seemed boring. They were boring – but even so I felt sad.
'Post-doctoral,' Arina replied with understandable pride. 'I'm thinking of presenting it this winter.'
'Is that your research library you have with you?' I asked, nodding at the bookshelf.
'Yes,' said Arina, nodding in reply. 'It was a stupid thing to do, of course, to drag all the books here. But I got a lift from . . . a friend. In a jeep. So I took the opportunity and brought along my whole library.'
I tried to imagine whether a jeep could get through this forest. It looked as though there was a fairly wide track starting just at the back of the house . . . maybe it could get through . . .
I went over to the bookcase and inspected the books closely.
It really was a rich library for a botanical scholar. There were some old volumes from the early part of the last century, with forewords singing the praises of the Party, and Comrade Stalin in particular. And some even older ones, pre-revolutionary. And lots of simple well-thumbed volumes published twenty or thirty years earlier.
'A lot of them are just lumber,' Arina said without turning round. 'The only place for them is in some bibliophile's collection. But somehow I can't bring myself to sell them.'
I nodded gloomily, glancing at the bookcase through the Twilight. Nothing suspicious. No magic. Old books on botany.
Or an illusion created so artfully that I couldn't see through it.
'Sit down, the tea's ready,' said Arina.
I sat down on a squeaky Viennese chair, picked up my cup of tea and sniffed at it.
The smell was glorious. It smelt like ordinary good-quality tea, with a bit of citrus, and a bit of mint. But I would have bet my life that the brew didn't contain any tea leaves, or citron, or plain ordinary mint.
'Well,' Arina said with a smile. 'Why don't you try it?'
She sat down facing me and leaned forward slightly. My gaze involuntarily slipped down to the open collar revealing her suntanned cleavage. I wondered if 'the friend with a jeep' was her lover? Or simply a colleague, another botanist? Oh sure! A botanist with a jeep . . .
What was wrong with me?
'It's hot,' I said, holding the cup in my hands. 'I'll let it cool off a bit.'
Arina nodded.
'It's handy to have an electric kettle,' I added. 'It boils quickly. But where do you get your power from? I didn't notice any wires round the house.'
Arina flinched.
'An underground cable?' she suggested plaintively.
'Oh no,' I said, holding the cup at a distance and carefully pouring the brew onto the floor. 'That answer won't do. Think again.'
Arina tossed her head in annoyance:
'What a disaster! And over such a little thing . . .'
'It's always the little things that give you away,' I said sympathetically. I stood up. 'Night Watch of the City of Moscow, Anton Gorodetsky. I demand that you immediately remove the illusion!'
Arina didn't answer.
'Your refusal to co-operate will be interpreted as a violation of the Treaty,' I reminded her.
Arina blinked. And disappeared.
So that was the way it was going to be . . .
I raised my shadow with a glance, reached towards it, and the cool Twilight embraced me.
The little house hadn't changed at all.
Except that Arina wasn't there.
I concentrated hard. It was too dim and grey to find my shadow. But I finally managed to find it and stepped down to the second level of the Twilight.
The grey mist thickened and the air was filled with a heady, distant drone. A cold shudder ran across my skin. This time the little house had changed – and radically. It had turned into an old peasant hut; the walls were bare logs, overgrown with moss. Instead of glass, there were sheets of semi-transparent mica in the windows. The furniture was cruder and older, the Viennese chair I was sitting in had become a sawn-off log. Only the distinguished scholarly bookcase hadn't changed. However, the books in it were rapidly changing their appearance, the false letters were dropping to the floor, the leatherette spines were changing to real leather . . .
I still couldn't see Arina. There was only a vague, dim silhouette hovering somewhere close to the bookcase, a fleeting, transparent shadow . . . the witch had retreated to the third level of the Twilight.
In theory I could go there too.
Only in practice, I'd never tried. For a second-grade magician, that meant straining his powers to the absolute extreme.