if he kept it. And his revenge was not just in Aleksei’s name. Iuda had killed Maks too, and Vadim, and it was for them that Aleksei hated him so. Mihail was happy to carry Aleksei’s hatred along with his own – his mother had taught him that.
But once he had Iuda in his power, once there was no chance of interruption from inconvenient uncles, once it was time for the sentence passed against Iuda to be carried out, then Iuda and the world would know Mihail’s true name:
Mihail Konstantinovich Danilov.
CHAPTER V
NOW HE WAS making progress. The boat across the Caspian had been speedy enough, but from Baku Mihail once again had travelled over dirt roads, either in creaking carriages or on the back of post horses so old that he suspected it was only his riding them that kept them from becoming a part of that evening’s stew. He’d headed north-west at first, sticking to the Caspian coast and observing how quickly it got colder as he progressed. At Petrovsk-Port the road turned inland and the journey continued by the same slow, unreliable means.
But at Vladikavkaz modernity returned – in the form of the railway. Now he travelled at thirty, sometimes even forty versts an hour. The track had turned almost due north and the change in the climate became more obvious with each passing hour. The train was slowing now, coming into Rostov-on-Don. The journey from Baku to Vladikavkaz had taken five long days. From Vladikavkaz it had taken scarcely twenty-two hours. Even so, it was now nine days since he had left Geok Tepe; twelve since Dmitry and Iuda’s departure. From here the journey would speed up, and that meant that those two might almost be in Petersburg by now. Mihail had no wish to tarry, but there wasn’t a train until the afternoon. There was little he could do but wait.
The town sat on the river Don, still a good forty versts from the Sea of Azov into which it emptied. A little way across that sea was the town of Taganrog, where Aleksandr I had died. That was the official story; Mihail knew better. Aleksei had told Tamara everything, and she had told Mihail – even down to the name that Aleksandr had chosen for his new life: Fyodor Kuzmich. It was dangerous knowledge, though less so now. Kuzmich must surely be dead – otherwise he would be over a hundred. But Tamara and Mihail both knew a way that that might be possible. Iuda, by their reckoning, was around that age.
In Rostov Mihail found a bathhouse and some lunch and returned to the station in good time for the Moscow train. On the platform he felt uneasy. He looked around him, but in the clear light of day he had no fear of vampires. He felt the same discomfort that every Russian experienced, especially when travelling. He was being watched; they all were, by the Ohrana – the secret police that had so recently taken over from the Third Section. Dmitry had been posing as one of their agents, or perhaps more than posing – he could well be a genuine operative – but his aims within that organization would be quite different from those of its more regular employees, which were to ensure that the people remained in their place.
Mihail could not despise the Third Section the way that others did. His mother had been one of their agents and had taught him much of what she had learned – anything that might help him in his quest. She believed that much of what she had done had been good work for the benefit of the nation. She loved the tsar, as a matter of principle, but in all her concern about bringing Mihail up to hate her enemies, she had neglected to make him an unquestioning royalist. He was no socialist either. Government by and large was an irrelevance; how would a change of government help him in his one goal, to destroy Iuda? Perhaps he was a nihilist, to use Turgenev’s definition – ‘a man who declines to bow to authority, or to accept any principle on trust, however sanctified it may be’. Nullius in verba – take nobody’s word for it – was another way of putting it. For a moment Mihail paused, wondering how he knew the phrase, then he gave a wry smile. They were the words that Aleksei had seen on the cover of Iuda’s notebook, years