The People's Will

by Jasper Kent

  Osokin gave a roar and began to run, hoping to see the prisoner react and tumble over the obstruction behind him. The creature did move, but far more swiftly than Osokin could have imagined. He turned and picked up the soldier from the floor behind him, holding him by his belt and collar, then he straightened and hurled the helpless man into Osokin’s oncoming charge. There was nothing Osokin could do. He heard an obscene noise and felt the stake press against his hands as it entered the man’s body. His nostrils caught the scent of human ordure. He fell backwards under the impact, letting go of the stake. The soldier rolled aside, groaning in agony.

  Osokin tried to sit up, but he had no time. The next moment, the prisoner was upon him, his eyes blazing, his mouth open to reveal his fangs. Osokin fell back once again and felt the prisoner’s hand on his chin, pushing his head upwards to reveal the pale white flesh of his throat. He began to pray, not that he would live but that he would truly die. He braced himself against the pain.

  But no pain came. Instead, he heard a strangled, gurgling cry and felt the prisoner’s weight lifted from him. He opened his eyes and raised his head to see what had happened.

  Colonel Otrepyev had returned, and had come prepared.

  Around the prisoner’s neck was a loop of wire rope, which was tightened like a dog’s leash. Otrepyev held the other end and now that he had pulled his captive away from Osokin, he had his foot in the small of his back, so that he could further tighten the noose. The prisoner’s hands were at his throat, scratching in search of some way to relieve the tension, but they could find nothing.

  ‘Bind him.’ Otrepyev’s command was to the two men who had returned with him. They had brought a wooden trunk which they emptied on to the floor. A pile of metalwork lay before them, chains, manacles and other devices. Otrepyev maintained his grip on the wire rope, while the soldiers moved in. First they placed a helmet over the prisoner’s head. It was not solid but made of strips of metal so that his eyes, ears and nose were not covered. His mouth received no such favour. A steel tongue forced its way between his lips as the device was fastened. Osokin had seen such a thing before, in a museum in Leipzig. It was called a Schandmaske – a scold’s bridle.

  Next they manacled him – both his hands and his feet. The wire rope was looped through the bindings at his wrists and tied off on those at his ankles. Now Otrepyev released his grip, confident that there was no chance of escape. Finally the prisoner was bound with chains, across his arms and torso, at about the level of his elbows, and around his knees.

  Under Otrepyev’s direction, the two men lifted the prisoner and began to carry him across the room. Osokin was on his feet now and could see more clearly the box they had brought in. It was no simple crate. The sides, top and bottom were constructed of thick, solid oak, and additionally there were bands of iron, hinged so that the lid could open, and fitted with hasps so that they could be locked. From its shape anyone would guess that the box was intended for use as a coffin – only those who had witnessed the inhuman powers that had just been displayed would understand the need for it to be so strong.

  The prisoner offered no struggle as he was lowered inside. Otrepyev lifted the lid and took one last, long look at the creature within before allowing it to drop with a slam that echoed around the inside of the conical chamber. Padlocks were quickly applied as a final security measure.

  The two men picked up the coffin – whose weight must have been doubled by all the additional metalwork – and carried it from the room. Colonel Otrepyev took a final glance around the chamber, as if checking he had not forgotten anything.

  He pointed to a couple of his men. ‘You two, come with me. I’ll need you to load the crates. The rest of you can return to your regiment.’ Then he turned to Osokin, offering a salute. ‘Thank you very much, Major,’ he said. With that, he was gone.

  Osokin felt the urge to laugh. He’d always despised men like Otrepyev – men who worked for the Third Section, or now the Ohrana. Was this really what they spent their days doing? If so, it was now clear that Colonel Otrepyev was a brave man. A hero. And yet still the question niggled at the back of Osokin’s mind; why couldn’t they have just left that creature to perish in the sunlight?

  He looked around him, at the bodies of the injured, dying and dead. He knew he must act. They needed a doctor. He was about to leave when he saw something on the floor – bloody and gnarled, but still recognizable. It was a human ear. At least it appeared human, but Osokin knew where it had come from. He had seen it being cut from the prisoner’s head during the struggle.

  And that was enough to expel any doubt there might have been in Osokin’s mind. The creature – the prisoner – was irrefutably a voordalak. Osokin had observed him closely as they had clamped the Schandmaske over his head and seen for himself with absolute clarity. The ear, whose twin now lay in the dirt of the cell floor, was perfectly intact on the prisoner’s head. There was only one explanation: it had grown back.

  CHAPTER IV

  LIEUTENANT MIHAIL KONSTANTINOVICH lukin leaned on the railing of the boat and gazed north across the Caspian Sea. The breeze was cold, but even now, in the middle of January, it was nothing to what he had known in Moscow or even in Saratov. To the north, the sea often froze in the winter, and Mihail could see a few solitary chunks of ice drifting gently by. Here though, and further south, the sea was deeper and warmer, and ice, so he was told, rarely formed.

  He looked down at the two letters in his hands, one to him, the other from him, the arrival of the former making the completion of the latter superfluous. He’d known what the letter to him had been about without the need to open it. He’d felt the small, hard lump inside and understood immediately what it was, and what it meant.

  The bayonet that Iuda hurled at him had not done any serious damage. It caught him in the back of the left hand, almost dead centre, and had gone right through. Mihail had been forced to let go of the rope and so he and the others had fallen. He landed badly, and was knocked out, waking the following day inside a mosque that had been commandeered for use as a field hospital. Major Osokin had told him of the prisoner’s strange departure.

  He’d spent two further nights in the hospital. His concussion was not serious, but the doctor was concerned about his hand. The bloody mark on his palm might have been taken for a single stigma. The doctor told him he was lucky not to have lost a finger or two, and Mihail had smiled quietly to himself. But the wound was bad enough to justify his taking some leave; that and his commendation for the mine works. He was more than happy to get away from the place, after what he’d seen of the Russian army’s treatment of the vanquished citizens of Geok Tepe – they’d given him no warning of the barbarity of his own army during his training at the Imperial Technical School. The only hold-up had been in waiting for the slow machine of military bureaucracy to fill out the paperwork. But ultimately it was a lucky delay. The letter arrived on the morning of his departure – three weeks after it had been sent.

  He’d taken the road north-west from Geok Tepe towards Krasnovodsk. There was plenty of traffic in both directions; supplies travelling one way and empty carriages holding a few dispatches being sent back. It was slow, but he doubted his quarry would be travelling much faster, and it gave him time to think. After Kyzyl-Arvat, the railway began; General Skobyelev’s great scheme for keeping the army supplied as it marched ever closer to the British Empire. But even by train, the pace was infuriatingly slow. The track had been started with a narrow gauge, and then the decision had been made to switch to the standard used throughout the Russian Empire. In places the carriages were pulled by steam engines, which broke down, in others by horses, who struggled to find a grip in the winter mud.

  Once at Krasnovodsk, it was a simple task to book a passage across the Caspian. The sense in every soldier on that boat that once ashore they would be on home soil was palpable – though Baku was very different from any truly Russian town.

  He might have chosen a different route across that vast
inland sea, heading north and then following the path of the Volga – by boat if it still flowed or on land if it had frozen – up to Saratov, the town of his birth. But the place held little for him now, and the only clue he had to guide his quest pointed towards a quite different city – to Saint Petersburg, far in the north.

  Mihail had listened intently to that conversation between Dmitry and Iuda, though his eyes had been closed and his head had lolled idly against the stone wall of the chamber. His mother had insisted that he learn English from an early age, even though she spoke not a word herself. The reason she held it so important, she had told him, was that English was the language of Cain’s journal. Whether he was truly an Englishman, no one had been able to determine for sure, but that he used it in writings intended only for himself to read suggested that the language was close to his heart. Mihail had been a little surprised to learn that Dmitry could speak English too, but as he’d suggested, he’d had plenty of time to learn.

  Only a fool – and neither Dmitry nor Iuda fitted into that category – would expect that speaking in a foreign tongue was a sure protection against eavesdroppers, but little of what they discussed would be comprehensible to the uninitiated. Most of it Mihail already knew. He’d followed the clues that led inescapably to the fact that somewhere deep beneath Geok Tepe there was a secret prison which held a captive so terrible that he was never allowed even to rise from his chair. In Kyzyl-Arvat he’d witnessed the interrogation of a captured Teke who described the appearance of the man – his straggling blond hair and cold grey eyes.

  Mihail had never met Iuda, but he’d heard the monster’s description even as he suckled at his mother’s breast. She’d tried to draw him, but without much skill, although when he’d finally seen Iuda face to face, bound to that chair, Mihail had begun to review his assessment of his mother’s abilities. Of course, when she had known him his hair had been dyed black, but they’d both guessed – and guessed right – that he was happier with it in its natural blond state.

  Mihail did not stare too long into Iuda’s eyes, no longer, he hoped, than any officer might upon encountering so strangely fettered a prisoner. He saw no hint of recognition in those eyes, but why should there be? Mihail’s mother had always claimed to see a family resemblance in her son, but he suspected she was just trying to flatter – for her there could be no greater compliment.

  It was only when Major Osokin had mentioned Mihail’s surname, Lukin, that there had been a flicker of recognition in Iuda’s eyes, and perhaps a flicker of fear too. It would be almost seventy years since that name had meant anything to Iuda, but he might still be wary of revenge. If he was, he was wise. He might suspect revenge if he heard other surnames too, the names Savin and Petrenko. But he would experience the greatest terror if he knew Mihail’s true surname. He would learn it soon enough. He would have discovered it there and then, on the day that Geok Tepe fell, if things had gone according to Mihail’s original plan, and would have died with that name on his lips, but it turned out that Mihail was not the only one who had been able to piece together the clues.

  Dmitry’s arrival – under the pseudonym of Colonel Otrepyev – had been a complete surprise. At first, Mihail had not even been certain it was Dmitry; his mother’s description of him had been less precise – she held for him none of the hatred that she felt for Iuda. She wondered even if he might be counted on as a friend, but warned Mihail not to trust him. It was his height that was the most recognizable feature, though it was not unique. But Otrepyev’s evident interest in and knowledge of the prisoner put into Mihail’s mind the list of people who might come so far to find him. And ‘people’ was not the right word. Mihail knew that Dmitry was a voordalak, just as he knew Iuda was. He watched Otrepyev and saw that he never went out of the tunnels during the day. He watched Otrepyev’s men too, but they led more normal lives. Mihail felt sure that they were not vampires; most of them, at least. He knew the error of presuming that most meant all.

  With Dmitry and his squad present, Mihail knew he would have little chance to kill Iuda. He could have helped as the Turcoman guards tried to spring their traps, but that might well have resulted in his death too. And it was more than that; it was not enough for Iuda to die. He had to know why he was dying and who was killing him – Mihail’s mother had been insistent upon that. This was to be an execution, a punishment for a crime – for many crimes. It meant nothing for the criminal to be shot quietly in the back of the head when he least expected it.

  When Iuda had escaped, Mihail’s attempt to grab at the rope and bring sunlight into the room had been an act of self-preservation, not revenge. He was almost glad he had failed. Perhaps whatever Dmitry had in store for Iuda would be worse than anything that Mihail could have conceived. And Dmitry, of course, was not working alone – his ‘we’ had given that away to Mihail as much as to Iuda. Both could take a good guess as to who the other half of the ‘we’ was. Even so, it would not be enough. No punishment, no death would be enough if Iuda did not at that moment look into Mihail’s eyes and see in them the eyes of his mother, and of his grandfather.

  And so it had become clear that, thanks to Dmitry’s intervention, Mihail would not take his revenge – not that day. He had been happy to listen to the two of them, and to learn. In all they had said, there were two things of particular interest.

  One was Ascalon. It was not a word that Mihail had ever heard before, but it seemed to be of importance to both vampires. Mihail had asked around, mentioning the word to Osokin and others he encountered during his brief stay in hospital. The only meaning anyone could put upon it was the town of Ascalon, or sometimes Ashkelon, a place on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from Jerusalem. The padre had even recalled a mention of it in the Bible, in the second book of Samuel:

  Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

  It didn’t seem likely to be helpful. Mihail considered going there, but Petersburg was the better bet. He didn’t think that the Ascalon in question was a place. Admittedly Dmitry had asked where it was, but if he was talking about the city, that question would be simple to answer. And then Iuda had talked about fetching it, which made no sense if it was a town. Dmitry had mentioned the Karaites. Mihail had heard about them from his mother too – a Jewish sect, a group of whom had lived at Chufut Kalye in the Crimea. But Mihail had already been there – it was one of the first places he’d looked in his search for Iuda. The Karaites were long gone and rubble still blocked the mouths to Iuda’s caves below. Mihail had not dug down – fearful of what he might uncover.

  No, Petersburg was the place to go. That would be where Dmitry was taking Iuda, secured in that coffin-prison. Dmitry himself would presumably travel in a similar manner, though without the constraints. Mihail knew because of a second name he had heard them speak of.

  Luka Miroslavich.

  Mihail had never met his brother – his half-brother – Luka Miroslavich Novikov. Luka had been adopted years before Mihail was born and taken the name of his new family. They had different fathers, but the same mother: Tamara Alekseevna Danilova. And Tamara’s brother – again, her half-brother – was Dmitry. That was why Dmitry could rightly call Luka his nephew.

  Just like her son, Tamara had been adopted, years earlier, but she’d always known in her heart that the man and woman who had raised her were not her true parents. Once she was old enough she had gone in search of them – and been reunited only to see them both die within hours of each other. It was obvious to Mihail that she hoped Luka would one day come looking for her, just as she had gone in search of her parents, Aleksei and Domnikiia. But Luka never came. It made her bitter towards him, even though she had loved Luka’s father, her husband Vitaliy, more than she could ever love Mihail’s, a passing encounter. She’d had two other children with Vitaliy. Both had died. Mihail often tried to imagine Milenochka and Stasik – his sister and brother – but Tamara was
loath to talk of them.

  Neither did she speak much of Mihail’s father, but of all the things she had told him – drummed into him since before he could remember – this was the aspect over which he most doubted her.

  It would be untrue to say he had not doubted other things. For a boy brought up in the second half of the nineteenth century to be told every day, by the woman whom he is by nature itself compelled to trust, that the voordalak – the vampire – was as real a creature as the wolf or the bear was, to say the least, unusual. She had told him of Baba Yaga and Zmey Gorynych, but never pretended that they were real (though she had debated whether Zmey Gorynych might have had a child and called him Zmyeevich).

  When he had gone to school, the other children had laughed at him for his beliefs. Mihail had felt humiliated and realized in an instant that everything his mother told him had been make-believe. She was mad, and whatever the cause, she had moulded her son to believe in her madness. He had ranted and screamed at her, but she had held her ground, though for years after she scarcely spoke of vampires, or of Iuda, or even of Aleksei. Then she had shown him something that had convinced him, the evidence of his own eyes proving that at least part of what she had told him was true and, by inference, that the whole of it was true. She had scolded him for that last leap of misplaced logic.

  But even then, there was nothing she could do to prove to him the identity of his father. She had told him how she, when young, had suspected that her real father was a prince, and not just any prince – specifically Prince Pyetr Mihailovich Volkonsky – but Mihail’s supposed father was of a higher rank even than that. He was, Tamara insisted, a grand duke – Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich Romanov, the tsar’s eldest brother. It was preposterous, and yet no one denied there were Romanov bastards scattered across the country. There was no certainty that Mihail was not one of them, but it seemed unlikely. Tamara had told him to go and see his father, and how to prove their kinship, but Mihail had always been afraid, afraid of his own humiliation, but afraid most of seeing his mother’s dreams exposed as rambling self-delusion.