Sixth Watch (28 page)

An instant later the final vampire still fighting the uninvited guest exploded and crumbled into dust.

The fake Killoran stood on the stage and looked around at the Masters. Apart from her torn clothes, she was uninjured, which wasn't really surprising for a vampire. Anything that doesn't kill them immediately heals very rapidly.

The vampiress reached out her clasped hand and opened it. Ash fell out of it in a thin trickle. Had she torn the heart out of that vampire, then? His main heart and his supplementary one?

“I assume authority over you, by the right of Blood and Power,” the vampiress said. “Are there any who will dispute my word?”

I looked at Pyotr.

Come on now, my friend,
I thought.
Come on, Ancient One. Dispute it. Somehow I have no doubt that you'll be torn to ribbons!

Unfortunately, Pyotr had no doubt about that either.

“The Master of Masters has come,” he said, bowing his head. “Word, Power and Blood . . .”

“The Master of Masters,” all the vampires who were still alive repeated. I looked and found Jack, Greta, Ekaterina, and Ellie among them.

Olga was there too, of course. Staring intently at the fake Killoran.

“These people,” the vampiress said, nodding toward me, “are my guests. Answer all their questions, give them every possible assistance, and do not harm them. Power and Blood.”

“Power and Blood,” the vampires echoed. I paid special attention to Pyotr—he repeated it too.

The old skunk certainly was a survivor!

“Wait!” I shouted to the new Mistress of Masters. “Answer me this . . .”

“I shall return when the hour comes, Anton,” the vampiress re
plied. “When the Others gather together. But in the meantime . . . think. Decide what answer you will give.”

“Then ask the question!” I shouted.

Killoran raised her eyebrows quizzically.

“Where will you stand when the hour comes? Among the six or in front of the six? That's the question.”

And she disappeared.

I wasn't trying to hide any longer. I looked through the Twilight and tried to sense her, using every means that could.

There was nothing. There was no one. The vampiress had completely disappeared, but I couldn't see any traces left by a portal either.

“I don't understand,” said Olga, walking up to me. “I don't know any ways to disappear like that, and I thought I knew everything.”

Meanwhile the remnants of the vampires' forces—security guards, human acolytes, and weak vampires—had all come running and gathered in the hall.

“Who is going to answer my questions?” I asked.

“I can!” Ellie responded with the air of a diligent schoolgirl. “But if you want the answers to more questions, then it's Pyotr.”

I nodded to Pyotr, who was about to vanish into the crowd of vampires.

“Hey, shaggy. Get over here!”

“As the guest of the Master of Masters wishes,” Pyotr replied, breaking into a broad smile. “Most willingly and with the greatest of pleasure!”

“I never thought I'd say this; I'm generally in favor of preserving endangered species,” Olga said in disgust. “But it's probably a good thing they died out.”

GESAR LOOKED TIRED AND SHORT OF SLEEP, AS DID I. TAKING
part in a witches' Sabbath was probably just as stressful as visiting a vampires' convention.

“I asked Hena what the Neanderthals were like,” Gesar growled, striding around his study. “He's probably the only Other we have who was around when they were.”

“And what did he say?” I asked. The shape-shifter Inquisitor wasn't very talkative, but when he did speak, you could rely on what he said. He once told someone he had lived in a time before lies were invented.

“Hena said that basically they were almost like people,” Gesar told me. “Only very large boned and very woolly. He used to cough up hairballs for weeks afterward.”

“Hairballs?” I asked, puzzled.

“It's obvious you're not a cat lover, Anton,” Olga sighed. “That's very enlightening, Gesar, but what about Pyotr? Did Hena know about him? And did Neanderthals often become Others anyway?”

“He didn't know about Pyotr. Neanderthals sometimes became vampires and shape-shifters, but he couldn't recall a single case of one becoming a magician. Hena believes their mode of thinking was very concrete. They could understand how Power was transmitted through blood or meat, but they couldn't control subtle energies.”

I nodded. That sounded believable.

“But then they gradually became extinct,” Gesar continued. “Most of them were eaten. Of course, they themselves had no objection to eating human flesh, like everyone else in those times. But first, they didn't have any magicians. And second, they were less aggressive.”

“Then Pyotr isn't typically representative of his species,” I said morosely. “He seemed aggressive and bloodthirsty to me. Although . . . when your evolutionary branch has been totally wiped out, literally gobbled up . . . that's not likely to fill you with the spirit of loving-kindness.”

“Hena was reluctant to speak about the subject,” said Gesar. “I think he feels very awkward. He was actively involved in thinning out the population of Neanderthals. Despite those hairballs. And I got the impression that he had Neanderthals in his family. Either his mother or his grandmother.”

“It's like a Mexican soap opera,” I said. “Maybe he and Pyotr are related? Maybe our transcarpathian friend is his daddy? We ought to introduce them.”

“The usual thing,” Olga snorted. “The best anticommunists were former Communist Party leaders. The most rabid anti-Semites are Jews, especially those of mixed blood. No, let's not get Hena and Pyotr together. Pyotr is a real piece of shit, but at least now we know all about him. But Hena might simply gobble him up, hair and all.”

“Maybe that would be for the best?” Gesar suggested. He walked over to the window and looked out somberly into the courtyard. “What did Pyotr tell you? What do vampires know about the Two-in-One in general?”

“Unfortunately, pretty much what we already knew anyway. All the legends that we thought of as comforting vampire folklore are the absolute truth for them, no more to be doubted than the fact that the sun will rise in the morning. Vampires believe . . .” I thought for a moment and corrected myself. “Vampires
know
that they were the first Others. They learned to obtain Power by drinking the blood of their enemies. They learned to change themselves, change their bodies, and acquire new abilities. And the Two-in-
One came to them. The details of his appearance are debatable. Maybe two men walking beside each other, maybe Siamese twins. The vampires were told that henceforth they were the custodians of mankind.”

“Oh really?” Gesar exclaimed, looking at me and raising his eyebrows. Then he stared out at the courtyard again.

“Yes, really. They were told that they were a special part of the human race, the best part. That they were being granted the right to kill people in order to feed themselves, since that gave them Power, but they had to follow some rules . . .” I cleared my throat. “Basically the same things that we demand from them now. Not to kill children or pregnant women, not to kill unnecessarily. The vampires accepted these conditions. As I understood it, there were some who didn't accept them, and the Two-in-One dealt with them very harshly and very persuasively. Yes, together with the right to feed on people, the vampires also inherited obligations. To protect the flock: against predators, against cataclysms, against epidemics. Against enemies who had not concluded a covenant with the Two-in-One.”

“So basically, vampires aren't predators,” said Olga. “They're shepherds. A shepherd eats the sheep, but he loves them, protects them against the wolves, tends the flock, and helps it multiply.”

Gesar didn't say anything. And I knew why the Great One was so silent—all this sounded too much like the truth to question or argue with.

“And for many years, decades and centuries, there was a golden age on earth,” I said sarcastically. “People lived in harmony with nature and themselves. The vampires held the top positions in the food chain and in the human hierarchy. Yes, everyone knew that the leader and, let's assume, the shaman, drank human blood. But so what? They didn't usually drink anyone to death. But they were always at the front in battle, and they could help out with their superhuman abilities. To be drunk completely dry, you had to make the leader really furious, or be captured by your enemies. I assume shape-shifters separated from the vampires at about this time, but
that didn't change the situation in any fundamental way. Big deal—they didn't drink the blood, they devoured their victims completely: six of one, half dozen of the other. This idyll continued for quite a long time, until a couple of vampires violated the status quo.”

“We could provisionally call them Adam and Eve,” Olga said.

“Well, I don't know what apples they gorged themselves on,” I continued, “but they stopped drinking blood. Maybe they were the first to learn how to work with power on a more subtle level? They were still vampires, of course. Only they didn't suck blood; they drank Power. Constantly, in background mode, so to speak. And that certainly didn't limit their abilities. Perhaps at first they were banished or, more likely, their entire tribe was banished by vampires who were affronted by the breach of tradition. But their new abilities gave them an advantage. They started reproducing and multiplying. And people probably preferred the new order of things. No one sucked blood, and if they sucked out Power—well an ordinary person couldn't use it anyway . . .”

“And we have the feeling,” said Olga, “that this was when the Two-in-One made his second visit.”

“We've been working hard,” I boasted to Gesar.

“All these oral traditions are such a tangle, it's like a maze,” Olga complained. “All the Two-in-One's appearances are jumbled up together. But we think there were at least two. With a period of hundreds or even thousands of years between them.”

“And the second one was a serious meeting at the highest level,” I said. “It was obviously attended by representatives of all the varieties of Others who were organized then. Dark Magicians. Light Magicians. Witches—women's magic, which depends on artifacts and the accumulation of energy, quickly separated off into a distinct variety. And the vampires, of course, but they were no longer the most important group by then. I don't know about the shape-shifters—they were probably yoked together with the vampires.”

“There's not really any new information on that,” Olga admitted.
“But the vampires know for certain about themselves, Light Ones, Dark Ones, and the witches.”

“It sounds as though at this meeting there was serious friction between the negotiating parties,” I said, chuckling. “The Two-in-One didn't like such a free interpretation of the initial agreement. But there was nothing he could do.”

“We think there was an Absolute Other at that meeting,” said Olga. “And the Two-in-One simply didn't want to risk a confrontation. We can say with reasonable confidence that the Two-in-One is another form of incarnation of the Twilight. Another type of stimulus response, let's say. The Tiger handles Prophets, since they mold a new reality and are most dangerous of all. The Two-in-One probably deals with large-scale, general problems . . . Anyway, he agreed to a new status quo and the appearance of Higher Others who didn't tear people to pieces or drink blood became a fait accompli.”

“But it didn't all go off quite that simply,” I added. “There was obviously some set of conditions under which the Two-in-One promised to return. For a bloody purge of the Others, let's say. And it looks like those conditions have come about.”

“That's really bad,” Gesar said with loathing. “This whole business is bad! Information that should have been preserved like the rarest of precious jewels was lost. No one in the Inquisition, with its bloated staff and its store of thousands of tons of manuscripts and artifacts, knows a single thing about the Two-in-One. The bungling oafs!”

“But you didn't know either, boss,” I remarked. “Why blame anyone else, if you—”

“Of course I didn't know,” Gesar agreed with surprising readiness. “And you, my young friend, do you know about the Dusty Granny? Or the Man-Candle? Or the Little Kizyak House?”

“The little what house?”

“Kizyak. Dried dung. If it's cow's dung, they call it
djepa
too, and if it's sheep's dung, they call it
kumalak
.”

“I've never heard of it. It's something Eastern, right?” I muttered.

“Ah, but you should have heard of it. If that Granny hadn't been given a drink, the world would have come to an end. If that Man-Candle hadn't been put out, the world would have come to an end. If the right person hadn't entered that Little House . . .”

“The world would have come to an end,” I sighed.

“No, but it would be filled with an appalling stench!”

“I get it,” I confessed. “You had enough to deal with anyway.”

“Precisely. You can criticize the territorial structure of the Watches as much as you like, but it's pretty flexible and it works. If we had some kind of central headquarters, it would be chaos; every emergency siren would go off there.”

“Got it, got it, got it,” I said with a nod. “Where's the Asian equivalent of the Inquisition? Beijing? Taipei? Tokyo?”

“Thimphu, you ignoramus. But unfortunately they don't have the information we need either. Or they were unable to dig it up out of their repositories.”

“And in Africa and America?”

“There are no Inquisition centers in Africa, either of the Americas, the Antarctic, or the Arctic,” said Gesar. “Although the North Americans will be establishing one in the next few years. There'll be problems with finding staff, of course, but they really want to do it.”

Olga gestured in annoyance.

“Let them open three Inquisition centers for themselves. In North, Central, and South America! Those colonists, with their short history and inflated self-importance, all they ever dream of is outdoing old Mother Europe. How did things go with the witches, Gesar?”

“The Grandmothers fully appreciate the importance of what's going on,” said Gesar. “But they're even worse off for information than the vampires are—they haven't got any information at all. But they believed everything we already know. They don't intend to try fishing in troubled waters and they're ready to do anything: provide any magical support, join the Sixth Watch, and even die in combat with the Two-in-One.”

“At least there's some good news,” Olga said with a nod.

“Not really. They said they're willing to help, but they can't.”

“Why not?” Olga asked in a dry, businesslike voice.

“They want to discuss that at a meeting this evening. But only with a certain member of the Night Watch.”

“But why?” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. “What for? To what do I owe this honor?”

“You're way too photogenic,” Gesar said mockingly. “Witches are always dreaming of feasting their eyes on a handsome youth . . . You mean you really don't understand what you owe it to?”

To my great regret, I did.

The cafeteria was empty.

I walked across to the serving counter and stared thoughtfully at the choice of salads. It was quiet, no one was rushing me, and the only sound was the clatter of cutlery in the kitchen: the staff was apparently taking advantage of the lack of customers to clean up.

Nowadays we work day and night. In the good old times dark deeds used to be committed by the light of the stars, not the sun, and the Night Watch went to work at night.

We still have the name, and a few customs and odd phrases that have endured (when a novice Night Watchman meets a Day Watchman during the night they still like to amuse themselves by asking: “What are you doing here? This isn't your shift!”).

But of course we work around the clock. In shifts. Eight hours a day, with additional pay for overtime. With two days off. Saturday or Sunday shifts are accounted separately. With two periods of leave a year—a month in summer and two weeks in winter plus bank holidays, as well as a paid flight to a holiday destination of your choice. And health care (so that our healers won't have to treat every petty complaint like tooth decay and colds). Not to mention presents from the team on our birthdays and other significant dates.

If we had a trade union, it would be a very good trade union.

But we don't have a trade union, of course. We only mimic what the normal people do. Not consciously, but that's the way it turns out. In the olden days when people used to stay in their houses at night, with the doors and shutters locked, and only the town guards patrolled the streets warily, we would also live in wooden houses and gallop along the cobbled streets on our horses. When people built houses five stories high, dug out the first metro system, and invented a miraculous machine with a gas engine, we started wearing frock coats and neckties, strolling along the boulevards in the light of the newfangled gas lamps and searching for vampires in the cesspits of the big cities. When airplanes first took to the skies, and leather flying jackets and radios came into fashion, we also bought radios and started traveling between cities in planes, discussing the chances of class war among the shape-shifters. When paper books were transformed into electronic ones and “other” became an option for gender in questionnaires, we started using cell phones and tracking down vampires on the Internet, trading in shares, and researching the genome of witches.