CHAPTER XIII

VOORDALAK!'

The word had found its way from my deepest childhood memories to my vocal cords before my adult mind had time to pour scorn upon it. I heard the whispered sound and only then realized that it was I who had spoken it.

Voordalak – the vampire. Now I remembered the word in the voice that had first spoken it to me. It was an instantly vivid memory: the old house in Petersburg that belonged to my grandmother and in which she had in her old age and her diminishing wealth retreated into just a few rooms; the taste and the texture of the sweet pirozhki of which she maintained a seemingly unending supply; the children gathered around her – myself and my two brothers and various cousins whom I could never quite keep track of – listening to her stories.

My grandmother was the dichotomy that lay at the heart of the Russian spirit made flesh. That at least, and using somewhat different words, was what my father, her son, had brought me up to believe and what I did believe. Despite the dilution of her family's capital over the generations, she maintained an unshakeable belief in etiquette, in the keeping up of a demeanour that fitted one's station and in the God-given order of society and of the world in general. And yet beneath that outward pride lay the intellect of a peasant. There was no stupidity to her, merely a complete lack of any useful education, and worse than that – far ' worse – a lack of any hunger to be educated. She had inherited her wealth from her parents and they from their parents and her knowledge of the world came to her, unamended, by the same route. Just as she, sitting in the few habitable rooms of her once grand house, with only one ageing maid to serve her, failed to realize that wealth did not last for ever but must be continually renewed, so she failed to understand that knowledge itself must be renewed, and not simply kept. The two concepts – in both success and failure – were inseparable. It was not for nothing that Christ had chosen the word 'talent' in His parable.

And so it was entirely in keeping with her own upbringing that my grandmother passed on her knowledge to her children and later to her grandchildren. From her I learned vast amounts of the history of the empire which I have never doubted, and even more about religion, which I constantly and fruitlessly have. But her greatest joy, her greatest expression of love for us, was in her attempts to terrify us. She told us stories, with the same personal confidence with which she described Tsar Pyetr or Jesus, of all the horrors – both natural and supernatural – that could ever be expected to keep a child awake at night. She told of witches, of wolves, of plagues of rats and, which scared me most of all, of the voordalak – the undead vampire.

My father quickly put me straight on the matter. Long before I was born – having seen the luxury in which some of his more distant cousins lived, while he had to work to maintain the most modest of households – he had realized the flaws in his mother's view of the world. He knew that his family would have to create its own wealth and that to do so, it would have to acquire an education. He had put the stories of vampires out of his mind, and when he discovered that I had heard them too, he put them out of mine. He found money to pay for some sort of education for me and each of my brothers, and I was the one who was lucky, or unlucky, enough for that education to be a military one. All thoughts of vampires, and witches, wolves and plagues of rats disappeared from my mind and I became a man.

My grandmother had died when I was seven, but it seemed she had been better read than I had given her credit for. 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.' St Ignatius had said it and, it seemed, my grandmother had known it. For in that instant when I had seen Matfei down in the cellar hunched over the soldier's body, everything that my grandmother had told me had flooded back into my mind like an invading army. Now I had seen it with my own eyes, the conviction I had had as a child, the conviction that my grandmother knew she had instilled into me, came back to me with renewed strength. These creatures truly existed. I had seen it. And with that knowledge came another certainty – again imbued in me by my grandmother as an indisputable truth – that such creatures were evil and must be destroyed.

And all that memory and all that knowledge returned to me in the moment it took me to listen to a single word, whispered on my own lips.

'Voordalak!'

Matfei heard it too. He raised himself from his grisly meal and looked towards the open trapdoor. I took a rapid step back into the shadows. I could still see the bottom half of Matfei's body, but not his face. He hesitated, wondering whether he truly had heard a noise and whether it posed any danger to him. He quickly chose the path of discretion and I saw his feet heading up the cellar steps and into the tavern above. He slammed the door behind him.

I dropped down into the cellar and examined the soldier's defiled body. He was most certainly dead. His wide eyes gazed unseeing at the ceiling above him and in the murky half-light of the lantern his skin was ashen, its colour drained from his body into the pool that stained the floor around him – and drained too into Matfei. The wounds to his throat were horrendous. Only gaping red caverns remained where there had once been flesh. His crushed voicebox remained in situ, but on either side the muscles of the neck had been wrenched away so deeply that the two cavities were joined together – I could, had I so desired, have placed two fingers in one wound and seen them emerge from the other.

I heard footsteps in the room above and remembered that the creature that had done this was still in the building. There was nothing that could be done to assist the dead man with whom I shared the cellar, but plenty I could do to avenge him, for vengeance was my immediate thought, driven into me by my departed grandmother, regardless of the fact that he was a Frenchman – my enemy. I climbed back out of the cellar and scampered across the street to hide. I watched the tavern and did not have to wait long to see Matfei emerge cautiously through the main door. He glanced from side to side and then took a few steps towards the open cellar, casting his eyes inside for a moment, but seeing only the remains of what he had left there. It might have been opportune to attack him there and then, but I could not see myself being victorious in such a battle. I was not armed with my sword – that would not have been compatible with my guise of being a butler – and only had a knife, which I had concealed in my coat. Besides, in all of my grandmother's stories, the voordalak rarely responded to the simplistic methods of killing that are so effective on humans.

He set off along the street, heading again to the north-east. He seemed to travel more warily than he had before, though not now concerned for anyone that he might run into ahead of him, but with an eye over his shoulder for fear that he was being followed. I don't think that he ever saw me or heard me, but he knew that there had been someone watching him in the tavern cellar. He also appeared now to be in more of a hurry – his pace was brisk, occasionally breaking into a stumbling run. At first I thought that this was in an effort to escape his pursuer, but as such it seemed ineffectual. Then I realized that it tied in with another piece of folklore that my superstitious grandmother – and how wrong I now knew I was to regard her in that way – had poured into me as a child. Dawn was approaching. The dull red light of the burning city which had filled the sky all night was now being replaced by the half-light of the as yet unrisen sun. Could it be that, as in legend, Matfei had to make his way to some dark resting place; that he would perish if as much as a glimmer of the sun's light fell upon him? 'We sleep by day and kill at night.' Those had been Pyetr's words at our first meeting, three weeks before; words that could easily have come from the lips of my grandmother or of any grandmother as she gave a description to her darling grandchildren of ancient encounters with the dreaded creatures of the night. As a military tactic, it had much to be said for it, imitating the lifestyle taken up by many predatory creatures in the wild. Now it seemed that Matfei and his friends chose that existence not in imitation of the wolves and the bats, but because they – the Oprichniki – were creatures of the wild, bound by nature itself to follow that nocturnal doctrine.

We were now in an area very familiar to me; only two blocks from the house on Degtyarny Lane where I had spent so many happy hours with Domnikiia. I thanked the Lord that she was no longer in the city. But Matfei carried on, through streets already consumed by the great fires, past others that were still ablaze. It was in Gruzinskaya Street, well outside the main sprawl of the city, that he finally showed signs of being home.

It was a small house, far more humble than most of those occupied by the French. From outside I could see the narrow, low windows that let some little light into a cellar for which there was no entrance from the street. Matfei flung himself over the fence into the back yard and, listening to his footfall, I could hear that his path was downwards to the cellar and not upwards to the house. I tried to look into the cellar through those small windows at the front, but could see nothing. They were painted over from the inside or covered with curtains.

I paused for a moment, for the first time since I had seen Matfei in the cellar. What I had seen him doing to that man – and I pushed the image from my mind immediately as I recalled it – was certainly abominable, inhuman even, but I had seen enough of the world to know that humans were quite capable of carrying out inhuman acts. I had witnessed that during those few hours I had spent as a captive of the Turks. But what they or I might be driven to in extremis was not the same as what I had seen Matfei do. And yet in the encroaching light of dawn, the memories of my grandmother's tales began to recede once again. My father's rationality reasserted itself. Perhaps my grandmother was right; there were creatures which drank the blood of men. Perhaps? It was now beyond question – I had witnessed it. But that did not mean that a special word like 'voordalak' needed to be conjured up to describe them. Matfei was just a man – however warped and vile a breed of man he might be. A cannibal is no less of an abomination than a vampire, but it is a much easier concept to handle.

Whatever his nature, it would make no difference to his fate. He had to die, and I would kill him. It did not matter that he was my ally; this was now an issue beyond mere war. That much at least remained from what my grandmother had taught me – a certainty as to what was right and what was wrong, a sense shared by the whole of humanity that in whatever squabbles we have between each other, there are some boundaries that are not crossed. But Matfei's nature did affect the question of how easy he would be to despatch. If he was merely some degenerate specimen of humanity, I would have little trouble with him. If a vampire, then I would have to be more wary. I tried to remember more of the folklore, but I knew that even if I could recall my grandmother's words, I would have no way of separating the kernel of fact from generations of embellishment. I did not want to find myself Matfei's prey simply for believing in some storybook method for despatching a vampire. Nor did I want to hold back from a conventional attack which might in reality prove to be perfectly effective. As so often, I wondered what Maks would have done.

Maks! For him too it did not matter as to the nature of these creatures. I had left him with them, and having seen the way that Matfei had done his work in the cellar, I had no reason to suppose they would have treated Maks any differently. Be they vampires or men, they would have ripped the flesh from his body and devoured it while he still lived. But then another part of the folklore emerged from my memory, and I prayed to God that either my grandmother was wrong or that the Oprichniki were mere men.

I vaulted the fence. The dawn was becoming ever brighter and the birds sang their song of salutation to it with all their might, but it would still be a good five minutes before the sun actually rose. And yet, I wondered, how much reliance could I place in the old legends that these creatures must shrink throughout eternity from the sun? Ultimately, it did not matter. Matfei had to die. All nine of the Oprichniki that remained had to die. And to kill nine I first had to kill one, and Matfei now awaited me at the bottom of those cellar stairs. At least, I hoped it was only Matfei. Did these creatures sleep alone? Might I go down there to find all nine of them waiting to welcome me, aware after my inept attempts the previous night to follow Foma that I was pursuing them? Had Matfei's long journey of butchery across the city been simply a lure to get me to this point so that I might be removed once and for all as an obstacle to their activities?

Beyond the fence, inside a small courtyard, a flight of stone steps led down to the cellar. At the bottom, a closed door hid from me what lay inside. Matfei, for sure, but who else I did not know. I descended on tiptoe and listened at the door. All was silent. I turned the handle and stepped inside.

It was dark, but not pitch black. Some light shone through the open door and the roughly torn cloth that I could see draped across the small, high windows did not completely obliterate the glow of the day awakening outside. The atmosphere was stale and dank, and colder than the air in the street. Within moments my eyes had adjusted to the dim light and I saw what lay in the cellar.

There were two coffins. I call them coffins because of their present usage. They had not been built to be coffins, but simply as large packing cases of the sort often used to transport muskets and other armaments to the front lines. By virtue of their size and shape, however, they sufficed as resting places for these dead creatures. The one furthest from the door was empty. Its lid lay untidily across it, reminding me of an unmade bed and making it easy to see that its owner had not yet returned. The other was neatly closed and therein, I concluded in the absence of any other hiding place, lay Matfei.

I took hold of the lid. It was not locked or restrained in any way and it lifted easily to reveal Matfei's recumbent body. To anyone who did not know the nature of this creature he would have appeared as though dead. Even a physician, who might test his heartbeat or his breathing, would have found no conventional sign of life. Any doubts I might have had now fled. This was no man, however depraved. This was the voordalak. This was the terror of my childhood become real. He lay quite still, his eyelids closed, his arms by his side. He was in many ways much like the soldier whose body he had left in another cellar less than an hour before, but the one difference was in his complexion. Whereas the soldier had been pale – deathly white as is fitting in the dead – Matfei had a warm and ruddy hue. All the colour that had been taken from the soldier had been transferred, through his blood, into the creature that lay dormant before me. And with the colour, the life was also transferred. In nature, one animal may feed on another's flesh; the taking of life is an inevitable consequence. But here in Matfei was a creature that fed directly on the life of others. The eating of flesh and drinking of blood may have been a necessary mechanism – a repugnant mimicry of the Eucharist – but the nutrient that was required was life itself.

I couldn't return that life, or the countless others that Matfei had taken in his time, but in ending his I could at least ensure that there would be no more deaths at his hand. I had with me still, in my pocket, a large folding knife. I took it out and opened it. The blade was easily long enough and strong enough to pierce his heart as he lay there, unaware of my presence, but I hesitated. I had no compunction about taking his life – if it could be so called – but I remembered again the stories of how difficult such monsters could be to kill. A metal blade was useless; every story I had ever heard agreed on that. Or would silver perhaps work? It didn't matter; my blade was made of steel. It had to be a blade of wood – a wooden stake.

I looked around me and my eyes fell upon the lid that I had moments earlier removed from Matfei's coffin and leaned against the wall. Would that do? Didn't I recall that it couldn't be just any wood, but had to be hawthorn? The packing-case lid was certainly not made from hawthorn. And how could I get a usable stake from the flat lid? And where should I stab Matfei? My grandmother's words began to come back clearly – too clearly. I could remember with certainty that in some stories the voordalak had to be impaled through the heart, in others through the mouth. Could both be right? Was either?

I looked down again at the knife in my hands. It felt solid and comforting. I had used it to kill in the past. Surely, whatever manner of creature Matfei was, he was subject to nature's laws. To have his heart pierced, whatever the material that did it might be, must destroy him. I raised the blade and turned back towards my quarry.

Matfei's fist came down sharply on my hand, knocking the knife to the ground. He was standing beside his coffin, just inches from me, evidently awakened by my presence. He shoved my chest with both hands, exerting a herculean strength which flung me across the room and into the coffin lid, smashing it into pieces. I struggled to my feet and stood, leaning against the wall, gasping to recover the wind that had been knocked out of me.

'So,' he said in his thickly accented French, 'the Russian commander has decided he's had enough of his underling, has he?' He strode towards me menacingly as he spoke, imbued with a new self-confidence that I had not seen in any of them before. His eyes were filled with a fire of sneering hatred which was directed solely at me. 'I'm surprised you'd stoop to getting your hands dirty.' He was in front of me again now and grabbed my lapels, hurling me across the room and into another wall. 'Why not just hire somebody else to kill us once we've killed the French for you? I saw the way you and your friends sniggered at the master when he spoke to you – like he was some old fool – some foreigner who didn't deserve to be in your beautiful city.'

He had crossed the room to me again and this time he struck me across the jaw with the back of his hand. The blow had the same casual might that I had seen him display earlier. It knocked me back into the corner, amongst the shattered remains of his coffin lid. In the face of his strength, I was helpless. At the farmhouse near Borodino, I had witnessed the Oprichniki use speed to capture their prey. In the streets and houses of Moscow it had been stealth. Here I found that Matfei needed neither; his physical power alone was more than enough for him to subdue me. But as if to prove that even this would not be the ultimate instrument of my death, he bared his teeth, still stained with the blood he had drawn at the throats of his earlier victims. His canines, as folklore tells, were bigger than those of a human, but were not, as I had imagined in my childhood, the sharp, precise tools of a surgeon. They were the teeth of a dog, designed more to tear than to pierce.

'You people think you are so refined, with your beauty and your love,' he continued as he approached me once again. I was surprised by this unsuspected feeling of pent-up loathing he had for me. 'But Dmitry Fetyukovich was right; you don't have the stomach to do what we do and you don't have the guts to stop us.'

A tiny part of me wanted to hear him out, not out of politeness, but out of a desperate hunger to discover what could be in the mind of a creature such as this. The struggle for my life, however, was of a greater importance, and now seemed to be my best opportunity. My aim was no longer to kill, but simply to survive; and survival meant flight, for which I needed to get him as far away from the door as possible.

I picked up the broken half of the coffin lid and held it in front of me with both hands, as if intending to use it as a shield. Then I dropped it downwards so that its jagged broken edge pointed towards Matfei as a single row of sharp, wooden teeth. At the same instant I launched myself up off the floor and out of the corner towards him. The upward impact of the serrated edge of the heavy lid into his chest caught him off balance and actually lifted him from the floor momentarily. I carried on running, gathering momentum and pushing him across the room. Had he once found a foothold, he might have been able to use his huge strength against me, but with his feet trailing along the ground, unable to find a purchase, there was nothing he could do.

His back hit the opposite wall and he came to a sudden halt. The coffin lid, and myself with it, came to a halt a fraction of a second later, but in that fraction, the heavy wooden board had travelled far enough to crush his chest. Splinters of wood had penetrated between his shattered ribs and into the organs beneath. Every sense told me to flee, but instead I stood there panting, leaning against the lid with all my weight to pin him against the wall. His head was slumped on to his chest and for a moment I thought he was dead. Then with a swift movement his head snapped upward and I again saw the glare of his hate-filled eyes. He pressed his arms against the wall behind him and, despite all the force I could summon against him, began to push his body away from it. Then, with a look of sudden surprise, he weakened and fell back. The wooden shards that permeated his chest embedded themselves just a little further as the heavy lid followed the motion of his body. I wasn't sure whether his final spasm had been the writhing of a dying animal or that as a result of his movement some tiny splinter had penetrated that vital fraction further into his heart, but now he hung limply and moved no more.

I held my breath, fearing that he might once again revive and avenge himself, and unsure of how to determine if he was truly dead. My uncertainty was unnecessary. Proof of his death soon came in an unexpected but unmistakable fashion. His whole body underwent an almost imperceptibly gradual transformation. One could more easily have captured the movement of the hands of a clock than to have noted any specific event of change in him. And yet within two minutes, the corpse had dehydrated before my eyes. The texture of his skin altered from marble to chalk; his hair from silk to cotton; his eyes from glass to ice. Every physical quality became an unconvincing imitation of what it had once been, just as in his undead life, his whole existence was an imitation of the man he had once been. At the moment of his death the creature before me, however gruesome and horrific, had displayed the richness and vibrancy of an oil painting. But now, though it was of the same scene, it was as though the oil had been replaced by watercolour. The subject was identical, but the medium had changed.

I relaxed my pressure on the wooden lid between us and the depth of penetration of the desiccation became clear. The body had no integrity left in it whatsoever. Every bone, every hair, every sinew had become dust. The dust had remained at the same point in space as the element of the body from which it had decayed, since it had had no impetus to move, but at that slight movement of the wooden guillotine that bisected the body, it began to fall away. His legs and arms and the lower half of his torso crumbled to the ground in an ashen pile, spilling out of his now shapeless garments like flour from a ruptured sack. I was left face to face with the parched bust of Matfei. A head and shoulders that rested on top of the instrument of his death, as true to life as any marble Caesar that has ever been unearthed, but nothing like as permanent. It took me a few moments to relax, to realize that he was dead beyond any resurrection, but finally I stepped back and let the wooden lid drop to the floor. As it fell, so did the last remnants of Matfei, not to shatter as they hit the ground, but before even reaching it, dispersed by the air through which they fell. As the last of his clothing hit the ground, a final puff of dust erupted from the chimney formed by the collar of his coat and then he was, beyond any doubt, no more.

I sank to the floor, flinging my head backwards with an urgent requirement to breathe deeply. The tension in my muscles hesitantly began to die away as my body came to understand that the fight was over. I looked across to where Matfei had perished, to where the body would have lain had this been any ordinary death, and as I did so I felt uneasy. Something was missing. Something that should have been there was not there. The body itself was obviously one thing that should have been there, but that was not it. It was not something missing from the room, but something missing from me. I felt absolutely no sensation of regret. One might expect that a soldier of more than ten years' standing, used to killing, has long passed the stage in his life when he regrets the death of his enemy, and to some extent this was true. In battle, when the enemy is remote, separated by the range of a cannonball or a musket shot, then killing is a mechanical action – the pulling of a trigger or the lighting of a fuse. Sometimes those actions cause death and sometimes, when the shot misses, they don't. Even when swords are drawn in battle, the enemy is faceless and it is difficult to say, at the end of it all, whom exactly one has despatched.

But that was not the kind of soldiery in which I had become involved. Many of the deaths I had caused had been personal, as this had been. Some had been men that I had been spying on, who had turned round to discover me following them and against whom I had to defend myself. Others I had marked out to kill, studying the details of their lives and their routine before striking. In every case I had known what I had done was right, that their deaths were necessary to my survival or for the benefit of Russia, but always I had regretted that there had not been some other way, that years before some twist of fate had not put the man in the situation where I had to kill him.

With Matfei, however, the killing had been a pleasure. There was no niggling wish that fate might not have caused our paths to cross, but quite the reverse. I was glad to have been there; glad to have been the instrument of his death. The inhumanity that I had perceived in the Oprichniki now made complete sense. Inhumanity was their most telling quality – and it cut both ways. It was inhumanity that allowed them to kill with such ease, with such determination and without scruple. They had at some point in their lives found a way to amputate their humanity, seeing it as a hindrance to what they desired to achieve. But having lost the restraint of humanity, they had also lost its protection. They had lost that secret Masonic sign of recognition that one human sees in another and gives him pity – holds him back from killing if there is any other way. Matfei may have been freed from any qualm about killing a man, but with it he paid the price that any man who knew his nature would have no qualm about destroying him.

Perhaps it was less complex than that. Perhaps the reason that I did not regret Matfei's death was simply that I had not witnessed it. Matfei had died many years before and far, far away, when he had first been transformed into what he had become. The rapid physical decay of his remains, to which I had just been witness, was merely the instant release of the years of accumulated decay since he had first died. Whether at his true death he had willingly chosen the undead path that his body had taken, or whether it had been forced upon him, I did not know. On that issue hinged the whole question of whether he merited any pity at all.

A sound above me interrupted my contemplation. A booted foot smashed through one of the high, narrow windows that opened on to the street. A voice shouted inside. It was one of the Oprichniki. I did not know which – I found it hard to tell some of them apart by sight, let alone by sound – but he was calling to Matfei. The Oprichnik – the voordalak – slithered through the smashed window feet first, but rather than jumping to the cellar floor (which was more than the height of a man below the window) he hung there, supporting his entire weight on one arm and using the other to grab hold of something he had left outside. I could see now that it was Varfolomei.

Having found his grip, Varfolomei finally dropped to the ground, bringing with him through the window the inert body of a soldier. The dark-green uniform revealed it to be an Italian – one of the many non-French nationals that made up almost half the Grande Armée. Varfolomei grasped him firmly by the collar of his coat. As the body fell, Varfolomei lost hold of it, and the soldier (a Carabinier, if I judged right, who could not have been more than seventeen) slammed to the ground. He groaned and tried to turn on his side. As I had seen before, the Oprichniki preferred their meals still to have a little life remaining in them.

Varfolomei knelt beside his prey, running his eyes up and down the young man's body and rubbing his own face and neck with a sense of urgent yearning. Again he called out to Matfei, generous enough to share his trophy with his friend.

'Matfei can't hear you, I'm afraid, Varfolomei.' I spoke with a confidence born out of my earlier battle, but not justified by the luck of my victory.

Varfolomei turned and rose to a crouched position, poised for an attack. He was, I think, the youngest of all the Oprichniki. That is, the youngest in appearance and therefore the youngest when he first met his death. Once preserved in that state he might have wandered the earth for centuries – longer even than any of the others – or for mere months. It was impossible to tell – and all guesswork on my part.

'Where is Matfei?' he asked.

I nodded towards the mound of clothes that lay discarded against the wall, coated in the powdery residue that was all there was of Matfei. 'Don't you recognize him?'

Varfolomei walked over and examined what remained of his comrade. His lip curled in an expression of distaste that was just what one might see when a human comes across the rotting carcass of an animal. There was a visceral disgust, but no sense of spiritual sympathy with the living being out of which those remains were formed. To me Matfei was merely dust; a dry powder that would soon be dispersed by the wind. To Varfolomei it was a memento mori, and his mood suddenly changed to one of devastation. He sank to his knees and picked up a handful, letting it run away through his open fingers as he inspected it in a hopeless search for some hint of remnant life.

'They told me I would live for ever,' he announced.

'Is that what attracted you to it?' I asked him.

'No. They said I would know no fear. Fear was my worst enemy.' He glanced towards me. I could not have been a very intimidating sight. I was unarmed and exhausted, my body slumped forwards and my arms resting on my knees. I could scarcely lift my head to speak to him.

'Fear of what?' I asked. Behind him, I saw the Italian roll on to his front and raise himself to his knees.

'Of consequence,' replied Varfolomei, with an ambiguity that implied he had thought about this many times before and chosen the word with care. The Italian was on his feet and was creeping towards Varfolomei with drawn sword.

'So you fear consequences?'

'I used to fear the opinions of my peers.' He raised his eyes from the dust in his hand and looked at me. 'Now I have new peers.' His hand slammed out to his side, hitting the Carabinier's chest and knocking him to the floor. It was a moment's distraction for Varfolomei, but long enough for me to shoot out my hand and grab what I needed.

'People like you used to despise me,' continued Varfolomei, rising to his feet, 'and I can tell you still do. But do you know what's changed? I don't care any more.' Behind him the soldier had risen to his feet. He did not bother to recover his sword, but began to shadow Varfolomei's steps as he approached me, always keeping a safe distance behind.

'You talk as if you care,' I said, rising to my feet. The reason that the soldier had not picked up his sword became clear. He was not stalking Varfolomei, but creeping towards the door. Now that he was within reach, he made a dash for it. He made his escape without interruption and we heard his feet race up the steps to freedom.

In his hurry, he had neglected to shut the door behind him. A fragile beam of the dawn's earliest sunlight shone through the door and into the cellar, a little way behind Varfolomei. He glanced behind him and his jaw tightened slightly, almost imperceptibly.

'And there seems to be something else you're frightened of,' I said, taking a step towards him. He could not move away from me for fear of stepping into the sunlight. There was, of course, little reason why he should move away. I could present no threat to him, but the army whose retreat is cut off will always have a greater fear of its attacker.

'It is nothing in comparison to what you have to fear.' There was no false bravado in his voice. He believed it and he was right. I could feel my own pulse in my neck as my heart attempted to prepare me for what was about to come. I took another step forward.

Varfolomei could either retreat or attack – and he could not retreat. I had deprived him of choice, and choice is a potent weapon of war.

Trapped, he launched his attack and threw himself at me with all his strength. I fell backwards, but as I did so, I raised my hand, presenting to his chest the sharp, pointed splinter of wood that I had snatched up earlier.

I hit the floor heavily, banging the back of my head against the ground hard enough that I feared I might lose consciousness, but throughout I kept the wooden stake pointed towards him. He fell upon me like a wild dog, his eyes ablaze with hatred and craving. I saw his mouth wide open, his fang-like canines descending towards my throat, preparing to rip it out, as I had seen Matfei do earlier. Then I felt an aching thump against the right side of my chest, almost like a stab wound, as the momentum of his body imparted itself to the stake and thence into me. But I had the blunt end of the stake to my chest, and although it might bruise, it did not pierce.

Since my body would not yield and nor could the wooden splinter itself, there was only one alternative. Varfolomei's body continued to descend towards me and I felt the wind punched out of me as his full weight landed, but his teeth made no attempt to connect with my throat; his eyes no longer looked on my face with either wrath or hunger. He was already dead. For his body to reach mine, the stake which I held out had been forced to pass through it. I had already learned by Matfei's death that the stake didn't need to be hawthorn; it just needed to pass through the heart. Varfolomei's death was mere confirmation.

I felt the weight of his lifeless body draped on me like an exhausted lover. Almost immediately, the load began to lighten. I heard a hissing sound, like running water – the dusty remains of Varfolomei's decayed body cascading off mine on to the floor. Just as they had with Matfei, the years of decay since his first, true death had come to his body in seconds. His head remained intact for a brief moment longer, his face staring into mine without even those basest and most basic of emotions which the Oprichniki could display in life. Then it collapsed, leaving only his empty clothing clinging to my body and filling my mouth with a dust that I leapt to my feet to spit out, wishing that I had a canteen with me to rinse away the taste. Not that it had much taste. It was the concept that I needed to wash away.

I left the cellar quickly, walked up the stairs and climbed back over the fence and on to the street. I walked a little way until ahead I saw a patrol of about half a dozen French heading towards me. At their head was a dishevelled young man who was shouting at them in an Italian which they little understood.

'It's this way. There were two of them. They were fighting over who should kill me.' It was the young infantryman who had just escaped from the cellar. I slipped down a sidestreet. As for the two that he thought had been fighting over him, I had escaped, and of the other he would find little but dust.