I suddenly noticed that Gennady was no longer there with us.
'And this resolves a certain number of moral difficulties,' Edgar said, turning away.
The explosives belt suddenly flew into little pieces. It wasn't an explosion: it looked like the work of a clawed hand moving with unnatural speed ?out of the Twilight, for example. Totally confused, the man opened his left hand, and a small switch with an absurd little tail of wire fell out of it. He'd been telling the truth.
The next moment the man screamed, and I too chose to turn away.
'An exceptionally loathsome character,' said Edgar. 'His threat was serious, even though the little girl is his own daughter. But now we have the blood we need, with none of the killing of innocent people that upsets Arina so much.'
'You're no better than him,' I replied.
'I don't pretend to be,' Edgar said, with a shrug. 'Let's go. It's not the first time we've entered the Twilight together, is it?'
He even took hold of my hand. I didn't protest. I found my own shadow on the floor and stepped into it. Through the gust of icy-cold wind, into the frozen, hungry space of the Twilight...
The first level.
We moved on without delay. The second level. The space around us was seething, agitated either by the fresh blood or by the hole that Merlin had made here in the fabric of creation.
Edgar and Arina were still beside me. Intensely focused. A moment later Gennady too appeared, with blood on his lips. On the second level I could barely recognise Saushkin senior, his face was so badly distorted by hideous malice and insane hatred.
The third level. The final eddies of the vortex of Power that had been blocking our way so recently were still raging here. Edgar started looking round and said:
'Someone's following us ... one of the signs has been activated.'
'Successfully?' A cloud of steam escaped from between Arina's lips as she asked.
'I don't know. Let's go lower!'
The fourth level greeted us with its pink sky and coloured sand. I pulled my hand out of Edgar's grasp and said:
'We agreed! I won't join the fight against the golem!'
'And nobody's forcing you to,' Edgar said, with a toothy grimace. 'Don't worry, you can keep out of it. Forward!'
This was the point at which I had planned to start an argu ment. To drag things out and then run for it, or even stay here and send the 'Last Watch' on to a pointless battle against the monster.
But something seemed to urge me on. Something like the insane obsession that had possessed Arina, Edgar and Gennady seemed to take possession of me too. I had to go down to the fifth level... I had to!
If only to lull their vigilance ...
'All right, but I don't intend to lay my life down for your sake!' I shouted and stepped down to the fifth level under Edgar's watchful eye.
They appeared beside me almost instantly. Yes, they had certainly pumped themselves full of Power. Gennady was the only one who was slightly delayed. He had obviously got through at the second attempt.
And this level of the Twilight was so much nicer than the ones above it! Cool, even chilly, but already without that icy wind that sucked the life out of you. And the colours here looked almost natural ...
I looked round, trying to spot the golem, and I saw it about two hundred metres away ?there were two snakes' heads sticking up out of the grass, turning this way and that like submarines' periscopes. Then the golem spotted us. The heads shuddered and reached up higher. There was a loud hissing sound, very much like a real snake's hiss, except that it was coming from such a long distance away...
A moment later the snake was already slipping towards us, managing to keep both of its heads above the grass at the same time.
'Head and tail,' Arina said pensively. 'I don't know, I don't know... Edgar, release Kong.'
I understood what she meant when Edgar took a small jade figurine out of his pocket - it was a long-armed monkey with short pointed horns protruding from its head. The Inquisitor breathed on the figurine and then carefully screwed its head off ?the figurine turned out to be hollow ?and carefully set it down in the grass. We barely had time to jump back before the vessel started giving out green smoke that coiled into the form of a monster.