This is a fan translation of School Oversight (Школьный надзор) by Sergei Lukyanenko and Arkady Shushpanov. The novel is a spin-off of the Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko.
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Note: Footnotes can be found at the end of the chapter.
Chapter 5
Dmitry was once again walking along Dvortsovaya Avenue to the parks. He even thought that today he was a lot like the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins because of all of this traveling there and back again. Strigal had offered to send the teacher instantaneously, but Dmitry refused outright.
He needed to collect his thoughts, and it worked better while walking. He also wanted for Anna and the Dead Poets to notice his approach from afar.
They had.
A wolf appeared from somewhere to the right. It began trotting next to him, keeping pace, without running ahead or giving any signals. Dmitry recognized Gogi Bureyev in his Twilight appearance. Despite his second initiation, he hadn't changed who he was, even though he was now probably a very powerful shifter mage.
The wolf was running next to him openly. Night had fallen on the former Sarskaya Myza [Footnote 1]. Dmitry and his gray companion didn't run into anyone. Not even a single car passed by. Dreher was certain that the lack of humans had been caused by the conspirators.
"I don't know what Dunkel told you—" Strigal had told Dmitry after waking up from his trance.
"I'd prefer not to have known myself," Dreher replied.
"…but I'll ask you to remain open when you re-enter the park."
"All right."
"We're going to pump Power into you."
"No need. I'm not going to do anything against the children."
"Teacher Dreher!.."
"I'll bring them out. But I want you to promise…"
Strigal listened to him and raised an eyebrow, "Why didn't you tell that to Dunkel yourself?"
"Don't know," Dreher admitted. "Didn't think of it right away. But we have to put them somewhere."
"I can't guarantee an affirmative reply. To be honest, I'm against it. But I'll pass it along."
Dreher rose and began walking back through the park without turning.
Good luck, teacher! this time Strigal's voice rang out in his mind. Dmitry didn't answer.
The werewolf was moving nearby. To be honest, Bureyev had never really looked like a hardened wolf. More like a large shaggy half-breed dog.
Dmitry involuntarily started thinking about where the first weres had come from. He hadn't heard that any of the early Others turned into, say, a mammoth. It wouldn't be until later that they learned to shift into small herbivore lizards. But any herbivore was a rarity. The vast majority of weres were predators, even Light shifters. Apparently, in the ancient times, the cavemen were simultaneously afraid of predatory animals and treated them with respect, choosing them as their totems. The first Others, a mutation of the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon, could have summoned the totems when entering the Twilight. That was what had affected their Twilight appearance. Back then everything was young, fresh, and new, penetrating deep and remembered for a long time. The way it was with children.
Then Dmitry recalled that many dogs also copied humans. They even learned to cross the street to traffic light signals. Maybe the Twilight had once been like those dogs. It just took a step further.
Mr. Dreher!
Dmitry recognized Komarov's voice.
Artyom?
You can't come in. You'll be human again.
I told you, it wouldn't be the first time. But it's best if you let me through. If I lose my abilities, I won't be able to show you what I must.
Dmitry wondered whether he ought to use the Mage Shield but then decided not to. Inquisition agents had likely tried to get into the palace complex under a shield like that but failed. The artifact lens amplified the power of anything and could punch through enchantments.
He didn't enter the Alexander Park. Together with the wolf, he walked to the Lyceum outbuilding.
Only one thing remained unclear to Dmitry. Owl Head hadn't said anything about it, while he himself hadn't thought to ask, crushed by the weight of new information.
How had those seven Lyceum students known what their experiments would lead to? Did they figure it out on their own, or did an Inquisitor tell them? They did have someone in the position of an overseer there. Dmitry seemed to recall reading about some overseer being kicked out of the Lyceum with Pushkin's involvement. Then again, that particular overseer might have had no relation to Other affairs.
Who taught them all magic? Did one of the professors combined the teaching of sciences with Other disciplines? Or were the teaching mages hiding under the guise of servants, tutors, and other members of the staff? What happened to them after all their wards turned into ordinary teenagers? Maybe they'd been quietly pulled out, replaced with human workers, leaving only a few for oversight. Or maybe they'd been tasked with protecting the students, monitoring the probability lines in order to ensure the desired future.
Considering the sort of future some of them had, the mages had done a piss-poor job. But then their tasks could've been different…
Dreher passed under the silent arch that connected the Lyceum to the imperial palace. The street ahead was also deserted under the starry sky.
This time it was six of them waiting for him. Bureyev kept up. Only now did the teacher finally realize that the number of the teenagers that had built the multi-figure artifact and the teenagers that had recreated it was the same.
If he discounted the jinn.
All were gathered on the steps in front of the Catherine Palace. To the right, as if on a cliff, stood the Cameron Gallery, ahead was the local Hermitage, towering over the well-manicured hedge of the park.
The classical statues seemed to have joined the gathering out of nocturnal boredom.
"What did you want to show us?" Artyom asked.
"Here." Dmitry sent a mental image. "Take a look."
Simultaneously, he pictured the first Twilight layer, where a giant middle finger addressed to Strigal appeared from out of the flows of Power.
I'm not going to explain anything to them in words. Dunkel told me alone. Meant for a narrow circle of people. Top secret. Burn before reading.
Good, teacher Dreher, said Strigal in Dmitry's head.
It was unlikely he'd seen the Twilight finger, which was just a figment of the teacher's imagination. The Inquisitor had most likely appreciated the move with the mental image.
The Dead Poets froze. Dmitry noted that Bureyev had returned his human appearance and was even standing dressed. The effect of the Fuaran spell and the rapid rise in level had helped the werewolves with something that had caused plenty of embarrassment at the school.
A mental image was an interesting thing. A lump of well-digested visual, auditory, and sensory information, seasoned with subjective attitude. It unfolded differently for each receiver. That was why, unlike aura molds, mental images were never permissible as evidence at Inquisition's Tribunals. But if one needed to relay something quickly, without lengthy explanations, they were invaluable.
"Something like that," the teacher broke the silence.
"Damn, we're climbing right into its mouth," Anatoly Klyushkin said.
"Like Jonah into the whale's belly," Dreher chuckled.
"Medicinal leeches, huh?" Artyom Komarov said thoughtfully.
"All we need is some quack to sell us," Dmitry agreed.
"The Inquisition is our quack," Anna said.
"What are you going to do, ladies and gentlemen?" Dreher inquired.
"What about you?.." Artyom gave him a confused look.
"What about me?" Dreher parried. "Was I the one to build that damned lens?"
"Do we have to surrender? Or to do what they did?"
"I didn't say that. They'll find someone to deactivate everything here."
"And we'll be tried by a Tribunal, right?" the gray wolf Bureyev finally spoke in a human voice.
"Not necessarily. You didn't want to be Light and Dark ones? Didn't want to drink blood and other such things? Then you can feel yourself as humans. When you choose not what you want but what—" Dmitry broke off suddenly. Carmadon had warned him not to speak in slogans. "Well, you don't know what!"
The Dead Poets seemed to think about it. Even the statues and the busts on the lawns also began thinking. The park's oaks, bound with steel corsets to keep them from breaking under the weight of the years, were also shifting their wooden brains.
"If we walk out of here now," Dmitry summarized, "I'll do everything in my power to get you recruited into the Inquisition. You're Higher ones now, you know a lot and can do a lot too. That's not something to be casually dismissed. If you weren't a revolutionary at a young age, you have no heart, if you're still a revolutionary at an old age, then you have no brain." [Footnote 2]
"You're not an old man yet, Mr. Dreher," Masha Danilova noted.
"You've definitely given me plenty of gray in the head."
"You know, Mr. Dreher, we're not old yet either," Artyom Komarov said.
"And?"
"Well, we can act… without a brain."
"And?"
"I have no intention of dismantling everything here. None of us does. Right?" Artyom turned to his friends.
"Artyom, what about the Twilight?" the smallest in the group, Stas Alekseyenko, spoke for the first time that day.
"We'll deal with the Twilight. As an ex-vampire, I can tell you that, yes, medicinal leeches are still used, just like a hundred years ago. But we also have blood transfusions! I'm not a leech, and neither are you."
Yeah, Owl Head's example wasn't the best, Dmitry thought. At least for this group. My opinion as a former teacher.
'We'll think of something," Ivan Danilov said calmly and carefully, as usual. "We'll figure it out. Anatoly will come up with an idea, Artyom will write it out, Anna will draw it."
"Sounds so simple…" Dreher exhaled.
"We need to study the Twilight. Try to come to an agreement with it, understand it," Masha supported her brother. "Like that ocean in Solaris. [Footnote 3] What does it want? What does it need? Maybe it needs healing, then it'll be able to digest everything on its own, all the Power of the world."
"That's right, Masha," Bureyev boomed in his early baritone. "All of us are Night, Day, leeches and frogs. Might as well be Twilight enemas!"
"Thanks, Mr. Dreher," Golubeva said. "We understand that you want what's best, but—"
"Screw them, no surrender!" Bureyev cut her off unceremoniously. "Tell them that."
"You tell them. I'm not going anywhere," Dreher said.
"Neither are we. We have nowhere to retreat to, we swore," Komarov replied.
"Then don't," Dmitry shrugged.
"What about you? You're an Inquisitor…" Anna said.
"You have your choice, I have mine."
"You won't stop us," Ivan warned him seriously.
"I have no intention of doing that. I'm curious what will happen myself. Maybe you're right. It's about time… to think of something more than leeches."
"If we leave everything as is," Anna said, "then no one is going to think of anything. No one is even going to try. They haven't over so many years."
Teacher Dreher! Strigal's voice rang out in Dmitry's head.
To be honest, the teacher had forgotten that his internal channel was open to monitoring. But it was too late to close it.
I'm here.
Open a portal. You know how.
But I've never done it before.
Focus on the point of opening on your side. We'll do the rest. We can take them all here and now. No one is going to get hurt. Open!
It won't work.
Artyom Komarov was again the first to notice Dreher's vacant stare. At the very least, his eyes grew suspicious. But Dreher couldn't worry about that now.
We can't storm them from the outside, but you're inside, Strigal explained.
You don't understand. I won't open a portal. Even if I knew how.
"Mr. Dreher," Komarov asked carefully, "are you all—"
"Don't disturb me!" Dreher bit back in irritation. "I've got an inner voice."
But the Dead Poets seemed to have felt that something was wrong. Before that, they'd been standing in a semicircle around Dreher. Now the radius of the geometric shape was significantly greater.
Have you thought about it, Dreher?
"Teacher Dreher," Dmitry wanted to correct him but held back.
I have.
So are you going to help the tactical team? Strigal asked again, for some reason.
Why would I? I'm staying here.
Yes or no?
Strangely enough, Dmitry was infuriated by this meticulousness.
Dreher threw his hand up, stopping him, and said sharply through the Twilight, No! A hundred times no! Is that what you wanted to hear?
Exactly. Strigal's voice became almost pleased.
There were loud thunderclaps all around them, as if someone had tossed a bunch of firecrackers, and those tiny explosions suddenly burned holes into the very fabric of creation. The holes grew rapidly and turned into portals, spitting out a large number of figures in gray robes, like a burst of spitballs from a straw.
"Nobody move! Get out of the Twilight! Hands in the air!" The powerful voice rang out in normal reality and didn't belong to Strigal.
What the… Dmitry didn't finish, realizing that he wasn't going to reach the former head Overseer.
The order had the opposite effect: the Dead Poets immediately vanished, leaving into the Twilight. No one even glanced in Dreher's direction, no one shouted, "You betrayed us!" Only the shifters lingered for a moment. Their clothing was torn to pieces, circling like dry leaves in fall. The only thing that didn't explode was Bureyev's tracksuit, as it was nothing more than an illusion.
Dmitry still got hit in the check by a piece of Masha Danilova's sneaker. For the first time, he was witnessing a naga transform. But Masha didn't just turn into a king cobra. The snake grew to the length of about nine meters. She was the last to leave into the Twilight. The final swing of the tail caught Dreher a lot more than the peace of the sneaker, knocking him off his feet and stunning him.
After coming to his senses, Dreher spent a brief moment trying to figure out who he was, where he was, and why he was there. At the moment, he was along in the middle of the Catherine Park. The moon was reflecting in two rectangular ponds. The silence stood like during the reign of Empress Catherine I.
Then Dreher entered the Twilight and found himself on a battlefield.
The Catherine Park wasn't in ruin like during the retreat of the Germans, but it was certainly heading in that direction. A statue on the lawn not far from Dreher had lost its head. Two others along the edges of the staircase were also shattered. Flashes of power glowed in the starless sky, all that was missing was the thundering of a cannonade and an air raid siren. Black, charred holes left by fireballs gaped in the hedge.
Dmitry turned his head and saw huge holes in the walls of the Cameron Gallery. He even swore out loud.
At the moment, the Overseer was deep in the rear. The fight was taking place on the shore of the pond and the adjoining islands. It didn't take a strategist to figure out what was happening there. The Dead Poets had likely hidden themselves in the park's vegetation and managed to complete a live magical chain, feeding Power to each other. It was perfect for guerilla warfare.
The Inquisitors knew that too and didn't tempt them. The teenagers couldn't employ their primary weapon, as they'd been forced into close combat. All because of him, Dreher.
The Dead Poets did have an exit, a very simple one. They could leave through a portal. There was probably a static one here somewhere.
Except they'd never abandon the Lyceum, the circuit, their idea.
Dmitry nearly tripped over a body. He didn't need to see the aura to tell that the gray robe under him was alive, just stunned. Possibly also struck by one of the nagas. When one was used to magic, one rarely expected to be punched in the face. The Inquisitor hadn't even managed to instinctively leave the first layer into the regular world.
Dreher turned the body face up and jerked.
It was Iva Mashkova.
Dmitry quickly pulled her out of the Twilight. He looked around and saw that everything around him was still calm and deserted; the statues and the Cameron Gallery were fine. Nothing would go away without a trace, of course. They'd start falling apart quicker, and the renovators would only be able to shake their heads in confusion.
Dreher sat the unconscious woman down, leaning her against a tree trunk. Above them, the trunk was wrapped in a "corset" of iron bars that looked like a medieval prototype of a neck brace. Dmitry caught himself wanting to kill Iva, but instead sighed and slapped her on the cheek.
No reaction.
"I didn't beat women till seventeen years old…" Dreher muttered, recalling Vysotsky's song and struck her several more times.
Mashkova groaned.
Dmitry poured Power into her, then waited for her to open her eyes and for them to focus.
"Listen to me!" he ordered, not recognizing his own voice. "As soon as you can move, leave. As far as you can, beyond the fence. Call for help, but make sure that no one else enters the park. I'll get everyone out. Understand?.."
Then he immediately left into the Twilight.
Something had changed on the first layer in those few minutes. There were no more powerful flashes over the pond, but in the landscape park, in the vicinity of the islands, he could hear crackling and flashes of discharges.
The Inquisitors had managed to scatter the Poets and were now trying to grab them one by one.
Dmitry quickly went there, immediately switching to a run and simultaneously putting a Mage Shield around himself. He kept jumping over the craters that looked as if they'd been left by shells, and when he was once again on the Ramp Alley, he saw a number of fallen trees.
The ramp behind him was broken into three pieces.
Dreher tried to pump the Mage Shield as much as he could, as there was more than enough Power around him and no need to borrow it from anyone. But the power of defensive magic was in its simplicity. Dmitry was far less skilled in search spells, one of the most important skills an Inquisitor was supposed to have. So he also took the simple route and formed Anna's mental image, rolling it into a gleaming ball only its creator could see and sending it forward.
Too bad he hadn't yet known this secret when they were looking for Chizhov, Shchukin, and Fedotov, the fans of night sabbaths. Many cadets at the Prague courses were surprised that a good number of flk tales and myths had a basis in reality. This was basically the ball of yarn given to Theseus by Ariadne to get through the Labyrinth.
The silver lump rolled along the Ramp Alley, then sharply went into the vegetation. For some reason, it brought him to a duel instead of Anna. In a meadow, right next to the edge of the trees, stood a large, very large wolf and the former Overseer Strigal. The beast was baring its teeth and growling. The Inquisitor outwardly calm. Neither looked away from the other, but Strigal still noticed Dreher.
"Don't interfere!" he said.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Dmitry replied. "This is Stas, right? Right now, I'd bet on him."
The teacher saw a wide tree stump nearby, walked to it, and sat down, pointedly throwing one leg over the other. He wouldn't have recognized Alekseyenko in his Twilight appearance, but he was absolutely certain who it was. And, like all the Dead Poets, Stas was already a Higher one, while Strigal wasn't. It was unlikely that he was going to use some trick like Alexander at the Smolensky Cemetery.
Everything was decided in a fraction of a second. Dmitry caught the werewolf's leap and didn't manage to figure out what the Inquisitor did. But the wolf was already rolling on the grass and whimpering, while Strigal continued to watch him dispassionately.
Then Dmitry rose.
"I told you—" Strigal turned to him.
He didn't get to finish. Dmitry saw legs in pointed shoes move, as if someone had sharply pulled the Inquisitor up by the collar. Dreher threw his head up.
Strigal was being carried up into the sky by a giant bat. In a few seconds, it was already hidden behind the tops of the trees. There was a crackling sound, indicating that the hiding Inquisitors were trying to hit the aerial target, but they were afraid of harming one of their own.
Dmitry walked up to the werewolf. It was the second time he had to render first aid to Alekseyenko in a year. Only this time neither Frieling nor Semyonov was nearby.
There was hissing over his ear.
Don't touch him, Masha Danilov's voice spoke in Dmitry's head.
Dreher turned. The Mage Shield would protect him from a magical attack but probably not from the strike of a snake tail as thick as a log. The last time the teacher had only been caught by the very edge of it, and he still lost consciousness. A naga's bite also promised nothing good.
Masha towered over him in her Twilight appearance, spreading the hood, as if it was the parachute of a scout being dropped behind enemy lines. She was now a lot bigger than at the school. Shifters were the only Others who could turn magical power into body mass, and there was plenty of Power around them.
Dmitry spread his hands and raised them, showing the naga his empty palms and the total lack of spell sparks hanging on them.
I'm not—
He didn't get to finish.
Discharges of the Inquisitorial Web ran through the naga's body. In a matter of seconds, the snake turned back into a girl in a denim suit, although strangely barefoot. Masha Danilova was twitching in a fetal position, doing her best to try to break out of the net. But the Inquisitorial Web was one of those nasty things that was a lot easier to avoid than to get out of. Only the mage who'd sent the cocoon could remove it… or a higher-ranking mage.
A figure climbed out of the bushes, then another. Gray robes. Everything was unambiguous to them. The lower Dark ones had been threatening teacher Dreher. A valuable employee, after all, he'd been the one who let them get in. Now the shifters were caught.
Teacher Dreher, step to the side! a voice of one of the Grays rustled in Dmitry's mind. Without an explanation, the teacher knew that they were about to throw another cocoon onto Alekseyenko. It was a routine procedure: placing magical handcuffs on him.
Then Dmitry struck suddenly and treacherously. With his first pulse, he caught the closest Inquisitor with a Web, the second pulse struck the next one while also tying them to a tree with the force ties. The teacher sensed the third one, who hadn't had time to come out and was instead monitoring the area from cover, as specified in the regulations. That third one Dmitry suspended on a thick branch, turning the Web into something like a sack.
When glancing through the second layer, the Inquisitor looked like a prisoner in movies about the Middle Ages, locked in a cage, which was hanging off a tree at a crossroads.
Dmitry mentally listed off all the crimes he'd just committed. He didn't forget the addendums to the Grand Treaty. But his plan had worked, his colleagues hadn't expected their own weapon to be turned against them. The poor schlubs needed to brush up on their Prague courses. They covered casting Webs and other methods of detainment in class. And who else would the students practice them on but each other?
But more than anything Dreher was surprised how easy everything was now. Before, he'd be tensing, remembering, muttering spells, and now he was doing it all with almost the snap of his fingers, and without preparing anything in advance. It seemed that was what it was like to be a Higher one. Which meant that he could also…
The teacher immediately tested his thought by tearing the Web on Masha. The girl gave him a surprised look and breathed heavily. Dreher quickly sat her up, stepped behind her, and pressed firmly on several spots on her head and neck, while simultaneously pouring Power into them. He saw Masha's aura begin to pulse again almost immediately.
"Do you remember how to put up a Mage Shield?" he asked the naga from behind.
Masha nodded.
"Help Stas and then both cover yourselves with shields. Crawl out of sight into the bushes or that pavilion over there. Don't shift and lay low. Clear?"
The girl nodded again without turning.
"Where's Anna?" Dreher asked.
"In the Pyramid," Masha replied.
The memories implanted by Strigal immediately provided Dmitry an image of a gray structure that looked like the burial tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Although the only ones that had been buried near this tomb were Catherine the Great's dead dogs.
He had no more questions. Dreher couldn't help himself and completed his healing manipulations with a light slap upside the head before barking, "Follow the order!"
Masha leapt to her feet and ran over to Stas. Dmitry glanced at the bound Inquisitors through the second layer, then splashed some more energy into their magical binds. After a moment's thought, he made a few gestures with his hand and sent an entire litter of Bureaucratic Rats into the grass. Then another, and another, and another. He could now produce hordes of them without any effort.
Hmm, teacher Dreher, he told himself. It's not enough that this park experienced one brown plague. [Footnote 4] Then again, like cures like, so we go after the Gray plague with another color. Doing it our way, the Other way. All in the name of the balance and the Treaty. At least these rodents aren't going to eat anything here, except for the abilities of a bunch of people in gray.
After making this insidious Inquisitorial move, Dmitry stepped out of the Twilight.
The guidebook memories, thanks to Strigal (Dreher hoped he was still alive), continued to serve him well. The teacher no longer needed a magical ball of yarn since he knew perfectly well how to get to the Pyramid. And now the path through the normal human world was the shortest one.
But, unfortunately, he couldn't take a leisurely stroll, enjoying the beauty of the nocturnal park. Dmitry once again got on Ramp Alley and took off running. He'd gotten used to taking morning jogs at the school, and it was helping him now. But Dreher was still regretting not being able to turn into a gray wolf. His level would easily allow him to transform, but the teacher didn't even know how to do that in theory.
First he ran out to a bridge. His internal guidebook told him that it was the Marble Bridge, built in the Palladian style, but it was the first time Dmitry was looking at it with his own eyes. For a few seconds, he forgot why he was here, amazed by the beauty that was utterly foreign to everything around it while simultaneously harmoniously fitting into the dark landscape under the stars. When he came to his senses, he saw that the entrance was blocked by a grating. He could've entered the Twilight again, but instead Dmitry decided to go around it. Sure, he might be a Higher one now, but he had no intention of becoming a live target over the rivulet.
Only a few dozen paces separated the bridge from the Pyramid.
Now Dreher finally stepped onto the first layer. The Pyramid was still just as gray and gloomy, lined with rectangular granite slabs. But the Twilight still preserved the marble columns on the corners that had disappeared long ago in the human world. A glow was flickering over the top, as if someone inside was lighting a magical campfire.
In addition, the entrance, barred by a door, was open.
But Dreher wasn't allowed to enter. Then again, he wasn't caught unawares either. He felt something dash from above and simply dropped to the ground. Something passed over him, flapping its wings in disappointment. When Dmitry leapt to his feet, sparks were lit on the tips of his fingers, each of them prepared to unfold into an Inquisitorial Web.
The giant bat that had nearly grabbed the teacher made a circle over the Pyramid, carefully moving around the energy stream. Then it dropped and turned into Artyom Komarov, who was blocking the entrance.
"Was that you who grabbed Strigal?" Dmitry asked without a preamble.
"Yeah," Komarov said, drilling Dreher with a hateful glare, as if trying to find the rare deposits of conscience with that drill.
"Where did you put him?"
"Dropped into the lake. It would be nice to spill his blood, but I don't feel like it. It's fine, things like him don't drown."
That was something, Dreher thought. He didn't wish the Inquisitor's death. He didn't wish anyone's death.
"You betrayed us!" Artyom spat out.
Finally, Dmitry thought. I've been expecting this lofty phrase for a while.
"No," he answered. "No one betrayed you. Strigal placed the opening of the portals on my 'no'. As soon as I told him 'no' directly through the Twilight, that kicked off the process. I used the same trick to take down Fedotov when they ran to the cemetery in Saint Petersburg. And now I fell for it myself…"
He didn't need to check Komarov's aura to understand his regret for merely dipping Strigal in cold water.
"Let me pass," Dmitry said. "I've figured out how to resolve everything."
"There's no need to resolve anything!" Artyom nearly shouted. "We've got our own process going! We'll deal with those at the park!"
Dmitry felt the unseen power inside the Pyramid grow, as if they were standing next to a working generator. Even the ground under their feet seemed to be vibrating.
"Stas already did," Dmitry said. "Masha nearly got her tail snapped too. Let me pass."
"A duel," Artyom said.
"I don't want to be d'Anthès." [Footnote 5]
"He didn't have a choice. Neither do you. And I'm stronger."
"Your shot," Dmitry allowed and demonstratively removed his Mage Shield.
Artyom dropped as if punched in the gut. He was motionless instead of writhing on the ground like Stas Alekseyenko or Masha Danilova. But his eyes continued to glare at Dmitry. To be honest, the teacher regretted not dialing down the strength of the spell. But this was the first time he was doing it. And he'd only seen it done once, in rendition by Alexander the Great at the Lutheran cemetery.
The Excalibur spell that violated causality. Artyom's magical attack was instantaneous, but the Excalibur always struck first.
Dmitry made a gesture in the direction of the surprised Komarov. He scarcely believed it had worked. But he was a Higher one now, then why not give it a try? Beginner's luck, as it were.
Then Dreher grabbed Artyom under his arms and dragged him into the Pyramid.
Anna Golubeva, who was hiding inside, yelped after seeing the pair.
"Help me!" Dreher barked.
Anna ran over to them, and together they sat Artyom down into one of the stone alcoves.
Actually, the Excalibur was a deadly combat spell. But Dmitry had managed to take a "snapshot" of what Alexander did to Vlad Chizhov. It seemed the alleged curator hadn't wanted to, figuratively speaking, stab the young witches with a sword, instead slamming him with the pommel or the flat edge of the blade.
Dmitry finally looked around. It was empty inside the Pyramid, if one ignored the large vases in wall alcoves and Anna's bag. He didn't have to refer to the implanted memories to realize that the vases were only in the Twilight. They were the primary accumulators of Power, gathering it into a beam that was shooting through the top of the pavilion.
The Inquisitors had screwed up, and Dmitry turned out to be no smarter, even if he was a literature teacher, not a historian. Even some genuine Egyptian pyramids were Power relays and static portals. They'd been invented by ancient Others, and only then humans began to mindlessly copy the shape without knowing the secret contents.
He had to have guessed which pavilion served as the key in this enormous artifact complex. But all the attention of Edgar, Strigal, and the others turned out to be focused on the very fact of mass deinitiation.
"Mr. Dreher—" Anna began.
"Listen," Dreher cut her off. "Where's the diagram? How does this this work?"
"Here." Anna ran to her bag and pulled out her disheveled notebook. "It comes from here, splits here, and focuses here…"
"How does it all start?"
"With a spell. Here it is."
Dmitry's eyes ran across the notebook, glad that in Prague they'd been mercilessly coached in ancient languages, using everything, from dumb cramming to delicate mental magic. Then again, the spell was in archaic Russian, with the use of some words from French and Sanskrit. The Lyceum students had clearly composed it together. The rhythm probably played its own role, a single stumble, a single extra stress, and nothing would happen.
But Dreher didn't need a stumble. Everything had to work like clockwork. Well, almost.
"Here's what you're going to do…"
Anna was listening to him, pursing her lips. She hadn't objected to Dmitry ordering her to burn Fuaran.
"Got it?"
Dmitry even wanted to dig through her bag, find a pencil or some other writing implement, and make a few strokes in the notebook like a typical language teacher.
"It needs a very powerful mage, a Higher one or even several. If I read it, it's not going to work."
Anna threw a glance at the hobbled and unmoving Komarov. He was looking at her with unblinking eyes, making him look like Owl Head. Dmitry felt ashamed again. He'd hit the boy with something he didn't even understand. Teacher Dreher was giving an excellent lesson in treacherous blows today.
But would Dmitry have been able to get into the Pyramid had they fought honestly?
"I'll pump as much Power as necessary into you," Dreher said. "You can do it."
"But then you—"
"I told you, it wouldn't be the first time. Do it."
Anna sat down on the edge of an alcove, placed the notebook on her knee, pulled out a pen with a bear or some other animal gripping it like a tree from the bag. The pen was probably bright and colorful, but all cats were grey in the Twilight, and that applied to writing implements too. An intricate Chinese vase was pulsing with light behind the girl's fragile back. Almost like a magical Leyden jar. It seemed that if Anna leaned back even a little, the bulging vase would burn a magical symbol into her back.
The jinn girl didn't lean back. Hunched over, she was making strokes on paper. This time she had to write instead of drawing, and do it while rhyming. But she hadn't been friends with poets for naught, even if they did call themselves Dead and were in some ways right.
"Done." Anna rose and stepped into the center of the Pyramid. The Power currents were pulsing over her head, as if the pavilion was an enormous geometrically proper heart of a stone giant.
Dreher stood in front of her. Artyom could do nothing but watch what was happening impotently. The girl easily agreed with the teacher's arguments, but the one whose wishes she'd been fulfilling all this time probably didn't.
A Circle of Power was a well-known combination when several mages could join and transfer their energy to one, who served as the tip of the spear. But now there were only two in the Circle: Anna and the Overseer. Dmitry didn't need other mages. He was pumping what he needed straight from the surrounding world, like a pump from a deep well, and sending it to the girl like water out of a hose. He'd never have been able to do that on his own before, just like a small child wouldn't be able to handle a fire hose. But now he'd been made a Higher one. The child hadn't become an adult, but he had grown rapidly, and now the fire hose in his hands was obedient, maybe twitching slightly, as if testing whether its master would show weakness.
A Circle of Power required joining hands. But Anna's hands were busy with the notebook, so Dmitry placed his hands on her shoulders. Only now did he realize that the girl had really grown over the year.
Golubeva began reading the spell. Dmitry felt as if an icy hedgehog had rolled onto his spine and began running down it. Simultaneously, the cold spread along his hands, from the fingertips to the wrists. Although inside he was actually warm.
It turned out to be unexpectedly easy to serve as a relay. It was probably just as easy for a whale to allow seawater to enter it and then produce a powerful fountain over the surface. Especially since Dmitry's internal resources weren't being used up at all thanks so the excess of external ones, spread out in nature back in the days when these lands had belonged to Novgorodians instead of Swedes, and the word "tsar" hadn't yet touched the Russian ear. But he had to focus his attention on Anna.
Dmitry was standing with his back to the open entrance, didn't see what was happening outside, and didn't look around. But then he could still picture what was going on since he was the one who'd thought up the combination, and the girl was able to put into life without using her jinn abilities. From the small gray pyramid, pulses were going to all the artifact stones, all the pavilions, bridges, and palace structures plugged into the magical circuit. But this Power, tamed by the words of the spell like a wild stallion, no longer pushed outward, instead turning inside the circuit, closing in on itself.
He'd realized what had to be done as soon as he saw Iva splayed out on the ground. She'd helped him leap over two levels with the aid of Čapek's Mirror against the rules. He recalled placing reversed Spheres of Negation and Mage Shields in his hotel room.
It wouldn't be the first time for the girl to diametrically change the meaning of a spell by moving the words around. She didn't even need to clearly understand the meaning of the words, as she did that on pure intuition, and no experience of teacher Dreher could compare with that skill. The enormous Tsarskoye Selo complex was deinitiating all Others within its borders.
All except Anna herself.
The wave moving from outer limits to the Pyramid, and the teacher was supposed to become its final victim. Dmitry wasn't listening to the spell. He was trying to walk to the Twilight while there was still time.
Do you hear me? I'm talking to you, would-be Solaris! Probably not, you're not God. Does a human know what a microbe in his gut thinks? But I am thinking something about you. You're an orphan with billions of living parents. Although you seem to be doing just fine for now and aren't feeling lonely. Maybe Others are your toys. How old are you? You're older than humans, but who are you compared to living realities: an adult, an old man, or still a child? To be honest, I'd vote for the latter. You know who you need? A good teacher. Or a mentor. They say that the point of education is for the one being educated to learn to no longer need their educator. You need to learn to live without humans. To not feed at someone else's expense. You ne—
"That's it," Anna said.
Dmitry saw that it was dark around him. It was night outside the slanted walls of the Pyramid, and the darkness inside the pavilion strove to even out with the one outside, like liquid in connected containers. The walls and the alcoves around him were bare, as if Dreher had only imagined the glowing vases.
The Twilight had pushed him out mid-sentence. Human had no business being there. Anna had most likely come out with him, as Dreher was still holding her shoulders. Only now the cold was no longer pulsing in his palms.
There was rustling nearby. Dmitry realized that it was Komarov, rejected by the Twilight. He'd probably fainted.
"Can you restore his consciousness?" Dreher finally let the girl go. "Do you remember your healing lessons? First aid?"
"I'll try," Anna said. "But I'm a jinn, not a healer."
"Right now, you're the only mage in the area."
The girl ran to Artyom. She could look through the Twilight and didn't need additional sources of light. Dmitry wouldn't mind having at least some matches, which he, naturally, didn't keep with him.
But light did come on unexpectedly. Dreher saw a tourist lantern that looked like an old kerosene lamp in Anna's hands. They'd probably hidden it somewhere in a corner just in case. Nice!
Anna placed the lantern where the ex-vampire had been sitting only recently and got busy on Artyom. Feeling himself like a theoretician, Dmitry was giving her some pointers. The girl was obediently following them, and Komarov groaned.
"Now let's get him outside," Dmitry ordered while thinking that they'd been dragging Artyom back and forth a lot over the past hour.
Fortunately, the entrance grating was open and the lock torn off in the human reality. Dmitry placed the slowly recovering Komarov on one of the square stones on the Pyramid's corner. They served as pedestals for columns, but those had been left in the Twilight.
"It's fine," the teacher calmed Anna. "Healers will get him back on his feet."
"Why do I still have my abilities?" the girl asked.
"You were the cause of it all. If I read the spell, then it wouldn't have worked on me either."
"But the circuit is still there. Someone else might be able to use it."
"Weren't you listening? It's now a giant artifact that will turn any Other who sets foot in here into a human! So no entry, humans only! All right, let's go get everyone and surrender to the Inquisition…"
"Wait!" Anna said.
"Why wait?"
"I forgot something, Mr. Dreher. One second! Just don't come in after me, please."
She dashed back into the Pyramid. Dmitry was left with the lantern. He decided to try to lift his shadow from the ground. Naturally, it didn't work. As if the very ability to do that was a fantasy. A fairy tale told by teacher Dreher at the school's book club.
"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted—nevermore!" Dmitry muttered to himself.
Anna ran out of the Pyramid even before he finished speaking.
"Here," she handed Dmitry something.
A vial was rolling slightly on her palm. An ordinary vial, maybe from medicine, or maybe from perfume.
But Dreher remembered these vials.
"The serum?"
"Nope." The girl shook her head. "It's me. My Shadow, I mean."
Dmitry carefully took the vial as if it were an explosive.
"How did you?.."
"I had a little bit of the serum left. I used it all up on myself. Extracted the Shadow, then told it to climb into the bottle. I'm a jinn, after all! Mr. Dreher, I was the only one who could restart the circuit. They wouldn't have left me alone! And now I'm also only human, like everyone here."
She outplayed me again, Dreher thought. The Inquisitors would've found out the truth, that was not in doubt. The only Other capable of getting into the Tsarskoye Selo Artifact (which was how it was probably going to be documented) was worth her weight in gold! But Dmitry couldn't have come up with such a solution…
He hurriedly stuffed the vial into a pants pocket, then took off his jacket and threw it onto Anna's shoulders. The girl was no longer able to warm herself with Power.
"Just don't show it to anyone!" Anna warned.
"Obviously…" Dmitry wondered whether he ought to toss the vial with Golubeva's Twilight double into one of the local canals. The bottom of the sea would be better, of course. A bottle with a genie in it was supposed to lie deep underwater. Actually, the Gulf of Finland might be suitable…
But Dreher knew he wouldn't be able to throw away this glass object.
In the meantime, the former Dead Poets were beginning to gather, guided by the light of the lantern like moths. Bureyev dove out of the darkness in his birthday suit, swore, apologized, then hid from Anna behind a Pyramid corner. Anatoly Klyushkin hobbled over. It turned out that when the deinitiation wave reached him, Anatoly had been hanging upside-down on a tree in the shape of a bat and ended up falling. Klyushkin immediately tossed his jacket to Gogi to cover up. Gray robes appeared at the Marble Bridge. The Inquisitors were moving like walking corpses raised from their graves. They were clearly at a loss, having forgotten what it was like to be mere mortals.
Dmitry thought about Iva. Had she managed to get far enough away?
He reached into his pocket and produced the cell phone. But all attempts to activate the device failed.
"We're out of contact." Dmitry glanced at Anna. "I'll go ask one of my colleagues for a phone."
He pictured looking for a number marked "Carmadon" or "Edgar". He also decided he had to find Strigal, who was probably sitting somewhere on a shore, not knowing what to do.
"Wait here," Dmitry told the Poets and headed towards the gray robes.
The longest and craziest day in his wife wasn't over yet.
Footnotes
1) The original name of Tsarskoye Selo.
2) This is a paraphrase of a quote falsely attributed to Winston Churchill. "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."
3) Solaris is a 1961 sci-fi novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem about scientists attempting to study a planetwide sentient ocean.
4) "Brown plague" is a colloquial term for the Nazis.
5) Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès was a nineteenth-century French officer and politician, most known for fatally wounding Alexander Pushkin in a duel in 1837.
