hard,
connecting with nothing but the air.
"Zabulon," I said, "if you can hear me..."
Calm. The usual calm of a late evening in Moscow-car engines roaring, music playing somewhere behind the
windows, empty streets.
"There's no way you can have covered every single possibility," I said, speaking to the empty air. "Just no way.
There are always forks in the road. The future isn't determined. You know that. And so do I."
I set out across the road without looking right or left, taking no notice of the traffic. I was on a mission, right?
The sphere of exclusion.
A streetcar screeched to a halt on the rails. Cars braked and skirted around an empty space with me at its
center. Nothing else existed for me now, only that building where we'd done battle on the roof months before, the
darkness, those bright flashes of an energy that human eyes couldn't see.
And that power, visible to so few, was on the increase.
I was right, this was the eye of the hurricane. This was the place they'd been leading me to all this time. Great.
Now I'd arrived. So you didn't forget that shameful little defeat after all, Zabulon? You haven't forgotten the way you
were slapped down in front of your minions.
Apart from all his exalted goals-and I understood that for him they were exalted-the Dark Magician cherished
another burning desire. Once it had been a simple human weakness, but now it had been increased
immeasurably by the Twilight.
The desire for revenge. To get even.
To play the battle out all over again.
This is a trait all you great magicians have, Light and Dark-you're bored with ordinary battle, you want to win
elegantly. To humiliate your opponent. You're bored with simple victories; you've had plenty of those already. The
great confrontation has developed into an endless game of chess. Gesar, the great Light Magician, was playing it
when he assumed someone else's appearance and took such delight in taunting Zabulon.
But for me the confrontation still hadn't turned into a game.
And maybe that was exactly where my chance lay.
I took the pistol out of its holster and clicked the safety catch off. I took a deep, deep breath as if I were about to
dive into the water. It was time.
Maxim could sense that this time it would all be over quickly.
He wouldn't spend all night lying in wait. He wouldn't spend hours tracking down his prey. This time the flash of
inspiration had been too bright. More than just a sense of an alien, hostile presence-a clear direction to the
target.
He drove as far as the intersection of Galushkin Street and Yaroslavskaya Street and parked in the courtyard of a
high rise. He watched the black flame glimmering as it slowly moved about inside the building.
The Dark Magician was in there. Maxim could already feel him as a real person; he could almost see him. A
man. His powers were weak. Not a werewolf or a vampire or an incubus. A straightforward Dark Magician. The
level of his powers was so low, he wouldn't cause any problems. The problem was something else.
Maxim could only hope and pray that this wouldn't keep happening so often. The strain of killing creatures of
Darkness day after day wasn't just physical. There was also that absolutely terrible moment when the dagger
pierced his enemy's heart. The moment when everything started to shudder and sway, when colors and sounds
faded away and everything started moving slowly. What would he do if he ever made a mistake? If he killed
someone who wasn't an enemy of the human race, but just an ordinary person? He didn't know.
But there was nothing he could do about that, since he was the only one in the whole wide world who could tell
the Dark Ones apart from ordinary people. Since he was the only one who'd been given a weapon-by God, by
destiny, by chance.
Maxim took out his wooden dagger and looked at the toy with a heavy heart, feeling slightly confused. He wasn't
the one who'd whittled this dagger; he wasn't the one who'd given it the highfalutin name of a "misericord."
They were only twelve at the time, he and Petka, his best friend, in fact his only friend when he was a child
and-why not admit it?-the only friend he'd ever had. They used to play at knights in battle-not for very long, mind
you; they had plenty of other ways to amuse themselves when they were kids, without all these computer games
and clubs. All the kids on the block had played the game for just one short summer, whittling swords and
daggers, pretending to slice at each other with all their might, but really being careful. They had enough sense to
realize that even a wooden sword could take someone's eye out or draw blood. It was strange how he and Petka
had always ended up on opposite sides. Maybe that was because Petka was a bit younger and Maxim felt
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slightly embarrassed about having him as a friend and the adoring way he gazed at Maxim and trailed around
after him as if he were in love. It was just a moment in one of the battles when Maxim knocked Petka's wooden
sword out of his hands-his friend had hardly even tried to resist-and cried: "You're my prisoner!"
But then something strange had happened. Petka had handed him this dagger and said that the valiant knight
had to take his life with this dagger and not humiliate him by taking him prisoner. It was a game, of course, only a
game, but Maxim had shuddered inside when he pretended to strike with the wooden dagger. And there had been
one brief, agonizing moment when Petka had looked at Maxim's hand holding the dagger where it had halted, just
short of the grubby white T-shirt, and then glanced into his eyes. And then he'd blurted out: "Keep it, you can
have it as a trophy."
Maxim had been happy to accept the wooden dagger. As a trophy and as a present. But for some reason he'd
never used it in the game again. He'd kept it at home and tried to forget about it, as if he felt ashamed of the
unexpected gift and his own sentimentality. But he'd never, ever forgotten about it. Even when he grew up and got
married and his own first child had started to grow, he'd never forgotten about it. The toy weapon always lay in the
drawer with the albums of children's photographs, the envelopes with locks of hair, and all the other sentimental
nonsense. Until the day Maxim first felt the presence of Darkness in the world.
It was as if the wooden dagger had summoned him. And it had proved to be a genuine weapon, pitiless,
merciless, invincible.
But Petka was gone now. They'd grown apart when they were still young: A year is a big difference for children,
but for teenagers it's a massive gulf. And then life had separated them. They'd still smiled at each other whenever
they met and shaken hands, even enjoyed a drink together a few times and reminisced about their childhood.
Then Maxim had got married and moved away and they'd almost completely lost contact. But this winter he'd had
news of Petka, purely by chance, from his mother-he phoned her regularly, just like a good son should, in the
evening. "Do you remember Petya? You were such good friends when you were children, quite inseparable."
He'd remembered. And he'd realized immediately where an introduction like that was leading.
He'd fallen to his death from the roof of some high rise, though God only knew what he'd been doing up there in
the middle of the night. Maybe he'd deliberately committed suicide, or maybe he'd been drunk-only the doctors [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]