Iuda felt a moment of exhilaration, but it was immediately followed by a wave of exhaustion. He was still weak from what he had drunk and what had been drunk from him. He picked up his bag and went over to where he had left the bowl of blood, sitting down on the ground beside it. It was a joy to have the weight off his feet, but his arms still felt heavy as he moved them. He picked up the bowl and swilled its contents around. The blood was still liquid – the only part of a vampire’s body that remained in its original form after the creature’s death, and even then, only if extracted before death.
He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a handful of glass vials. Each already contained a few drops of the liquid – itself extracted from the saliva of a vampire – that would stop the blood from clotting. He poured blood from the bowl into each of them in turn, watching it glisten, almost black in the moonlight. A little of it spilled on to his fingers. The taste for blood he had acquired in those few moments in which he had shared Kyesha’s experience still lingered, but he resisted it, wiping his fingers on the grass instead. He filled almost four of the vials. He should only ever need the first, but one could never tell. He wrapped them carefully in scraps of rag and then put them back in his bag. He still had one dose of Zmyeevich’s own blood, left over from the several he had taken during their plans to induct the tsar. But that blood would not suit his purposes, and might yet be needed to save him from his former ally once again.
He went back over to Kyesha’s remains, now scarcely visible. Only his clothes were left. It would be ridiculous not to take the opportunity to pilfer. He felt through the pockets of the coat. There was a watch, which seemed to be of reasonable quality, and a small number of gold coins. Then, in the side pocket, Iuda found something he could not comprehend. Six roughly shaped items he first took to be stones and then realized were made of bone. What their purpose might be, he could not fathom, but they had clearly had some significance for Kyesha. He slipped them into his pocket, along with the money and the watch. He could work out what they were for later.
He felt a sudden pain in his neck. He reached up and touched his finger to the bandage. The wound felt sore beneath. The bandage was damp, but not wet. The bleeding had stopped. He reached into the bag again and brought out a small package, wrapped in paper. He opened it. Inside was a small, dark lump of meat: kishka – another trick he had learned from Pyotr. To say it was meat was a misnomer; it was a sausage made from congealed pig’s blood. Normally, Iuda would not have willingly chosen to eat it. He was not squeamish about blood in general, but to consume it was a different matter. That was always one of the hardest things about passing himself off as a vampire.
But today, he had to eat it – it was good for him, as his father used to tell him, a long, long time ago. And besides, now that he thought about it, blood didn’t seem unappetizing at all. He wolfed the sausage down in a few bites and followed it with a second. He felt a little better, but still tired. He packed up his things and prepared to set off; a short trek back to Simferopol, thence to hire a horse, and northwards. There were two further matters to be attended to: one might help rebuild his relationship with Zmyeevich; one was purely for himself.
He dragged himself up on to his feet, but instantly felt ill. The loss of blood and the potion he had drunk beforehand combined to make him feel dizzy. He lay back on the frosty grass and let his eyelids droop. A few hours’ sleep there would do him good, despite the cold. He was in no hurry.
It was almost eight o’clock, and the sun was still an hour from rising. Tamara had woken Aleksei early and he had been happy to talk to her alone, letting her mother sleep in. He had spent as much of his time as he could with her in the four days he had had in Moscow – and most of the rest with Domnikiia. Domnikiia had now woken, and was playing with Toma. Aleksei decided it was time to do some work.
He still had a job to do. Aleksandr was – to all the world – a dead man, but there was still a tsar. Konstantin might not want to carry on using Aleksei in the role his brother had, and Aleksei wasn’t sure he wanted to continue it, but he at least had to put together some sort of documentation summarizing what he knew about the Northern and Southern societies.
He went through to his study and sat at his desk, assembling piles of papers in front of him, but not looking at them. Ever since he had left Taganrog, he had wondered whether it might not be better to let the revolutionaries have their way. A republic might not be the best form of government for Russia, but it would be one in the eye for Zmyeevich – a way of cutting the Gordian Knot. Whatever influence Zmyeevich could then exert on subsequent generations of Romanovs, unpleasant though it might be for them, would have no bearing on the fate of Russia. If that was lost, Zmyeevich might not even bother with his revenge. Even if the revolutionaries went for the most moderate of their options – a constitutional monarchy – it could so weaken the role of the tsar that Zmyeevich would find him useless.
The problem was, not all of them were so moderate, particularly not in the south. There might not be subsequent generations of Romanovs – certainly not from the core of the family. Look what had happened to the Bourbons, those who had not got away. Aleksei had been eight years old when the French Revolution began. Four years after that marked the start of the Reign of Terror. The French themselves called it, more succinctly, la Terreur. That was when Petersburg had started to fill with émigrés fleeing for their lives. It was not their sudden poverty or their fall from grace that had terrified the young Aleksei; it was the stories they told. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the bizarrely named Committee of Public Safety, which believed that somehow the safety of the public was an issue unconnected to the safety of individual members of that public.
They saw the guillotine as a clean, efficient, modern way of carrying out their year-long massacre, with an efficacy which only lawyers the likes of Robespierre could achieve – and take pride in. In Russia, the revolutionaries were more poets and soldiers than lawyers, but Aleksei knew what would follow them. At best, it could only mean their killing would be less well organized, but still they would massacre any they thought to be enemies of the state, and since they were the state – wasn’t it a French king who had said that? – that made them free to kill anyone they regarded as an enemy of themselves.
Perhaps the very inefficiency of the current batch of Russian revolutionaries would mean they could not kill so many with such a degree of sanitization, and that therefore the people, literally revolted, would turn against them. The French idea of death carried out by a machine was vital to the success of the whole venture. But compared to a Russia like that, being ruled by a tsar who was himself ruled by Zmyeevich seemed almost desirable – at least a sane form of tyranny.
Aleksei laughed out loud. It was a sorry state of reasoning that led him to such a conclusion. But the fault was in assuming there could only either be one outcome or another. There were two much more desirable possibilities: either to let the revolutionaries found a constitutional monarchy; or to defeat them, let Konstantin reign as tsar, and go on to defeat Zmyeevich when the time came. He’d beaten him once, when he had only just discovered what it was Zmyeevich was attempting. In future he, or whoever he chose to pass his knowledge on to, would be better prepared.
But who would that person be? It was a cruel chalice and a bitter poison to pass on to a child. Could he do that to Dmitry? He would have no desire to protect a tsar. But in any case it was not a matter that needed considering now. What mattered now was the immediate threat to Konstantin.