Free Sixth Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko Page B

where was Gesar?
    I struck out at both of them together. To hell with Denis being one of ours—this was no time for trying to figure out if he was a traitor or under some kind of spell.
    A whole series of small spells tore into the Watchmen. The spells’ main virtue was their variety—battle-magic classics: the Fireball; the Triple Blade, as old as the hills—it chops into a man like an axe into firewood; the White Spear, a stream of energy; Opium—even though Morpheus hadn’t worked; and the Grater, which I kept because it was so nonstandard. Opponents don’t usually expect an attack with everyday magic, and after the Grater has rasped over their skin, they don’t usually feel up to working magic anymore.
    My calculation was simple: The diverse range of attacks would overload the Watchmen’s defenses, which would give us time fora proper attack. Not many Others who don’t belong to the Higher level are capable of attacking with a cascade of four or five spells simultaneously. And repelling an attack like that is no piece of cake either.
    I was expecting anything at all.
    Maybe success—in that case our opponents would collapse, pierced through by invisible blades, scorched by a jet of fire, enveloped in flames, with their skin scraped off, and sound asleep.
    That’s right—a truly appalling sight!
    Or maybe failure—our colleagues were no fools, they had to have a Magician’s Shield around them, and some kind of protective amulet, all ready to set up a Crystal Sphere or a Sphere of Negation.
    That’s the way it usually goes in a battle, to be honest. The first attacks fizzle out in Shields. Then the energy of the protective spells runs out and the enemy . . .
    Usually the enemy surrenders.
    But I could never, ever have imagined what did happen.
    All the spells hit the target.
    I saw Denis’s jacket split apart as three invisible blades sank into it; I saw the Dark One’s coat burst into flames as it was pierced by the White Spear and he staggered from the blow. I saw them both engulfed in flames and the Grater scraping over them.
    It meant nothing to them.
    Denis started brushing flames, mingled with blood, off his face (a good fireball sticks to the skin, like napalm). He took no notice of his wounds at all. And the Dark One started weaving some spell of his own.
    Logic had let me down.
    There was only one way what I had seen could have happened—if both Denis and the Dark Magician were already dead. Either transformed into vampires, or raised from the dead.
    Then they wouldn’t give a damn about the flames and the wounds.
    So I put all the power I had available to me right then into theGray Prayer, the simplest, most reliable, fail-safe spell against the undead.
    The only thing that determines if the Gray Prayer will work is the Power behind the spell.
    I struck so hard that it would have disembodied any vampires within twenty inches or twenty miles in the direction of the spell. I’d only ever struck that hard once before, in Saratov, when I tried to destroy my friend and enemy Kostya. No, to be honest, I struck even harder that time—I’d been pumped full of Power by Gesar and Zabulon. On that occasion I think I really did disembody several perfectly law-abiding vampires.
    But I was much less experienced then. This time I didn’t splash the Gray Prayer out in all directions; I compressed it into a beam, directed at the Watchmen, and angled it slightly upward, so that the spell would rise as it traveled over the ground, moving up into the sky.
    If there were any vampires flying by in a plane at that moment, I wasn’t to blame.
    When you use the Gray Prayer, the world seems to turn colorless—that’s the Twilight showing through into our reality. Undead creatures can’t take that, I was told once—they all exist by virtue of the difference in magical potential between our world and the Twilight.
    This time