The People's Will (46 page)

Mihail studied the scene. A sense of revulsion and nausea filled him as he looked. He knew that now was his chance. Never again would he find the two so vulnerable. Zmyeevich’s back was turned to him, his mind focused on the obscene ritual they were performing. Mihail could plunge his wooden dagger into the creature’s heart and still be able to deal with Dmitry using the crossbow. But he felt unaccountably sickened. Why the thought of a vampire drinking the blood of another vampire should revolt him so, he had no idea. He must steel himself to his task.

But then his gaze fell upon Dmitry again and he knew he was too late.

Dmitry’s eyes were open, and stared directly at Mihail. There was no doubt that he saw him, but he made no acknowledgement of it. He simply continued consuming the blood of the monster that lay upon him, and enjoying it too. And the worst of it was – Mihail could see it in his face – that the whole thing was made more pleasurable by the very fact that they were being watched.

Mihail would not give them the satisfaction. He pushed himself up on to his feet and fled.

NOW HE COULD
drink as he should – from the throat. He had the strength in his jaw for his teeth to pierce her skin and he had begged her and at last she had succumbed.

He had lungs now too, which he could fill with air thanks to his diaphragm. Below that, it was still an obscene hash of half-formed organs; something that might become a stomach, a few lengths of intestine, not yet comprising a whole. When she left him alone he would watch as they formed and developed, the half-grown parts never seeking one another, but somehow knowing when they touched and joining into something greater. Even his other arm was beginning to lengthen and grow stronger, but still he did not have an elbow.

It was all down to her – to her blood. Each night she gave him a share of what was hers, and each day she found some way to recuperate. Her friends must suspect she was pregnant, the amount extra she would have to eat. It was much the same process: she ate and produced blood, which she used to nurture a creature that she loved, a creature that grew each day and would soon be reborn. The only difference was that she needed no umbilical cord to transfer to him the blood that he craved.

Once she had been persuaded, she was pleased to do it. She unbuttoned her collar as before to reveal her neck, and then leaned over him. There was no need now for artificial blades to break the skin, his teeth were enough. As her flesh yielded she pulled away, not out of want of love for him, but from an instinctive human fear that deep down knew the nature of a vampire. He was ready; his one working hand held her by the back of her
head, its fingers caressing her blonde curls and pulling her back down to him.

She squirmed and moaned as he drank, but did not pull away again, though she was still stronger than him. Now that he had the beginnings of organs that could properly digest it, each mouthful of her blood did him so much more good than before. But that did not concern him – his desire was solely to slake his thirst. Nature made him enjoy drinking so that he would be nourished, but he was not yet well enough for such rationality to prevail. He would drink and go on drinking until she was dry and lay dead, her body sprawled across his torso. It would be the end of him, since he would no longer have her to feed from, but he did not care.

Thankfully, she did. She was his conscience and his salvation. All too soon he felt her pull away from him. He tried to hold on with his single hand, but he could not. Even if he had cast aside the precious object he had held in his palm for as long as he could remember, he had no strength to hold her. In an instant he could see her again, kneeling above him, her hand clutching at a bandage which she held to her neck. She looked pale and faint, but she would survive.

‘Please,’ he said softly, more softly than was necessary, considering the new strength of his lungs. But he knew humility was more likely to persuade her.

She shook her head, rubbing her neck against the bandage and causing a little blood to ooze from under it. ‘Next time,’ she said.

He smiled meekly and nodded, thinking of next time. Involuntarily the stump of his growing right arm twitched. She saw it too, and understood his thoughts – as he drank she had shared a fragment of his mind. Next time, he would be strong enough to hold her.

Mihail was bewildered. He could not make sense of what he had seen. What he knew of the
voordalak
he knew from folklore, and from what his mother had learned – both first-hand and from Aleksei – and from what they had discovered from their simple, rudimentary experiments. And of the idea that one vampire should ever choose to drink the blood of another he knew nothing.

But there was a greater experimenter than either he or Tamara, and he was a meticulous note-taker. Mihail scoured Iuda’s journals for an explanation of what he had witnessed. The books were not indexed, but were divided into chapters, one of which, though by far the longest, also seemed to be the most apposite.

On Vampires and Blood Magic

Iuda began with an immediate apology for the title, firmly asserting that there was no magic involved, merely the laws of science, but that the broad set of phenomena he was discussing was regarded both by vampires and by their adversaries – typically men of the church – as being magical.

Mihail read on avidly. Much of what he saw, he knew already. The first subtitle was ‘On Induction’.

It featured a long discussion of the situation in which the Romanov family found itself, with references to similar observations in less august bloodlines. The basic facts were simple. Because of the blood Zmyeevich had taken from Pyotr, any one of Pyotr’s descendants was at risk. If he – or she – should drink Zmyeevich’s blood and die with it in his body, then he would be reborn a vampire. Like any vampire, he would have a mental link with his creator, Zmyeevich. But in facing a mind as strong as Zmyeevich’s he was more likely to become the vampire’s slave than his brother.

Even before that, the mental link was there, but only in one direction. Zmyeevich could project the influence of his mind towards any carrier of the Romanov blood. He could not force that Romanov to act against his will, but he could communicate with him, influence him, scare him. Thus it had been that Zmyeevich had persuaded Aleksandr I to travel to Taganrog, and thence to Chufut Kalye. The only good news for the Romanovs was that this power could be exerted only once in each generation. His manipulation of Aleksandr meant that his brother Nikolai, even when tsar, was quite free of it. It meant Zmyeevich must choose carefully.

The last comment of the section was an example of why such care was needed. The current Aleksandr’s eldest son, Nikolai, who
would one day have become tsar, had died young. If Zmyeevich had begun to work on him, his efforts would have been wasted and he would not be able to redirect them towards the new tsarevich, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich.

Here Iuda had scribbled a footnote, short but chilling.

I now have reason to believe that Z. deliberately brought about the death of N.A.R., knowing he will have better luck with A.A.R.

The initials were easy to decipher.

The next section was far shorter. Mihail skimmed through it quickly. It did not seem to apply to the current situation, however intriguing the subtitle might be.

On Anastasis

I have recently heard of a legend not uncommon among Wallachian vampires, though less widespread elsewhere, which, if true, would add another level to the bond between a human and a vampire in the circumstances of the Romanovs and Zmyeevich, or indeed any other pairing where the human’s blood has been drunk by the vampire, either directly or through descent, but for whom the process of induction has not been completed. I have long known that if the vampire were then to die there is still the possibility (as I am living proof) that induction may be achieved, but equally the human, if left unmolested, may go on to experience a natural death. However, it seems that under certain conditions the human may be susceptible to drinking the vampire’s blood not to the end of themselves becoming transformed but of bringing about a form of parousia with regard to the dead creature. This seems to be a very ancient story, going back to before the time even of Zmyeevich’s human existence as Ţepeş and I can find no vampire who has been eyewitness to it. However, it is an intriguing possibility and clearly an apt subject for experimentation, when circumstances next permit.

The final section contained what Mihail wanted, and explained the bizarre behaviour he had witnessed the previous night. Here the title was ‘On Assimilation’.

Mihail read it through three times. Iuda began with the basics, describing the revulsion that any vampire had for the taste of the blood of its own kind. He described the flavour in great detail, writing from personal experience, though adding how he had grown to regret his actions as he learned the biology behind it. He went on to explain that, as with any unpleasant experience, such as pain or nausea, there was a good reason for it to occur; simply put, it deterred the creature – be he man, vampire or beast – from behaviour which could be damaging to it. Sunlight inflicted pain upon a vampire to persuade him to return to the shade where he would not be burned. The taste of vampire blood was foul to dissuade him from drinking it and suffering consequences perhaps worse still than being roasted in the sun.

Iuda went on to describe how he had been puzzled by the eleven creatures that accompanied him to Russia back in 1812. He referred to them as
oprichniki
, just as Aleksei did, though acknowledged that he had not coined the term himself. It had always been puzzling to him why they and other vampires that he had met in Wallachia were such feral creatures compared to others of their breed who might pass themselves off in the best of human company. He mentioned the first vampire he had ever encountered, a French aristocrat by the name of Honoré Philippe Louis d’Évreux, whom he described as an intelligent and entertaining interlocutor. That description could certainly not be applied to the
oprichniki
. But it came down to the exchange of blood between vampires.

When Mihail had finished he understood it all, and realized that in his knowledge he now had a wedge to drive between Zmyeevich and Dmitry. If he could gain Dmitry’s acquiescence, or even his assistance, then it might be possible to blunt Zmyeevich’s power over the Romanovs. What he would then do with Dmitry he did not know. It depended how far things had gone.

Even so, taking on Zmyeevich would be absurdly dangerous, but Iuda’s journals had provided Mihail with an idea as to how he might save not just his own soul. He went over to the windowsill
and picked up the cyanide-filled hazelnut that Kibalchich had given him. The People’s Will had made suicide its ultimate defence against its enemies. Maybe that wasn’t such a stupid idea after all.

A pretty one would be better, but she didn’t have to be anything special. Someone who would willingly do what he told her, and then pretend she did it unwillingly. Halvard Karlsson had been travelling for weeks. His captain had planned to make it into Petersburg before the Gulf of Finland froze over, but there had been delay after delay and they hadn’t even reached Tallinn when winter set in. But the cargo had to get through, so they’d hired sleds and loaded the goods on to them and the sailors – Halvard among them – had swapped navigating the sea for navigating the ice. But at last they had made it, delivered the cargo and been handsomely paid. Halvard did not know whether he would try to return overland to the stranded ship, or wait until the thaw came. But for now he was in the city, he had money and he had one thing on his mind.

The single word of Russian that he knew covered it:
shlyooha
. He knew the equivalent in several languages. He said it to one of the men at the docks, who’d gabbled on in Russian but managed to convey vague directions that Halvard should head south, across the river. He said it to a few others when he got lost. Some had frowned, one man had tried to hit him, but at last he’d met a man who spoke a little German and had told him, with a wink, to follow the canal until it started to curve down towards the Haymarket. Around there, on the embankment or in the side streets, was where he would find them. When he did find them, he was spoilt for choice; some young, some older, all eager once he showed them his purse.

There was a problem though. Halvard liked to talk. You could show them what you wanted them to do, but it wasn’t the same. These girls all spoke Russian – a few of them French, but that was no help to Halvard. He did find one who said she was born in Göteborg, and he believed it from the accent, but that had obviously been a good few decades ago. He’d got the money to do better than that.

Then he saw one that really took his eye. She was older than
some, in her mid-twenties, but as long as they were half his age Halvard wasn’t going to make a fuss. She was dressed more soberly than the other girls, with only a pretty scarf tied snugly around her neck providing any adornment. It was the gleaming blonde hair that made him think she might even be Swedish, but when he spoke to her she didn’t understand a word. He was about to move on but she was a real treat, so he tried again in German. She knew enough to name a price, to which he eagerly agreed.

‘Where shall we go?’ he asked. In some cities the whores would do their business in an alleyway, but not in Petersburg – not in winter.

‘I know a place,’ she said.

‘Nearby?’

‘A little way.’

She led him away from the canal, along a grubby street. As far as he could tell they were heading back towards the docks. Soon the way was blocked by another canal – the city was full of them – and they turned to walk alongside it.

‘How much further?’ he asked.

‘Not too far.’ She glanced at him, worried that she might lose the business. She stopped. ‘Don’t worry – it’ll be worth it.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled off his mitten, then thrust the hand inside the flap of her coat, down between her legs. He squeezed, but there was nothing much to feel beneath the layers of clothing. Even so, it showed willing, and the glint in her eye as she held his hand there for a few seconds showed that she knew what she was about.