“Everything’s cool!” I said firmly. “Don’t worry, I’m not having a fit of hysterics, I’m not going on a binge, and I’m not hatching plans to quit the Watch. I’ll take a trip to the airport and wander about there for a while. This whole thing’s wrong somehow, can’t you see? A boy-Prophet mouthing vague prophecies, a plane that should have crashed but didn’t . . . it’s not right!”

“Gesar’s already sent someone to inspect Sheremetyevo,” Semyon told me.

His voice had a sly kind of note to it . . .

“Who did he send?”

“Las.”

“I see,” I said with a nod, stopping in front of the elevators and pressing the call button. “In other words, Gesar’s not expecting anything interesting.”

Las was an untypical Other. He didn’t have any Other abilities at all to begin with, and he shouldn’t have developed any. But several years earlier he had managed to get in the way of the spell of an ancient magical book, the Fuaran. The vampire Kostya, who at one time was my neighbor and even my friend, had used Las to demonstrate that the book gave him the power to turn human beings into Others . . .

What had seemed strangest to me was not that Las was transformed into an Other, but that he was transformed into a Light Other. He was no evil villain, but he had a very specific sense of humor . . . and his views on life would have been more suitable for a Dark One too. Working in the Night Watch hadn’t changed him all that much—he seemed to regard it as just one more joke.

But he was a weak Other. Seventh-Level, the very lowest, with only vague prospects of ever reaching the Fifth or Sixth (and Las wasn’t desperately keen on the idea anyway).

“I wouldn’t say that,” Semyon disagreed amiably. “Gesar simply isn’t expecting anything interesting in the line of magic. You were there, after all, you didn’t spot anything. And you’re a Higher Magician . . .”

I winced.

“Yes, you are, you are,” Semyon said in a friendly tone. “You don’t have much experience, but you have all the abilities. So digging in that direction is pointless. But Las—he’ll look at the situation differently. Practically from a human point of view. His head works in a rather paradoxical fashion . . . what if he spots something?”

“Then the two of us should definitely go together,” I said. “And you can boldly proceed with initiating the Prophet.”

“ ‘Arise, prophet, and see, and hearken . . .’ ” said Semyon, quoting Pushkin. He walked into the elevator first when it finally arrived. He sighed: “Oh, I don’t like Prophets and Clairvoyants! They blurt out something about you, and then you wander around like an idiot, wondering what they meant by it. You can imagine such terrifying things sometimes, but it’s all total nonsense really, phooey, not worth bothering about!”