They are the ones who eventually fathom a most important truth—it’s easy enough to put on an impressive show, battering each other with fireballs or trying to crush each other with the Press. And it also carries on for a very long time. Because that’s what your adversary is expecting from you. And he protects himself with the Barrier of Will, the Sphere of Negation, the Magician’s Shield . . . There they stand, facing each other—a Light Other and a Dark Other, hammering at each other with spells, defending themselves against spells, sometimes even finding time to abuse each other verbally in the process. Maybe this is a good thing. After all, the majority of magical duels are not fought to the death but until one of the adversaries surrenders or withdraws from the field of battle. Otherwise we would have wiped ourselves out ages ago.

But if a genuine Battle Magician enters the fray—then everything goes very differently. He employs the good old healing spell Willow Bark or its jolly Dark variant, Aspirin. And the unsuspecting enemy suddenly finds that his body temperature has fallen to that of the ambient environment. A Battle Magician doesn’t fling the Triple Blade, he applies the simple little Grater, which Svetlana uses when she makes vitamin salads for Nadya out of apples and carrots, and I use to clean off the saucepans if something gets burnt on . . . And his adversary suddenly becomes a millimeter or two slimmer. Instantly, from all sides. Usually no one can continue the battle after that.

I, of course, am very far from being a genuine Battle Magician. But it was still a long time since I’d flung any fireballs.

That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three meters.

It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself!

“Fuck your fucking mother!” Gesar howled, twisting the wheel round. In a moment of genuine terror only the Russian language could convey the true depths of his feelings. It made me feel proud of our great Russian culture!

The Rolls-Royce jerked to the left—like any driver, Gesar automatically turned so as to place the person beside him in the line of fire instead of himself. Nothing personal, just a pure reflex response.