‘Exactly, but bigger of course, with some kind of vessel for the explorers.’
‘It would be impossible.’
Kibalchich had proved him wrong, with a few lines on a scrap of paper. It was a tricky formula; the more fuel you carried, the more fuel you needed to lift its own weight, along with that of the men and equipment on board. But it was calculable and finite. The amount required was enormous, Kibalchich was happy to concede it, but it wasn’t so large as to be unattainable within a few decades.
‘I’ve already started work on a design,’ Kibalchich explained.
‘To go to the moon?’
Kibalchich’s face fell. ‘Small steps, Mihail. We’ll start by travelling between cities first, then continents. These things take time.’
‘You have your plans here?’ Mihail asked.
Kibalchich glanced around furtively and lowered his voice. ‘No. I’m not sure I’d trust everyone here. They wouldn’t understand. But I have them at home. I’ll show you some time and see what you think – get a practical viewpoint on them.’
Mihail never saw Kibalchich’s rocket designs, and doubted he would have understood them if he had, but he secretly imagined the two of them as old men, themselves too decrepit to take that fateful flight, but able to stand and watch others depart for the moon in Kibalchich’s machine.
In the evenings he would read through Iuda’s papers, sitting on the scruffy, uneven chair that along with the bed made up the sole furnishings of his second hotel room. He would not sleep here – if he did, how would Dusya know where to find him? – but he had brought his more unusual possessions here. He placed the hazelnut that Kibalchich had given him on the window ledge and would glance up at it as he turned each page. It was a reminder of just how dedicated these people were, and reaffirmed how dedicated he would have to be to defeat Iuda. He imagined his teeth pressing down on the shell and feeling the liquid inside spill on to his tongue and roll down his throat, wondering just how much pressure his jaw would have to exert to break it. He thought about slipping it into his mouth and resting his teeth lightly against it, allowing fate to decide if it would shatter or not. But he never did.
From Iuda’s books on vampires he learned of new weaknesses and new dangers of which he and Tamara had never been aware. Even in these later volumes where Iuda had begun to summarize his years of work there was too much for Mihail to remember every detail, and he could not know now what might one day be of use to him. The other correspondence, he hoped, would be of more help in locating Iuda, but there was nothing. The most obscure collection of letters dated back to the 1830s and were signed Auguste de Montferrand, a name with which Mihail was unfamiliar. The letters discussed issues of architecture, sometimes in general, sometimes very specifically, particularly with regard to the positioning of windows – an issue over which any voordalak would be concerned. It would seem that de Montferrand was taking advice from Iuda – whom he addressed as Vasiliy Innokyentievich Yudin, an alias which Mihail knew – on the design of some building, but there was no clue to its location, save for the fact that the documents were in the folder marked Petersburg. In all of it there was thankfully no indication that Iuda knew where Tamara had fled to in 1856, nor that he had any inkling she had borne a son.
The strangest thing he found was a single sheet of paper, not part of any of the notebooks, but placed between the pages of one of them. It could have been put there as a bookmark or for safe keeping. In any event it was a peculiar thing for a creature like Iuda to have in his possession: a charcoal drawing of a woman’s breast. The artist had talent and Mihail mused as to why it had been drawn. It was more than an anatomical diagram; it seemed to have been crafted with love, though not with lust. It lacked the exaggerated perfection that might come from a lascivious imagination. And yet it was not so mundane that it did not raise desire within him. It was