by Jasper Kent
Then, in an instant, all was clear. Yudin froze as the realization came upon him. He had eliminated every other possibility and now only one explanation remained, unlikely though it seemed.
If Aleksandr was not properly affected by Zmyeevich’s blood, then – and it was as preposterous as it was inescapable – Tsar Nikolai could not be dead.
Yudin looked down at his own watery grave. It had been almost thirty years, but he remembered the cold. The surface of the Neva had been frozen then – frozen solid. Today there were still chunks of ice, floating out towards the Gulf of Finland, but also stretches of clear blue water in between. He turned round and looked behind him. The Bronze Horseman stared into the sky, oblivious to his presence. The statue had not gone by that name in 1825. It was only after Pushkin had written his poem that the statue of Pyotr the Great picked up its now familiar epithet. Yudin was one of the few who understood the statue’s meaning.
Trampled beneath the hooves of Pyotr’s horse lay a serpent, defeated by him as though he were Saint George and it was a dragon. In truth, the serpent represented Zmyeevich – his name literally meaning ‘son of the serpent’. It was on this very spot, in 1712, that Pyotr had tricked the vampire and stolen his knowledge, but in doing so had condemned his own descendants to be victims of a blood curse.
It was here too that the Decembrists had stood against Tsar Nikolai. Yudin had been among them, along with his old adversary, Aleksei. They had been near the statue when the guns opened fire. Yudin traced their steps from there. He’d been ahead, suspecting that Aleksei had something planned for him, though nothing so lacking in subtlety as a mere pistol. He’d thought to run down Galernaya Street, but one glance at it told him that if the imperial guards caught up, it would be a shooting gallery. Instead, he had turned to the river, where many were already fleeing across the thick, steady ice.
This evening there was no one around. Beneath him, in the river, ice clung to the embankment, but where he had jumped down all those years before there was a gap through which he could see the cold dark water. He stepped forward, feeling the sensation of falling for only a fraction of a second before the icy water engulfed him. If anyone had seen, they would have taken it for a suicide, but his body would not be found, just as it had not been found thirty years before. Neither had Zmyeevich’s, 113 years before that.
Yudin swam forward, under the water, barely able to see, remembering that Zmyeevich too, after his confrontation with Pyotr, had thrown himself into the river somewhere hereabouts, in fear for his life. There were myths that vampires hated the water, but in reality they had many of the attributes required to be good swimmers. They had no trouble with the cold – until it was enough for the fluids in their bodies to actually freeze solid – and they had little need for air. To be sure they needed to breathe, but they could survive without it, just as they could survive without consuming the blood and flesh of humans. Eventually lack of any of those things would cause them to slip into unconsciousness, but it would not kill them. If Yudin remained beneath the water too long he would lose strength and sink to the river bed, there to remain undisturbed. Perhaps centuries from now some fisherman would dredge him up, and on the first gulps of cool, fresh air he would come spluttering and coughing back to this world, hungry and grateful to find in that fisherman both his saviour and his first repast.
But Yudin would not be so foolish. He knew he could make his planned journey by surfacing a mere two or three times for breath. It would mean that his approach was unobserved. It was a hard swim though, upstream against a strong current. He had no idea which direction Zmyeevich had headed on entering the water, but he would guess it was out to sea. His aim had been to depart Russia by the quickest conceivable route. As for Yudin, in 1825, there had been no aim – no intent. He remembered that Aleksei had shot him as he fled across the ice, mortally wounding him, but not killing him outright. Then Aleksei had begun his play-acting for the crowd, pretending to comfort his fallen friend, victim of one of the soldiers’ muskets. They had talked and Aleksei had teased him over some trick that he had pulled, but the details were hazy. Yudin had drunk the blood that he had taken from the voordalak Kyesha, who had previously drunk his blood. It was Yudin’s only hope of survival – to become such a creature himself. Then, with death, memory stopped.
He surfaced and took a gulp of air, glad of the opportunity to check his bearings. He was between the Winter Place and the lighthouses, just at the point where the Greater and Lesser Nevas split. He could just see his destination in the distance. He submerged again, and remembered his soggy restoration to life.
The persistence of memory had been his greatest fear. All the voordalaki he had ever spoken to claimed that they were the same being – the same person – that they had been before being transformed into that new state. It was easy enough for them to say, but Yudin had always wondered if the vampire might not be some other creature that took over the physical body of its victim, discarding its previous owner and taking from him only sufficient memories to pass itself off as a continuation of the original. He could think of no experiment that could prove things one way or another, except one that he would have to perform on himself, and that he delayed until the only other possibility was his own death.
He had returned to consciousness somewhere to the east of Helsingfors on one of the many islands that were scattered along that stretch of coast. It had been a little over a month since his death. That was a not untypical period for the transformation. Ideally a vampire would awake in its human grave, safe from the light of day and able to dig itself out when night fell, but Yudin’s body had simply lain on a beach, exposed to the rays of the sun. Thankfully, nature guarded against such risks. The final stages of the transformation, when the vampire’s flesh changed its nature so as to become susceptible to even the dimmest sunlight, always occurred at night. Yudin had known it by experimentation, and had learned it for himself. He had scuttled into a cave long before the dawning of his first day as a voordalak.
He popped his head above the water again. He was very close now. The Peter and Paul Fortress stood ahead of him. He was directly in front of the jetty from which the Decembrists, Aleksei among them, had begun their journey to the east. He could see two guards, some distance apart. Neither of them seemed particularly alert. There would be more of them on the far side, where an attack from the land could take them by surprise, but from the river an enemy could only approach by boat and would be easily spotted before reaching the fortress walls; or so they thought.
When he next surfaced he was under an arch of the jetty itself – the one closest to land. He could hear the footsteps of one of the guards above him. The water was shallow enough here that he had no need to swim.
‘Help!’ he shouted weakly. He heard the guard’s feet move, but nothing more. ‘Help me!’ A little louder this time.
‘Who’s there?’ shouted the guard.
‘Please!’ cried Yudin plaintively, then squatted down so that he was entirely submerged, with his face just inches below the surface.
He saw the blurry silhouette of the guard, peering out from the edge of the jetty and into the cold water, searching for the source of the sound. Yudin launched himself upwards, pushing against the firm river bed beneath his feet. He reached out with both hands and grabbed at the man’s head. One hand caught his collar, the other an ear. In a moment, Yudin was falling back into the water and the soldier, off balance from leaning over, came with him. There would have hardly been a splash. Once beneath the river surface, the man attempted to struggle for a few seconds, but Yudin’s teeth soon found their mark and he felt the delicious warmth of fresh blood filling his mouth, diluted but unmistakable, mixed with the river water.
He didn’t wallow in the indulgence. He floated the body under the jetty, hoping that the current would not spit it out again too soon. A dark trail meandered through the water, staining the blocks of floating ice where it touched them, but it would take a keen eye for the other guard
to notice it – and a good deal more time than he had available to him.
Yudin peered out of the water. On the other side of the jetty, the second guard was just disappearing around the corner of the Naryshkin Bastion. Yudin pulled himself up on to the pathway and ran lightly along it, hoping the splat, splat, splat of his wet feet would not attract attention. He stood with his back pressed against the ravelin, listening for the man’s return, estimating his height.
He heard steps approaching and then glimpsed the soldier’s leading foot emerging from behind the stonework. Yudin threw out his fist with a single, determined backhand blow. He heard a crunch as the man’s nose collapsed. Yudin had been aiming for the throat, but it did not matter. The guard crumpled and Yudin caught him before he hit the ground – any observer might have thought it an act of concern. Out of the water, and with less prospect of being disturbed, Yudin took the opportunity to feed. He bent over the unconscious guard, listening to uneven breaths that were sucked into the mouth and then spluttered out through the broken nose.
Yudin’s teeth easily penetrated the man’s throat and from then on it was a simple matter. The human heart, desperate to cling on to life, continued to pump, forcing the blood out of the newly created wound. Yudin merely had to swallow occasionally and he became nourished.
Sated, he left the body half empty, rolling it into the river with an indifferent shove towards the jetty where it might be hidden beside its former comrade. He was glad the man had been unconscious, or he would have been tempted to linger too long in enjoying his pain. To drink as he had done was merely the scratching of an itch – the yielding to an obvious temptation from which no pleasure but the visceral could be taken. And while the blood that he had consumed would, over the next few days and even weeks, make him feel stronger and appear younger, its immediate effect was to render him tired and slothful; satisfied – it was an odious sensation.
But it could be overcome. Yudin looked at the stone wall. It was perhaps six times his height, with an overhanging ledge at the top. Arched openings allowed cannon to aim out into the river, but gave no access to the interior of the fortress. Occasionally, deliberate gaps in the stonework allowed a view through the entire thickness of the wall, but were too narrow for anything larger than a rat to make use of.
He began to climb. It was a fascinating skill that he had discovered – and needed – within hours of awakening as a vampire, as he climbed his way up the cliffs that surrounded the beach where he had found himself. He clung close to the wall, allowing his fingers to take his entire weight as they insinuated themselves into even the tiniest crevice between the straight-cut stones. He moved quickly, despite his wet clothes, leaving behind him a damp trail soaking into the granite. He pictured himself as a slug.
Once on the top of the fortifications, he glanced around. His final destination was the Pyetropavlovskiy Cathedral – dedicated to the same two saints who gave the fortress itself their names. Its spire soared into the air, disproportionate for the whole island, not merely the church beneath it. He could see no one, but knew there would be guards patrolling the interior. He could deal with them, but he did not want to be again distracted by his baser needs.
He dropped to the ground and crept through the shadows between the mint and the commandant’s house, smiling at the thought that it was in there that Aleksei, along with the other Decembrists, had been interrogated and, hopefully, tortured to reveal the names of all the other conspirators he knew. Aleksei would have held out, to protect one name at least: that of his son. Even then, he would have had some idea that Dmitry was lost to him, taken in hand by Yudin himself when Aleksei was away with his mistress, just as Aleksei’s wife, Marfa, had been. Aleksei knew that too. It was a delightful torture for Aleksei now, far away, cut off from any communication, to wonder how the relationship between his son and his most bitter enemy had developed. One day, Dmitry would face the final humiliation – and Yudin would ensure that Aleksei learned of it; better still, witnessed it. But that day would have to be soon – like Yudin, Aleksei was an old man now. Yudin wore it better.
He dodged a couple of guards easily and was soon in front of the cathedral’s yellow walls, at the foot of the bell tower. Pyotr had founded it in 1712. Some in the Romanov family, who pretended they knew, said he did so specifically to give thanks to God for his defeat of Zmyeevich, but as with so much of that story, it was a mixture of myth and propaganda. It was a quite un-Russian church, better suited to Rome than Petersburg, wherein one might expect to hear ancient superstitions intoned in Latin by an old man who knew nothing of the world. In reality the language would be Church Slavonic rather than Latin, but the inanity of the content would be the same. The cathedral was not built for defence – the walls of the fortress saw to that – but it might still be guarded; to walk in through the door would be unwise.
Yudin scaled the wall of the bell tower with much the same ease as he had that of the fortress. Soon he was higher than the roof of the main building. The gilded spire stretched skyward above him, topped by an angel clutching a cross and pointing towards heaven. Yudin had no need to go that far. He smashed a window and was soon inside the bell tower. From there, he found a stone stairway spiralling downwards to the body of the church.
For any Russian who loved his tsar, it would have been a magnificent sight. The illumination of a thousand candles shone on the marble columns and brightly decorated walls and ceiling. The iconostasis – not simply a flat wall but an entire structure in itself – towered over the sanctuary. But it was all mere decoration. In the middle of the nave, in front of the iconostasis, surrounded by candles, on a pedestal, in a coffin, lay the centrepiece – a cold, still, silent corpse. This was what Yudin had come to see.
He heard the murmur of a voice. Over by the main door stood two soldiers, chatting softly. Yudin again felt on his lips the taste for blood, even though he had already consumed more than enough for his needs. He resisted. If they noticed him, he would deal with them, but it would be wiser to let them live. Tomorrow the church would be filled with almost every living member of the Romanov family – come to pay homage to one of their own. At least one of them would know of the ancient pact with Zmyeevich – Yudin was not sure who, but they would not be so stupid as to let the story be lost and so leave their children ignorant of what might befall them. To find bodies that so obviously bore the mark of the voordalak would raise their suspicions, and their defences, unnecessarily.
He skirted around the nave, along the northern aisle, until he was as close as possible to the late Tsar Nikolai. At least, that was whose body officially lay there. Yudin had his suspicions. Why, though, should Nikolai fake his own death? Did it have something to do with the Romanov bloodline, or was it unrelated? Was he even a willing participant, or had the new tsar, Aleksandr, taken power from his father by force and imprisoned him somewhere, lacking the stomach for parricide? If it were true then Aleksandr II was breaking with centuries of familial tradition.
But it all hinged on the fact or otherwise of Nikolai’s death. Yudin stole a glance at the two guards, still deep in conversation, and crept out towards the centre of the nave, ducking down so that the coffin itself obscured any view they might have of him. Soon he was beside it. He stood up, and gazed in.
It certainly looked like Nikolai. He was older than when Yudin had last seen him, and a little fatter, but that could be put down to the process of embalming. His moustache was neatly waxed and his hair brushed forward, as it usually had been in life, to hide the great expanse of his balding head. Yudin placed his hand on the body’s forehead, enjoying its coldness, and confirming beyond doubt that it was dead.
It could, of course, be a doppelgänger. Any man of approximately the correct height and appearance could have easily been persuaded to perform this duty of ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his tsar, and probably wouldn’t have been given the option. The blood would tell, but Yudin understood enough of the mechanisms of preservation to know that the first step wo
uld have been to drain the blood from the body. The ruddy hue of the cheek was purely the effect of external make-up, to hide the work of entirely legitimate, if wasteful, vampirism. But a sample of flesh would be just as informative.
Yudin reached into his pocket, stiff and unyielding from its earlier soaking, and withdrew a small leather case. Inside was a scalpel. It was a delicate instrument; ideal for the task. The fragment of tissue need not be large, but still had to be taken from somewhere that would not be noticed. But why be so subtle? Yudin felt the sudden urge to desecrate the body in a way that would be unmistakable to all the Romanovs when they came to bury their beloved – to carve into his forehead a single word: Zmyeevich. That would scare them, the thought that the arch-voordalak could get in here, so close to the heart of their power.
Yudin chuckled quietly, but resisted. He lifted the corpse’s left arm and turned it so that the hand was palm up, pulling back the sleeve to reveal the pale skin between it and the glove. They had not thought to apply make-up here, where no one would look. He cut away a sliver of skin and a little of the fat below, and slipped it into a glass tube, which he returned to the leather case.
He turned away. Tomorrow, before a vast crowd, Nikolai would be interred beneath the cathedral, beside his father Pavel and his grandmother Yekaterina and countless other tsars and tsaritsas, most but not all of whom shared that same Romanov blood and its curse. Pyotr III had been willing to join with Zmyeevich, but Yekaterina, his wife, had prevented it and herself become empress. Her blood was not Romanov, though her spirit was. With Aleksandr I they had come closest. He had even drunk Zmyeevich’s blood, but had lived long enough to be free of it. His body was down there too, having taken the long slow journey across Russia from Taganrog, where death had found him.
