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.

Chapter 3

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.

I was walking along in a crowd that was moving slowly toward the castle on the hill. No, I wasn’t planning to study the austere dwelling of the proud kings of Scotland. I just wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere of the city.

I liked it. Like any tourist center, its festive atmosphere was a little bit forced and feverish, encouraged by alcohol. But even so, the people around me were enjoying life and smiling at one another. For the time being they had set their cares aside.

Cars didn’t often come this way, and they were mostly taxis. Most of the people were walking. The streams moving in the direction of the castle and back intermingled, swirling together in quiet whirlpools around the performers doing their thing in the middle of the street; thin rivulets trickled into the pubs, filtered in through the doorways of the shops. The boundless river of humanity.

A wonderful place for a Light Other. But a tiring one too.

I turned off into a side street and strolled gently downhill toward the gorge that separated the old and new parts of the city. There were pubs here, too, and souvenir shops. But there weren’t so many tourists, and the frantic carnival rhythm slowed down a bit. I checked my map-it was simpler than using magic-and moved in the direction of a bridge over the broad gorge that had once been Nor Loch. The gorge had now passed through its final stage of evolution and been transformed into a park, a place where local people and tourists who were sick of noise and bustle could take a relaxed stroll.

There were more tourists eddying onto the bridge-boarding the double-decker tour buses, watching the street artists, eating ice cream, pensively studying the old castle on the hill.

And on the grassy lawn there were Cossacks, dancing and waving their swords about.

I gave way to that shamefaced curiosity with which tourists regard their compatriots who are working abroad and moved closer.

Bright red shirts. Broad pants like jodhpurs. Titanium alloy swords, presumably so that they would give off pretty sparks during swordplay and be easier to wave around. Stiff, frozen smiles.

There were four men squatting down and dancing.

And they were talking to one another-with Ukrainian accents, but still in my own native Russian. Although you might say they were using the underground version. In more or less printable form it went something like this:

“Up yours!” one pantomime Cossack dancer spat merrily through his teeth. “Move it, you louse! Keep the rhythm going, you tattered condom!”

“Go to hell!” another man in fancy dress answered. “Quit grousing. Wave those arms about. We’re losing money!”