Sixth Watch (32 page)

But everything turned out differently and Olga became a Light Other.

Things are actually more complicated than that. Yes, there are certain essential signs of a witch—the use of artifacts and vegetable or animal extracts, the frequent use of magic that is only accessible
to women (there's nothing sexist in this, it's just that male physiology doesn't allow you to work certain spells, like the Bottomless Pit or brew the potion Mummy's Rat-a-Tat, which includes three drops of breast milk).

In fact, witches often use physiological fluids—which is one reason they're not liked. In this respect they're a bit like vampires and werewolves, with their craving for blood and flesh. However, despite all the rumors, these “virgins' tears” and “drops of baby's blood” are usually gathered without whipping innocent young maidens or chopping children into pieces. But there are some straightforward sadists among witches too, and if a young girl hears a witch say, “I want your tears,” she'll probably be too frightened to respond rationally.

That was why people used to burn witches, whenever they could catch them. And at one point the Inquisition got so annoyed about it all that the Conclave took a real hammering. And after that the witches, who had been quite powerful and independent, started keeping a lower profile.

But I had no doubt that witches were among the very first Others. Originally they were probably vampires who had learned to do a lot with a little and extract Power from a few drops of blood, instead of quarts of it.

But there is another far more interesting question. Did the witches start storing Power in beads, rings, and earrings because they already wore them, or did they start wearing jewelry so they had a place to store Power? I was inclined to believe the latter. Which, by the way, would explain the universal female passion for jewelry—human women wore it to disguise themselves as Others, as witches. In less enlightened times a woman could find it useful to be regarded as a witch.

In fact, even nowadays it can be pretty handy . . .

“How are you?” I asked Nadya.

“Fine, Dad,” my daughter answered.

That's the only answer she's ever given me in the last couple of
years: “Fine,” “Okay,” “Cool.” It's her awkward age, I suppose. At ten she used to ask me about everything, and when she was twelve I could still ask her about absolutely anything.

“An unusual spot for a witches' Sabbath, isn't it?” I asked.

My daughter shrugged.

“Why do you say that? I think it's a very good spot. They can't keep on meeting in Kiev all the time, up on Bald Hill, can they?”

“There's the Brocken in Germany too,” I reminded her.

“Everywhere has its own Bald Hill,” Nadya said with a shrug. “In Moscow the witches meet on the Sparrow Hills . . . Try to catch me!”

She pushed off with her ski poles and glided down the slope.

We were standing on the crest of a hill. One side of the slope was wild and unkempt, with a scattering of boulders. In some places the wind had blown away the snow to expose the dark underlying rock, and in others it had piled up huge snowdrifts.

On the other side the slope had been cleared and it was covered with a smooth layer of snow. There were snow cannons, long lines of ski-lift pylons, and the diminutive figures of skiers and snowboarders slithering down the slope in their bright-colored outfits. The sun was sinking in the west and the ski lifts were only carrying people down now. It gets dark quickly up in the mountains, and in half an hour all these tourists would be taking showers and getting changed, and an hour or so after that they'd be eating dinner and drinking beer.

It was a small ski resort on the border between Austria and Italy, set in the narrow valley of a mountain pass, with a host of hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants, huddled along the road that ran through the valley. There were ski lifts everywhere, on the west and east sides of the valley. This place probably lived a different life in the summer, based on ecological tourism, with long hikes along the slopes to collect edelweiss flowers and admire the cows.

But the resort only really came alive in the winter.

And when the witches held a convention here.

I had been planning to go to the meeting alone, as Gesar had told
me to. But at the very last moment, when Nadya and Svetlana had already been allocated a room on one of the basement levels of the Night Watch building, the plans were changed. Zabulon showed up, saying that he had been contacted by one of the senior witches in the Conclave, and the witches “wanted Gorodetsky to bring his daughter with him.” Half an hour was spent arguing about security, until the Inquisition guaranteed Nadya's safety (although, to be quite honest, I wasn't sure that the entire might of the Inquisition, including all its spells of prohibition and the artifacts in its special repositories, would be capable of destroying the Two-in-One). Then it took another half hour for Nadya and me to persuade Svetlana. She responded to the suggestion of letting Nadya accompany me to the Conclave with the same suspicion she had shown fifteen years earlier, when I offered to feed Nadya from the bottle. Women just don't believe that men know how to take care of children.

But the invitation from the Conclave was very specific and it couldn't be interpreted in any other way. Anton Gorodetsky and his daughter, Nadezhda. No more, no less.

In the end there wasn't enough time to get to Austria by using any human form of transport. And the area immediately surrounding the hotel where the witches had gathered for their Conclave had been securely closed against magical portals. I had never seen Gesar and Zabulon so annoyed and embarrassed as when I asked them to open a portal directly into the hotel.

They couldn't do it.

And neither could the Inquisition.

The witches had used some special spells and artifacts of their own, making it impossible to travel directly to their Sabbath. Our journey acquired the surreal air of a James Bond adventure as ski suits and equipment were brought for Nadya and me.

We had been on skiing trips before, and this was a simple piste, only “light-red” in the local classification, well tended, and clearly marked. Even so, I took precautions on the descent, using magic to calculate the probabilities as I followed Nadya down. I was slightly
alarmed to realize that my body had begun forgetting its downhill-skiing skills. There was one spot where I would have gone tumbling head over heels, another where a wild young snowboarder would have cut in on my slow, clumsy advance and knocked me over, and a third spot where I would have become overconfident as I started remembering a thing or two, increased my speed, and gone rolling down the slope again . . .

So I followed Nadya down without hurrying, like a novice, slowing myself by doing a snowplow, meandering across the slope, and gradually piecing back together what I had forgotten. I thought what a shame it was that we hadn't been to the mountains for a couple of years. It was really great up here . . . and how wonderful it was when little Nadya used to ski down behind me, looking so funny and concentrating so hard . . .

We reached the bottom of the slope right beside the hotel where the Conclave was taking place. I hadn't taken a close look until then, or maybe the hotel had been protected with some kind of witches' spell of darkness, but down here the display of auras was dazzling.

Others.

Mostly Dark Ones.

Witches.

The hotel was called Winter Hexerei, a name with an old-fashioned charm and air of menace about it. The Dark Ones are fond of provocative, revealing little jokes like that—vampires tell funny stories about blood, teeth, and sucking; shape-shifters make wisecracks about wolves, fur, and midnight. And witches just adore talking about sorcery.

The poster at the entrance was equally impish and provocative.

“Welcome to the delegates of the DCLXV traditional convention of feminist gerontologists, cosmetologists, botanists, and personal relationship consultants.”

It was a bit longwinded, of course, especially in the German version, but it conveyed rather well the essence of what witches do. I would have added zoologists too—lots of witches' spells use sub
stances of animal origin. But then that would have sounded really ponderous.

“How did I do?” Nadya asked as she slowed to a halt.

“Really good,” I said sincerely, stopping beside her. “Did you check the probabilities through the Twilight?”

Nadya hesitated for a second before she confessed.

“Well . . . just a bit. I got frightened halfway down and took a look. It was a good job I did, if I hadn't slowed down, I'd have fallen. Are we going in here?”

I nodded. We were standing beside the hotel entrance, with a leisurely stream of people flowing past us. Most of them were witches, most of them were old and most of them were wearing ski suits and holding skis.

“Where shall we put the skis?” Nadya asked as she took hers off.

I pointed to a rack beside the restaurant's open-air patio. During the day people left their skis there while they ate, but now, with night coming on and the air turning colder, the patio was empty except for a few people smoking by the door. The sky had turned dark very early and lights were coming on all over the valley—beside the hotels, along the road, on the ski trails.

“Let's dump them here,” I said. “It would be rather absurd to lug them in with us, wouldn't it?”

“They're good skis,” Nadya said. But she obediently put her pair beside mine. “It was so fantastic to go skiing again . . .”

“When this crisis is all over, we'll take a trip into the mountains,” I said. “I promise.”

Nadya flashed a quick glance at me and nodded. But I could see she didn't believe it. I didn't even believe it myself.

“Herr Gorodetsky? Young Fräulein Gorodetsky?” a plump, middle-aged woman in a luminous white and orange jumpsuit asked, walking up to us.

“Yes, yes, of course,” I replied.

The question was rhetorical, naturally, since we could see each other's auras. The woman was a witch. A Higher Other.

“Etta Sabina Waldvogel,” said the witch, holding out her hand. “I've heard a lot about you, Herr Gorodetsky.”

I struggled frantically to recall an old memory.

“Frau Waldvogel . . .” I said, nodding, and asked: “Would I be correct in assuming that you are the author of
Guidance on Journeying and Journeyers
?”

Etta Sabina's eyes glinted with curiosity.

“Have you read it, Herr Gorodetsky?”

“No, I was unable to obtain a copy.”

“It is rather rare,” Waldvogel said offhandedly. “And I'm not sure that I can release the
Guidance
to anyone outside our own community . . . or that such highly specialized literature would be of any help to you. But I can let you have
Frau Etta's Brief Trasology
. It's more popular and easier to follow.”

“I'd be glad to read it,” said Nadya.

“And I'd be glad to give it to you, sweetheart,” Etta cooed. “Come on, let's go somewhere a bit warmer!”

We followed Etta into the foyer of the hotel. There were no normal people there, only witches, including at the reception desk. Even the waitress carrying little jugs of mulled wine around the foyer was a rather high-ranking witch. Unlike our escort, they were all disguised as young, beautiful women.

“What a pleasure it is for me to see an Absolute One, my child!” Etta said sweetly, putting her arm round Nadya's shoulders and hugging her. After the cold, frosty air she looked exactly like a charming, ruddy-cheeked, genial middle-aged woman.

The owner of the little gingerbread house that Hansel and Gretel visited probably looked exactly the same.

Or maybe she and Etta had actually been acquainted and used to visit each other for supper?

“Thank you, Grandma,” Nadya replied, lowering her eyes modestly. “It's such a pleasure for a foolish and thoughtless girl like me to be invited by such wise women and given an opportunity to improve my mind . . .”

Waldvogel laughed.

“Oh, what a sharp little tongue!” she exclaimed, patting Nadya on the neck. “Why, you're a witch, little girl!”

“I'm not a witch,” Nadya objected. “You're mistaken, Grandma.”

“A witch, a witch!” Etta repeated cheerfully. “All genuine sorceresses are witches . . .”

Nadya jerked her shoulder out from under Etta's arm. I looked at my daughter curiously—she had tolerated the embrace for a long time, although ever since she was a child she had always hated this kind of physical contact from genial strangers who stroked her hair or patted her on the cheek. She didn't actually suspect that people's intentions were bad. She just didn't like undue familiarity.

“I'm not a witch, Etta Sabina Waldvogel,” Nadya said in a low voice that resonated strangely, filling the small foyer. The witches froze. “I'm not a witch, I'm not a werewolf, or a vampire, or a sorceress. I'm something more than that. I'm an Absolute One. Remember that, Mother of These Mountains.”

For a brief instant Waldvogel changed, as if someone had run a damp rag over her, wiping away her magical makeup. The charming woman standing beside us was replaced by a bloated, ancient crone, with beady eyes drowning in loose folds of skin covered with a cobweb of fine red veins. Her half-open mouth was absolutely toothless, and I suddenly recalled that one of the traditional sins of witches in the Middle Ages was drinking a mother's breast milk. Apart from sucking out Power—probably at least much as vampires sucked out—there could have been another reason for doing that . . .

Then “normal vision” was restored, and the cheery, red-cheeked lady was there beside us again.

“And all with just the voice,” Waldvogel said admiringly. “I haven't removed that appearance for thirty years, I'd almost forgotten how to do it. I'm impressed, little girl. Well, come along now, come along!”