“And you’re right,” said Semyon, nodding. “Exalted feelings, noble impulses, reckless courage, foolhardy self-sacrifice—that’s all very fine. But there has to be a reason for it. A real reason. Otherwise all your Light Other aspirations amount to no more than stupidity. The annals of the Watches recall many Others who were noble but stupid. But they’re history now. And unfortunately their example is not worth imitating.”

“You’d better go home,” Alisher put in. “You’re not on duty.”

And I realized that when Gesar gave me permission to reveal the information about the Tiger, he’d had a different purpose in mind. To make me see sense.

Well, he’d done just that.

I didn’t go home, of course. No, I didn’t pester anyone else with questions about whether they would wade into a hopeless battle with a Twilight Creature. And I didn’t make the rounds of the office, mentally placing Others in the key defensive positions. I went to the analysts and scrounged a copy of the report for Gesar (before they gave it to me, the guys contacted the boss and got his go-ahead). A close reading convinced me that Gesar wasn’t lying and in the opinion of the analysts (based on rather poorly documented attempts to fight the Tiger—in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries) we wouldn’t be able to defeat the Twilight Creature.

At night, strangely enough, the Watch office is empty. We’re called the “Night Watch” and we patrol the streets mostly at night (how else can we do it—our main client base are the lower Dark Ones, the vampires and shapeshifters, who find it harder to control themselves) but our work is like an iceberg: most of it’s invisible. And that work takes place during the day—paper-shuffling, training, analyzing data, studying fresh information. We live among human beings, after all, and it’s more convenient for us to live by their rhythm. At least we managed to push an initiative through the human parliament recently to coordinate daylight-saving time across the entire country . . .

I sat at the computer in my office for a while. Went into my e-mail and wrote a couple of letters. For some reason I suddenly remembered the song that the policeman Iskender’s son had been playing, searched for the group that performed it, and was surprised to discover that it was from Kazakhstan—I hadn’t realized before that they played anything but the dombra down there! Then I found a pirate site where their other songs were available. I clicked on the title Obedient Boys, leaned back in my chair, and listened:

Stabbing sharp asters into the streets,

The moon rose to greet susceptible youth,

And sang as she beamed out pagan brightness:

“Children, kill your electrical glare,

Children, before you are all left eyeless,

I’ll point out salvation, show you the way:

All those who walk the moonlight path