I relaxed my pressure on the wooden lid between us and the depth of penetration of the desiccation became clear. The body had no integrity left in it whatsoever. Every bone, every hair, every sinew had become dust. The dust had remained at the same point in space as the element of the body from which it had decayed, since it had had no impetus to move, but at that slight movement of the wooden guillotine that bisected the body, it began to fall away. His legs and arms and the lower half of his torso crumbled to the ground in an ashen pile, spilling out of his now shapeless garments like flour from a ruptured sack. I was left face to face with the parched bust of Matfei. A head and shoulders that rested on top of the instrument of his death, as true to life as any marble Caesar that has ever been unearthed, but nothing like as permanent. It took me a few moments to relax, to realize that he was dead beyond any resurrection, but finally I stepped back and let the wooden lid drop to the floor. As it fell, so did the last remnants of Matfei, not to shatter as they hit the ground, but before even reaching it, dispersed by the air through which they fell. As the last of his clothing hit the ground, a final puff of dust erupted from the chimney formed by the collar of his coat and then he was, beyond any doubt, no more.
I sank to the floor, flinging my head backwards with an urgent requirement to breathe deeply. The tension in my muscles hesitantly began to die away as my body came to understand that the fight was over. I looked across to where Matfei had perished, to where the body would have lain had this been any ordinary death, and as I did so I felt uneasy. Something was missing. Something that should have been there was not there. The body itself was obviously one thing that should have been there, but that was not it. It was not something missing from the room, but something missing from me. I felt absolutely no sensation of regret. One might expect that a soldier of more than ten years' standing, used to killing, has long passed the stage in his life when he regrets the death of his enemy, and to some extent this was true. In battle, when the enemy is remote, separated by the range of a cannonball or a musket shot, then killing is a mechanical action – the pulling of a trigger or the lighting of a fuse. Sometimes those actions cause death and sometimes, when the shot misses, they don't. Even when swords are drawn in battle, the enemy is faceless and it is difficult to say, at the end of it all, whom exactly one has despatched.
But that was not the kind of soldiery in which I had become involved. Many of the deaths I had caused had been personal, as this had been. Some had been men that I had been spying on, who had turned round to discover me following them and against whom I had to defend myself. Others I had marked out to kill, studying the details of their lives and their routine before striking. In every case I had known what I had done was right, that their deaths were necessary to my survival or for the benefit of Russia, but always I had regretted that there had not been some other way, that years before some twist of fate had not put the man in the situation where I had to kill him.
With Matfei, however, the killing had been a pleasure. There was no niggling wish that fate might not have caused our paths to cross, but quite the reverse. I was glad to have been there; glad to have been the instrument of his death. The inhumanity that I had perceived in the Oprichniki now made complete sense. Inhumanity was their most telling quality – and it cut both ways. It was inhumanity that allowed them to kill with such ease, with such determination and without scruple. They had at some point in their lives found a way to amputate their humanity, seeing it as a hindrance to what they desired to achieve. But having lost the restraint of humanity, they had also lost its protection. They had lost that secret Masonic sign of recognition that one human sees in another and gives him pity – holds him back from killing if there is any other way. Matfei may have been freed from any qualm about killing a man, but with it he paid the price that any man who knew his nature would have no qualm about destroying him.
Perhaps it was less complex than that. Perhaps the reason that I did not regret Matfei's death was simply that I had not witnessed it. Matfei had died many years before and far, far away, when he had first been transformed into what he had become. The rapid physical decay of his remains, to which I had just been witness, was merely the instant release of the years of accumulated decay since he had first died. Whether at his true death he had willingly chosen the undead path that his body had taken, or whether it had been forced upon him, I did not know. On that issue hinged the whole question of whether he merited any pity at all.
A sound above me interrupted my contemplation. A booted foot smashed through one of the high, narrow windows that opened on to the street. A voice shouted inside. It was one of the Oprichniki. I did not know which – I found it hard to tell some of them apart by sight, let alone by sound – but he was calling to Matfei. The Oprichnik – the voordalak – slithered through the smashed window feet first, but rather than jumping to the cellar floor (which was more than the height of a man below the window) he hung there, supporting his entire weight on one arm and using the other to grab hold of something he had left outside. I could see now that it was Varfolomei.
Having found his grip, Varfolomei finally dropped to the ground, bringing with him through the window the inert body of a soldier. The dark-green uniform revealed it to be an Italian – one of the many non-French nationals that made up almost half the Grande Armée. Varfolomei grasped him firmly by the collar of his coat. As the body fell, Varfolomei lost hold of it, and the soldier (a Carabinier, if I judged right, who could not have been more than seventeen) slammed to the ground. He groaned and tried to turn on his side. As I had seen before, the Oprichniki preferred their meals still to have a little life remaining in them.
Varfolomei knelt beside his prey, running his eyes up and down the young man's body and rubbing his own face and neck with a sense of urgent yearning. Again he called out to Matfei, generous enough to share his trophy with his friend.
'Matfei can't hear you, I'm afraid, Varfolomei.' I spoke with a confidence born out of my earlier battle, but not justified by the luck of my victory.
Varfolomei turned and rose to a crouched position, poised for an attack. He was, I think, the youngest of all the Oprichniki. That is, the youngest in appearance and therefore the youngest when he first met his death. Once preserved in that state he might have wandered the earth for centuries – longer even than any of the others – or for mere months. It was impossible to tell – and all guesswork on my part.
'Where is Matfei?' he asked.
I nodded towards the mound of clothes that lay discarded against the wall, coated in the powdery residue that was all there was of Matfei. 'Don't you recognize him?'
Varfolomei walked over and examined what remained of his comrade. His lip curled in an expression of distaste that was just what one might see when a human comes across the rotting carcass of an animal. There was a visceral disgust, but no sense of spiritual sympathy with the living being out of which those remains were formed. To me Matfei was merely dust; a dry powder that would soon be dispersed by the wind. To Varfolomei it was a memento mori, and his mood suddenly changed to one of devastation. He sank to his knees and picked up a handful, letting it run away through his open fingers as he inspected it in a hopeless search for some hint of remnant life.