“Merlin’s Rune.”
“Ah…” I said, slowly beginning to understand something. “Merlin’s Rune…isn’t that in the grave?”
It was a shot in the dark, but from Gesar’s silence I realized that I’d hit the bull’s-eye.
“Anton, how do you…” He swore briefly. “Find Foma and have a completely frank talk with him! I’ll get in touch with him too.”
“Yessir!” I rapped, and put the phone away in my pocket.
Well, how about that!
So there was a rune. A rune in a grave. The grave of Merlin.
But Merlin was a mythological character, wasn’t he? King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin…None of them had ever existed!
Aha. But the Great Gesar and Thomas the Rhymer didn’t exist either. Neither did crazed vampires and young girl werewolves, Light Healers and obstinate young magicians who had acquired the higher level of Power by some oversight…
Strangely enough, my mood was rapidly improving. Maybe because things had finally started moving? I ran down the stairs, said good morning to the previous day’s receptionist, and opened the door of the restaurant.
There wasn’t a single human being in there. Only two young vampires and a girl werewolf.
The vampires were eating carpaccio. Galya was eating an omelet. That was surprising: Usually after two consecutive transformations, werewolves eat meat by the pound.
“Good morning,” I greeted my fellow guests.
The vampires smiled crookedly and nodded. Galya began prodding at the omelet with her fork. It was obvious why: The hormonal rush had receded, and now she was feeling embarrassed. She’d managed to get some clothes from somewhere-black trousers, a white blouse, a little jacket with short sleeves. Something like the things that schoolgirls wear in Japanese cartoons.
“Hi,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Had a good rest?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not bothered by any nightmares? That’s a frightening kind of room you’ve got, I’m not surprised you didn’t want to stay in it. The designer tried a bit too hard, don’t you think?”
Galya gave me a thoughtful look. She put a piece of omelet in her mouth, chewed it, and said, “Thank you, Light One. But I don’t really fancy you, honestly. Would you like me to bring you some food? Look after you a bit?”
“Yes, do,” I agreed.
The girl went over to the buffet table-omelets and fried eggs in heated containers, bread, salami, cheese, meat, a bunch of green herbs. In the corner by the door into the kitchen there was a small refrigerator. I wondered if the vampires’ blood was kept in there. Or did the barman pour it for them in the evening? The bar counter was empty now; even the beer pumps were covered with colorful cases.
My phone rang again.
“Oh, let me get something to eat,” I groaned, taking the phone out of my pocket.
“Anton?”
“Hello, Foma.”
“Are you up already, Anton?”
“Yes, I’m just having breakfast.”
“I’ll send a car round for you. Can you be outside your hotel in about five minutes?”
“Er…,” I said, gaping at Semyon, who had just appeared in the doorway. He looked radiant and he waved to me gleefully. “All right if I bring a friend?”
“That Dark One? The girl werewolf? Better not.”
“No. A friend of mine has just arrived from Moscow. A Light Magician.”
Foma sighed.
“All right. Both of you come. The driver knows where to go.”
“There’s something I have to ask you,” I warned him.
Lermont sighed again.
“I’m afraid there’s also something…that I have to tell you,” he said. “Get a move on, I’m waiting.”
I put the phone away and smiled at Galya, who had just reached me with the plates and the coffeepot. At the same time, Semyon started moving toward me from the door.
“Oh! Galya Dobronravova!” Semyon exclaimed, breaking into a broad smile. “I remember, I do…How’s school going? How’s Marina Petrovna?”
The girl’s face came out in red blotches. She put the dishes down on the table.
“Can you imagine,” Semyon told me in a confidential voice, “Galya took a dislike to her chemistry teacher and started harassing her. She would transform and then wait for her outside the house in the evenings, snarling and showing her teeth. Can you believe it? But the husband of this modest teacher of chemistry turned out to be a not-so-modest police patrol officer. And on the third evening, the way it always happens in fairy tales, he came out, rather concerned about aggressive dogs, to meet his wife on her way home from work. He saw our little Galya snarling in the bushes, realized that she wasn’t a dog, but a wolf, grabbed his pistol, and fired at her, emptying the entire clip. Two bullets, by the way, got Galya in her little backside as she was hightailing it away from the infuriated guardian of law and order. There was a great fuss. We worked out what was going on, paid Galya a visit at home, and had a little chat… It was OK, though, we managed without the Inquisition. The whole business was played down.”
The girl turned and ran out of the dining room. The vampires watched her go with thoughtful expressions.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on her,” I said. “Yesterday she faced bullets to save my life.”
Semyon grabbed a piece of salami and chewed it. He sighed with disappointment. “Pure soya…It’s good that she faced up to the bullets. But what about persecuting her teacher?”
“That’s bad,” I said gloomily.
We piled into the taxi, taking the robot shooter with us, wrapped up in a bathrobe. The metal tripod stuck out, but that didn’t concern us too much.
The driver was a human being. It looked as if the Edinburgh Watch made much greater use of paid human staff than we did. We quickly drove out of the tourist center and set off in the general direction of the Firth of Forth.
“Thanks for calling me over,” said Semyon, gazing out the window with undisguised delight. “I’d been stuck in Moscow too long… So tell me, what’s going on?”
I started telling him. At first Semyon listened with the condescending interest of an old, experienced soldier listening to a raw recruit’s horror stories. But then he turned serious.
“Anton, are you sure? I mean, that Power flows down there?”
“Shall I ask the driver to turn back and drive past the Dungeons?”
Semyon sighed and shook his head. He said just two words. “A vault.”
“Meaning?”
“A hiding place. Where something very important is hidden.”
“Semyon, I don’t really understand-”
“Anton, imagine that you are a very, very powerful magician. And for instance, you can stroll around on the fifth level of the Twilight.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t imagine it?”
“Can’t stroll around down there. I can imagine it easily enough.”
“Then imagine it. You can go deeper than any of the Others that you know. You suddenly need to hide something that’s very valuable. A magical artifact, a powerful spell…even a sack of gold, if you like. So what do you do? Bury it in the ground? It will be found. Especially if you’re hiding a magical object; it would create a disturbance in the Power around itself, no matter how you covered it up. Then you take this thing and go down deep into the Twilight…”
“And I leave it there, say, on the fifth level,” I said and nodded. “But an object from our world would be pushed back up…”
“That’s why you need a constant stream of Power. Well…it’s like putting an object that floats on the bottom of a bathtub filled with water. Left on its own, it will surface. But if you keep it pressed down with a stream of water…”
“I understand, Semyon.”
“Do you have any ideas about who hid what down there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Only first I’ll ask Foma about it.”
The phone in my pocket rang
again. Would it never give me any peace?
“Yes?” I said, without looking at the screen.
“Anton, this is Gesar.”
The boss’s voice sounded strange somehow. As if he was bewildered.
“Hello.”
“I’ve had a word with Foma, and he’s promised to be frank with you. And with Semyon, now it’s come to that…”
“Thank you, Boris Ignatievich.”
“Anton…,” Gesar began, and paused. “There’s another thing… We’ve dug back into Victor Prokhorov’s past. And we’ve found something.”
“Well?” I asked, already sure that I shouldn’t expect anything good.
“Did his photo look familiar to you?”
“An ordinary-looking young guy. A statistically average Moscow face.” I caught myself starting to get rude, the way I always do when I get agitated. “Every second guy in every college looks like that.”
“Try to picture Victor a bit younger. As a teenager.”
I made an honest effort. And answered, “You get a statistically average Moscow schoolboy. In every school…”
“But you’ve almost certainly seen him, Anton. And not just once. He was in the same class at school as your neighbor, Kostya Saushkin. He knew him very well. You could say they were friends. He probably dropped in to see him at home quite often. I think sometimes he must have run into you, waving his backpack about and laughing for no reason at all.”
“It’s not possible,” I whispered. Gesar’s story had flabbergasted me so completely that I wasn’t even amazed by the un-typically colorful way he’d told it. Waving his backpack about and laughing? Yes, more than likely. If there are children living on your hallway in your apartment building, you’re bound to stumble over their backpacks, hear them laughing, and step in little patches of chewing gum. But who remembers the faces?
“Anton, it’s true. The only vampire Victor ever knew was Konstantin Saushkin.”
“But Gesar, Kostya was killed.”
“Yes, I know,” said Gesar. “At least, that’s what we all thought.”
“He couldn’t have survived,” I said. “There’s no way he could have. Three hundred kilometers above the Earth. There isn’t any Power there. He burned up in the atmosphere. He burned up, you understand, Gesar? Burned up!”
“Stop shouting,” Gesar told me calmly. “Yes, he burned up. We watched his space suit on radar right to the very end. But what we don’t know, Anton, is if Kostya Saushkin was still in that space suit. The height was quite different by then. We have to think. We have to calculate.”
He cut off the call. I looked at Semyon, who shook his head sadly.
“I heard, Anton.”
“Well?”
“If you haven’t seen the body, don’t be in a hurry to bury it.”
Foma Lermont lived in the Midlothian suburbs. In a quiet, wealthy district of cozy cottages and well-tended gardens. The head of the Edinburgh Night Watch met us in his own garden. He was sitting in a wooden arbor entwined with ivy, setting out a game of patience on a coffee table. In his crumpled gray trousers and polo shirt he looked like a typically placid gentleman of pre-retirement age. Surround him with a crowd of grandsons and granddaughters, and he would have been the elder statesman of a large family. When Semyon and I arrived, Lermont politely got to his feet and greeted us, then he swept the cards up into a heap, muttering, “It’s not working out…”
“Foma, I think the time has come for straight talking,” I said, and glanced at Semyon. “You don’t object if my friend is present.”
“Not at all. Gesar has vouched for him.”
“Foma, today I got a call from Zabulon, of the Moscow Day Watch.”
“I know who Zabulon is.”
“He told me…He asked me to ask you when was the last time you visited your neighbor in the grave.”
“Last night,” Lermont replied in a low voice.
“And Gesar…he asked about the Rune. Merlin’s Rune.”
“The Rune’s not in the grave,” Lermont said. He looked over at Semyon and asked, “What do you know about Merlin?”
“There was a magician of that name,” said Semyon, scratching the back of his head. “A Great Light Magician. A long time ago.”
Lermont looked at me and asked, “How about you?”
“I always thought Merlin was a mythological character,” I replied honestly.
“You’re both half right,” Lermont said, smiling. “The Great Light Magician Merlin really is a mythological character. The real Merlin was…not so nice. Yes, of course, he did help the young Arthur to draw the sword out of the stone and become king. Although Arthur had no right to the throne at all…that’s just between you and me. Merlin was not a thoroughly black-hearted villain. He simply used any means available to achieve his ends. If he needed to put a king who would listen to him on the throne, then he did. If the king had to inspire respect and love in his subjects-and of course he had to, why suffer unnecessary complications?-then he educated the king to be noble and high-minded. And the king could have his own royal toys to play with…a beautiful round table and brave knights. And did you know that Arthur’s ruin at the hands of a child born on a certain day was predicted even before Mordred was born? And do you know what the noble Arthur did?”
“I’m afraid to imagine.”
Lermont laughed. And then he recited off by heart from Morte d’Arthur, “‘Meanwhile did King Arthur order to be brought to him all the infants born to noble ladies and noble lords on the first day of May, for Merlin had revealed to King Arthur that the one who would destroy him and all his lands had been born into the world on the first day of May. And therefore did he order them all to be sent to him on pain of death, and many sons of lords and knights were sent to the king. Mordred was also sent to him by the wife of King Lot. Arthur did put them all in a ship and launch it to sea, and some were four weeks from birth, and some younger still. And by the will of fate the ship was driven ashore where a castle stood, and shattered, and they were almost all killed-but Mordred was cast up by a wave and picked up by a good man and raised until he did reach the age of fourteen years from birth, and then he brought Mordred to the court, as is told hereafter.’
“‘And many lords and barons of Arthur’s kingdom were outraged that their children had been taken away and killed, but they laid the blame for this more on Merlin than on Arthur. And either out of fear or out of love, they did keep the peace.’”
“A worthy successor to the good King Herod,” Semyon murmured.
I didn’t say anything. I was remembering an animated film that my little Nadya was very fond of. About the young King Arthur. About the funny, forgetful magician Merlin. I imagined the sequel, about how Arthur, egged on by Merlin, orders wailing, screaming infants who can’t understand what’s going on to be loaded into an old, dilapidated ship…
So this was the symbol of purity and nobility? The much-vaunted King Arthur of glorious legend?
“Not much like that fine young boy in the warmhearted Disney cartoon, is it?” Lermont asked, having apparently read my thoughts. “Or like that eccentric magician who took him under his wing? But you mustn’t blame Arthur. It was his destiny. That was the kind of teacher he had.”
“How did Mordred survive?” I asked.
Lermont’s eyes glinted ironically. “That’s hard to say. How did the boy Arthur become heir to the throne? Perhaps Mordred didn’t survive, but instead there were people who told some boy that he was Arthur’s son and his father had tried to kill him when he was a baby. What does it matter who he really was by birth? The important thing was who he thought he was.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Mordred? Of course not. He was only a human being. And so was Arthur. They departed this world a long time ago.”
“And Merlin?”
“He withdrew into the Twilight forever,” Lermont said with a nod. “But Merlin was a genuinely great magician. I think he was the greatest magician of all time. I th
ink,” he said with a sideways glance at Semyon, “that Merlin was a zero-point magician.”
I nodded. I understood that. A magical “temperature” of zero. Merlin didn’t contribute a single drop to the streams of Power that permeate the world; he had absolutely none of it. And that was precisely why he was a great magician. He absorbed the Power of others, the Power that was diffused in space, and used it to work miracles.
No other magician so powerful had been born in the world since then.
But one such enchantress had been born. My daughter, Nadya.
“Merlin didn’t leave many artifacts,” Lermont continued. “He created them playfully, as if it took him no effort at all. Excalibur, of course. Merlin’s Cloak. Merlin’s Chalice. Merlin’s Crystal. Merlin’s Staff.”
“He didn’t bother himself too much about finding names for them, then?” Semyon said with a laugh, and then suddenly fell silent.
“Merlin’s Rune?” I asked.
Lermont shook his head.
“Merlin’s Rune is only a key, kept in Merlin’s grave, twenty-two miles from…from what is believed to be the grave of Thomas the Rhymer. Naturally, Merlin himself is not in the grave, but some traces of the great magician are preserved there. You may think me sentimental, but I often visit my own grave. Although I have never liked going to Merlin’s. I simply relied on the protective spells. But that was a mistake. The grave has been robbed.”
“I thought Merlin’s grave was in Brittany,” said Semyon.
“No, it lies to the south of Edinburgh. Near the little town of Peebles, at the confluence of the Tweed and the Powsel. It’s not very far from here.”
“And what does this rune consist of?” I asked.
“A stone. Charged to the hilt with magic and scratched all over with almost illegible signs. Merlin’s Rune”-Lermont hesitated and looked all around us, but continued nonetheless-“is the key, or rather, the main part of the key that allows access to a hiding place that Merlin once set up on the bottom of a lake. The lake has vanished long ago, but the hiding place, of course, is still there.”
“A hiding place in the Twilight?” I asked.
“Yes.”
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