As he passed Tamara’s room, he glanced inside. She was in bed. Her mother was singing gently to her. Aleksei could not make out the words. He paused to watch and to listen. It was another twenty minutes before he left the house.
Aleksei had run across the city. As he went, he questioned what he was doing. Kyesha had killed a man the previous night, and had to be well aware that Aleksei had planned the action against him. And yet Aleksei felt no fear. Kyesha had made no move to attack him all week. His ultimate goal had been to deliver the book, and now that was achieved, it seemed even more pointless to do anything to harm Aleksei until he had actually managed to read it.
The greater worry was that Kyesha wouldn’t be there. It seemed more than likely – he had said himself on Friday that there would only be one more meeting in Moscow. On the other hand, they hadn’t actually met at the theatre the previous night. Aleksei might be taking things too literally, but there was no benefit in ignoring the possibility.
He was only a few minutes late when he arrived at the church. He glanced inside, and inside Menshikov’s Tower, but there was no sign of Kyesha. It was raining, and Aleksei didn’t feel inclined to wait outside. He returned to the tavern where he had taken Kyesha a week before. There was still no sign of him, but Aleksei ordered vodka and sat down to wait. He was at the same table where they had sat before, where Kyesha had first brought out the bones Aleksei now knew to be his own.
Knew? That was a stretch of faith. Kyesha was, in many ways, like Iuda. Iuda would lie and toy with Aleksei, mixing truth and falsehood, leaving him to doubt any certainty he’d had over either. Even today, Iuda’s legacy continued. Aleksei still did not know the truth of what he had seen at Domnikiia’s window, all those years before. His joke earlier that evening about her plotting with Kyesha to keep him in Moscow had started as just that, but he had never felt that depth of certainty with Domnikiia that he did with Marfa. He knew it was one of the things that made their relationship so exciting.
But what would have been easier for Kyesha? To sneak back, as he had described, and retrieve Aleksei’s fingers, to keep them for a decade and a half, and finally reveal them to their original owner? Or simply to steal a few bones from a peasant’s grave and pass them off as Aleksei’s own? How could Aleksei tell the difference? Perhaps they were even Kyesha’s fingers – he seemed happy enough to harvest them as he thought necessary. Could he have cut them off some months before and waited until, just as the flesh grew back on his own hand, it decayed from those severed fingers and they became no more than dry bones?
Aleksei reached into his pocket. Inside, Kyesha’s two fingers still lay where Aleksei had put them. He made sure no one else in the room saw as he drew them out and placed them on the table. They looked and felt just as they had done before, still in that strange state that was both unliving and undead. That was remarkable in itself. It had been three days since Aleksei saw with his own eyes that ragged piece of metal separate those fingers from the body that sustained them. And yet there was not a hint of decay. He raised one to his face, cupping it inside his hand so no one would see, and sniffed it. There was no noticeable odour. It was conceivable that it was still too early, but Aleksei had other ideas.
He had observed putrefaction in the body of more than one vampire in his time. Usually it came on very quickly after death – if the body had not been destroyed anyway, by sunlight or fire. But when he had killed a vampire using a wooden blade to the heart, or by decapitation, the collapse of its bodily integrity had been almost immediate. There had been one exception: a young soldier who had become a vampire only weeks before he met his final end. His decay had been slower and less pronounced. Indeed, as far as Aleksei had been able to tell, the body had decayed, but only to the extent that it would have done if nature had taken her usual course from the point of the soldier’s actual death – the moment at which he became a voordalak. Ultimately, what Aleksei had seen in front of him had been exactly what he would expect to see in a corpse that had lain in the open, unattended to, for several weeks.
Thus his conclusion was that the state of being a vampire somehow suspended the normal process of decomposition expected in a dead body. In reality, that was all that Kyesha and any of his kin were: lifeless cadavers given the semblance of existence by some foul spirit. That same force which animated the limbs fended off the processes of decay. When it had lost control of the body, nature rapidly reasserted herself.
Those fingers would not decay until Kyesha himself was dead.
Aleksei slammed his fist down on to the table, crushing the little finger beneath it. He smiled to himself, wondering if Kyesha, wherever he might be, could still feel pain in that detached part of his body. The sound of the impact made a few heads turn, but none could see what Aleksei was doing. He ignored them and took a gulp of vodka.
Once again, he placed his hand on the table so that the two fingers lay precisely where his own fingers should have. The skin that had grown over the tops of his shattered knuckles had little feeling in it, but he could see that it was just touching the still-raw ends of Kyesha’s fingers. There was no blood in them now, and no healing had taken place, so blood vessels, bones and other structures, of whose nature Aleksei knew little, were clearly visible. It was an anatomist’s dream; a body-part that could be studied slowly and over a long period, without ever worrying about losing the sample through decay.
Those two fingers answered another question which Aleksei had asked himself years ago. The Oprichnik Andrei had suffered a similar but far more serious injury than Kyesha. In that case, Andrei had lost an entire arm, severed by a blow from Maks’ sword during a desperate fight for self-preservation. Aleksei had seen Andrei not long after with the arm fully restored. The question that had briefly crossed his mind was, if a voordalak could grow back a severed arm, could not the arm grow back the body of a voordalak? Would such an intersection result in two copies of the original?
It seemed not. There was no sign of a new Kyesha, growing out of his own fingers. Perhaps though, even if they could not grow a body anew, they might be able to reattach themselves to an existing body if the chance arose. For a second time, Aleksei pulled his hand away in revulsion. He had almost felt the sensation of new tendrils growing out of those moribund cylinders of flesh and feeling their way towards his own hand, which lacked what they could so readily provide, making him whole once again – part human, part monster. It was all in his mind, but the thought sickened him. He rammed the fingers back into his pocket and downed more vodka.
He looked up at the clock. It was past eleven. Kyesha would not come tonight.
CHAPTER XII
‘I THINK I KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THE TSAR.’
Aleksandr smiled to himself as he heard the words in his head, spoken in Clemens von Metternich’s refined Austrian accent. It had not been his own ears that had heard Metternich speak, but he knew what had been said. He knew much of what people said.
He gazed out of his study window, across the garden and out to the sea. It was peaceful here in Taganrog, and that gave him the chance to contemplate; not merely to think – though he had done enough quick-thinking in his time – but to look back on how things were, and how they might have been.
They had all presumed to understand him: Metternich, Castlereagh, Bonaparte. The last two were dead, and Bonaparte’s fall could be attributed almost entirely to Russia. And Russia was the tsar. That’s what Aleksandr’s babushka had always told him. She, of course, had said ‘tsaritsa’, but he had chosen to take the more general interpretation of her words – the role, not the individual.