The Third Section (Danilov Quintet 3)

by Jasper Kent

  She climbed the stairs in the way she had done as a child, leaning forward and half crawling so that her hands touched the steps in front of her, ignoring the filth and grime that they picked up, almost pleased that in the darkness she could not see it. The steps flattened out and she thought she must be in Yudin’s office, but she remembered the small landing where the stairway had branched into two. She turned right, and soon felt the steps rising again.

  At last she came up against another door. She pushed at it, but it would not open. Her hands fumbled around, searching for a handle or latch. Eventually she gripped something metallic. She pulled on it and the door opened. Now, finally, in Yudin’s office, there was some little illumination, but it did not stop her flight. She crossed the room and carried on upwards on the stairs that she knew led to the surface. Soon another door was in front of her, but this one opened easily. She spilled outside and took in great gasps of the cool, clean night air. Eventually her breathing slowed.

  She waited for Yudin to join her, but he did not. She knew she should go back down – only to his office – and speak to him, but she was unable. Instead she headed home. The taste of the foul air below was still on her tongue, its scent still in her nostrils. She lit a cigarette and drove the stench – and the memories – away.

  It was the small hours before Dmitry made it back to his lodgings and went to bed, but he did not sleep. The enemy bombardment had begun to subside, but still the occasional blast could be heard, which was enough to keep him awake – as was his state of mind.

  It should have all been quite inexplicable. Dmitry had been at the mercy of Ignatyev and yet the creature had not killed him. More than that, Ignatyev had desisted at Tyeplov’s instruction. Why should Tyeplov command him? Why should he obey? And yet the explanation came in the image that filled Dmitry’s mind as he lay in the darkness and gazed at the ceiling.

  It was the scene in the bedroom, before the explosion – the dead man on the floor, Ignatyev turning away, blood streaming from his lips, and Tyeplov, his face in his hands at the washstand. Dmitry let his mind create music to accompany his recollection, but the tunes that came were strangely light-hearted; clarinets and piccolos danced over the melody, laughing at Dmitry. And there was good reason for it, for there was one aspect of the tableau that proved Dmitry to have been an utter fool.

  In the mirror on the bedroom wall, above the washstand, Tyeplov had shown no reflection.

  Dmitry had never seen him in daylight. He had seen him consort with men who had later proved to be vampires – Mihailov, Wieczorek and now Ignatyev. When Mihailov and Wieczorek had come to them in the casemate, it was not as two vampires come to feast on two men. They were merely rejoining their comrade in the hope of sharing at least a taste of the blood that Tyeplov had so cunningly taken into his possession.

  And that was another way in which Dmitry felt a fool. It was so absurd he even chuckled at it – thinking of himself as some deluded young virgin, tricked by an old letch. Tyeplov had wanted him only for his body. If that were true in the normal sense, then Dmitry would not have minded; he was not a romantic who needed to be flattered to be seduced. He had enjoyed Tyeplov’s body just as much as he had believed Tyeplov enjoyed his. But for Tyeplov, the night they had spent together had not been the goal of his seduction, but merely a phase of it, a way to weaken Dmitry’s resistance when the moment came for the final consummation of the flesh, which Dmitry would have found impossible to enjoy.

  The same thing must have happened that night. Whoever their poor victim had been, Dmitry could only suspect that Tyeplov and Ignatyev had lured him with promises of much the same enjoyments as Dmitry had experienced. Clearly Tyeplov had learned from his mistakes with Dmitry, and had allowed Ignatyev to strike swiftly.

  The bed suddenly shook. Someone had sat down on it, beside Dmitry. In the darkness, Dmitry could see only a silhouette, but he knew Tyeplov’s scent intimately. He felt a finger placed on his lips.

  ‘Have you guessed?’ said Tyeplov softly. He held his finger there for a few moments more and then pulled it away so that Dmitry could speak. Dmitry lay still, terrified by the simplicity of the situation. There was no need for conversation or seduction or for leading men away down a quiet city street. Tyeplov had come to his room, and would kill him and devour him, all in the space of one night, and Dmitry would be able to do nothing about it. Even if he could fight off one vampire, Ignatyev would be somewhere near.

  ‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked, his voice hushed and bitter.

  ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Why should I believe you?’

  ‘Why should I lie?’

  ‘You’ve lied to me before.’

  Dmitry felt Tyeplov lie down beside him and rest his arm across his chest. His face was now close and Dmitry could feel breath on his cheek. The smell was repellent, like rotting meat. Dmitry wondered that he had never noticed it before, but then realized: in their previous encounters, Tyeplov had not recently eaten.

  ‘Have I?’ said Tyeplov.

  Dmitry thought back. Perhaps he hadn’t. ‘You deceived me.’

  ‘I had to. Look at what you did to Wieczorek.’

  ‘And look at what you did to that poor fellow tonight. Why do you need to pretend with me?’

  ‘You’re different.’

  For a ghastly moment, Dmitry feared that Tyeplov was about to tell him that he genuinely loved him, that, though he lusted after human blood, in Dmitry’s case a deeper emotion meant that he would resist his basest urges, and hoped that Dmitry could overcome his natural revulsion at such a creature and reciprocate his affection. It was a revolting concept. Unholy. A union between man and beast, fouler even than the beast itself.

  ‘Different?’ he asked.

  ‘“For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.”’

  ‘So it’s about Papa?’ Dmitry had suspected something from the moment Tyeplov had shown such interest in Aleksei. ‘He’s too far away for you to take your vengeance on him, so you plan to take it out on me?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. It was the three-fingered man who saved us. His son will be the instrument of our vengeance.’

  ‘Papa saved you?’

  ‘We were imprisoned – tortured by a man called Cain. Your father freed us – or at least attempted to.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Near here – a place known as Chufut Kalye.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In 1825.’

  As with any deceit, it was founded upon truth. In 1825 Aleksei had travelled to the Crimea, in pursuit of a vampire, Kyesha. On his return, he had told little of what had happened, and the death of Aleksandr I had begun a sequence of events that seemed far more pressing. But before then, Dmitry had heard his father speak of vampires with nothing but loathing; that he would side with them, and against a human, was absurd.

  ‘And only now you seek your revenge?’

  ‘Cain tricked us – we were entombed. We were freed only recently.’

  ‘He must be getting on a bit now,’ said Dmitry. ‘He may be dead.’

  ‘He has become like us.’

  ‘A voordalak?’

  Tyeplov nodded, his face scarcely visible in the darkness. ‘Will you help us?’

  It was absurd. Dmitry was being asked to take sides in a battle, not between Russian and Frenchman, or even between man and monster, but between voordalak and voordalak. Even if it were true that Aleksei had sided with them in the past, it did not mean that Dmitry should do so now. Fundamentally, all of these creatures merited but one fate – death. But Dmitry’s concerns were far more immediate.

  ‘I thought I was your friend,’ he said.

  ‘You are,’ Tyeplov insisted. ‘To the extent that I can have a friend.’

  ‘You made me your friend, to get what you wanted.’

  ‘I sensed what you wanted,’ said Tyeplov.

  Dmitry could not deny the truth of what Tyeplov said, but it only went to show that Tyeplov had been acc
urate in detecting Dmitry’s weakness. It had all been a matter of seduction, though it seemed he had guessed wrongly again as to the ultimate goal. If Tyeplov had wanted his body – in any sense – he could have taken it. Dmitry would have succumbed willingly to one expression of his lust, and was in no position to resist the other. But Tyeplov had found a third way to exploit him.

  ‘I won’t help you,’ Dmitry said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a vampire,’ said Dmitry. He meant it figuratively as well as literally. ‘If you want revenge on another vampire, what should I care? How can one of you be right and one of you be wrong, when you’re both spawned from Hell? I hope you all die – and if I see you again, it will be me that kills you.’ The calm of his voice belied a strength of passion that surprised him, but he knew that it came not from his hatred of all vampires. That existed, though it was of little relevance. At that moment it was the depth of his emotions towards one voordalak in particular that drove him.

  Tyeplov stood. Dmitry could see his body, dimly silhouetted against the curtains. ‘Your father thought differently,’ he said.

  ‘Then my father was a fool.’ Dmitry believed his own words and, for some reason, believed Tyeplov’s too. The whole story about Aleksei could be a fantasy, but it fitted with the fact that Tyeplov had come to him. Over his life, his view of his father had fluctuated through every conceivable sentiment, but at that moment Dmitry hated him – hated him for his weakness in once siding with this creature, and for his short-sightedness in not seeing that one day that weakness would come to haunt his child.

  ‘You should talk to your father,’ said Tyeplov. ‘Write to him.’

  ‘When I get round to it, I’ll be sure to mention your name.’

  Tyeplov paused. His head tilted to one side. ‘He won’t know me by this name,’ he said. Perhaps it was the nature of the vampire, or perhaps it was just him, not to recognize sarcasm.

  ‘What did he call you then?’ Dmitry’s voice was laden with disdain, but still Tyeplov failed to recognize it.

  ‘We never spoke, but there is a name by which he might know me.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Prometheus.’

  CHAPTER XI

  TYEPLOV WAS GONE. He had walked out of Dmitry’s room and Dmitry had not seen him again, neither had anyone he spoke to. Neither had anyone seen anything of Ignatyev or Mihailov. Neither had he heard stories of any more dead found with their throats ripped out – though there had certainly been many more dead. It was over two months since he had spoken to Tyeplov – Prometheus – in his room. He had not said any more and had not attempted to harm Dmitry in any way and Dmitry had not attempted to harm him. He possessed no weapon with which he might achieve it, but even if he had done, he would not have tried.

  He thought of writing to his father, but what would be the point? He could not conceive of how to discuss matters in a way that would not alert the suspicions of the censor. And if Aleksei had not deigned to reply to him before, then why now?

  Over the intervening weeks the sound of the roaring guns had stopped, recommenced and stopped again. Today the guns had once more begun to fire. Official reports back to Petersburg described this as the sixth bombardment, but Dmitry could find few in Sevastopol, other than the most senior officers, who had wasted a moment on counting. The shells of the latest bombardment were very much the same as those of the first except that – at least for Dmitry – they were louder.

  Yet still the city had not fallen. Things had quietened down a little in the summer, when cholera and dysentery had taken their toll on the men of every nation’s army, reducing both their ability and their need to kill one another. But Generals Juillet and Août were less partisan than their hibernal brothers, and their departure would leave both sides equally weakened. And since the enemy had begun the summer stronger than Russia, they would leave it stronger. Dmitry doubted that the siege would hold beyond September. September? They still had to survive another week of August.

  He was out in the third bastion now, as he had been, when on duty, for the last few weeks. As the supply of able-bodied men dwindled postings became fluid, with officers assigned to tasks purely on the basis of numerical necessity, without any regard to their background or skills. It was the cavalry that tended to be moved around the most – a joke at the expense of their renowned manoeuvrability. At least they got to withdraw back to the city when off duty.

  The third bastion wasn’t getting the worst of it. To the left, the French were concentrating their fire on the Malakhov Tower. Since the fall of the Kamchatka Lunette and the White Works, this was the main defensive position in the east. Each night, Russian soldiers would work furiously to repair the damage that had been done by day, but would not quite have time to do enough, and at dawn the barrage would begin again. And so the decline of the Malakhov, like every other defence around the city, was slow enough that it could be watched day by day.

  To the right, the British were attacking the fourth bastion. It was holding out better than the tower, but even so it was decrepit compared with earlier in the year. If it did not eventually fall, it would only be because the defences elsewhere failed sooner. Thoughts of the fourth bastion brought Tyeplov to Dmitry’s mind once again. Had he really left the city, intent on taking his revenge on this man Cain without Dmitry’s help, or had he merely gone into hiding, forgetting his personal vendetta and realizing that the day would soon come when the city fell and there would be fresh livestock – French, British, Turkish and Sardinian – swarming in, on which he and his kind could feed?

  The guns boomed and the shells exploded and Dmitry gazed out over the enemy lines to the south, and he knew that that day would not be long in coming.

  * * *

  It was over six months since Tamara had been in Petersburg. When she left she had made no vows never to return, but she had not anticipated that she would be travelling back quite so soon, or that her purpose would be to carry out research. She thought she had exhausted the capital of all the information it could give her concerning her parentage. But now she was interested in a new topic. She had only one clue regarding the murders in Moscow – the name Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov. And with regard to Danilov she had only one useful fact – an address in Petersburg. Yudin had not returned the file on the Decembrist exile, and there might be far more there to be discovered.

  But Gribov’s library was, to say the least, imperfectly sorted. Although the vast majority of the papers regarding Danilov might have been collated into that one file that Yudin held, a few had slipped through the net. Tamara had found a report from the Manège – the riding school in Moscow – dating back to 1827 and describing the success of a cadet named Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov. Yudin had already revealed that Aleksei’s son was named Dmitry, and now this document provided an address for him and his mother in Petersburg. They might have moved on years ago, but it was still somewhere to start.

  The train whistle sounded three times, signalling the conductors in each carriage to apply the brakes, and they began to slow. The stop at one of the many intermediate stations along the route was not primarily for the sake of passengers, but because the locomotive itself needed to be replenished, taking on wood and water. Over a journey of twenty-two hours, it was not possible for the engine to carry all its provisions.

  They were coming into Bologoye, close to the halfway mark of the journey and one of the three big stations between Moscow and Petersburg. Tamara looked at her husband’s watch. It was almost ten o’clock at night. The wait here would be around half an hour and many of the passengers would alight to get something to eat, but Tamara didn’t feel hungry.

  She felt the train lurch to the left and the station buildings began to skip past, splitting the two tracks apart like the prow of a boat. The train came to a halt, then moved forward a little then forward again. Finally it seemed to have come to a position where the driver was happy. Once they got going again Tamara, like most passengers, woul
d try to sleep, but since that wouldn’t be for a while yet, she decided to get out and stretch her legs. The line of bodies moved slowly down the second-class carriage towards the exit. Ahead of her, as people emerged from the carriage and stepped on to the platform, Tamara sensed a certain buzz among the crowd, as each of them encountered something that she could not yet see.

  Once outside she understood. The imperial train was already in the station, on the other side of the platform. She looked along its length and saw that the locomotive was at the northern end, so it too was heading to Petersburg. It was allowed to travel much faster than the regular passenger services. It would leave first and would be in the capital hours before her own train.

  The crowds headed somewhat reluctantly for the Kartsov Restaurant, situated at the opposite end of the platform from the exclusive royal quarters. Stomachs conflicted with the desire to catch the slightest glimpse of some grand duke, grand duchess or perhaps even His Majesty, and for the most part the more visceral hunger won out. A few, like Tamara, remained in the middle of the platform, but soon became discomforted by the cool night air and either went to the restaurant or got back on the train.

  Tamara lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs until the sensation of its presence had dimmed to nothing, then blew it out through her nostrils, watching the billowing fumes caught in the station lamps and quickly absorbed into the smoky atmosphere that hung over the station whenever a train was in.

  ‘You can’t do that here,’ said a voice. Tamara turned to see a blue-uniformed gendarme, performing the mundane duty of maintaining order on the railways which, by some quirk of bureaucracy, was tasked to the same organization that acted as the public face of the Third Section.