The love I feel cannot be told,
For passion, Princess, was I born.
Yield me, Giray then; with these tresses
Oft have his wandering fingers played,
My lips still glow with his caresses,
Snatched as he sighed, and swore, and prayed,
Oaths broken now so often plighted!
Hearts mingled once now disunited!”’
Aleksei recognized the words as soon as he heard them. It was Pushkin – The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, published just the previous year. It was apt in more ways than one. The first was the most obvious; that even as he heard the words, Aleksei was sitting in a courtyard, enjoying the fading warmth of the autumn twilight, sipping at a local vodka of which he planned to take home with him at least a bottle and listening to the trickle of the very Fountain of Tears that had inspired Pushkin when he had visited the town.
But more than that, the subject of the poem itself could not help but suggest comparisons to Aleksei’s own life. Zarema, the former favourite of the Khan Giray, had crept into the bedchamber of his new love, the captured Polish princess Maria. Zarema was begging Maria to reject Giray, in the hope that once his love for this new beauty had proved to be a passing fancy, he would return once again to Zarema.
Would Marfa, if she knew, creep into Domnikiia’s room and beg her to abandon Aleksei, in the hope that he would return to her? Was Marfa Zarema, Domnikiia Maria and Aleksei himself Giray? The comparison broke down on many points. Marfa knew nothing of Domnikiia, nor had she lost Aleksei’s love. And where would Marfa’s new love, Vasya, fit into the analogy? But the biggest difference was that, though Maria did not love Giray, Domnikiia did love Aleksei. For her to abandon him would not be some casual act of indifference, but a dagger to her heart.
At least, so Aleksei hoped. Again today Iuda had taunted Aleksei, offering to tell the truth about Domnikiia. Aleksei had been tempted to listen, but would still have believed what he wanted to believe. And now Iuda was dead – truly dead, and more aptly than by having been drowned in a freezing river. He had died at the hands – at the tearing claws and ripping teeth – of creatures that in 1812 he had tried to emulate and in 1825 had tried to subjugate. But now he was no more. The tsar was safe, and Aleksei felt at peace.
But it was not only the words of Pushkin’s poem that Aleksei had recognized. The voice that spoke them, from somewhere out of the shadows to his left, was also unmistakably familiar.
Kyesha stepped into view.
‘You’re alive,’ he said, ‘so I presume Cain is dead.’
‘Maybe not yet,’ said Aleksei. ‘It depends on just how merciful your friends are feeling.’
‘You left him to them?’
Aleksei nodded.
‘Then I doubt they’ll have finished with him just yet – though they will be hungry. He may have inadvertently saved himself a little suffering when he starved us.’
‘Can you tell me the full story now?’ asked Aleksei.
‘I’m not sure that’s wise. Now Cain is dead, surely we are enemies again.’
Aleksei thought about it. His plan in Moscow had been to kill Kyesha, simply for the reason that he was a voordalak. Kyesha had led him to Iuda, but that didn’t change what Kyesha was. But Aleksei was in no mood for killing.
‘Tomorrow, perhaps,’ he said. ‘We can remain allies for today. He was Iuda, when I first knew him.’
‘I didn’t know that. All I learned was from conversations we had, early on.’
‘Early on?’
‘To begin with, he posed as a vampire,’ said Kyesha.
‘He’s done that before.’
‘He recruited many of us quite willingly. We helped him assemble everything that you saw up there in the caves. It was a huge task – but he had money as well as our labour.’
‘And then the experiments started?’
‘At first it was all voluntary. A lot of what he did was pain-free; investigating reflections, sleeping patterns, religious imagery. Then he asked for volunteers for experiments that involved a greater degree of physical intervention. Many agreed; there was no risk of permanent damage and some saw it as a badge of honour to be able to withstand the pain. All of us thought that, ultimately, knowledge of our own nature would make us stronger.
‘But then, imperceptibly, a division began to emerge between us. Cain – Iuda – orchestrated it, though none of us was ever aware explicitly. There were those who carried out the experiments, and those who actually were the experiments. Guards and prisoners, Cain called it, but only much later on. I was lucky – I suppose – to be one of the guards. But when there were only a few of us left, and we began to realize what had happened, he rounded us all up and locked us away too. He has the place rigged with various ways for letting in light.’
‘I saw,’ said Aleksei.
‘Of course, we thought it would have the same effect on him as on us. It was only too late we discovered he was human. By then we couldn’t do anything about it. That was six years ago.’
‘But you escaped.’
‘Earlier this year. He made a mistake. He had me chained up by the wrists, and in a cave where daylight could get in. Each day it would burn me, and each day I’d recover. I don’t know what he learned from it. Much of what he did was just to terrorize – to keep us to heel.’
‘He’s doing much the same thing again now,’ said Aleksei.
‘With one major difference, I suspect. He made the chain too long – gave me that little bit of freedom, and I grabbed at it. One morning, when the sun first crept into the cave, I clenched my fists and thrust them into the light. You saw me cut off my own fingers, but that was nothing. I stood there as my hands dissolved into a stinking mess that seeped on to the floor. Oh, I knew they’d regrow, but I still felt every scintilla of pain that you would if you thrust your hands into a fire and held them there until they shrivelled to nothing.’
Aleksei looked at his own hands as Kyesha spoke. It was a horrible concept.
‘In the end though,’ continued Kyesha, ‘I was free. The manacles just slipped off. I ran and hid somewhere deep in the caves, whimpering in agony. It took two days for my hands to grow back. You’ve seen how quickly it can happen, at least for my fingers, but that was when I was healthy and well fed. When you’re starving, the whole thing slows down – sometimes even stops completely. That’s another thing Cain discovered.’
‘And how did you get hold of Cain’s notebook?’
‘Raisa Styepanovna helped me with that.’
‘I met her,’ said Aleksei.
‘You did? A beautiful woman. It was I who actually turned her into one of us, though it was Cain that persuaded her. Thankfully, when she realized the awfulness of what had been done to her, it was him, not me, that she blamed. We are close, as any vampire is to the one that created it; as any child is to its parent. For instance, I can tell you with absolute certainty that she is still alive.’
‘Really? Where?’
‘That much, I don’t know. Some can develop the bond to a very precise extent, but it takes much practice.’
‘So how did she help you?’ asked Aleksei.
‘She told me where he kept the notebook – just the one he was working on; the others were locked away. Plus some other documents.’
‘What other documents?’
‘How do you think I knew where your meetings were, and the codes for them? But we knew you were the only person who could defeat Cain – at least, that’s what he thought.’
‘But you said you didn’t know my name.’
‘No, but Cain had said a lot about Maksim Sergeivich Lukin, and particularly about his death in Desna. He said you blamed yourself for it.’
‘Yet he still never told you who I was?’
‘You were just the three-fingered man. And the only clue about Maks was that he came from Saratov. So once I was free, I went there. His mother was dead, but I found one of his sisters. She told me about their poor little brother Innokyentii Sergeivich, and when I mentioned a man with three fingers, she told me all about you.’