Dmitry appeared unconvinced, but even so he bent forward and placed his lips against her skin. He was right to be dubious. Yudin had not got much sustenance from this old woman in a long time. But that was not the point. And anyway, Dmitry seemed to be doing a good job. Yudin could see smears of blood emerging from beneath his lips, and could only guess that at least a taste was getting into his mouth. Still, there was no need for further delay.

'This one's called Marfa,' he said. Dmitry did not react. He continued to drink. 'Marfa Mihailovna,' Yudin added. He sensed the slight movement of Dmitry's head cease. For a second or two, all was still, with Dmitry remaining bent forward. If his lips had been touching the back of her hand rather than the inside of her forearm, it might almost have mimicked a formal introduction at a ball. But these two had no need to be introduced.

Finally, Dmitry straightened up and Yudin pulled on the chain at Marfa's neck to bring her head up and make her face Dmitry. For himself, Yudin did not know which way to look. He was like a child outside a toyshop window, trying to take in everything. His eyes darted between the two faces in front of him as one broke into an expression of amused surprise and the other, slowly emerging from a pall of broken acceptance, revealed that a woman who had learned to live with so many horrors could discover that there were still things in this world that could make her weep for her very existence.

It was a touching moment, and one which Yudin found delightful. They had not seen each other in a decade. One had thought the other to be dead. But now, thanks to him, mother and son were finally reunited.

CHAPTER XXVI.

MARFA'S LIPS MOVED, but emitted no sound. Her face was pale and the skin was drawn tight over her skull, hollow at her cheeks. She was seventy-one years old, though in her bedraggled state she appeared older. As a loving son, Dmitry should have recognized her the moment she stepped into the cell, however much she had changed in the ten years since he had seen her. But he was no longer any such thing. Whether or not he was her son was a matter of philosophical debate. That he did not love her was a fact of undeniable certainty.

It was only when Yudin had spoken her patronymic that Dmitry had even begun to guess the truth, but then realization had come to him quickly. When he looked at her face, it was obvious who she was, and as he gazed at her, impa.s.sively, he had the privilege of seeing two waves of understanding come over her almost simultaneously: the first that he was her son; the second that he was a vampire.

She seemed very small. She had been a plump sixty-year-old when he had last seen her, her girth increasing consistently with her age, but that was all gone now. She seemed smaller in every way. She kept her eyes on him as they filled with tears, her hands, once he had released her arm, hanging down limply in front of her. The little blood that Dmitry had been able to find in her had already ceased to flow.

'She didn't die then?' he said, speaking to Yudin but still looking at his mother.

'She wasn't even ill. She merely noted one day that I never seemed to age, and that could only lead to her realizing the truth. I knew it would happen eventually, and with you in Bessarabia it was the ideal time. I suggested we take a trip to Moscow together, and she never came back. It was surprisingly easy to make everything official.'

'And she's been here ever since?' said Dmitry. 'Eight years?'

'I'm amazed she lasted, but something kept her going. Hoping that Aleksei would come along and rescue her, I dare say or perhaps you.'

Dmitry spoke now to his mother. 'If it's any consolation, I'm sure I would have done, had I known.' He wondered why he should want to console her.

'And now?' she asked, finally finding her voice, a shallow whisper.

Dmitry shrugged. He could scarcely understand why she asked the question. Did she hope that there remained in him some vestige of the man he had been, which would compel him to play the gallant son? Her calm sorrow could only imply that she did not. And yet why shouldn't he? What rules were there to bind his behaviour?

Seeing that she would get no answer, she chose a different question. 'Why?'

Dmitry took a deep breath. 'A long story,' he said. 'Suffice to say I did it for ...'

He stopped as Marfa closed her eyes forcing the tears from them on to her cheeks and shook her head. She opened them and spoke again. 'Why, Vasya? Why show him to me?'

Dmitry felt a sudden annoyance at being ignored. He was reminded of when he was a child and she had wanted to punish him. Her favourite trick was to talk about him to someone else.

'Why not?' said Yudin.

'Haven't you brought me enough pain?'

'You think this is about you?'

'I saw you watching me just now, squirming with pleasure at how you thought I'd react just like you always did.'

'That doesn't make you the reason. You were always a means, Marfa, never an end. You know that.' Yudin raised his hand and stroked her cheek as he spoke, like an affectionate husband of many years.

'So it was to see Mitka react?'

'Again a bonus, though there was little reaction to observe. But you're right; this is for Mitka's benefit. You should be pleased.'

'Pleased?'

'He's become an immortal; stronger than ever he was before, and faster, and wiser. What mother could not be proud of that?'

'You forget, Vasya, I know you. How could I be happy to know he has become like you?'

'Have it your way,' snapped Yudin, taking his hand from her face. 'I hope at least Dmitry's happy with what I have given him.'

'And what's that?' asked Dmitry.

Yudin looked at him, as if the answer were utterly obvious. 'Self-knowledge! Self-awareness! Look inside yourself, Mitka. What is it you feel?'

Dmitry thought for a moment, doing just as Yudin had said; examining his feelings. He spoke as the ideas occurred to him. 'A little amus.e.m.e.nt; the situation is, I think we all have to admit, somewhat ironic. Also annoyance at having been tricked with myself mostly, but also with you, Vasya. I should have realized she was not dead.'

'Anything else?'

'Disgust.'

'Disgust?'

'At this place. At what you do. Living off chained humans in a hidden cellar, letting them revive each day only so that you can feed from them the next night. The voordalak is a hunter, not a farmer.' He meant it. Yudin's way was not the only way.

Yudin grinned and nodded. 'Good. Good,' he said. 'I disagree, of course, but I understand your instincts. And?'

Dmitry thought for a moment longer, then shrugged.

'No sorrow?' asked Yudin. 'No sense of regret, or outrage, or affection? No pity?'

'No.'

'And so you have learned,' explained Yudin. 'Would you have thought it possible to feel so little for your mother, even if you had possessed the capacity to imagine her in such straits as these?'

Dmitry considered and then began to nod. 'No, you're right, I couldn't. Or, at least, I might have thought it, but I wouldn't have felt it. If you'd asked me, I'd have guessed I'd feel nothing, but I wouldn't have truly known. So thank you, Vasya. Thank you.'

As he spoke, Dmitry understood that those same sentiments or the lack of them applied equally to Yudin. Surely Yudin understood that too, and yet he seemed confident of Dmitry's loyalty.

'And so now you are ready,' said Yudin. He held his open hand towards the door and Dmitry set off that way, with Yudin closely in tow.

'Ready?'

'I have one other thing to ask of you.'

'What?'

'You'll see.'

They had made it to the door and Yudin began to open it. 'Aren't you going to lock them back up?' Dmitry asked.

Yudin shook his head. 'Let them eat. I can do it later.' He stepped out through the doorway. Dmitry bent his head even further to follow.

'Mitka!' He turned. Marfa had finally managed to raise her voice above a whisper. 'Do you still hear music, Mitka?' she asked.

He turned without offering a reply, but she had managed to ask the only question about his former life that had truly concerned him since becoming a vampire; and the answer was no. Though he had tried every night since awaking in his grave on Vasilievskiy Island, he had not been able to summon a single note of music to his mind. And he understood now, with little doubt, that he never would.

Again he had something to thank his mother for; she had taught him to discover a new emotion in himself, and to understand that it would not be a stranger to him. For the first time, and only very slightly, he felt regret.

Gribov had been mistaken. Yudin's office was not empty. As soon as Tamara stepped out of the stairwell, she saw the tall figure, gazing into the mirror on top of the map drawers. Even if she had not guessed who it was from his stature, she would have been able to tell it was Dmitry from his reflection in the mirror.

There was no reflection.

Tamara was alone. At the brothel she had told Gribov to wait, and it had taken her only minutes to prepare herself to come here, but in that time he had gone. She doubted he would have been much help anyway. This was something she had to do for herself.

'Why didn't you tell me?' she asked.

Dmitry turned, without any expression of surprise, eyeing her up and down. In her left hand she had the Colt revolver, now reloaded, that had proved so useful against Raisa. In her right she held her wooden cane with its sharpened end, its cap lost somewhere in the rough gra.s.sland beside the railway track south of the Skhodnya. She wondered why she hadn't plunged it into his back before he even knew she was there, but she hadn't yet learned to hate him that much.

'Tell you what?' he asked.

'That they're my parents.' Her next words scarcely managed to escape her throat. 'That you're my brother.'

'Would you really want to know?' he replied. 'That your mother was a wh.o.r.e? That your father was an adulterer and a traitor and an exile? That your brother was ... me?'

'It wasn't your decision to take.'

'It was Papa's decision. Should I have gone against that?'

'I had the right to know the truth.'

Dmitry shrugged and Tamara realized it was a pointless conversation. She was arguing with a voordalak over a decision made by the man who had once occupied the same body.

'Is he down there?' she asked, nodding towards the open door to the dungeons. 'Papa? With Yudin?'

Dmitry nodded. 'It's quite a reunion.'

'Why aren't you with them?'

'Yudin's plan is that I make my entrance in a little while the brave son galloping to the rescue of his long-lost father. Then the son asks the father what it was that Yudin wanted to know, and in his relief the father reveals all.'

'So he doesn't know what's become of you?' Tamara failed to hide the loathing in her voice.

'That is to be the final coup de theatre. Not only will Aleksei discover that his son has betrayed him to his oldest enemy, but he will learn that I have become what he despises most in all the world.'

'Is that really necessary?'

Dmitry gave a tight smile. 'He has the right to know the truth.'

Tamara had nothing to counter her own words. 'You'd better get on with it then,' she said.

He remained still. 'As I say, that is Yudin's plan.'

'I'd presumed you were his serf.' The bile she put into the word would have shamed her in front of Konstantin.

Dmitry's smile widened a little. 'So did I, for a while.' He paused for a moment. 'I remember a long time ago, when I was eighteen, when I joined the cavalry, I came down to Moscow with Papa. The coach dropped him off at his lodgings and then took me to barracks. And once I got there, I can remember this sudden sense of being totally alone. For the first time in my life, I didn't have my parents to fall back on, to make everything right. I was unprotected.

'And then minutes later I realized that I might be unprotected, but I was also untrammelled. Everything that I had been prevented from even thinking of doing as a child was now open to me. I could be naughty and no one would stop me. I could go out and get drunk; find myself a wh.o.r.e. Anything.

'And then I realized that I was freer even than that. I could do all those things, but I wasn't obliged to. I could do whatever I liked.'

'And did you?' asked Tamara, wondering where this was leading.

He laughed. 'No. I was mistaken. I wasn't free I was in the army. I have been ever since. But now I'm free again; freer than I ever was, though it's taken me time to realize it. I don't have to do what humanity thinks I ought. But equally, I don't have to do what Yudin tells me to. Whatever I do, I do by choice.'

'And so will you choose to help Yudin?'

'Let's wait and see, shall we?'

He seemed to revel in his own indecision, seeing it as something positive. It could be a bluff, but it was the best that Tamara could hope for. She couldn't abandon Aleksei. She doubted she could defeat Dmitry, armed though she was, and even if she did, it would attract Yudin's attention. All she could do was go down to those dungeons alone, and pray that Dmitry did nothing.

Where the stairs forked she took the left branch, just as when Yudin had brought her down here. Soon she was in the narrow corridor. Light shone into it from the far door on the right. This was the room Tamara hated most the room that smelt of sewage and disease. She walked along on tiptoe and stopped outside to listen. There were no voices, but she could hear movement, and splashing, and the occasional grunt or gasp. She might have been listening to someone in the bath, straining to reach out to clean the tips of their toes. Then there was a huge splash, and the sound of a man gasping for breath. Then she heard Yudin's voice.

'Just a name, Lyosha, that's all I need. A name or a place. You must know one or the other.'

The fast, heavy breathing continued, and began to slow. Then it paused and she heard another man's voice her father! A dim sense of recognition came to her at the sound.

'You're a fool, Iuda. He never told me, and this is why.'

There was another splash, and the sound of breathing stopped completely. Tamara was sure she had heard right 'Iuda', not 'Yudin'. The betrayer. It was the same name Domnikiia had used; clearly the name that she and Aleksei had known him by, years before.

She turned and stepped through the doorway. The room was as she remembered it; the only distinctive feature the stone bath, with the lead pipe that constantly fed it with water. Next to it, Yudin was seated on a wooden chair, his jacket removed and his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was leaning forward over the bath, pushing his hands down into it. Tamara could not see what was in there, but she could guess. The floor was covered with spilled water, which gradually drained into the gutter and then flowed out through the little hole in the wall. The smell of filth was still there, but it was less than when she had last been in the cell; perhaps that was due to the time of year. Again she felt the urge to run, but today she knew she would resist it.

She was about to speak, when Yudin straightened up, pulling what he had been holding down back out of the water. It was an old man. Tamara thrilled at the sight of him. His white hair was quite long, and stretched out straight, thanks to the water, to below his shoulders. His fringe covered his eyes, dripping into them. As soon as he emerged, he shook his head and water splashed across the room. His beard was white too, and clung together in a point from which water dribbled. He looked strong for a man of his age.

Despite the circ.u.mstances, he was everything she had imagined her father to be.

'How does it feel, Lyosha?' asked Yudin, his teeth gritted and his face close to Aleksei's. 'For once it's you who is drowning, and me who's thrusting you beneath the water.'

'It feels even better than the last time,' replied Aleksei.

'What?'