Thirteen Years Later (63 page)

He picked his knife up off the floor again and examined it, walking contemplatively around behind Kyesha again. This time there was no need for neatness or precision. He flipped the knife
over so that the jagged, toothed edge faced Kyesha’s neck, and grabbed his hair once again.

The blood spilled forth with the same eagerness as before, but now it was of no especial interest to Iuda. He felt its warmth flowing over his hand, but it was hard to distinguish from the folds of flesh that caressed him as his hand moved deeper into the gaping wound. Muscle and sinew yielded easily. Kyesha did not scream, but that was unlikely to be the result of any bravery. It was difficult for a man – or a vampire – to utter any sound with his windpipe severed and his voicebox lolling on his chest.

The bones of Kyesha’s neck proved more tricky. Iuda grabbed the hair tighter and pressed his knee into the back of the neck to brace himself. He could still feel pain in his own neck, where Zmyeevich had tried to kill him, but it was healing. He twisted and sawed with the knife, searching for a way through, but still the bones were too strong. Then suddenly one of the blades found a gap between two vertebrae, and he was through. He felt no more resistance.

Iuda looked down at the creature, but did not see what he had expected. Beheading should have led to instant death and the predictable collapse of the corporal remains to dust. But what Iuda’s eyes saw and what his hands felt was still flesh and blood. He realized he had been too slow. In the time it had taken him to cut through the neck bones, the front of Kyesha’s throat had begun to regrow. The decapitation had to be complete.

It was of little consequence. Iuda reversed the direction of his pressure and, with a flick of his wrist, the opposite edges of the blades cut back through Kyesha’s new-grown flesh with ease. At the same moment his right hand flicked forward as the knife became free, so his left lurched into the air, holding the severed head by its hair. He turned to look at it, but already the face was unrecognizable, falling away as it decayed and revealing a skull which itself crumpled and tumbled to the ground, its broken fragments retaining some slight vestige of shape as they lay in the
grass. The hair entwined round his fingers broke apart and was scattered by the breeze.

Iuda felt a moment of exhilaration, but it was immediately followed by a wave of exhaustion. He was still weak from what he had drunk and what had been drunk from him. He picked up his bag and went over to where he had left the bowl of blood, sitting down on the ground beside it. It was a joy to have the weight off his feet, but his arms still felt heavy as he moved them. He picked up the bowl and swilled its contents around. The blood was still liquid – the only part of a vampire’s body that remained in its original form after the creature’s death, and even then, only if extracted before death.

He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a handful of glass vials. Each already contained a few drops of the liquid – itself extracted from the saliva of a vampire – that would stop the blood from clotting. He poured blood from the bowl into each of them in turn, watching it glisten, almost black in the moonlight. A little of it spilled on to his fingers. The taste for blood he had acquired in those few moments in which he had shared Kyesha’s experience still lingered, but he resisted it, wiping his fingers on the grass instead. He filled almost four of the vials. He should only ever need the first, but one could never tell. He wrapped them carefully in scraps of rag and then put them back in his bag. He still had one dose of Zmyeevich’s own blood, left over from the several he had taken during their plans to induct the tsar. But that blood would not suit his purposes, and might yet be needed to save him from his former ally once again.

He went back over to Kyesha’s remains, now scarcely visible. Only his clothes were left. It would be ridiculous not to take the opportunity to pilfer. He felt through the pockets of the coat. There was a watch, which seemed to be of reasonable quality, and a small number of gold coins. Then, in the side pocket, Iuda found something he could not comprehend. Six roughly shaped items he first took to be stones and then realized were made of
bone. What their purpose might be, he could not fathom, but they had clearly had some significance for Kyesha. He slipped them into his pocket, along with the money and the watch. He could work out what they were for later.

He felt a sudden pain in his neck. He reached up and touched his finger to the bandage. The wound felt sore beneath. The bandage was damp, but not wet. The bleeding had stopped. He reached into the bag again and brought out a small package, wrapped in paper. He opened it. Inside was a small, dark lump of meat:
kishka
– another trick he had learned from Pyotr. To say it was meat was a misnomer; it was a sausage made from congealed pig’s blood. Normally, Iuda would not have willingly chosen to eat it. He was not squeamish about blood in general, but to consume it was a different matter. That was always one of the hardest things about passing himself off as a vampire.

But today, he had to eat it – it was good for him, as his father used to tell him, a long, long time ago. And besides, now that he thought about it, blood didn’t seem unappetizing at all. He wolfed the sausage down in a few bites and followed it with a second. He felt a little better, but still tired. He packed up his things and prepared to set off; a short trek back to Simferopol, thence to hire a horse, and northwards. There were two further matters to be attended to: one might help rebuild his relationship with Zmyeevich; one was purely for himself.

He dragged himself up on to his feet, but instantly felt ill. The loss of blood and the potion he had drunk beforehand combined to make him feel dizzy. He lay back on the frosty grass and let his eyelids droop. A few hours’ sleep there would do him good, despite the cold. He was in no hurry.

It was almost eight o’clock, and the sun was still an hour from rising. Tamara had woken Aleksei early and he had been happy to talk to her alone, letting her mother sleep in. He had spent as much of his time as he could with her in the four days he had had in Moscow – and most of the rest with Domnikiia. Domnikiia
had now woken, and was playing with Toma. Aleksei decided it was time to do some work.

He still had a job to do. Aleksandr was – to all the world – a dead man, but there was still a tsar. Konstantin might not want to carry on using Aleksei in the role his brother had, and Aleksei wasn’t sure he wanted to continue it, but he at least had to put together some sort of documentation summarizing what he knew about the Northern and Southern societies.

He went through to his study and sat at his desk, assembling piles of papers in front of him, but not looking at them. Ever since he had left Taganrog, he had wondered whether it might not be better to let the revolutionaries have their way. A republic might not be the best form of government for Russia, but it would be one in the eye for Zmyeevich – a way of cutting the Gordian Knot. Whatever influence Zmyeevich could then exert on subsequent generations of Romanovs, unpleasant though it might be for them, would have no bearing on the fate of Russia. If that was lost, Zmyeevich might not even bother with his revenge. Even if the revolutionaries went for the most moderate of their options – a constitutional monarchy – it could so weaken the role of the tsar that Zmyeevich would find him useless.

The problem was, not all of them were so moderate, particularly not in the south. There might not
be
subsequent generations of Romanovs – certainly not from the core of the family. Look what had happened to the Bourbons, those who had not got away. Aleksei had been eight years old when the French Revolution began. Four years after that marked the start of the Reign of Terror. The French themselves called it, more succinctly,
la Terreur
. That was when Petersburg had started to fill with émigrés fleeing for their lives. It was not their sudden poverty or their fall from grace that had terrified the young Aleksei; it was the stories they told. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the bizarrely named Committee of Public Safety, which believed that somehow the safety of the public was an issue unconnected to the safety of individual members of that public.

They saw the guillotine as a clean, efficient, modern way of carrying out their year-long massacre, with an efficacy which only lawyers the likes of Robespierre could achieve – and take pride in. In Russia, the revolutionaries were more poets and soldiers than lawyers, but Aleksei knew what would follow them. At best, it could only mean their killing would be less well organized, but still they would massacre any they thought to be enemies of the state, and since they
were
the state – wasn’t it a French king who had said that? – that made them free to kill anyone they regarded as an enemy of themselves.

Perhaps the very inefficiency of the current batch of Russian revolutionaries would mean they could not kill so many with such a degree of sanitization, and that therefore the people, literally revolted, would turn against them. The French idea of death carried out by a machine was vital to the success of the whole venture. But compared to a Russia like that, being ruled by a tsar who was himself ruled by Zmyeevich seemed almost desirable – at least a sane form of tyranny.

Aleksei laughed out loud. It was a sorry state of reasoning that led him to such a conclusion. But the fault was in assuming there could only either be one outcome or another. There were two much more desirable possibilities: either to let the revolutionaries found a constitutional monarchy; or to defeat them, let Konstantin reign as tsar, and go on to defeat Zmyeevich when the time came. He’d beaten him once, when he had only just discovered what it was Zmyeevich was attempting. In future he, or whoever he chose to pass his knowledge on to, would be better prepared.

But who would that person be? It was a cruel chalice and a bitter poison to pass on to a child. Could he do that to Dmitry? He would have no desire to protect a tsar. But in any case it was not a matter that needed considering now. What mattered now was the immediate threat to Konstantin.

Aleksei pulled the papers towards him and started sorting through them, choosing which he would hand over intact to the representatives of the new regime, which he would summarize
and which he would leave out. It would take all day just to do that.

‘Can you come and play?’

He turned. Tamara’s face was grinning through the door. It would be so easy to say yes, but this had to be done – and she had to learn that sometimes she couldn’t have what she wanted.

‘I’m sorry, my darling,’ he said. ‘Not just now.’

Toma ran back into the other room. Aleksei heard her voice as she went, speaking to her mother. ‘I told you he’d say no,’ she said, with an air of smugness. It looked like she wasn’t the only lady in the family who had yet to learn she couldn’t always have what she wanted. He turned back to his papers.

The one on top concerned the poet Aleksandr Sergeivich Pushkin. Aleksei moved it swiftly into a pile he would not be showing to anyone – he would burn them, most likely. Pushkin had a revolutionary spirit, but it manifested itself only in what he wrote, never in what he did. He was a better poet than Ryleev and a worse rebel – he would not have managed to kill a dozen in twenty years, with or without a guillotine, unless each one had challenged him to a duel.

Underneath that was a small paper envelope. Aleksei wondered for a moment what it was, and then remembered with a shudder. It was where he had placed the two fingers Kyesha had given him, the last time they had met in Moscow. It seemed a little crushed by the papers on top of it. Would a sensation as mild as that be transmitted to Kyesha, wherever in the world he might now be?

He picked up the envelope. It felt surprisingly light. He opened it and looked inside. There were no fingers. God forbid Tamara should have found them. But the desk had been locked all the time Aleksei had been away – and Domnikiia would not have let the little girl near it. What if Valentin Valentinovich had taken them? It was he who had allowed Aleksei the use of his desk – along with this section of the house – and had given him the keys. He might well have kept a spare set. Aleksei could only laugh at
what his host might think at finding a pair of severed fingers in his desk. What if he had taken them out into the sun?

But when he looked inside the envelope once again, he saw that it was not empty. He tipped the contents out on to the desk. It was a dusty, grey powder – not a huge amount, but instantly recognizable for what it was: the final, rotted remains of a dead vampire. It had been over fifteen years since Kyesha had abandoned his humanity and become a
voordalak
. Now that he was dead, those years of decay had acted upon his remains in an instant. There was little left of him. It was hard to mourn his passing, but it was difficult, unlike with most of them, not to regret his becoming a vampire. Clearly Kyesha had chosen the path he had taken, but in their conversations there had been no sign of the base malice Aleksei had known in the Oprichniki. Even so, he knew Kyesha had killed, and would have killed again, and so ultimately his death had to be applauded.

There was one concern though. Aleksei could not be sure – there were a hundred ways in which he could have died, at the hands of any righteous Christian he might have chosen to attack – but Aleksei felt it in his bones. Wherever it had taken place, it had been brought about by the man for whom Kyesha had himself been searching.

It had been done by Iuda.

A
LEKSEI HAD BEEN IN MOSCOW FOR NINE DAYS, UNDECIDED
as to what to do. It was easy to assert that action must be better than inaction, but to do the wrong thing now could bring disaster, and change the future of Russia for ever. Even if he simply went to the wrong place, he might find himself too distant from events when they finally occurred to have any influence over them. True, little was likely to happen in Moscow, but Moscow was at least reasonably central. The seat of government was to the north, in Petersburg; Tsar Konstantin was to the west, in Warsaw, though presumed to be preparing for his return, if he hadn’t already set out; the Southern Society, and its revolutionary fervour, was to the south, around Kiev. Minsk was the city most ideally positioned between those three potential powder kegs, but Aleksei was damned if he was going to Minsk.