a sad thought, but Geser could have given the order to eliminate Victor. Not for revenge, of course not! But the Great Magician would always find a morally accept able form for justifying what he wanted to do.
But stop! Then why would Geser send me to Edinburgh? If he was guilty, then he had to understand that I wouldn't try to conceal his guilt!
And if Zabulon was guilty, then he had even less reason to help me. For all his dainty manners, I would be only too glad to get rid of him!
So it wasn't the Great Ones...
I took a little sip of wine and set down the glass.
The Great Ones weren't responsible, but they suspected each other. And they were both relying on me. Geser knew I wouldn't pass up any opportunity to do Zabulon a bad turn. And Zabulon understood that I could even go against Geser.
Excellent ?I couldn't have asked to be dealt a better hand. A Great Light One and a Great Dark One, both significant figures in the worldwide struggle between the Light and the Dark, and both on my side. I could get help from them. And Foma Lermont,
The Scot with a surname that echoed so sweetly in the Russian heart ?he would help me too. And that meant the vampire had nowhere left to hide.
And that made me feel good. Evil goes unpunished far too often.
I got up and squeezed cautiously past the man next to me into the aisle. I looked up at the sign. The toilet at the front of the plane was occupied. Of course, the easiest thing would have been to wait, but I felt like stretching my legs. I moved aside the curtain separating business class from economy and walked towards the tail of the plane.
As that well-known ironic phrase puts it, 'economy-class passen gers get there at the same time as first-class passengers, only for a lot less money'. Well, there wasn't actually any first class on our plane, but the business class wasn't bad at all ?fine wide seats, lots of space between the rows. And then again, the flight attend ants were more helpful, the food was better, the drink was more abundant.
Not that the economy-class passengers were having it tough, either. Some were sleeping or dozing lightly, many of them were reading newspapers, novels or guidebooks. A few people were working on their laptop computers and others were playing games. One highly original individual was piloting a plane. As far as I could see it was a fairly realistic flight-simulator, and the player was actually flying a Boeing 767 from Moscow to London. Maybe that was his own cranky way of fighting his fear of flying?
And, of course, lots of passengers were drinking. No matter how often we're told that alcohol is particularly harmful when flying at altitude, some people are always keen to give their flight above the clouds a little extra lift.
I walked all the way back to the tail. The toilets there were occupied too, and while I stood and waited for a few minutes I examined the backs of the passengers' heads. Bouffant hairstyles, girlish braids, short crew cuts, gleaming bald patches, amusing kids' punk cuts. Hundreds of heads thinking about their business in London...
The door of the toilet opened and a young guy slipped out and squeezed past me. I stepped towards the toilet.
Then I stopped.
And turned round.
The guy was about twenty years old. Broad in the shoulders, a little bit taller than me. Some young men start to grow rapidly and broaden out after the age of eighteen. This used to be attrib uted to the beneficial influence of the army, which 'made men out of boys'. But in reality, it's simply a matter of the way the hormones work in any particular organism.
Common or garden physiology.
'Egor?' I said uncertainly.
Then I took a hasty glimpse through the Twilight.
Yes, of course. Even if he'd been wearing an iron mask I would still have recognised him. Egor, Zabulon's decoy, who was intercepted and cunningly exploited by Geser. Once he had been a unique boy with an indeterminate aura.*
Now he had grown into a young man. With that same indeterminate aura. A luminous glow that was usually colourless but was sometimes tinted red, or blue, or green, or yellow. Like the sand on the fourth level of the Twilight... look closer and you'll see all the colours in the world. A potential Other, still capable, even as an adult, of becoming