'The book's already in Moscow. We're wasting time, gentlemen. Edgar!'
The Inquisitor put one hand in his pocket and took out a small yellowish-white sphere. It looked like a pool ball, only a little smaller, and it had incomprehensible pictograms engraved haphazardly on its surface. Edgar squeezed the sphere tightly in his hand and concentrated.
A moment later I felt something changing. As if there had been a shroud hanging in the air – invisible to the eye, but palpable nonetheless – and now it was disappearing, being sucked into the small sphere of ivory . . .
'I didn't know the Inquisition still had Minoan spheres,' said Gesar.
'No comment,' said Edgar. He smiled, pleased at the effect he had produced. 'That's it, the barrier has been removed. Put up a portal, Great Ones!'
Of course. A direct portal, without any reference points in place at 'the other end' was a riddle for Great Ones to solve. Edgar either couldn't do it, or he was saving his strength . . .
Gesar squinted at Zabulon and asked:
'Do you trust me to do it again?'
Zabulon made a pass with his hand without speaking – and a gap opened up in mid-air, oozing darkness. Zabulon stepped into it first, then Gesar, gesturing for us to follow. I picked up Arina's precious note, together with the invisible magical compass – and stepped in after Svetlana.
Despite the difference in external appearances, inside the portal was exactly the same. Milky-white mist, a sensation of rapid movement, total loss of any sense of time. I tried to concentrate – soon we would find ourselves near the criminal who had killed a Higher Vampire. Of course, we had Gesar and Zabulon leading us; Svetlana was just as powerful, if less experienced; Kostya was young, but he was still a Higher Vampire; and there was Edgar and his team with their pockets full of Inquisitors' artefacts. Even so, the fight could turn out to be deadly dangerous.
But a moment later I realised there wasn't going to be any fight.
At least, not straight away.
We were standing on a platform at Moscow's Kazan railway station. There was no one very close to us – people sense when a portal is opening nearby and spontaneously move out of the way. But we were surrounded by the kind of crush that even in Moscow you can only find at a railway station in summer. People walking to their suburban trains, people getting off trains and carting baggage along, people smoking in front of the mechanical noticeboards, waiting for their train to be announced, people drinking beer and lemonade, eating those monstrous railway station pies and bread wraps with suspicious fillings. There were probably at least two or three thousand people within a hundred-metre radius of us.
I looked at the spectral compass – the pointer was spinning lazily.
'We need Cinderella here,' said Zabulon, gazing around. 'We have to find a poppy seed in a sack of millet.'
One by one the Inquisitors appeared beside us. The expression of readiness for fierce battle on Edgar's face was suddenly replaced by confusion.
'He's trying to hide,' said Zabulon. 'Excellent, excellent . . .'
But he didn't look too happy either.
An agitated woman pushed a trolley full of striped canvas bags up to our group. Her red, sweating face was set in an expression of firm determination that could only be mustered by a Russian woman who works as a 'shuttle trader' importing goods by train to feed her idle, useless husband and three or four children.
'Haven't announced the Ulyanovsk train yet, have they?' she asked.
Svetlana closed her eyes for a moment and replied:
'It will arrive at platform one in six minutes and leave with a delay of three minutes.'
'Thank you,' the woman said, not surprised in the least by such a precise answer. She set off for platform one.
'That's all very nice, Svetlana,' Gesar muttered. 'But what suggestions do you have concerning the search for the book?'
Svetlana just shrugged.
The café was as cosy and clean as a railway station café could be. Maybe because it was in such a strange place – in the basement, beside the baggage rooms. The countless station bums obviously didn't show their faces here – the owners had cured them of that habit. There was a middle-aged Russian woman standing behind the counter, and the food was carried out from the kitchen by taciturn, polite Caucasian men.
A strange place.
I took two glasses of dry wine from a three-litre box for Svetlana and myself. It was