by Jasper Kent
That would make sense. The whole construction had a much rougher, more functional feel to it than had the cathedral.
‘And an exit?’ Zmyeevich asked.
Iuda glanced in the direction from which they had come. The door back to the passageway had been open when they arrived. Zmyeevich strode over and slammed it shut. The key was in place. He turned it and slipped it into his pocket. Dmitry began to look around, still keeping a tight hold on the rope, but moving some way from Iuda. In the middle of the chamber, where a ninth column might have been expected, stood a pool of water, almost like an ornamental fountain, except for the lack of the fountain itself. Its raised stone sides came to waist height, and water filled it almost to the brim. Dmitry had not realized how cold it was in the room, but the water was frozen over. Even here underground, embraced by the warm earth, it was impossible to entirely escape the chill of a Russian winter. But the ice didn’t look particularly thick. Dmitry rapped it firmly with the back of his fist, and a crack spread across the diameter.
‘I suspect this place was once a chapel,’ explained Iuda. He nodded towards the pool. ‘A font?’
‘Where are we?’ asked Zmyeevich.
‘Somewhere beneath Senate Square,’ answered Iuda. ‘I could show you precisely on a map.’ He pointed, upwards and ahead of them. ‘The statue of Pyotr is just there.’
From the walls, on both sides, hung a number of cupboards. They were closed, but had no visible locks.
‘What’s in these?’ asked Zmyeevich.
Iuda raised an open palm in the direction that Zmyeevich was looking. ‘Be my guest.’
Zmyeevich gave a short laugh, but wasn’t fooled. ‘I think not. You may have the honour.’
Iuda shrugged and walked forward, reaching up to one of the cupboards, but not the one which Zmyeevich had indicated. Dmitry tightened the rope to stop him.
‘This one, I think,’ said Zmyeevich, indicating his original choice.
Iuda went over to it and raised his hands, placing them on the two handles. He glanced from side to side, taking in the positions of his two captors. Then with a sudden motion he flung open the double doors of the cupboard, at the same time stepping back, away from it.
Dmitry tensed, but Zmyeevich remained calm. Iuda was teasing them. They stepped forward and examined the open cupboard. Inside they found shelf upon shelf of bottles, flasks and vials. Some contained powders, others potions, many of which had evaporated almost to nothing. Dmitry cast an eye over them, but the names scribbled on faded labels meant nothing to him. Zmyeevich lingered a moment longer, but he was no more a man of science than Dmitry.
He pointed to the next cupboard and Iuda opened that. Much of its contents was similar, but in addition there were a number of notebooks and papers. Zmyeevich picked one up and flicked through it.
‘English,’ he said with a sneer, before adding in that language, ‘but that shouldn’t prove to be a problem.’ Even to Dmitry’s ear his accent had a strange intonation. He put the papers back down. ‘We’ll examine them in detail later.’
He opened the next cupboard himself, satisfied that there were no booby traps. It contained much the same.
‘Do you have the samples of my blood that you took?’ asked Zmyeevich.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Iuda. ‘If I did, they’d be in there.’ He pointed to a cupboard and then strode quickly over to it, but Dmitry was faster. He opened the doors before Iuda could reach it. Inside were further vials, each containing a small amount of red liquid that Dmitry knew instinctively to be blood, and guessed to be vampire blood. They were all neatly labelled in Latin text and ordered alphabetically. Dmitry looked to the bottom right, where Zmyeevich would have been.
‘Nothing,’ he announced. ‘Perhaps he’s used it all up.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Iuda.
‘And what of Ascalon?’ asked Zmyeevich. ‘Do you have that here?’
‘Why would I have it?’
‘Perhaps you found it here. We’re beneath the very place where Pyotr took it from me.’
‘And you think he might have built this, to hide it?’ said Iuda. He thought about it for a moment, but then shrugged, seeming unconvinced. ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘When did you first come across this place?’ Dmitry asked.
‘When they were building the cathedral,’ Iuda explained. Behind him, Zmyeevich began opening other cupboards, examining their contents. ‘They found the tunnel when they were digging the foundations; you have to go deep to build anything stable with the mud round here. It was years later that I got to investigate. I told them it was unimportant, but I made sure the stairs were built.’
From the corner of his eye, Dmitry could see that Zmyeevich had opened the last cupboard on that wall. He stood gazing into it.
‘To be honest, I’ve not made much use of it,’ Iuda continued chattily – uncharacteristically, ‘but when I’m in the city …’
Zmyeevich hadn’t moved. His hand still rested on the door handle. The door itself was half open, hiding whatever Zmyeevich had uncovered from Dmitry’s view. It all looked quite innocent, but somehow Dmitry knew that Zmyeevich was in terrible pain. He dashed over.
The cupboard was empty. It had no bottles, no papers, not even shelves. Like the others, it was only around four inches deep, but its back wall, rather than being the dull brick of the rest of the cellar, was a mirror – and not a particularly refined one at that. It was cloudy, and seemed to be made of many small sections rather than a single sheet of glass.
But the oddest thing about it was that Dmitry could see Zmyeevich’s reflection. A moment later he realized that he could see his own.
Or at least he could see a figure at the place where his reflection should be. He had never seen himself – not since the moment he had become a vampire, but he had assumed he remained unchanged from what he was in life. Now he knew different. What others saw in him, what he could see in himself when he looked down at his own hands, it was all an illusion. What he saw in that mirror was not sharp and distinct – and that was a blessing – but he knew without doubt it was a truer representation of himself than he had ever laid eyes on before. He peered closer, trying to see through the hazy glass. Various shapes and textures caught his eye, but they did not form a clear image. He did not want them to. He wanted to tear his eyes away before they could fully take in what he saw, but he was unable. He could not step away, nor raise his hands to cover his face, nor close his eyelids, nor even move his eyeballs to look in a different direction. With each passing moment that he gazed into the mirror, the clearer what he saw became, and the greater was his desire to see it.
And through all this came a memory – a memory that he had witnessed such a thing before, and yet a memory that was not his own. It was something he had never understood in the past, but which was now quite clear to him. He knew that the sight of this reflection had led to death. It had done so before and it would do so now.
And then he was no longer staring immobile at the thing reflected in the mirror. He was lying on the ground, on his back. Above him he could see the arched ceiling and, looming closer, Zmyeevich. The ancient vampire’s hands gripped his shoulders, unable to let go after holding him so tightly to drag him away from the mirror, his eyes squeezed shut. His tongue protruded from his lips and his teeth bit down on to it. His precious blood seeped from the corners of his lips. His fingers dug still harder into Dmitry’s flesh.
Dmitry dashed Zmyeevich’s hands aside. He scrambled across the floor, on his back, keeping his eyes averted so that there was no chance of seeing the mirror. When he was far enough away he stood, and edged back along the wall until he was able to slam first one door then the other back over the obscene looking glass. Then he knelt down beside Zmyeevich. His eyes were open now, but he appeared shaken, old, as though he hadn’t fed for weeks.
Dmitry helped him to his feet. He looked over to the mirror, and sighed deeply when he saw that the doors were shut. He turned back to Dmitry,
holding on to him for support, his eyes full of fear.
‘What was that?’ asked Dmitry, his voice shaking.
‘I saw …’ Zmyeevich spoke softly, but then paused to think. He seemed to become instantly stronger, and stood upright, stepping away from Dmitry. ‘I saw what I have always known,’ he concluded.
Dmitry wondered if he himself had always known of what he had seen, but pushed the thought from his mind. He had caught only a glimpse of his own image; he did not want to learn more. Zmyeevich was now almost completely himself again. His head twisted from side to side as he scanned the room.
‘Iuda!’ he hissed.
Dmitry looked around too. He looked at the door by which they had entered, but it remained closed. He strode over and tried it but it was still locked. It had been only a matter of seconds that they had stared into the awful glass, but in that time Iuda had vanished.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ICY WATER embraced him, infiltrating every crevice of his body. For a vampire such as Dmitry, it was not a discomfort but it was still a piercing sensation. The cold could not kill him, but it could slow him and weaken him. If it became cold enough for his body’s fluids to freeze, then he would become dormant, but at some point before that ice crystals would begin to form in his blood, and his limbs – and his mind – would stiffen.
It had taken only moments for them to deduce where Iuda had gone. The wire rope that had bound him by the neck was discarded on the floor. In the middle of the cellar the ice on the frozen pool, which before had displayed merely the single crack that Dmitry had caused, was now smashed to a thousand floating, bobbing lumps. The glassy mosaic reminded Dmitry of the mirror into which they had just gazed, but he knew it would require something more than mere ice to make him see his own reflection.
Dmitry dived in in pursuit, while Zmyeevich headed back to the surface via the cathedral. The pool was an illusion; appearing simply to be standing on the cellar floor, it in fact went beneath it. From there the pipe turned to the horizontal and narrowed. It was too tight for Dmitry to make much use of his arms, but he kicked hard and propelled himself through. He could hold his breath for a long time, but if the pipe didn’t come to an end eventually, then the lack of air would subdue him in just the same way that the cold might. But Iuda would face exactly the same problems – and Iuda had come this way in full knowledge of what lay ahead.
Dmitry’s pursuit of Iuda had a new passion to it – a hatred that he had not been able to feel towards anyone since becoming a vampire. But in that time, there had always been one regret – that Raisa, the woman who had turned Dmitry into a vampire, was dead. His feelings for her were not the romantic love or corporeal lust that had attracted him to her in life. It was more of a pack instinct; the sense of loyalty that a dog has to its own kind. There was a practical side to it too – the fact that he could learn so much about his new state from her – but her loss had affected him more viscerally than could be dismissed with so rational an explanation. It still did.
Because she had made him, part of her mind had been in him, guiding and teaching him. With her death, that had gone, all except one tiny splinter which stuck in him like a bee’s sting after the insect itself has fallen away: a desire for vengeance. For Raisa’s death to be avenged would do her no good, but still that bit of her which remained inside Dmitry sought it on her behalf. It would act as a warning to others; even from beyond the grave, they would be punished.
But until today, until he had gazed into that mirror, he’d had no idea what had befallen Raisa. In the hours before her death her mind had become confused, unhinged, incapable of his understanding. And today, for a few moments, he had felt the same. The jumbled images of her last hours had suddenly coalesced. He still did not know just how she had died, but he knew that she, like him, had gazed into a mirror that had the power to let her see her own true appearance. Whatever effect that might have had on Dmitry or Zmyeevich, the impact on Raisa – a woman who loved her own beauty – had been devastating. Perhaps it hadn’t caused her death directly, but it had prevented her from defending herself when she most needed to.
It had all come from looking in a mirror. The mirror that Dmitry had seen today had been created by Iuda and Iuda had tricked them into looking at it. The mirror that had destroyed Raisa’s mind had been created by Iuda, and he had tricked her, or enticed her, or cajoled her into looking at it. Iuda had brought about her death, and now Dmitry would kill Iuda – whatever Zmyeevich might say about needing to keep him alive.
Dmitry kicked his legs more vigorously. Ahead he could see the dimmest circle of light, like the moon forcing its way through thick cloud. A second later he became suddenly colder still. He no longer found his arms constrained by the sides of the pipe, nor his kicking to have any effect whatsoever on his motion. He was swept sideways, far faster than he could propel himself by swimming.
He was out in the Neva. It was as he had suspected – the only way that Iuda’s escape route could make any sense was if it led to that vast waterway. Dmitry had no idea how many millions of barrels of water flowed each day from Lake Ladoga out into the Gulf of Finland, but he was now a part of it, and it was indifferent to him.
He exercised what little control he had over his body, and swam upwards. Within seconds he hit the ceiling of the underwater world, and fully understood just how quickly he was travelling, as his fingertips scraped across the underside of the ice sheet. As a voordalak he had discovered the ability to find texture in even the smoothest wall in order to climb it, but here he could find no purchase. Even if he’d managed to hold on, he doubted it would have helped him much. This was no thin covering like that over the pool into which he’d dived. However he might kick and beat his fists against it, he would achieve nothing. All he could do was let the current take him until, somewhere out in the gulf beyond, the ice began to part. Iuda would be long gone, but with luck Dmitry would still be conscious, though he would have no chance to breathe before then. He must make the best use of the air he had. He tried to relax.
He came to a halt with a painful thud which propelled the air from his lungs and into his mouth. He tried to keep hold of it, but saw bubbles rising up in front of his eyes. He had hit the pier of a bridge – it could only be the Nikolaievsky. Now he had some slight hope. He scrambled up the stonework, still feeling the Neva pressing against his back and trying to carry him away. Soon he reached the ice again, but here it was nothing like the solid barrier he had encountered before. Where the river met the pier, the ice was broken and fragmented. He thrust himself upwards through it and felt the night air against his face. The river still grabbed at his legs, and blocks of ice barged into him, threatening to crack his skull.
He swam forward through the barrage of miniature icebergs and found the lip of the ice shelf. He pulled himself up out of the water and prepared to fall forward, to allow himself a few moments to catch his breath and to dispel the coldness that was beginning to affect even his vampire body. He felt light-headed – a combination of the cold and the breathlessness, and perhaps the lingering influence of Iuda’s mirror. It had been enough to drive Raisa to insanity – it was possible that there might be some effect on him.
But before he could compose himself he saw in front of him a figure running across the ice. It could only be Iuda. He must have followed the exact same path through the water that Dmitry had, just seconds ahead of him.
Dmitry hauled himself to his feet and resumed his pursuit. Iuda was heading back upriver, in the direction they had come, but veering towards the northern bank. He reached it at the Menshikov Palace, almost directly across from Senate Square. Dmitry didn’t bother to see whether Zmyeevich had yet emerged to join the chase. He ran with long strides, wary of the slippery surface, but knowing that the real problem would be to stop or make a sharp turn. Iuda chose not to attempt to climb the stone embankment, but instead ran alongside it, looking for the next point at which steps came down to the water’s edge. Dmitry was able to see the location a
nd head straight for it, gaining ground on his quarry.
But as Iuda reached the steps he hesitated. Dmitry heard shouts and saw that on the embankment a small band of soldiers had spotted Iuda, who did not seem inclined to deal with them. He changed his plan of getting up on to land and continued along the frozen river. His feet slipped as he tried to accelerate and it took him seconds to get up to speed. Again, it was all a chance for Dmitry to get closer. The soldiers – six of them in total – split into two groups. Some came down on to the ice and the others ran along the bank, paralleling Iuda’s movements below them. Dmitry could only guess that they had seen his uniform and realized that he must have good reason to be chasing a fugitive at this time of night. He had discarded his greatcoat back in the cellar, but his tunic was enough for them to recognize his seniority.
Iuda swung away from the bank, out towards the centre of the river, making good speed again. Ahead of him stood the pontoon bridge, spanning the river from the Winter Palace to the Stock Exchange. In the summer it offered a convenient but somewhat undulating route out to Vasilievskiy Island, but now it was held firm by the ice. Dmitry remembered it stretching out from Senate Square on the day of the Decembrist Uprising, but it had long since been moved upstream. Iuda disappeared beneath it, under one of the central spans.
Dmitry was close to him now, and the three soldiers who had come down on to the river were not far behind, but the men who had remained on land had made far quicker progress, running over snow rather than ice. Soon though they would have run out of land as they came to the fork at which the Great and Lesser Nevas split. Instead, they turned on to the pontoon bridge itself, running across it at almost the moment Iuda darted beneath.
Seconds later, Dmitry was under it too, and he saw Iuda ahead of him, heading out to the middle of the widest part of the river, trying to leave as late as possible the choice of which branch to take. But out there, the ice was at its weakest and he might easily fall through. Perhaps that was his plan, to return once again to the water, where his capture would be impossible.