The Third Section (13 page)

Using artificial light was a sufficient solution, which Yudin had come upon with only a little further experimentation. The light was not as bright as the sun would have been, but it was clear enough for him to examine his specimens. He made final adjustments to the magnifying glass so that it focused the image of the lamps and candles close to the mirror. Then he prepared his slide.

He poured out just a drop of Aleksandr’s blood. He corrected himself – of the tsar’s blood. It was still liquid thanks to the anticoagulant that Raisa had naturally introduced with her bite. He added a thin film of mica which the blood sucked eagerly down on to itself until it was thin enough for light to penetrate. He put the slide under the microscope and peered down through the eyepiece.

The blood appeared perfectly normal.

That was to be expected. While Yudin had never had the chance to examine Romanov blood like this before, the circumstances that had created it were not unique. He had reproduced them in his laboratory in the Crimea. He had allowed a vampire to drink a man’s blood almost to the point of killing him, but not quite. He’d then let the man breed, and examined the offspring’s blood. It had looked like that of any human – and yet when the child was given the blood of the original vampire to drink and then killed, it became a vampire. It was just as they had planned with Aleksandr I – just as Zmyeevich was undoubtedly planning with the new Aleksandr.

Yudin surmised that there was a change in the blood at some level, but it was an internal change, or perhaps something too small to be seen by the microscope. It did not matter – his experiments had not ended there and neither would this one. He went over to the map drawers and opened the top one. In it lay
several
vials, each neatly labelled. He picked one out. It was larger than the vial of Aleksandr’s blood, but then it had been donated voluntarily. Even as he held it in his hand he felt awed by it. This was why Zmyeevich hated him so, and yet feared to act against him. It felt almost sacred to cradle it in his fingers: the blood of the vampire Zmyeevich. What power it gave him. He needed only to wait until day and then hurl it out into the light to inflict the most terrible pain on Zmyeevich, wherever he might be in the world, as the sun burned that small fragment of him. It would be as if the blood within his own veins were burning. But he would quickly recover, and Yudin would become suddenly vulnerable, his only power over Zmyeevich lost for ever. Along with his ability to experiment.

He mixed a drop of Zmyeevich’s blood with the sample of Aleksandr’s and re-examined the slide, licking his lips in anticipation of observing this once-in-a-generation moment. This was what would happen, on a much vaster scale, within Aleksandr’s own body if he were to ingest Zmyeevich’s blood. Yudin opened his notebook on the desk beside him and picked up a pencil, ready to make notes.

The red cells of Zmyeevich’s blood were quite distinct from Aleksandr’s. This was simply a difference between vampires and humans that Yudin had observed many times before. Aleksandr’s were disc-shaped, with a slight depression in the middle. The
voordalak
cells were larger – almost half as large again – and completely smooth.

The next observation was important – although it was more a lack of an observation. If the blood had been merely human – not Romanov blood that had already been taken by Zmyeevich – then the vampire cells would have attacked the human cells. In numbers as great as this, they would have been victorious, although a strong human could fight off a small dose. Yudin used the word ‘attack’, but the exact mechanism wasn’t clear; again too small to be seen in the microscope. The human cells merely withered. But that did not happen here.

What did happen was far more spectacular. The cells merged. It was almost – though Yudin knew he was being fanciful – as if the vampire cells seduced the human cells. They buffeted against
them
and then, being larger, began to surround them. And then, with the silent ‘pop’ of two droplets of rain on a window pane forming into one, they merged into a single cell – perfectly spherical. Within two minutes, Yudin could see no other kind of cell in his sample.

The third stage would come soon, when each spherical cell would redivide, regenerating the two cells from which it formed, except that now both cells would be larger and would lack the indentation in the middle. Both would be vampire cells. He had seen it a hundred times before, but never with such illustrious bloodlines. The idea that he was about to witness the spawning of the blood of a Romanov thrilled him.

He waited.

He checked his watch.

The process should have begun within a minute of the spherical cells forming.

He waited again.

After five minutes, he stood up. He began to pace around the desk, staring angrily at the microscope, as though it were to blame. He wished he had all his old notebooks with him, but they were back at the house. He went through the possibilities in his mind.

One consideration jumped at him. Aleksandr was not a Romanov. It was no secret that Russia’s tsaritsas could be as promiscuous as her tsars. It had been a constant fear for Zmyeevich – that the throne would one day be taken by a bastard child who did not carry the Romanov blood and over whom he had no chance of taking control. The most likely candidate had been Tsar Pavel, whose mother, Yekaterina the Great, had had countless lovers and shown no affection for her supposed son. But Pavel’s son, Aleksandr I, was beyond doubt a Romanov. He had seen through Zmyeevich’s eyes and the
voordalak
had in turn been able to influence his mind. But that did not prove that Aleksandr’s brother Nikolai was a true Romanov, nor that Nikolai’s son was.

But Yudin was being an idiot. If the blood he had seen had not been Romanov blood, then the spherical cells would not have formed. The red blood cells would have been destroyed, as
when
any normal human blood met vampire blood. So if this was Romanov blood, then perhaps it was not Aleksandr’s. If it had come from his brothers, or his son, then it would have shown the full reaction, just as it should for Aleksandr. Could it be Nikolai’s? That would fit the observations. Nikolai came from a generation of Romanovs that could no longer be affected, thanks to the attempts already made on his brother – Zmyeevich could only focus his power on one child in each generation. That would mean the spherical cells formed but did not divide, wouldn’t it? Yudin cursed not having his books to refer to. But why should Raisa take Nikolai’s blood and pass it off as his son’s? She wouldn’t risk lying to Yudin. And the chances of her stealing a kiss from the tsar were far more slight than that she should manage it with his son.

Then, in an instant, all was clear. Yudin froze as the realization came upon him. He had eliminated every other possibility and now only one explanation remained, unlikely though it seemed.

If Aleksandr was not properly affected by Zmyeevich’s blood, then – and it was as preposterous as it was inescapable – Tsar Nikolai could not be dead.

Yudin looked down at his own watery grave. It had been almost thirty years, but he remembered the cold. The surface of the Neva had been frozen then – frozen solid. Today there were still chunks of ice, floating out towards the Gulf of Finland, but also stretches of clear blue water in between. He turned round and looked behind him. The Bronze Horseman stared into the sky, oblivious to his presence. The statue had not gone by that name in 1825. It was only after Pushkin had written his poem that the statue of Pyotr the Great picked up its now familiar epithet. Yudin was one of the few who understood the statue’s meaning.

Trampled beneath the hooves of Pyotr’s horse lay a serpent, defeated by him as though he were Saint George and it was a dragon. In truth, the serpent represented Zmyeevich – his name literally meaning ‘son of the serpent’. It was on this very spot, in 1712, that Pyotr had tricked the vampire and stolen his knowledge, but in doing so had condemned his own descendants to be victims of a blood curse.

It was here too that the Decembrists had stood against Tsar Nikolai. Yudin had been among them, along with his old adversary, Aleksei. They had been near the statue when the guns opened fire. Yudin traced their steps from there. He’d been ahead, suspecting that Aleksei had something planned for him, though nothing so lacking in subtlety as a mere pistol. He’d thought to run down Galernaya Street, but one glance at it told him that if the imperial guards caught up, it would be a shooting gallery. Instead, he had turned to the river, where many were already fleeing across the thick, steady ice.

This evening there was no one around. Beneath him, in the river, ice clung to the embankment, but where he had jumped down all those years before there was a gap through which he could see the cold dark water. He stepped forward, feeling the sensation of falling for only a fraction of a second before the icy water engulfed him. If anyone had seen, they would have taken it for a suicide, but his body would not be found, just as it had not been found thirty years before. Neither had Zmyeevich’s, 113 years before that.

Yudin swam forward, under the water, barely able to see, remembering that Zmyeevich too, after his confrontation with Pyotr, had thrown himself into the river somewhere hereabouts, in fear for his life. There were myths that vampires hated the water, but in reality they had many of the attributes required to be good swimmers. They had no trouble with the cold – until it was enough for the fluids in their bodies to actually freeze solid – and they had little need for air. To be sure they needed to breathe, but they could survive without it, just as they could survive without consuming the blood and flesh of humans. Eventually lack of any of those things would cause them to slip into unconsciousness, but it would not kill them. If Yudin remained beneath the water too long he would lose strength and sink to the river bed, there to remain undisturbed. Perhaps centuries from now some fisherman would dredge him up, and on the first gulps of cool, fresh air he would come spluttering and coughing back to this world, hungry and grateful to find in that fisherman both his saviour and his first repast.

But Yudin would not be so foolish. He knew he could make
his
planned journey by surfacing a mere two or three times for breath. It would mean that his approach was unobserved. It was a hard swim though, upstream against a strong current. He had no idea which direction Zmyeevich had headed on entering the water, but he would guess it was out to sea. His aim had been to depart Russia by the quickest conceivable route. As for Yudin, in 1825, there had been no aim – no intent. He remembered that Aleksei had shot him as he fled across the ice, mortally wounding him, but not killing him outright. Then Aleksei had begun his play-acting for the crowd, pretending to comfort his fallen friend, victim of one of the soldiers’ muskets. They had talked and Aleksei had teased him over some trick that he had pulled, but the details were hazy. Yudin had drunk the blood that he had taken from the
voordalak
Kyesha, who had previously drunk
his
blood. It was Yudin’s only hope of survival – to become such a creature himself. Then, with death, memory stopped.

He surfaced and took a gulp of air, glad of the opportunity to check his bearings. He was between the Winter Place and the lighthouses, just at the point where the Greater and Lesser Nevas split. He could just see his destination in the distance. He submerged again, and remembered his soggy restoration to life.

The persistence of memory had been his greatest fear. All the
voordalaki
he had ever spoken to claimed that they were the same being – the same person – that they had been before being transformed into that new state. It was easy enough for them to say, but Yudin had always wondered if the vampire might not be some other creature that took over the physical body of its victim, discarding its previous owner and taking from him only sufficient memories to pass itself off as a continuation of the original. He could think of no experiment that could prove things one way or another, except one that he would have to perform on himself, and that he delayed until the only other possibility was his own death.

He had returned to consciousness somewhere to the east of Helsingfors on one of the many islands that were scattered along that stretch of coast. It had been a little over a month since his death. That was a not untypical period for the transformation. Ideally a vampire would awake in its human grave, safe from the
light
of day and able to dig itself out when night fell, but Yudin’s body had simply lain on a beach, exposed to the rays of the sun. Thankfully, nature guarded against such risks. The final stages of the transformation, when the vampire’s flesh changed its nature so as to become susceptible to even the dimmest sunlight, always occurred at night. Yudin had known it by experimentation, and had learned it for himself. He had scuttled into a cave long before the dawning of his first day as a
voordalak
.

He popped his head above the water again. He was very close now. The Peter and Paul Fortress stood ahead of him. He was directly in front of the jetty from which the Decembrists, Aleksei among them, had begun their journey to the east. He could see two guards, some distance apart. Neither of them seemed particularly alert. There would be more of them on the far side, where an attack from the land could take them by surprise, but from the river an enemy could only approach by boat and would be easily spotted before reaching the fortress walls; or so they thought.

When he next surfaced he was under an arch of the jetty itself – the one closest to land. He could hear the footsteps of one of the guards above him. The water was shallow enough here that he had no need to swim.