“Not necessarily,” said Alisher, trying to intercede on behalf of the Inquisition. “It could be a retired Inquisitor.”

“Yes? Then how did anyone find out that Gesar had sent us to Samarkand? He only informed the Inquisition!”

“One of the traitors is a Light Healer,” Alisher reminded me.

“Are you saying it’s a Higher Light One from our Watch? A Healer? Working for the enemy?”

“That could be it!” Alisher said obstinately.

“There has only ever been one higher-level Light Healer in our Watch,” I reminded him calmly. “And she’s my wife.”

Alisher stopped short and shook his head. “I beg your pardon, Anton! I didn’t mean anything of the kind!”

“Ai, that’s enough quarreling!” Afandi said in his old foolish voice. “The shurpa’s gone cold! And there’s nothing worse than cold shurpa. Apart from hot vodka!”

He looked around stealthily and passed his hands over the bowls of shurpa. The cold broth started steaming again.

“Afandi, how can we talk to Rustam?” I asked again.

“Eat your shurpa,” the old man muttered. And he showed us how.

I broke off a piece of a bread cake and started on my broth. What else could I do? The East is the East, they don’t like to give a straight answer here. The best diplomats in the world come from the East. They don’t say yes or no, but that doesn’t mean they abstain.

It was only after Alisher and I had finished our shurpa that Afandi sighed and said, “Gesar was probably right. He probably can demand an answer from Rustam. One answer to one question.”

Well, at least that was one small victory!

“Coming right up,” I said, nodding. Of course, the question had to be formulated correctly, to exclude any possibility of an ambiguous answer. “Just a minute…”

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Afandi asked in surprise. “A minute, an hour, a day…Think.”

“In principle, I’m ready,” I said.

“So what? Who are you going to ask, Anton Gorodetsky?” Afandi laughed. “Rustam’s not here. We’ll go to see him, and then you can ask your question.”

“Rustam’s not here?” I asked, almost struck dumb.

“No,” Afandi avowed firmly. “I’m sorry if anything I said might have misled you. But we’ll have to go to the Plateau of the Demons.”

I thought I was beginning to understand how Gesar could have quarreled with Rustam. And I thought that Merlin, for all his evil deeds, must have been a very kind soul and an extremely patient Other. Because Afandi was Rustam. No crystal ball was needed to see that!

“I’ll just be a moment…” Afandi got up and went toward a small door in the corner of the chaikhana that had the outline of a male figure stenciled on it. It was interesting that there wasn’t any door with a female silhouette. Apparently the women of Samarkand were not in the habit of spending time in chaikhanas.

“Well, this Rustam’s a real character,” I muttered while he was gone. “As stubborn as a mule.”

“Anton, Afandi’s not Rustam,” Alisher said.

“You mean you believe him?”

“Anton, ten years ago my father recognized Rustam. At the time I didn’t think anything of it…the ancient Higher One was still alive-so what? Many of them have withdrawn from the active struggle and live unobtrusive lives among ordinary people…”

“So?”

“My father knew Afandi. He must have known him for fifty years.”

I thought about that.

“But what exactly did your father say to you about Rustam?”

Alisher wrinkled up his forehead. Then, speaking very precisely, as if he was reading from the page of a book, he said, “‘Today I saw a Great One, whom no one has met anywhere for seventy years. The Great Rustam, Gesar’s friend, and then his enemy. I walked past him. We recognized each other but pretended that we hadn’t seen anything. It is good that an Other as insignificant as I has never quarreled with him.’”

“But what of it?” I asked. It was my turn to argue now. “Your father could finally have recognized Rustam, disguised as Afandi. That’s the point.”

Alisher thought about that and admitted that, yes, it could have happened like that. But he still thought his father hadn’t meant Afandi.

“But anyway, that doesn’t get us anywhere,” I said, gesturing impatiently. “You can see how obstinate he is. We’ll have to go to the Plateau of the Demons with him… By the way, what is that? Just don’t tell me that in the East there are demons who live on some plateau!”

Alisher laughed. “Demons are the Twilight forms of Dark Magicians whose human nature has been distorted by Power, the Twilight, and the Dark. They teach us that in one of our very first lessons. No, the Plateau of the Demons is a human name. It’s a mountainous area where there are boulders that have fantastic shapes-just like petrified demons. People don’t like to go there. That is, only the tourists go…”

“Tourists aren’t people,” I agreed. “So it’s just garden-variety superstition?”

“No, it’s not all superstition,” Alisher said in a more serious voice. “There was a battle there. A big battle between Dark Ones and Light Ones, almost two thousand years ago. There were more Dark Ones, they were winning…and then the Great White Magician Rustam used a terrible spell. Nobody has ever used the White Haze in battle again since then. The Dark Ones were turned to stone. And they didn’t dissolve into the Twilight, but tumbled out into the ordinary world, just as they were-stone demons. What people say is true, only they don’t realize it.”

It was as if Alisher’s words had broken open some lock in my memory. And the door of a closet had creaked open to reveal an ancient skeleton with its teeth bared in a bony grin…

I felt my heart seared by a cold, clammy, repulsive memory. I was standing facing Kostya Saushkin. And from far away Gesar’s voice was whispering in my head…

“The White Mist,” I said. “The spell is called the White Mist. Only Higher Magicians can work it; it requires total concentration and the bleeding of all Power from within a radius of three kilometers…”

Gesar had not simply given me bare knowledge. He had transferred an entire piece of his memory. A generous gift…

The stone burns your feet through the soft leather shoes, because the stone is red hot, and even the spells applied to your clothes lose their effect. And up ahead someone’s body is smoking, half sunk into the softened stone. Not all of our comrades’ charms have withstood the Hammer of Fate.

“Gesar!” a broad-shouldered man shouts in my ear. His short black beard has turned frizzy in the heat, his red and white clothes are dusted with black ash. Lacy black-and-gray flakes are falling on us from above, crumbling into dust as they fall. “Gesar, we have to decide!”

I say nothing. I look at the smoking body and try to discern who it is. But then his defense finally collapses, and the body explodes into a column of greasy ashes that shoots up into the sky. The streams of dispersing Power waft the ashes about and for a moment they assume the spectral form of a human figure. I realize what it is that is falling on us, and a lump rises in my throat.

“Gesar, they’re trying to raise the Shade of the Masters.” The voice of the magician dressed in red and white is full of panic and horror. “Gesar!”

“I’m ready, Rustam,” I say. I reach out my hand to him. Magicians do not often work spells in pairs, but we have been through a lot together. And it’s easier for two to do it. Easier to make the decision. Because there are hundreds of Dark Ones and tens of thousands of men in front of us.

And behind us there are only a hundred people who have put their trust in us, along with about ten apprentice magicians.

It’s not easy to convince yourself that a hundred and ten are worth more than a hundred and ten thousand.

But I look at the black-and-gray ash, and suddenly I feel better. I tell myself what powerful and benign individuals will always tell themselves in a situation like this in a hundred, a thousand, or two thousand years: