Sixth Watch Read online

  “I believe you!” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “I believe you, Kesha.”

  “The Sixth Watch—what is that?” The boy asked curiously.

  “Well, the Night Watch and the Day Watch are the first and the second,” I said. “The Third Watch is the Inquisition. The Fourth Watch is the apparatus of the mass media. The Fifth Watch is like a fifth column, a secret organization within the Watches. The Sixth—oho, you’re asking me about the Sixth Watch . . .”

  Kesha’s eyes turned big and round.

  “I’m only joking,” I said. “No one has ever called the Watches by numbers. There are a couple of stupid jokes, but that’s all there is. The Sixth Watch is meaningless abracadabra.”

  “There has to be a meaning,” Kesha said sternly. “Really and truly! Prophecy has laws!”

  “All right. I’ll think about it.”

  “‘The Fifth Power has disappeared, the Fourth has not come in time. The Third Power does not believe, the Second Power is afraid, the First Power is exhausted.’” Kesha spread his hands helplessly. “This part is totally incomprehensible, Uncle Anton. Perhaps there is a meaning. But it could be twaddle or twiddle. Just to make the prophecy sound mystical.”

  “So all we’re left with is the Sixth Watch,” I said. “One solitary little thread that we can cling to.”

  Kesha nodded guiltily.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Anton . . . I’ll ask Glyba in our lesson tomorrow.”

  “Ask him,” I said, getting up and putting the money on the table. The waitress, who had been looking at us in annoyance for a long time (we had two ice creams and two coffees, and had sat there for a whole hour), came toward us from the counter.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

  “I can go on my own, the metro . . .”

  “No, Kesha. I’ll feel more relaxed. There’s nothing I have to do just now anyway. I have a meeting this evening, until then . . . Kesha?”

  Innokentii was standing there, swaying and looking at me blankly. His pupils slowly dilated, turning his eyes into black gulfs glinting with red sparks. His face turned pale and little beads of sweat sprang out on it.

  I froze.

  You should never interfere with a Prophet who has fallen into a trance. Kesha would probably manage to stay on his feet.

  Perhaps it would be a clarification of the prophecy? Such things had happened before. Or yet another prophecy?

  Kesha’s eyes suddenly narrowed and flooded with amber yellow. The pupils imploded and lengthened out vertically. I shuddered. The waitress, who had made such an ill-timed dash to get the money, squealed.

  “Anton,” said Kesha, looking at me. “First, take the boy with you. Second, hurry home. Third, it is not for you to decide. Fourth, I shall come again.”

  It wasn’t like a prophecy. It looked as if someone had forced the Prophet to speak—and taken over the controls. The external forms, the structure of the phrases—that was from prophecy. The content . . . The content was something quite different.

  “Exactly what sort of grotesque gibberish is that?” the waitress asked in a tearful voice. “It’s unbecoming for decent people to behave in such a manner!”

  “I do beg your pardon,” I replied, fighting the urge to add “my lady.” “But it is merely a childish prank. I beg your pardon, please accept this in recompense for your trouble . . .”

  The waitress nodded stiffly, raked the money off the table, took the thousand-ruble note out of my hand, and walked away.

  The urge to speak in an eloquent, old-fashioned manner—to the extent of a person’s understanding of what is eloquent and what is old-fashioned—is a typical sign of a discharge of Power somewhere nearby. But what kind of discharge did it have to be to affect me, a Higher Other?

  And why hadn’t I identified it in any other way?

  Kesha’s gaze gradually cleared.

  He shook his head and looked at me in amazement.

  “Uncle Anton . . . Did I prophesy? Twice in the same day?”

  “No, my boy, you driveled some absolute twiddle,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Home?” Kesha asked timidly.

  “Home to my place. Let’s say you’ll be my guest. Call your mother.”

  “She’s in Paris. With . . .” Kesha paused. “With her husband. My stepfather, kind of. He’s called Grigorii Ilich.”

  “Kind of?” I asked, puzzled, taking my coat from the cloakroom attendant. And I cast a Sphere of Inattention over Kesha and myself—it wasn’t a good idea for everyone to hear what we were saying, which really was very odd.

  “It was I who brought them together,” Kesha said awkwardly. “A year ago. I suddenly thought what an ungrateful swine I was and how my mum had never become really close to anyone, she was always with me, but she wasn’t old yet, she could still find some happiness in life and even have a brother or sister for me. And Uncle Gosha is a good man. Conscientious and no fool, well to do. So he has taken my mother to Paris to celebrate their wedding anniversary. He invited me also, but I refused point blank, so that I would not be a hindrance to them.”

  Kesha pulled on his jacket, buttoned it up, and said sincerely: “I probably am prepared to regard him as my father. In a certain, general human sense. Especially since he does genuinely try to take care of me . . . because he believes I need it, he tries to set me a laudable example as a man, one that I can follow later in life. That is noble, and he is worthy to be regarded as a father. But alas, it is too absurd, in view of the circumstances. Most regretfully, it was I who brought him and my mother together . . . Yuck! Why am I talking like this?”

  “A strong discharge of Power. It affects the subconscious,” I explained.

  “Ah, I remember! They taught us that!” Kesha exclaimed, delighted.

  We got into the car, I started the engine, and turned the heater up to maximum.

  “Then what happened to me?” Kesha asked, sniffing. “If I wasn’t prophesying . . .”

  “Someone used you as a relay station,” I explained. “They spoke to me through you.”

  “Who?” Kesha asked tensely.

  “Who do you think?”

  Kesha sighed.

  “The Twilight.”

  “Yes. The Twilight. More precisely, the Tiger.”

  CHAPTER 5

  INNOKENTII HAD OFTEN BEEN TO OUR HOME. THERE WAS A time when Nadya became his special patron, not so much in magical matters as in ordinary, human ones. At the time I felt this was a good thing. Especially since they didn’t really become friends at all—Nadya was a year older than him, after all, and they were at the age when boys and girls feel embarrassed to be friends in the way that children are, and still don’t know how to be friends like grown-ups.

  But even so, Kesha sometimes came to our place to talk to Nadya. Then, at Nadya’s request, we arranged for him to be transferred to the school that she attended. The Night Watch was wholeheartedly in favor; they couldn’t have given a Prophet special protection—we don’t have that much manpower—but they put him together with the Absolute Enchantress, and that was one less headache.

  And Kesha started showing up at our home more and more often, either after school or on the weekends. Sometimes he invited Nadya to the cinema, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing, but during the last year they had started going to clubs of some kind, which to my mind is completely excessive for teenagers.

  And so Kesha hung up his jacket and took off his shoes in a perfectly habitual manner, and went to wash his hands. I went to the kitchen. Coffee is all very well, but we weren’t in Italy. This was Russia, the “land of tea.” Drink up your tea, or feeble you shall be . . .

  “I’ll have green!” Innokentii shouted from the bathroom, just one second before I was about to ask.

  “That kind of trick is why no one likes you Prophets!” I replied. But I smiled. The boy was playing with his Power, checking it out, using a sledgehammer to crack nuts. What if all of a sudden he was able to control his abilities as a Prophet as
freely as Seers could?

  I brewed green tea for Kesha—the standard kind, with jasmine. And strong, nine-year-old pu-erh for myself.

  Kesha came in and sat at the table facing me. He nodded gratefully as he took the cup.

  “Uncle Anton, why did the Tiger want me to come to your place?”

  “He probably wants to have a talk,” I said with a shrug. “With you and me at the same time.”

  “Well, I’m not really important . . .”

  “Okay, okay, no false modesty. Do you feel any premonitions?”

  The boy shook his head. “No. You can’t predict the Twilight.”

  “You manage to predict me all right.”

  “That’s not really prediction,” Kesha admitted. “It’s just that I know you well. Whenever you want to talk, you always suggest going for an ice cream. And when you go to the kitchen, you ask who wants what kind of tea.”

  “So it’s the deductive method, then.”

  “Well . . . And just a little bit of prophesy.” Kesha suddenly smiled cunningly. “I do know I’ll have a sore throat tomorrow. Which means I’m probably going to eat ice cream. I shouldn’t eat it in winter at all; my throat’s my weak spot. And just now, I knew I was going to drink green tea with jasmine. That meant you were going to make it. I can’t predict your actions, but I can predict my own.”

  “That’s a good trick,” I said respectfully. “Well done!”

  Kesha nodded, accepting the compliment without any false modesty. Then he asked:

  “But who else are we expecting? Apart from the Tiger?”

  “We? Sugar . . .” I said with a start. “Yes, that’s right. Zabulon promised I’d get a visit from a . . . a certain Dark One.”

  “A vampire?” Kesha asked.

  “Absolutely right. A very old vampire. So you can foresee after all?”

  “No, I’m not foreseeing. Just seeing.” Kesha pointed with his eyes to the window behind my back.

  I turned around and barely managed to suppress a shudder.

  A bat was hanging from the cornice outside the window. A huge, monstrous bat—its outspread wings were two yards across, its head was the size of a human head, and the body was brushing against the molding of the window frame.

  “Ah, there’s our guest now,” I said in a low voice.

  “How can they fly?” asked Kesha, also lowering his voice. “That weighs as much as I do.”

  “Sorcery, lad, sorcery,” I said, getting up and going toward the window. The bat watched me with an unblinking gaze.

  Only Higher Vampires are able to transform themselves into animals. But not even a Higher Vampire could have approached so close to my apartment, which was protected by absolutely every possible spell of the Light and the Darkness.

  I looked at the bat through the Twilight. Through the first level, and the second, and the third.

  At every level it looked like a huge bat, nothing more and nothing less. Yes, indeed . . .

  I opened both panes of the window. The vampire just stayed there, looking at me.

  “I admit you,” I said. “Come into my home. I permit you to enter.”

  The three-times-repeated permission broke down some invisible barrier. Waddling heavily on its feet and the elbow joints of its wings, the bat clambered onto the windowsill. And froze there.

  No one knows why vampires cannot enter a house uninvited. Human legends lie about almost everything—vampires are reflected in mirrors, vampires can eat garlic, they don’t like sunlight, but they can tolerate it, they’re not afraid of silver (but then, a silver bullet works just as well as a lead one), they’re not afraid of crosses and holy water (unless, of course, the person trying to resist the vampire is a latent Other and believes in God sincerely and absolutely, in which case the cross will burn the vampire and the water will corrode his flesh). However, vodka or pure alcohol burn vampires even more fiercely, and they can be used by any atheist.

  But the ban on entering someone else’s home—that’s true.

  “Turn away,” I told Kesha. “They don’t like to change in front of strangers.”

  “No one likes it,” the bat said in a hoarse voice after the boy turned away. This really was a very old and experienced vampire—he had even learned to talk when in animal form!

  I didn’t turn away. My home, my rules.

  The vampire threw up its wings, wrapping them around itself, and stood up on the windowsill, with its head almost reaching the ceiling—then it started changing form.

  He did this with extreme skill too. Very neatly. None of the splashes or loose scraps of flesh that inexperienced werewolves and vampires produce. A gigantic bat had been standing there in front of me—and now there was a person. An Other.

  A female Other.

  “Good evening,” I said after a moment’s hesitation and held out my hand.

  “The evenings are always good to me,” the vampiress said with a smile. She leaned elegantly on her hand and jumped down off the windowsill. “You can turn around now, boy.”

  Kesha immediately turned around with lively curiosity.

  “Are you surprised by something?” the vampiress asked.

  “Yes.” To my amazement, Kesha wasn’t even slightly diffident. “I thought you’d be naked. How do you manage to change form dressed?”

  “Because I’m not a werewolf, but a vampire,” the woman said. “Werewolves are naked when they change form, but we . . . We have our own cunning artifices. And what are you surprised at, Gorodetsky?”

  “Zabulon promised that I would be visited by one of the oldest vampires of all.”

  The woman laughed.

  “Anton, you didn’t really expect to see an old woman, did you?”

  “In principle, I was prepared for it. Especially knowing Zabulon’s sense of humor.”

  “Ah, I understand. You were prepared to see an old woman with fangs. Or an old, portly male vampire. You imagined a touching, innocent little girl, who has lived for hundreds of years by sucking the life out of people—or a melancholy youth in the likeness of Dorian Gray. You wouldn’t have been surprised by some sultry, passionate, brilliant beauty whom men would beg to sink her fangs into their throats . . . Or a tender, young blonde, the perfect embodiment of helplessness and guile.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you saw an ordinary woman,” said the vampiress. “A little bit worse for wear, with a backside that’s a bit heavy, maybe, but on the whole, pretty ordinary.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” I said.

  The vampire was a perfectly ordinary woman.

  Middle-aged. Thirty-something.

  Moderately good looking. That is, it could be fun flirting with someone like this, and some men would fall in love with her (well, if they thought of her as a normal human being), but nothing superattractive. Maybe her backside was “a bit heavy,” but it looked perfectly fine to me.

  And she was dressed in an ordinary way. Absolutely ordinary—jeans, a short, light coat (either she drove everywhere, or her home and job were right beside a metro station . . . or she flew everywhere as a bat).

  And her face was in no way exceptional. No intense emotions. No blinding charm, no gloom, no stupidity, no wisdom.

  “You’re like Zabulon,” I said. “You’re . . . You’re very ordinary.”

  The vampiress nodded.

  “Yes, Anton. Someone who lives for thousands of years has to be ordinary.”

  “Oh wow!” Kesha exclaimed.

  That word “thousands” shook me too.

  “Even Master Pyotr . . .”

  “A mediocre little vampire boy. He’s not even six hundred yet. A mere suckling.” The vampiress smiled: “Pardon the foolish pun.”

  “But he’s the Master of the vampires of Europe!”

  “So? Barack Obama is the president of the United States. What of it? That doesn’t make him the cleverest man, or the richest, or the most influential.”

  I held my hands up.

  “I surrender. Pardon
my ignorance. We haven’t been introduced.”

  “Eve.”

  “Anton.”

  “That can’t be your real name, though,” Kesha remarked, gazing at Eve with avid curiosity.

  “No, of course not. But it’s an ancient name, known to all the peoples of the world. I find it convenient.”

  A thought flashed through my mind, but I didn’t even let it take shape. She was a very, very old and powerful vampire. And not even my Higher Other level made us equal.

  If she wanted, she could tear Kesha and me to pieces.

  “All right, Eve,” I said. “I let you into my home, I repeated the invitation three times, I’ve introduced myself. I have an ancient right in accordance with an ancient law.”

  “The right to three questions?” Eve was obviously amused: the corners of her lips were twitching. “Ah, Light One, I invented that right myself . . . I can change it.”

  She sat down between us with a light, catlike movement. She looked at me. She looked at Kesha.

  “All right, Anton, we’ll play. You’ll get three answers, but they won’t be answers to the questions that are bothering you. They’ll just be answers. We’ll have a serious talk afterward, but this is just the warm-up.”

  “Who is the vampire who saved us and why did she do it?”

  Eve laughed and wagged her finger at me.

  “All right.” I sighed. “A warm-up. What is the connection between you and Zabulon?”

  Eva thought for moment. She licked her lips.

  “Blood.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is an answer, Anton Gorodetsky. You asked a question, I answered. It’s an honest answer. If it didn’t answer your question, the asker is to blame.”

  “All right,” I said. “The second question. Csaba Orosz. How much truth is there in his book, and how much falsehood? Were the vampires simply making a fool of him, or are the legends that he tells genuine?”

  Eve froze. She nodded.

  “A good question. Most of what he says there is true.”

  “Can I ask something?” Kesha said.

  “Let the boy ask,” I said.

  “How do you keep your clothes during transformation? It isn’t magic, I would have felt it.”