The owl made a wide circle round the tornado, then flew lower and over our heads. Olga still looked very self-possessed, but her careless emergence from the Twilight showed how agitated she really was.
'Why, what did he do wrong?'
'Nothing really . . . except for being overconfident. He got to know the girl. Then he started pushing things along and that made the twister start to grow . . . and how!'
'I don't understand,' I said, confused. 'It can only grow that way if it's being fed with energy by the magician who summoned up the Inferno . . .'
'That's the whole point. Someone must have tracked Ignat and started shovelling coal in the firebox. This way. . .'
We entered the building that stood between us and the vortex. The owl flew in after us at the last moment. I gave Ilya a puzzled look, but I didn't ask any questions. Anyway, it was clear soon enough why we were there.
An operations centre had been set up in an apartment on the first floor. The heavy steel door, firmly closed in the human world, was standing wide open in the Twilight. Without stopping, Ilya dived into the Twilight and walked through. I fumbled for a few seconds, raising my shadow, and followed him.
It was a large apartment, with four rooms, all very comfortable. But it was also noisy, smoky and hot.
There were more than twenty Others there, including the field operatives and us back-room boys. No one took any notice when I arrived, they just glanced at Olga. I realised that the old Watch members knew her, but no one made any attempt to say hello or smile at the owl.
What could she have done?
'Go through into the bedroom, the boss is in there,' Ilya said briskly, turning off into the kitchen, where I could hear glasses clinking. Maybe they were drinking tea, or maybe it was something a bit stronger. I glanced in quickly as I passed and saw I was right. They were reanimating Ignat with cognac. Our sexual terrorist looked completely knackered, crushed. It was a long time since he'd suffered this kind of failure.
I walked on by, pushed open the first door I came to and looked inside.
It was the children's room. A child of about five was sleeping on a little bed, and his parents and teenage sister were on the carpet beside it. Clear enough. The owners of the apartment had been put into a sound, healthy sleep so they wouldn't get under our feet. We could have set up the entire operations office in the Twilight, but why waste all that energy?
Someone slapped me on the shoulder and I looked round – it was Semyon.
'The boss is this way,' he told me. 'Come on . . .'
It seemed like everyone knew I was expected.
When I entered the next room, I was taken aback for just a moment.
There couldn't be any more absurd sight than a Night Watch operations centre set up in a private apartment.
There was a medium-size magic sphere hanging in the air above a dressing table stacked with cosmetics and costume jewellery. The sphere was transmitting a view of the vortex from above. Lena, our best operator, was sitting on a chair beside it, silent and intense. Her eyes were closed, but when I came in she raised one hand slightly in greeting.
Okay, so that was usual enough. Sphere operators see space in its totality, there's no way to hide anything from them.
The boss was reclining on the bed, propped up with pillows. He was wearing a bright-coloured robe, soft oriental slippers and an embroidered skullcap. The room was filled with the sweet fumes of a portable hookah. The owl was sitting in front of him. It looked as if they were communicating silently.
That was all usual enough too. In moments of exceptional stress, the boss always reverted to the habits he'd picked up in Central Asia. He'd worked there at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, first disguised as a mufti, then as a Muslim guerrilla leader, and then as a red commissar, and finally he spent ten years as the secretary of a district party committee.
Danila and Farid were standing by the window. Even with my powers I could make out the purple glimmer of the wands hidden in their sleeves.
A perfectly standard arrangement. At moments like this the headquarters was never left unprotected. Danila and Farid weren't the strongest fighters we had, but they were experienced, and that was often more important than crude strength.
But what was I supposed to make of the last Other in the room?
He was squatting modestly and unobtrusively in the corner. As thin as a rake with sunken cheeks, black hair cut short, military style, and big, sad eyes. It was impossible to tell how old he was, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred. He was dressed in a dark, loose-fitting suit. A human would probably have taken the stranger for a member of some obscure sect. And he would have been half right.
He was a Dark Magician. And a powerful one too. When he glanced briefly at me, I felt my protective shell – which wasn't installed by me – crack and start to buckle.
I took an involuntary step backwards. But the magician had already lowered his eyes to the floor as if to show me that the momentary probing had been accidental . . .
'Boris Ignatievich.' I could hear my voice wheezing slightly.
The boss nodded curtly, then he turned to the Dark Magician, who immediately fixed his eyes on him.
'Give him an amulet,' the boss ordered brusquely.
The Dark Magician's voice was sad and quiet, the voice of someone burdened with all the woes of the world.
'I'm not doing anything forbidden by the Treaty. . .'
'Neither am I. My colleagues must be immune against observers.'
So that was it! We had an observer from the Dark Side in our headquarters. That meant Day Watch had a headquarters somewhere close by, and one of us was there.
The Dark Magician put his hand in his jacket pocket. He took out a carved ivory medallion on a copper chain and held it out to me.
'Throw it,' I said.
The magician smiled gently with the same air of melancholy sympathy and flicked his hand. I caught the medallion. The boss nodded approvingly.
'Your name?' I asked.