– Water cannon! – the girl blurted out the first spell that came to her mind and extended both hands forward, palms out.
It didn’t take long for the force to appear again. Now it seemed to the sorceress that her heart had drowned in the depths of the ocean, and a stream of water gushed from her palms under great pressure, so that she could hardly stand on her feet.
I must say, Alina made it just in time, and the hissing firebrand fell to the ground literally five meters from the plane’s wing.
– Phew!
Dan, smiling contentedly, looked at the heavily breathing magician.
But, alas, it was too early to relax again. She was guaranteed a meeting with the asphalt that the sorceress would remember for a long time. Two orcs took a tactically correct action and, knocking her down, sat on her like on a log: one on her shoulder blades, the other on her knees.
The cheek with which Alina hit the ground ached with pain, but she could not even raise her head.
– Why did you interfere, bitch? – barked the orc, who settled on his shoulder blades. – Pink FIFA doesn’t like amateur performances!
No matter how much she wanted, the girl could not say a word. And while two disgusting taxi drivers were holding her back, the remaining one attacked Dan with a knife. And he would not have lived if not for an accident.
– Hey, orc, wait! – the black dragon shouted in Czech, having already climbed over the fence and settled down not far from the battlefield with his notes.
The taxi driver, who obviously did not know any language other than Russian, stared questioningly at the animal, which spoke a language very similar to this Russian, but in a slightly different language. Ukrainian? Moldavian? Bulgarian?
– What are you staring at? You must attack Dan with a brutal expression on your face, and my master must skillfully dodge you. Otherwise there is not enough pathos in the poem.
The orc, blinking his eyes, looked questioningly at the foreign dragon, who, after his fiery speech, again began to diligently scribble in his notebook.
Dan, who really disliked his pet’s penchant for poetry, winked at him. It turns out that sometimes the stupid speech of a graphomaniac has a stronger effect on the enemy than a spell. All the orcs abandoned their prey and went to the writer. Have you really decided to read his heroic poem?
Alina, of course, got up, without ceasing to rub her cheek, which was torn and bleeding.
– Jak se jmenujete, Linanote 3? – Dan looked sideways at the girl.
Alina stared questioningly at the magician with a stunned look. His phrase was similar to a stupid student stem: «Who wrote Turgenev’s Mu-mu?»
«I don’t name anyone,» she snorted. – And I’m not Lina. You’ve made a mistake.
– You don’t understand me, Russian woman. I’ll ask you what your name is. And Lina… You look a lot like her.
The girl introduced herself and smiled back, as much as her broken cheek would allow her. But the magician opened his mouth in surprise. Even if it’s not Lina, Alina, what’s the difference.
– Are you a foreigner? – she asked in response. – But you know Russian quite well.
– I’m coming to Moscow from Prague. My name is Dan. I study Russian at school. I am a necromancer. I will get…
But he didn’t have time to finish. The orcs, who suspiciously quickly ceased to be interested in the dragon’s poetry, looked at the victim with a grin. But Alina understood perfectly well that the magician she met at the airport did not know combat spells. It’s a shame not to be able to use levitation, but other bells and whistles require strength. If Dan is a necromancer, then all his abilities are in resurrecting the dead, and not in throwing fireballs. That’s why the guy chased the orcs around the plane, because the only thing he could do to them was to exhaust their physical strength.
The sorceress stretched her hands forward and whispered:
– Fuck-tibi-doh-tibi-doh! Kirieshkus-dimedrolus!
She closed her eyes and imagined small crackers, filled with sleeping pills, flying out of the palm of her right hand. For some reason, out of fear, she decided that the stupid orcs would certainly rush to the crackers scattered on the ground and begin to devour them. As if the movie Shurik’s unsuccessful experience with the professor’s sausage didn’t mean anything.
But, alas, even the first point of Alina’s plan failed. She has not yet reached that absolute level when any imagined spells would be translated into reality. I rolled my lip, as they say: it was one to noon in the magical world, and I already wanted to throw homemade spells.
So it turned out that instead of a hail of crackers, a pack of «Kirieshki’ suddenly fell out of the sorceress’s hand. This would have been the end of the stupid idiot if one of the orcs had not picked up the crackers and swallowed them along with the packaging. Alina grimaced, how unsympathetic she was to such a habit of monsters.
Suddenly the non-human grabbed his stomach and spat out a pile of white rounds onto the ground… sucked diphenhydramine tablets. In the best traditions of «Operation Y», as you would expect!
However, the effect of the spell immediately manifested itself, and the orc, unable to overcome gluttony, fell to the ground, snoring loudly.
«You are a very powerful magician, Alina,» Dan patted her on the shoulder. «You are no worse than Lina, with whom I confused you.»
The two remaining monsters, having recovered from putting their comrade to sleep, grabbed him by the arms and ran towards the airport service premises, loudly shouting to the skeletons in the trucks that hooligan magicians were operating at the fence.
«I would probably die if Alina didn’t save me,» said the necromancer, taking the girl’s hand and touching the back of her hand with his lips.
Oddly enough, in her twenty-three years of life the girl had never met such a gallant gentleman as the young necromancer turned out to be. And even if he doesn’t look like Sylvester Stallone or Leonardo DiCaprio, it doesn’t matter that his long-nosed face is not at all photogenic, and his amber eyes combined with thick silver hair made him look like a Japanese cartoon character. But despite all this, there was something attractive about him. She lowered her gaze and covered her bruised cheek with her hand.
– Is a Russian girl embarrassed? – the magician pouted, – Dan doesn’t understand.
– Hey, what are you doing there? – a skeleton on a cart, driving towards the place where the sorceress and the necromancer stood, shouted into a megaphone. – Who allowed you to walk along the runway as if it were Arbat?
The skeletons in Novosibirsk and Moscow were in exactly the same uniforms, only on the back of their orange vests were different airport names.
From her past life, Alina knew very well what the risks of walking along the tarmac were: if you weren’t arrested and called a terrorist, you’d be run over by an airplane or blasted with such hot air that you’d turn into a chop. Airports in the world of magicians were no different, with the exception of the skeletal-goblin staff, of course.
– Levitation! – Alina and Dan said, each in their own language, and jumped over the fence.
– And what about me? – the dragon howled, starting to climb the net in the opposite direction.
«You’ll catch up, poet,» the necromancer waved his hand and walked towards the transport stop.
The sorceress, limping on her leg that was broken on the asphalt (and she only now felt pain in her knee), trudged behind. She still had nowhere to go, and this young man, whom she saw at the most terrible moment in her life (or death), could explain something. What if the ticket was his doing?
«Excuse me, Dan,» she interrupted the short pause, «what did these airport orcs want from you?» Who is Pink Fifa?
– Dan doesn’t know. «Dan is coming to catch Pink Fifa,» he answered dryly and looked back towards the fence.
