He let go of Kyesha’s hair and put the bowl down carefully some way away on a flat piece of ground. It would be ridiculous to risk spilling it now. Then he returned to Kyesha, reaching inside his coat as he walked.

The vampire had managed to crawl a little way away, in a hopeless attempt at escape, but he scarcely had the strength to move. Iuda strode over to him. His chest was matted with blood, and the ground around him was stained. Iuda grabbed his hair again and lifted his head. The two parallel lines across the neck where the blades had cut gaped open, but even as Iuda watched, he could see they were beginning to heal. He let go, but Kyesha’s head remained lifted under his own volition. The eyes opened and looked blearily in Iuda’s direction. The lips moved, but no sound escaped them.

Iuda knew that he was decades old, but now, in this battered, vulnerable state, Kyesha looked more than ever the boy he had been when he had first allowed a vampire to drink his blood. Iuda would have loved to let him recover just a little more. Inside his overcoat he felt the handle of his wooden dagger, but then he hesitated. It would be too easy, and Iuda was in the mood for some fun.

He picked his knife up off the floor again and examined it, walking contemplatively around behind Kyesha again. This time there was no need for neatness or precision. He flipped the knife over so that the jagged, toothed edge faced Kyesha’s neck, and grabbed his hair once again.

The blood spilled forth with the same eagerness as before, but now it was of no especial interest to Iuda. He felt its warmth flowing over his hand, but it was hard to distinguish from the folds of flesh that caressed him as his hand moved deeper into the gaping wound. Muscle and sinew yielded easily. Kyesha did not scream, but that was unlikely to be the result of any bravery. It was difficult for a man – or a vampire – to utter any sound with his windpipe severed and his voicebox lolling on his chest.

The bones of Kyesha’s neck proved more tricky. Iuda grabbed the hair tighter and pressed his knee into the back of the neck to brace himself. He could still feel pain in his own neck, where Zmyeevich had tried to kill him, but it was healing. He twisted and sawed with the knife, searching for a way through, but still the bones were too strong. Then suddenly one of the blades found a gap between two vertebrae, and he was through. He felt no more resistance.

Iuda looked down at the creature, but did not see what he had expected. Beheading should have led to instant death and the predictable collapse of the corporal remains to dust. But what Iuda’s eyes saw and what his hands felt was still flesh and blood. He realized he had been too slow. In the time it had taken him to cut through the neck bones, the front of Kyesha’s throat had begun to regrow. The decapitation had to be complete.

It was of little consequence. Iuda reversed the direction of his pressure and, with a flick of his wrist, the opposite edges of the blades cut back through Kyesha’s new-grown flesh with ease. At the same moment his right hand flicked forward as the knife became free, so his left lurched into the air, holding the severed head by its hair. He turned to look at it, but already the face was unrecognizable, falling away as it decayed and revealing a skull which itself crumpled and tumbled to the ground, its broken fragments retaining some slight vestige of shape as they lay in the grass. The hair entwined round his fingers broke apart and was scattered by the breeze.

Iuda felt a moment of exhilaration, but it was immediately followed by a wave of exhaustion. He was still weak from what he had drunk and what had been drunk from him. He picked up his bag and went over to where he had left the bowl of blood, sitting down on the ground beside it. It was a joy to have the weight off his feet, but his arms still felt heavy as he moved them. He picked up the bowl and swilled its contents around. The blood was still liquid – the only part of a vampire’s body that remained in its original form after the creature’s death, and even then, only if extracted before death.

He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a handful of glass vials. Each already contained a few drops of the liquid – itself extracted from the saliva of a vampire – that would stop the blood from clotting. He poured blood from the bowl into each of them in turn, watching it glisten, almost black in the moonlight. A little of it spilled on to his fingers. The taste for blood he had acquired in those few moments in which he had shared Kyesha’s experience still lingered, but he resisted it, wiping his fingers on the grass instead. He filled almost four of the vials. He should only ever need the first, but one could never tell. He wrapped them carefully in scraps of rag and then put them back in his bag. He still had one dose of Zmyeevich’s own blood, left over from the several he had taken during their plans to induct the tsar. But that blood would not suit his purposes, and might yet be needed to save him from his former ally once again.

He went back over to Kyesha’s remains, now scarcely visible. Only his clothes were left. It would be ridiculous not to take the opportunity to pilfer. He felt through the pockets of the coat. There was a watch, which seemed to be of reasonable quality, and a small number of gold coins. Then, in the side pocket, Iuda found something he could not comprehend. Six roughly shaped items he first took to be stones and then realized were made of bone. What their purpose might be, he could not fathom, but they had clearly had some significance for Kyesha. He slipped them into his pocket, along with the money and the watch. He could work out what they were for later.

He felt a sudden pain in his neck. He reached up and touched his finger to the bandage. The wound felt sore beneath. The bandage was damp, but not wet. The bleeding had stopped. He reached into the bag again and brought out a small package, wrapped in paper. He opened it. Inside was a small, dark lump of meat: kishka – another trick he had learned from Pyotr. To say it was meat was a misnomer; it was a sausage made from congealed pig’s blood. Normally, Iuda would not have willingly chosen to eat it. He was not squeamish about blood in general, but to consume it was a different matter. That was always one of the hardest things about passing himself off as a vampire.

But today, he had to eat it – it was good for him, as his father used to tell him, a long, long time ago. And besides, now that he thought about it, blood didn’t seem unappetizing at all. He wolfed the sausage down in a few bites and followed it with a second. He felt a little better, but still tired. He packed up his things and prepared to set off; a short trek back to Simferopol, thence to hire a horse, and northwards. There were two further matters to be attended to: one might help rebuild his relationship with Zmyeevich; one was purely for himself.

He dragged himself up on to his feet, but instantly felt ill. The loss of blood and the potion he had drunk beforehand combined to make him feel dizzy. He lay back on the frosty grass and let his eyelids droop. A few hours’ sleep there would do him good, despite the cold. He was in no hurry.

It was almost eight o’clock, and the sun was still an hour from rising. Tamara had woken Aleksei early and he had been happy to talk to her alone, letting her mother sleep in. He had spent as much of his time as he could with her in the four days he had had in Moscow – and most of the rest with Domnikiia. Domnikiia had now woken, and was playing with Toma. Aleksei decided it was time to do some work.

He still had a job to do. Aleksandr was – to all the world – a dead man, but there was still a tsar. Konstantin might not want to carry on using Aleksei in the role his brother had, and Aleksei wasn’t sure he wanted to continue it, but he at least had to put together some sort of documentation summarizing what he knew about the Northern and Southern societies.