Last Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Author:Sergei Lukyanenko [Lukyanenko, Sergei]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780434017386
Publisher: London : Heinemann, 2008.
Published: 2008-11-06T06:00:00+00:00

first one was a boy about five years old, dusted with snow, wearing a large cap with earflaps and clutching a plastic spade in his hand. He was probably the ticket-seller’s son and she had no one to leave him with at home

… It didn’t seem like anything special, but it gave me such a bad feeling that I made the driver of a passing truck stop and took off to the city centre.

Allowing for the difference between the cities, that was pretty much the kind of street where the Night Watch office was located. I didn’t need a map, I could sense where I needed to go. And I only had to walk for ten minutes from the market place, which was right at the centre of town. But I seemed to have entered a different world. Not the bright world of an eastern fairy tale, but a kind of ordinary, average place that you can find in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, and Turkey, and the southern countries of Europe. Half European, half Asian, with far from the best features of both parts of the world. A lot of greenery, but that’s the only good part -

the two-or three-storey houses were dusty, dirty and dilapidated. If they’d been less monotonous they might at least have rejoiced the eye of some tourist. But even that variety was lacking here. Everything was dismally standard: paint flaking off the walls, dirty window’s, entrance doors standing wide open, washing hanging on lines in the courtyards. The phrase ‘frame-and-panel housing construction’ surfaced from somewhere in the depths of my memory. Its bleak bureaucratic tone made it the perfect description of these buildings that had been meant to be ‘temporary’ but had already stood for more than half a century.

The Night Watch office occupied a small, dilapidated single-storey building that was surrounded by a small garden. I thought a building like that looked just perfect for a small kindergarten, filled with swarthy, dark-haired little kids.

But all the children here had grown up long ago. I walked round a Peugeot parked by the fence, opened the gate, went past the flower beds in which withering flowers were struggling to survive, and shuddered as I read the old Soviet bureaucratic-style sign on the door.

NIGHT WATCH

Samarkand branch Business hours:

20.00 - 8.00

At first I thought I must have gone crazy. Then I thought I must be looking through the Twilight. But no, the inscription was absolutely real, written in yellow letters on a black background and covered with a cracked sheet of glass. One corner of the glass had fallen off, and the final letter of the word ‘watch’ was tattered and faded.

The same text was written alongside in Uzbek, and I learned that ‘Night Watch’ translated as ‘Tungi Nazoraf.

I pushed the door - it wasn’t locked, of course - and walked straight into a large room. As usual in the East, there was no entrance hall. And that was right: why would they need a hallway here? The weather was never cold in Samarkand.

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