Sixth Watch (9 page)

“You weren't listening properly,” Gesar said abruptly. “And I've told you more than once before—forget about that human geography.”

“All of them, Anton,” said Zabulon. “All the Other Prophets and all the Higher Other Seers. Every single one in the world. It's a good thing there aren't many of them.”

I licked my dry lips. All of us have some prophetic ability. In the crudest form, it's “calculating a probability,” when even a weak Other (sometimes uninitiated) knows where there's going to be a traffic jam on the road, or which plane he shouldn't get on.

For Higher Others—including even me—it becomes possible to foresee the probability of a certain event. The important thing here is to understand in advance what events have any probability of occurring at all . . .

Seers see the future constantly. Even when they're not consciously aware of it. Their world is a shimmering mishmash of the probabilities of human history. In this mishmash Ukraine fights Russia for the Crimea, President Obama converts to Islam, the pope comes out
of the closet, and the Netherlands legalizes cannibalism for medical purposes.

And even far less likely events are also real for Seers.

The only thing the Seers can't perceive is the fate of Others. All of us who walk in the Twilight are hidden from them. Our lives and our actions are not so easy to read.

It's the Prophets who see us.

They see absolutely everything. Fortunately not all the time and usually not deliberately. You can't ask a Prophet to see something specific—the Prophet himself decides (or maybe the Twilight decides for him) what he will see and how he will inform the world.

“What is foretold?” I asked, not even surprised by the old-fashioned phrase that had flown off my tongue. At that moment it was appropriate.

“It was not spilled in vain, nor burned to no purpose. The first time has come. The Two shall arise in the flesh and open the doors—” Zabulon suddenly broke off. He looked at me, and in his glance, the glance of an old, pitiless, relentless enemy, I read . . . well, all right, not pity. Commiseration. But a weary kind of commiseration, and for himself too. It was the way the first violin might have looked at the second trombone, standing on the deck of the
Titanic
as it went down.

“Three victims, the fourth time . . .” Gesar said dryly, looking at us.

“Five days are left to the Others,” said Zabulon.

I sensed Svetlana put her arms around our daughter and hug her close. I didn't stir a muscle. Somehow I'd lost my fondness for beautiful gestures in recent years. And beautiful words too. And prophecies are always inordinately beautiful.

“Six days are left to people,” said Gesar.

“To those who stand in the way, nothing will be left,” Zabulon added.

And suddenly he smiled his blinding-white smile.

“The Sixth Watch is dead,” Gesar continued. “The Fifth Power has disappeared. The Fourth has not come in time.”

“The Third Power does not believe, the Second Power is afraid, the First Power is exhausted,” Zabulon concluded.

There was silence for several seconds.

And then Nadya asked: “Did you rehearse that?”

“What?” Gesar asked, as if he hadn't heard.

“You did it so smoothly. One finished and the other started.”

“It's a Prophecy, little girl,” said Gesar. “A Prophecy that has just been proclaimed by all the Prophets on earth. I believe your lives are in danger. Yours, your father's, and your mother's. You are the three for whom the two have come.”

“I understood that,” said Nadya. “It's almost open text . . . for a Prophecy. They're coming to kill our family. In five days the Others will die. And a day after that—all people will die. Are the days counted from the Prophecy or from when we die?”

“We haven't managed to work that out yet,” Zabulon said in an apologetic tone. “Perhaps the countdown has already started, perhaps it was broken off when you survived. All Prophecies are deliberately vague . . .”

“And that's why, the moment we started shouting for help, you showed up to observe—but not to help,” Svetlana said in an icy voice. “Wonderful. Gesar, at least
you
know what I think of you, don't you?”

Gesar squirmed on his wide, comfortable chair, looking as if he wanted to start apologizing and roar out some harsh response at the same time.

“Sveta, stop it,” I told her. “All right. Gesar, Zabulon, we've heard you. I accept that there were good reasons for your caution. We're all going to die, I understand that. Now I'd like to know what you gleaned from observing what was happening, what help you're prepared to give us, and if there are any materials at all on this subject in the archives of the Watches and the Inquisition.”

Gesar looked at Zabulon. Zabulon looked at Gesar.

“Damn and blast . . .” Zabulon suddenly swore, which was completely out of character for him. “Why, you coached him, I'm sure you did . . .”

“Don't try to wriggle out of it,” said Gesar.

Zabulon lowered his hand under the tabletop and brought it back out holding something. His palm was clasped around an old, smoke-blackened pipe, carved of stone or perhaps wood that had long ago turned as hard as stone.

“Let's have it, Dark One,” said Gesar.

Zabulon handed him the pipe without saying a word.

“So you still say Merlin himself smoked it?” asked Gesar, clearly savoring his moment of triumph. “There wasn't any tobacco in Europe back then.”

“You'd be too squeamish to hold it in your hands if I told you what he did smoke,” Zabulon muttered.

Gesar chuckled and put the pipe into his jacket pocket.

“So this whole business was just a charade?” Svetlana asked in a tense voice.

“No,” Gesar answered. “It's the honest truth. But I still took the risk of placing a bet that neither Anton nor you nor Nadya would panic. Merlin's own pipe is just too desirable a prize. Even if there are only five days left to own it.”

THE WORST THING OF ALL WAS THAT NEITHER GESAR NOR
Zabulon had noticed anything special about the Other traitors.

It was definitely them—the Light Magician Denis and the Dark Magician Alexei. At least, their auras had remained the same. And even the level of their Power hadn't changed—to a casual outside observer. Third Level for Denis and Fourth Level for Alexei.

But nonetheless the energy they wielded was so immense that the Great Ones had preferred to avoid giving battle.

“I would class them as Higher Others,” said Gesar. “Not from their auras, but from the power of their spells.”

“And the spells themselves are most unusual,” Zabulon added. “I've never come across anything like them before.”

“Maybe they camouflaged themselves?” Svetlana suggested.

Gesar gave her a heavy, querulous look.

“Perhaps. Only you see, Sveta . . . You couldn't camouflage yourself from me. Just as I couldn't camouflage myself from you. Nadenka, now—she could. Camouflage can only work for a more powerful Other.”

“So are they ‘Zero' Others then?” Nadya asked. “Like me?”

“Well, what did you feel?” Gesar asked her.

“I couldn't make out who they were at all,” Nadya confessed. “Just power coming closer. And a sense of danger. Like a tsunami.”

“Like the Tiger?” Zabulon suddenly asked.

Nadya shook her head vigorously.

“No, I could hardly even see the Tiger. Only . . . a kind of rippling . . .” She wiggled her fingers in the air. “If I looked really hard.”

(That's the trouble with these descriptions of the indescribable. Nadya was only three years old when she baffled me by saying: “The second layer of the Twilight is salty!”)

“Then it's not the Twilight,” said Zabulon. “Well, most likely not.”

“Someone unknown to us wants to kill us for reasons also unknown to us,” I said. “Wonderful. And the greatest magicians in Russia can't understand a thing. And what about the vampire?”

“Vampiress,” Gesar corrected me. “Unfortunately, Anton, it was a Higher Vampiress in attack mode. Trying to get a good look at her is like trying to count the beats of a hummingbird's wings as it hovers over a flower bud.”

Zabulon turned toward Gesar in surprise. He took a cigar (already lit) out of his jacket pocket, took a draw on it, and then said, “My dear enemy. Today is an amazing day. Tell me, have you never thought of writing poetry?”

“What are you talking about?” Gesar asked in astonishment. “Small hummingbirds flap their wings up to a hundred times a second, which exceeds the physiological capacity of human vision to follow. A vampire in attack mode reaches a speed of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty miles an hour, which over short distances makes him impossible to see clearly. I think I defined the situation very precisely and appropriately.”

“Ah,” said Zabulon. “I see. Let it go, I was imagining things . . . Yes, Anton, your boss is right. It was a Higher Vampiress. It wasn't feasible to get a good look at her.”

“There's no proof of it, but applying Occam's Razor, it's obviously the same one,” Gesar added.

“What do you mean the ‘same one'?” Zabulon said.

“It's not that important,” Gesar said dismissively. “A few days ago we had a series of . . . incidents. Anton was handling it.”

“A series of incidents with a vampire?” said Zabulon, raising an eyebrow. “And you didn't register a protest? Curious.”

“It's not important, not important,” Gesar repeated in a voice so false that a child wouldn't have believed him. “Apparently the vampiress has decided to defend Anton, hoping for leniency . . . I'll make sure to keep you informed.”

Zabulon chuckled. I had no doubt that now the entire Day Watch would go dashing out to search for the vampiress. And it looked as if that was exactly what Gesar had been trying to achieve.

“So, all the Prophets in the world have conspired and they're foretelling the end of the world,” I said. “My family has been attacked by a deranged Dark One and a deranged Light One, and what's more, they command powers so great that the two Highest Magicians in Russia chose to observe, but not interfere in what was happening. And these deranged traitors were driven off by the Higher Vampiress whose incidents I was investigating. Simply magnificent. What do you advise, Great Ones?”

“Anton, I have no fondness for you at all,” Zabulon said quite sincerely. “But your daughter is very important. It's vexing that she's a Light One, but that's the way it turned out—so let her be a Light One. Therefore I am inclined to protect you and your family. And again, I am certain that your lives are in some way connected with the lives of all Others . . . and of all people too, come to that. And so . . . I offer you asylum and protection within the walls of the Day Watch.”

I chortled.

“Zabulon, dear fellow, believe me, I am quite capable of ensuring the safety of my own colleagues,” said Gesar. “Although, of course, I should be glad to see your vampires . . . in the outer circle of the defenses. It seems as if our deranged colleagues are helpless against vampires. A very strange, but interesting situation. Let's work together!”

I looked at Svetlana. She gave a faint nod. I took hold of Nadya's hand and pressed hard twice on her little finger.

“All right, Dad,” my daughter said.

Blue panels of crackling light started fluttering around us. The table came apart where the panels pierced through the wood. The patterned parquet flooring of Karelian birch started smoking under our feet. Cracks ran across the ceiling.

“Stop that!” Zabulon barked, jumping up off his seat.

“The sand and the pendulum, Dad,” Nadya suddenly said.

I looked at her for a moment, then I thought I understood. And I replied.

“In the morning the blue moon rises.”

Gesar frowned. He continued sitting there quietly, looking at us, but he clearly didn't understand these last two phrases, and that infuriated him.

The dark, empty gap of a portal opened up in front of us. We stood up, I kicked my chair away, and it flew into a wall of blue light and shattered into splinters.

“I'm sorry, Great Ones,” I said. “But in view of the circumstances, I am obliged to take the safety of my family into my own hands.”

Svetlana stepped into the portal first, keeping hold of our daughter's hand. Nadya followed her and I went after Nadya, still clutching her hand. If I had let go of her for even a split second, the portal would have ground me into mincemeat.

“I told you, Dark One,” I heard my boss's voice say. “Merlin's tobacco pouch, if you please!”

Unfortunately, I then passed through the portal, which closed behind me, and I didn't hear Zabulon's reply to Gesar.

It was dark all around us. I raised my free hand and waved it through the air. No effect. Then I ignited the Firefly spell on the tips of my fingers—probably the very simplest spell of all.

The large room was filled with an even, white light.

Apparently the motion sensor on the wall had broken down. After all, I hadn't been here for two years. I walked over to the wall and clicked the switch. There was power—the chandelier on the high ceiling lit up. An old, ugly chandelier made of bent brass tubes and
matte-white glass horns. No doubt made some time in the middle of the twentieth century.

“What was the blue moon about, Dad?” Nadya asked.

“What were the sand and the pendulum about?”

“Well . . . I thought that if I blurted out some kind of nonsense,” said Nadya, “then the Great Ones would try to find the hidden meaning in it. And they'd be less likely to trace the portal.”

“I got that. And I decided to back you up.”

Meanwhile Svetlana walked around the room. There was nothing interesting in it. Old furniture—a Yugoslavian suite from the times when Yugoslavia was still a big country and not a bundle of territories all at each others' throats. Two sofa beds. A window covered by heavy, dusty curtains. Svetlana pulled one curtain back—there was a brick wall behind it. The only relatively modern thing was a flat-screen television set, but a cheap and plain one.

“What town is this?” Svetlana asked.

“I told you. St. Petersburg.”

“That's right,” she said with nod. “I can't get any sense of the surrounding aura at all.”

“We tried really hard,” Nadya announced delightedly.

I'd bought this apartment in the center of St. Petersburg three years earlier and then spent a long time camouflaging it in secret. I was attracted to it because it was located in an old nineteenth-century building that had been remodeled and restructured numerous times, and the spacious old “aristocratic” apartments had been broken up into communal apartments and separate rooms. Some time in the fifties this strange apartment had appeared, with its window bricked in (the window used to look out into a narrow enclosed yard before then in any case) and its tiny bathroom (a cast-iron, sit-in bath with a toilet standing flush up against it). There was no kitchen as such, only a wide, deep closet space that accommodated an electric stove and a tiny table.

An ancient granny who came from a rich merchant family used
to live here. I think the previous generation had owned the entire building, or at least a couple floors of it. The old lady had survived the revolution, the civil war, and the blockade of Leningrad. She taught French and translated some books and spent her life entirely alone, all the while generously showering her neighbors' children with sweets and toys. Living in one room with no window and no kitchen didn't bother her in the least.

And later on, in the sixties, she had somehow managed to get permission to leave and move to Paris, where she lived for another quarter of a century, even marrying two Frenchmen and then getting divorced from them with a scandalous brouhaha. Before she left she had registered some distant relative as resident in her apartment. An interesting life altogether, no denying that.

The relative tried to live in the apartment. He furnished it in a more contemporary style and took out the bricks, opening up the window into the yard. Six months later he couldn't stand it anymore and filled the window back in. Six months after that he took to drink. Then he swapped the apartment, where it seems that only the old woman ever felt at ease, for an apartment in the suburbs.

The new owner wisely didn't attempt to live in the room. Instead, now that he had a foothold in this expensive and beautiful building, he tried to buy up the rooms next to it and combine them into a single apartment. But nothing came of his efforts. The apartment had served as a rendezvous for dates, as security for loans, a present for newlyweds, and a storeroom for all sorts of junk.

And maybe for shadier business too—I didn't check.

And then I bought it—through a front man. And in one month I had erased all traces of the apartment's existence from the surrounding world. That is, it was still listed in the municipal records, I paid for the power and water (or rather, the money disappeared of its own accord from an anonymous digital currency account that was set up), and one of the doors on the stairway landing was still the old wooden door leading into this unusual apartment.

Only now multilayered drapes of protective and camouflaging spells concealed the apartment from everyone—Others and ordinary people alike.

Svetlana had never even shown her face here. Yes, on the whole she approved of my idea—a totally secure place that not even Gesar knew about. Ever since people used to live in caves, every woman has felt the need to have a safe burrow of her own. But Svetlana left the arrangement and furnishing of the refuge entirely up to me, as the organizer, and to Nadya, as an infinite source of Power.

“The telephone works,” I said, picking up the receiver of the old landline phone. I walked into the “bathroom.” “Water . . . there is water . . . only it needs to be run for a while,” I admitted, looking at the rusty liquid flowing out of the tap.

“The television,” Nadya said proudly. “I made Dad put in a television. There was an old Horizon in here. This big!” She spread her hands to demonstrate. “It worked, but it wasn't even color!”

“We have to flush the toilet plenty of times,” I said. “It has oil in it as a hydraulic seal. So does the shower. There are provisions in the cupboard in the kitchen—canned food and soup, rusks, sugar, tea, coffee.”

“I don't like where you're going with this,” said Svetlana.

“There's also a bottle of cognac and a few bottles of wine,” I told her.

“I still don't like it.”

“Sveta, whatever might have happened to those guards—first and foremost they were hunting Nadya,” I said. “No one knows about this place, and it's protected as securely as possible. I think it's safer than the Watch offices.”

“Dad, what's on the disk?” asked Nadya, picking up an external hard drive off the TV stand.

“Films. Everything you used to love three years ago. Cartoons and fairy tales.”

“Oh, Dad,” Nadya exclaimed indignantly.

“Sorry, I didn't think of updating the video library,” I said. “Or I would have filled the disk with anime and fantasy movies.”

Nadya pouted resentfully.

“I agree that Nadya ought to stay here,” Svetlana said thoughtfully. “But why on earth should I—”

“So that our daughter doesn't do anything stupid,” I explained. “Sorry, Nadya. But I wouldn't like you to leave this place because of some bad premonition or sheer boredom and run into those two . . . You stay here, girls. I'll come to get you in a day or two. But please hide in the meantime.”

Svetlana nodded. Reluctantly and crankily, but she accepted my logic.

“What are you going to do?”

“The same as usual,” I said. “Look for the bad guys and protect the good guys.”