‘He’s gone,’ said Dmitry.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ replied his father, panting.

  Dmitry paused. He had not had a moment to think since they had been inside Saint Vasiliy’s, but now there was only one question on his mind.

  ‘What is he?’ Dmitry had seen enough to know that this was the correct formulation for the question. Not ‘How did he do that?’ or even ‘Did I really see it?’ He had seen it, and what he had seen was beyond his understanding. He had entered the world of folklore – a world his father had always been so keen to reject, and one with which he now seemed intimately acquainted.

  Aleksei turned to face his son. His body appeared to straighten and grow a little taller, reminding Dmitry of the father of his youth. He raised his hand and held it to his son’s cheek. His lips parted as if about to speak and he seemed to look beyond Dmitry into another world.

  But he said nothing. His hand dropped to his side and he walked briskly away. Dmitry trotted to catch him up, but Aleksei was walking at a phenomenal pace. Dmitry almost had to run to keep up with him.

  ‘Papa, tell me!’ he insisted, but to no avail. Aleksei said nothing more on the matter that night.

  The Clashing Rocks let Rzbunarea pass through them unmolested. It was to be expected. Those rocks had not slammed together for millennia, not since Jason had, imitating Noah, let a dove fly between them in advance of his own passage, leaving the channel in future open to all. The passenger wondered if the gods of Greece might have resurrected the custom, just for this one occasion, had they known that he was passing between the rocks that night. Perhaps they would have let him pass anyway – those ancient gods had always tended to be less . . . judgemental than their upstart counterparts. Anyway, the gods of Greece were dead, like all gods, and were not amongst those lucky enough for death to be inseparable from rebirth. It was with the gods who could achieve that feat that he felt most kinship, with all the hatred that kinship implied.

  Soon the Bosphorus was just a memory, and the ship sailed on into the open waters of the Black Sea. He had not crossed these waters in over a decade, and then his journey had been much more direct. But even he had to bow to affairs of state, he whose own land had been long ago taken from him. That would change soon. Just a few more days’ sailing.

  Aleksei lay on his back, his mind in turmoil. He felt the warmth of Domnikiia’s hand on his chest, but she was not awake. The realization had come to him even as Kyesha’s right hand had descended on to his left. The action itself had taken him back fifteen years, to that gaol in Silistria. The Turks had captured seven of them. All appeared to be local men, but they knew that one of them was a Russian spy. Aleksei had been in no mood to reveal that he was that one, but his captors had their own plans for eliciting a confession. They’d worked through the prisoners one by one. Each was taken up to a table, and a rusty meat cleaver fell upon his hand. After seven little fingers had been separated from their owners, there was still no confession. Aleksei knew enough to realize that if he did confess then his ensuing fate would be more horrific than anything he had so far experienced. He might have chosen to relieve the suffering of the other six prisoners, but he cared as little for them as they did for him.

  The Turks worked their way through the line again, this time taking the ring finger of each man, but again Aleksei said nothing. Then, as the third fingers went, the confession came. It was a perfect example of the inadequacies of torture. The second man in the line – more a boy than a man – had, bizarrely, waited until he had lost his middle finger before confessing that he was the Russian spy. It was an act of desperation, born out of the false belief that nothing could be worse than the current misery.

  But at least it brought some temporary relief. For Aleksei it meant that his left hand would still be of some use. For the boy who had confessed, it would mean further interrogation, the discovery that he was no Russian, and a slow death. The boy seemed to realize this too. He opted to die quickly, vainly attempting to flee the prison yard by climbing a wall, only to receive a bullet to his chest from a Turkish musket. The confusion had been Aleksei’s chance to escape, and he had grabbed it. He hadn’t stayed to see the boy die, but he hoped that that first bullet had done its work. If it had not, death would eventually come, but only after the resumption of the torture the boy had risked so much to evade.

  That had been Aleksei’s perception of those events for fifteen years, but now he realized he was quite wrong. The face of that boy, which had been for so long buried inaccessibly at the back of Aleksei’s mind, was a face he had seen today. It was Kyesha. He had not aged a jot since that day, and perhaps for many years before it. The fear that had taken him – triggering his blurted confession – had not been a fear of the torture, or for the fate of his fellow prisoners, but the most primal fear that any voordalak could experience: the fear of sunlight. The torture session had gone on long into the night, and Aleksei could clearly remember that his escape had taken place as the birds sang to the new day.

  The gunshot wound would have been little hindrance to Kyesha. He would have jumped rather than fallen from that high wall beside the gaol and would have hit the ground running. Even if his captors had caught up with him, they would have been no match for a vampire desperate to get under cover before the sun rose. His fingers would have quickly grown back, just as Aleksei and Dmitry had witnessed that evening. There, though, was an oddity. In what he had seen tonight, and years before when dealing with the Oprichniki, the regrowth had been fast – almost instantaneous – but back then it had not. If it had been, the soldiers would surely have noticed that his first finger had returned when they reached for his second.

  Perhaps Kyesha had not been a vampire then. But if so, why did he look almost exactly the same age now? If he had not been a voordalak when in that gaol, it must have come upon him very soon after; perhaps that very night, encountering another such creature as he fled in terror. That might explain how he had survived the bullet wound, but not how his fingers had grown back. Or was the process whereby a vampire could regrow flesh and bone something that could be applied in retrospect to wounds already suffered?

  Aleksei caressed his own hand and chuckled to himself. He had not, as some seemed to think, spent his whole life wishing there were some way to become restored to what he had once been. Even if there were, it would not be worth becoming a vampire. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain two fingers and lose his own soul?

  Kyesha had lost three fingers that night in Silistria, but tonight he had severed only two. The discrepancy mattered little – the point had been made. Nor did it matter whether he had become a voordalak before those events or just after. What was more interesting was that tonight he had refrained from killing, up to the point of punctiliousness, even when faced with attack from both Aleksei and Dmitry. This was not, in Aleksei’s experience, the normal nature of a voordalak, but he was coming to realize that his experience – fourteen of them in all, that he knew of – might prove a poor sample of the breed as a whole.

  Domnikiia muttered to herself and turned away from him on to her side. Aleksei turned too and matched the shape of his body to hers. He laid his arm across her and let his hand lie somewhere near to her belly, and he felt her hand gently curl around his. Still she did not wake, the action having become so familiar over the years that she could repeat it without the need for recourse to consciousness. He squeezed her to him.

  No, it did not matter what kind of voordalak Kyesha was – he would die as they all must die, and if he had reasons for holding himself back in his own defence, then so much easier the task.

  It was the seventh and final meeting place. Aleksei had been down this street only twice in the last thirteen years. It was not that he had avoided it, but it led from nowhere to nowhere in terms of the routes he wanted to take through Moscow, and he knew no one who lived in it. It had been almost totally razed by the fires in 1812, and had been in that state when he stood there then, hoping to meet Vadim, fearing he would encounter something else. There had been one visit since then, but the rendezvous on that occasion was not his.

  The venue at which they had chosen to meet – chosen before the fires had wreaked their destruction – had been a tavern on the north-west side of the street which had vanished along with everything else. By chance, the rebuilt street also had a tavern, but on the other side and a little further away from Tverskaya Street itself. Aleksei glanced at his watch, and then up and down the street in either direction. It was a quarter past nine and there was still no sign of Kyesha.

  ‘Perhaps he’s not coming,’ said Dmitry.

  Aleksei turned and looked at his son. Everything between them still seemed so normal. Had their conversation earlier that day really taken place? Had Dmitry completely misunderstood what Aleksei had told him? It was impossible. Aleksei tried to recall the exact words he had used. He could not have put it more plainly – and yet it was also impossible that, having learned that the voordalak was a real creature, not some inhabiter of dreams, having learned that his own father had done battle with them in his youth, he could remain the same person he had been that morning. But Aleksei had seen the reaction many times before. The turmoil of his own mind at the discovery of the existence of vampires had not manifested itself in any obvious way. He had seen the reactions of Vadim, Maks, Dmitry Fetyukovich and even Domnikiia, and although they had all taken it differently, none of them had been reduced to the jabbering wrecks of humanity such knowledge should surely inspire in any sane person.

  Perhaps the strangeness was not the ease with which Dmitry had come to terms with the concept, but the fact that he believed it at all. Dmitry’s was the first truly modern generation of Russians, unable to remember the turmoil the French Revolution had brought to Russia, but familiar with the new age that had been ushered in across Europe. But still the old beliefs lurked within his mind, waiting to be given substance. It was not something that was learned – it was in the Russian blood. And how could Dmitry not believe? What he had seen in Saint Vasiliy’s the previous night had been beyond any human experience. It had needed an explanation, and the single word – voordalak – uttered from his father’s lips brought together a belief based both on filial respect and that great mass of Russian folklore. Maks would have pointed out the flaw: vampires may have regrowing fingers, but that does not mean that regrowing fingers necessitate a vampire. His reasoning would have been right, but his conclusion wrong, or at least unhelpfully ambiguous. Maks himself had come to believe in the voordalak.

  ‘He’ll come,’ said Aleksei in response to his son’s suggestion. ‘There’s something he wants.’

  ‘What?’

  Aleksei shrugged. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  They went into the tavern. It hadn’t changed much since Aleksei’s only previous visit. That had been in 1818. Domnikiia had become happily settled in her shop – truly happy for the first time in her life – and had decided that now was perhaps the time to be reconciled with her estranged family. Her father had thrown her out because she’d slept with one of his customers. Then the distinction between a lover and a customer had dwindled to nothing; at least they had been her own customers. But in 1818, that was all behind her, and she had decided to make amends. She had asked Aleksei to find her mother and father.

  Her mother was dead; dead since 1812. At least that was what everyone assumed. She had not been seen after the five weeks of the French occupation. She might have fled, starved, been killed by the invaders or have died in the fires. There was no clue as to which. There was one other possibility – a cause of death of which few were aware – but it would have been an unthinkable coincidence for Domnikiia’s mother to have become a victim of the Oprichniki. Even so, Aleksei knew that Domnikiia would want certainty, and so he had told a story of how her mother had been crushed under the walls of a collapsing building ravaged by the conflagration. It was a cruel invention to convey to a daughter, but kinder than allowing her imagination free rein.

  News of her father had been more difficult to come by, but eventually Aleksei had found him. His business had evaporated before the war, and his home life had collapsed with the loss of his wife. Aleksei discovered that he spent most of his life slumped against the bar of the tavern near Tverskaya Street. Domnikiia had gone to speak to him, but Aleksei had sat in a corner and kept an eye on them.

  Semyon Arkadievich Beketov was a little over fifty, of average height and corpulent build. Greying hair surrounded a large bald patch. His face was bloated, presumably from his continual drinking, and was of a yellow – almost green – complexion. The red slits of his eyes emerged from between his swollen eyelids. Even so, Domnikiia recognized him at once. She had spoken to him, but Aleksei had not been able to make out clearly what was said. He could not even be sure that her father knew who she was. Towards the end of the conversation, he had heard Beketov call her a whore and watched him slide a handful of money across the bar to her – mere copecks. Perhaps he had recognized her and remembered the reason he had thrown her out – perhaps he hadn’t, and was genuinely trying to hire her services. Then Beketov had stood and grabbed Domnikiia by the wrist, as if about to drag her to the door. Aleksei was instantly on his feet, but Domnikiia had no trouble freeing herself from the pathetically feeble old man. She hadn’t even needed to push him; he had fallen to the floor, unable to maintain his own balance. She had rushed out, and Aleksei had followed.

  Domnikiia never told him the details of the conversation, and he didn’t really care to hear. He suggested that he continue looking for the rest of the family – her sister and three brothers – but she said she wasn’t interested. Three years later he repeated the offer when he told her the news he had heard, that Beketov was dead. He had stumbled out of a public house and under the wheels of a carriage. Domnikiia said she wanted to forget them all, and the topic had never been raised again. Three months after that, Tamara was born.

  And this was the first time Aleksei had been back to the street, or to the tavern, since. As they entered, he glanced at the spot at the bar where Domnikiia and her father had spoken. Today, it was occupied by a similar drunk, who somewhere in the city might have a similar family. That was not Aleksei’s concern. Kyesha was sitting alone in a corner. He was not to know that this was not the actual tavern of the meeting place arranged in 1812. Whoever he had heard of the meetings from had never been here – the alliance between Oprichnik and Russian had fallen apart long before seven consecutive meetings could be achieved.

  In truth it was a surprise to find Kyesha there at all, after the events of the previous night. But then again, Kyesha had proved himself quite capable of resisting the attacks of both Aleksei and his son, so he would feel he had little to fear. That would change – but not tonight. The more logical question was why Aleksei had come. He was the one who had been defeated, so why was Kyesha sitting here, confident that his opponent would come back for more? He knew how well he had set his lure.

  Or perhaps he had just come in for a drink. Beside him was a bottle of Bordeaux and three glasses. All were full, including Kyesha’s own.

  Aleksei and Dmitry sat down.

  ‘I remember you now,’ said Aleksei.

  ‘From last night?’ asked Kyesha, with a smile that Aleksei had to force himself not to reciprocate.

  ‘From Silistria.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘I thought you were either a fool or a hero,’ said Aleksei.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘You did what you had to do. I know how much your kind fear the day.’ Aleksei knew he had to be careful. There was a purpose for him and Dmitry in tonight’s meeting, and that was to prepare the ground for tomorrow. After what had happened in the cathedral, Kyesha would be wary. He had to be lulled. ‘I presume you were already a vampire,’ he added.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kyesha. He did not elaborate further.

  ‘So why didn’t your fingers grow back then?’ demanded Dmitry. It was the right tone – Kyesha wouldn’t be fooled by utter acceptance. Aleksei and Dmitry had discussed this very question earlier.

  ‘Regrowth can be repressed temporarily,’ replied Kyesha, ‘with practice.’

  ‘Why bother?’ asked Dmitry.

  ‘A good question. You think like a scientist.’

  ‘And the answer?’

  ‘To survive! History has taught us that, of all the skills that might fend off death for a little while longer, the simplest and most effective is to avoid being recognized for what we are.’ He paused for a moment. ‘By people such as you.’ They were speaking in Russian, and it was clear that his use of the plural form of ‘you’ was not intended to be polite, merely to encompass a very large plural – the whole of humanity. He was right though. If he had allowed his fingers to regrow before the eyes of the Turks, they would have known precisely how to deal with him.

  ‘I thought you were a hero,’ said Kyesha after a brief silence, directing his words at Aleksei.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘In Silistria,’ continued Kyesha. ‘I knew from the start that you were a spy – even before the Janissaries came in to arrest us. I saw you dropping that message out of the window. Obviously I could have escaped when they rounded us up, but I was curious.’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘I’d heard all those terrible stories about the brutal Turk and his torturous ways – I wanted to see if they were true.’

  ‘Wanted to pick up a few tips,’ added Dmitry. Aleksei was pleased to hear how quickly his son had understood the vileness of these creatures.

  Kyesha chose to ignore the comment. ‘I thought the idea of cutting off the fingers one by one was ingenious; the way it incremented the terror, the way that, as the victim became accustomed to the pain, he would become more aware of the permanence of the mutilation. Most of all, I was fascinated by the fact that a single word from you could end it for the rest of us – and yet you said nothing. Were you being brave or callous? Of course now I’ve learned what you knew then – there’s little difference between the two.’