brought the files or not. And I have even less idea what I would have done if he had. Probably 1 would have chosen a different candidate for the role of the Mirror Magician.
But we weren't given a chance to do any of that.
First I noticed Lermontov's face change. He was looking away from me, in the direction of the road.
Then I heard the roar of an engine and turned round.
A little white van hurtling along the road suddenly turned and broke easily though the symbolic wooden fence surrounding Lermont's cottage. It braked to a halt with a wild squeal, throwing up earth and gravel from under its wheels.
The rear doors of the van had been removed earlier. Two men jumped out of it and a third, left inside, opened fire from a machine gun mounted on a swivel.
The first to react was Foma. He had put up a shield as soon as the van came flying into his garden. Or maybe he hadn't put it up? Perhaps it was just a guard spell that had been installed a long time ago in order to deal with this kind of invasion?
The machine gun roared and rattled, the sound resonating in the back of the van and reaching us as if it had been amplified by a huge tin megaphone. The sound was accompanied by a stream of lead. But the bullets didn't reach their target. They halted gently, hung in the air for a second like some special effect in an action movie, and then fell to the ground.
The two who had jumped out, both masked in black hoods, dropped to the ground and opened fire with sub-machine guns. As yet, no one had got out of the front of the van.
Were they idiots, or what?
Semyon waved his hands a few times. I noticed the harmless Morpheus, which would give the attackers about ten seconds to carry on playing at soldiers, and the instantly acting Opium. But the spells didn't work and the firing continued, with the bullets getting stuck in mid-air halfway between us. I looked closely ?no, they weren't Others. Just ordinary people. But each of them had the gentle glow of a protective amulet on his chest.
'Just don't kill them!' Lermont cried out when I raised my hand.
I only had two Triple Blades ready and waiting for instant action ?I hadn't been expecting to wind up in a shoot-out like this. I flung both, aiming at the large machine gun. The first charge missed, but the second struck home, reducing the weapon to a heap of shredded metal. The racket quietened down a bit ?now only the men with sub-machine guns were firing, but rather uncertainly, as if they had just discovered the invisible barrier. That was good. Every defence has its limit of saturation and the machine-gun fire would have put it out of action fairly quickly.
We had been attacked by men! Ordinary men, equipped with protective amulets. An act that was not only absolutely unheard of but also stupid. It's one thing to shoot a magician from ambush, using a remote-controlled weapon. But like this, face-to-face, three gunmen against three magicians... what were they hoping to achieve?
Simply to distract our attention!
I swung round just in time to see the white smoke trail heading in our direction. The rocket had been launched from the roof of a high-rise building standing almost a kilometre away. But it was clearly controllable, and it was coming straight for the arbour.
'Foma!' I shouted, throwing a Freeze in the direction of the rocket on the off chance. But the temporal stasis spell either missed its target, or the rocket had also been protected against magic -nothing happened.
'Into the Twilight!' Lermont shouted.
Sometimes it's better to do as you're told than to think up your own original moves. I stepped into the Twilight, sinking down to the second level almost immediately. Lermont was there beside me ?he too considered the first level an insufficiently secure defence. But to my surprise, he didn't stop on the second level ?he waved his hand and went down deeper. Perplexed, I followed him down to the third level. What need was there for this? A powerful explosion in the real world might be felt on the first level, but it wouldn't reach the second... and if Foma suspected the unthinkable, the most terrible thing possible, then a nuclear blast scorched through the material of all levels of the Twilight...