The final two amulets were rather less ordinary, both in appearance and content, and had quite clearly been prepared by Gesar himself for this mission of ours. The first was a SIM card for a cell phone, in a little plastic box. An ordinary card, but pumped full of magic. I studied it for a while, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then I decided to experiment: I took my own card out of my phone and put the one charged with magic in its place.

It didn’t make any sense! It was a copy of my own SIM card! But what for? So I wouldn’t have to waste money on calls to Moscow? What raving nonsense!

I thought for a while and then asked Alisher to call my number. Strangely enough, the phone still worked there.

My phone rang immediately. Everything was OK, it really was a copy of my SIM, but it had been treated with magic for some reason… I shrugged and decided to leave the card in my phone. Maybe it coded the calls in some clever magical way? But I’d never heard of any magic like that before.

The final amulet was a small stone rolled smooth by the sea, with a hole in it-something I’d once heard was called a “chicken god.” Human superstition believes it brings good luck. A cunningly woven silver chain that looked like a thick, twisted thread ran through the hole.

In itself, of course, a “chicken god” doesn’t bring any good luck, but that doesn’t stop children from searching enthusiastically for them on the seashore and then wearing them on a string around their necks. This stone, however, had been enchanted with a complex spell that partially resembled the Domination. Was that for the conversation with Rustam too? I thought about it for a while and then hung the chain around my neck. It couldn’t do any harm…

All I still had to do was distribute the rings and the wands. I didn’t think about that for too long either. I nudged Afandi awake and asked him to put on the rings. He exclaimed “Ah!” in delight, put the rings on his left hand, admired them-and nodded off again.

I gave the wands to Alisher, and he put them in the breast pocket of his shirt without saying a word. They stuck out like Parker or Mont Blanc ball-point pens, no less elegant and almost as deadly. I say almost because a single stroke of a boss’s pen could kill more people than those battle wands ever could.

“I’ll get some sleep,” I told Alisher.

He didn’t say anything for a while. The jeep was slowly making its way up the rocky track, which had been climbed by donkeys far more often than by four wheels. The beams of the headlights swung from left to right and right to left, alternately picking out a steep rocky cliff and a sheer drop with a river roaring at the bottom.

“Sleep,” said Alisher. “But take a look at the probability lines first. The road’s really bad.”

“I wouldn’t even call it a road,” I said. I closed my eyes and looked into the Twilight. Into the immediate future, where the sinuous, interwoven lines of probability led.

I didn’t like the picture I saw. There were too many lines that broke off abruptly and ended at the bottom of the ravine.

“Alisher, stop. You’re too exhausted to drive through the mountains in the dark. Let’s wait until morning.”

Alisher shook his head stubbornly. “No, I can sense that we have to hurry.”

I could sense that too, so I didn’t argue.

“Shall I drive?” I suggested.

“I don’t think you’re any wider awake than I am, Anton. Give me a blast, will you?”

I sighed. I don’t like using magic to drive away sleep and tiredness, to sharpen the senses. Not because of the negative consequences (there aren’t any; get a good sleep afterward, and you’re fine). That’s not the problem. The problem is that very soon you stop relying on your usual senses and start using a constant feed of magical energy, walking around hyped-up all the time, like a manic-depressive in the manic phase. Everything you do goes well, and you’re a welcome guest in any company, a bright spark, a jester. But sooner or later you get used to it, you want to be even livelier, even wittier, have even more energy. You increase the flow of Power stimulating your nerves. And so it goes, until you discover that you’re spending all the Power that you are capable of processing on maintaining an artificial level of vivacity. And you are simply afraid to stop.

Addiction to magic is no different from ordinary drug addiction. Except that only Others suffer from it.

“Give me a blast,” Alisher asked me again. He stopped the car, put on the hand brake, threw his head back, and closed his eyes.

I put one hand on his face and the other on the short-cropped top of his head and concentrated. I imagined the stream of Power moving through my body and starting to seep out through my palms, soaking into Alisher’s head, running along his nerves like cold fire, sparking across the synapses, jolting every neuron… No special spells were needed, I was working with pure Power. The most important thing here was a clear understanding of the physiological process.

“That’s enough,” Alisher said in a fresher voice. “That feels really good. I’d just like a bite to eat.”

“Just a moment.” I leaned over the seat into the hatchback. My instincts had not misled me: There were two boxes of cola in plastic bottles and several boxes of chocolate bars. “Will you have some cola?”

“What?” Alisher exclaimed. “Cola? Sure! And I’ll have some of those bars too! God bless America!”

“Isn’t that a bit too much just for inventing a sickly sweet lemonade substitute and highly calorific candy?”

Instead of answering, Alisher pressed a button on the stereo console and a second later the speakers started playing a rhythmic sequence of chords.

“It’s for the rock-and-roll, too,” he said imperturbably.

We sat there awhile eating chocolate bars and washing them down with cola. All Others have a sweet tooth. Still snoring, Afandi smacked his lips and reached out his hand. I put a chocolate bar in his fingers that were now decorated with the rings. Afandi munched the candy bar without waking up. He carried on snoring.

“We’ll be there at three o’clock,” Alisher told me. “Are we going to wait until morning?”

“The night is our time,” I replied. “We’ll wake old man Rustam up. He doesn’t work very hard anyway.”

“It’s strange,” said Alisher. “Odd. Does he live there like a hermit, in a cave?”

“Why do you think that?” I asked, and pondered for a moment. “Maybe he grazes goats or sheep. Or he keeps bees up in the mountains. Or he has a weather station.”

“Or an observatory for watching the stars…What was that strange ring you put on Afandi’s hand?”

“You mean the one with the ruby? Protection against a vacuum.”

“Very exotic,” said Alisher, sucking on his plastic bottle. “I can’t remember a case of an Other being killed in a vacuum.”

“I can.”

Alisher said nothing for a few seconds, then he nodded and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Does it still bother you?”

“We were friends…almost. As far as a Light One and a Dark One can be.”

“Not just a Dark One. Kostya was a vampire.”

“He never killed anyone,” I said simply. “And it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t grow up as a human being. Gennady made him a vampire.”

“Who’s that?”

“His father.”

“What a bastard.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge. The boy wasn’t even a year old when he ended up in the hospital. Double pneumonia and allergies to antibiotics. Basically, the parents were told that their son wouldn’t survive. You know, there are some wonderful doctors who shouldn’t even be allowed to practice as vets, for the poor cows’ sake: ‘Your little boy’s going to die, prepare yourselves for that. You’re still young, you can have another child…’ Of course, they couldn’t have another. Kostya was Gennady’s posthumous child. After initiation, vampires retain the ability to impregnate and conceive for quite a long time; it’s one of nature’s strange jokes. But they can only have one child. After that, the vampire becomes sterile.”