The People's Will (57 page)

It was all as clear in Zmyeevich’s mind as if the procession truly had been a funeral cortège, but it was no idle daydream on his part. Aleksandr could see his mind. If Zmyeevich looked upon the prophetic vision of the tsar’s funeral, so Aleksandr himself would
see it, and understand his fate, and how he might be saved. The black, plumed horses reached the corner and swung away from Zmyeevich to continue alongside the canal, then the imperial hearse slowed and turned. As it did so, Aleksandr’s recumbent corpse began to rise, sitting up, his head twisting to look into Zmyeevich’s eyes.

The vision evaporated, but Aleksandr’s eyes remained fixed on Zmyeevich’s as the coach in which he sat turned the corner. He knew. He had seen what Zmyeevich wanted him to see. How he would react to it only time would tell, and the tsar had little enough of that.

Across the canal, the woman with the large forehead leaned against the railing, her face eager. On this side, two of the men with paper packages exchanged glances. The third, a thickset young man with a flat nose, stepped out into the road, behind the Cossacks and in front of the tsar’s coach. He raised his arm, as if about to hurl a snowball.

The wooden bolt smashed into the brick wall, shattering on impact, its iron core clattering to the ground. Iuda pulled back the lever on the
arbalyet
to reset the bow then released the trigger with no bolt loaded. The twang of the vibrating string filled the air.

‘An interesting weapon,’ he commented. ‘Is it actually effective? On a vampire, I mean.’

‘I was hoping to find out,’ said Mihail.

‘So I gathered. But I have to ask, why? You’re not working with Zmyeevich, but you seem to be entirely intent on my undoing.’

‘I have my reasons.’

‘But you refuse to explain them to me.’

Mihail said nothing.

‘Dusya,’ said Iuda, ‘do you have any idea?’

She had moved to stand beside him, the revolver still in her hand. ‘He’s not mentioned you at all,’ she replied, ‘except when he asked me to watch the hotel. He knew Luka.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Iuda. ‘But then you’d have overheard us talking about him in Geok Tepe. And you wouldn’t have had time since then to perfect a weapon like this.’ He waved the crossbow from side to side.

Still Mihail remained silent, thinking. His plan still had a chance, but it did not account for the presence of Dusya, let alone for the fact that she was working alongside Iuda. All Mihail’s work had been with the goal of trapping and killing a vampire. A human would be quite unaffected – otherwise how was Mihail himself supposed to survive? But with Dusya free to act for him, Iuda would easily escape. That assumed that she was human. Mihail had seen her in daylight, but not for a while; the change could have been recent. Did the scarf she had taken to wearing, that she wore even now, hide the marks of Iuda’s teeth?

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ Iuda continued. ‘Once he’s dead, he’ll talk.’

‘What?’ Dusya almost giggled.

‘Didn’t you wonder why I called him “Romanov”? He is an illegitimate branch of that illustrious tree, and therefore the blood that runs in his veins is blood that was drunk by the great vampire Zmyeevich. Only days ago he in turn drank Zmyeevich’s blood. He has exchanged blood with a vampire – to become one he now needs only to die.’

Dusya’s eyes widened as he spoke, her hand went to her throat, caressing it through her scarf. ‘So one only has to exchange blood,’ she said. Evidently she was as yet no vampire.

‘And die,’ added Mihail.

‘But it would not be death,’ she insisted. ‘It would be a new life.’

‘No kind of life,’ said Mihail. ‘Worse than being simply a
voordalak
– I’d be a
voordalak
who shared his mind with Zmyeevich.’

‘You share minds?’ she said. ‘How blissful.’

Iuda seemed as uninterested in her romanticism as Mihail was.

‘It won’t be blissful for either of them,’ he said. ‘Lukin will be my prisoner – my slave. Through him I will be able to inflict pain upon Zmyeevich wherever in the world he may be. You remember that chair to which I was bound in Geok Tepe? I have something like that in mind for you – with a few improvements.’

‘Wouldn’t you be afraid that Zmyeevich would find us?’ asked Mihail. ‘He’d know where I was. I’d be rescued – and you would die.’

Iuda smiled. ‘I’ll sort something out, don’t you worry. The
important thing is for you to die. Dusya, go get me one of those.’ He pointed to the pile of wooden bolts that Mihail had laid out in anticipation of his arrival. She went and fetched one.

‘You’re just going to kill him?’ she asked. ‘We still don’t know why he came after you.’

‘As I say, that really isn’t an issue.’ Iuda pulled back the string of the
arbalyet
once again as he spoke, slipping the bolt into place. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to talk to him after he’s dead.’ He raised the crossbow, aiming it at Mihail.

‘In that case,’ said Dusya, ‘allow me.’

She placed the revolver on the floor beside her and held out both hands towards Iuda. He thought for a moment and then smiled, handing her the weapon.

‘What do I do?’ she asked.

He stood behind her, his arms around her, his hands over hers. ‘Just like a gun,’ he explained. ‘Aim at the heart, and then squeeze the trigger.’

She cocked her head to one side, examining Mihail dispassionately. Then she grinned and her finger began to squeeze.

Mihail moved fast. He dived to the side, grabbing one of the acid cells that Kibalchich had stored in the room and hurling it towards them. The crossbow launched its bolt across the room, but at a space Mihail no longer occupied. The lid came off the battery in mid-flight and the liquid inside spilled through the air. Most of it fell on their hands, and a little on the side of Dusya’s face. There was a hiss of burning flesh and smoke began to rise into the air. Dusya squealed and dropped the crossbow. Even Iuda reacted, pulling his hands away and wiping them on his jacket.

Mihail had changed direction the instant he threw the jar, hurling himself across the room in its wake. He caught the crossbow as it fell from Dusya’s hands, before it even reached the ground. In the same movement he kicked at the revolver beside her, sending it skidding across the flagstones and through the door, out into the passageway. As it hit the wall it fired, the sound of the blast echoing through all the chambers and tunnels around them.

Mihail backed quickly away, rearming the crossbow as he did so, but at the same time keeping his eyes on the two of them. Both
had managed to wipe away the splashes of acid. On Iuda’s hands there was no sign of it – he had already healed – but his jacket had holes in it from which smoke still rose. Dusya bore further proof that she was not a vampire. Her clothes too showed the marks of where she had wiped her hands against them, but her hands themselves were scarred – the right merely raw and red, but the left blistered. The wound to her face was only a minor disfigurement; a single line of red where a drop of the acid had trickled, like a tear cutting through face powder. As Mihail watched, a genuine tear fell from her eyelid and ran down her cheek along a similar path. She winced as its salt water touched her wound. Mihail searched his heart to see if it held any sympathy for her, but he found none. Her alliance with Iuda was unexpected, but he had been too long planning his revenge to be distracted by it. He had been raised from boyhood to know that any friend of Iuda’s was an enemy of his. That it was Dusya did not complicate the matter.

Iuda regained his presence of mind more quickly than Dusya and was already striding across the room towards Mihail. Mihail groped behind him until his fingers found the pile of bolts. He grasped one and a moment later the crossbow was loaded and aimed.

‘Get back!’ he shouted.

Iuda obeyed. Soon he was against the wall, standing alongside the weeping Dusya.

‘I think we’ve been here before,’ said Iuda.

‘Except that Dusya is in no position to save you this time,’ Mihail added. He raised the
arbalyet
and aimed. It was not what he had planned, but it would have to do. ‘There’s one thing I must tell you before I die, Iuda. And that is my name.’

Iuda laughed, though his voice revealed his fear. ‘And what’s that? Rumpelstilzchen?’

Mihail smiled. He could only admire Iuda’s projection of calm. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My name is …’

‘Who gives a shit what your name is?’ Dusya sprang suddenly to life, awakened from her shock at the acid burns. She took a few steps across the room and stood boldly in front of Iuda, her hands by her sides, clenched into tight fists, her chest stuck out defiantly, her
blouse clinging tight against her breasts. ‘If you want to kill him, you’ll have to kill me first.’

Mihail thought about it, but not for very long. He pulled the trigger.

The bomb hit the ground between the legs of the horse pulling the tsar’s coach and exploded in an instant. The noise filled the Saint Petersburg air, causing snow to cascade in miniature avalanches from the roofs of the buildings that looked on to the canal. It was met by a spray of earth, snow and fragments of horseflesh blown upwards by the blast. These heavier remnants of the explosion soon settled back down to the ground, but a bluish smoke remained hanging in the air.

After the initial shock the crowd began to close in around the tsar’s broken carriage, Zmyeevich among them. Other than the shattered rear axle the coach didn’t appear too badly damaged. That was no surprise; it was built to be bomb-proof – a gift from Napoleon III. Some of the material at the sides was torn and the glass of the windows was smashed – like the windows of every adjacent building – but from Zmyeevich’s position it was impossible to see inside.

Those unlucky enough to have been around the carriage at the moment of the explosion had not escaped.

One of the Cossacks lay unmoving in the snow beside his horse. The creature raised its head and tried to get to its feet, little understanding that two of its legs were now no more than shredded skin and horsehair. The sound of its agonized screams filled the embankment. Nearby was a young lad – a butcher’s boy, judging by his clothes and the joint of meat that lay beside him, half out of its wrapping paper, its blood mingling with that of the boy himself. His body twitched, and then lay still. Others stood dazed – soldiers, gendarmes and civilians – many with cuts to their faces and hands.

Within seconds order began to be restored. The colonel who had been riding in the sleigh behind Aleksandr’s coach barked orders and his men obeyed, pushing the crowd away to keep the blasted area clear. Beyond, Zmyeevich could see that the man who had thrown the bomb was unharmed, but had been
apprehended. Two soldiers had him pinned back against the canal railings.

The colonel marched over to the coach and opened the door to look inside. The tsar’s bloodstained hand dropped down and hung loosely in the cold air.

That single shot revealed what an ineffective weapon a crossbow could be against a vampire, while still being entirely efficacious against a human. The boy had a good aim, but even so the bolt had missed Dusya’s heart, piercing her torso instead just a little lower, around her solar plexus. At such close range and with no ribs to hinder it, the bolt buried itself deep in her body. Iuda had felt its tip thump against his own midriff, but it had lost the momentum to do any damage. For Dusya the wound would be fatal, though neither quick nor painless. Iuda could not deny that he was surprised at what had happened, and took a moment to admire Lukin’s ruthlessness.

Dusya let out an unnatural, grating moan and her knees buckled. Iuda caught her under the arms and she twisted deliberately to face him. He stepped forward on to one knee so that he could support her. She looked up into his eyes.

‘I saved you, Vasya,’ she said. ‘I saved you once, did you doubt that I would again?’

He said nothing. His eyes looked at her, but barely registered the image of her face. Instead he was gazing back a century into his past, into the face of Susanna. He pictured her the last time he had seen her, or believed he had seen her – he had never been sure. Her face had been pale then, just as Dusya’s was now, and the reasons for both were not so very dissimilar.

He felt Dusya’s hand reaching up to touch his cheek, smearing the blood from her wound across it.

‘And I’ve never doubted you either,’ she continued. ‘And now you can save me.’

Iuda withdrew from his reminiscences and tried to make sense of what she meant. He frowned. What did she expect him to do?

She smiled and continued to stroke his face. ‘My blood is in you, Vasya. You drank it to make you strong. Now give me just a little of yours, and then let me die, so that I will live.’

Iuda almost laughed. Perhaps she would have made a good companion as a
voordalak
, but he’d never taken a moment to consider it. Now was not the time to make such decisions. She had done enough to help him, but even if he chose to transform her into a vampire, it took weeks for the dead to become undead. The problems that Iuda faced were immediate.

He looked up. Lukin seemed stunned by what he had done to Dusya, but as soon as he locked eyes with Iuda he sprang into action, pulling back on the lever of the
arbalyet
to rearm it.

‘Please, Vasya,’ Dusya whimpered, blood now in her mouth and on her lips. ‘Out of your love for me.’

Iuda launched himself across the room. He did not even bother to throw Dusya’s limp body aside; she merely slumped to the ground as he stood, emitting an agonized gasp. Before Iuda was halfway Lukin had another bolt in his hand. He placed it into the groove at the same moment that Iuda’s foot connected with the forestock, knocking it out of Lukin’s hand and across the cellar. Both men dived for it, but Iuda was faster. He grabbed it, the string in one hand and the limb in the other, pulling hard until with the sharp precision of a gunshot the string snapped. He hurled the useless weapon to the floor.

Dusya emitted a noise that was impossible to categorize. Iuda and Lukin both turned to look at her. She was lying on her front, pushing her head and shoulders up with one hand pressed against the floor while the other reached out towards Iuda. She had managed to drag herself several feet – a fat trail of blood marking her path as though she were some great slug.