Sixth Watch Read online

  “So, all the Prophets in the world have conspired and they’re foretelling the end of the world,” I said. “My family has been attacked by a deranged Dark One and a deranged Light One, and what’s more, they command powers so great that the two Highest Magicians in Russia chose to observe, but not interfere in what was happening. And these deranged traitors were driven off by the Higher Vampiress whose incidents I was investigating. Simply magnificent. What do you advise, Great Ones?”

  “Anton, I have no fondness for you at all,” Zabulon said quite sincerely. “But your daughter is very important. It’s vexing that she’s a Light One, but that’s the way it turned out—so let her be a Light One. Therefore I am inclined to protect you and your family. And again, I am certain that your lives are in some way connected with the lives of all Others . . . and of all people too, come to that. And so . . . I offer you asylum and protection within the walls of the Day Watch.”

  I chortled.

  “Zabulon, dear fellow, believe me, I am quite capable of ensuring the safety of my own colleagues,” said Gesar. “Although, of course, I should be glad to see your vampires . . . in the outer circle of the defenses. It seems as if our deranged colleagues are helpless against vampires. A very strange, but interesting situation. Let’s work together!”

  I looked at Svetlana. She gave a faint nod. I took hold of Nadya’s hand and pressed hard twice on her little finger.

  “All right, Dad,” my daughter said.

  Blue panels of crackling light started fluttering around us. The table came apart where the panels pierced through the wood. The patterned parquet flooring of Karelian birch started smoking under our feet. Cracks ran across the ceiling.

  “Stop that!” Zabulon barked, jumping up off his seat.

  “The sand and the pendulum, Dad,” Nadya suddenly said.

  I looked at her for a moment, then I thought I understood. And I replied.

  “In the morning the blue moon rises.”

  Gesar frowned. He continued sitting there quietly, looking at us, but he clearly didn’t understand these last two phrases, and that infuriated him.

  The dark, empty gap of a portal opened up in front of us. We stood up, I kicked my chair away, and it flew into a wall of blue light and shattered into splinters.

  “I’m sorry, Great Ones,” I said. “But in view of the circumstances, I am obliged to take the safety of my family into my own hands.”

  Svetlana stepped into the portal first, keeping hold of our daughter’s hand. Nadya followed her and I went after Nadya, still clutching her hand. If I had let go of her for even a split second, the portal would have ground me into mincemeat.

  “I told you, Dark One,” I heard my boss’s voice say. “Merlin’s tobacco pouch, if you please!”

  Unfortunately, I then passed through the portal, which closed behind me, and I didn’t hear Zabulon’s reply to Gesar.

  It was dark all around us. I raised my free hand and waved it through the air. No effect. Then I ignited the Firefly spell on the tips of my fingers—probably the very simplest spell of all.

  The large room was filled with an even, white light.

  Apparently the motion sensor on the wall had broken down. After all, I hadn’t been here for two years. I walked over to the wall and clicked the switch. There was power—the chandelier on the high ceiling lit up. An old, ugly chandelier made of bent brass tubes and matte-white glass horns. No doubt made some time in the middle of the twentieth century.

  “What was the blue moon about, Dad?” Nadya asked.

  “What were the sand and the pendulum about?”

  “Well . . . I thought that if I blurted out some kind of nonsense,” said Nadya, “then the Great Ones would try to find the hidden meaning in it. And they’d be less likely to trace the portal.”

  “I got that. And I decided to back you up.”

  Meanwhile Svetlana walked around the room. There was nothing interesting in it. Old furniture—a Yugoslavian suite from the times when Yugoslavia was still a big country and not a bundle of territories all at each others’ throats. Two sofa beds. A window covered by heavy, dusty curtains. Svetlana pulled one curtain back—there was a brick wall behind it. The only relatively modern thing was a flat-screen television set, but a cheap and plain one.

  “What town is this?” Svetlana asked.

  “I told you. St. Petersburg.”

  “That’s right,” she said with nod. “I can’t get any sense of the surrounding aura at all.”

  “We tried really hard,” Nadya announced delightedly.

  I’d bought this apartment in the center of St. Petersburg three years earlier and then spent a long time camouflaging it in secret. I was attracted to it because it was located in an old nineteenth-century building that had been remodeled and restructured numerous times, and the spacious old “aristocratic” apartments had been broken up into communal apartments and separate rooms. Some time in the fifties this strange apartment had appeared, with its window bricked in (the window used to look out into a narrow enclosed yard before then in any case) and its tiny bathroom (a cast-iron, sit-in bath with a toilet standing flush up against it). There was no kitchen as such, only a wide, deep closet space that accommodated an electric stove and a tiny table.

  An ancient granny who came from a rich merchant family used to live here. I think the previous generation had owned the entire building, or at least a couple floors of it. The old lady had survived the revolution, the civil war, and the blockade of Leningrad. She taught French and translated some books and spent her life entirely alone, all the while generously showering her neighbors’ children with sweets and toys. Living in one room with no window and no kitchen didn’t bother her in the least.

  And later on, in the sixties, she had somehow managed to get permission to leave and move to Paris, where she lived for another quarter of a century, even marrying two Frenchmen and then getting divorced from them with a scandalous brouhaha. Before she left she had registered some distant relative as resident in her apartment. An interesting life altogether, no denying that.

  The relative tried to live in the apartment. He furnished it in a more contemporary style and took out the bricks, opening up the window into the yard. Six months later he couldn’t stand it anymore and filled the window back in. Six months after that he took to drink. Then he swapped the apartment, where it seems that only the old woman ever felt at ease, for an apartment in the suburbs.

  The new owner wisely didn’t attempt to live in the room. Instead, now that he had a foothold in this expensive and beautiful building, he tried to buy up the rooms next to it and combine them into a single apartment. But nothing came of his efforts. The apartment had served as a rendezvous for dates, as security for loans, a present for newlyweds, and a storeroom for all sorts of junk.

  And maybe for shadier business too—I didn’t check.

  And then I bought it—through a front man. And in one month I had erased all traces of the apartment’s existence from the surrounding world. That is, it was still listed in the municipal records, I paid for the power and water (or rather, the money disappeared of its own accord from an anonymous digital currency account that was set up), and one of the doors on the stairway landing was still the old wooden door leading into this unusual apartment.

  Only now multilayered drapes of protective and camouflaging spells concealed the apartment from everyone—Others and ordinary people alike.

  Svetlana had never even shown her face here. Yes, on the whole she approved of my idea—a totally secure place that not even Gesar knew about. Ever since people used to live in caves, every woman has felt the need to have a safe burrow of her own. But Svetlana left the arrangement and furnishing of the refuge entirely up to me, as the organizer, and to Nadya, as an infinite source of Power.

  “The telephone works,” I said, picking up the receiver of the old landline phone. I walked into the “bathroom.” “Water . . . there is water . . . only it needs to be run for a while,” I admi
tted, looking at the rusty liquid flowing out of the tap.

  “The television,” Nadya said proudly. “I made Dad put in a television. There was an old Horizon in here. This big!” She spread her hands to demonstrate. “It worked, but it wasn’t even color!”

  “We have to flush the toilet plenty of times,” I said. “It has oil in it as a hydraulic seal. So does the shower. There are provisions in the cupboard in the kitchen—canned food and soup, rusks, sugar, tea, coffee.”

  “I don’t like where you’re going with this,” said Svetlana.

  “There’s also a bottle of cognac and a few bottles of wine,” I told her.

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Sveta, whatever might have happened to those guards—first and foremost they were hunting Nadya,” I said. “No one knows about this place, and it’s protected as securely as possible. I think it’s safer than the Watch offices.”

  “Dad, what’s on the disk?” asked Nadya, picking up an external hard drive off the TV stand.

  “Films. Everything you used to love three years ago. Cartoons and fairy tales.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Nadya exclaimed indignantly.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think of updating the video library,” I said. “Or I would have filled the disk with anime and fantasy movies.”

  Nadya pouted resentfully.

  “I agree that Nadya ought to stay here,” Svetlana said thoughtfully. “But why on earth should I—”

  “So that our daughter doesn’t do anything stupid,” I explained. “Sorry, Nadya. But I wouldn’t like you to leave this place because of some bad premonition or sheer boredom and run into those two . . . You stay here, girls. I’ll come to get you in a day or two. But please hide in the meantime.”

  Svetlana nodded. Reluctantly and crankily, but she accepted my logic.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The same as usual,” I said. “Look for the bad guys and protect the good guys.”

  “You need a Prophet,” Nadya said.

  “Yes, my darling daughter, and we have one.”

  Nadya nodded.

  “You need combat support even more,” said Svetlana. “Sorry, but . . . you won’t be able to cope on your own.”

  “I have some ideas about that too,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Contact?”

  “Absolutely none,” I said. “Everything can be traced. I’ll drop in to see you in twenty-four hours. You make some coffee, okay?”

  Svetlana nodded. Then she hugged me impulsively. Nadya snorted and turned away, examining the hard disk drive, as if she could view the contents just by looking at it.

  Although I wouldn’t swear to it that she couldn’t.

  The portal that Nadya opened at my request led me back out into the conference room.

  Nothing there had changed—only the chair that was shattered after it caught a kick from my foot in the heat of the moment had been cleared away.

  Apart from that, Zabulon was sitting there, slavering his cigar with his lips, and Gesar was painstakingly filling his pipe with the contents of Merlin’s tobacco pouch—whatever it was.

  “Back again,” Gesar said without even looking at me. “Well, I can’t blame you. Sooner or later every one of us realizes that a secret hideaway is a useful thing.”

  “You didn’t bet on whether I’d come back?” I asked.

  “No,” said Zabulon. “I was certain you’d come back. I just hadn’t expected you to have the wits to hide your family.”

  By his standards this was a serious compliment.

  “I’m ready to keep listening,” I said, sitting down.

  “There’s nothing more to listen to,” Gesar replied.

  “How’s that? What happened to our guys? What happened to the vampiress?”

  “All the analysts are already at work,” said Gesar. “But so far we know no more than you do. You can hook up with them, or you can work independently. I can let you have a few men.”

  “I’m ready to help as well,” said Zabulon. “You can hook up with my analysts too.”

  He didn’t seem to be joking.

  “Gesar, I request permission to conduct an independent investigation, the right to bring in any members of the Night Watch, use the archive and the special vault, and have the scientists deal with my requests as a first priority.”

  “You are granted that right,” said Gesar. He held his hand out toward Zabulon and opened it.

  “What?” Zabulon asked in bewilderment. “You want to swear by the Light and the Darkness?”

  “Give me the matches.”

  “Ah . . .” Zabulon took a box of matches out of his jacket. “Take them, you aesthete.”

  Without saying a word, Gesar struck a match, held it for a moment to allow the head to burn off, then began fastidiously lighting his pipe.

  “You definitely don’t want to know what it is you’re smoking?” Zabulon asked.

  “No, it’s enough for me that Merlin smoked it.”

  Zabulon shrugged.

  “Dark One, I have a request to put to you.”

  “Put it.”

  “I need a car,” I said. “I’m going to go to the school now, to examine the evidence at the scene and have a word with our people who are working there.”

  Zabulon took out his keys and tossed them across the table to me.

  “Take it. And no need to return it, I’m fed up with it already.”

  “Thank you,” I said with a nod. “The second thing—I need your analysts and archivists to respond to my requests.”

  Zabulon thought for a moment.

  “All right. But they’ll only respond to requests that concern what’s going on now.”

  “That’s reasonable,” I agreed. “The third thing . . .”

  Zabulon laughed.

  “You’ve matured, Anton. Fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have accepted anything from me. But now it’s ‘I want health, money, and sexual potency—that’s in the first place . . .’”

  “No, there are only three points,” I reassured him. I squinted at Gesar—the smoke coming from his pipe had an unpleasant, acrid odor. But Gesar was smoking it with a stony, imperturbable face. “A car. Information . . . At least some information; I realize you’ll keep part of it back. And the third thing is—I need to talk to the very oldest vampire of all.”

  Zabulon frowned.

  “That’s curious. Perhaps the Master of the Vampires of Moscow would suit you? Or the head of the European organization?”

  “Master Yekaterina is too young,” I said. “She’s not even two hundred yet, is she? Master Pyotr is a bit older, but he hasn’t been actively involved in things for a long time and they say he never gets out of his coffin. I don’t necessarily need the highest-ranking one, just one who’s as old as possible.”

  “I’m impressed,” Zabulon admitted. “But I can tell you in secret that it’s a very good thing Pyotr went batty about abstinence and spends most of the time sleeping in his vault. Fewer problems for everyone . . . All right, Anton, I have a good idea of who you need to see and how I can persuade that person to come to you. But you have to get that person to talk frankly yourself, I’m powerless when it comes to that.”

  I nodded.

  “Be at home this evening,” said Zabulon. “I’ll give you a call if there’s any kind of hitch. But I expect everything will be fine and you’ll get a visit.”

  “You’re taking a risk,” said Gesar, looking at me.

  “With my boss’s permission, I’ll take that risk,” I said, getting up. “Call, write, send telegrams. And don’t forget the food parcels.”

  “Good luck, Anton,” I heard the boss’s voice say when I reached the door. Gesar continued beside Zabulon—it looked as if their conversation would only begin in earnest after I was gone. Then Gesar started coughing.

  “Just what is this shit?” he asked.

  “Well, I did give you a hint,” Zabulon replied snidely.

  I hadn’t asked for
the car because I didn’t have one of my own or I couldn’t requisition any car that took my fancy.

  I wanted to see just how far Zabulon was prepared to go. Well, and in case things went awry—which I wasn’t particularly expecting—so that I could show any Dark Ones that I was well in with their boss.

  Zabulon drove a Volvo family car—at least it was a normal sedan, not some kind of overhyped SUV. A good car, but without any excessive swank to it. And inside it everything was neat and tidy, lived in, just slightly rearranged to suit the owner’s taste—and yet at the same time absolutely sterile. Not a single hint at the owner’s personality. A pack of tissues and some napkins in the glove compartment, a dash cam on the windshield.

  Well, what was I expecting?

  Skulls with incense burning in them?

  A log recording the day’s atrocities?

  And it was also amusing that all the spells had disappeared from the car. They had been here; I could still sense a faint trace. Protective, camouflaging, servicing . . . But while I was walking down from the office, while I was looking for the car in the parking lot, it had become absolutely ordinary and human.

  Well, that was exactly what I should have expected.

  I cast a light veil against traffic cops over the car. I didn’t even bother to protect myself against security cameras—Zabulon had removed the protection, they could send the fines to him.

  And I set off to Nadya’s school.

  The schoolyard was clean, the remains of the dead Inquisitor had been removed. Sitting at the entrance was a guard who looked very much like the one who had been hurt, only he was a part-time member of the Day Watch, an Other and—if all the details are important—a vampire.

  I nodded to him and he got up and bowed politely.

  The corridors were empty; there were lessons going on. Only on the third floor did I come across a boy walking along the corridor. The boy’s eyes were blank and sleepy.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  “I have to do my lessons. I’m going to the toilet,” the boy replied. “I said I needed to go to the toilet. I really need to pee. But I said that about the toilet, because I wanted to smoke in the toilet. But I have to do my lessons!”