‘Yes… er…’ I said in embarrassment, stubbing out the cigarette in the coffee that was left in my cup and flapping my hand in the air. ‘I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.’
‘Don’t be angry with my dad,’ said Nadya. ‘He was lost in thought. He’s just had some bad news.’
‘Has something happened?’ the waitress asked suspiciously, but her expression softened as she watched me taking money out of my pocket.
‘Yes,’ said Nadya. ‘We’re all going to die.’
‘Well, that really is news. What a comedian,’ the waitress snorted, raking up the money.
One day, during a casual conversation, Olga had told me that she almost became a witch. Not in the metaphorical sense, like ‘that woman is a witch’, and not even in the pseudo-scientific sense that any female Other is inclined to use the magical techniques of witchcraft. But in the absolutely literal sense. There was a time when, if things had gone differently, Olga would have started boiling up potions in a cauldron, charging amulets with magic, hexing people and making ‘medicinal ointments’ to drive virgins wild…
But everything turned out differently and Olga became a Light Other.
Things are actually a bit more complicated than that. Yes, there are certain essential signs of a witch – the use of artefacts and vegetable or animal extracts, the frequent use of magic that is only accessible to women (there’s nothing sexist in this, it’s just that male physiology doesn’t allow you to work certain spells, like the Bottomless Pit or brew the potion Mummy’s Rat-a-Tat, which includes three drops of breast milk).
In fact, witches often use physiological fluids – which is one reason why they’re not liked. In this respect they’re a bit like vampires and werewolves, with their craving for blood and flesh. However, despite all the rumours, these ‘virgins’ tears’ and ‘drops of baby’s blood’ are usually gathered without whipping innocent young maidens or chopping children into pieces. But there are some straightforward sadists among witches too, and if a young girl hears a witch say ‘I want your tears’ she’ll probably be too frightened to respond rationally.
That was why people used to burn witches, whenever they could catch them. And at one point the Inquisition got so annoyed about it all that the Conclave took a real hammering. And after that the witches, who had been quite powerful and independent, started keeping a lower profile.
But I had no doubt that witches were among the very first Others. Originally they were probably vampires who had learned to do a lot with a little and were able to extract Power from a few drops of blood instead of from litres of it.
But there was another, far more interesting question. Did the witches start storing Power in beads, rings and earrings because they already wore them, or did they start wearing jewellery so that they had a place to store Power? I was inclined to believe the latter. Which, by the way, would explain the universal female passion for jewellery – human women wore it to disguise themselves as Others, as witches. In less enlightened times a woman could find it useful to be regarded as a witch.
In fact, even nowadays it can be pretty handy…
‘How are you?’ I asked Nadya.
‘Fine, Dad,’ my daughter answered.
That’s the only answer she’s ever given me in the last couple of years: ‘Fine’, ‘Okay’, ‘Cool’. It’s her awkward age, I suppose. At ten she used to ask me about everything, and when she was twelve I could still ask her about absolutely anything…
‘An unusual spot for a witches’ Sabbath, isn’t it?’ I asked.
My daughter shrugged. ‘Why do you say that? I think it’s a very good spot. They can’t keep on meeting in Kiev all the time, up on Bald Hill, can they?’
‘There’s the Brocken in Germany too,’ I reminded her.
‘Everywhere has its own Bald Hill,’ Nadya said dismissively. ‘In Moscow the witches meet on the Sparrow Hills… Try to catch me!’
She pushed off with her ski poles and glided down the slope.
We were standing on the crest of a hill. One side of the slope was wild and unkempt, with a scattering of boulders. In some places the wind had blown away the snow to expose the dark underlying rock, and in others it had piled up huge snowdrifts.
On the other side the slope had been cleared and it was covered with a smooth layer of snow. There were snow cannons, long lines of ski-lift pylons and the diminutive figures of skiers and snowboarders slithering down the slope in their bright-coloured outfits. The sun was sinking in the west and the ski lifts were only carrying people down now. It gets dark quickly up in the mountains, and in half an hour all these tourists would be taking showers and getting changed, and an hour or so after that they’d be eating dinner and drinking beer.
It was a small ski resort on the border between Austria and Italy, set in the narrow valley of a mountain pass, with a host of hotels, boarding houses and restaurants, huddled up together along the road that ran through the valley. There were ski lifts everywhere, on the west and the east sides of the valley. This place probably lived a different life in the summer, based on ecological tourism, with long hikes along the slopes to collect edelweiss flowers and admire the cows.
But the resort only really came alive in the winter.
And when the witches held a convention here.
I had been planning to go to the meeting alone, as Gesar had told me to. But at the very last moment, when Nadya and Svetlana had already been allocated a room on one of the basement levels of the Night Watch building, the plans had been changed. Zabulon showed up, saying that he had been contacted by one of the senior witches in the Conclave, and the witches ‘wanted Gorodetsky to bring his daughter with him’. Half an hour was spent arguing about security, until the Inquisition guaranteed Nadya’s safety (although, to be quite honest, I wasn’t sure that the entire might of the Inquisition, including all its spells of prohibition and the artefacts in its special repositories, would be capable of destroying the Two-in-One). Then it took another half-hour for Nadya and me to persuade Svetlana. She responded to the suggestion of letting Nadya accompany me to the Conclave with the same suspicion she had shown fifteen years earlier, when I’d offered to feed Nadya from the bottle. Women just don’t believe that men know how to take care of children.
But the invitation from the Conclave was very specific and it couldn’t be interpreted in any other way. Anton Gorodetsky and his daughter Nadezhda. No more, no less.
In the end there wasn’t enough time to get to Austria by using any human form of transport. And the area immediately surrounding the hotel where the witches had gathered for their Conclave had been securely closed against magical portals. I had never seen Gesar and Zabulon so annoyed and embarrassed as when I asked them to open a portal directly into the hotel.
They couldn’t do it.
And neither could the Inquisition.
The witches had used some special spells and artefacts of their own, making it impossible to travel directly to their Sabbath. Our journey acquired the surreal air of a James Bond adventure as ski suits and equipment were brought for Nadya and me.
We had been on skiing trips before, and this was a simple piste, only ‘light red’ in the local classification, well-tended and clearly marked. Even so, I took precautions on the descent, using magic to calculate the probabilities as I followed Nadya down. I was slightly alarmed to realise that my body had begun to forget its downhill-skiing skills. There was one spot where I would have gone tumbling head over heels, another where a wild young snowboarder would have cut in on my slow, clumsy advance and knocked me over, and a third spot where I would have become overconfident as I started remembering a thing or two and increased my speed, going rolling down the slope again…