The Last Watch:

  Instead of a number, the screen on the phone simply said ‘Zabulon’, even though the Dark One’s number was not in my address book, of course.

  ‘Hello, Dark One.’

  ‘How’s your health, Anton?’ Zabulon enquired sympathetically. ‘Has the shoulder healed up?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, thank you.’ I touched the place where there had been a wound the day before. The skin there was pink and it itched.

  ‘I’m glad my gift was of some use,’ Zabulon continued in the same polite tone. ‘I’d like to share a bit of information with you. There are no candidates for the role of Mirror in Great Britain. There is one in France, one in Poland, two in Italy … I can’t imagine why Thomas chose to drag Egor all the way to Edinburgh.’

  Clear enough. My naive attempt at cunning had failed. Zabulon had dug up the truth after all.

  ‘I hope that he won’t be required,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Zabulon agreed. ‘It really is quite disgraceful to exploit the poor boy again in the interests of the Light … Anton, my dear fellow, what is actually going on there? I heard there was another murder yesterday. Has someone else has his blood drained?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up in bed. ‘Another one. He was beheaded with a model guillotine.’

  ‘And what did they do with the blood?’ Zabulon enquired.

  ‘Drained it into the bucket used for washing the floor.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m glad you understand something at least,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be so modest, Anton …’ Zabulon said and paused. ‘Ask Foma how long it is since he visited his neighbour in the grave.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, thinking that I must have misheard. ‘His neighbour’s grave?’

  ‘How long is it since he visited his neighbour in the grave?’ Zabulon said with a chuckle and cut the connection.

  Swearing under my breath, I got up and set out for the bathroom. I tidied myself up and took a cold shower, then put on a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans. Somehow I wasn’t in the mood any more for frivolous shorts and a T-shirt – if the weather had allowed, I would have put on a sweater or a jacket.

  My phone rang again.

  ‘Hello, Gesar,’ I said after glancing at the display.

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘The shoulder’s healed,’ I said, absolutely certain that Gesar knew everything.

  ‘Which shoulder’s that?’

  ‘Yesterday someone shot at me.’ I told him in brief what had happened. And there was such a deadly silence that I blew into the microphone, as if it was an old-style telephone.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ Gesar said drily. ‘Thinking …’

  ‘Maybe I should go and get some breakfast first?’

  ‘Yes, do,’ said the boss. ‘And then find Foma. Tell him there’s no time left for half-truths and dissembling. He has to check the Rune.’

  ‘Which one exactly?’ I asked in the tone of someone who checks Runes every day of the week.

  ‘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 realised 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 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 omelette. That was surprising – usually after two consecutive transformations werewolves eat meat by the kilogram.

  ‘Good morning,’ I greeted my fellow guests.

  The vampires smiled crookedly and nodded. Galya began prodding at the omelette 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 omelette 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 smorgasbord – omelettes 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 vampire’s 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 draped with colourful coverings.

  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 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. 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 coffee pot. At the same time Semyon started moving towards 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 little 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 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, realised 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 a w
as great fuss, we worked out what was going on, paid Galya a visit at home and had a little chat … It was okay, 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 on their faces.

  ‘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.

  ‘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 that was waiting for us, taking the robot shooter wrapped up in a dressing gown. 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 drove quickly out of the tourist centre and set off in the general direction of the bay.

  ‘Thanks for calling me over,’ said Semyon, gazing out of 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 experienced old 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.’

  ‘Imagine it?’

  ‘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 artefact, 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 bath of water. Left on its own, it will surface. But of 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 neighbour 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 briefcase 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 untypically colourful way he’d told it. Waving his briefcase about and laughing? Yes, more than likely. If there are children living on your stairwell in the apartment building you’re bound to stumble over their briefcases, 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 Kostya Saushkin.’

  ‘But Gesar, Kostya was killed.’3

  ‘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 kilometres 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 spacesuit on radar right to the very end. But what we don’t know, Anton, is if Kostya Saushkin was still in that spacesuit. The altitude 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 suburbs. In a quiet, wealthy district of cosy cottages and well-tended gardens. The head of the Edinburgh Night Watch met us in his own garden. He was sitting in a wooden arbour entwined with ivy, setting out a game of patience on a coffee table. In his crumpled grey trousers and polo shirt he looked like a typically placid gentleman of pre-pension age. Surround him with a crowd of grandsons and granddaughters and he would have been the elderly head 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 and muttered:

  ‘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 neighbour 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 across 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 w
ho 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:

  ‘“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. He did put them all in a ship and launched 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, only 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 him to the court, as is told hereafter, at the end of the book Morte d’Arthur.

  ‘“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 a cartoon 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, useless 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 warm-hearted Disney cartoon, is it?’ Lermont asked, as if he had 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.’