Сергей Лукьяненков - Last Watch

“Two hundred and eight years, three months, and eleven days,” Bruce specified. “Yes, I am young. But this is Scotland. If only you knew what suspicious, stubborn people the Highlanders are, absolutely hidebound in their superstitions! In the time of my youth not a year went by without one of us having an aspen stake hammered through his heart.”

Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought I detected a hint of pride in his fellow countrymen in Bruce’s voice.

“Will you help me, Master?”

Bruce shook his head. “No, of course not! If we find out who killed the Russian boy, we will punish him. Ourselves. We won’t destroy him, but we will punish him severely. No one will hand him over to the Watches.”

Well, naturally. I should never have expected anything else.

“Is it pointless to ask whether you have already found him and punished him?”

“It is,” Bruce replied with a sigh.

“Well, then, should I go bustling about, trying to find the criminal?” I asked in a deliberately rueful voice. “Or should I simply take a holiday in your wonderful city?”

A harsh note of irony appeared in Bruce’s voice. “As a Dark One, the only thing I can say to you is, take a holiday! Relax, look around the museums, have fun. Who cares about this dead student now?”

That was when I felt I couldn’t hold back any longer. I looked into Bruce’s eyes. The black holes of his pupils glittered scarlet. I asked, “And what if I break you, you bloodsucking carrion? If I break you, turn you inside out, and make you answer all my questions?”

“Go ahead,” Bruce replied in a soft, almost tender voice. “Try it, Higher One. Do you think we don’t know about you? Do you think we don’t know how you came by your Power?”

Eye to eye.

Pupil to pupil.

A black, pulsating tunnel, drawing me into emptiness. An eddying vortex of red sparks from the stolen lives of others. An enticing whisper in my ears. The inspired, exalted, unearthly beauty of the youthful vampire’s face.

Fall at his feet…

Weep in ecstasy at his beauty, wisdom, will…

Beg for forgiveness…

He was very powerful. After all, he had two hundred years of experience, multiplied by the first level of vampire Power.

And I felt the full brunt of his Power. I stood up on trembling legs that would not obey me. I took an uncertain step forward.

Bruce smiled.

Another vampire once smiled in exactly the same way in a Moscow alleyway when I ran into it, following the boy Egor, who was helplessly following the Call…

I put so much Power into my mental attack that if I had used it for a Fireball, it would have shot straight through about thirty houses and struck the fortress wall of the old Scottish castle.

Bruce’s pupils turned white and blank. The alluring black tunnel was scorched by a white radiance. Sitting there in front of me, swaying backward and forward, was a dried-up old man with a young face. But the skin on his face was starting to peel off, flaking away in little scales, like dandruff.

“Who killed Victor?” I asked. The Power continued to flow through me in a fine stream, twisting into a running knot threaded through the vampire’s eyes.

He didn’t say anything, just carried on swaying in his chair. Maybe I’d burned out his brain…or whatever it is they had instead of brains. A fine start to the unofficial investigation!

“Do you know who killed Victor?” I asked, reformulating the question.

“No,” Bruce replied quietly.

“Do you have any theories about the matter?”

“Yes…two. A young vampire lost control…Someone from the outside…a visitor…”

“What else do you know about this killing?”

Silence. As if he was gathering his thoughts before starting a long speech.

“What else do you know that is not known to the staff of the city Watches?”

“Nothing…”

I halted the flow of Power and sank into an armchair.

What should I do now? And what if he submitted a complaint to the Day Watch? An unprovoked attack, interrogation…

For about a minute Bruce carried on swaying in his chair. Then he startled, and his eyes acquired a meaningful expression again.

Meaningful and pitiful.

“I beg your pardon, Light One,” he said quietly. “Please accept my apologies.”

It took me a few seconds to understand.

A vampire Master is not simply the most powerful, cunning, clever bloodsucker. He is also the one who has never known defeat.

A complaint from Bruce would mean serious trouble for me. But for him it would mean loss of status.

And this polite old youth was very vain.

“I accept your apologies, Master,” I replied. “Let what has happened remain between us.”

Bruce licked his lips. His faced turned pink, recovering its former attractive appearance. His voice became slightly stronger, as he had realized that it was not in my interest to publicize what had happened. “But I would ask,” he said, putting emphatic, poisonous hatred into that last word, “that you do not make any more attacks of the kind, Light One. The aggression was unprovoked.”

“You challenged me to a duel.”

“De jure, I did not,” Bruce replied quickly. “The ritual of challenge was not observed.”

“De facto, you did. Are we going to bother the Inquisition with this?”

He blinked, and once again became the hospitable host.

“All right, Light One. Let bygones be bygones…”

Bruce got to his feet and swayed slightly. He walked across to the door. Once outside the room, he turned and declared with evident displeasure, “My home is your home. This room is your dwelling and I shall not enter it without permission.”

This ancient legend, strangely enough, is quite true. Vampires cannot enter anyone else’s home without being invited in. No one knows why that is.

The door closed behind Bruce. I let go of the armrests of my chair; there were wet marks left on the white satin. Dark marks.

It’s bad to be sleep-deprived. Your nerves start playing tricks.

But now I knew for certain that the Master of Edinburgh’s vampires had no information about the murder.

I unpacked my suitcase and hung a white linen suit and two white shirts on hangers. I looked out the window and shook my head. I took out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with the inscription NIGHT WATCH on it. A hooligan’s joke, of course, but you can see anything at all written on T-shirts nowadays.

Then my eye was caught by a fancy calligraphic text in a frame on the wall. I had already noticed a frame like it downstairs, and another on the staircase. Were they hanging all over the hotel, then? I walked over and was surprised by what I read:

By oppression’s woes and pains,

By your sons in servile chains,

We will drain our dearest veins

But they shall be free!

Robert Burns

“Why, the son of a bitch!” I said almost admiringly. Even the people who stayed in the hotel would never suspect anything!

Unquestionably, Bruce had the same sense of humor as the vampire who had drained his victim at the Castle of the Vampires. He was an excellent candidate for the role of murderer.

The only trouble was that after the kind of shock he had suffered, Bruce couldn’t possibly have lied.

TOURISTS ARE THE MOST TERRIBLE BREED OF HUMAN BEINGS. SOMETIMES I feel a vague suspicion that every nation tries to send its most unpleasant representatives abroad-the loudest and most clueless, with the worst manners. But it’s probably all much simpler than that. Probably it’s just that the secret Work/Play switch everybody has hidden in their heads gets toggled and turns off 80 percent of their brains.

But the remaining 20 percent is more than enough for play anyway.