His back hit the opposite wall and he came to a sudden halt. The coffin lid, and myself with it, came to a halt a fraction of a second later, but in that fraction, the heavy wooden board had travelled far enough to crush his chest. Splinters of wood had penetrated between his shattered ribs and into the organs beneath. Every sense told me to flee, but instead I stood there panting, leaning against the lid with all my weight to pin him against the wall. His head was slumped on to his chest and for a moment I thought he was dead. Then with a swift movement his head snapped upward and I again saw the glare of his hate-filled eyes. He pressed his arms against the wall behind him and, despite all the force I could summon against him, began to push his body away from it. Then, with a look of sudden surprise, he weakened and fell back. The wooden shards that permeated his chest embedded themselves just a little further as the heavy lid followed the motion of his body. I wasn't sure whether his final spasm had been the writhing of a dying animal or that as a result of his movement some tiny splinter had penetrated that vital fraction further into his heart, but now he hung limply and moved no more.
I held my breath, fearing that he might once again revive and avenge himself, and unsure of how to determine if he was truly dead. My uncertainty was unnecessary. Proof of his death soon came in an unexpected but unmistakable fashion. His whole body underwent an almost imperceptibly gradual transformation. One could more easily have captured the movement of the hands of a clock than to have noted any specific event of change in him. And yet within two minutes, the corpse had dehydrated before my eyes. The texture of his skin altered from marble to chalk; his hair from silk to cotton; his eyes from glass to ice. Every physical quality became an unconvincing imitation of what it had once been, just as in his undead life, his whole existence was an imitation of the man he had once been. At the moment of his death the creature before me, however gruesome and horrific, had displayed the richness and vibrancy of an oil painting. But now, though it was of the same scene, it was as though the oil had been replaced by watercolour. The subject was identical, but the medium had changed.
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.