by Jasper Kent
But for now his main concern was what Dmitry and Zmyeevich were planning. They wanted to take back Zmyeevich’s blood. In that they might already have succeeded. Lukin had certainly taken it and could well have handed it over. Could Zmyeevich sense that there was yet more of his blood out there, safe and far away? In his experiments Iuda had not discerned that ability in any other vampire, but Zmyeevich was a special creature in ways that even Iuda could not imagine.
The other thing they wanted, more even than Zmyeevich’s blood, was Ascalon – or at least the fragment of it that had once been in Zmyeevich’s possession and which Pyotr the Great had stolen. They did not have it – of that Iuda was quite certain. But they had discovered much about where Pyotr had hidden it. Why else had Dmitry – under the name of Shklovskiy – ordered the mine that was to kill His Majesty to be dug at quite so precise a location in the city.
Iuda peered through the binoculars again. Dmitry had already returned to the cathedral to sleep, but Zmyeevich was still out there, somewhere. It had been like that on several nights, and Iuda had been forced by the rising sun to return to his own tomb before catching sight of the great vampire. He felt uneasy; vulnerable. There was no reason to suppose that they knew of his presence, but seeing Dmitry alone made him wonder whether Zmyeevich might even now be watching him. In a fair fight between them, Iuda did not rate his chances – but fair fights were not his style.
He needed to learn more. He had to hear them, not just see them. He dared not go back into the cellar itself – he would be too easily trapped – but he could at least get into the cathedral safely. It was a building he knew very well indeed. After all, he’d helped to design it.
‘Is this the sort of thing you meant?’
Mihail handed over the single handwritten sheet and returned to sipping his tea. It was Friday now – his fifth day of working on the tunnel, and they’d made good progress. They’d got under the sewer and propped it up safely. It sagged a little, but Mihail was sure it wouldn’t break again. Now they had only another eight feet to go. There was room for two men at most at the digging face, so they worked in short shifts of just an hour. They left it to the women to clear away the displaced earth and mud, shovelling it into barrels in the storeroom. Currently Bogdanovich and Mihailov were doing the digging. The sound of their work could be heard in the living room where a small group of them sat drinking tea: Mihail, Kibalchich, Zhelyabov, Frolenko and Sofia. The cat, recently discovered to be pregnant, snuggled quietly in Sofia’s lap. In the shop beyond Anna Vasilyevna kept an eye out for customers. Dusya had gone out a few hours before, and had not yet returned.
Kibalchich glanced over the obituary that Mihail had scribbled down the previous evening. There was nothing in it that was very far from the truth. It spoke of his youth in Saratov and of his mother, though identifying her as a member of the Lukin family. It referred to his years in Moscow at the Imperial Technical School and then his life in the army. Those occasions when he had mixed with radicals, particularly in Moscow, were emphasized. His exploits in the army and his commendation at Geok Tepe were told in terms of love of country, not love of the tsar. He had no doubt that what Kibalchich had said was the genuine reason behind it. He’d read the underground newspaper and seen the same done for others. But equally he understood that whatever he told them might be checked out, to ensure that he really was who he said he was. It was unlikely they’d discover the truth. He’d taken steps to hide the name Danilov from a far wilier enemy than these.
‘Seems reasonable,’ said Kibalchich, handing it over to Zhelyabov, who skimmed over it before folding it and putting it in his pocket.
‘Any last words?’ asked Sofia.
‘Charming!’ Mihail laughed.
Zhelyabov smiled. ‘Sofia Lvovna can be very direct. We generally like to print something short and personal to round it off. “My heart lies with the Russian people” or “He laid down his life for freedom”.’
‘But a little less vomit-inducing,’ added Frolenko. Zhelyabov glanced at him sternly, then tried to conceal a smile.
Mihail already had an answer. ‘“He sought revenge,”’ he said. He looked round the faces in the room. Most nodded with approval, but Zhelyabov was an exception. His mouth was twisted, as though eating a lemon. ‘Problem?’ asked Mihail.
‘Is revenge really what we’re all about?’ replied Zhelyabov.
‘We’re going to kill the tsar for what he’s done,’ said Frolenko. ‘That sounds like revenge to me.’
Mihail’s words had nothing to do with His Majesty, but the debate could apply equally to Iuda, so he listened with interest.
‘For what he’s done to whom, though?’ continued Zhelyabov. ‘To ourselves or to the people?’ he looked around, expecting an answer, though none came. ‘If it’s for ourselves, then yes, this is mere revenge. But our business is not vengeance; it’s punishment. We’ve seen what Aleksandr has done to the people. We calmly judged him on their behalf – at Lipetsk. If this is revenge then it is the collective revenge of the entire people. Isn’t that the very definition of punishment?’
Mihail’s mind wandered back to when he had been a little boy and he and Tamara had gone through the process of trying Iuda. Neither the verdict nor the sentence came as a surprise. But Mihail still knew in his heart it was revenge, and was not ashamed of it. True, as with Aleksandr, it was in part on the behalf of others, but it would be a personal pleasure he took in killing Iuda. He doubted that any of the others here felt differently about their own quest, but it was better to keep his head down and leave it unmentioned.
Thankfully Kibalchich had been thinking along similar lines. ‘But it’s personal too, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘We are all victims ourselves. I mean, I’m not saying we’re wrong, but we’re hardly neutral in this.’
‘All victims?’ asked Mihail.
‘Most of us here have spent months in prison, if not years,’ explained Zhelyabov. ‘You remember the trial of the 193? Me, Sofia, Anna Vasilyevna and 190 others. That’s how a lot of us met.’
‘You were acquitted,’ said Kibalchich with a hint of competitiveness in his voice.
‘Which makes it worse. They kept me locked up for almost a year only to decide I’d done nothing wrong.’
‘I was in prison for 969 days,’ said Kibalchich, more passionate than Mihail had ever seen him or imagined he could be. ‘You know how long the actual sentence was? One month – for lending a banned book to a peasant. The rest was waiting for trial.’
‘I don’t know what you’re all complaining about,’ announced Frolenko. ‘I for one enjoyed my time in prison.’
Kibalchich and Sofia both smiled and Zhelyabov emitted a brief laugh.
‘What?’ asked Mihail.
‘Frolenko saw the other side of prison life,’ Zhelyabov explained. ‘He was a guard.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Not quite as you imagine it,’ said Frolenko. ‘It was back in ’77, when Stefanovich, Deutsch and Bohanovskiy were in prison in Kiev. I got myself a job as a warder in the hope of breaking them out. But first we had to get rid of the head warder.’
‘A notorious drunk,’ added Zhelyabov happily.
‘Indeed,’ continued Frolenko. ‘So we lured him away with the offer of a job at a distillery. I’d been such a good boy that I got promoted to fill his shoes. And my first duty as head warder was to escort those three dangerous subversives out through the prison gates and onwards to freedom, never to return. It was only when the old head warder found there was no distillery and came back begging for his job that they realized anything was up.’
Even Sofia laughed as the story came to an end, but the good humour subsided as first Bogdanovich and then Mihailov emerged from the tunnel exhausted, their bodies plastered with mud. Their hour was up.
Sofia was on her feet in an instant. The cat dropped to the floor and then looked up at her reproachfully. ‘I’ll get you some water,’ she said.
The two men stood, stretching their achin
g muscles. It was Mihail and Kibalchich’s turn next. They both stripped down to only their trousers; it was easier to clean flesh than cloth.
‘Any problems?’ asked Kibalchich.
‘Nothing special,’ replied Bogdanovich. ‘Slow but steady.’
Kibalchich bent down and crawled in first, followed by Mihail. Today the tunnel was lit only with oil lamps which the two previous diggers had left close to the entrance, and which Kibalchich and Mihail now carried as they made their way out under the street.
‘There was something I meant to ask you,’ said Mihail, addressing Kibalchich’s wobbling backside as it led the way.
‘What?’
‘Who’s Auguste de Montferrand?’
Kibalchich gave a little chuckle. ‘You’re not from these parts, are you?’
‘No. He’s big then, is he?’
‘One of the city’s great architects.’
‘What, back in Pyotr’s day?’ Mihail realized as he spoke the stupidity of the question. The dates on Iuda’s letters were much more recent.
‘No. Under Aleksandr I and then Nikolai.’
‘Was he any good?’
Kibalchich stopped and turned his head. He raised a hand towards the city above them. ‘Next time you’re up there, look around you.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘There’s the Kazan Cathedral, just up the road. And he did various rooms in the Winter Palace – though I think we undid a little of his good work there.’ He emitted a brief snort.
‘Anything else?’
‘Saint Isaac’s, of course. And the Nikolai Monument behind it. And the Aleksandr Column in Palace Square.’
‘Busy chap.’
Kibalchich nodded. ‘Died the year they finished Saint Isaac’s.’
There was no further for them to go now – they had reached the tunnel’s end. Even in the time since Mihail had first been here it had almost doubled in length, but there was still more to be done. They picked up the shovels that Bogdanovich and Mihailov had left for them and began to dig.
On leaving the cheese shop, Mihail once again made straight for the library. It was easy to rule out some of the buildings that Kibalchich had mentioned. De Montferrand’s letter to Iuda had described windows. There were none of those in either of the monuments to emperors past. He also dismissed the work at the Winter Palace, at least for the time being. Even for Iuda, that would be too audacious. That left the two cathedrals: Saint Isaac’s and Kazan. In broadest terms they matched what Mihail had read in the letter.
Of course, it might be none of the more famous examples of de Montferrand’s work that had been under discussion. Or it might have been something built outside the city. After only a few minutes’ research Mihail discovered that he had also done a great deal of work on the design of the park and buildings at Vyborg, over a hundred versts away. But he had to start somewhere. He soon found the information he needed. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan was built during the reign of Aleksandr I and completed even before the start of the Patriotic War. That was too early for the letters.
Saint Isaac’s, on the other hand, fitted perfectly. It had taken forty years to construct, spanning more than the entire reign of Nikolai and reaching into that of both Aleksandrs. When Aleksei had stood with the Decembrists in Senate Square it was scarcely begun. The letters from the ’30s were bang in the middle of the period. Mihail tried to recall their detail. What he could remember now began to make sense in the context of what he knew, but he still couldn’t be sure.
He walked briskly through the snowy streets. As so often he was grabbed by the fear that someone would have broken into his room and taken the papers and the blood, but once again they proved to be safe. He read through the letters voraciously, nodding as each statement suddenly made sense in the context of the cathedral. The last lines he read had originally been the most bewildering of all with their reference to ‘the toes of Saint Paul’, but now Mihail began to have some idea of what it might mean.
He itched to test out his theory, but it was dark now. Only a fool would go hunting vampires at night. Even by day, in the dark passages that he guessed he would discover beneath Saint Isaac’s, it could be dangerous. Thankfully, just that morning, a delivery had arrived for him from Saratov.
Mihail chose midday to visit the cathedral. The sun was rising higher in the sky now as winter drew gradually to a close. The days were over ten hours in length and gaps were beginning to appear in the ice sheet that covered the Neva. Saturday was a busy day at the cheese shop – remarkably, for the purpose of selling cheese. Thus they did not dig on Saturdays out of fear that they’d be overheard.
Mihail walked from his hotel along the English Quay and then turned across Senate Square to approach the cathedral. It was built to impress, and it succeeded. The great golden dome, gleaming in the sunlight, was visible from all over the city but seemed designed to be most imposing from just about this distance, close to the Bronze Horseman. Across the water the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral was still the tallest structure in the city, but it had none of the fat, squat authority of the dome, itself stolen, in some sense, from both Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Mihail had only ever seen them in pictures, easy to find during his researches at the Imperial Library, but the similarities with Saint Peter’s in Rome and Saint Paul’s in London were unmistakable, particularly with regard to the latter. De Montferrand had even managed to incorporate the Greek Cross floor plan that Wren had been refused permission to use.
But he was not here to admire the building’s exterior. He began walking again towards the steps, noticing how the whole edifice seemed almost to shrink as he moved closer, away from the ideal viewing point. As he approached he noticed a hunched figure emerge through the massive bronze doors and walk gingerly down to street level. Mihail recognized him as the old man he had met in the square on the day of Dostoyevsky’s funeral, almost two weeks before – the one who had first told him what Ascalon meant. He hurried his pace so as to intercept him and offer a greeting, but once on the pavement the man moved with unexpected sprightliness and was soon heading towards the Admiralty. Mihail chose not to be distracted from his quest.
Inside the cathedral was quiet, but not empty. It was bright, but the sun was high and Mihail guessed that there would be more light still when the morning or evening sun shone through the tall, arched windows. Two or three people knelt facing the iconostasis, praying. Others simply stood, their necks bent back and their jaws hanging loosely as they gazed up at the painted interior of the dome, or at the walls, or the columns. Almost every surface displayed artwork, either statues or paintings or mosaics, each depicting an individual or scene of the holiest nature. A dyachok pottered about the place, tending to candles and incense, as was his duty. Mihail stood among the gawkers, and studied the decoration, with a specific interest in just one adornment that he knew was somewhere inside the building, but had no idea quite where; an icon of Saint Paul.
He found it quickly enough, just outside the Nevsky Chapel in the north-eastern corner of the church. He checked around him, but no one would see him if he was quick. He reached out and rested his thumbs against the saint’s big toes, precisely as de Montferrand’s letter had suggested. At first there was no response. He began moving the tips of his thumbs in small circles of widening diameter, searching the nearby area. The letter had said that if either button was pressed on its own there would be no discernible movement. Only when both were pushed would the mechanism release. It made it safe, both from accidental activation and from what Mihail was now attempting. But he was determined. Within a minute he felt a slight depression beneath both his thumbs as tiles of the mosaic yielded, and the whole icon felt suddenly loose, pressing back on him as it tried to swing open.
He checked around him again. A man and woman were emerging from the side chapel, arm in arm, but still their mouths were open and their eyes upraised. Mihail could probably have made it through the doorway without them even n
oticing, but he chose to wait. He moved his hands across the icon until they were side by side, in front of him, still holding the panel in place. He closed his eyes, as if drawing strength from the apostle. He heard footsteps and when he looked around again he was alone. It took him only a second to pull open the door, climb up into the passageway beyond and shut himself inside.
It was utterly black. Mihail reached into his bag and fetched out a paraffin lamp. Once this was alight he could see more clearly. He examined the door he had come in by, feeling in the corners where it met the walls until he found a catch. He tested it and the panel sprang open again, just a fraction of an inch. It was enough for him to know he had an escape route. He looked ahead. The passageway was not long, but he couldn’t make out how it ended. He reached into his bag again and pulled out his favourite weapon of the many he knew could kill a vampire.
At his side he had his military sword, which he could use for beheading. Under his coat he carried the short wooden dagger, with which he could stab through the heart. But both were close-range weapons. This was something rather different, arrived from Saratov just the previous morning.
It was an arbalyet – a crossbow. He’d been developing it since he was a boy. The device itself was standard enough, an eighteenth-century German Armbrust that he’d found rotting in a barn. The problem had been the bolts. The short drawback and high tension of a crossbow meant that it needed a dense bolt to receive the maximum kinetic energy. That was why iron was the traditional material. Wood though, not iron, was what was needed to kill a voordalak. But a wooden arrow fired from an arbalyet was liable to fly off in any direction, and even when it hit its target it had little penetration.