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 just 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,” he said. “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 coffeepot. At the same time, Semyon started moving toward 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 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 not-so-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, realized 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 was a great fuss. We worked out what was going on, paid Galya a visit at home, and had a little chat… It was OK, 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.

“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 with disappointment. “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, taking the robot shooter with us, wrapped up in a bathrobe. 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 quickly drove out of the tourist center and set off in the general direction of the Firth of Forth.

“Thanks for calling me over,” said Semyon, gazing out 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 old, experienced 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.”

“Can’t imagine it?”

“Can’t 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 artifact, 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 bathtub filled with water. Left on its own, it will surface. But if 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 neighbor, 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 backpack 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 un-typically colorful way he’d told it. Waving his backpack about and laughing? Yes, more than likely. If there are children living on your hallway in your apartment building, you’re bound to stumble over their backpacks, 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 Konstantin Saushkin.”

“But Gesar, Kostya was killed.”

“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 kilometers 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 space suit on radar right to the very end. But what we don’t know, Anton, is if Kostya Saushkin was still in that space suit. The height 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 Midlothian suburbs. In a quiet, wealthy district of cozy cottages and well-tended gardens. The head of the Edinburgh Night Watch met us in his own garden. He was sitting in a wooden arbor entwined with ivy, setting out a game of patience on a coffee table. In his crumpled gray trousers and polo shirt he looked like a typically placid gentleman of pre-retirement age. Surround him with a crowd of grandsons and granddaughters, and he would have been the elder statesman 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, muttering, “It’s not working out…”