I jumped to one side, tossing a fireball at the little dragon. A very small fireball, so as not to cause any shocks in the real world.
Then I went down to the second level.
The dungeon hadn't changed. But the dragon here was black and a little bit taller. His eyes were bigger, rounder and darker, and he had acquired pointed ears that stuck up. The scales had changed into either coarse fur or chitin spines that were pressed tight against his body. The jaws were extended forwards. The wings had been transformed into small, trembling legs.
The mouth opened wide and a bundle of blue sparks flew out in my direction.
I dodged and took a few more steps. And then, forgetting once again about the barrier, I stepped down onto the third level of the Twilight.
At first it felt as if I had run into a wall - a flexible, springy, but impenetrable wall. But that sensation only lasted for a second.
An instant later I found myself on the third level.
And I realised immediately that this was connected with that scream of a dying human being.
Someone had opened the barrier again. Opened it with someone's living blood.
But there wasn't any little dragon here.
I ran along the corridor without bothering to destroy the robot shooter. Lermont could handle that himself. The machine wasn't going anywhere. It was more important for me to catch the killer. Whoever he might be ?vampire, magician, sorcerer. A stranger or a former friend...
This was clearly the central section of the Dungeons. The focus of the Power, the centre of the vortex, the keyhole. The River of Blood ?only here it looked like a ditch filled with bubbling black liquid as thick as pitch. A gleaming black table. And lying on it -a motionless body in a bloodstained white robe.
It looked as if this time the person who had lost his life was one of the hired human personnel who worked for the Edinburgh Night Watch. One of the pathologists who did jobs for Lermont.
Could Lermont really have left the Dungeons with no reliable guards? Without anyone to ambush raiders? Had he abandoned the people who trusted him to the whim of fate?
A single glance at the real world told me everything.
He had left guards. And had set up an ambush.
But he had underestimated the strength of his enemy.
I counted six bodies in the room. Three of the dead were raiders
in semi-military uniforms that didn't belong to anyone's army, with automatic weapons ?and the magazines of the guns glitered with the spells applied to the bullets. One of the dead was a first-level Light Magician, almost torn in half by bursts of machine-gun fire at point-blank range. The magician's unexpended Power was slowly oozing out of him in a cloudy white glow. The other two who had been shot were human ?employees of the Night Watch. The protective amulets that had failed to save them sparkled brightly on their chests. They too had died with guns in their hands - they were still clutching pistols.
How many attackers had there been? And how many had gone on past the third level?
Before I had time to complete the thought, a grey shadow came flitting down through the Twilight from the first level to join me on the third. And Bruce appeared in front of me.
The Master of Vampires looked in pretty poor shape. His chest had been ripped to shreds by bullets. He was breathing heavily, and his fangs glittered in his mouth.
'Aha!' I exclaimed with such obvious delight that Bruce under stood me straight away.
'Stop, Light One!' he howled. 'I'm on your side! I came at Lermont's request!'
'And who shot you?'
'The robot in the corridor!'
I screwed up my eyes, tracing the 'vampire trail'. Yes, the traces of the undead feet passed through the corridor, from the entrance to the Dungeons. He wasn't responsible for the bloodbath.
So this was who Lermont was counting on to defeat the auto mated gunman. It's hard to kill someone who's already dead, even with charmed bullets.
'Who is he?' I didn't specify who I meant, but Bruce understood.
'I don't know! Not one of us! A stranger! He had about twenty people with him, but they're all dead. And Lermont's guards are dead!'
'Let's go after them,' I ordered.
Bruce hesitated. He glanced at the body oozing blood - unlike all the others, this man had died very recently, and his body existed on all levels of the Twilight at once. Death is very strong