“Drop it,” said Gesar, with a wave of his hand. Yes, he was clearly in an excellent mood. “What’s done is done. No point raking over old coals. I don’t have any assignments for you today, you can take care of your own business. Ah yes . . . you are granted the right to one seventh-level benign intervention!”

“If only I’d had it yesterday evening!”

“You would have saved the girl, and the vampire would have been given a new license. You know that!”

I shrugged and walked out of the office.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

THE MAIN ADVANTAGE THAT SOMEONE AT the top has, at least in an organization like the Night Watch, is the freedom to plan his own day.

I actually always had more than enough work. Officially I had been made responsible for supervising trainees, monitoring teaching in the school and inspecting patrols. In the tedious bureaucratic language that is self-generated in any organization, whether it’s the accounts office of a pipe-rolling mill or an alliance of anarchistic romantic artists, my job was titled “Deputy Director for the Training and Professional Development of Personnel.”

Doesn’t actually sound too exhausting, right? But I had practically no free time left. Unless I took an arbitrary decision to rake all the papers to one corner of the desk, switch off my work mobile, and do something that was strictly optional. Then it miraculously turned out that the Watch was capable of existing without one of its deputy directors for as long as you could wish. But the moment I turned back to work, I was swamped by a tsunami of applications, requests, complaints, instructions, and schedules.

As a child I didn’t like school, as a young man I didn’t like college—and I went through all that to end up supervising the training program in a magical police force! I wonder whether, if I had remained a programmer, or taken up architecture—that was what my parents wanted, we had some well-known architect or other in our family—educational work would have caught up with me anyway?

Probably it would. Anybody, even an Other, can only change the form of his life, not its content. In one old computer game a wicked witch had the habit of asking people she met: “What can change human nature?”—and afterwards she took great pleasure in killing them. Because no one could find the right answer . . .

But although Nature cannot be changed, she can always be deceived. For a while.