Lermont stepped into the first portal. I hung back a moment, waiting for Semyon, but he suddenly stopped, with his eyes fixed on a gaunt man with red hair.

“Kevin! You old fogey!”

“Simon, you old blockhead!” the redhead shouted in delight. “Where are you going? Hang on!”

They put their arms around each other and started hammering each other on the back with all the enthusiasm of the crazy rabbit in that commercial for electric batteries.

“Later, we’ll catch up on everything later,” Semyon muttered, freeing himself from Kevin’s embrace. “Look, the portal’s getting cold. I brought you some wine from Sebastopol, remember it? Sparkling Muscat, here!”

I spat and shook my head. What sort of thing was that to say-“later, later.” In the movies, any character who said that to an old friend was irrevocably doomed to die soon.

I could only be glad that we weren’t characters in an action movie.

I stepped in through the frame of the portal.

A dense white glow all around. A feeling of lightness that can only be compared with what cosmonauts experience. Mysterious paths inaccessible to human beings.

What were those Others in police uniforms going to do there? The basic day-to-day routine work of the Watches? Wipe clean the memories of any chance witnesses, remove all traces of the explosion, interrogate the attackers, if they survived.

But who had dared to do it? Attacking a member of a Watch was already an act of insanity. But to attack the head of a Watch, plus two foreign magicians, was absolutely unheard of. And to use human beings to do it…

I suddenly realized quite clearly that the Frenchman I had met in the Dungeons had also been a human being, as I’d first thought. Not a Higher Magician who had concealed his true nature from me. Just an ordinary man. But incredibly cunning and cool, a brilliant actor. Not the same sort of pawn as these bandits who had been sent to their death. Perhaps he was the one who had fired the rocket at us?

And then the vampire. Was it really Kostya? Had he really survived after all?

And to top everything off, there were the protective amulets on the bandits, which had won them time. Vampires weren’t capable of creating amulets. That was the work of a magician, an enchantress, or a witch!

Just who were we up against, here? Who was trying to break into the Twilight to get his hands on Merlin’s legacy?

And was he capable of going down to the seventh level?

As always, the portal came to an end suddenly. The white glow contracted into a frame, I stepped through it, and I was immediately grabbed by the shoulder and jerked sharply down to the left, onto the floor behind the cover of an improvised barricade consisting of several overturned tables.

Just in time. A bullet went whistling over my head.

I was in the Dungeons of Scotland. In one of the first rooms.

Lermont was beside me, sheltering behind the barricade, and I had been dragged to the floor by a dark-skinned Other. Judging from the number of spells he had teed-up on his fingers, he was a Battle Magician.

Another shot rang out. The shooting was coming from the open door that led into the next room.

“Foma, what’s happened?” I asked, looking at him in bewilderment. “Why are we lying on the floor? We should put up a Shield…”

Lermont didn’t lift a finger, but a barrier appeared at the door, sealing it off. Before I even had time to feel amazed at the Scottish magician’s stupidity and delighted with my own astuteness, there was another shot, and the bullet whistled by overhead. The barrier hadn’t held it back.

“I beg your pardon, I was a bit hasty there,” I muttered. “How about going through the Twilight?”

“The same problem as with the rocket,” Lermont explained. “The bullets are enchanted down to the second level.”

“Let’s go through to the third.”

“There’s a barrier on the third from here!” Lermont reminded me. I felt ashamed and said no more.

The dark-skinned magician half-stood and hurled several spells into the corridor. I spotted Opium, Freeze, and Bugaboo. The reply was another shot. With that same precise, mechanical rhythm.

“Foma, it’s a machine!” I said quickly. “It’s the same kind of machine that fired at me!”

“So what? It’s protected against minor spells. Do you suggest blazing away with Fireballs, starting a fire, and bringing the bridge down on top of us?”

No, Thomas the Rhymer wasn’t panicking or falling into despair. He was clearly trying to think of something. And he had to have some kind of plan. Only I didn’t want to hang about.

Semyon stepped out of the portal that was still hanging in midair. He immediately squatted down and scrambled toward the barrier. Yes…sometimes experience is more important than Power.

Somewhere far away, behind the walls and the doors, there was a scream that broke off on a high note.

And sometimes fury is more important than experience.

I slipped into the Twilight.

First level. The decor seemed to have become real. The walls of plasterboard and plastic were now stone, there were dried stalks of some kind rustling under my feet. In the Twilight the interior of the building must have been constructed by human fantasy: Too many people had passed this way who sincerely believed in the rules of the game and had made themselves believe in dungeons.

Dungeons and dragons.

There was a little dragon with bristling red scales standing in the stone archway and blocking my way. The dragon came up to my shoulder. He was supporting himself on his back legs and a long tail, twisted into a corkscrew. His webbed wings were flickering nervously behind his back. The glowing, faceted eyes glared at me, the mouth opened and spat out a gobbet of flame.

So that’s what you look like in the Twilight, Shooter I!

I jumped to one side, tossing a Fireball at the little dragon. A very small fireball, so as not to cause any shocks in the real world.

Then I went down to the second level.

The dungeon hadn’t changed. But the dragon here was black and a little bit taller. His eyes were bigger, rounder, and darker, and he had acquired pointed ears that stuck up. The scales had changed into either coarse fur or chitinous spines that were pressed tight against his body. The jaws were extended forward. The wings had been transformed into small trembling legs.

The mouth opened wide and a bundle of blue sparks flew out in my direction.

I dodged and took a few more steps. And then, forgetting once again about the barrier, I stepped down on to the third level of the Twilight.

At first it felt as if I had run into a wall-a flexible, springy, but impenetrable wall. But that sensation only lasted for a second.

An instant later I found myself on the third level.

And I immediately realized that this had to be connected with that scream of a dying human being I had heard before entering the Twilight.

Someone had opened the barrier again. Opened it with someone’s living blood.

But there wasn’t any little dragon here.

I ran along the corridor without bothering to destroy the robot shooter. Lermont could handle that himself. The machine wasn’t going anywhere. It was more important for me to catch the killer. Whoever he might be-vampire, magician, sorcerer, a stranger or a former friend…

This was clearly the central section of the Dungeons. The focus of the Power, the center of the vortex, the keyhole. The River of Blood -only here it looked like a ditch filled with bubbling black liquid as thick as pitch. A gleaming black table. And lying on it-a motionless body in a bloodstained white robe.

It looked as if this time the person who had lost his life was one of the hired human personnel who worked for the Edinburgh Night Watch. One of the pathologists who did jobs for Lermont.

Could Lermont really have left the Dungeons with no reliable guards? Without anyone to ambush raiders? Had he abandoned the people who trusted him to the whim of fate?