The flesh gave way.
For a moment the glass was covered with a red film of blood, but then the wind swept it away. And all I could see was the vague outline of the Dark Magician's body, getting smaller and smaller, tumbling over and over in the tower's turbulent slipstream. He was being carried in the direction of The Three Little Pigs, a fashionable establishment at the foot of the tower.
The clock ticking away in my mind gave a loud click and instantly halved the time I had left.
I stepped off the glass and walked round the platform in a circle. I wasn't looking at the people, I was gazing into the Twilight. No, there weren't any more guards here. Now I had to find out where their headquarters were. Up on top in the service area, among all the equipment? I didn't think so. Probably somewhere more comfortable.
There was another security guard, a human, standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the restaurant. One glance was enough for me to see that he'd been influenced already, and quite recently. It was a good thing they'd only influenced him superficially.
And it was a very good thing they'd decided to influence him at all. That was a trick that cut both ways.
The security guard opened his mouth, getting ready to shout.
'Quiet! Come this way!' I ordered.
The security guard followed me without saying a word.
We went into the gents' – one of the tower's free attractions, the highest urinal and toilet bowls in Moscow. Please feel free to make your mark among the clouds. I waved my hand through the air. A spotty-faced youth came scurrying out of one cubicle, zipping up his trousers, another man at the urinal grunted, broke off and went wandering out with a glassy look in his eyes.
'Take your clothes off,' I ordered the security guard and starting pulling off my wet sweater.
The guard's holster was half open, and his Desert Eagle was far older than my Makarov, but that didn't bother me. The important thing was that the uniform was almost a perfect fit.
'If you hear shooting,' I told the guard, 'go down and do your duty. Do you understand?'
He nodded.
'I turn you towards the Light,' I said, intoning the words of the enlistment formula. 'Renounce the Dark, defend the Light. I give you the vision to distinguish Good from Evil. I give you the faith to follow the Light. I give you the courage to fight against the Dark.'
I used to think I'd never get a chance to use my right to enlist volunteers. How could there be free choice in genuine Dark? How could I involve anybody in our games when the Watches themselves were established to counterattack that practice?
But now I was acting without hesitation, exploiting the loophole that the Dark Ones had left me by getting the security man to guard their headquarters, the way some people keep a small dog in their apartment: it can't bite, but it can yap. What they'd done gave me the right to sway the security man in the opposite direction and get him to follow me. After all, he wasn't either good or bad, he was a perfectly ordinary man with a wife he loved in moderation, elderly parents whom he remembered to support, a young daughter and a son from his first marriage who was almost grown up, a weak faith in God, a tangled set of moral principles and a few standard dreams – an ordinary, decent man.
A piece of cannon fodder in the war between the armies of Light and Dark.
'The Light be with you,' I said. The pathetic little man nodded and his face lit up. There was adoration in his eyes. A few hours earlier he'd gazed in exactly the same way at the Dark Magician who'd given him a casual command and shown him my photo.
A moment later the security guard was standing at the top of the stairs in my stinking clothes, and I was walking down the stairs trying to figure out what I was going to do if Zabulon was at the headquarters. Or any other magician of his level, come to that.
In that case my powers wouldn't be enough to maintain my disguise for even a second.
The Bronze Hall. I stepped through the doors and looked at the absurd ring-shaped 'restaurant car'. The ring was slowly rotating, along with the tables standing in it.
I'd been sure the Dark Ones would have set up their headquarters in either the Gold Hall or the Silver Hall. And I was quite surprised by the scene in front of me.
The waiters were drifting from table to table like lazy fish, handing out bottles of spirits, which were supposedly forbidden up here. On two tables straight ahead of me computer terminals had been set up, connected to two mobile phones. They hadn't bothered to run a cable to any of the tower's countless service outlets, which meant the headquarters had only been set up to function for a short while. Three young guys with short hair were working away intently, with their fingers leaping around all over the keyboards while the lines of type scrolled up the monitor screens and their cigarettes smoked away in the ashtrays. I'd never seen Dark programmers before, and these were only simple operators, of course. But they didn't look any different from one of our magicians sitting at a laptop plugged into the network at headquarters. Maybe they even looked a bit more respectable than some of ours.
'Sokolniki's completely covered,' one of them said. His voice wasn't loud, but it rumbled right round the ring of the restaurant, making the waiters shudder and falter in their stride.
'The Tagansko–Krasnopresnenskaya line's under surveillance,' said another. The programmers glanced at each other and laughed. They probably had a little competition going to see who could report fastest on his sectors.
Go right ahead, keep looking!
I set off round the restaurant, making for the bar. Take no notice of me. I'm a harmless security man who just happened to be given the role of a lowly guard. And now the security man's decided he'd like a beer. Has he completely lost all sense of responsibility? Or has he decided to check that his new bosses are safe?
The young woman behind the bar was wiping glasses in a melancholy sort of way. When I reached her, she started pouring me a beer without saying a word. Her eyes were dark and empty, she'd been turned into a puppet and I had to struggle to suppress an outburst of fury. I couldn't allow it. I had no right to feelings. I was a robot too. Puppets didn't have feelings.
And then I saw the girl sitting on the tall rotating stool opposite the bar, and my heart sank again.
Why hadn't I thought of that earlier?
Every field headquarters has to be declared, and an observer sent over from the other side. It's part of the Treaty, one of the rules of the game, in the interest, supposedly, of both sides. If we had a field headquarters, then one of the Dark Ones was sitting in it right now.
The Light One here was Tiger Cub.
At first her glance slid over me with no sign of curiosity, and I was almost certain everything would be okay.
Then her eyes came back to me.
She'd already seen the security man whose appearance I'd assumed. And there was something about me that didn't match the features stored in her memory, something that bothered her. In an instant she was looking at me through the Twilight.