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profitable for them to put the call through and take the money for it from my account.
And also, of course, I put my hope in Svetlana's common sense. When her phone rang and then stopped again,
she had to use magic, not try calling back. Arina and Edgar were far older than me. But for them a cellphone
would always be a portable version of a cumbersome apparatus into which you had to shout: 'Young lady! Young
lady! Give me the Smolny Institute!'
'She suspected something,' Edgar said. 'You shouldn't have done that with the bomb ... it didn't have to be
detonated, but at least we would have had a trump card in reserve!'
'Never mind,' said Arina. 'Even if she did suspect something, they don't have any time. Anton, give me that
phone.'
A glint of suspicion had appeared in her eyes. I gave her the cell without saying anything, handing it to her
fastidiously with the tips of my fingers without touching the keys.
Arina looked at the phone and saw that it was in waiting mode. She shrugged and switched it off completely.
'Let's do without any calls, all right? If you need to call anyone, you can ask me for my phone.'
'I won't bankrupt you?'
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'No, you won't.' Arina took out her own phone and dialled a number - not from the phone book, but the old way,
pressing every key. She raised the phone to her ear and waited for an answer. When it came she said quietly:
'It's time. Go to work.'
'Still haven't run out of accomplices, then?'
'They're not accomplices, Anton, they're hired hands. People can be perfectly effective allies if you equip them
with a small number of amulets. Especially the kind that Edgar has.'
I looked at the royal castle towering up in state above the city, crowning the remains of an ancient volcano now
for ever extinct. Well, well, this was the second time I'd ended up in Edinburgh, and I still didn't have time to visit
its main tourist attraction . . .
'And what have you prepared this time?' I asked There was an idea flickering on the edge of my consciousness,
scratching away at it like Schrodinger's Cat. Something very important.
'Funnily enough, I've actually prepared one of Merlin's artefacts,' Edgar said. He had already recovered from my
ungentlemanly blow. 'It's called Merlin's Sleep.'
'Ah, yes, he was rather uninventive with his names for things,' I said, nodding. 'Sleep?'
'Just sleep,' Edgar said, shrugging. 'Arina was very upset about the high number of casualties the last time. This
time it will all be very . . . cultured.'
'Ah, and there's the first little spark of culture,' I said, looking at the smoke rising from a taxi in front of us. The
driver had clearly fallen asleep as he took a bend, and his car had run up onto the sidewalk and crashed into an
old building. But the most terrible thing was not the smoke coming from under the taxi's hood, or the motionless
bodies inside it. The sidewalks were covered with the corpses of local people and tourists - one young woman
had clearly been knocked aside by the taxi's radiator and then crushed against the wall by its old-fashioned black
box of a body. She was probably dying. The only thing I could be glad about was that she was dying in her sleep.
This was not the humane Morpheus that we learned in the Night Watch, the spell that gave people several
seconds before they lost consciousness. Merlin's Sleep acted instantly. And it was very precisely localised - I
could see the boundary line of the artefact's influence. Two adults stepped inside it and fell to the ground,
instantly overcome by sleep. But the seven- or eight-year-old boy who was walking a few steps behind them was
still awake and he cried as he shook his motionless parents. He had little prospect of help - those people who
had not entered the zone of sleep were running away from it with remarkable alacrity. I could understand why. To
someone who didn't know the truth it all looked like the effect of some highly poisonous gas. And somehow the
sight of this little boy trying to get his parents to their feet on the other side of the scattering crowd was almost as
tragic as the sight of the young woman killed in the crash.
Edgar continued gazing fixedly at the smoking taxi after we had driven past it. That would probably have been a
good moment to escape ... if I had been intending to escape. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]