The White City (2 page)

He had once known it in his bones. It was not so different now.

Like many cities of an age with the wampyr, Moscow was built in a series of rings. At its heart lay the Moscow Kremlin, the Tsar’s residence in his once-capital, a patchwork citadel overlooking the Moskva River. The palaces, arsenals, and churches within its walls made up a crazy-quilt of architecture ranging from the classically Russian elevated proportions of the Church of the Annunciation through the Italian Renaissance façade of the Faceted Hall to the lofty onion domes of the Winter Palace. The previous evening, Abby Irene and Sebastien, prevailing upon Phoebe, and taken her to see and hear the Tsar Bell. Even in her mourning, she had been unable to resist the world’s largest bell, which had only been successfully cast through the intervention of imperial sorcerers from the college in Kyiv. Abby Irene had had a great deal to say about the details of the process, and Sebastien hoped that Phoebe had found them as welcome a distraction as had he.

She had been close to Jack.

On the side away from the river, the Kremlin was bounded by Red Square, and beyond that the Kitai Gorod, the Chinese City—which, as Abby Irene had noted, was not Asian in flavor at all. Sebastien was headed in the opposite direction—to the outer ring of fortifications, the Bely Gorod. Moscow’s White City, famed for pallid walls and a bohemian arts scene. Russians, Sebastien found—Muscovites in particular—were fanatically devoted to the arts. Sebastien speculated it was cultural memory, a sort of national inferiority complex founded in Russia’s late arrival in the Renaissance. Whatever the cause, the outcome appealed to him: the city it produced was vibrant, remarkable—and weird.

Moscow had two or three underground clubs catering to the needs of the blood—the one Sebastien favored was called
Beliye Nochi
, The White Nights, though properly speaking Moscow did not have true white nights as did the Tsar’s 200-year-old new capital at Pavelgrad. But he was not bound to Beliye Noche now, unless his other plans bore no fruit.

He had once had friends in Moscow, and evidence suggested he might still.

Six years might seem but an eyeblink to one of the blood, but for a mortal, it could mean the transformation of an entire life. And one’s existence
could
change in a relative eyeblink, Sebastien admitted to himself as he threaded between pedestrians on his way to Nikitsky Square. The Bely Gorod once had boasted eleven gates and twenty-eight towers. The wall was no longer complete, but the names of those gates persisted in the squares that had surrounded them.

The woman he meant to see had lived in a building first constructed in the eighteenth century. The scrawled paper in his pocket suggested she might still, and Sebastien could think of no reason other than increasing penury or sudden improbable wealth that might have moved her to relocate. Her name was Irina Stephanova Belotserkovskaya, and she was an artist.

It was Sebastien’s unhappy duty to bring her the news of a loved one’s death.

He paused at the foot of the stairs leading to her loft. The hallway was a public space, and he required no invitation to enter it, so he told himself that his pause was just the habitual feigning of human windedness. He should have come to see Irina three nights ago, immediately upon his arrival in Moscow. The truth was, he had been stalling, and there were so many small tasks to accomplish that he had managed to delay until Irina’s letter of invitation had found
him.

She must have learned of his arrival through the rumor and report that inevitably passed between those of the blood and those who associated with them, which meant she was still—
affiliated
. That she would send an invitation meant she had not become a member of another wampyr’s court, which might mean she still considered herself a part of his.

That would be…convenient. In both the English and Russian senses of the word.

He probably could have distracted himself endlessly in getting himself (and Abby Irene, and Phoebe) installed in the Hotel Bucharest near Red Square, reacquainting himself with the city and finding diversions for the women so they did not spend every waking moment moping over Jack or chasing news of the war for independence now winding to a close in the Americas. Such news was harder to come by here in the East, where distances and languages intervened, and that was in part why Sebastien had chosen to bring them to Russia.

The intervention of the French on the Colonies’ side had shortened what could have been a terrible, grinding transatlantic siege—England was not so eager to fight another protracted sea war with
la belle
(and belligerent)
France
—but that intervention had come at a price. Abby Irene was unlikely to find herself welcome in her native England again, and none of them could raise much desire to be in Paris after the losses they had suffered there—or to return to an America at war, where Sebastien was presumed dead and if he were not would have a price on his neck. And not the ambulatory sort of death he professed, but the kind that came with flames.

—and this train of thought was bearing him nowhere he cared to travel.

Sebastien steeled himself and ascended the five flights to the topmost floor. Granite steps dished under his feet. The banisters were worn smooth where his gloved hand skipped over them. He did not have to duck under the landing crossbeams, but a man built to more modern proportions might.

Once Sebastien had been tall. In another five hundred years, he imagined he might be accounted a midget, and men would go on hands and knees through buildings such as this.

As he mounted the last flight, a delicious aroma tantalized him. Thick, meaty, it brought the rush of saliva to his cold mouth and a chill to the pit of his stomach.

Blood, and human, and more than a little.

Irina Stephanova’s loft was the only apartment on the top floor. She had been a friend, and when Sebastien paused to listen through the panel and heard nothing within, he felt as if a dagger twisted within him. The smell of blood was fresh, but not
too
fresh—an hour or two old, surely. Perhaps three.

He put a hand on the knob. The door was locked. Nothing moved within.

He broke the lock without straining and let the door swing wide, the shattered knob hanging on its broken linkages. Inside, Irina Stephanova’s one-room loft lay dark except for what light filtered up through high northern windows from the gaslamps at street level, and what moonlight fell through mildew-stained skylights. It would not have been enough for human eyes, but from where he paused just outside the door Sebastien could see plainly.

Irina had hung sailcloth across the eastern windows to shut out the glare. Candles had dripped, run, and guttered dark on two of three paint-stained bureaus pushed against the walls. Sebastien smelled the cold acrid reek of charred wick: a kerosene lantern had burned itself out as well. A palette of oils lay discarded on dropcloths covering the corner of the room that got the best daylight, smears of pigment adding a rich, bitter undernote to the loft’s collage of smells. A slashed canvas—a female nude, Sebastien thought, though the details were distorted by the defacement—was propped upon an easel.

The dead woman sprawled before it, a canvas knife congealing into the same puddle of blood in which she lay.

Sebastien crossed the floor to her, stepping carefully. He experienced no difficulty in entering the loft: he had often been Irina Stephanova’s invited guest. He crouched beside the body, removed his glove, and reached across the sticky puddle to brush blood-clotted black hair from her cheek.

In the process, he learned two things. One was that the dead woman was not yet cold, though cooling. The other was that she was not Irina Stephanova.

He heard the treads on the stair, saw the scanning beams of electric torches and heard rough male voices that made no effort at concealment. The wampyr stood, turning away from the body. It would have been easy enough to vanish through a window, and for a moment Sebastien considered it. It was the only way he could manage to keep his date with Abby Irene for the midnight ballet.

But remaining here would give him a route of access to the investigation. And perhaps to Irina Stephanova, to whom he now wished even more strongly to speak.

Two men stepped back and one stepped up into the doorway. The one who put himself forward was a slight creature, slim-shouldered, silhouetted against bright lights.

Sebastien tugged his glove back on. He spoke in Russian, so there would be no confusion.

—Good evening. By your presence, I presume the blood has dripped through to the tenants below?

—Don’t tell me.— The slender man said. —There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for your being here.

In the heart of the Kremlin, the massive Tsar Bell began—sonorous, savage—to toll the eleventh hour.

Moscow

Bely Gorod

January 1897

The snow had settled over Moscow in October, and would not melt entirely until perhaps March. It creaked and moaned underfoot, heaped so high where it had been shoveled against walls that the ground-floor dwellers carved tunnels to let light in their windows—but it kept the heat of coal fires snug inside, though the pale stone of the old city’s eponymous medieval walls showed it filthy and trodden by comparison.

Teamsters came after every storm and stood by shaggy, stolid horses while workmen in wool and furs and quilting heaved shovelfuls of snow into their carts. Once each load had settled the wagon bed toward the axles, the carters hauled it to the river, where it lay piled atop the ice in drifts like haystacks until a thaw.

Jack Priest had spent enough of his short life traveling to adapt readily to most climates, but even he had to admit that this was extreme—especially after summering at Sebastien’s home in Spain. Sebastien had offered to leave him behind when he came to Moscow for a winter holiday, but Jack would rather endure the cold than be parted from his patron for four months, and so he wrapped himself in jumpers and coats and tugged sable caps down over his ears—and still the cold found crevices to work through. It pried at the hems of his clothing as if it had fingers and a malevolent sense of humor, and somehow managed to get icy hands down his neck, up his sleeves, across the small of his back.

But the cold couldn’t keep him inside, though he learned to move like the Muscovites did: shoulders hunched and chin tucked, scurrying with short quick strides that kept one’s feet solidly planted even on slick terrain and didn’t kick open the skirts of one’s coat to let the wind inside. He muffled his neck and face in scarves and wondered how peculiar he would look if he began affecting goggles. Or perhaps a full facemask—something to shield his eyes and the skin around them without interrupting his view of Moscow.

Because Moscow was worth looking at. A wampyr’s paramour by necessity became a bit nocturnal, but the truth was that Moscow in January was not just cold, but dark. Jack could have managed to navigate the city entirely in Sebastien’s company simply by napping through the brief daylight. But then, he reasoned, he would never learn Russian.

And he’d never have witnessed the weighty domes of the Church of St. Catherine the Great Martyr in-the-Fields with the cold winter sky behind them. A sight that was worth a little walking out alone.

Besides, the young Russian girls were different from their Western sisters. He might say wilder, except it wasn’t wildness, precisely.
Freedom
, that was the word. They went about unchaperoned and loose-haired, and they had opinions and educations more rigorous than those encouraged in the West.
Russia and Britain had been at the edge of war for decades, each thwarting the others’ imperial ambitions, and so they also found an Englishman—even a pretend-Englishman like Jack—unbearably exotic.

When he was fourteen, Sebastien had provided to him the means for complete independence. Jack was both emancipated and self-reliant, and Sebastien had made it plain that he considered Jack perfectly capable of seeing to his own maintenance and entertainment. Having been raised a companion of the blood, however, Jack found his tastes ran to the more mundane. He liked tea bars and coffee houses, the sorts where the floors were gritty and the raw wood pillars hung with peeling onionskin layers of cheaply printed flyers.

Today, Jack let his footsteps lead him to a café called Kobalt, a half-underground maze of mismatched tables and chairs scattered with even more mismatched furniture that one reached by descending a steep iron stair across from a building whose windows were plastered with political posters that Jack couldn’t read more than every other word of. He recognized the anarchist’s symbol across some, the red-white-and-black two-color process giving the whole a bold look. The whole business made him itch with a funny
liquid craving, not too different from looking at girls.

Jack paused at the top of the stair and sniffed deeply. He smelled eggs, fresh black bread, beans and potatoes, the tang of cheese or sour cream. In other words, lunch, or—for someone who slept into the afternoon, as a wampyr’s companion might be wont—a very nice breakfast.

When Jack entered, the café was already thickening with a crowd. He’d only been here once before, midmorning, and hadn’t found it quite so infested with people. Now, full—while the walls weren’t quite bulging—it gave off quite a different air. Jack walked into a low, shadowy space full of the hum of conversation he couldn’t follow, the smells of tea and coffee from assorted pots and samovars. The selection of food looked limited—Jack imagined this was more a sitting-and-sipping kind of place than one of renown for its cuisine—but what there was smelled promising.

He slid into the middle of three empty stools at the bar. When the stocky blue-eyed counterman turned around, Jack ordered coffee by the pot, scalded milk, the eggs, and two slices of quick bread studded with berries. The bread arrived first, rewarding his strategy, and Jack began the serious business of lining his stomach while somewhere in the back of the kitchen, protein sizzled.