Sixth Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  Csaba Orosz also retold the stories of a whole slew of other events, presenting them in a new light. Joan of Arc, Thor Heyerdahl, Émile Zola, and Thomas Edison were all vampires. And Tesla was a vampire too, of course. He was turned into a vampire by President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor (who had been turned into a vampire by Roosevelt himself).

  All famous people were vampires. Or at least they sympathized with them.

  When I learned, after a cursory glance through Orosz’s encyclopedia, that Joseph Stalin was also a vampire, it very nearly brought tears to my eyes. What a shame that Russia’s liberal media hadn’t read this encyclopedia! They could have cited it. If you ask me, the liberal media are where all the most genuine vampires are to be found.

  I put down the fifth and final volume. And sighed.

  Poor, unlucky Orosz had fallen foul of his own guiding light. As I understood things, he had fallen in with a company of vampire jokers (it does happen, they do exist) who had led him down the garden path with their stories about vampire customs and world history from their perspective.

  Among the mass of fantasies, jokes, and hoaxes that he gullibly noted down and passed on, there were probably some grains of sound sense. If I only knew how to identify them.

  Probably the only thing relating to the possibility of revitalizing vampires was the story of the Eternal Vampire, a very liberal reworking of the story of the Eternal Jew. Of course, it wasn’t Christ whom the Eternal Vampire offended, it was Merlin, but the consequences were similar. Henceforth he was condemned to wander eternally, but he couldn’t drink blood—it burned him like fire—so he suffered unimaginable torment and fed mostly on wine (which was extremely odd and inconsistent, in view of vampires’ intolerance of alcohol).

  But then it suddenly occurred to me that all the advice I’d read recommended dousing vampires with strong spirits. Maybe they were able to drink wine?

  Ah, phooey, it was all raving nonsense.

  It was also mentioned that the most valiant (oh, what a word the Hungarian had chosen!) and intrepid of the vampires could be reanimated by the God of Light and Darkness after being laid to rest. But on this point even Orosz didn’t let his fantasy off the leash.

  Glancing through the final document, I discovered how Orosz’s life ended. No, he wasn’t drunk by a vampire, and he wasn’t shot by Soviet soldiers—which I had been vaguely afraid of on seeing the date of his death. He couldn’t give a damn about politics, and the vampires didn’t touch him. Orosz caught a cold while strolling through a park in autumn, came down with meningitis, failed to consult a healer in time, and the human doctor made a mess of things.

  An absurd death!

  I packed all the documents into the box, went to the kitchen, and brewed some tea. And just then Svetlana got back—with two plastic bags of positively monstrous dimensions.

  “You could have warned me,” I reproached her. “We could have gone to the supermarket together.”

  “I got carried away,” said Svetlana. “I wasn’t planning to get so weighed down. I saw Nadya off to school, and then I thought I’d just drop into Ashan . . .”

  “You took a pretty long time,” I said, glancing at the clock as I unpacked a bag crammed with vegetables. “Did it take you four hours to choose a salad?”

  “I circled around the school for a while first,” Svetlana confessed unhesitatingly. “You’re panicking for no good reason, of course. But I just took a look at how things are there anyway.”

  “And?” I asked, finishing with the first bag and starting on the second one.

  “They’re guarding her.” Svetlana chuckled. “One of ours, two from the Day Watch, and a gray one, from the Inquisition.”

  “Gray?” I asked in surprise.

  “He’s a Light One originally,” said Svetlana. “But all of them have that grayish shade.”

  I snorted. I’d never spotted any details like that in the Inquisitors’ auras. Although I had sensed that they had a certain common quality about them.

  But then my thoughts took a rapid turn in a different direction.

  “One Light One, two Dark Ones, and an Inquisitor?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Svetlana replied, tensing up immediately at my tone of voice.

  “That can’t be right. It violates the rule of parity. Either two of ours, or one Dark One.”

  “They could have counted the Inquisitor . . . as a Light One,” Svetlana said, bewildered. She was trying to justify herself now, knowing she ought to have realized immediately that the imbalance was impossible. But the Light Inquisitor had thrown her off. She had added him to “our side” and decided everything was all right.

  “No one knew about the Inquisitor,” I said, slamming the fridge door and looking into Svetlana’s eyes. “Only Nadya noticed him. I didn’t. And the Watches didn’t know about him. Nadya mentioned one Light One and one Dark One.”

  A second later we were already in the stairwell, running down the steps. We probably didn’t need to hurry—if nothing had happened in four hours, the chances were that nothing was going to happen. But we ran. Opening a portal would have taken longer. Even getting into a car and driving would have taken longer. The school was blocked off in the Twilight and opening up a way through would have taken quite a lot of time too. The run through the courtyards was just two minutes.

  And we ran, knowing that either we didn’t need to hurry at all, or we were already way too late.

  In a modern city you don’t often come across anyone running. People often plod slowly past the shop windows. When they walk, it’s always fast. But running . . . There are two scenarios for that: a short sprint to the bus stop, hoping to catch a bus that’s already leaving, and the daily spurt of some enthusiastic follower of a healthy lifestyle—somewhere in a park or close to one—wearing a natty tracksuit with headphones jammed into their ears.

  Anyone running, who isn’t running to a bus stop or wearing a tracksuit, automatically arouses suspicion.

  Who is he running away from?

  Who is he chasing?

  Perhaps he’s a burglar who’s been spooked by an alarm system? Or a rapist who has attacked a woman in an elevator? Citizens feel a desperate desire to join in the hunt and participate in the most ancient of human amusements.

  But there were no shouts of “Stop thief!” or “Grab that villain!” A man and a woman, just running along—but they looked as if they’d be only too glad to give someone a poke in the eye.

  And the egotism of city life won out. The citizens looked away—let them run if they want, there must be some reason for it. Only the frost-proof old grannies, out strolling with their grandchildren or freezing solid on the benches, reached furtively for the cell phones their grandchildren had given them, in order to capture the runners in a blurry snapshot. What if the polizais come and start looking for witnesses? And here, I’ve already got a photo!

  As long as there are grannies in Russia, no courtyard need ever feel unsafe.

  People watched us with lively interest, and some of them, either the most curious or the most empathetic, shouted to us: “What’s happened?” We didn’t answer, and they didn’t try to detain us.

  We hurtled through three courtyards and came out by the school fence.

  Well yes, three. Nadya was right, and I was wrong. But they were big yards, especially the third one, so I had every right to say that the school was four courtyards away.

  By the wall we both stopped.

  And exchanged glances.

  “Everything seems quiet,” I said. I looked through the Twilight—inside the building I saw the blurred yellow and green patches of auras. Schoolkids, not frightened by anything, not hurt. On the first level of the Twilight the school was thickly overgrown, just as it should be, with blue moss, the parasitical plant that is the only representative of flora and fauna in the Twilight world.

  Svetlana relaxed too. We looked at each other, smiling.

  And then turned toward the school again.

  “Too qui
et,” said Svetlana.

  After all, a school is more than just pupils from year one with white bows in their hair, little poems recited at the morning assembly, and a forest of hands raised by little kiddies who are dying to answer a question.

  It’s also bad marks and insulting nicknames, scoldings from the headmaster and entries in the register in red ink; it’s star-crossed love and pokes in the teeth from some hooligan; it’s defeat in a game of volleyball and a stolen smartphone.

  It’s a huge, great mass of emotions! It’s a seething cauldron with Power splashing out of it. That’s why schools get overgrown with moss; it consumes human emotions.

  And children in school never have uniformly tranquil auras like this.

  “Let’s go,” said Svetlana. She made a peculiar kind of movement with her left hand and I spotted a flurry of tiny little sparks glittering in the air, outlining an invisible oval. Some kind of local defense, something like the Magician’s Shield, but activated in advance, in “standby mode.” I thought perfunctorily that I ought to check out how she did that.

  “Gesar . . .” I called, following after Svetlana. We didn’t even discuss if we needed to call for backup and who we would call. “Gesar . . .”

  I put a little more Power into my voice.

  “Anton?”

  “Emergency at Nadya’s school.”

  “Code?”

  I was about to say “six,” which signifies “critical situation in a location with a large gathering of people, possible casualties,” but then Svetlana stopped and grabbed me by the arm.

  “Two,” I said. “Code two—gray.”

  A two is a critical situation in a location with a large gathering of people, with proven casualties. Gray meant the victim was a member of the Inquisition.

  He was lying between the sports field, which was fenced off with metal mesh, and the main entrance to the school building. His pose suggested that he’d been running toward the school . . . a really young-looking guy with the fading aura of a Light Other (and this time I did spot the tone that Sveta had called gray—as if the general light tone had been dusted with dark speckles). The level, of course, was already blurred, but it was at least third, maybe closer to second . . .

  The young man was completely and irreversibly dead. And what’s more, he’d been killed in a way that was so unusual I’d never even heard about it before.

  The left half of the Inquisitor’s body was charred. The clothing had been partly burned away and partly transformed into brittle black flakes. The wind was mercifully blowing away from us, but the nauseating smell of roasted flesh still reached us.

  The right half of the Inquisitor’s body was frozen. To be more precise, frozen solid—when he fell, his arm had snapped off at the elbow. The ice still covered his body in a thin crust; it had only melted on the snapped-off arm, which was lying in a red puddle.

  I blinked and sent Gesar a mental image of the dead Inquisitor.

  The boss swore. A very vile and convoluted oath. No, I’d never doubted that his knowledge of Russian was thorough. But this was really very intricate.

  And even so, it was inadequate to express what we had seen.

  “Wait,” Gesar told me. “Don’t go sticking your neck out. Do not enter the building!”

  I assume he wasn’t even hoping that we would obey him, but at least he had said what he thought necessary.

  “Gesar, what level was he?” I asked, looking away from the dead body.

  “About seventy years ago, when we first met, he was Second Level. Probably First now.”

  “He was First Level,” I told Svetlana as we set off toward the doors of the school, skirting around the dead Other on the upwind side.

  Sveta didn’t answer. Everything was clear anyway—to kill a First-Level Other—and an Inquisitor in the bargain, with their special spells and cunning amulets—was a very difficult proposition. Even for a Higher Other it meant at the very least an intense and dangerous battle with an unpredictable outcome.

  But the Inquisitor had been disposed of instantly and conclusively. And he had also been left near the entrance, as a warning.

  I flexed my hands and shook my fingers, “hanging” spells on them. And as I did it, I realized I was involuntarily biasing them toward defense.

  Well, we’d see about that.

  Two Higher Others is a different prospect from one First-Level Other.

  We walked into the school.

  I saw the first bodies in the entrance hall, beside the cloakroom—two little boys, about ten years old. It looked as if the attack had taken place during lessons; there were hardly any children in the corridors.

  Svetlana leaned down over one, I took the other.

  “He’s asleep,” my wife said.

  “Out like a light,” I confirmed. “Morpheus?”

  “Nadya’s bracelet was triggered,” Svetlana said. “Didn’t you realize that?”

  And then it hit me too.

  Apart from constantly being followed around by two Other guards—no, three, as it turned out—ever since she was little, Nadya had worn protective amulets. Gesar had tried to foist some of his own on her as soon as she was born, but Svetlana had responded by giving him such an earful that he had kept his mouth shut ever since.

  The amulets were chosen and charged by Svetlana. Most of them had disappeared when Nadya’s infancy came to an end (I don’t remember what she charged the trinkets with, but they had protective magic in them), to be replaced by enchanted toys (if you only knew what Nadya’s teddy bear was capable of doing to a grown man, your hair would stand up on end).

  Now the amulets were Nadya’s jewelry—the way it has always been for women.

  My contribution to my daughter’s safety wasn’t very great. Working with artifacts is more a female kind of magic; it’s no accident that witches are so fond of it. But even so, the ring in her left ear had been charged by me—if Nadya was the subject of unwanted attention, she generated a field of inattention so powerful that any human being, animal, or Other, even if he was a werewolf dying of hunger, completely lost all interest in her.

  Nadya was very suspicious about this earring. She believed that it occasionally “went on the blink” and frightened off inoffensive admirers. The two of us had even had a serious conversation about that. I explained to Nadya how offended I was by her lack of trust, and she apologized.

  It’s a good thing that for all her power, my daughter doesn’t know how to work with subtle energies yet. Well, of course the earring went on the blink. Just a tiny little bit . . . When Nadya turns eighteen, it will stop doing it—and don’t you even think of reproaching me if you don’t have a teenage daughter of your own!

  I also charged the chain that Nadya used for her pendant. Svetlana worked on the pendant, but I fixed the chain, and I hung the Gray Prayer on it—a spell against the undead, primarily, that is, against vampires. Well, and I charged one of the trinkets on the silver bracelet—a little book with the title Fairy Tales.

  (Now do you understand why witchcraft and artifact magic are mostly women’s work? They have things to record the spells on. We men only have our watches and cuff links—and that’s clearly not enough.)

  The spell that I crammed into the silver book of fairy tales was the “Wolfhound”—a powerful spell targeted at werewolves and shape-shifters. It frightened them off, and if they attacked anyway, it could kill them. The Wolfhound also frightened off vampires, although it was less effective on them. One of its shortcomings was low selectivity—shape-shifting Light Magicians took the full hit, just like werewolves.

  The bracelet with nine trinkets on it (little orbs, figures, goblets, and books) was Nadya’s primary line of defense. I basically knew how it was arranged, and now I could roughly picture what had happened.

  “Everything’s all right,” I said. “Everything must be all right, Sveta. The artifacts worked as planned.”

  The protective spells were supposed to come awake first, like the one in that earrin
g, the Sphere of Inattention, which altered the appearance of the “veil,” and several other spells that were intended to distract an aggressor and divert his interest. If they didn’t work, then a magical SOS signal was sent (I didn’t put much faith in that though—all signals of that kind can be jammed, and there hadn’t been any SOS signals today), and then the attacking spells were triggered—against human beings, against Others, and especially against vampires and shape-shifters.

  And Morpheus was one of the links in the final line of defense. If it had already been triggered, plunging everyone around into a magical sleep, that meant the situation was critical. The enemy could not be frightened away or destroyed.

  Nadya had to be defended with minimal damage to anyone nearby. And what’s the safest thing for human beings if Others start settling scores somewhere close by?

  That’s right—sleep.

  We moved farther into the school, advancing cautiously, as if through enemy-held territory. I walked slightly ahead, prepared to attack or counterattack. Svetlana was slightly behind me and to my left.

  But there wasn’t any enemy.

  There was another young lad sleeping—a bit older than Nadya, probably. He was clutching a pack of cigarettes in his hand. The brat had been on his way out of school for a smoke!

  And then we saw the guard who was usually on duty between the spacious entrance hall with the cloakroom and the main school building. He had a desk and a chair there, and on the desk was a register in which he was supposed to record any visitors, but I couldn’t remember him ever doing that. Guards-cum-janitors of this kind usually spent their time watching TV or reading cheap, trashy magazines. But this man didn’t watch TV, because he didn’t have one, and he didn’t read anything, for lack of interest. When there were no children or adults at his post, he took out a basic cell phone and played Tetris on it. He’d been playing Tetris for the whole four years that Nadya had been coming to this school, and I don’t think he even suspected that any other games existed.