The People's Will

by Jasper Kent

  It was not the blissful state of being that Mihail had been anticipating, and it did not last long. There had been only a moment to check as he fled the cathedral but he had looked back and seen no trace of Iuda, just a few smouldering fragments of his clothes. It should have been preposterous to conceive that any vampire could have survived such an exposure to the sun’s rays, but in the moments he had seen Iuda die Mihail had seen Zmyeevich live through just the same circumstances, with little sign even of discomfort, except for that last moment when his blood had been let.

  Mihail needed certainty, and he knew where to find it. But even as he strode along the streets of the capital his pace slowed to an easy saunter. He was right to be careful, to make sure, but whatever his need for proof he still had a belief, and his belief was that Iuda was dead. Mihail’s first thoughts were of Tamara – of her measureless need for vengeance. If only she could have lived just a few more months, long enough to learn of Iuda’s death. How that might have changed her. Mihail had seen when a boy the relationships that other children had with their mothers and had yearned for it, but had understood it could never be. Iuda had to die, he had known that for as long as he could remember. It was a fact, as fundamental as the fact that his name was Mihail, that eating dispelled hunger, that falling over caused pain. Those things remained as true as ever, but Iuda no longer had to die. Iuda was dead. It was as revolutionary a change as if he had discovered that he no longer needed to eat; that he could defy gravity.

  What would have been the effect on Tamara though? Would she have seen herself as free? Would she have carried on happily into her dotage? She was a woman who lived by her obsessions, Mihail knew that – for half her life to find her father, for the other half to avenge his death. As far as he could tell she had been truly happy for only one brief period of her life, when she had been married to the man she loved, and lived with him and her three children. It had not lasted long, and Mihail had not been one of those children. Would news of Iuda’s death have returned her to that happiness, or would she have been forced to find some new mania to sustain her? Or would she have died anyway, with no reason left to live – not even her son Mihail. It was better not to know.

  He was close to his room – the room where he stored his collection of bizarre curios, not where he slept – when he realized that his journey might be unnecessary. He stopped and reached into his shirt, pulling out the two pendants that lay always against his chest. He looked into the eyes of the Saviour. The face in that icon, intended to be a depiction of Christ, had always reminded Tamara of her father, Aleksei. Mihail hadn’t thought of the connection until now, but remembered that he had made the same association looking at the stained glass of the cathedral. It was a reminder of Him who should really be thanked for Iuda’s death. He kissed the icon and offered up a silent prayer of gratitude.

  But the icon had not been what he sought. The other item that hung around his neck was a locket. He flipped it open with his thumbnail. Within still lay the dozen coils of hair, as blond as the day they had been plucked from Iuda’s head. It was inconclusive. Had they withered now, it would show that Iuda was dead, but they had been taken from Iuda before he became a vampire and any human hair might have survived as long as they; there was no reason to suppose that their immortality depended on him.

  He pressed on, with greater determination now, greater eagerness for certainty. Minutes later he was kneeling in front of his trunk, having carefully drawn the curtains to allow no sunlight to fall upon what he was about to examine. He unlocked it. Inside nothing had been touched. The second arbalyet and its bolts, some batteries, the Yablochkov Candles, Iuda’s books and all the other paraphernalia that Mihail regarded as so precious were just where he had left them. He piled the books on the floor, revealing among the heaped clothes a silk handkerchief, folded to hide what lay within.

  Even as he lifted it out of the trunk, he knew. He could tell by the weight, by the slight rigidity. He placed the handkerchief and its contents on the table, with a reverent gentleness for which he could find no reason. He unfolded the four corners and saw the contents plainly.

  It was just as when he had last looked: a white crescent of flesh, internally bloodless but externally bloodstained, the intricate curls and folds that were somehow necessary to funnel sound to its centre perfectly preserved. It was Iuda’s severed ear. The hairs from his head might have been able to survive his death, but this more recently separated slab of flesh could not. If it lived, so did he. Aleksei had seen it in the vampire skin that covered Iuda’s notebooks, and the notebooks themselves described it. Mihail and Tamara had seen it with their own eyes – a severed hand that decayed to dust in the same moment that its owner did, even though in a different building.

  Mihail picked up the ear and hurled it against the wall. It hit the paper with a splat, sticking for a moment before peeling away and falling to the floor, bouncing off the skirting board to land a little way from it. Mihail walked over to it, anger filling him. He laughed briefly at the thought of the thanks he had given to God for Iuda’s death. Even then he had wondered what had taken the Lord so long, but now His utter indifference revealed itself once again.

  Mihail stamped on the ear with the heel of his boot and then again, hoping that wherever he might be Iuda would feel it, but doubting that it would add much to the agony he must be suffering. He would have carried on, but he knew that he could do damage – the ear would not heal like its owner – and he would need it again. He would need it one day soon to verify that which was the whole purpose of his existence, what he had hoped would be verified today.

  But the evidence before him was irrefutable. Iuda lived.

  Time passed, but could not be measured. Wounds healed, but did not make whole. Respiration returned, but not breathing. The lungs were the first organs to begin their slow reformation; before even the heart, what little there was left of it. If nothing had remained, he would be dead. One chamber had survived, one of the atria, though whether the left or right he could not tell. It still pumped feebly, but alone could not cause the blood to flow. And what would be the point of pumping blood if the blood had no oxygen to carry? So the lungs would grow first. He did not know how he knew that – did not even know his own name, not clearly; there seemed too many possibilities.

  Even to say that his lungs were reforming was to give dignity to his status. A hash of alveoli hung from somewhere beneath his neck and remaining shoulder. There were no bronchi to feed into them, no diaphragm to draw fresh air in and expel it once it grew stale. He remembered the terms, the structure, so clearly. He had seen it all, in frogs – where the lungs were very primitive – in rats, in pigs and in men. He’d eventually seen it in creatures such as himself, whatever that might be. He knew he was neither frog nor rat nor pig nor even man, but that was not the same as knowing what he was.

  In truth at the moment he was more like a fish. He did not have lungs but gills, exposed to air rather than water, at the whim of the currents that carried the precious oxygen to him. He was glad he could not see himself, sprawled – if the little that was left of him could sprawl – in that foul, dark sewer, the horrid mess of his nascent lungs spilling out from him, giving him his only chance of life.

  And indeed they had. They were enough to save him – enough at least to keep him conscious. But no more. That in itself was a cruelty that tempted him to ponder whether there might be a god – the wrathful, vengeful god about whom his father had preached from his pulpit in … wherever it was. No – pulpits; there had been three of them, each closer to heaven than the last. He remembered the grass and the trees and the rolling green hills. ‘The Downs’ – that’s what they were called. God had made those, he had been told as a boy – that same God who had put him in this state; alive, conscious, but too weak to recover any more. He was in a perpetual limbo, able neither to die nor to revive. There was much that could tip the balance in one direction, to kill him, but only one thing would restore him. He needed …


  He could not remember what it was he needed, much as he yearned for it. He could taste it on his lips and tongue, and feel it cascading down his throat, but he could not name it. It was warm and vital and corporeal and … Was it milk? His mother’s milk? No – that could not be. He had killed his mother much as he had killed his father. Someone must have fed him, but no, he was sure; milk was not the fluid he craved.

  And even if he could drink, it would be of little sustenance. He had no stomach. Somewhere among the slime that was his lungs lay the end of his oesophagus, where anything he drank would spill. But he would absorb some tiny part of it; through his mouth, through his gullet, just as his lungs – though pathetic shadows of what they should be – could absorb a few molecules of oxygen. He would heal by the tiniest fraction, and on the next sip there would be a little more of him with which to absorb the nourishment, and then a little more still. But for now even that first sip was only a dream.

  Then a light. At first he feared it. Light had made him what he had become, but this was not the great celestial orb that brought death to his kind. This was the flimsy, guttering flame of a candle, still far away, but coming towards him. He heard footsteps and the light came nearer. Then they stopped. There was a gasp. A face loomed close.

  He tried to remember, but memory was still unclear. He knew the face. It made him feel safe, comfortable, secure. Faces he had known ambled through his mind and he tried to recall names. Then one matched.

  ‘Raisa?’ he said. But he did not say – he did not even whisper. He still did not have the organs to force breath across his vocal cords. But his lips moved sufficiently for him to be understood.

  ‘No,’ said the face, ‘I’m not Raisa.’ A hand stroked his hair.

  He thought again, and now he was certain. This time he did not even attempt to speak, but merely mouthed the name.

  ‘Susanna?’

  ‘No, I’m not Susanna.’

  He thought again, but there was no other possibility. He knew he was right.

  ‘You must be,’ he mouthed. ‘You must be Susanna.’

  The face smiled. Then nodded. The hand continued to stroke his hair.

  ‘All right then, yes,’ she said. ‘I am. I am Susanna.’

  They met as they had done each evening of their vigil under the low, vaulted ceiling of Wulf and Beranger’s café on Nevsky Prospekt. They both drank tea. On the table between them sat the remains of a plate of chocolates – Georg Landrin’s finest – which she had got through with unexpected gusto.

  ‘Who is it you suspect?’ asked Dusya.

  ‘I can’t say,’ Mihail replied. ‘I’m not sure I even know. Why? Have you seen someone?’

  She shook her head. ‘No one like any of the three you described.’

  She could not know that he had in fact described to her two men, not three, but one of those would appear quite different depending on whether she saw him by day or by night. Mihail had given her both descriptions of Zmyeevich, the old, doddering man of the day and the impressive strong creature of the night. He had no reason to suppose that Zmyeevich had any concept of the connection with the Hôtel d’Europe, but his real motive in asking Dusya to watch it – apart from having an excuse to meet regularly with her – was in case Iuda returned. His was the third description Mihail had given her, though he had little idea what Iuda might look like at present, given his state when Mihail had last seen him. Mihail himself had been keeping watch on Saint Isaac’s, thinking that the more likely location to see either of them, or Dmitry. There had been no need to describe Dmitry to Dusya; if she saw him she would immediately recognize him – as Chairman Shklovskiy. His suggestion that the reason for watching the hotel was that there might be a spy in their midst was purely an invention, but it would fit well with Dmitry’s arrival. Even so she might hesitate to mention it, which prompted Mihail’s next question.

  ‘And no one from …’ He glanced around the salon. Any one of those present, quietly drinking coffee or tea or enjoying the café’s famous confectionery, could be an ohranik. He rephrased the question. ‘No one we know?’

  ‘Oh, lots of them. It is Nevsky Prospekt – just around the corner from you know where.’

  ‘You’ve seen some? Going into the hotel?’

  ‘Not going in – just passing.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Let me see. Frolenko a couple of times. Bogdanovich. Zhelyabov. Sofia, of course.’

  ‘Why of course?’ asked Mihail.

  ‘Because if you see Zhelyabov you’re bound to see Sofia. Well, usually. I’ve seen her alone a couple of times. She’s been very strange.’

  Mihail couldn’t give a damn about Sofia. ‘No one else?’

  ‘No. And I guess I can cross all of them off my list.’

  ‘What list?’

  ‘My list of the people you think could be the traitor. You’re clearly not interested in any of them.’

  Mihail smiled. ‘I might be bluffing,’ he said.

  ‘There was one other person,’ she added.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I paid him particular attention.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s very pleasant to look at.’

  Mihail racked his brains. ‘Mihailov?’

  She grinned. ‘You, you idiot. I saw you chatting to the concierge.’

  Mihail smiled back. ‘He’s my man on the inside.’

  ‘I don’t know why you can’t watch the place yourself and leave me out of it.’

  ‘It’s not their only rendezvous. Besides, I wouldn’t get to sit and have tea with you if I didn’t need to find out what you’ve seen.’

  ‘You see me most nights,’ she said, her eyes flashing momentarily at him, then returning their gaze to the window beside them. It was true, during the past few days, now that the work on the tunnel was almost complete, she had become an even more regular – and more passionate – visitor to his bed.

  ‘I don’t deny it,’ he said. ‘But that’s not the same as having tea.’

  ‘You’re so bourgeois,’ she replied, neither as a joke nor an insult.

  ‘Because I like to drink tea?’

  ‘Because you like to dress up what we do to each other at night with displays of conventionality like this. It’s not for your benefit, and you know it doesn’t impress me, so who’s it for?’

  Mihail offered no answer.

  ‘Them!’ she said, waving a hand around the room, her voice raised. A few eyes glanced towards them, but they could not have heard the bulk of what she said. She lowered her voice again. ‘And they wouldn’t even suspect that you were screwing me if you hadn’t brought me here. You’re showing me off – a trophy.’

  So vulgar a word on her lips both shocked and thrilled him, but still he wasn’t convinced of her logic. ‘So I meet you here both to disguise the fact that we’re lovers and to announce it?’

  ‘A typical bourgeois dichotomy. Like ordering a huge meal and then only picking at it. You’re showing the world that you can, even though you don’t.’

  ‘Not something you’d see very much in Russia,’ said Mihail.

  ‘Absolutely. You’re really quite an advanced specimen.’

  ‘But not as advanced as you?’

  ‘What I do is to please myself, not others.’

  As she spoke she leaned forward, hunched over the table, her eyes fixed on his. Beneath it he felt her hand on his thigh, her fingers caressing his flesh through the cloth of his trousers, working their way up. Though the action was hidden from them both by the table top, anyone else in the room who cared to look would see it. He grinned and decided to call her bluff, copying her action, his fingers pressing into her thigh through the material of her dress, searching for a gap. Still their eyes remained locked.

  ‘My arms are longer,’ he whispered.

  She pulled away, sitting upright. Her hands came up to the table, allowing her to push her chair back a little.

  ‘Now who’s bourgeois?’ he asked.

 
; ‘It’s not that,’ she said, ‘but we have a higher duty. We can’t raise suspicion.’

  It might have been true, but her flushed cheeks indicated more embarrassment than revolutionary ardour.

  ‘But come the glorious day …?’ he said.

  She reached across to him, above the table, and held his hands in hers.

  ‘I don’t think we have to wait that long,’ she smiled.

  Whatever his expectations might have been, Mihail spent that night alone. Before he and Dusya could leave the café, Sofia had entered, her face pale, her eyebrows knitted. She had summoned Dusya over to speak to her in private and then the two women had left together. Of all of them, it was Sofia that Mihail feared the most. She was the most fanatical, the most driven, the most hardened. If anyone were to expose him, it would be she.

  And yet what was there to expose? That in reality he had no interest in blowing up the tsar and that his real purpose was to destroy a vampire that had persecuted his family through the generations? If she doubted him, it wouldn’t be because she suspected him of that. There was the fact that Konstantin was his father, and that Aleksandr was therefore his uncle – that would certainly be a black mark against a member of the People’s Will. But that would seem even less likely than his vampire hunting. No; he felt safe; safer still in the sense that he had Dmitry on his side. Since they had spoken, Dmitry had apparently made no attempt to denounce him. That did not make him an ally, but it meant that the two were locked together within the People’s Will. They had a shared secret and neither would betray the other for fear of betraying himself.

  But it was not simply that Dmitry had not denounced him. No one had seen Dmitry for several days. Mihail’s surveillance of Saint Isaac’s had yielded nothing, and neither had Dusya’s at the hotel. All had gone cold – nothing of Iuda, nothing of Dmitry, nothing of Zmyeevich. Those latter two were chiefly of interest in that they might lead to Iuda, but Mihail knew that if the chance came to act against Zmyeevich, he would take it. The world would be a better place without him, but more than that, with Zmyeevich out of the picture Aleksandr would have no reluctance in helping Mihail with his true quest. But there was a greater motivation; it was what Aleksei would have done. There was little point in avenging him if Mihail could not live up to his image. But all that hinged on finding Dmitry and Zmyeevich.