Sixth Watch (26 page)

The audience listened to this hoary, feeble, vulgar joke, which a final year schoolboy would have been embarrassed to laugh at. The audience laughed in chorus and applauded briefly.

Master Jack bowed.

I turned my eyes away in embarrassment. And I saw the little girl vampire blow a brownish-pink bubble of gum out of her mouth.

I realized that my world would never be the same again.

“Brothers and sisters,” Master Jack continued. “We all know why we are gathered here. And none of us want to talk about it. But let's be quite frank. The Two-in-One has returned!”

A deathly silence—forgive the banal pun—fell in the hall. The vampires stopped breathing altogether and the humans seemed to hold their breath. At least I did.

“Were we expecting this?” asked Jack, moving out from behind the lectern and starting to walk to and fro. The attention of the audience had been won and now he started talking in all seriousness. “We realized that the equilibrium had been violated, that we had forgotten the ancient traditions and covenants . . .”

“If only a single bloodsucking rat had told someone about their rules and covenants . . .” Olga whispered in my ear. I gave her a grim look—vampires have very good hearing. But they were all absorbed in Jack's performance.

“And we all know that only one thing can stop the Two-in-One—the Sixth Watch. As it was of old. As it was at the beginning of our history, when the Twilight reached out to us with both hands, and we took hold of both and chose our paths.”

I cursed to myself. Lilith, Ekaterina, the vampire who pretended to be Killoran and their entire kind . . .

They knew, after all. They knew something!

Not everything, but far more than they were telling!

The end of the world was nigh, and these puffed-up, self-important bloodsuckers were still hiding their secret. But who could have known that vampires, the very lowest of the Others, despised by Light Ones and Dark Ones alike, were really keepers of ancient knowledge? That they were actually the first Others?

But then, what was so surprising about it? The very simplest, the very “lowest” ought to be the first. Time had been needed for all the complex, subtle, specialized forms among Others to develop. The Twilight had needed to develop its self-awareness and its awareness of people. People had needed to learn to interact with the Twilight. To become Others entirely. To start working with Power at a subtle level.

But at the very beginning everything had been simple and clear.

Blood pouring out of a lacerated throat.

Life departing with it.

An increasing “magical temperature differential.” The magical “temperature” falling in the dying man. Falling to zero. Like Nadya's. Or almost to zero . . .

And the absorption of this Power, flooding into the dying man—and immediately leaving him.

An inflow of Power.

An inflow of Blood, filled with Power.

And someone who drank that blood in their hunger, or in the fury of the victorious savage, had sensed it. And had managed to use it. To control it.

And then the Two-in-One came out to the campfires where the savages were holding their bloody funeral feast.

The Two-in-One concluded a covenant with them in the name of the Darkness, the Light, and the Twilight.

About what?

And for what purpose?

“Do you want to ask me if I'm willing to join the battle for the right to become the Master of Masters?” Jack pontificated. “Then I will answer: No, I am not willing. I am powerful, you know, I really, really am! But there are others more powerful than me.”

He suddenly turned toward the old man sitting on the stage and bowed deeply. The little old man nodded benevolently

“If it was possible to simply hand over authority to someone,” Jack exclaimed, reaching his hands up into the air. “If this was possible, I would hand it to Master Pyotr!”

A gentle murmur of approval ran through the auditorium. Apparently no one had any objections. All eyes were turned toward the old man sitting at the table. An expectant silence fell—and in that silence the bubble on the lips of the little girl vampire burst with a deafening pop.

Everyone turned toward the sound.

“Hey,” said Ellie. “Sorry about that. I'm all for it! Master Pyotr, I'm for you!”

She waved to the little old man, smiling blithely (as monstrously inappropriate as that word sounds, applied to a child vampire). The old man waved back good-naturedly.

“My dear friends,” he said in a quiet voice. “Thank you for these kind words; they are music to my ears, as they would be to anyone's. Thanks to you, Master Jack. And to you, my dear Greta. And to you, little Ellie, my sweetheart—thank you.”

Pyotr spoke quietly. He smiled. And at the same time he radiated such an intense, sepulchral chill, such a mortally numbing aura of decay and deadly danger, that for a moment I caught my breath.

I wasn't the only one who sensed it. The handsome youth sitting between Pyotr and Greta squirmed. Until now he had seemed pleased to be on the stage, but now he really looked quite dejected.

“And thanks to you, Ekaterina,” Pyotr suddenly said, looking up at the Mistress of Moscow. “Somehow today my glance keeps falling on you again and again.”

If someone else's blood had not been pulsing through Ekaterina's veins, she would probably have turned white.

But in fact she gave a very dignified reply.

“I thank you, Master Pyotr. It is an honor for me.”

The old man frowned, but he turned his eyes away from Ekaterina. He didn't look at us yet. We were not worthy of his glance.

“It is not permissible to hand on authority in that way, Master Jack,” Pyotr said after a pause. “It is against the rules. And such authority would not be genuine authority. In order to acquire that authority, I have to drag a dozen of you down off the benches, knock you on the heads, and bite out your throats.”

“With our consent,” Ellie said in a quiet voice.

“Yes, little girl, with your consent,” Pyotr agreed, nodding. “And I sense that will not be given. Of course, it is possible to be a little devious in one way or another.”

The old vampire suddenly started giggling and nodding his head rapidly.

“What do you mean, Master Pyotr?” Greta asked nervously.

“It doesn't concern you, silly girl,” Pyotr reassured her. “I could, I could . . . you could try to fight with me. And I could tear you to pieces. And become the Master of Masters.”

The hall seemed to turn dark at his words. I felt the sudden tension in the vampires around me and a succession of odors surged past me: musk and ammonia, the sweet aroma of pheromones exuding from vampire skin and the sour stench of neurotoxin seeping out of fangs.

“Only I don't need that,” said Pyotr. “And none of us need the Sixth Watch. And we won't fight against the Two-in-One, against him who gave us Power. If he decides to destroy the world, then he will destroy the world and that will be the end of us . . .”

His voice fell silent, as if the volume on a music player had been turned right down. Pyotr even lowered his head and stared at the table. Then he raised it abruptly and smiled cunningly.

“Only what I think is this, brothers and sisters. The Two-in-One
has not come to punish us, the ones who have remained faithful. Oh no, not us! But those who have departed from the truth, from blood—it is their final hour that has arrived! It is the end of the Others! Of the Dark Ones and the Light Ones. The magicians and the enchantresses. They are finished, finished, finished. But we . . .”

He paused. The vampires listened. The vampires waited.

“But we shall remain,” Pyotr said very confidently. “The herd will remain, and we shall remain to keep an eye on the herd. If the cattle are not slaughtered, there will be no order!”

He started chuckling.

And in response to his chuckling a wave of laughter from other vampires ran around the auditorium.

“As it was in the good old days!” Pyotr exclaimed. “With no humiliation, no documents! Choose a village or a town. Go there and feast. It will be that way again now, soon.”

He's six hundred years old, I thought. That's really, really old. A really ancient beast. Eve/Lilith could laugh at six hundred years of life as a vampire. But I won't. It's a long time. Long enough to become powerful and terrible. Long enough to become the equal of a Higher Other in Power and to exceed him. Long enough to lose your mind, if you ever had one.

“He's very, very powerful,” someone whispered in my left ear, and I caught a scent of strawberry. The little girl vampire screwed up her lips expressively. “And clever.”

She slid back along the bench to her own place.

So.

There was at least one vampire who hadn't been fooled by my masquerade.

I started getting up and caught Ekaterina's frightened glance—yes, the Mistress of the vile nocturnal beasts of Moscow was genuinely frightened now.

“There's something I'd like to say to you, Master Pyotr, Mistress Greta, respected Masters,” I said, squeezing past Ellie. Somehow I
was sure that the little girl vampire wouldn't sink her teeth into the back of my neck. Not because she was a good girl, nothing like that.

She was simply more cunning and more intelligent than most of the others sitting in the hall.

“Then speak, since you wish to, Light One Anton Gorodetsky, Higher Other,” Pyotr said with a smile. “You came to us uninvited, but we're not offended, are we now?”

Forty-nine vampires turned their eyes toward me. As well as a score of human minions: food, sexual partners, surrogate children . . .

Either our disguise had been really poor or the vampires had a much better intelligence and counterintelligence setup than we thought.

“Thank you, Master Pyotr,” I said

“Not at all, Anton, not at all,” the little old man said, and giggled. “How did he get in here, Greta? What was the pretext?”

“He was declared as food by Mistress Ekaterina,” Greta replied

“And he didn't dispute it?” Pyotr asked.

“No.”

“That's good,” Pyotr said with a nod. And he fixed the gaze of his pale, unblinking eyes on me. “Let him speak. I enjoy talking to my food.”

I walked all the way down to the lectern without speaking. Master Jack made no effort to move out from behind it. He stood there, dithering. This jolly vampire seemed genuinely confused and frightened.

Which was hardly surprising.

They did have a Master. A genuine Master—not formally confirmed in combat, but nonetheless genuine. Master Pyotr, who had spent decades lying in his tomb in Lvov, or so it had been thought, was perfectly hale and hearty. He simply hadn't stuck his nose out into the light, where he would have attracted the attention of the Watches.

And he was quite definitely not averse to drinking my blood. In
a normal situation, he probably wouldn't have risked it. But now, on the verge of Armageddon, it was no problem. The old principle applied: “The war will cancel everything out.”

“We are Others,” I said, looking at the amphitheater looming up over me. At the vampires, both decrepit and youthful—and there really were both: some as ancient as the forgotten youth of humankind, some as youthful as the endless movement of passing time. “We are Others. We serve different forces. But in the Twilight there is no difference between the absence of Darkness and the absence of Light. The battle between us is capable of destroying the world . . .”

Pyotr laughed quietly.

“Drop that, Anton, drop it. The Great Treaty is not for us. We were here before it, and we shall be here after it. Are you trying to appeal to our sense of responsibility? Are you trying to remind us that we are a part of the world? We are a different world, Watchman. An eternal world, and not living mildew . . .”

“A dead world,” I said, turning toward Pyotr. Everything had gone awry. My entire speech, invented by Gesar and polished to a high sheen by Zabulon. All the consultations with spies and analysts, all the phrases that should have hooked the Masters known to us—and persuaded them to launch into battle for the title of Master of Masters.

It was all down the tubes now.

“Dead,” Pyotr agreed. “But only the dead is eternal. The living is doomed to become the dead, what lives is only fodder for eternity. We are eternal.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing dead is eternal. Mountains crumble to sand, deserts are flooded over, seas dry up. The dead are not eternal.”

“Sand remains sand, water remains water,” said Petya, shrugging his skinny little shoulders. “Where are the people who used to live on the slopes of the mountains and the shores of the sea? Not even their bones remain. Where are the languages that they used to speak? The wind has borne them away, not a trace remains.”

“You are six hundred years old,” I said. “Is that really so long?
Can you remember the mountains that have been worn away and the peoples who have disappeared? Lilith called you a mere suckling vampire.”

To my surprise, Pyotr laughed.

“Lilith? Are you acquainted with the stupid, vain, naive Lilith? Ah . . . but of course.” He threw his head back and sniffed in the air. “I see that she fed on you.”

The vampire's eyes glinted.

“And how did she like you?”

“I don't know,” I replied. “You can't ask ashes.”

“Ah, that's bad,” Pyotr said regretfully. “She was a funny little girl . . . once upon a time, very, very long ago. Yes, the very oldest Other—she was the very oldest Other. From human stock, naturally.”

The features of his face slowly sharpened. The skin stretched and the bones showed through it. The forehead flattened out and crept backward. The brow ridges thrust forward. The nose became broader and larger and the cheekbones protruded. The chin almost disappeared, but the jaws moved out and grew larger. The sparse gray hair reddened—it didn't cover his bald spot properly, but a ragged bunch sprang up at the center of the crown of his head. The skin turned pale and chalky.