Authors: Jasper Kent
But the question remained: should he tell her? Would she be pleased to learn the truth; that her apparent parents were no such thing, that they had lied to her throughout her life, that she was the bastard offspring of a whore and an exiled traitor? But would that not be compensated by gaining a new-found brother, by the lost time they could make up together? He shook his head. That would be a boon for him, but not her. She did not yearn for a brother, just as he had not yearned for a sister until he knew that he had one. On this issue at least, he would not be so self-indulgent. He would stick with his father’s wishes, as best he could perceive them. Aleksei had clearly gone to great efforts to hide himself from Tamara – Dmitry would not act against him. Perhaps, if the rumours of the amnesty were true, Aleksei would return home with a changed mind. Time would tell, but until then, Tamara would not hear the truth – not from Dmitry’s lips.
He looked out across Senate Square, then turned to face the Admiralty. He shifted a few paces to the left and leaned on his cane. Now he was at the exact spot where he had been standing back then. He could clearly see the Bronze Horseman, and just a little way in front and to the left had been Yudin and his father. There was one major difference – there was no bridge there any more. The Isaakievsky Bridge was in the process of being reconstructed upstream, away from Senate Square. It had been a floating bridge of pontoons – somewhat grander than the one
in
Sevastopol, but on the same principle. Now there was a new bridge, originally the Annunciation Bridge, but quickly renamed in honour of the dead Tsar Nikolai – the first real, solid bridge ever to be built over the Neva. It stood opposite the Church of the Annunciation, a little way downstream, so the pontoon bridge had been moved to keep a distance between them.
Today, as in 1825, there was little need for bridges. The surface of the river was frozen solid, though it still flowed swiftly beneath. It was across the ice that Aleksei and Yudin had fled, there that Yudin had been shot, there that Aleksei had comforted him and there that Aleksei had been arrested. Dmitry could see their figures as he had seen them for the last time, minutes before that – Aleksei desperately signalling that he should get away, Yudin calmer, but with the same intent.
Dmitry turned now as he had turned then and left the square. His destination was as it had been then, but his route was less circuitous. There were no troops out today searching for straggling revolutionaries. He walked past the Admiralty and turned down Nevsky Prospekt and soon he was outside his home – not the home that he shared with Svetlana on the other side of town, but the home in which he had grown up with Marfa and Aleksei – where Marfa had died. Underneath was a bookshop. That hadn’t been there when he was young. He remembered Marfa writing to him about it when the old man had moved in. She had never seen so many books in one place. It was soon after that that she had stopped writing, and instead Yudin had sent a letter to explain that she had died.
Dmitry looked up at the windows of the apartment, remembering which room was which. The one in the centre of the first floor was the salon. That’s where his harpsichord had been, and after it his piano – a gift from Aleksei. It had arrived only a day or so before the revolt, and so his father had never heard him play it. Now it was across town, in the home that Dmitry shared with Svetlana. He knew he should go there.
But he didn’t go immediately. Instead he stood in the snow and looked up at his former home, and let the music fill his head.
Tyeplov. That was his real name, as best as Yudin could remember. It would be in his notes. Prometheus the Titan. It had seemed fitting when Yudin had scrawled the word on the cave wall at Chufut Kalye, all those years ago.
But whatever he was called, Prometheus should not have been in Moscow. He should not have been anywhere on the surface of the Earth, but deep beneath it. Yudin and Raisa had left them all entombed beneath Chufut Kalye. Prometheus himself had been shackled to a wall, but had evidently escaped his chains. And then, somehow, he had dug his way to freedom. And now he had come for Yudin.
Of that there was little doubt. Prometheus had been following him, and there could be no question as to his motivation – revenge. For such antisocial creatures, vengeance was an unusual passion in vampires. Yudin had more than once turned the trait against them, or at least used it to his own advantage. Aleksei’s friend Maks had killed three
voordalaki
back in 1812. With a little direction from Yudin, the retribution that the others had meted out to him had been quite wonderful to behold. But Yudin had no desire to become the victim of a similar vendetta – and what he had done to those
voordalaki
he held captive beneath Chufut Kalye was far worse than anything achieved by Maks.
He left Lubyanka Square and walked north-east, away from the centre of the city and the Kremlin. He knew full well he would not be going there, or to his house in Zamoskvorechye, while Prometheus was following him – and for the moment it seemed that the easiest way to be certain of where Prometheus was, was to have him always just a few paces behind. Yudin had no direct reason to suppose that his pursuer was there, but he had been so indiscreet about his movements that only a fool would have lost track of him. From the little he could remember, Prometheus was no fool.
He turned on to Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, heading west, deciding that it was best to take a path tangential to the one that would lead him home while he pondered what to do. As he turned, he glanced over his shoulder, but did not see the tall figure of Prometheus. He had no doubt that he was out there, somewhere. And perhaps not just he alone. A dozen or more had
been
buried there at Chufut Kalye. How many had escaped? Had they all come to Moscow and was Prometheus merely the one that Yudin had recognized? Anybody he passed in the street might be one of them. Or perhaps they were keeping back, encircling him, preparing to close in.
And there was another consideration. It was not just Yudin against whom the vampires of Chufut Kalye would seek vengeance – there was also Raisa. She had been one of them, ostensibly. Yudin had experimented on her. Most of his discoveries about reflection were based on observations of her. And yet he had always avoided being cruel to her, at least so cruel that she would notice. He had never been quite sure why but, as with his friendship with Dmitry, it was down to a feeling that one day it would prove useful.
With Raisa, even when that day had come, he had not been sure of her till the last. It was Aleksei who had ruined everything – released all of Yudin’s prisoners and turned them against their master. Even without Raisa’s help Yudin would probably have escaped, but it would have been much tougher. She had helped him to entomb the others. Still he had not delivered to her the reward he had promised – the mirror she so craved. But it meant that the other vampires would hate her as much as they did Yudin – perhaps more. Would they accept her as a sacrificial offering to appease their wrath, and so allow him to live? If it came to it, he would certainly make the offer.
Yudin turned right down a narrow alleyway and immediately broke into a run, making sure that his feet came down with an audible stomp, stomp, stomp, despite the attempts of the snow to muffle them. After a few seconds he swiftly turned and came to a halt. In the mouth of the alley, caught in the moonlight, stood his pursuer.
It was not Prometheus. The fact that he was following Yudin became clear as he first froze for a moment, then fled back out into the street. So now it seemed there were at least two of them – two who had escaped the caves. And while Prometheus had seemed a very able huntsman in the city streets, this new arrival was an outright amateur.
Yudin ran back up the alleyway after him.
The sleigh moved slowly along Nevsky Prospekt. There was traffic ahead, but Tamara was in no hurry. It was Konstantin who had invited her here to Petersburg and he who had sent the sled – if she was late, he could hardly blame her. The Kazansky Bridge was chaotic, as some sleighs turned down to ride alongside the canal and others turned out on to the Prospekt. There was even a wheeled carriage ahead, but it was hopelessly stuck in the snow. Tamara’s driver flicked his whip at his horse and steered them around the obstruction. They passed Great Konyushennaya Street and Tamara glanced over towards Aleksei Ivanovich’s former apartments, but she knew that there was nothing more for her to learn there. She had received a reply to her brief note to the new tenant, who signed herself simply as Mademoiselle Nevant. It was clear she had something to hide, but it was nothing that would help in Tamara’s quest.
The bridge over the Moika was less congested. The sleigh would have glided over easily had it not been for Tamara’s sudden scream of ‘Stop!’
The driver pulled up almost immediately, and Tamara leaned out of the carriage. She pulled her scarf tighter round her face, so that she would not be recognized. On the left-hand side of the street was a row of shops. Most sold food and drink, but some sold other goods such as furnishings. One of them sold toys.
The window of the store was decorated for Christmas in the Germanic style that was becoming ever more popular in Russia. At it stood a little boy, his hand clasped in his mother’s. He was nine years old – Tamara knew that precisely. She could not see the boy’s face, but she could see the mother’s clearly as she attempted to press on through the snow. And in recognizing the mother, she knew the child.
Soon, the boy was pulled away from the window and mother and child continued along the street. Tamara told the driver to carry on, slowly, and they kept pace with the pair, allowing Tamara to keep her eyes on the boy for a little longer, before he and his mother turned left towards Saint Isaac’s, disappearing from view as Tamara’s coach travelled on. At the end of Nevsky Prospekt they turned right, passing in front of the Winter Palace. In Palace
Square
, dwarfed by the column commemorating Aleksandr’s victory over Bonaparte, stood a decorated spruce tree. Again it was an import from the Germanic traditions of celebrating Christmas. The imperial family, with so much German blood in it, had erected such a tree at home for many years. This was only the fourth year that one had been placed here for public display, much to the disgust of the metropolitan.
They drove across the square and out into Millionaire’s Street. It led straight to the Marble Palace, and to the same door she had used on her last visit. She knocked sharply and the door was opened by the footman she had seen before. Her suspicions of his dark past in the form of a lizard were now forgotten. Now, it all seemed very real – almost familiar. He led her along the corridor to the flight of wooden steps, then up them and out on to the stone staircase. At the top of it, he took her across the marble landing and then paused at the high doors to knock. From within he heard a response that Tamara didn’t catch and he opened the door. Tamara stepped inside.
Konstantin came over to her, his arms outstretched. He took her hands and kissed them both through her gloves. Then, still holding them, he leaned back slightly and looked into her face. Straight away he frowned. She could well understand why. Despite the effort she had made with her make-up, she knew that it must now look awful. She could feel the tracks that her tears had cut through the powder on her cheeks and could taste their salt at the corner of her lips.
‘My dear Tamara,’ asked Konstantin, ‘what has happened to make you cry so?’
She could not think of any lie with which to appease him, and she doubted whether she wanted to. More than anything, she had the overarching desire to explain to somebody how she felt and tell them what had happened. And so she told him.
‘I’ve just seen my son.’
Once back on the main street Yudin’s pursuer soon caught up with him again. He was more stealthy now, or thought he was, but it was very easy for Yudin to ensure that this new
voordalak
was never too far behind him. Yudin let him follow as far as
the
Vysokopetrovsky Monastery before deciding to turn the tables.
He ducked inside the monastery. It was a sprawling collection of buildings, and a place wherein a man could be lost from view simply by turning two corners. That was easily achieved. Now Yudin stepped back into the shadows. He saw the
voordalak
walk past quickly, looking from side to side, trying to pick up a trace of Yudin. Once he had gone, all was quiet and the monastery seemed deserted, but from within the pale blue walls of St Sergius’s Church came the sound of chanting. It became momentarily louder and a patch of yellow light told Yudin that a door had been opened.
The light vanished and the sound dimmed and from the side of the church emerged a priest. He was perfect for Yudin’s needs. Yudin waited a moment until he had almost disappeared from view and then scuttled silently after him, hiding again as he got close. He made an easy quarry – his head too full of thoughts of his Saviour for him to have any awareness of what was going on around him on Earth. Soon he wouldn’t need to worry about either. His final destination appeared to be the monastery cathedral, an unusual brick rotunda whose tower seemed to dwarf its body.
Yudin caught up with the priest just inside the doorway. His teeth sank quickly into the aged neck and he felt a gush of warmth as blood spilled over his lips. The priest died without uttering a sound. Yudin held him for a few moments and drank, but there was little pleasure in it. Once the prey was dead, the blood began to stale quickly – and without experiencing the suffering of his victim, what real enjoyment could Yudin draw from any of it? This was nothing like the hours of self-indulgence that Yudin had been planning for the evening – a night of hedonism of the sort that he rarely allowed himself – but it would have to do. Besides, there were many hours until dawn and perhaps still the prospect of spoiling himself.