said. 'You must have felt her mind. Do you think she could have become a Light One?'
'For an ordinary Other, it's impossible,' Svetlana said. 'Or almost impossible... For a Higher One... for Arina...'
She paused, remembering. I waited, glancing now and then at the TV screen, where a sad little girl was dragging a mitten along on a string and imagining that it was a puppy. How terrible! That would be the end of all our mittens and gloves. Nadya wouldn't actually turn them into dogs, of course - any magic has its limits. But there would be more toy dogs in the apartment from now on.
It was time to buy her a puppy, before life became unbearable.
'She could,' Svetlana said. 'She could have become a Light One. Her soul is very strange, everything's mixed up together inside it... there weren't any particular atrocities, though. But Arina swore an oath to me that she would live for a hundred years without killing a single human being or Other. She can't go against that.'
'And she hasn't killed anyone,' I observed. 'But as for supplying Edgar with amulets and raising his level of Power... nothing was said about that. Arina has enough wisdom to interpret your prohi bition like that.'
'Anton, we're talking about the wrong thing,' Svetlana said, putting down her cup. 'Arina, who has become a Light One, or some other enchantress ?that's not the point at all. The import ant question to ask is: What are they trying to achieve? What has united them? The ambition to destroy the entire world? Nonsense! You only find people who want to destroy the world just for the sake of it in stupid films. Power? But that's stupid too, Anton! They have enough Power already. No artefact, not even one made by a crazy magician fifteen hundred years ago, will allow them to achieve absolute Power. Until we understand what they are trying to achieve, what they want to find at the bottom of the Twilight, then it's completely irrelevant whether it is Arina or not, if she has become a Light One, or disguised herself so that Thomas couldn't recognise her.'
'Sveta, do you have any hunches?' I pretended not to notice that she had said 'we'. It's true what they say - you never really leave the Watch completely.
'The Crown of All Things erases the barriers between the levels of the Twilight... ' Svetlana said and paused.
'Mama, the cartoon's over!' Nadya shouted.
'Try comparing it with the White Mist. The spells obviously have a single root... ' Svetlana said, getting up and walking towards Nadya. 'Time for bed.'
'A story!' Nadya demanded.
'Not today. Daddy and I have to talk.'
Nadya looked at me resentfully, fiddling with the thin string of turquoise beads round her neck. She muttered:
'You're always talking... And Daddy's always going away'
'That's Daddy's job,' Svetlana explained calmly, grabbing hold of her daughter's hand. 'You know he fights against the forces of darkness.'
'Like Harry Potter,' Nadya said rather doubtfully, looking at me. I suppose I didn't have the spectacles or the scar on my forehead that were needed to match up to the image.
'Yes, like Harry Potter, Fat Frumos and Luke Skywalker.'
'Like Luke Skywalker,' Nadya decided and gave me a smile. Obviously that was the character she thought I resembled most of all. Well, that was better than nothing.
'I'll be straight back...' said Svetlana, and the two of them went to the nursery. I sat there, looking at a chocolate sweet with a bite taken out of it. It had alternate layers of dark choc olate and white chocolate. When I counted seven layers, I laughed. It was a graphic illustration of the structure of the Twilight. The White Mist folded all the layers together, turning any Others who got in the way into stone. Okay, let's sidestep the effect of the spell in battle. What happened afterwards? I closed my eyes, trying to remember.
Afterwards the Twilight straightened out again. The levels of the Twilight returned to their old places.
Why had we decided that the Crown of All Things would join the Twilight and the real world together for ever? Simply because we believed what Rustam had said? But how did he know... The Twilight would fold up - and then expand again. As it left our world the Twilight would spread out its layers again. It was like a stiff spring ?you could compress it, but it would straighten back out.
And that was interesting. I didn't believe in a Merlin who had created a