Free Sixth Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko Page A

And then, there might not be any code, and we’ll have to wait for it to dissipate on its own.”
    â€œThere’s no time,” the Dark One said anxiously. “Can we shift her?”
    He set one hand firmly against the back of Nadya’s head and the other against her waist and pushed with all his might. I realized that nothing would happen to my daughter, that they were simply trying to evacuate her quickly to somewhere safe, but I found his offhand manner offensive. These Dark Ones!
    â€œCan we lift her?” Denis asked, and tried to hoist Nadya up by her backside. With the same result.
    â€œShe has to be attached to some kind of anchor points,” the Dark One reasoned. “Something’s coming back to me . . . The center of the earth, maybe?”
    â€œA Freeze is attached to arbitrary spatial vectors, you dunce,” Svetlana said behind me with surprising venom.
    The Watchmen swung around.
    â€œWhat went down here, guys?” I asked as amiably as I could,trying to smooth over my wife’s severity. “There’s a dead Inquisitor in the yard . . .”
    Without even glancing at each other, the Watchmen threw their hands out toward me. Denis flung out his left hand and the Dark Magician flung out his right. With their free hands they grabbed hold of each other.
    Suddenly it dawned on me.
    It wasn’t the female vampire who had killed the Inquisitor, wounded the guard, and frightened Nadya so badly that she’d tried to jump out the window.
    It was the two Watchmen!
    The Light One and the Dark One.
    The Watchmen were traitors!
    I could see their auras, and Denis was Light, absolutely, immaculately Light, and the young guy from the Day Watch was Dark, but they were standing there holding hands like a couple in love, all set to zap us with the same spell that had killed the Inquisitor . . .
    A surge of hellfire and a blast of cosmic cold shattered against the Shield put up by Svetlana. It was definitely a Magician’s Shield, but some version of it that I didn’t know.
    The Shield held.
    Well, that’s only natural; a Magician’s Shield pumped full of energy can withstand anything at all. I’ve tested that myself.
    And it’s only natural for a Shield constructed by a Great Enchantress to withstand a blow from two ordinary, rank-and-file Others.
    But this blow was so powerful that for an instant I thought the Shield was going to burst.
    The door frame on my right didn’t just catch fire, it simply crumbled into ashes, and part of the wall collapsed into dust. A deep black trench ran across the floor—as if a stream of lava had flowed over it. The heat started baking my feet through the soles of my shoes.
    On Svetlana’s left the wall gave out a shrill, sad ringing note and started splitting into pieces. I don’t know if it had been chilled downto absolute zero or not, but the builders clearly hadn’t anticipated a temperature drop like this.
    The Watchmen slowly lowered their hands. Apparently they hadn’t expected us still to be alive. They weren’t the only ones—I hadn’t expected that either.
    â€œI think,” Svetlana said in a quiet voice, “that for safety’s sake I’ll have to kill one of you. And then the other one can tell us what happened here. The only thing you can do if you want to survive is surrender immediately.”
    What she said was good, those were the right words. And what’s more, entirely sincere—I could sense that Svetlana really felt like killing someone right now. In the wayward Watchmen’s place, I’d have surrendered.
    The Light Watchman and the Dark Watchman looked at each other.
    And then I realized—no, they weren’t going to surrender.
    Apparently, dumbfounded as they were by our resilience, they weren’t frightened in the least. They didn’t think they’d really given it their best shot yet.
    They were all set to continue.
    But