It was still not certain enough, however. Their cellar lay beneath a massive sprawl of buildings. It was conceivable that, with a degree of luck, they might find their way to safety without ever having to expose themselves to daylight. It was a risk I did not want to take.
I raced into the house and down the cellar steps with none of the trepidation that I had shown during the night. The doors behind which the two coffins lay remained closed. Already I could smell smoke creeping in from the neighbouring houses. I looked around me. In the collapsed cellar opposite I saw a short beam of wood. It was perfect. The cellar doors had on them two large handles through which the beam would fit, barring the door securely.
I turned and lifted the wooden beam. When I turned back, I saw that the doors had begun to move. Somebody was beginning to push them from the inside. The vampires were awake and were about to make their bid for freedom. I flung myself against the door, the beam stretched out in front of me with my full weight behind it. Whoever was pushing the doors open was taken completely off guard and they slammed shut. I had only moments before he recovered. I could not both lean against the door and use the beam to bar it permanently. I took my weight away and slipped the beam behind the two iron handles, fearing at every moment that the doors would spew open before I had made them safe. They did not, and now that the beam was in place, they would not. I breathed again.
I knew that I should leave, that I had as much to fear from fire as the vampires did, but I felt the urge to wait, to make certain that they perished. I sat down on the steps. Almost immediately, I heard someone banging against the doors. At first it was the rapid beating of someone demanding attention, then it was the slower, heavier thud of a shoulder trying to break down a barrier. The door held. Soon there was coughing. I could see smoke beginning to seep under the door. I remembered one of my grandmother's stories, wherein a voordalak could transform itself into mist or smoke at will. Could that be true? If it was, then I might have expected to see evidence of them doing it already. And still the coughing and the banging continued, so I felt I was safe.
With the fire so close upon me, I decided it was time to leave. As I began climbing the stairs, the beating on the doors returned to the rapid pounding that cried attention. Now, between coughs, it was accompanied by an excruciated scream.
'Help! Help!'
I could not resist smiling at the thought of Iuda or Ioann, whichever it was, dying in such pain after what they had inflicted on others. At a conscious level, it never even occurred to me that the cry was in Russian. Soon the voice lost the strength even to scream. I heard the sound of a body slumping to the ground and the voice relaxed from a scream to a prayer.
'My God, have mercy upon me.'
It was only then that I recognized the voice as Dmitry's.
CHAPTER XV
I THREW MYSELF BACK DOWN THE STAIRS AND LIFTED THE BAR FROM the doors. Immediately they swung open and Dmitry's semiconscious body spilled out on to the floor. At the same time, I was hit by a wall of smoke and heat which combined to make breathing an impossibility.
The cellar beyond was in flames. Fire licked across the wooden ceiling and the supporting beams were almost charcoal. Within moments the roof would collapse. One of the coffins was completely ablaze, the other, in which I could just make out Ioann's still-dormant body, was already beginning to blacken in the flames. It had been dragged from its original position towards the door, so that Dmitry's feet almost rested against it.
I bent down over Dmitry. He was breathing shallowly. The backs of his hands and his forearms were burnt. On the right side of his face, his beard had withered away to reveal his scar, surviving intact as the rest of his cheek had blistered under the intense heat. I would have slapped his face to try to bring him round, but given his injuries, I chose to shake him by the shoulders.
He soon began to cough and open his eyes.
'Can you walk?' I asked.
'Yes, yes!' he insisted, pushing himself up to a sitting position.
'We have to get out, and fast.' I went back to the doorway. The stairway down which I had descended was beginning to smoulder. In places its ceiling was already alight. It was still passable and, anyway, it was the only exit we had.
'Come on,' I said, turning back to Dmitry.
'Give me a hand!' Dmitry was further into the cellar than where I had left him. His hands were clasped around a handle on Ioann's coffin and he was straining every sinew to pull it to the door. In his weakness, Dmitry was unable to move it even an inch. 'We have to get them out of here.'
Even if I had wanted to save the Oprichniki – rather than leave them there to be reduced to nothingness by the all-consuming flames – it would have been impossible. Ioann showed no sign of regaining consciousness and there was little hope for even the two of us to manhandle his coffin up the blazing stairway.
'Leave him, Dmitry! You've got to come now!' Dmitry ignored me and continued to haul pathetically at the coffin. I dashed back over to him and pulled him away. He could offer little resistance.
I pushed him towards the door, and he seemed then either to bow to my stronger will or realize that his rescue attempt was hopeless. I herded him in front of me up the stairs. When he was almost at the top, and I was about halfway up, the step beneath my foot gave way. The fire below the wooden stairs was intense – enough to eat away at them without actually sending them up in flames. As my leg fell through the gap, up to my thigh, I felt immediately the heat of the cavity below. My leg began to roast with a pain such as I had never before experienced.
My body twisted and I found myself looking back down the stairs into the cellar. Through the smoke and flame I saw Ioann, awake now and fighting his way towards us. His eyes fell upon me and, with a leap that was unmistakably similar to the movement with which Varfolomei had launched himself on me the previous night, he attacked. He seemed not so much concerned with saving his life as with avenging his and Iuda's deaths, or at least with having one final meal.
As he leapt, the ceiling above him gave way. Burning beams crashed to the ground and took Ioann with them. They would have fallen on me too, pinning me to the steps and trapping me in this inferno, had I not felt Dmitry's strong arms at that moment lift me from where I lay and out into the hallway above. Even there, we were not safe. The whole house was ablaze and on the verge of collapse. We made a dash for the door, one of us supporting the other, though which was which I could not say, and made it outside to the cool, life-giving Moscow air.
The fire had now attracted some attention. A French captain was attempting to organize a human chain of both French soldiers and Russian civilians to get water to the fire. The task was hopeless, but they were intent on it and paid little attention to the two figures that had just bolted out of the house and lay gasping for breath in the street outside.
At length I heard a voice ask, in genuine Muscovite Russian, 'What were you doing in there?'
I raised my head. It was a girl of about fifteen, scruffy, with a dirty face and tightly curled black hair. She was leaning over Dmitry to see if he was unconscious or dead, but speaking to me.
'We were sleeping in there. Our house has already been burnt down. This time it almost got us.' I rolled on to my side towards Dmitry. 'Is he all right?' I asked.