Iuda raised an open palm in the direction that Zmyeevich was looking. ‘Be my guest.’
Zmyeevich gave a short laugh, but wasn’t fooled. ‘I think not. You may have the honour.’
Iuda shrugged and walked forward, reaching up to one of the cupboards, but not the one which Zmyeevich had indicated. Dmitry tightened the rope to stop him.
‘This one, I think,’ said Zmyeevich, indicating his original choice.
Iuda went over to it and raised his hands, placing them on the two handles. He glanced from side to side, taking in the positions of his two captors. Then with a sudden motion he flung open the double doors of the cupboard, at the same time stepping back, away from it.
Dmitry tensed, but Zmyeevich remained calm. Iuda was teasing them. They stepped forward and examined the open cupboard. Inside they found shelf upon shelf of bottles, flasks and vials. Some contained powders, others potions, many of which had evaporated almost to nothing. Dmitry cast an eye over them, but the names scribbled on faded labels meant nothing to him. Zmyeevich lingered a moment longer, but he was no more a man of science than Dmitry.
He pointed to the next cupboard and Iuda opened that. Much of its contents was similar, but in addition there were a number of notebooks and papers. Zmyeevich picked one up and flicked through it.
‘English,’ he said with a sneer, before adding in that language, ‘but that shouldn’t prove to be a problem.’ Even to Dmitry’s ear his accent had a strange intonation. He put the papers back down. ‘We’ll examine them in detail later.’
He opened the next cupboard himself, satisfied that there were no booby traps. It contained much the same.
‘Do you have the samples of my blood that you took?’ asked Zmyeevich.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Iuda. ‘If I did, they’d be in there.’ He pointed to a cupboard and then strode quickly over to it, but Dmitry was faster. He opened the doors before Iuda could reach it. Inside were further vials, each containing a small amount of red liquid that Dmitry knew instinctively to be blood, and guessed to be vampire blood. They were all neatly labelled in Latin text and ordered alphabetically. Dmitry looked to the bottom right, where Zmyeevich would have been.
‘Nothing,’ he announced. ‘Perhaps he’s used it all up.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Iuda.
‘And what of Ascalon?’ asked Zmyeevich. ‘Do you have that here?’
‘Why would I have it?’
‘Perhaps you found it here. We’re beneath the very place where Pyotr took it from me.’
‘And you think he might have built this, to hide it?’ said Iuda. He thought about it for a moment, but then shrugged, seeming unconvinced. ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘When did you first come across this place?’ Dmitry asked.
‘When they were building the cathedral,’ Iuda explained. Behind him, Zmyeevich began opening other cupboards, examining their contents. ‘They found the tunnel when they were digging the foundations; you have to go deep to build anything stable with the mud round here. It was years later that I got to investigate. I told them it was unimportant, but I made sure the stairs were built.’
From the corner of his eye, Dmitry could see that Zmyeevich had opened the last cupboard on that wall. He stood gazing into it.
‘To be honest, I’ve not made much use of it,’ Iuda continued chattily – uncharacteristically, ‘but when I’m in the city …’
Zmyeevich hadn’t moved. His hand still rested on the door handle. The door itself was half open, hiding whatever Zmyeevich had uncovered from Dmitry’s view. It all looked quite innocent, but somehow Dmitry knew that Zmyeevich was in terrible pain. He dashed over.
The cupboard was empty. It had no bottles, no papers, not even shelves. Like the others, it was only around four inches deep, but its back wall, rather than being the dull brick of the rest of the cellar, was a mirror – and not a particularly refined one at that. It was cloudy, and seemed to be made of many small sections rather than a single sheet of glass.
But the oddest thing about it was that Dmitry could see Zmyeevich’s reflection. A moment later he realized that he could see his own.
Or at least he could see a figure at the place where his reflection should be. He had never seen himself – not since the moment he had become a vampire, but he had assumed he remained unchanged from what he was in life. Now he knew different. What others saw