CHAPTER XIX

I WASTED NO TIME IN THROWING MY ARM DOWN TOWARDS THE creature's chest, but a hand grabbed my wrist, and I could not reach my target. Another pair of hands took hold of my left arm and I was dragged away from the coffin and over to the wall. The Russian soldier climbed out of the coffin and approached me.

The two men who had grabbed me relaxed their grip, and the one on my right said to the soldier, 'Hold him.' It was a voice I knew and should not have been hearing; the voice of a creature that I thought I had seen annihilated in a burning cellar many weeks before. It was Iuda.

The soldier pressed his hand against my chest, revealing a tremendous strength, and I found myself unable to move. Iuda and my other captor – as he stepped into the light, I saw it was Andrei – walked to the middle of the room.

'You're surprised to see me, I think,' said Iuda, with the tone almost of a bonhomous host.

'A little,' I replied.

'It must be so irksome,' he continued, 'when you think that you've murdered four of your comrades – men who have willingly come at your invitation to your country to fight on your side – it must be so irritating to find that one of the four has survived.'

I didn't respond.

'It's the same mistake your friend Maksim made,' said Andrei, making none of Iuda's faux effort to hide his loathing.

'So how did you get out?' I asked.

'Can't you work it out?' asked Iuda. 'My good friend Dmitry Fetyukovich rescued me. By the time you arrived, he had already awakened me and helped me to safety.'

'Safety where? You couldn't go out into the daylight.'

'No, of course not, but in these big blocks of connected buildings one can move from one house to the next without ever going outside. Having a little greater strength than living humans helps too. It allows us to knock through the odd wall here and there between houses.'

I had seen examples of these creatures' strength weeks before, and I felt it in the hand that pinioned me against the wall. I wondered what other powers they might possess, and moreover what their weaknesses might be. 'And that's it?' I asked, 'Your strength? Is that the only thing you creatures have that gives you an advantage over us?'

Iuda laughed; I had been very obvious. 'Perhaps you'd like a written list? Three dozen ways that vampires are better than humans? Well, it won't help you, Lyosha. No, our strength is nothing. I think it's just a side effect of the diet. What makes us superior is not something that we have; it is something that we lack. We lack conscience. When we act we are not bound by any rules of what is wrong and what is right. We have no fear of recrimination either on earth or in hell. We can achieve things that you could never dream of because our dreams are not haunted by doubts about our righteousness and concerns for others.'

'And what have you achieved?' I asked him, scornfully.

He chose to ignore the question. 'I can do things of which you would never be capable. When I caught Vadim Fyodorovich following me' (he nodded carelessly towards Vadim's hanging corpse) 'my scruples might have told me to let him go, but I didn't. When he told me he had just been curious to see how I worked, I might have believed him, but I didn't. When he begged me for mercy, telling me about the wife and family that he loved, I could have felt pity, but I didn't. Instead I hung him up on that nail over there, just to shut him up, not so as to kill him; otherwise we wouldn't have been able to taste the fresh blood that we all so much prefer.

'Could you have done that, Lyosha?' Iuda continued. 'Of course not – you wouldn't want to. But you'd like to do it to me now, wouldn't you? And yet still you couldn't. I could just beg you for mercy; tell you about my terrible upbringing in the Carpathians and you'd lose all stomach to do it.'

'So that's why you're so hard to kill?' I said, straightening up. The soldier, listening to Iuda, had relaxed his pressure on me a little. 'It's not your strength, but our weakness?'

'Exactly. We are certainly quite easy to kill. Sunlight. Fire.' He nodded down towards my wooden dagger, which had fallen to the floor. 'A stake through the heart. Decapitation. They're all ways that I've seen it happen. Maybe there are others too. I can't say I'm an expert.'

'You mean you don't know?' I asked. I was surprised, but also attempting to goad him.

'Why should I know? You're not a doctor, are you? You don't know every detail of how your body works, nor do I of mine. We're not going to carry out experiments to find out new ways of killing ourselves.' He smirked suddenly, as if he'd just thought of something very funny. If he had, he did not share it.

'Why not?' I asked. 'You're easy enough to replace.'

Iuda raised an inquisitive eyebrow. 'Easy?'

'Like your friend here,' I said, indicating the soldier who had by now, relaxed by my utter defeat, completely forgotten to restrain me. 'Just a quick bite and it's one less human and one more vampire.'

Iuda chuckled. 'If only it were that easy, but unfortunately we remain a very exclusive group.'

'You have a long list of membership rules, I suppose, to keep out the riff-raff.'

'We have but one criterion. The individual in question must want to become one of us. One would imagine that most organizations offering such a relaxed admission would be inundated with applications, but we are not. For us, self-selection is the ideal approach. You, for example, would not wish to join us, would you?'

'No,' I said, needing no special effort to inject absolute conviction into my voice.

'And so we would not have you. In fact, this gentleman is the only recruit we've had since we arrived in your deeply pious country. Not that we have the opportunity to ask on every occasion.'

'And what happened to him?'

'He ran into Varfolomei. That, by the way, is why he has a particular dislike for you. We're all upset that you murdered Matfei and Ioann, but he regards Varfolomei as something of a father figure. Anyway, there he was, fleeing from – deserting if you will – the field at Borodino and whom should he meet but Varfolomei? They have a little chat and he decides that yes, a life of immortality would be preferable to being a ryadovoy in the Russian army, to be sent to his death at the whim of cowardly officers such as yourself.'

'And so just by wanting to be a vampire, he became one?'

'No, no. There's a mechanism. First Varfolomei drank some of his blood, just enough so that he would die, but not straight away. He then willingly – and it has to be willingly, I'm told – drank some of Varfolomei's blood. It's traditional to drink from a cut to the chest, but I don't think that matters.'

'So you understand that much of how your body works,' I commented. 'How you're created, but not how you are killed.'

He smiled. 'We have an advantage over you in that we can remember the moment, and therefore the process, of our own conception. It makes it so much easier for us the first time we come to do it ourselves, rather than all that messy fumbling about that humans go through.'

'So how many vampire offspring have you produced in your time, Iuda?'

'None,' he replied and then quickly added with a smile, 'that I know of. And I would know. What I have just described could not very well happen by accident. Some of us are different, but I am very like you humans. I like the chase and I like the kill, but I don't want to be concerned with any long-term consequences.' He thought for a moment. 'It's much the same as you feel when you're with that young lady – Dominique. You love the physical experience of her body, but you'd be appalled if your congress with her ever produced a child.' He looked into my face enquiringly and then raised his eyebrows. 'Or maybe not.'

He turned away and the eyes of the other two vampires in the room followed him. I took my chance. I raced across the room towards the window, brushing aside the relaxed arm of Varfolomei's 'offspring' and playing hopscotch over the pitiful corpses which were lined up across the floor. My best guess was that by now it was dawn outside. I grabbed hold of one of the curtains and wrenched at it, pulling it away from its fixings high above me at the top of the window. Andrei took a step towards me as I tugged, but he was too late. The curtain rail gave way and the curtain came tumbling down over my head, blocking my sight completely, but revealing the window behind it.

I quickly wrestled the heavy material off me, the darkness of its covering giving way to the still dim, lamp-lit room. Around me stood the three vampires – two of them utterly impassive at the futility of my action, Iuda with the trace of a mocking smile on his lips. I turned back to the window to see that, behind the curtains, it had been boarded up with the floorboards that had been taken from downstairs. Through the occasional chink I could see that outside it was just daylight, but not enough of it could get inside to do any harm to my captors.

In happier times, parties held in a house such as this would have carried on long into the night and on to the following morning. Sometimes the zealous host would ensure that the windows were shuttered and the clocks stopped so that no guests would realize that dawn had broken and spoil the atmosphere by considering that it might be time to depart. My hosts – the new, undead occupants of this house – had a similar desire to obscure the light of the new day, but with very different motivation.

With a flick of his head, Iuda indicated to the soldier that I should be held fast once again. The soldier pushed me back against the wall and pressed his hand firmly against me.

'So,' I said, feeling the depressing reaction to my failed action sweeping over me, 'I suppose you're going to kill me now.'

There followed a brief conversation between Iuda and Andrei in their own language. I think that Iuda wanted me to die there and then, but Andrei disagreed. He mentioned Pyetr a number of times. It was odd that they referred to him as Pyetr even amongst themselves. Did they not know his real name, or were they taking caution to the extreme – making sure that no one could ever find out who they were and use that knowledge to track them down? From their discussion, I presumed that they were waiting for Pyetr to arrive. Any delay was a moment more for me to enjoy life, and any moment was time for me to think how I might escape.

'It's going to be a bit cramped for the three of you all sleeping in that one coffin, isn't it?' I said.

Iuda looked away from his conversation with Andrei to answer me. My attempt to escape seemed to have knocked his earlier good humour out of him. He was now quite dismissive in his mood.

'We don't need coffins to sleep in, any more than you need beds. How do you suppose we spent all those days out there on the Smolensk road?'

It was a good question. 'How did you?' I asked.

'We'd just dig a hole and bury ourselves in it. All we need is to keep the sun off. It doesn't need to be very deep.'

Before I could reply, we heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. The door to the landing opened and in walked Pyetr. He was quickly followed, to my consternation, by Dmitry.

Pyetr and Iuda began talking furtively in their own language. Dmitry spoke directly to me.

'You shouldn't have killed them, Aleksei. I know we couldn't help Ioann, but Matfei and Varfolomei – that was just murder.'

'I suppose you told them about Matfei and Varfolomei,' I said.

'I told them you followed Matfei. They knew he was dead. It didn't take much to work it out.'

'How did Pyetr get here?' I asked. 'It's light outside, isn't it?'

'We came underground. The sewers run right under this street. With a bit of work you can get into any of the cellars. It's dark as night down there.'

'I presume they've agreed to spare your life,' I said bitterly.

'And yours, Aleksei. They have no quarrel with us. They understand you killing them. If we'd told you the truth from the start, you wouldn't have over-reacted.'

He was utterly deceived; deceived by himself as much as by the Oprichniki into the conviction that because their cause – our cause – was right then they themselves must be righteous; deceived into the belief that because they were righteous, anything that they did to support our cause must be to the good. And yet through it all, the thought popped into my head that there was something I had been meaning to tell him next time I saw him. It wasn't relevant, unless Dmitry was in an even greater state of self-delusion than I could possibly believe, but there was little else to discuss.

'Did you hear that Yelena Vadimovna has had a little boy?' As I spoke, my thoughts went to Marfa and an idea began to form.

'That's nice,' said Dmitry. 'Vadim will be pleased.' I was shocked that he did not know, but also relieved that his present attitude was based upon ignorance.

'You have no idea, do you?' I said to him, as I slipped my hand inside my shirt.

'What do you mean?'

'Vadim Fyodorovich is just over there,' I said, gesturing towards where the rotting corpse hung, as yet unnoticed by Dmitry. 'They . . .'

Iuda had been listening and interrupted me. 'We have decided what we are going to do,' he announced loudly.

We never heard his plans. As he spoke I withdrew my hand from my shirt with a jerk. I felt the chain snap around my neck, leaving me free to pull out the icon that Marfa had given me. I held it up to the soldier's face and ominously shouted at him, 'Keep back!'

In the face of the Saviour's image, the voordalak's entire strength began to wither away. He released his grip on me and covered his eyes, backing away from me across the room.

The reaction of the other vampires was quite different.

'You fool!' shouted Pyetr at the terrified creature.

'Don't be so damned superstitious!' added Iuda. Pyetr gave a brief hand signal to Andrei, who marched across the room and, without fear, grabbed the icon from me and cast it into a corner. Evidently, there was nothing real for them to fear in the religious symbol, but the young, inexperienced vampire believed that there was, and that was enough to make him afraid. Fortunately, the moment's distraction gave me time to place my hand on something which could have a very real effect on them.

As Andrei turned back towards me I grasped my sword and, with a single backhand motion, drew it and struck him across the front of the throat. Ever since Iuda had mentioned it, I had been itching to try decapitation as a method for despatching one of these creatures. It was not, as I knew from battle, an easy thing to achieve. The blade slipped over the top of his Adam's apple and, severing his windpipe, buried itself about halfway through his neck. With a swift tug I extricated it. The wound was not fatal. Andrei bent forward, his hands clutching at the long, deep gash in his throat as a torrent of blood flowed out between his fingers. He was incapacitated, and his death was not my immediate concern. I dashed towards the window once again, this time stepping first on to the seat and then the back of the armchair that stood near to it and leaping as high as I could. I thrust the tip of my sword hard down into the wooden planks to give me a little more upward momentum. My left hand just grasped the top of one of the floorboards that covered the glass and with my two fingers I hung there above the room for five or even ten seconds, viewing the scene beneath me.

On one side of the room, Dmitry, Iuda and Pyetr stood stock still, not in shock, but unable to make any move until they could see what would happen next. On the other, Andrei stood quite upright with his back to the wall. His left hand pressed against the wall behind him for support, while his right was held ineffectually across his throat, having little effect on the flow of blood from it. Near him crouched the soldier, covering his head in fear – fear either still of the icon, or of the horrific injury I had inflicted upon Andrei.

My entire weight was held on my two fingers, and they began to scream at me that they could not hold on. Beneath me, Iuda and Pyetr were almost licking their lips in anticipation of my fall. I felt my body gradually begin to descend. But it was not my fingers that had given way, it was the board itself. With the screeching sound of nails being drawn out of wood, the floorboard I was holding yielded. As its tip etched out a quarter circle across the room, moving horizontally at first and then smoothly bending round to its final, rapid, vertical descent, I fell with it.

I landed on my feet, but immediately fell on to my side, managing to keep hold of my sword. Where the wooden plank had been, now sunlight could penetrate as a beam which sliced across the room, bisecting it with an area of light about the thickness of a brick wall. For the vampires, it was just as impassable. I had landed on the wrong side of the division, being at the feet of Iuda and Pyetr, but for me the barrier was as impenetrable as mere air. I rolled across to the other side of the room and got to my feet.

Iuda was enraged. He leapt towards me with a look of unutterable malevolence on his face, and it took the combined strength of both Pyetr and Dmitry to keep him from crossing through the intrusion of light that would so certainly have meant his death.

I smashed the hilt of my sword into Andrei's stomach and he doubled up in pain, his hands leaving his throat to clutch at his belly. The back of his neck was now fully exposed to me and I brought the blade of my sabre down on it with the strength of both hands. Still it was not enough to sever it. I could feel my sword trapped tightly between two vertebrae, unable to move forward or backward. I flicked my wrist and gave the blade a sharp sideways twist. I heard the popping sound of whatever ligaments remained to hold Andrei's head upon his shoulders and felt the blade come free.

Andrei's head was dust before it ever hit the ground. His body straightened up and his hands went to where his face had once been. They too never made it, desiccating and then crumbling to nothing as his body fell to its knees. It was a falling motion that was never stopped. By the time he had reached his knees, his whole body was no more than a fine powder which settled, rather than fell, to the floor. At some moment during the descent his coat, his shirt and his breeches ceased to be carried down by his body and began to fall of their own accord as a heap of laundry – as a marionette whose strings had been suddenly cut.

The looks of horror on the faces of Pyetr and Iuda were nothing compared with that of Dmitry. Theirs were angry and vengeful. His was a genuine shock to see his friend Andrei slaughtered before his eyes and to see his friend Aleksei carrying out the butchery with such evident satisfaction.

'Take him, Dmitry Fetyukovich!' growled Pyetr. 'You're the only one who can.'

Dmitry approached the wall of light, but even he seemed reluctant to cross it. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke.

'Why, Aleksei?' he said. 'You of all people are an enlightened man. You don't have to wallow in the prejudices and superstitions of our grandparents. They came here to help us, to fight against our enemies as though they were our brothers. Throughout their lives they've had to face the hatred of the ignorant and now you – even after they helped us to throw out the French – even you can offer them no thanks but death.'

He drew his sword and took a step towards me, standing in the middle of the very barrier that split the room, his face and his scars and his tears illuminated by the sunlight.

'Kill him, Dmitry!' snarled Iuda from behind.

'I don't want to fight you, Dmitry,' I said, dropping my sword to my side, but not being so foolish as to sheath it, 'but I will if I have to, and if I do, I will win.'

'I don't believe you would kill me, Aleksei, but having seen what you did to Andrei, what do I know of you?'

'Take a look around you, Dmitry,' I insisted. 'Look at the corpses on the floor. They're not French; they're Russians – innocent Russians. These creatures don't kill to help liberate our country. They kill to eat, and they'll eat whatever they find there is the greatest supply of.'

Dmitry began to look about him, taking in the truth of what I said. Almost beneath his feet lay the body that I had briefly mistaken for Natalia. With his boot, he turned its head to one side so that he could see its face. If he had suspected it was Natalia, he showed no sign of relief on seeing that it wasn't. Perhaps like me he realized that it might just as well have been.

Behind him, Iuda came to the conclusion that Dmitry was losing the argument. He took a step towards Dmitry, but at the same time Dmitry took a step forward and entered my side of the room.

'We have to live, Dmitry,' Pyetr called plaintively after him. 'These few peasants were just so that we could survive until we left the city.'

'And what about Vadim?' I called out to Pyetr.

'Vadim?' asked Dmitry.

'Over there,' I said with a jerk of my head.

Pyetr and Iuda could find no more words to say as Dmitry inspected the remains of his commanding officer, comrade and friend. He put a hand to Vadim's face and let out a cry of deepest sorrow. Vadim's dead eyes stared back at him and offered no forgiveness.

Dmitry raised his sword and began to advance upon the two vampires who stood on the other side of the room from us. I restrained him before he could cross back into their half.

'You promised you'd control yourselves this time,' he said, addressing Pyetr, whom he had known longest.

'I did,' replied Pyetr ambiguously.

'It's too late to pretend to be surprised, Dmitry,' said Iuda in a more determined tone. 'You chose to sup with the Devil. You knew what we are – what we do.'

I think his words were directed more at me than at Dmitry, and I agreed with them. If the reality of the deaths of innocent Russians and of Vadim had come as a surprise to Dmitry, then he had only been fooled by himself, not by the Oprichniki. It could never be said that Dmitry was one to see only the good in people, but in this case he had only seen the benefit to himself, and to his country, that could be gained from working with them.

However, if Iuda's words were intended to make me mistrust Dmitry, it was also clear that Dmitry would no longer be wise to trust the Oprichniki. They might have had better reasons to kill Vadim or to kill me, but if he stuck with them, Dmitry's time would eventually come.

'I'm sorry, Aleksei,' muttered Dmitry. It was hopelessly inadequate, but it was all that could be said.

'I think you had better go,' I said, addressing the two vampires.

'Go?' said Pyetr. 'Why should we go? It's you that's trapped.' This was ostensibly true. The two doors to the room were both in their half. While they could leave if they wanted, we would not be able to reach an exit without crossing the divide and risking attack from them.

'All we have to do is wait until it's dark again,' continued Pyetr. Iuda, however, was glancing nervously around at the narrow window, at the ray of light and at the doors.

'I'm not sure,' I said, 'whether you creatures still believe that the sun revolves around the earth or that the earth revolves around itself. Either way, the sun travels from east to west once a day. And that means that that beam of light is going to travel from west to east – towards you. By noon, you'll only have one door to exit by. By mid-afternoon, you'll have none. You'll slowly be backed into the corner, until the sunlight hits the corner, and then you'll be gone.' Unless, of course, it turned cloudy. I didn't know whether the indirect sunlight of a cloudy day would be enough to kill them. That's why I played my card then, hoping to force them to leave, rather than risking the scenario being played out.

'Or we could just pull down all the other floorboards from the window right now,' suggested Dmitry. It was practical, but somewhat less elegant.

Either way, it was enough to persuade the Oprichniki. Pyetr was already out of the room. Iuda clicked his heels together and gave a mocking formal bow. 'We shall meet again, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said, and then left.

Dmitry made to pursue. 'We had better wait a little,' I told him. 'Give them time to get out.' Dmitry nodded. 'Let's get some more light in here,' I suggested, going over to the window.

Before we could start work on any of the remaining boards, we both heard a whimpering noise emanating from underneath the oriental screen that I had knocked over. I drew my sword and used it to lift up the edge of the screen and flick it aside. Underneath was the crouched figure of the soldier-vampire, curled almost into a ball, his hands covering his head. He was shaking with fear. He had been there all the time, forgotten by us and, had he been capable of it, he had been in a position to reach out and kill us. Perhaps Iuda and Pyetr had been counting on that, or perhaps they, like us, had forgotten him.

I poked him with my sword and he looked up, his eyes showing that he was still inexperienced enough as a vampire to remember the sensation of terror.

'What's your name?' I asked him.

'Pavel,' he stammered. In his eyes I saw a new emotion; hope – the vaguest conception of the possibility that this day might not be his last.

Iuda, it turned out then, was correct. I did have scruples which held me back from killing. If Pavel had resisted, or simply remained bravely silent, I might have had the stomach to kill him. But now, though I knew him to be a vampire, he had such shades of his recently lost humanity about him that I found myself incapable of any action against him.

The decision was taken from me.

With a whoosh of displaced air, my wooden dagger came down upon Pavel's curled back, driven by Dmitry, who clutched it with both hands. The dagger buried itself deep between the vampire's ribs. Pavel let out a gasp and knelt upright, his hands reaching behind him to try to pull out the weapon. Dmitry gave it another thrust and then twisted it. The wooden blade broke in two, leaving Dmitry with only the handle. A trickle of blood appeared at Pavel's lips and his eyes became glassy as he slumped forward.

I nudged the body with my foot. It still felt like flesh and blood. Unlike the others, there was no instant collapse to ashes and dust.

'He hadn't long been a vampire,' said Dmitry, reading my thoughts. He evidently knew, as I had already deduced, that a vampire's body could only decay to the extent that it would have if he had never become one.

'What shall we do now?' I asked.

'Pyetr told me they would be leaving Moscow.'

'Back the way they came?'

'No. Just like the French, they won't retreat by the same lines that they advanced along,' explained Dmitry.

'So which way will they go?'

'South-west. Pretty much the same way that Bonaparte is going – at least for a while. It will give them a food supply of French soldiers.'

'Or Russian,' I added. Dmitry did not reply. 'Do you believe what Pyetr said about them leaving?' I asked.

'I think so. It's what I would do.'

'So we follow them?'

'I suppose,' said Dmitry, nodding thoughtfully, 'or just let them go.'

I went over to the corner of the room and bent down.

'What are you doing?' asked Dmitry.

'My icon,' I said. I tied a knot in the broken chain and put it back over my head. It felt a little unusual, resting against my chest slightly higher than its accustomed position, but I would quickly get used to it.

I turned again to Pavel's body. Though slower than in the other vampires I had seen, his body's decomposition was still quicker than that of any human. As we had been speaking, he had decayed enough to be indistinguishable from one of the older corpses in the adjacent room, whose deaths must have occurred only a short time after his. Only the untidy placing of his body distinguished him from them.

We went down into the cellar, carrying Vadim Fyodorovich's body with us. The broken-down wall into the next cellar I now realized, and Dmitry confirmed, was part of the route that he and Pyetr had used to get to the building without venturing out into the daylight. It was then also the exit through which Pyetr and Iuda had left. I peered through and once again caught the polluted stench of the sewer below, a stench which I now realized consisted of not just a miasma of human waste, but also that of bodily human decay. I could just hear the sound of water flowing somewhere down there, but the darkness was total. It was the habitat of the Oprichniki and I chose not to follow them.

Fear begged me to just leave Vadim's body where it was and get out into the light as soon as I possibly could, but that would not have been decent. He needed to be buried and this cellar was as good a place as any. Even so, we worked quickly, and as we first dug and then filled in the grave, it was with a wary eye over our shoulders towards the dark breach in the wall, in case the vampires returned the way they had left.