‘I think Iuda is dead,’ he said.
‘Think – but not believe.’
‘He drowned. I held him under.’ Aleksei could feel the cold numbness that had penetrated his left hand and arm. ‘But I never found his body.’
‘You let go?’
‘I don’t know. The water was freezing. I couldn’t feel a thing.’ He reached inside his shirt. Against his chest he felt two small pieces of metal; one oval, the other square. The first was an icon of Christ that Marfa had sent him during the darkest days of the Patriotic War. He pulled the second chain off over his head and tossed it towards Kyesha, who caught it with the same dexterity he displayed during their games of knucklebones. ‘Open it,’ he said.
Kyesha slid his thumbnail down the small crack between the two halves of the locket and it sprang open. He peered inside. Aleksei could clearly picture what he was looking at: twelve blond strands, coiled into a circle, unfaded by time.
‘His hair?’ asked Kyesha.
Aleksei nodded. There had been more wrapped around Aleksei’s fingers as he pulled them out of the water to discover Iuda gone. He had slipped it into his pocket and only weeks later remembered it was there. Twelve seemed the appropriate number to keep.
‘How strange that you should keep such a memento of a past encounter,’ said Kyesha. Aleksei noted the stress on ‘you’, but before he could ask what it meant, Kyesha had continued. ‘Couldn’t you have looked for the body?’ he asked.
Aleksei gave a short laugh. ‘I wouldn’t have had much trouble finding a body,’ he said. ‘It’s just a question of whether it would have been the right one.’ Aleksei saw the river flowing out in front of him, chunks of ice and the corpses of men carried along by it with equal alacrity. Thousands of French had drowned or frozen that day. A few had managed to swim across. The chances were that Iuda could be counted with the former group.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kyesha. ‘It appears we’ve been breaking the rules.’ He tossed the locket to Aleksei, who caught it and put it back around his neck. Kyesha produced the knucklebones from his pocket once again, all six of them. ‘For five,’ he said. ‘Where was Iuda from?’
Aleksei pondered the question as Kyesha threw one bone into the air and began picking up the others. He had assumed that Iuda was from Wallachia. Why? Because Dmitry Fetyukovich had said they came from Wallachia. But Dmitry had not met them all before, certainly not Iuda. It seemed reasonable that the other eleven were Wallachians, but why assume the same for Iuda? It was as foolish as the assumption Aleksei had so blithely and speciously made that, because eleven were, then the twelfth must also be a voordalak – the sort of fallacy that Maks had more than once warned him against. Iuda could speak French perfectly and Russian better than many of the Russian nobility. He had also spoken Romanian to the others, which Aleksei did not understand at all, but which had apparently been good enough to fool them into believing he was their countryman. So, all things considered, the answer which Aleksei prepared to deliver to Kyesha was a simple and honest ‘I don’t know.’
The need never arose. Kyesha had picked up the five bones from the floor of the chapel and clutched them tightly in his fist, but he never reached out his hand to catch the sixth. It dropped to the brickwork floor, with the slightest of sounds.
‘Oops,’ said Kyesha. The comment was unnecessary. It was clear enough to Aleksei that the failure had been deliberate. Aleksei had not been in control of the bones for days, and hence had had no chance to ask a question. He’d been happy with it, knowing that he would learn more by hearing Kyesha’s questions than by listening to his potentially deceitful answers. Perhaps Kyesha had worked out the same thing. He pushed the bones towards Aleksei and Aleksei knew that now was his chance to ask the sole question that mattered. He picked up the bones and cast them down on the floor, then selected the largest to throw. He looked Kyesha in the eye.
‘I think this one’s a five, don’t you?’ said Kyesha.
Aleksei nodded. ‘For five. Yes-or-no question. Are you a voordalak?’
Aleksei threw the large bone high in the air. The others had not scattered too broadly, and the first four were easy to pick up, but the fifth had fallen between two of the red floor bricks, where the mortar had worn away slightly. It was the smallest, no bigger than the tip of Aleksei’s little finger. Aleksei scrabbled, trying to retrieve it from its hiding place, and eventually it yielded, but the bone in the air had almost reached the floor. He had no time to turn his hand to catch it. Instead, he brought his hand sharply upward, batting the bone back into the air again. It flew off at an angle, heading towards Kyesha. Aleksei leaned forward and pushed with his legs, launching himself across the room. He kept the bones in his hand pressed against his palm with his smallest two fingers and reached out with the remaining three, the handicap of his left hand momentarily mimicked in his right. The side of his hand hit the ground at the moment his two fingers and thumb plucked the bone out of the air. He closed his palm and then opened it again, showing the six knucklebones to Kyesha with a smile of victory that revealed he was taking the game too seriously.
The remembrance of the prize suddenly cooled his excitement. He looked again at Kyesha and waited for him to speak. Kyesha rose to his feet and seemed to grow in stature, more than ever seeming older than his youthful face suggested. Aleksei stood as well, partly to be less vulnerable, but also from the sense of awe which Kyesha had managed to instil into the moment. Kyesha held out his hand and Aleksei felt compelled to pour into it the knucklebones with which he had so recently claimed victory. Kyesha pocketed them. It was as if they both sensed they would be playing no more.
‘Yes, Aleksei Ivanovich, I am a voordalak.’
So there it was; from the creature’s own mouth, confirmation that, thirteen years on, thirteen paranoid years, Aleksei was finally facing what he feared most. He took a step back, feigning repulsion and surprise, but he had known all day – all week – what he would have to do when this moment came. Now he had only to work out the final tactical details. It was good they had stood up; that would make it easier.
He put his hand to his face and let slip a horrified murmur of ‘Oh my God!’, then he turned, as if unable to look upon the creature with which he shared that tiny, ancient chapel. It occurred to him, momentarily, that he had been here before. Maks had confirmed with his own mouth that he was a French spy, and Aleksei had not believed such a thing could be excused in any way. A few minutes’ further conversation would have proved how wrong he was. Did Kyesha not deserve some chance to plead for his life, to explain that which Aleksei could not conceive? Perhaps he did, but practicality screamed against it. Aleksei’s best chance was surprise. Even as he turned away from Kyesha he let his mind fill with a hatred that he could not in honesty claim he felt for this particular creature but did for all the other vampires he had met, and for all the misery they had caused. This was for Vadim, for Dmitry and for Maks. Some might say they had already been avenged, but it would be the highest pleasure for Aleksei to settle the score one further time.
He reached out for his sword, knowing that his body blocked Kyesha’s view of it. Decapitation was – as Aleksei had discovered for himself – a method that could quickly send a voordalak down to meet its hellish creator. In one movement, Aleksei had grasped the sabre and begun to turn, unsheathing it as he raised it to strike. He pictured in his mind Kyesha’s precise position, considered his height, the length of his own arm and of his sword, and swung so that the razor-sharp tip would rip out the monster’s throat with the same proficiency the vampire itself had used upon every victim it had ever slain. If the stroke did not kill, it would incapacitate sufficiently for Aleksei to move in with the fatal blow.