We drove to the Dungeons in total silence, past sidewalks strewn with bodies and motionless vehicles (I saw three that were burning). We got out of the car.
On Princess Street, on the other side of the ravine, everything had stopped dead too, but I could already hear a siren howling somewhere. People always recover from a panic. Even if they don't know what it is that they're up against.
'Let's go,' said Edgar, pushing me gently in the back.
We set off down the stairs. I looked back for a moment at the stone crown of the castle above the roofs of the buildings.
Why yes. Of course. You only had to think for a moment and put it all together. Merlin had been most magnanimous when he'd composed his little verse...
'What are you dawdling for?' Edgar shouted at me. His nerves were on edge, and no wonder. He was anticipating a meeting with the one he loved.
We walked past motionless bodies. There were people and Others - Merlin's Sleep didn't differentiate between them. I noticed several sleeping Inquisitors. Behind the fake dividing walls everything was lit up brightly by the glow of auras. They had been waiting, and the ambush could not have been prepared better.
Only no one had known the full Power of the artefact that had been used.
'You haven't forgotten about the barrier on the third level, I suppose?' I asked.
'No,' said Arina.
I noticed that as we walked along first Edgar and then Arina left perfectly innocent-looking objects charged with magic on the floor and the walls: scraps of paper, sticks of chewing gum, bits of string. In one place Edgar rapidly sketched several strange symbols on the wall in red chalk ?the chalk crumbled into dust as soon as he had traced out the final sign. In another place Arina smiled as she scattered a box of matches across the floor. The 'Last Watch' was clearly afraid of pursuit.
Eventually we entered the room with the guillotine, which for some reason the 'Last Watch' had chosen as its point of entry into the Twilight. This was probably the exact centre of the vortex, the precise focus of Power.
And here, as well as two first-level magicians who were asleep, there was one person who was wide awake.
He was a young man, short and plump, wearing spectacles on his cultured-looking face. He looked very peaceful and unaggressive in his jeans and bright-coloured shirt. In the corner of the room I noticed a girl about ten years old, sleeping with her head resting on a bag that had considerately been placed under it. Had they decided to open the way through with the blood of a child, then?
'My daughter fell asleep,' the man said, correcting my mistaken assumption. 'An extremely interesting device, I must say...' He took a small sphere woven from strips of metal out of his pocket. 'The lever shifted and it won't move back again.'
'That's the way it should be,' said Edgar. 'It won't move back again for seventy-something years. So the device is useless to you ?leave it here. Take this!'
He tossed a wad of money to the man, who caught it and casu ally ran his finger over the ends of the notes. But I noticed that he was keeping his left hand behind his back. Oh-oh...
'All correct,' the man said with a nod. 'But I'm a little concerned about the scale of the event... and the devices that you employ. It seems to me that the deal was clearly made on unequal terms.'
'I told you this would happen,' Edgar said to Arina. He turned back to the man and asked, 'What do you want? More money?'
The man shook his head.
'Take the money and your daughter, and go. That's my advice to you,' said Arina.
The man licked his lips and then unbuttoned his shirt.
He turned out not to be fat at all. His torso was encased in something that looked like an orthopaedic corset. Except that it had wires protruding from it.
'A kilogramme of plastic explosive. The switch works on the "dead hand" principle,' said the man, raising his left hand. 'I'm going to take that sphere, all the strange trinkets that I found on these guys' ?he prodded one of the sleeping Others with his foot ?'and everything you have in your pockets. Is that clear?'
'As clear as day,' said Edgar. 'I said right at the beginning that this would happen. I made the right choice