He felt a sudden pain in his stomach, a burning that spread out to his arms and legs. This was worse than anything he had experienced before, though each time the pattern was the same. Sometimes it began in his stomach, sometimes – he suspected – in his heart. He stood painfully and turned out the lamp on the table.

  It was dark now, but he knew the way to the bed. He lay down, and the agony began to recede. His breathing slowed and he felt the sweat on his skin cool. The pain was not gone, but it was tolerable once again. Aleksandr knew it would return. Deep in that cave beneath Chufut Kalye, Cain had told him so.

  Aleksandr opened his eyes. His body ached, but he could tell that the shaking he now felt was not caused by the convulsions of his own body, but by the coach itself. They were travelling more slowly now, partly out of consideration for the tsar’s delicate condition, but also with regard to the awful accident that had killed Major Maskov. They had buried him quietly in a cemetery in Orekhov, not very far from where he had fallen. The heavy local clay had been hard for the men to dig through. Aleksandr had begun a letter to his family, but had not been able to finish it before the fever had overcome him.

  Aleksandr still felt cold, although he was sweating. They had piled blankets and furs over him, but it did little to help. His greatest fillip was that soon the journey would be over and they would be back in Taganrog, though he would hate for Yelizaveta to see him like this. He forced himself to sit up and look out of the window.

  The view outside was very familiar. They were closer to home than he had imagined, though it was easy to lose sense of time as he slipped between consciousness and an unconsciousness that was sometimes sleep and sometimes a thing far deeper and more disturbing. They were already in the outskirts of Taganrog. He recognized some of the buildings, especially the churches. It would be less than a quarter of an hour now before they were home.

  The coach turned on to the coastal road that ran along the length of the town, and Aleksandr immediately felt more comfortable. It was not as familiar a place as Petersburg, but it brought to him the same sense of contentment, with few of the pressures. Little had changed. Perhaps, if he thought carefully about it, he could notice that the leaves on the trees, golden when he left, had mostly fallen to the ground. It had been a gradual process, and one he had observed all through his journey. Even that one yacht was still anchored out to sea. He really should send someone over to see if its passengers were people of any note.

  The ship had, he observed, moved a little since he had last seen it – of that he was sure, despite the numbness that seemed to grip his memory. It was unlikely there would be need for so small an adjustment to its position. Perhaps it too had made a sojourn that had coincided with the tsar’s own. Where might it have been, he wondered.

  It did not matter. The carriage clattered to a halt and the door opened, revealing the kind but concerned face of Prince Volkonsky. Aleksandr forced himself to his feet and stepped down from the carriage, ignoring Volkonsky’s proffered arm for fear of showing weakness. In front and behind, the other carriages were disgorging their occupants, and he could see Wylie, Tarasov, Diebich and others stretching their limbs and appearing happy to be somewhere that was a little more like home. But turning his head anxiously from side to side, he confirmed that the one man he most desperately wanted to speak to was not with them. Colonel Danilov was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  ALONE AND ON HORSEBACK, IT ONLY TOOK ALEKSEI FIVE DAYS to get back to Chufut Kalye. It was mid-afternoon when he finally made it to the cliff top. He noticed the weather cooling all through his journey back and, although there was still no snow, the place felt wintry. He saw groups of Karaite men talking in the streets, but he didn’t make contact with them. If a host of vampires had suddenly escaped the cave system beneath them, then the neighbours of those men might well have become an immediate source of nourishment. Aleksei didn’t feel inclined to stand there and look into their eyes if that had been the case. He made his way to the rocky hilltop from where he had first entered Iuda’s lair, over a week before. He scrambled down to the cave mouth and peeked inside.

  It was not what he had expected – certainly not what he had seen the last time he was here. The tunnel was impassable. The roof had collapsed, and rocks filled the way. He could see a few small gaps, but none that would be enough for him to get through. He could possibly dig his way in, but he had no idea how deep the cave-in went. He traversed the hillside and found two other tunnels, similarly blocked. Others seemed passable, but it was a superficial appearance. One had caved in just a little further into the hillside, whereas two more were undisturbed but led nowhere, terminating naturally without ever connecting to the underground labyrinth Aleksei had explored.

  It was all very contrived; only those tunnels which might have led deeper had collapsed – those that had never led anywhere were spared. These were not the results of some random earthquake. The question was, had the vampires, once they had fled their former prison, caused this collapse so as to bury all memory of what they had endured there? Or had the tunnel roofs given way with the voordalaki still inside, and now unable to escape?

  Aleksei climbed back up to the rocky plane above. There was one way of finding out, though it was not guaranteed. He sat on a boulder and opened up his knapsack. Inside was the book. Aleksei’s initials were still there on the paper in which Kyesha had wrapped it before giving it to him in Moscow. It seemed like years ago. He folded a corner of the paper to one side, and the skin once again began to smoulder in the sunlight. He listened carefully. The wind was blowing strongly, and it was difficult to differentiate the sound of a scream from its whistling between the rocks.

  He went over to the edge of the cliff, just above the tunnel he had gone down on his first visit, and pulled the paper aside again. This time he was sure he heard nothing. He got on to his hands and knees to be closer to the cave mouth, but still there was only silence. He knew, though, that there was more than one tunnel that led down to those cells, and any one of the openings around there could be an entrance.

  He walked back towards the middle of the rocky plain. He was surrounded by caves now, the mixture of natural and artificial he had seen here before. He prepared to open up the book again, but he didn’t need to. From somewhere nearby, he heard a muffled cry. He looked around, trying to work out where the sound had come from, and it came again. It sounded almost like words rather than a holler of pain, but if it was, he could not make them out.

  He ran in the direction from which he thought he’d heard the sound come. An outcrop of rocks stood up higher than the ground around them, by more than a man’s height. Aleksei skirted round them and saw that they were in fact the housing to the entrance of a large cave, shaped like a gaping mouth. There had been a rockfall here too. Aleksei could only guess that this collapse was as recent as all the others.

  Again the shout came.

  ‘I’m here! I’m in here!’

  Now it sounded close. It was definitely ahead of him; somewhere in, or behind, the jumble of boulders that filled the passageway. He scrambled down the short slope and began hefting the stones to one side. Some of the larger ones were immovable, but it did not matter too much; they were wedged at odd angles, leaving sizeable gaps in between. Aleksei tugged away at the rockfall, working opposite the point at which the voice called to him. He now clearly recognized it to be the tattooed voordalak.

  It was almost twenty minutes before he caught his first glimpse of the creature, no more than a view of its eyes through a gap between two boulders, but it gave him new vigour. He saw one large stone towards the base of the pile that he thought he would be able to shift, and which, if he did, would free up a number of others. He put his hands around the rock, feeling for any crevice that might give him purchase, and knowing that his left hand would never grip it as strongly as his right. Then he pressed down against the ground with his feet, the muscles of his face and neck straining as he tried to pull the rock away.

  At last it came, and as it did, Aleksei fell backwards. He didn’t see, but heard the rumble of collapsing stones as those around the rock he had pulled out cascaded in to take its place. He felt a sharp pain to his ankle and looked up to see it pinned under one large rock and several smaller ones. He sat up and tried to push it away, both with his hands and by moving his trapped leg. It was painful, but he quickly freed himself. He stood up and put weight on the injured ankle. He lifted it from the ground again almost immediately, wincing. He didn’t think it was broken, but it would take a few days before he could walk on it again without pain. He turned back to his work, and let out a gasp.

  Aleksei’s efforts had revealed the tattooed skin with which he was familiar, but the figure of the voordalak to which it belonged was hard to discern. It had not occurred to Aleksei that being crushed was not one of the ways in which a vampire could die. Had this creature been human, it would not have survived its ordeal. An enormous weight of rocks had fallen on it – most were still there. Its head was trapped, as was one of its legs; the other was out of Aleksei’s sight, still buried in the mass of rocks behind, and must have been bent back at the most extraordinary angle. Another huge boulder pinned its chest to the ground, and moved up and down only slightly as the creature breathed. But its arms were now freed, and it began to use them to pick away the rocks that covered it. Even in its degenerate state, it was stronger than Aleksei, and cast aside rocks with a single arm that it would have taken a block and tackle for men to move.

  ‘Thank you,’ it said.

  Aleksei hopped back up the slope, a little way away from the cave mouth, ostensibly to find a comfortable place to sit, but also wary now that the voordalak was almost free. It certainly needed no more of his assistance. It had freed its legs, and indeed every part of its body but for the head. It kicked out hard with both feet, sending a ripple through its body like an eel flicking its way through the water. Its body tugged against its head and popped it out of the grip of the rocks. It would have been agony for a human – probably fatal. It may have been agony for the vampire too, but it was expedient and would not kill it.

  Now that Aleksei could see the creature’s entire body, he realized what a sorry state it was in. Voordalaki, he knew, healed quickly, and this one had had many days to recover from the initial damage done to it by the rocks pounding into its body. But the healing process had not been free to take its natural course, and had done its best within the strictures the fallen rocks forced upon it. The body had healed in much the same way that a limb set at the wrong angle will heal – rebuilt, but not in the form in which it had been originally created.

  The creature’s left hand was relatively normal, but its right was bent back at the wrist, almost to a right angle. When it moved its fingers, the bones within its palm pushed forward and caused the skin to rise and fall in sympathy. One leg was shorter than it should have been, between the knee and the ankle, while the other – the one that had been bent back under the rocks, curved out in a huge bow. It must have been broken in over twenty places. The remarkable outcome was that the creature was able to stand with its feet side by side, but it left a gap so wide a child would have been able to climb through its legs.

  Its chest was utterly concave, like a mixing bowl from a kitchen. Bone and flesh had not always re-formed in the correct order, and in places ribs could be seen erupting from the skin then submerging back under inches later. The skin itself was very thin, particularly on the left-hand side, and Aleksei could see the slight motion of a beating heart beneath it. Another huge dent was visible in the side of its head, almost reaching the eye. Aleksei was reminded of Major Maskov’s wound.

  ‘Aren’t you in pain?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Less than I was a moment ago, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better than this.’

  ‘Perhaps if . . . if your bones were broken again, they’d have a chance to heal more freely.’ Aleksei had not really considered the concept, and had spoken in some sense out of politeness, but the voordalak took on his suggestion.

  It placed its right hand on a large, flat rock and then raised a smaller stone in the other, smashing it down on its upturned fingers. It made a slight grunt as the stone impacted, but the sound was drowned by a horrible crunching as its finger bones were smashed. It lifted its hand and shook it vigorously, as a man would on trapping his fingers in a door. At first Aleksei could see the crushed bones wobbling loosely, but even as he looked they stiffened and the hand opened like a flower to reveal itself once again in its proper form – or close enough.

  The voordalak inspected its new hand, looking first at the back, then the front.

  ‘Thank you, again,’ it said. ‘Though I’ll leave the rest for later.’ It sat on a rock and looked at Aleksei. It was still just inside the cave. The sun had not yet set, and it would not dare venture further out.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Cain,’ it replied simply.

  ‘I thought you had him at your mercy.’

  ‘That was your mistake – and ours. He had assistance.’

  Aleksei was surprised, though he knew he should not have been. Iuda would have been a fool not to have someone watching his back. ‘Where were they hiding?’ he asked.

  ‘Hiding?’ The creature laughed humourlessly. ‘There was no need to hide. You saw for yourself.’ Aleksei said nothing, nor did he understand. ‘One of our own number – Raisa Styepanovna.’

  ‘Her? But she hated him as much as the rest of you.’

  ‘It seems not. Somehow he had persuaded her that he would find a way of letting her see herself in a mirror. Perhaps he can – though God knows what she’ll see. She’d been on his side all along.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Once I’d released everyone, we all converged on the main chamber, where you’d left Cain surrounded. He was trying to talk the creatures in there into going back to their cells. They were weak-willed, and he might have done it, but the rest of us were not so easy to assuage. We stood there watching him, saying nothing, except me. All I did was read out the time from the clock, every five minutes, counting the remainder of his life before the sun set and he lost its protection.

  ‘None of us noticed that Raisa Styepanovna had made her way over to his desk – and why should we care about it if we had? But suddenly she pulled on some rope or lever, and the whole room was flooded with sunlight – not even flooded, it was cleverer than that. There were wide corridors of light that surrounded pools of shadow. Only a few of us were caught so quickly as to be killed, most recoiled into the shade, just where Cain wanted us. Raisa had opened a whole set of curtains that let in sunlight in the exact pattern required – the point at which she stood remained safely unilluminated. Cain must have planned for the eventuality long before.’

  ‘It relied on Raisa Styepanovna – he was lucky she was there to save him.’ Even as he spoke, Aleksei realized how Iuda had tricked him into releasing the other prisoners, safe in the knowledge that one of them would be his rescuer.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the vampire, ‘but even if she had not been there he would have found a way. It was less than ten paces to his desk. He might have made it and released the mechanism himself before we got to him.’

  Another realization hit Aleksei as he listened. This was not the only part Raisa Styepanovna had played in recent events. Kyesha had told him it was she who had revealed the location of Iuda’s notebook, and the other information he had needed to contact Aleksei. Perhaps Kyesha’s entire escape had been contrived, and with only one purpose – to bring Aleksei to Chufut Kalye.

  ‘What happened then?’ he asked.

  ‘Cain and Raisa discussed what to do. They were considering whether they would be able to round us all up and put us back in our cells, but they decided it would be impossible. Cain said it was time to move on. He lit a taper and disappeared with it down one of the tunnels. She stayed behind, taunting us, telling us that hers was the last beauty we would ever look upon. Cain soon returned. He picked up his notebooks and some other bits and pieces, and they left together. It was difficult for her to pick her way through, always keeping in the shadows. She caught her hand once and let out a scream as the skin burned, but it was nothing. I’ve had worse from you reading that damned book.’

  Aleksei couldn’t help but smile at the creature’s stoicism, but he didn’t interrupt the story.

  ‘They headed off down the tunnel and we waited. Some were unconcerned, saying it would be dark soon, but others knew Cain better. There was a fear that he somehow had worked out a way of flooding the entire cavern with light, but it seemed unlikely. Even if he had, there were plenty of places we could have sheltered until sunset. But that wasn’t his plan. As soon as I heard the first explosion, I realized what he was up to. I knew there wasn’t much time. I ran for all I was worth in the direction they’d gone, dodging the light as much as I could, but it was impossible to avoid it completely. I felt the burns, but they didn’t slow me – it’s something I’m used to.

  ‘I was only just out of the main chamber when the roof behind me collapsed. There were several routes out, but some of them were blocked already. Again, he’d had it all planned – gunpowder packed into crevices in the rock, primed to entomb us and let him walk free, should the need arise. I came up this way. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was still light outside, so it was either be entombed or burned. In the end, the choice was made for me. There was an explosion above my head and down came the roof, and that’s where I’ve been for – however long it is.’

  ‘Ten days,’ said Aleksei.

  ‘It seemed longer.’

  ‘What about Raisa? Wouldn’t she be in the same boat as you – unable to escape into the sunlight?’

  ‘Who knows? What would Cain care, anyway? If she was lucky there was some bit of cave she could shelter in until dark. If not – you won’t find any remains.’