Aleksei grabbed the notebook, forgetting about the paper in which he usually wrapped it. He needed help. Dmitry was an obvious choice, but what interest would Dmitry have in the safety of the tsar? Most likely, this book revealed some sort of plot by the Southern Society. No member of the Northern Society was going to act against it. Perhaps they even knew already.
Who in Moscow could Aleksei trust? He couldn’t think, but he had to do something. He raced through the house, leaving each door open behind him. In the distance, he heard Valentin Valentinovich shouting at him, but he paid no heed. The next moment he was out on the street. In his mind he ran through the list of generals he knew in the city – men who would trust him, and whom he could trust.
As he stood there in the sunny street, he felt bile rising in his throat. At first he could not account for it, but he understood the cause moments after the sensation came over him. It wasn’t fear for the safety of the tsar that brought on that sense of nausea, but a smell – a devastatingly familiar smell, recalled from long ago. Burning hair. Mould. A scent of decay. He had experienced it only once before, as he stamped down on the wrist of the Oprichnik Pyetr and forced his hand into a beam of sunlight, watching with pleasure as it blistered and burned to nothing, but horrified to see it regrow, as Kyesha’s fingers had regrown, before his eyes.
He looked around. The sun was not high but above the buildings and shining bright on this crisp autumn day. Any voordalak outside in these conditions would not simply burn, he would be obliterated. There was no sign of any such occurrence, yet still the smell persisted, strengthened.
Suddenly, Aleksei noticed a dampness against his arms, through his shirtsleeves. He was holding the notebook against his chest, with his arms crossed over it. He now pulled them away, and saw that the leather cover of the book had split open, and was curling at the edges, degrading to a yellow pus which blackened as it soaked into the linen of his clothes.
He stepped back inside the house.
‘What in Heaven are you doing, Aleksei?’ he heard Valentin Valentinovich’s voice say behind him. ‘What is that awful stench?’
‘Get back!’ shouted Aleksei, raising his hand and again clutching the book to him. He must have given off the aura of some mad starets – a preacher foretelling the end of the world. It did the job. Valentin disappeared back into the house.
Now that he was out of the sunlight, Aleksei looked again at the book. The leather was not completely destroyed; two wide stripes were missing across the front of it, plus most of the top edge of both front and back. The central strip of the front, where the Latin text was written, had been protected by Aleksei’s arms.
Even as he watched, and as he had expected, the leather began to repair itself. In parts, it was like a wave riding up a shallow beach in an advancing line which never receded. In other places, a thin tendril of the material would shoot across the cover, like the stem of a climbing plant accelerated a thousand times, and bind to a dangling fragment of leather on the other side. Then those two slivers, reinvigorated by one another, would spread outwards in a thickening band, until, within less than a minute, the cover was as it had always been.
The stench was now no more than a forgotten hint on the breeze.
Aleksei took a step towards the door, holding a corner of the book in front of him. The smell returned, and he saw what he had known he would see. The shadow of the doorframe cut off the sun in a clear line. One small corner of the book was in light, the rest in relative darkness. The corner burned, briefly bursting into flame, and then subsiding as the same noxious fluid as before dribbled from it to the floor emitting its putrid scent. The remainder of the book was unaffected; the same light-brown leather it had been when he first looked at it. The line between what had survived and what had been destroyed was exact – it was the line along which sunlight had been cut off by shadow.
Aleksei stepped inside the hallway again, but he did not need to watch as the wound to the book once again healed over. He had seen all he needed to see.
It explained the strange, delicate texture of the leather that bound the book, so refined it was as if the tanner’s salts had never touched it.
It was not leather.
The book was bound in the skin of a vampire; a living vampire.
CHAPTER XIII
ALEKSEI RETURNED TO HIS STUDY. DOMNIKIIA WAS STANDING in the doorway to the bedroom, her hand clasping Tamara’s.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
Aleksei flicked his eyes towards their daughter, and Domnikiia understood. She led the little girl away. Even before she returned, Aleksei had begun rereading his translation notes. That same sun that had burned the skin that covered the book had shone a new light on the meaning of its contents – it had nothing to do with rats.
‘What is it?’ said Domnikiia, now alone, closing the door behind her.
‘The book,’ said Aleksei. ‘I understand it now.’
‘You understand it?’ Domnikiia did not see what he meant.
‘Not the detail – but I understand what it’s about.’
‘Which is?’
‘Voordalaki.’ The single word still held the power to shock Domnikiia, despite what she already knew. She said nothing and he continued. ‘This Englishman, Cain, who wrote the book; he’s been conducting experiments on vampires – horrible experiments. He cuts them open and watches them regrow.’ Fresh understanding was coming to Aleksei even as he spoke. Every bizarre translation of the English suddenly became clear once he had the knowledge of what Cain’s victims were.
‘So?’ said Domnikiia dismissively. ‘Let him. He can torture them till doomsday for all I care.’
Aleksei wondered if he could be so callous, even towards a vampire. But that was not the issue. ‘It’s not torture – it’s experimentation. He’s trying to find out how they function. The question is, why?’
‘The better to kill them.’ Again, Domnikiia spoke with a passion she had picked up from Aleksei over the years. ‘You’ve done the same – this Cain’s just being a bit more thorough.’
‘Perhaps, or perhaps to use them – to make them stronger.’ That was the impression Aleksei had got from the notebook, but there was no specific line he could point to that asserted it. It was simply a question of tone – and tone was the hardest thing even for an expert to translate.
‘So how will you find out? Translate the rest of the book?’
Aleksei didn’t answer her question. ‘There’s another thing,’ he said instead. ‘I know where Cain is. He’s in Taganrog.’
She looked blankly at him.
‘That’s where the tsar is,’ he explained, his voice dropping unnecessarily to a whisper. It was not common knowledge, and he didn’t recall ever having told her.
‘More than a coincidence,’ she said.
‘He’s even mentioned in the book. It can’t be coincidence.’ Aleksei had never discussed with Domnikiia her views on the tsar – not as an institution. She loved him as a distant hero just as almost every other loyal Russian did, but Aleksei had no idea whether she would fall in with or against the members of the Northern Society, or if she would care at all. She had no idea about his own ambivalence.
‘So-’ She did not have time to finish what she was about to say. Valentin Valentinovich stormed in.
‘How dare you make such a scene, Aleksei,’ he blustered, still unable to raise his voice to the shout he so evidently wished to produce. Aleksei and Domnikiia both stared at him blankly, unable to think how to respond to his petty complaints in the light of what they had been discussing. ‘I should throw you both out of the house right now,’ continued Valentin. ‘All three of you.’