“He’s called Fan Wen-yan,” Arina replied. “Actually, he has plenty of different names, but that’s the one he uses now for living among human beings. He’s about three hundred years old. A Light Other, but he has never been a member of any Watches.”

“What rank is he?” I asked.

“Fourth.”

“Is that all?” I asked, amazed.

Of course, fourth rank is pretty serious, not just the ability to perform petty magic tricks, like seventh rank. But in three hundred years even a weak Other hauls himself up two or three levels from his original level. Did that mean Fan had been a total weakling when he was initiated?

“Why so snobbish?” Arina snorted. “Weren’t you a fourth-ranker once upon a time?”

“Fifteen years ago,” I admitted. “But I was initiated as a Fourth-Level Other.”

“Well, he started right at the very bottom,” said Arina, confirming my surmise. “From the Seventh-Level. And he climbed patiently . . . In 1925 he was appointed curator of the Gugun Palace Museum in Beijing. Great Others were not required there, the Chinese respect the authorities, no one attempted to steal the treasures. Even when the Xinhai Revolution took place”—Arina gave me a glance and took pity on me—“and that was in 1911, the imperial treasures weren’t plundered seriously . . . Fan Wen-yan would have had a quiet life, but in 1930 something strange happened. Fan Wen-yan had a friend, a Prophet. A weak one, but a Prophet nonetheless. I don’t know the details—maybe he was more than just his friend . . .” Arina laughed. “Anyway, the young man prophesied something or other, and the only witness to it was Fan. For some reason he didn’t like the prophecy and he didn’t want to reveal it to the human population. And so the Tiger came for Fan and his friend. That wasn’t what they called him but, from all the descriptions, it was the Tiger.”

I waited.

“His friend was killed. But Fan managed to do something . . . either he destroyed the Tiger . . .”

“How could he have destroyed him?” I exclaimed in surprise. “The Tiger has only just been in Moscow . . .”

“But are you sure that there’s only one Tiger?” Arina asked with a smile. “Anyway, Fan managed to do something. Killed it, drove it away, frightened it off, bought it off—I don’t know what. But the prophecy wasn’t proclaimed, and later, under interrogation in the Night Watch, Fan said that he ‘would rather cut himself into pieces and feed them to the tigers in the Beijing zoo than utter what had been revealed to him.’ When we put everything together and realized that a weak Chinese magician had managed to drive away the Tiger, it was decided to find him and clarify the details. Not for any specific requirement . . . but additional knowledge never does any harm.”

“So what stopped you?”