“Something terrible’s about to happen,” Gesar declared, and then he took off his jacket and threw it down on the ground.

Had he decided to have a fistfight, then?

The young man didn’t seem to have anything against fisticuffs—he moved along an arc, avoiding the section of space frozen in time by the spells. And despite his likeable, attractive appearance, somehow I was reminded only too clearly of what Pastukhov had called him.

A tiger . . .

Just at that moment I heard an engine roaring. Battle Magician Jermenson and the team had finally caught up with us. He leapt out of the SUV before it had even stopped, I think. Garik put up a Magician’s Shield on the run, and to judge from its power he must have used one of the Watch’s amulets. Jermenson moved out in front, Alisher fell in behind him with his head inclined and his hand pressed to his heart—it looked as if he was preparing to work as a reserve power source, pumping Jermenson full of energy.

The blond young man stopped, assessing the disposition of forces. To be quite honest, it wasn’t clear what move he was thinking of making in a situation like that—he was facing four Higher Magicians, as well as a couple of field operatives who might be less powerful but had pretty good battle experience.

Jermenson moved his hand up through the air, as if he was lifting an invisible load. The ground bulged up between him and the stranger, sprouting into a pillar three meters high. The pillar shuddered, taking on the features of a grotesque human figure, beside which the boxer Nikolai Valuev would have looked like a slim, handsome, but rather undersized fashion model.

I had come across golems before. Rather more often, perhaps, than I would have liked purely for educational purposes. But this was the first time I had seen a golem created—and so quickly, without any runes embedded in the clay, without any obvious programming.

“Oh, these sly Jewish tricks!” said Olga.

The young man was clearly disconcerted by the golem. He made some elusive kind of movement—and a monstrous weight seemed to crash down onto the golem, crumpling it and driving it back into the ground. Only that didn’t bother the golem. It soaked into the ground and immediately oozed out of it at another point, much closer to the stranger, reaching out a massive hand for him.

A rapid flickering of fingers, a brief fluttering of lips—and the arm reaching out to the stranger started falling to pieces, collapsing onto the ground in lumps of clay, as if some invisible meat-slicer was chopping it off as it advanced.

The golem paid no attention to this and simply carried on reaching out its arm. The falling clay wriggled on the ground and was absorbed back into its feet, so it didn’t lose any mass at all.