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All the fabled Seers of Greyhawk have been killed on the same night, each by their own instruments of divination. And the only unusual sign is the ominous number of black birds in the skies of late. The mystery is dumped in the lap of Garett Starlen, commander of the night shift of the City Watch, who discovers that a web of evil has been tightly drawn around the great city.

As if murder by magic were not enough, strange beasts decend on the citiznery, and the powerful Guild of Wizards is vanguished by an unseen force. Can nothing stop the deadly zalots of the Horned Society?

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Worlds of If, July-August 1974. The story can also be found in the anthology Pawn to Infinity (1982), edited by Fred and Joan Saberhagen. It is included in the collections Heroes and Horrors (1978), The Ghost Light (1984), The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (1990) and Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories (2010).

The creator of a group of artificially intelligent space fortresses is forced into intrigue on the moon and a confrontation with both his creations and an alien threat to the Earth, against a fairly conventional dystopian near-future background.

This morning, Commander Vimes of the City Watch had it all. He was a Duke. He was rich.He was respected. He had a silver cigar case. He was about to become a father.

This morning he thought longingly about the good old days.

Tonight, he's in them.

Flung back in time by a mysterious accident, Sam Vimes has to start all over again. He must get a new name and a job, and there's only one job he's good at: cop in the Watch. He must track down a brutal murderer. He must find his younger self and teach him everything he knows. He must whip the cowardly, despised Night Watch into a crack fighting force -- fast. Because Sam Vimes knows what's going to happen. He remembers it. He was there. It's part of history. And you can't change history . . .

But Sam is going to. He has no choice. Otherwise, a bloody revolution will start, and good men will die. Sam saw their names on old headstones just this morning -- but tonight they're young men who think they have a future. And rather than let them die, Sam will do anything -- turn traitor, burn buildings, take over a revolt, anything -- to snatch them from the jaws of history. He will do it even if victory will mean giving up the only future he knows.

For if he succeeds, he's got no wife, no child, no riches, no fame -- all that will simply vanish. But if he doesn't try, he wouldn't be Sam Vimes.

And so the battle is on. He knows how it's going to end after all, he was there. His name is on one of those headstones. But that's just a minor detail . . .

John Rast went to the Ren Faire looking for a fight. Well, a simulated fight, with blunt swords and safety equipment. But when his final opponent turns into a living, fire-breathing dragon, John finds himself in the fight of his life. It's John or nothing stopping a disaster in its tracks--and the only real weapon at hand is his mom's Volvo. So John decides to let it roll...

And that's when destiny comes to call. John is spirited away to the well-hidden base of Knight Watch, the organization that stands between humanity and the real nasties the rest of the world doesn't know about.

Knight Watch would be John's dream job - except for the storm goddess that destroys his parents' house, the abandoned mall replete with too much dead, and the Fetch that aims to make John's domain a final resting place. All this has John's putative allies in the Knight Watch worried that John is the one bringing bad things into multiple worlds. John and his reluctant teammates have to figure out who, or what, is pulling the strings before all of Knight Watch falls prey to a well-concealed puppetmaster and far worse things enter this world.

When John Rast signed up for Knight Watch, he expected it to be all fighting dragons and rescuing maidens. You know, hero stuff. But instead he's stuck patrolling game conventions and cosplayer competitions, looking for dangerous anachronisms and the villains who may be trying to exploit them. Fortunately, all that changes when an honest-to-goodness necromancer shows up wielding a weapon created by Nazi occultists and accompanied by some badass evil Valkyries, hell-bent on kicking off the end of the world.

John and the team will go to great lengths even Minnesota to find out who's responsible for all this and foil their plans. Also, there's a giant dog who thinks the moon is a ball. It's epic.

They are "The Others," an ancient race of suernatural beings - magicians, shape-shifters, vampires, and healers - who live among us. Human born, they must chose a side to swear allegiance to - the Dark or the Light - when they come of age.

For a millennium, these opponents have coexisted in an uneasy peace, enforced by defenders like the Night Watch, forces of light who guard against the Dark. But prophecy decrees that one supreme "Other" will arise and spark a cataclysmic war.

Anton Gorodetsky, an untested mid-level Light magician with the Night Watch, discovers a cursed young woman - an Other of tremendous potential unallied with either side - who can shift the balance of power. With the battle lines between Light and Dark drawn, the magician must move carefully, for one wrong step could mean the begining of annihilation.

The second book of in the internationally bestselling Nighht Watch series - the powers of Darkness and the forces of Light grow closer to war.

For the past one thousand years, the two factions of the Others - an ancient race of magicians, shape-shifters, vampires, and other supernatural beings - have been locked in an uneasy truceas the powers of Darkness and the forces of Light secretly maneuver for the upper hand.

Now in the thrilling follow-up to the internationally bestselling Night Watch we ttrack members of the Dark Others - called the Day Watch and tasked with keeping the Light Others in check - including a young witch who has had the tragic misfortune of falling in love with a Light Other; a powerful warlock struggling to understand his purpose in the war; and a top lieutenant who worries that Zabulon, the leader of the Day Watch, is planning to betray him. Meanwhile, a forbidden artifact witht he ability to bring the most dangerous Dark magician in history back to life has gone missing.

As the inevitable war between the forces of Darkness and Light threatens to destroy modern-day Moscow, it becomes clear that good and evil are only a matter of perspective.

The third book in Sergei Lukyanenko's dark and thrilling Night Watch series - a visionary blend of urban fantasy and riveting thriller, set in contemporary Moscow.

Night Watch and Day Watch revealed "the Others," an ancient race of supernatural beings - magicians, shape-shifters, vampirse, and healers - who live among us and swear allegiance to either the Light or the Dark. For a millennium, these opponents have coexisted in an uneasy truce, guarding each other and tottering on the brink of war.

In Twilight Watch, the Others face their greatest threat yet. An ancient book of spells with the power to turn ordinary humans into Others has fallen into the wrong hands, threatening to destroy the precarious balance between the forces of Darkness and Light. Now the Night Watch and the Day Watch must cooperate to stop the culprit. Anton, the hero from Night Watch is back, but when the renegade Other turns turns out to be closer to home than he expected, the race to prevent gobal war becomes more urgent than ever. And as Anton gets closer to discovering the true nature of the Others, he begins to question how much of a difference there truly is between the Dark and the Light.

The fourth novel from the blockbuster series from one of Russia's most popular authors, Last Watch returns us to the hyper-imaginative world of Sergei Lukyanenko, where the endless battle between good and evil is about to reach its climax.

Anton Gorodetsky is just getting the feel for his new powers when his boss, Gesar, sends him to assist the Scottish Night Watch in Edinburgh in a murder investigation. A young Russian man has been murdered - apparently by a vampire. But the mystery is more than it seems, and soon Anton himself is in danger. The murderer appears to be someone with intimate knowledge of the Night Watch. Before long, Anton realizes a plot is being hatched by the forces of both darkness and light that - unless he can intervene - may mean nothing less than Armageddon.

Full of treachery and intrigue, the fifth volume in Sergei Lukyanenko's internationally bestselling Night Watch series - a mesmerizing blend of noir and urban fantasy, set in contemporary Moscow, that tells the story of an ancient race of supernatural beings known as the Others.

For a millennium, the Others have maintained an uneasy peace that has protected them and the Twilight, their shadowy parallel world beneath our own. But the battle for supremacy between the forces of Light and the Darkness is far from over...

Older and more powerful, Light magician Anton Gorodetsky has risen to the top levels of the Night Watch. He is also father to a 10-year old girl who is destined to become a magician of unprecedented powers. When he hears a young boy at the airport screaming that a plane will crash, Anton suspects the child is a prophet - a rare type of Other who portends catastrophe.

If Anton is right, then the boy has awakened a terrifying danger - a rare multi-faced beastthat exists to stop the prophecy from coming true. With all their lives in mortal peril and time running out, Anton must find a way to keep his gifted young daughter safe... and save the Twilight world.

The final chapter in Sergei Lukyanenko's internationally bestselling Night Watch series--a revelatory urban fantasy set in contemporary Moscow.

They live among us. They fight among us. They're the Others, a supernatural race of magicians, shape-shifters, vampires, and healers. Divided into the Light and the Dark, these rival factions have spent a millennium under a reluctant truce. Now, however, both sides must unite against the ultimate enemy.

A Light magician and high-ranking member of the Night Watch, Anton Gorodetsky fears nothing. But lately the threats are mounting. A reincarnated vampire has been terrorizing Moscow. His daughter's school is ambushed by a bizarre chimera. And the Prophets have all reached the same chilling conclusion: The world will end in five days' time.

To ward off the apocalypse, an ancient council called the Sixth Watch must be assembled. After both Light and Darkness select their emissaries, Anton must enlist the unwilling aid of the four other Great Parties: the Vampires, the Witches, the Form-Takers, and the enigmatic Foundation. Journeying from Russia to Paris, the Alps, and New York City, Anton comes in peace--but he is prepared for war. For if he fails, none are safe.

It is now 2074. Magic has been in the world for as long as anyone can remember--and has taken over. Children are sacrificed to gods and ghosts. Man-made machines have conquered the inner cities. And people who enter the forests are never seen again...