The coach turned on to the coastal road that ran along the length of the town, and Aleksandr immediately felt more comfortable. It was not as familiar a place as Petersburg, but it brought to him the same sense of contentment, with few of the pressures. Little had changed. Perhaps, if he thought carefully about it, he could notice that the leaves on the trees, golden when he left, had mostly fallen to the ground. It had been a gradual process, and one he had observed all through his journey. Even that one yacht was still anchored out to sea. He really should send someone over to see if its passengers were people of any note.
The ship had, he observed, moved a little since he had last seen it – of that he was sure, despite the numbness that seemed to grip his memory. It was unlikely there would be need for so small an adjustment to its position. Perhaps it too had made a sojourn that had coincided with the tsar’s own. Where might it have been, he wondered.
It did not matter. The carriage clattered to a halt and the door opened, revealing the kind but concerned face of Prince Volkonsky. Aleksandr forced himself to his feet and stepped down from the carriage, ignoring Volkonsky’s proffered arm for fear of showing weakness. In front and behind, the other carriages were disgorging their occupants, and he could see Wylie, Tarasov, Diebich and others stretching their limbs and appearing happy to be somewhere that was a little more like home. But turning his head anxiously from side to side, he confirmed that the one man he most desperately wanted to speak to was not with them. Colonel Danilov was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER XXIII
ALONE AND ON HORSEBACK, IT ONLY TOOK ALEKSEI FIVE DAYS to get back to Chufut Kalye. It was mid-afternoon when he finally made it to the cliff top. He noticed the weather cooling all through his journey back and, although there was still no snow, the place felt wintry. He saw groups of Karaite men talking in the streets, but he didn’t make contact with them. If a host of vampires had suddenly escaped the cave system beneath them, then the neighbours of those men might well have become an immediate source of nourishment. Aleksei didn’t feel inclined to stand there and look into their eyes if that had been the case. He made his way to the rocky hilltop from where he had first entered Iuda’s lair, over a week before. He scrambled down to the cave mouth and peeked inside.
It was not what he had expected – certainly not what he had seen the last time he was here. The tunnel was impassable. The roof had collapsed, and rocks filled the way. He could see a few small gaps, but none that would be enough for him to get through. He could possibly dig his way in, but he had no idea how deep the cave-in went. He traversed the hillside and found two other tunnels, similarly blocked. Others seemed passable, but it was a superficial appearance. One had caved in just a little further into the hillside, whereas two more were undisturbed but led nowhere, terminating naturally without ever connecting to the underground labyrinth Aleksei had explored.
It was all very contrived; only those tunnels which might have led deeper had collapsed – those that had never led anywhere were spared. These were not the results of some random earthquake. The question was, had the vampires, once they had fled their former prison, caused this collapse so as to bury all memory of what they had endured there? Or had the tunnel roofs given way with the voordalaki still inside, and now unable to escape?
Aleksei climbed back up to the rocky plane above. There was one way of finding out, though it was not guaranteed. He sat on a boulder and opened up his knapsack. Inside was the book. Aleksei’s initials were still there on the paper in which Kyesha had wrapped it before giving it to him in Moscow. It seemed like years ago. He folded a corner of the paper to one side, and the skin once again began to smoulder in the sunlight. He listened carefully. The wind was blowing strongly, and it was difficult to differentiate the sound of a scream from its whistling between the rocks.
He went over to the edge of the cliff, just above the tunnel he had gone down on his first visit, and pulled the paper aside again. This time he was sure he heard nothing. He got on to his hands and knees to be closer to the cave mouth, but still there was only silence. He knew, though, that there was more than one tunnel that led down to those cells, and any one of the openings around there could be an entrance.
He walked back towards the middle of the rocky plain. He was surrounded by caves now, the mixture of natural and artificial he had seen here before. He prepared to open up the book again, but he didn’t need to. From somewhere nearby, he heard a muffled cry. He looked around, trying to work out where the sound had come from, and it came again. It sounded almost like words rather than a holler of pain, but if it was, he could not make them out.
He ran in the direction from which he thought he’d heard the sound come. An outcrop of rocks stood up higher than the ground around them, by more than a man’s height. Aleksei skirted round them and saw that they were in fact the housing to the entrance of a large cave, shaped like a gaping mouth. There had been a rockfall here too. Aleksei could only guess that this collapse was as recent as all the others.
Again the shout came.
‘I’m here! I’m in here!’
Now it sounded close. It was definitely ahead of him; somewhere in, or behind, the jumble of boulders that filled the passageway. He scrambled down the short slope and began hefting the stones to one side. Some of the larger ones were immovable, but it did not matter too much; they were wedged at odd angles, leaving sizeable gaps in between. Aleksei tugged away at the rockfall, working opposite the point at which the voice called to him. He now clearly recognized it to be the tattooed voordalak.
It was almost twenty minutes before he caught his first glimpse of the creature, no more than a view of its eyes through a gap between two boulders, but it gave him new vigour. He saw one large stone towards the base of the pile that he thought he would be able to shift, and which, if he did, would free up a number of others. He put his hands around the rock, feeling for any crevice that might give him purchase, and knowing that his left hand would never grip it as strongly as his right. Then he pressed down against the ground with his feet, the muscles of his face and neck straining as he tried to pull the rock away.
At last it came, and as it did, Aleksei fell backwards. He didn’t see, but heard the rumble of collapsing stones as those around the rock he had pulled out cascaded in to take its place. He felt a sharp pain to his ankle and looked up to see it pinned under one large rock and several smaller ones. He sat up and tried to push it away, both with his hands and by moving his trapped leg. It was painful, but he quickly freed himself. He stood up and put weight on the injured ankle. He lifted it from the ground again almost immediately, wincing. He didn’t think it was broken, but it would take a few days before he could walk on it again without pain. He turned back to his work, and let out a gasp.
Aleksei’s efforts had revealed the tattooed skin with which he was familiar, but the figure of the voordalak to which it belonged was hard to discern. It had not occurred to Aleksei that being crushed was not one of the ways in which a vampire could die. Had this creature been human, it would not have survived its ordeal. An enormous weight of rocks had fallen on it – most were still there. Its head was trapped, as was one of its legs; the other was out of Aleksei’s sight, still buried in the mass of rocks behind, and must have been bent back at the most extraordinary angle. Another huge boulder pinned its chest to the ground, and moved up and down only slightly as the creature breathed. But its arms were now freed, and it began to use them to pick away the rocks that covered it. Even in its degenerate state, it was stronger than Aleksei, and cast aside rocks with a single arm that it would have taken a block and tackle for men to move.