Last Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  “Hello, how can I help you?” someone answered politely after the phone had rung a couple of times. The interesting thing was that he answered in Russian.

  “Good afternoon, Thomas,” I said, deciding not to use the Russian name Foma after all. “My name is Anton Gorodetsky, I’m a colleague of yours from Moscow. Gesar asked me to give you his warmest greetings.”

  It all sounded very much like a bad spy story. I pulled a wry face at the thought.

  “Hello, Anton, I’ve been waiting for your call. How was your flight?”

  “Great. I’m staying in a very nice little hotel. It’s a bit dark, but it is right in the center. I’ve had a stroll around the Old Town and some of the surroundings.” I was getting carried away; it seemed highly amusing to speak in Aesopian language. “Could we get together?”

  “Of course, Anton, I’ll just come over. Or perhaps you might join me? I have a nice cozy spot here.”

  I raised my eyes and looked at the elderly gentleman sitting by the window. A high forehead, pointed chin, intelligent and ironic eyes. The gentleman put a mobile phone away in his pocket and gestured toward his table.

  Yes, he and Gesar had a lot in common, all right. Not in the way they looked, but in the way they behaved. Thomas Lermont was probably just as good as Gesar at putting his subordinates in their place.

  I picked up my glass and joined the head of Edinburgh’s Night Watch at his table.

  “Call me Foma,” he said. “I’ll enjoy remembering Gesar.”

  “Have you known him for long?”

  “Yes. Gesar has older friends, but I don’t... I’ve heard a lot about you, Anton.”

  I let that pass. There was nothing I could say. I hadn’t heard of the head of the Edinburgh Night Watch before yesterday.

  “You’ve been talking to Bruce. What do you make of our vampire Master?”

  I paused to formulate my impression precisely. “Spiteful, unhappy, ironic. But they’re all spiteful, unhappy, and ironic. Of course, he didn’t kill Victor.”

  “You put pressure on him,” he said, not asking, but stating.

  “Yes, that was just the way it worked out. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “No need to make excuses,” said Lermont, taking a sip of his beer. “It worked out just fine. His own vanity will make sure that he keeps quiet, and we have the information... All right, what did you see in the Dungeons of Scotland?”

  “Scary stories for children. The show’s closed, but I managed to speak to one of the actors. And take a look at the crime scene.”

  “Well?” Lermont asked keenly. “So what did you find out, Anton?”

  I’d learned a lot from all those years dealing with Gesar. Nowadays I could tell when the boss’s hand was poised to swat down a young magician who had overreached himself.

  “The River of Blood where Victor’s throat was cut”—I glanced at the impassive Lermont and corrected myself—“where Victor was killed... There’s blood in the water. A lot of human blood. It doesn’t look as if it was a vampire who sucked the boy’s blood out. Someone opened his artery and held him while his blood spilled out into the trench. But we need an analysis of the water. We could bring in the police, they could do a DNA analysis... .”

  “Oh, what great faith you have in technology,” Foma said with a frown. “It’s Victor’s blood in the trench. We checked the very first day. Simple similitude magic, no more than fifth-level Power required.”

  But I wasn’t about to give in. Dealing with Gesar had also taught me the art of wriggling out of things.

  “It’s no help to us, but the police ought to be given the idea too. Let them know that the blood was drained into the trench, and that will put an end to any rumors about vampires.”

  “The police here are good,” Foma said calmly. “They checked everything too, and they’re conducting an investigation. But putting an end to stupid rumors is none of their business. Who takes any notice of the yellow press?”

  I felt encouraged. I had gone straight to the right conclusions after all.

  “I don’t think any more intervention will be required from us,” I said. “Murder is evil, but let people fight their own evil themselves. It’s a pity about the boy, of course, but...”

  Foma nodded once or twice and took another sip of beer. Then he said, “Yes, a pity about the boy... But Anton, what are we going to do about the bite?”

  “What bite?”

  Foma leaned forward across the table and whispered, “It wasn’t a knife wound on Victor’s neck, Anton. There’s absolutely no doubt that the marks were left by a vampire’s fangs. Now, that’s an unfortunate problem, isn’t it?”

  I felt my ears burning.

  “Is that definite?”

  “Ab-so-lute-ly. Just how would a hit man know so much about the way a vampire’s fang is structured and how it works? The lateral grooves, the tapping point, Dracula’s Fissure, the corkscrew twist on entry...”

  By this time my entire face was blazing red. I could see the classroom where I had once been taught, and my teacher Polina Vasilievna with her pointer, and the huge rubber model on the desk: a pointed, twisted object like a corkscrew and a white fiberglass board with black letters: VAMPIRE’S RIGHT CANINE (OPERATIONAL) TOOTH. MODEL, SCALE 25:1. It had been a working model at one stage; when a button was pressed, it elongated and began to rotate. But the electric motor had burned out long ago, and nobody had taken the trouble to repair it, so the fang was permanently frozen in a position between concealed and operational.

  “I was too hasty with my conclusions,” I admitted. “It’s my fault, Mr. Lermont.”

  “It’s nobody’s fault, you simply didn’t want any Others to be involved,” Foma said generously. “If you’d familiarized yourself with the results of the autopsy, you’d have realized your version was wrong. So now what do you say?”

  “If the vampire was very hungry and he sucked the man dry”—I frowned—“he could have puked it up afterward. But not all the blood. Were there any traces of anesthetic serum in the water?”

  “No, there weren’t,” Foma said with a nod of approval. “But then, that doesn’t mean anything. The vampire could have been in such a hurry that he didn’t bother with the anesthetic.”

  “He could have been,” I agreed. “So, either he puked, or he bit and then held the victim until he bled out. But what for?”

  “To confuse us all and mislead the investigation.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head. “Why confuse things? Why leave the marks of a vampire’s bite and drain away the blood? They’re very careful with it; they wouldn’t just pour it away. Our vampires even have a saying for novices: ‘Blood spilled on the ground is mother’s milk wasted.’”

  “You can always find a way to make sense of anything,” Foma declared didactically. “For example—the killer vampire needed to make us suspect a young, hungry vampire. So he bit the boy but he didn’t drink, just poured the blood away, hoping that it wouldn’t be found. Or the vampire was hungry, but as soon as he bit, he realized what he’d done and decided to pour the blood away, to create the impression of falsified evidence... .”

  Completely carried away now, I fluttered my hands in the air, as if I was talking to Gesar. “Oh, come on, Bo—Foma! You can come up with lots of theories, but I’ve never met a hungry vampire who would leave the blood once he had his fangs in. This argument isn’t getting us anywhere. What’s far more important is why the boy was killed. Was he a random victim? Then we really do have to look for a tourist or a novice. Or did someone have a special reason for killing Victor?”

  “A vampire can kill a man with a single blow,” said Foma. “And without even touching him. Why would he leave any clues behind? Victor could have died from a heart attack, and no one would have suspected a thing.”

&
nbsp; “Agreed,” I said with a nod. “Then... then your Master is right. It’s some vampire from out of town, and the boy just happened to be in the wrong place. He bit him, then got frightened and puked up the blood... .”

  “It looks that way,” Foma agreed. “But there’s still something bothering me, Anton.”

  We finished our beer without another word.

  “Have you tried testing traces from the body?” I asked.

  I didn’t have to say that I meant traces left by an aura.

  “A dead aura from a dead body?” Foma said with a skeptical shake of his head. “That’s never been much help. But we did try. No traces were found... Tell me, watchman, what else did you see that was unusual in the Dungeons?”

  “There are Others working there,” I said. “There’s no blue moss, although the place is overflowing with emotions. Someone cleans it out regularly.”

  “There are no Others working there,” Foma snapped. “The blue moss just doesn’t grow there.”

  I looked at him uncertainly.

  “Out of interest, we tried bringing it in from outside. It withers and falls off in an hour. A sort of natural anomaly.”

  “Well... it happens, I suppose,” I said, making a mental note to check in the archives.

  “It does,” Foma agreed. “Anton, I’d like to ask you not to leave the investigation just yet. There’s something here that really bothers me. Try having a word with Victor’s girlfriend.”

  “Is the girl still here?”

  “Of course. The police asked her not to leave town. The Alex City Hotel, not far from here. I think it will be easier for you to make contact with her.”

  “Do you suspect her of something?”

  Foma shook his head. “She’s just an ordinary person... It’s something else. She’s taking her lover’s death very hard, but cooperating willingly with the police. Still, maybe a fellow Russian will find it easier to get through to her. A gesture, a glance, a word—any little thing. I really don’t want to close this case and leave everything to the police, Anton.”

  “And it would be a good thing to meet the owner of the Dungeons of Scotland, too,” I said.

  “That won’t get you anywhere,” Foma said dismissively.

  “Why not?”

  “Because those stupid Dungeons belong to me!” Foma said with loathing.

  “But—” I broke off. “Well... but then...”

  “What then? I have a small holding company, Scottish Colours, that works in the tourist business. Our Night Watch is a shareholder in the company, and the profits go to finance its activities. We organize musical events and circus performances, we have shares in a few hotels, four pubs, the Dungeons of Scotland, three tour buses, and an agency that takes tourists to the Scottish lochs. How else would you like us to earn our money?” He laughed. “The whole of Edinburgh lives off the tourists. If you go to Glasgow and you find yourself in the suburbs, you’ll see a frightening sight—buildings on the point of collapse, hotels boarded up, factories closed down. Industry is dying. It’s not profitable to produce goods in Europe any longer, but it is profitable to produce services. What else should an old bard do but run concerts and tourist attractions?”

  “I understand, it was just unexpected... .”

  “There aren’t any Others working there,” Foma repeated. “It’s a strange place... the blue moss doesn’t grow there... That was why I bought the land in the first place. But I didn’t find anything unusual.”

  “Then could the murder have been intended as a blow against you?” I asked. “Against you personally and the Night Watch of Edinburgh? Does someone want to compromise Light Ones?”

  Foma smiled and stood up.

  “That’s what I need you for, Anton. To have a powerful magician from the outside involved in the investigation. Have a word with Valeria, all right? And don’t put it off.”

  But I ended up having to put off the meeting with Valeria for a little while after all.

  When I was already almost at the hotel, I saw yet another crowd of tourists gathered in a circle around a performing street artist. There was a whole rainbow of tiny little colored balls flying up in the air above the people’s heads, and somehow I knew who I was going to see, even though Egor had called himself a conjurer and not a juggler.

  In actual fact, there were five performers there. Three young guys in bright circus clothes were taking a break. A young girl in a flowing, semitransparent dress was going around to the spectators with a tray, and they were gladly putting in coins and notes.

  At the moment, only Egor was performing. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt, with a bow tie—looking very well-groomed and quite different from the crowd in their summery clothes.

  Egor was juggling with the colored balls. But not simply juggling... His right hand was shooting red, blue, and green balls no bigger than a cherry high up into the air. The open palm swiveled with emphatic slowness, demonstrating that there was nothing in it. Then the fingers folded together and the whole hand swung rapidly—and another ball went soaring upward. His left hand caught the falling balls and crumpled them into his fist, breaking off the rainbow, then immediately opened again—empty.

  The little balls came from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere. There were more and more of them all the time, as if Egor didn’t have enough time to take back out of the air everything that he had thrown up into it. The colored parabola kept growing brighter and brighter, denser and denser, turning into a gleaming, glittering rope of color. It was dazzling. The movements of his fingers became so fast that they exceeded the ability of any prestidigitator. The spectators held their breath. The sounds of the street rolled up to that motionless circle of people and died, like the murmuring waves of a distant sea. The colored cord fluttered through Egor’s hands.

  The tension grew and grew. The girl stopped collecting money—nobody was looking at her now in any case. She turned toward Egor and looked at him with eyes filled with love and delight.

  Egor suddenly jerked both his hands—and he was left holding a fluttering, brightly colored ribbon.

  The spectators applauded as if they just woke up.

  I recalled the hoary old joke about the conjurer who came to a circus looking for a job. “I go out onstage and juggle with different-colored fish, get it? And then they fly up into the big top and disappear. The only thing is, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet... .”

  Poor stupid conjurer. To do that, you have to be an Other. Even an uninitiated one.

  In actual fact, even without being initiated, or having made that first entry into the Twilight, an Other is capable of far more than an ordinary human being. And in Egor’s case everything was far more complicated. He had entered the Twilight when he was a child. He had even broken through into the second level—although he was fed Power by someone else, since his own abilities were minimal.

  But he had avoided going through with initiation, and remained what he was—an indeterminate Other who did not know how to control his abilities and had not turned either to the Light or the Dark. His Book of Fate had been rewritten, returning him to his initial condition and giving him the chance to choose again. But he had refused to make a choice.

  And he had decided that he was an ordinary human being.

  Egor himself did not understand how he performed his act. He was certain that he was controlling the little balls very deftly, skillfully transferring them from one hand to the other before launching them into the air again, then adroitly replacing them with a special kind of ribbon that was evidently weighted at several points to make it all easier.

  In actual fact a trick like that is impossible.

  But Egor was quite certain that he performed his act without any magic. Like a very dexterous ordinary human being.

  The spectators applauded with expressi
ons of lively, genuine delight on their faces, the kind of delight you only see in the faces of children at the circus. For a moment the world had become magical and wonderful for them.

  They didn’t know that that’s the way the world really is—our world...

  Egor bowed and walked around the circle quickly—not collecting money, although they were holding out notes to him, but simply looking into the eyes of the spectators.

  He was drawing Power from them, feeding! Without even realizing it, he was feeding on the emotions of his audience!

  I started hastily making my way out of the crowd, but the spectators behind me were pushing forward, there were children jumping about at my feet, and a seminaked girl with studs in her pierced lips was breathing hotly in my ear. I was too slow—Egor had spotted me. And he stopped.

  There was nothing left to do but open my arms wide.

  Egor hesitated for a second, then whispered something to the girl with the tray, who was following him. He squirmed his way into the crowd. People made way for him, but they also slapped him enthusiastically on the back and made delighted comments in various languages.

  “I’m sorry, I just happened to be passing,” I said guiltily. “I wasn’t expecting to see you at all.”

  He looked at me for a second, then nodded. “I believe you.”

  Ah yes, he was at the peak of his Power right then. He could sense a lie intuitively.

  “I’ll be going,” I said. “That was a great performance, I was fascinated.”

  “Wait, I need to wet my throat,” said Egor, setting off beside me. “I’ve been streaming with sweat...”

  Some curious little boy grabbed hold of his sleeve. Egor politely stopped and unbuttoned his shirt to show that there was nothing in it. Then he took a light, silvery little ball out of the air and handed it to his suspicious spectator. The kid squealed in delight and dashed across to his parents, who were standing nearby.

  “Really great,” I said appreciatively. “Do you perform in Moscow? I could take my daughter to the circus.”