The Last Rite (Danilov Quintet 5)

by Jasper Kent

  ‘Not surprising the Boche are pissing all over us.’ I glanced around, realizing I shouldn’t use such language in a church, but it was the way soldiers always spoke to one another.

  ‘It’s madness. Everyone’s out for what they can get. Example: years ago – after Japan – it was obvious that you didn’t need eight-gun batteries. The latest breech loaders can fire at twice the rate we used to manage, so you only need four in a battery, right? Wrong. We still have some eight-gun batteries, even today. Why? Because a four-gun battery can be commanded by a captain, whereas eight guns need a major. And no major wants to put himself out of a job.’

  ‘You think it’ll be better?’ I asked. ‘If he goes?’ There was no need to explain who I meant by ‘he’.

  ‘It can’t be worse. It’s up to you lot to make it better.’

  ‘If we get the chance.’

  ‘It has to be the Duma that takes over – or something like it.’

  I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure. It was easy enough for all of us, of whatever party, to agree now. We had a common cause. But afterwards I could foresee only bickering. But Isayev was right; it couldn’t be worse.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘that’s not what I’m here for. I’m looking for one of your men: Lieutenant Lavrov – Ilya Vadimovich.’

  Isayev squeezed his bottom lip for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Don’t know the name. You sure he’s one of mine?’

  ‘He’s in the regiment. I don’t know who his commanding officer is.’

  Isayev stood up. We walked out of the cathedral and down the steps on to the street. By the time I’d untied Polkan, Isayev was already across the road. We caught up with him just before he entered the barracks. At his arrival the sentry showed somewhat more respect than he had for me, but not much. We walked across the courtyard and then through a door and into an office. There was a desk, but no one in attendance. Isayev tutted and went over to the filing cabinets against the wall, looking at their labels until he found the drawer he wanted. He squatted down to pull it open and began to leaf through.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  I turned. A captain was standing at the door with an air of irritation. This was evidently his office. Isayev stood upright, with a file in his hand, and the captain snapped to attention. It was a refreshing show of discipline compared to what I’d seen from the sentry, but an army couldn’t function solely on the obedience of its officers.

  ‘Too late now, captain,’ said Isayev. ‘I’ve got what I needed.’ He held up the file briefly, then sat in the captain’s chair, putting his booted feet up on the desk. He began to inspect the papers, a frown appearing on his face.

  ‘So what do you want to see him for, this Lavrov?’ he asked after only a few moments’ reading.

  ‘He’s an old friend – family friend. We lost touch but I thought I ought to look him up.’

  ‘Close friend?’

  I shrugged. Perhaps if I’d said he was then Isayev would have broken the news to me more gently.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  I felt the colour run from my cheeks. I might even have staggered a little. Isayev was on his feet in a moment, guiding me to the chair with the help of the captain.

  ‘Sorry to be so blunt,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I replied. ‘Just a bit of a surprise.’ I didn’t tell him quite how much of a surprise, nor the fact that I’d seen Ilya only the previous evening, nor how that and the news of his death were quite compatible – to me anyway. ‘He’s definitely dead? Not missing?’ I was clutching at straws.

  ‘That’s what it says here. Fifth of September 1916. Not sure where. There’s a cross reference.’ He handed the paper to the captain, pointing to what he had read. The captain busied himself at another filing cabinet.

  It hardly mattered. For most people, the explanation would have been that one or other of us was wrong. Military reports are imperfect; Ilya might well have survived. And I was an old man, with poor eyesight, who saw someone briefly through the darkness and thought it was an acquaintance he’d not seen in over ten years. But I was in a position to know better. I knew something they didn’t.

  The captain soon found what he was looking for. ‘It was at the Battle of Cobadin, sir. The first one.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ I asked – not that it much mattered. Though when the answer came it made perfect sense.

  ‘Near Constanţa, on the Black Sea coast – Romania.’

  They must have thought it strange to see me chuckle when I heard that. It was as if that last fact had been thrown in deliberately, just in case I couldn’t work it out for myself. But I could. I’d got by for thirty-six years without encountering one and somehow I’d begun to hope that I never would again. But that was not to be. They’d persecuted my grandfather, my mother and myself. And now they had come again.

  It was the only explanation. Ilya Vadimovich Lavrov was a vampire.

  CHAPTER III

  I TOOK POLKAN home. As we approached the Anichkov Bridge I looked down again at the river, but the bodies had been cleared away. The authorities might not be capable of feeding the city, but they still seemed able to keep it clean – clean of any evidence that might suggest they’d ordered troops to fire upon their fellow citizens at any rate.

  But had all four of those bodies fallen victim to the regime? The wounds to the throat of the man I’d seen could well have come from a cavalryman’s sabre, but they could equally have been caused by the teeth of a voordalak – of Ilya. It was impossible to know. And why only Ilya? From what I knew – from what I’d been told by Mama – vampires were as likely to descend upon a city in a pack as alone. They would still hunt as individuals, but they would huddle together once the sun rose, somewhere dark and safe, and brag about their exploits of the night before.

  And whatever fate had befallen that man whose corpse I’d seen on the frozen river, there was another victim whom Ilya had most certainly claimed: that poor girl I’d seen him with. What had her choices been? She must have been starving, desperate for money to pay for food, probably not just for herself, but for her entire family. She’d offered up her body in exchange for enough to buy – what? – a loaf of bread or a few potatoes. But she hadn’t guessed just how much she was offering when she gave herself to Ilya, nor how much he would take. I imagined what I would find if I went back to that courtyard close to the Yekaterininsky Canal. Would she still be lying there on those coal sacks, paler even than she had been before? Probably not. Like Tsar Nikolai’s cronies, the voordalak was usually wise enough to clear up the mess that it left in its wake.

  As I walked, I felt a trembling in my limbs. My cheeks were flushed with blood. An anger that I hadn’t known in decades filled me. Strangest of all, I felt young again. My mother had raised me with a singular purpose: to hate vampires – to hate one in particular, but whatever I felt towards the individual, I felt towards the breed as well. I’d done my best in my later years to be a good man, to make a difference for the better, but now I knew once again what I’d known since I first suckled at my mother’s breast. I knew the reason I was here on Earth – my purpose. It was to rid the world of the scourge of the voordalak. If it was only Ilya, that would suffice, regardless of his being Nadya’s brother. But I hoped there were more, more than I could ever deal with, so many that I would kill them and go on killing them and never stop. Until they stopped me.

  The mood passed, fading as rapidly as it had arisen. I was older now than then. I’d seen so much more of the world, and so much more killing. Now I knew better. The voordalak was a symptom, not a disease. Or if it was a disease it was a secondary infection that attacked a body already weakened by something far more deadly. In 1812 vampires had only dared come to Russia when it was debilitated by the pestilence that was Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1855 they had waited until the nation was on the verge of defeat. And now they had chosen the moment when Russia was at war with itself. When the tsar was weak – too weak to ever lead again – and when the people were bat
tle-weary and starving and being struck down by the very police whose duty it was to protect them.

  And yet I knew that it had been more than opportunism that had brought vampires to Russia. There had been a grander plan – a plan devised by the greatest and most dangerous vampire of them all: Zmyeevich, also known as Ţepeş and sometimes as Dracula. His quarrel with Russia – with the Romanovs – dated back to the time of Peter the Great. They had been friends. Pyotr had promised to let Zmyeevich make him into a vampire, but had reneged when the process was only half complete; Zmyeevich had drunk his blood but he had not drunk the vampire’s. It meant that the Romanov dynasty was forever in danger. Zmyeevich could complete the process with any descendant of Pyotr and make him, or her, not just a vampire, but thrall to Zmyeevich’s will. And if that Romanov were tsar, then all of Russia would be under Zmyeevich’s dominion. The Romanovs knew what might happen to them – and feared it. Sometimes they even shared a part of Zmyeevich’s mind, through the blood that they shared, and could see with his eyes.

  But still the tsar remained human. Zmyeevich and his emissaries – Iuda among them, until the two had fallen out – had tried more than once to spring the trap that he had set with Pyotr, but they had always been defeated. My family had played no little role in that – Aleksei, Tamara and most recently myself. We had all paid a price, though mine was different from theirs. I still lived, but unlike my mother and grandfather there was Romanov blood running in my veins. And knowing that, I had quite deliberately drunk Zmyeevich’s blood – one of several samples Iuda had taken from him years before when they worked together. It meant that for a time I too had been privy to the thoughts that passed through Zmyeevich’s foetid consciousness. But even that brought with it the benefit that I could assist the Romanovs. While Zmyeevich’s mind was bound to mine he had no power over any other Romanov of my generation – no power over one tsar, at least.

  And soon there would be no tsar at all. Once things changed, once a decent, honest government took power, then Russia would have no need to fear vampires. For now, though, the danger was very real. Whether it was a question of ‘they’ or simply ‘he’ I did not know, but Ilya was the only one of them I knew to exist for sure, and so it would be with him that I would start.

  But not just yet. It was mid-afternoon, still a few hours before dusk. The sun shone high in the sky – as high as it could in February in Petrograd. Ilya would be sleeping, protected from its rays, and I had little chance of guessing where. There must have been ten thousand tombs or more in and around the city – perhaps a hundred thousand. I couldn’t search them all. And there was other business to attend to: the Duma.

  I went home briefly and spoke to Syeva. Nadya had gone out. She worked at a kitchen most days, serving borshch to those who could find nothing to eat. It wasn’t a recent thing. She’d started in 1915 – that was when we’d begun to notice the war back home. Nowadays there were always some they’d have to turn away, simply because they had no more food to give. I went up the stairs to the top floor and past the three rooms we used to the end of the corridor. There was a heavy padlock on the door there, to which only I had a key. I opened it and went inside.

  I flicked the switch and the light came on. There were no windows to this room, but fortunately the generators were running today – it hadn’t always been the case of late. Polkan lay down at the doorway, as if nervous of what lay within. I went inside. I’d never dared get rid of any of it, always fearing that the day would come. Here was everything I possessed that might be of any use in destroying a vampire.

  Along one shelf stood Iuda’s notebooks. When alive, and when undead, he’d been a scientist and had made detailed studies of creatures like himself. It had aided his understanding of them, and the books contained information that might be used against them. Here too was my arbalyet – a crossbow firing wooden bolts that might kill a vampire. In my hands it had only ever killed a human – a girl called Dusya who had chosen the wrong side. Over the years I’d looked into my heart and attempted to find regret over her death, but I could not. I recalled her pretty face and shining blonde hair, and that brought to mind the girl I’d seen with Ilya in the courtyard. Her hair might have shone too, if she’d had the opportunity to wash it. But now she never would. If killing someone like Dusya might offer the chance of saving someone like that girl, then there could be no room for sentimentality. But I knew that over the years I had grown sentimental.

  There was various other junk in the room: a box full of Yablochkov Candles, arc lights intense enough to kill a vampire, as I had so happily demonstrated with Iuda. (Ordinary incandescent bulbs, like the one that lit the room now, had no power to destroy them. But the Yablochkov Candles emitted light across a broader spectrum and so could, as far as was necessary, imitate the sun.) There was a simple wooden sword, no more than a child’s toy – and yet deadly to a vampire.

  But none of these was what I had come for. It would be a risk to carry an arbalyet or a wooden sword around the city at the best of times, let alone now with guard posts at every street corner. I chose instead a weapon that had belonged to my mother. It was a simple walking cane, or so it appeared. I took it in my hand and leaned on it, testing that it could take my weight. It was sixty years old – as I was – but unlike me age had not weakened it. In terms of style, it was out of fashion, but that hardly mattered. I raised it up and held its tip in my left hand, gripping it tightly as I gave the shaft a firm twist. The cap came loose to reveal the sharp point that my mother had whittled all those years before. It would still be capable of its purpose – piercing a vampire’s heart.

  I put the cap back in place, then turned off the light and locked the door once more. I went downstairs and looked at myself in the hall mirror. I’d managed so far to walk without a cane – my legs were still strong. But the time would come soon enough. No one would think it amiss to see an old man carrying a walking stick. I went outside, leaving Polkan in the house, and set off for the Tavricheskiy Palace.

  My route took me north, up to the Neva and then along the embankment to the east. The streets were busier now that it was mid-afternoon, and I was still outside the cordon sanitaire marked by the Neva and Fontanka. Whether the streets within it were calm and peaceful, I had no idea. I couldn’t even imagine what it was they were trying to protect. The tsar was far away in Mogilev, to where the Stavka – the circle of ancient generals who pretended to direct the path of the war – had most recently been forced to retreat. It was probably a wise decision on his part. It was difficult to rise up against an absent dictator.

  The Neva was still frozen and I could see figures running across the ice. The recent warmer temperatures wouldn’t weaken it, but within a month the frozen surface would start to thin, and people would have to stick once again to the bridges. That would make the city easier to control. The French had waited until July for their revolution, but in Russia we knew these things were best achieved in the cold. On the Liteiny Bridge, its movable span swung open to one side to prevent anyone from crossing, I saw a group of soldiers. They aimed their rifles at the men who were approaching across the ice. They fired and one of the protestors fell. The others began to hurl rocks and chunks of ice, and soon they were safely under the middle span. But now they were trapped. If they emerged, they’d be shot down before they could even raise their arms to throw a single stone. I didn’t wait to see what happened, but carried on towards my destination.

  The river began to curve slightly northwards. I turned inland and then on to Shpalernaya Street, pressing my cane into the snow with every other pace, practising so that carrying it would appear natural. Soon I came to a wide gap in the blocks of buildings that lined the road, and I turned off on to the long crescent drive of the Tavricheskiy Palace. The name came from the old Greek term for the Crimea. When Potemkin had conquered the peninsula for his lover, the Empress Yekaterina, she’d had the palace built for him. It was an imposing enough structure, but in every aspect it reeked of ‘second best’
. It was not like the Capitol in Washington or Westminster Palace in London. Those places were built specifically to house the governments they contained. The Tavricheskiy Palace was just a convenient place to let the members of the Duma debate, while the tsar got on with the real business of government.

  The entrance reminded me a little of the Izmailovsky Barracks, where I’d been earlier, but on a grander scale. Again there was a triangular pediment, this time with six equally spaced columns, but the whole thing was far more impressive, set back from the street and out in front of the main building itself, and almost twice the size of the Izmailovsky. There was a guard on the door, but they didn’t bother to ask for my papers. They knew the members of the Duma by sight. Where, I wondered, would their allegiance lie, if it came to it? When it came to it. So far the Duma had taken the line that it was loyal to the tsar, and so there wasn’t an issue, but soon we would have to make a stand, and our guards would have to decide whether their real duty was to protect us or to detain us.

  It was almost five years since I’d first come here after the elections of 1912. After I’d returned from the war against Japan I’d become increasingly interested in the prospect of taking Russia along the path that Aleksandr II might have chosen, if he’d lived. I was still in the army, but my heart meant I was unfit for active service – and there were better ways I could be put to use. The military’s newfound interest in aviation coincided with my own expertise and so I found that I rarely had to travel far from our aerodromes in Petrograd and Moscow. Standing for parliament seemed the perfect way to fill what remained of my time. Then, as now, I’d been a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party – the Kadets. In many countries we’d have been considered moderate – conservative even – but in Russia simply to favour a constitution was thought extremist. Of those represented in the Duma we were the tsar’s best hope. The parliaments since 1912 had sat only sporadically, and achieved little. But now we sensed our moment had arrived.