had not been in the city since the end of the previous year. While away there had still been opportunities to indulge himself, but they were stolen and infrequent, and he knew of few places in the whole Russian Empire where he would find a creation of such elegance and beauty as what lay here beneath the stage of the Mariinskiy Theatre.
Soon he came to the door with which he was so familiar. This was his fifth visit since returning to Petersburg. He was overindulging himself, but who was to stop him? Zmyeevich laughed at him but offered no objection. How could he? He had his own vices of which Dmitry was well aware.
He almost felt the urge to knock before entering, though he would receive no granting of admission. Perhaps crossing himself would be a more appropriate act of deference, but coming from a voordalak it would be a worthless sham. He knew he was just delaying the moment, aware that the anticipation was almost as thrilling as the act. Almost.
He opened the door. The room was lined with mirrors so that the dancers could watch themselves as they rehearsed. Dmitry could never, therefore, be a dancer. He crossed the floor, but no image was reflected in any glass. He might have expected to see the candle floating mysteriously in mid-air, supported by his invisible hand, but even that was gone. He was by now used to the phenomenon, but had no way of explaining it. No doubt Iuda had conducted some foul experiment to determine the mechanism, but Dmitry did not care. Who knew where such exploration might lead? Dmitry shuddered. He did know – he had seen it in that strange mirror beneath Senate Square. At least these reflected nothing.
Thoughts of Iuda filled his mind once again, but he felt no sense of relief at the death of the creature that had once been his mentor. Zmyeevich had assured him that Iuda was no more, but even as he spoke there had been doubt in his eyes. He had witnessed Iuda’s body burned to almost nothing, but had been distracted. Together they had searched Saint Isaac’s and found no trace of Iuda – but what did that tell them? Raisa, lurking somewhere at the back of Dmitry’s skull, remained unconvinced. But she had no mind of her own. Her suspicions were a reflection of Dmitry’s. She merely told him what he hid from himself. He pushed them all – Raisa, Zmyeevich and Iuda – from his mind. They were not the reason he was here.
At the far end of the room stood the object of his desire: a piano. It was probably not the finest in the theatre; that would be upstairs where it could be heard in the auditorium. This was merely for rehearsal, but all the same it was a wonderful instrument: a Bösendorfer – only around five years old, regularly tuned. He fixed the candle to the floor behind him with a drop of its own wax. He did not need to see in order to play, but it would help him in finding his way out. He would not risk placing it on the beautiful instrument itself and seeing the hot wax dribble down on to the smooth, polished wood.
He sat and lifted the lid.
Music no longer filled his mind as it had done when he was human – right up to the very moment of his death. He could still bring to mind a melody, but not in the same way as before – there was no orchestra filling his skull. A tune was just a tune, like a word on a page rather than a word spoken out loud. Worse still, every tune he could bring to mind was one that he already knew; one that had been created by someone else. When a man, the orchestra had played madly and creatively and he had known that the music could only have come from him. That part of his mind was gone, sucked from him in the same moment that Raisa Styepanovna had taken his blood and his life. Perhaps that part of him was his soul.
But at least he could still play – in some ways better than he had before. His fingers possessed greater dexterity and greater strength. He could truly perform Chopin’s Valse du Petit Chien in the minute prescribed by its mispronounced English title. He knew that it must sound awful but – and this was the