by Kent, Jasper
Dmitry had never met the late Tsar Nikolai, but had seen him on several occasions, the first being in December 1825 as he sat astride a horse just to the south of Senate Square and ordered his cannon to open fire on the thousands of good men who had dared raise objections to his absolute power. Nikolai’s power had won out – and Dmitry had never forgiven him.
But neither had Dmitry ever done anything about it. He’d fantasized over the idea of himself as a lone assassin, liberating Russia by annihilating her dictator, but he had never acted, or even begun to formulate a plan. He guessed that there were others like him – in the army and elsewhere – but it would need them to work together for anything to come of it. And since the fall of the Decembrists, there were few who dared talk like that. The Third Section was everywhere, or at least that was what people – what Dmitry – believed, and that was enough. No one had acted. In the end Nikolai had died of a winter chill. General Février had turned traitor.
‘You’re the last man I expected to see moping over the death of Impernikel.’
Dmitry looked up. It was Tyeplov. In each hand he held a glass of brandy. He offered one to Dmitry.
‘You shouldn’t call him that,’ said Dmitry, his voice kept low. The name, a simple contraction of ‘Empereur Nikolai’, was not particularly insulting in itself, but it was the favourite epithet of the tsar’s long-time critic, the exile Aleksandr Herzen.
‘Nobody here cares any more than you or I do,’ said Tyeplov, sitting down beside him. Dmitry looked around. It was probably true. If anyone here held the same strength of opinion as Dmitry, they kept it to themselves, but few would object to so trifling an insult.
Two weeks ago, Dmitry would have suspected that Tyeplov was trying to lure him into saying something even more treasonous, which he could report back to his masters in the Third Section, but now he had come to doubt it. Tyeplov was too obvious for a government spy – and far too engaging. They had already dined together several times. Anatoliy Vladimirovich Tyeplov – Tolya, as Dmitry now addressed him – was wonderful company. In many ways, Dmitry found him like a child, his mind an empty vessel into which Dmitry could pour so much of his knowledge and fascination and taste. Tyeplov was in no way stupid, but there were some huge gaps in his education. On the other hand, there were areas in which he had ideas of which Dmitry had never dreamed. Talking to him was like talking to an open-minded father – someone from whom he could learn but who did not object to learning from him. Dmitry had lost his own father, Aleksei, at an age when such communication could only really be one way. Even with Yudin there was a sense that there was little Dmitry could tell him that he did not already know.
But there were other ways in which Tyeplov was nothing like a father. For a start, he must have been a good fifteen years younger than Dmitry. And neither Aleksei nor Yudin had ever occupied Dmitry’s mind quite so exclusively as Tyeplov did.
‘Anyway,’ said Dmitry, sipping his brandy, ‘I wasn’t moping. I was remembering.’
‘14 December 1825,’ said Tyeplov, simply.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s what everyone’s thinking. At the end, we think of the beginning.’
‘I was there,’ said Dmitry. It was a foolish admission, but for some reason he blurted it out.
‘With your father?’
Dmitry nodded. ‘And a friend – someone who was almost like a father to me.’
‘What happened?’
Dmitry looked over to him. It wasn’t something he had spoken of to anyone before, apart from Yudin, but the concern that displayed itself in Tyeplov’s eyes made Dmitry’s urge to unburden himself irresistible.
‘My father and I were both there, in Senate Square, with the others – prepared to die for what we believed in. And then Vasiliy Denisovich – this friend – came and joined us.’
‘He was a revolutionary too?’
Dmitry smiled at the thought. ‘Oh no. Vasiliy had no interest in that sort of thing.’
‘Had?’
‘He died – on that day.’ It was odious for Dmitry to lie to Tyeplov, but it was a promise he had made to Yudin on discovering that he was alive and that he had changed his name.
‘Go on.’
‘Both Papa and Vasiliy begged me to leave – Vasiliy even brought Mama into it – and so I did. I walked away and left them to it.’
‘It must have been a great relief to them.’
‘You think so?’ asked Dmitry eagerly. Yudin had always said as much to him, but he knew nothing of Aleksei’s thoughts. Even a hint of where Dmitry had been that day would be pounced upon by the censors.
Tyeplov nodded firmly. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I went home – by a roundabout route. There were troops everywhere, some loyal to Nikolai, others on our side, but I didn’t want to run into either. I went out across the Neva, over to Vasilevskiy Island, then on to Petrogradskaya and finally back across the ice to the mainland. The shooting was over by then. Vasiliy was dead and Papa had been arrested.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was shot. I heard about it long after. My father tried to help him. But then when the ice broke up, his body was lost in the water.’ That much was true. Dmitry had managed to piece it together from various witnesses and in the end from Yudin himself. His father had never written of it.
‘Did they find the body?’
Dmitry shook his head, staring down into his drink. He could not look Tyeplov in the eye and lie so blatantly. Though it was in a sense true. They didn’t find a body because Yudin had survived. The bullet wound had been superficial and he had been pulled from the water moments after falling in. He had managed to escape the city and flee. He told it all to Dmitry when he returned, years later.
‘And your father?’
‘Arrested. Tried. Exiled. I never saw him again.’
‘Not even when he was in prison?’
‘No.’ Everyone, Aleksei included, had said it was for the best, to avoid any suspicion of where Dmitry’s sympathies lay.
‘So what did you do?’
Nothing, thought Dmitry, before churning out the usual list. ‘I stayed with the army. Became a loyal subject of Impernikel. Suppressed those who rose up against him. Looked after my mother. Got married.’ Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
‘Children?’
Dmitry shook his head. ‘What about you?’
‘Never even married.’
‘No, I meant the whole life story thing.’
‘Ah!’ said Tyeplov. ‘Now there’s a tale.’
Dmitry was not to hear it, not then. The shout of ‘Anatoliy’ flew across the room. Tyeplov looked, and Dmitry thought that he saw a momentary scowl cross his friend’s face. It was a reflection of Dmitry’s own annoyance, of his jealousy of Tyeplov’s company.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tyeplov said, standing. ‘Come. Join us.’
Dmitry considered, but the thoughts of Aleksei and Yudin and the events of thirty years before had thrown him into a dark humour. Instead he went over to the piano and began to play Beethoven – it suited his mood and he knew Tyeplov enjoyed it. He watched as Tyeplov chatted with the two officers who had hailed him; a Shtabs-Captain and a poruchik. He had no need to look at the keyboard and kept his eyes fixed on his friend, playing with just a fragment more passion whenever Tyeplov’s eyes flicked towards him.
Yudin had chosen to savour the moment. He’d been busy in the days since the news had arrived, but not so busy that he couldn’t have spared the hour or so that it would have taken to set up his microscope and finally gaze upon the exquisite detail of what Raisa had provided for him. But so august an observation merited better than time that was spared; it required time that was dedicated. There was no rush. If Yudin could have observed Aleksandr’s blood at the very moment of his father’s death, then he might have seen something uniquely wonderful, but in the time it had taken the news to reach Moscow – even via the magnetic telegraph – that moment had passed, and a delay of days was no worse
than a delay of minutes.
Yudin checked himself. That was an assumption. For him to believe that it took but an instant for the knowledge of Aleksandr’s new-found status to be transferred from his body in Petersburg to the sample of his blood in Moscow was as foolish as the belief that light travelled at an infinite speed – which was to say that it did not travel at all. A new experiment was needed to establish the speed of that transfer, but now was not the time. Yudin had better things to interest him: the blood of a Romanov – the blood of a new tsar.
What secrets might it reveal? Might he find a way to hurry the process of transformation, to make Aleksandr into a voordalak with none of the machinations that their failed attempt on the first Aleksandr had involved? If he could present such a mechanism to Zmyeevich then all would be forgiven. Or perhaps what he discovered might lie in a different direction. Perhaps he could even find out that it was possible to completely reverse the process and thereby cure the Romanovs of their affliction for ever. He had no affection for the rulers of Russia, but they would pay mightily for such a cure – and would protect him from Zmyeevich. On the other hand, Zmyeevich would pay for it too, if only to keep it from them. Yudin saw the auction price rising and rising before his eyes.
He allowed himself one more moment to savour the idea, then got to work. He cleared his desk and took the microscope out of its case. The brasswork was a little tarnished, but he would see to that later. Next, he gathered together every lamp and candle he had – even going up to Gribov’s room to fetch more – and lit them, assembling them as close together as he could at the opposite end of the desk from the instrument. Then, from a small drawer in the bottom of the microscope case, he produced a lens. It was an ordinary magnifying glass, quite a large one, mounted on a stand. He placed it between the lamps and the microscope and began adjusting its position.
It had been one of the most horrible realizations after he had become a vampire. For a moment he had feared he might never be able to look into a microscope again. A microscope required light – an abundant commodity for most in the form of sunlight, but unusable for a vampire. Any microscope – Yudin’s included – was fitted with a small mirror beneath the viewing platform. The mirror could be adjusted to any angle and was meant to be positioned so that sunlight reflected from it up through the specimen, through the combination of lenses that did the work of magnification and into the observer’s eye.
Yudin had tried it once. It had been the most delectable agony he ever experienced. He only opened the curtain a fraction, so that sunlight fell upon the mirror, not on him, but the light that came from the microscope and entered his eye had been as intense – more intense – than any example he had seen of light falling directly upon a vampire’s body. In the caves beneath Chufut Kalye, when he had been merely human, he had carried out many experiments to discover the effect of light on vampires. But times had changed, and this one he had been forced to perform upon himself.
He had gone completely blind in that eye. Raising his hand to it he could find only a bloody gap, which he knew was already healing. He could not look in a mirror to see the effect. He had put his hand to the back of his head and felt a gap there too. The light had burned all the way through his skull. And yet, within less than a minute, he was as normal. The wound was healed and his sight restored, with no scar to hint at the horrible disfigurement he had so briefly endured. It was the knowledge that there would be no permanent damage that made the pain bearable.
Using artificial light was a sufficient solution, which Yudin had come upon with only a little further experimentation. The light was not as bright as the sun would have been, but it was clear enough for him to examine his specimens. He made final adjustments to the magnifying glass so that it focused the image of the lamps and candles close to the mirror. Then he prepared his slide.
He poured out just a drop of Aleksandr’s blood. He corrected himself – of the tsar’s blood. It was still liquid thanks to the anticoagulant that Raisa had naturally introduced with her bite. He added a thin film of mica which the blood sucked eagerly down on to itself until it was thin enough for light to penetrate. He put the slide under the microscope and peered down through the eyepiece.
The blood appeared perfectly normal.
That was to be expected. While Yudin had never had the chance to examine Romanov blood like this before, the circumstances that had created it were not unique. He had reproduced them in his laboratory in the Crimea. He had allowed a vampire to drink a man’s blood almost to the point of killing him, but not quite. He’d then let the man breed, and examined the offspring’s blood. It had looked like that of any human – and yet when the child was given the blood of the original vampire to drink and then killed, it became a vampire. It was just as they had planned with Aleksandr I – just as Zmyeevich was undoubtedly planning with the new Aleksandr.
Yudin surmised that there was a change in the blood at some level, but it was an internal change, or perhaps something too small to be seen by the microscope. It did not matter – his experiments had not ended there and neither would this one. He went over to the map drawers and opened the top one. In it lay several vials, each neatly labelled. He picked one out. It was larger than the vial of Aleksandr’s blood, but then it had been donated voluntarily. Even as he held it in his hand he felt awed by it. This was why Zmyeevich hated him so, and yet feared to act against him. It felt almost sacred to cradle it in his fingers: the blood of the vampire Zmyeevich. What power it gave him. He needed only to wait until day and then hurl it out into the light to inflict the most terrible pain on Zmyeevich, wherever he might be in the world, as the sun burned that small fragment of him. It would be as if the blood within his own veins were burning. But he would quickly recover, and Yudin would become suddenly vulnerable, his only power over Zmyeevich lost for ever. Along with his ability to experiment.
He mixed a drop of Zmyeevich’s blood with the sample of Aleksandr’s and re-examined the slide, licking his lips in anticipation of observing this once-in-a-generation moment. This was what would happen, on a much vaster scale, within Aleksandr’s own body if he were to ingest Zmyeevich’s blood. Yudin opened his notebook on the desk beside him and picked up a pencil, ready to make notes.
The red cells of Zmyeevich’s blood were quite distinct from Aleksandr’s. This was simply a difference between vampires and humans that Yudin had observed many times before. Aleksandr’s were disc-shaped, with a slight depression in the middle. The voordalak cells were larger – almost half as large again – and completely smooth.
The next observation was important – although it was more a lack of an observation. If the blood had been merely human – not Romanov blood that had already been taken by Zmyeevich – then the vampire cells would have attacked the human cells. In numbers as great as this, they would have been victorious, although a strong human could fight off a small dose. Yudin used the word ‘attack’, but the exact mechanism wasn’t clear; again too small to be seen in the microscope. The human cells merely withered. But that did not happen here.
What did happen was far more spectacular. The cells merged. It was almost – though Yudin knew he was being fanciful – as if the vampire cells seduced the human cells. They buffeted against them and then, being larger, began to surround them. And then, with the silent ‘pop’ of two droplets of rain on a window pane forming into one, they merged into a single cell – perfectly spherical. Within two minutes, Yudin could see no other kind of cell in his sample.
The third stage would come soon, when each spherical cell would redivide, regenerating the two cells from which it formed, except that now both cells would be larger and would lack the indentation in the middle. Both would be vampire cells. He had seen it a hundred times before, but never with such illustrious bloodlines. The idea that he was about to witness the spawning of the blood of a Romanov thrilled him.
He waited.
He checked his watch.
The process should have begun within a minute
of the spherical cells forming.
He waited again.
After five minutes, he stood up. He began to pace around the desk, staring angrily at the microscope, as though it were to blame. He wished he had all his old notebooks with him, but they were back at the house. He went through the possibilities in his mind.
One consideration jumped at him. Aleksandr was not a Romanov. It was no secret that Russia’s tsaritsas could be as promiscuous as her tsars. It had been a constant fear for Zmyeevich – that the throne would one day be taken by a bastard child who did not carry the Romanov blood and over whom he had no chance of taking control. The most likely candidate had been Tsar Pavel, whose mother, Yekaterina the Great, had had countless lovers and shown no affection for her supposed son. But Pavel’s son, Aleksandr I, was beyond doubt a Romanov. He had seen through Zmyeevich’s eyes and the voordalak had in turn been able to influence his mind. But that did not prove that Aleksandr’s brother Nikolai was a true Romanov, nor that Nikolai’s son was.
But Yudin was being an idiot. If the blood he had seen had not been Romanov blood, then the spherical cells would not have formed. The red blood cells would have been destroyed, as when any normal human blood met vampire blood. So if this was Romanov blood, then perhaps it was not Aleksandr’s. If it had come from his brothers, or his son, then it would have shown the full reaction, just as it should for Aleksandr. Could it be Nikolai’s? That would fit the observations. Nikolai came from a generation of Romanovs that could no longer be affected, thanks to the attempts already made on his brother – Zmyeevich could only focus his power on one child in each generation. That would mean the spherical cells formed but did not divide, wouldn’t it? Yudin cursed not having his books to refer to. But why should Raisa take Nikolai’s blood and pass it off as his son’s? She wouldn’t risk lying to Yudin. And the chances of her stealing a kiss from the tsar were far more slight than that she should manage it with his son.