And then he did. I don’t know what Gesar was about to say, but the young stranger certainly needed no prompting. He spread his hands—I thought he was molding another fireball out of the air, a little bit smaller than the first one, but there wasn’t any bright glow, although Power of some kind was glimmering in the palms of his hands, something was being prepared . . .

“Freeze!” shouted Olga, and I responded to the word as if it were a command—I struck at the stranger, with all the Power I had, with a localized time halt.

And why not? If you think about it, it’s humane and it’s reliable. The enemy is immobilized but entirely unharmed. We have time to figure out what to do, he has no time of any kind.

Only Olga wasn’t asking me to use a freeze: she was warning me what the stranger was about to do.

Gesar suddenly disappeared—it looked as if he’d skipped down or up a level in the Twilight. Olga flew off about ten meters to one side with a gigantic leap that an Olympic champion, or even a hungry vampire, would have envied. But I stayed standing there like a fool, right in the path of the freeze that was advancing towards me . . .

Only I wasn’t fated to end up suspended in the Twilight, stuck like a fly in the amber of halted time. My own freeze—far, far weaker than my adversary’s—crashed into the spell hurtling towards it. And, as often happens with spells, they immediately interacted.

A faceted form like a precious stone suddenly appeared, suspended above the middle of the somber gray road that was hemmed in by the grotesque wooden buildings. It rotated slowly, sinking down into the ground. Looking through it, I saw our adversary fragmented into a host of tiny little figures.

“Old fool!” bellowed Gesar, appearing beside me. He waved his arms—and there was a flash of green flame beyond the transparent crystal.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, boss,” I told him, unable to resist.

I caught Gesar’s baffled glance.

“I’m glad you’re still able to joke, but I meant him,” said Gesar, nodding in the direction of the green fire. “And you, Anton, have clearly used up all your reserves of good luck for today. Shooting down a Freeze with a Freeze is no easy task.”

“You meant him?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the young man. I looked at the green fire that was gradually fading away. “What is that?”

“It will slow him down,” Gesar said evasively, but very confidently.

The green fire went out.

The young man shook some strange, sticky green sparks off his cloak and looked at us. This time his expression was far from friendly.

“Uh-oh,” said Olga, coming back to us. “So we couldn’t give a damn for Gesar’s Taiga . . .”