“Let’s go,” said Edgar, pushing me gently in the back.

We set off down the stairs. I looked back for a moment at the stone crown of the castle above the roofs of the buildings.

Why, yes! Of course. You only had to think for a moment and put it all together. Merlin had been most magnanimous when he composed his little verse…

“What are you dawdling for?” Edgar shouted at me. His nerves were on edge, and no wonder. He was anticipating a meeting with the one he loved.

We walked past more motionless bodies. There were people and Others; Merlin’s Sleep didn’t differentiate between them. I noticed several sleeping Inquisitors. Behind the fake dividing walls everything was lit up brightly by the glow of auras. They had been waiting, and the ambush could not have been prepared any better.

Only, no one had known the full power of the artifact that had been used.

“You haven’t forgotten about the barrier on the third level, I suppose?” I asked.

“No,” said Arina.

I noticed that, as we walked along, first Edgar and then Arina left perfectly innocent-looking objects charged with magic on the floor and the walls: scraps of paper, sticks of chewing gum, bits of string. In one place Edgar rapidly sketched several strange symbols on the wall in red chalk-the chalk crumbling into dust as soon as he had traced out the final sign. In another place Arina smiled as she scattered a box of matches across the floor. The Last Watch was clearly afraid of being pursued.

Eventually we entered the room with the guillotine, which for some reason the Last Watch had chosen as its point of entry into the Twilight. This was probably the exact center of the vortex, the precise focus of Power.

And here, in addition to the two first-level magicians who were asleep, there was one person who was wide awake.

He was a young man, short and plump, wearing spectacles on his cultured-looking face. He looked very peaceful and nonaggressive in his jeans and bright-colored shirt. In the corner of the room I noticed a girl about ten years old, sleeping with her head resting on a bag that had been considerately placed underneath it. Had they decided to open the way through with the blood of a child, then?

“My daughter fell asleep,” the man said, correcting my mistaken assumption. “An extremely interesting device, I must say…” He took out a small sphere woven out of strips of metal from his pocket. “The lever shifted, and it won’t move back again.”

“That’s the way it should be,” said Edgar. “It won’t move back again for seventy-something years. So the device is useless to you; leave it here. Take this!”

He tossed a wad of money to the man, who caught it and casually ran his finger over the ends of the notes. But I noticed that he was keeping his left hand behind his back. Uh-oh…

“All correct,” the man said with a nod. “But I’m a little concerned about the scale of the event…and the devices that you employ. It seems to me that the deal was clearly made on unequal terms.”

“I told you this would happen,” Edgar said to Arina. He turned back to the man and asked, “What do you want? More money?”

The man shook his head.

“Take the money and your daughter, and go. That’s my advice to you,” said Arina.

The man licked his lips and then unbuttoned his shirt.

He turned out not to be fat at all. His torso was encased in something that looked like a back brace. Except that it had wires protruding from it.

“A kilogram of plastic explosive. The switch works on the ‘dead hand’ principle,” said the man, raising his left hand. “I’m going to take that sphere, all the strange trinkets that I found on these guys”-he prodded one of the sleeping Others with his foot-“and everything you have in your pockets. Is that clear?”

“As clear as day,” said Edgar. “I said right at the beginning that this would happen. I made the right choice with you.”

I suddenly noticed that Gennady was no longer there with us.

“And this resolves a certain number of moral difficulties,” Edgar continued, turning away.

The explosives belt suddenly flew into little pieces. It wasn’t an explosion; it looked like the work of a clawed hand moving with unnatural speed…out of the Twilight, for example. Totally confused, the man opened his left hand, and a small switch with an absurd little tail of wire fell out of it. He’d been telling the truth.

The next moment, the man screamed, and I chose to turn away.

“An exceptionally loathsome character,” said Edgar. “His threat was serious, even though the little girl is his own daughter. But now we have the blood we need, with none of the killing of innocent people that upsets Arina so much.”

“You’re no better than him,” I replied.

“I don’t pretend to be,” Edgar said with a shrug. “Let’s go. It’s not the first time we’ve entered the Twilight together, is it?”

Edgar even took hold of my hand. I didn’t protest. I found my own shadow on the floor and stepped into it. Through the gust of icy cold wind, into the frozen, hungry space of the Twilight…

The first level.

We moved on without delay. The second level. The space around us was seething, agitated either by the fresh blood or the hole that Merlin had made here in the fabric of creation.

Edgar and Arina were still beside me. Intensely focused. A moment later Gennady also appeared, with blood on his lips. On the second level I could barely recognize Saushkin senior, his face was so badly distorted by hideous malice and insane hatred.

The third level. The final eddies of the vortex of Power that had been blocking our way so recently were still raging here.

Edgar started looking around and said, “Someone’s following us…one of the signs has been activated.”

“Successfully?” A cloud of steam escaped from between Arina’s lips as she asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go lower!”

The fourth level greeted us with its pink sky and colored sand. I pulled my hand out of Edgar’s grasp and said, “We agreed! I won’t join the fight against the golem!”

“And nobody’s forcing you to,” Edgar said with a toothy grimace. “Don’t worry, you can keep out of it. Forward!”

This was the point at which I had planned to start an argument. To drag things out and then run for it, or even stay on the fourth level and send the Last Watch on to a pointless battle against the monster.

But something seemed to urge me on. Something like the insane obsession that had possessed Arina, Edgar, and Gennady seemed to take possession of me, too. I had to go down to the fifth level…I had to!

If only to distract them from their vigilance…

“All right, but I don’t intend to lay down my life for your sake!” I shouted, and stepped down to the fifth level under Edgar’s watchful eye.

They appeared beside me almost instantly. Yes, they had certainly pumped themselves full of Power. Gennady was the only one who was slightly delayed. He had obviously got through at the second attempt.

And this level of the Twilight was so much nicer than the ones above it! Cool, even chilly, but already without that icy wind that sucked the life out of you. And the colors here looked almost natural…

I looked around, trying to spot the golem, and I saw it about two hundred meters away: There were two snake’s heads sticking up out of the grass, turning this way and that like submarine periscopes. Then the golem spotted us. The heads shuddered and reached up higher. There was a loud hissing sound-very much like a real snake’s hiss, except that it was coming from such a long distance away…

A moment later the snake was already slipping toward us, managing to keep both of its heads above the grass at the same time.

“‘Head and tail,’” Arina said pensively. “I don’t know, I don’t know…Edgar, release Kong.”

I understood what she meant when I saw Edgar take a small jade figurine out of his pocket. It was a long-armed monkey with short, pointed horns protruding from its head. The Inquisitor breathed on the figurine and then unscrewed its head-the figurine turned out to be hollow-and carefully set it down in the grass. We barely had time to jump back before the vessel started giving out green smoke that coiled into the form of a monster.