The Last Watch (2 page)

‘Has something happened to your friend, miss?' The boy was very young, probably the same age as Lera.

‘Yes … no … I don't know.' She looked into the attendant's eyes, but he was bewildered too. ‘Help me! We have to get him out of the boat!'

‘Maybe it's his heart?' The lad leaned down and tried to take hold of Victor's shoulders – then he jerked his hands away, as if he had taken hold of something hot. ‘What's this? What kind of stupid joke is this? Light! We need light!'

He kept shaking his hands, and there were drops of something thick and dark falling from them. But Lera was petrified, staring at Victor's pale face. The lights came on, bright and white, burning out the shadows, transforming the frightening tourist attraction into the setting for a sordid farce.

But the farce was over, vanished with the tourist ride. There were two open wounds with raised edges on Victor's neck. Blood was oozing from the wounds slowly, like the last drops of ketchup from an upturned bottle. The thin spurts of blood-drops were even more terrifying because the wounds were so deep. Right above the artery … as if they'd been made with two razors … or two sharp teeth …

And then Lera started screaming. A thin, terrible scream, with
her
eyes closed, waving her arms around in the air in front of her, like a little girl who has just seen her favourite kitten smeared across the surface of the road by a dump truck.

After all, inside every woman, no matter how grown-up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.

CHAPTER 1

‘HOW COME I
could do it?' Gesar asked. ‘And why couldn't you?'

We were standing in the middle of a boundless grey plain. My eyes could not make out any bright colours at all in the overall picture, but I only had to look closely at an individual grain of sand and it would flare up in tones of gold, purple, azure and green. The sky over our heads was a frozen swirl of white and pink, as if a river of milk had mingled with its fruit-jelly banks and then been splashed out across the heavens.

There was a wind blowing too, and it was cold. I always feel cold down on the fourth level of the Twilight, but that's an individual reaction. Gesar, on the other hand, was feeling hot: his face had turned red and there were beads of sweat trickling down his forehead.

‘I haven't got enough Power,' I said.

Gesar's face turned deep crimson.

‘Wrong answer! You are a Higher Magician. It happened by accident, but you are still a Higher One. Why are Higher Magicians also known as magicians beyond classification?'

‘Because the differences between their levels of Power are so
insignificant
that they cannot be calculated, and it is impossible to determine who is stronger and who is weaker …' I muttered. ‘Boris Ignatievich, I understand that. But I haven't got enough Power. I can't get to the fifth level.'

Gesar looked down at his feet. He hooked up some sand with the toe of his shoe and tossed it into the air. Then he took a step forward – and disappeared.

What was that, a piece of advice?

I tossed some sand up in front of myself. Took a step forward and tried in vain to raise my shadow.

There was no shadow.

Nothing changed.

I was still where I had been, on the fourth level. And it was getting even colder – the steam of my breath no longer drifted away in a little white cloud, it fell on the sand in a sprinkling of sharp frosty needles. I turned round – in psychological terms I always found it easier to look for the way out behind myself – and took a step forward, emerging onto the third level of the Twilight. A colourless maze of stone slabs corroded by time, lying beneath a low, motionless grey sky. In places the desiccated stems of plants trailed across the stone, looking like oversized bindweed killed by the frost.

Another step. The second level of the Twilight. The stony labyrinth was covered with a carpet of interwoven branches …

And another one. The first level. Not stone any longer. Walls with windows. The familiar walls of the Moscow office of the Night Watch – in its Twilight version.

With a final effort, I tumbled out of the Twilight into the real world. Straight into Gesar's office.

Naturally, the boss was already sitting in his chair. I stood there, swaying, in front of him.

How on earth had he managed to overtake me? After all, he
had
gone on to the fifth level, and then I had started making my way out of the Twilight!

‘When I saw you were getting nowhere,' Gesar said, without even looking at me, ‘I came straight out of the Twilight.'

‘From the fifth level into the real world?' I asked, unable to conceal my amazement.

‘Yes. What do you find so surprising?'

I shrugged. There was nothing really surprising about it. If Gesar wanted to present me with a surprise he always had a huge range to choose from. There's an awful lot that I don't know. And this …

‘It's annoying,' said Gesar. ‘Sit down, Gorodetsky.'

I sat down facing Gesar, folded my hands on my knees and even lowered my head, as if I felt guilty about something.

‘Anton, a good magician always finds his powers when he needs them,' said the boss. ‘Until you become wiser, you won't become more powerful. Until you become more powerful, you won't master higher magic. Until you master higher magic, you won't go into places that are dangerous. Your situation is unique. You were affected by' – he frowned – ‘the spell of the
Fuaran
. You became a Higher Magician when you weren't ready for it. Yes, you do have the Power. Yes, you do know how to control it … and what you used to find hard to do is no problem at all to you now. How long were you down on the fourth level of the Twilight? And now you're sitting there as if it was nothing special. But the things that you couldn't do before …'

Gesar stopped.

‘I'll learn, Boris Ignatievich,' I said. ‘After all, everyone says I'm making good progress. Olga, Svetlana …'

‘You are,' Gesar admitted willingly. ‘You're not a total idiot, you're bound to develop. But right now you remind me of an inexperienced driver, someone who has driven a Lada around for six months and then suddenly finds himself at the wheel of a
Ferrari
racing car! No, worse than that, a dump truck in a quarry. A huge BELAZ truck weighing two hundred tonnes, creeping up round a spiral road on its way out of the quarry … with a hundred-metre drop at one side! And there are other dump trucks driving down below it. If you make one false move, turn the wheel too sharply, or let your foot slip on the pedal – then everyone's in trouble.'

‘I understand,' I said, with a nod. ‘But I never asked to be a Higher Magician, Boris Ignatievich. It was you who sent me after Kostya …'

‘I have nothing to reproach you with and there are a lot of things I'm trying to teach you,' said Gesar. And then he added, rather off the point: ‘Although you did once reject me as your teacher!'

I said nothing.

‘I don't even know what to do …' Gesar drummed his fingers on the file lying in front of him. ‘Send you out on routine assignments? “A schoolgirl has seen a hobo werewolf,” “A vampire has shown up in Butovo,” “A witch is casting real spells,” “There's a mysterious tapping sound in my basement”? Pointless. With your Power, nonsense like that is no problem for you. You'll never have to learn anything new. Leave you to rot behind a desk? That's not what you want, anyway. Or what then?'

‘You know what to do, Boris Ignatievich,' I answered. ‘Give me a genuine assignment. Something that will force me to develop and mature.'

Gesar's eyes glittered ironically.

‘Sure, coming right up. I'll organise a raid on the special vault of the Inquisition. Or I'll send you to storm the Day Watch office …'

He pushed the file across the desk:

‘Read that.'

Gesar himself opened an identical file and immersed himself in the study of several pages from a school exercise book, covered in writing.

Why did we have these old cardboard files with tatty lace bindings in our office anyway? Did we buy several tonnes of them last century, or had we picked them up a little while ago from some charitable organisation providing work to housebound invalids? Or were they produced in some ancient factory that belonged to the Night Watch in the provincial city of Flyshit?

But anyway, it was a fact that in the age of computers, photocopiers, transparent plastic folders and elegant, robust files with convenient clips and pins, our Watch still used flaky cardboard and string … What a disgrace – we should be ashamed to look our foreign colleagues in the eye!

‘It's easier to apply protective spells that prevent long-distance sensing to files made of organic materials,' Gesar said. ‘It's the same reason why we only use books for studying magic. When a text is typed into a computer, it doesn't retain any of the magic.'

I looked into Gesar's eyes.

‘I never even thought about reading your mind,' the boss said. ‘Until you learn to control your face, I don't have to.'

Now I could feel the magic that permeated the file. A light defensive spell that caused no problems for Light Ones. Dark Ones could have removed it with no difficulty too, but it would have created a real din while they were at it.

When I opened the file – the Great Gesar had tied the laces in a neat bow – I discovered four fresh newspaper clippings that still smelled of printer's ink, a fax and three photographs. The three clippings were in English, and to start with I focused on them.

The first clipping was a brief article about an incident in a tourist attraction that was called the Dungeons of Scotland. This establishment seemed to be a fairly banal version of the standard
‘room of horror'. But a Russian tourist had been killed there, ‘as a result of technical faults'. The dungeons had been closed and the police were investigating to establish whether the personnel were responsible for the tragedy.

The second article was much more detailed. It didn't mention any ‘technical faults' at all. The text was rather dry, even pedantic. I grew more and more excited as I read that the man who had died, twenty-year-old Victor Prokhorov, had been studying at Edinburgh University and was the son of ‘a Russian politician'. He had gone to the ‘dungeons' with his girlfriend, Valeria Khomko, who had flown from Russia to see him, and he had died in her arms from loss of blood. In the darkness of the tourist attraction someone had cut his throat. Or some
thing
had cut it. The poor guy and his girlfriend had been sitting in a boat that was sailing slowly across the River of Blood, a shallow ditch around the Castle of the Vampires. Perhaps some sharp piece of metal protruding from the wall had caught Victor across the throat?

When I got to this point, I sighed and looked at Gesar.

‘You've always been good with … er … vampires,' the boss said, looking up from his papers for a second.

The third article was from the yellow press, one of Scotland's cheap tabloids. And of course, in this case the reporter told a terrible story of modern-day vampires who suck the blood of their victims in the dismal darkness of tourist attractions. The only original detail was the journalist's claim that vampires did not usually suck their victims dry and kill them. But, like a true Russian, the student had been so drunk that the poor Scottish vampire had got tipsy too and then got carried away.

Even though the story was so tragic, I laughed.

‘The yellow press is the same everywhere the whole world over,' Gesar said without looking up.

‘The worst thing is that that's exactly the way it was,' I said. ‘Apart from him being drunk, of course.'

‘A pint of beer with lunch,' Gesar agreed.

The fourth clipping was from one of our Russian newspapers. An obituary. Condolences to Leonid Prokhorov, Deputy of the State Duma, whose son has been killed tragically …

I picked up the fax.

As I expected, it was a report from the Night Watch of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, Great Britain.

The only slightly unusual thing about it was that it was addressed to Gesar in person, and not to the duty operations officer or head of the international department. And the tone of the letter was just a little more personal than was normal for official documents.

The contents were no surprise to me, though.

‘We regret to inform you … the results of a thorough investigation … total loss of blood … no signs of initiation were found … searches have discovered nothing … our best men have been put on the case … if the Moscow department considers it necessary to send … give my best wishes to Olga, I'm very pleased for you, you old co—'

The second page of the fax was missing. Obviously the text on it was personal. And so I didn't see the signature.

‘Foma Lermont,' said Gesar. ‘Head of the Scottish Watch. An old friend.'

‘Aha …' I drawled thoughtfully. ‘And so …'

Our glances met again.

‘Oh no, you can ask for yourself if he's related to the Russian poet Lermontov,' said Gesar.

‘I was thinking of something else. “Co” – is that commander?'

‘“Co” is …' Gesar hesitated and glanced at the page with obvious annoyance. ‘“Co” is just “co”. That's none of your business.'

I looked at the photographs. A young man, that was the unfortunate victim Victor. A girl, very young. His girlfriend, no need to guess there. And an older man. Victor's father?

‘The circumstantial evidence suggests a vampire attack. But why does the situation require intervention by us?' I asked. ‘Russians are often killed abroad. Sometimes by vampires. Don't you trust Foma and his men?'

‘I trust them. But they don't have much experience. Scotland is a peaceful, calm, cosy country. They might not be up to the job. And you've had a lot of dealings with vampires.'