There were seven Russian bodies in the room. The soldiers had naturally all been men, but once the Oprichniki had switched to civilians, they demonstrated no discrimination over sex. One of the bodies was small, scarcely bigger than a child. Its head, covered in tight curls of black hair, lay on one side, facing away from me, causing the foul lacerations in the throat to gape open even more. For an agonizing moment, I believed it to be Natalia. I bounded across the room and turned her head to look at her face, the wounds on one side of her neck closing up as I did so. It was not her. It wasn't even a girl, but a boy of about Natalia's age. I stood up, relieved that the suffering of grief was not, in this case, to be felt by me but could be transferred to others elsewhere in the city who knew and loved this boy.
I went over to the oriental screen and pulled it to one side. Behind it, a figure stood upright, its awful, contorted face staring directly into mine. I smelled the reeking stench of decay stronger than ever and I threw myself back, knocking the screen to the ground.
I had been mistaken. The figure was not standing; it was hanging – hanging like a coat casually thrown on to a peg. A long nail had been hammered into the wall behind and the body had been thrust upon it so that the head of the nail could just be seen sticking out of the neck under the chin. It was in a position that would not have much hindered the Oprichniki as they ate. The body was old and almost as decayed as some of those in the other room, but it wore no French uniform, just regular clothes. The wounds in the neck had long ago begun to putrefy, to such an extent that it was surprising it still had the integrity to support the weight of the body from that single nail. Most of the flesh of the face had begun to decay, but the full beard still remained, as did the eyes.
And so, despite the darkness and the hideous putrefaction of his face, the body was not unrecognizable. His clothes and his beard and his eyes – especially his eyes – all gave him away.
It was Vadim.
So it became clear that Rodion Valentinovich would never be held in his grandfather's arms; that their lives had overlapped by only a few hours or days, if at all. Vadim could never even have known of his grandchild's existence, and neither I nor anyone else would have the pleasure of telling him. I could not weep. I had known for a long time that Vadim was dead; known since I had seen Iuda arrive at that house in Kitay Gorod without Vadim in tow. Every time I had tried and failed to meet up with Vadim since, I had felt a little fear and a little sadness and suspected that his failure to appear hinted at his utter inability so to do. And so seeing his body now was more of a confirmation than a revelation. Still I wished, as I had done and still did with Maks, for the chance then to say a proper goodbye and the opportunity now to mourn.
I turned away and my foot knocked against something hollow and wooden. Vadim's corpse had not been the only thing hidden by the screen. I had also found what I had come into the house to look for. It was a coffin, but again, like those of Matfei and Varfolomei, not purpose-built; merely a crate of the conveniently correct size and shape.
I pulled it away from the wall, towards the middle of the room, and prised open the lid. Inside was the soldier whom I had so long ago seen dead but not decaying, whom that night I had followed to the house where he now slept. His eyes were closed and his hands lay across his belly. I raised my hand, firmly grasping my wooden dagger high above my head, ready to bring it down on the sleeping monster's heart with all my strength.
His eyes flicked open. He engaged me in the same dead stare that I had seen in him before and once again hissed the only word I had ever heard him utter.
'Murderer!'
CHAPTER XIX
I WASTED NO TIME IN THROWING MY ARM DOWN TOWARDS THE creature's chest, but a hand grabbed my wrist, and I could not reach my target. Another pair of hands took hold of my left arm and I was dragged away from the coffin and over to the wall. The Russian soldier climbed out of the coffin and approached me.
The two men who had grabbed me relaxed their grip, and the one on my right said to the soldier, 'Hold him.' It was a voice I knew and should not have been hearing; the voice of a creature that I thought I had seen annihilated in a burning cellar many weeks before. It was Iuda.
The soldier pressed his hand against my chest, revealing a tremendous strength, and I found myself unable to move. Iuda and my other captor – as he stepped into the light, I saw it was Andrei – walked to the middle of the room.
'You're surprised to see me, I think,' said Iuda, with the tone almost of a bonhomous host.
'A little,' I replied.
'It must be so irksome,' he continued, 'when you think that you've murdered four of your comrades – men who have willingly come at your invitation to your country to fight on your side – it must be so irritating to find that one of the four has survived.'
I didn't respond.
'It's the same mistake your friend Maksim made,' said Andrei, making none of Iuda's faux effort to hide his loathing.
'So how did you get out?' I asked.
'Can't you work it out?' asked Iuda. 'My good friend Dmitry Fetyukovich rescued me. By the time you arrived, he had already awakened me and helped me to safety.'
'Safety where? You couldn't go out into the daylight.'
'No, of course not, but in these big blocks of connected buildings one can move from one house to the next without ever going outside. Having a little greater strength than living humans helps too. It allows us to knock through the odd wall here and there between houses.'
I had seen examples of these creatures' strength weeks before, and I felt it in the hand that pinioned me against the wall. I wondered what other powers they might possess, and moreover what their weaknesses might be. 'And that's it?' I asked, 'Your strength? Is that the only thing you creatures have that gives you an advantage over us?'
Iuda laughed; I had been very obvious. 'Perhaps you'd like a written list? Three dozen ways that vampires are better than humans? Well, it won't help you, Lyosha. No, our strength is nothing. I think it's just a side effect of the diet. What makes us superior is not something that we have; it is something that we lack. We lack conscience. When we act we are not bound by any rules of what is wrong and what is right. We have no fear of recrimination either on earth or in hell. We can achieve things that you could never dream of because our dreams are not haunted by doubts about our righteousness and concerns for others.'
'And what have you achieved?' I asked him, scornfully.
He chose to ignore the question. 'I can do things of which you would never be capable. When I caught Vadim Fyodorovich following me' (he nodded carelessly towards Vadim's hanging corpse) 'my scruples might have told me to let him go, but I didn't. When he told me he had just been curious to see how I worked, I might have believed him, but I didn't. When he begged me for mercy, telling me about the wife and family that he loved, I could have felt pity, but I didn't. Instead I hung him up on that nail over there, just to shut him up, not so as to kill him; otherwise we wouldn't have been able to taste the fresh blood that we all so much prefer.
'Could you have done that, Lyosha?' Iuda continued. 'Of course not – you wouldn't want to. But you'd like to do it to me now, wouldn't you? And yet still you couldn't. I could just beg you for mercy; tell you about my terrible upbringing in the Carpathians and you'd lose all stomach to do it.'
'So that's why you're so hard to kill?' I said, straightening up. The soldier, listening to Iuda, had relaxed his pressure on me a little. 'It's not your strength, but our weakness?'