Sixth Watch (5 page)

And he wanted youth.

Vampires and witches—these are two extremes. Vampires are
always young, even if it is the youth of the undead. Witches are always old, although not many folk are as full of life as witches are.

Orosz admired the youthfulness of vampires. Their polish. Their manners. All the false brilliance and glamour that vampires have developed as camouflage, as a way of luring their victims. And the former apothecary from the town of Székesfehérvár apparently understood all about this—but he admired it.

Well, there's no accounting for taste.

Csaba Orosz, of course, didn't drink blood, and he didn't try to whitewash vampires. He understood their nature perfectly well. But his admiration for the physical capabilities of vampires, their strength and stamina, their magic that was so different from the magic of other kinds of Others—all this soon turned him into a very strange person. Although he was a Light One who worked in the Night Watch, Orosz constantly wrote about vampires, collected information about them, and studied them. Apparently the vampires were flattered by this. He spent time with them (well, and why shouldn't a law-abiding vampire who observed the provisions of the Great Treaty consort with a law-abiding Light Other?). They told him about themselves, they even allowed him to perform experiments of some kind (far gentler than the Danish girl's, of course).

Everyone likes to be the focus of attention. They say that the most spine-chilling psychos, when they are finally caught, are absolutely delighted to start reciting the story of their atrocities. Vampires are no exception.

Basically, Csaba Orosz became a collector of vampire folklore. He was awarded some kind of “Badge of the Guild of Vampires” and set off to travel around the world with it. This was the first thing that astonished me, for I knew of several attempts that vampires had made to set up a unifying structure, but they had never really come to anything—vampires are individualists, they only acknowledge . . . hmm . . . blood kinship. Either family ties, or the ties of initiation . . .

But with his Guild Badge, Orosz gathered folklore everywhere. He roamed the world again. Came back to Budapest. And, book by book, he published a five-volume encyclopedia called
Everything About the Others Known as Vampires
.

This was when everything went askew (you couldn't call it a scandal, there were too many belly laughs).

Others—both Light Ones and Dark Ones—read the encyclopedia and discovered that it was chock-full of balderdash. A number of well-known facts were embedded in a string of wild yarns preposterous enough to make the paper blush in shame.

Csaba Orosz wrote in all seriousness that vampires were the very first Others, who later gave rise to the werewolves and other shape-shifters (“corrupted vampires” in his terminology) and the Light and Dark magicians.

Orosz painted a vivid picture of how, long, long ago at the dawn of mankind, the Two-in-One—the God of Light and Darkness—appeared to the first Other (a vampire, naturally) and allowed him to taste of his divine blood, thereby bestowing upon him the powers of the Twilight.

Csaba Orosz related the biblical legend of the flood, except that in his version the flood occurred because in their pride the vampires decided to turn all the people in the world into vampires (Csaba didn't pass over the delicate question of how, meaning on whom they would feed—in his legend the vampires decided to drink the blood of animals and of their own children, that is, first feed on them, and then transform them into vampires—a kind of waste-free cycle). And it was for this pride that the God of Light and Darkness punished the vampires with the flood, and only Noah and his family were saved . . . and one vampire, a little infant whose vampire parents had put him in a wooden box and launched him upon the waters, and then the box was picked up by Noah's wife . . . Well, now do you see what can be made out of the Bible if you have no inhibitions, but you do have a distinctive sense of humor and an urge to explain everything from the vampire point of view?

Csaba Orosz also retold the stories of a whole slew of other events, presenting them in a new light. Joan of Arc, Thor Heyerdahl, Émile Zola, and Thomas Edison were all vampires. And Tesla was a vampire too, of course. He was turned into a vampire by President Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor (who had been turned into a vampire by Roosevelt himself).

All famous people were vampires. Or at least they sympathized with them.

When I learned, after a cursory glance through Orosz's encyclopedia, that Joseph Stalin was also a vampire, it very nearly brought tears to my eyes. What a shame that Russia's liberal media hadn't read this encyclopedia! They could have cited it. If you ask me, the liberal media are where all the most genuine vampires are to be found.

I put down the fifth and final volume. And sighed.

Poor, unlucky Orosz had fallen foul of his own guiding light. As I understood things, he had fallen in with a company of vampire jokers (it does happen, they do exist) who had led him down the garden path with their stories about vampire customs and world history from their perspective.

Among the mass of fantasies, jokes, and hoaxes that he gullibly noted down and passed on, there were probably some grains of sound sense. If I only knew how to identify them.

Probably the only thing relating to the possibility of revitalizing vampires was the story of the Eternal Vampire, a very liberal reworking of the story of the Eternal Jew. Of course, it wasn't Christ whom the Eternal Vampire offended, it was Merlin, but the consequences were similar. Henceforth he was condemned to wander eternally, but he couldn't drink blood—it burned him like fire—so he suffered unimaginable torment and fed mostly on wine (which was extremely odd and inconsistent, in view of vampires' intolerance of alcohol).

But then it suddenly occurred to me that all the advice I'd read recommended dousing vampires with strong spirits. Maybe they were able to drink wine?

Ah, phooey, it was all raving nonsense.

It was also mentioned that the most valiant (oh, what a word the Hungarian had chosen!) and intrepid of the vampires could be reanimated by the God of Light and Darkness after being laid to rest. But on this point even Orosz didn't let his fantasy off the leash.

Glancing through the final document, I discovered how Orosz's life ended. No, he wasn't drunk by a vampire, and he wasn't shot by Soviet soldiers—which I had been vaguely afraid of on seeing the date of his death. He couldn't give a damn about politics, and the vampires didn't touch him. Orosz caught a cold while strolling through a park in autumn, came down with meningitis, failed to consult a healer in time, and the human doctor made a mess of things.

An absurd death!

I packed all the documents into the box, went to the kitchen, and brewed some tea. And just then Svetlana got back—with two plastic bags of positively monstrous dimensions.

“You could have warned me,” I reproached her. “We could have gone to the supermarket together.”

“I got carried away,” said Svetlana. “I wasn't planning to get so weighed down. I saw Nadya off to school, and then I thought I'd just drop into Ashan . . .”

“You took a pretty long time,” I said, glancing at the clock as I unpacked a bag crammed with vegetables. “Did it take you four hours to choose a salad?”

“I circled around the school for a while first,” Svetlana confessed unhesitatingly. “You're panicking for no good reason, of course. But I just took a look at how things are there anyway.”

“And?” I asked, finishing with the first bag and starting on the second one.

“They're guarding her.” Svetlana chuckled. “One of ours, two from the Day Watch, and a gray one, from the Inquisition.”

“Gray?” I asked in surprise.

“He's a Light One originally,” said Svetlana. “But all of them have that grayish shade.”

I snorted. I'd never spotted any details like that in the Inquisitors' auras. Although I had sensed that they had a certain common quality about them.

But then my thoughts took a rapid turn in a different direction.

“One Light One, two Dark Ones, and an Inquisitor?” I asked.

“Yes,” Svetlana replied, tensing up immediately at my tone of voice.

“That can't be right. It violates the rule of parity. Either two of ours, or one Dark One.”

“They could have counted the Inquisitor . . . as a Light One,” Svetlana said, bewildered. She was trying to justify herself now, knowing she ought to have realized immediately that the imbalance was impossible. But the Light Inquisitor had thrown her off. She had added him to “our side” and decided everything was all right.

“No one knew about the Inquisitor,” I said, slamming the fridge door and looking into Svetlana's eyes. “Only Nadya noticed him. I didn't. And the Watches didn't know about him. Nadya mentioned one Light One and one Dark One.”

A second later we were already in the stairwell, running down the steps. We probably didn't need to hurry—if nothing had happened in four hours, the chances were that nothing was going to happen. But we ran. Opening a portal would have taken longer. Even getting into a car and driving would have taken longer. The school was blocked off in the Twilight and opening up a way through would have taken quite a lot of time too. The run through the courtyards was just two minutes.

And we ran, knowing that either we didn't need to hurry at all, or we were already way too late.

In a modern city you don't often come across anyone running. People often plod slowly past the shop windows. When they walk, it's always fast. But running . . . There are two scenarios for that:
a short sprint to the bus stop, hoping to catch a bus that's already leaving, and the daily spurt of some enthusiastic follower of a healthy lifestyle—somewhere in a park or close to one—wearing a natty tracksuit with headphones jammed into their ears.

Anyone running, who isn't running to a bus stop or wearing a tracksuit, automatically arouses suspicion.

Who is he running away from?

Who is he chasing?

Perhaps he's a burglar who's been spooked by an alarm system? Or a rapist who has attacked a woman in an elevator? Citizens feel a desperate desire to join in the hunt and participate in the most ancient of human amusements.

But there were no shouts of “Stop thief!” or “Grab that villain!” A man and a woman, just running along—but they looked as if they'd be only too glad to give someone a poke in the eye.

And the egotism of city life won out. The citizens looked away—let them run if they want, there must be some reason for it. Only the frost-proof old grannies, out strolling with their grandchildren or freezing solid on the benches, reached furtively for the cell phones their grandchildren had given them, in order to capture the runners in a blurry snapshot. What if the polizais come and start looking for witnesses? And here, I've already got a photo!

As long as there are grannies in Russia, no courtyard need ever feel unsafe.

People watched us with lively interest, and some of them, either the most curious or the most empathetic, shouted to us: “What's happened?” We didn't answer, and they didn't try to detain us.

We hurtled through three courtyards and came out by the school fence.

Well yes, three. Nadya was right, and I was wrong. But they were big yards, especially the third one, so I had every right to say that the school was four courtyards away.

By the wall we both stopped.

And exchanged glances.

“Everything seems quiet,” I said. I looked through the Twilight—inside the building I saw the blurred yellow and green patches of auras. Schoolkids, not frightened by anything, not hurt. On the first level of the Twilight the school was thickly overgrown, just as it should be, with blue moss, the parasitical plant that is the only representative of flora and fauna in the Twilight world.

Svetlana relaxed too. We looked at each other, smiling.

And then turned toward the school again.

“Too quiet,” said Svetlana.

After all, a school is more than just pupils from year one with white bows in their hair, little poems recited at the morning assembly, and a forest of hands raised by little kiddies who are dying to answer a question.

It's also bad marks and insulting nicknames, scoldings from the headmaster and entries in the register in red ink; it's star-crossed love and pokes in the teeth from some hooligan; it's defeat in a game of volleyball and a stolen smartphone.

It's a huge, great mass of emotions! It's a seething cauldron with Power splashing out of it. That's why schools get overgrown with moss; it consumes human emotions.

And children in school never have uniformly tranquil auras like this.

“Let's go,” said Svetlana. She made a peculiar kind of movement with her left hand and I spotted a flurry of tiny little sparks glittering in the air, outlining an invisible oval. Some kind of local defense, something like the Magician's Shield, but activated in advance, in “standby mode.” I thought perfunctorily that I ought to check out how she did that.

“Gesar . . .” I called, following after Svetlana. We didn't even discuss if we needed to call for backup and who we would call. “Gesar . . .”

I put a little more Power into my voice.

“Anton?”

“Emergency at Nadya's school.”

“Code?”

I was about to say “six,” which signifies “critical situation in a location with a large gathering of people, possible casualties,” but then Svetlana stopped and grabbed me by the arm.

“Two,” I said. “Code two—gray.”

A two is a critical situation in a location with a large gathering of people, with proven casualties. Gray meant the victim was a member of the Inquisition.

He was lying between the sports field, which was fenced off with metal mesh, and the main entrance to the school building. His pose suggested that he'd been running toward the school . . . a really young-looking guy with the fading aura of a Light Other (and this time I did spot the tone that Sveta had called gray—as if the general light tone had been dusted with dark speckles). The level, of course, was already blurred, but it was at least third, maybe closer to second . . .