him in the form of the orange glow of a lamp, spilling from the doorway of one of the largest tombs in the whole cemetery. It was the size and shape of a shed, but built of stone rather than wood. Two urns sat atop pedestals on either side of a heavy bronze door that stood ajar. Above the doorway a typical Byzantine cross was carved into the stone, with its three crossbeams: at the top the plate on which would have been written the letters INRI; in the middle, the longest, where Christ’s arms would have been spread, suspended by His nailed hands; the bottom was the beam on which He could rest His feet, allowing Him, if He so desired, to prolong His torment. That lowest beam was tilted to an angle, one end pointing towards heaven for the righteous, the other directing the wicked to hell.
Mihail followed the path of the sinful, and peeped around the open door. The tomb was deceptive – bigger on the inside than it appeared. Rather than housing the burial chamber, the upper building was merely the cover to a flight of steps leading down into the earth. Mihail could not see to the bottom, but he heard the sound of murmuring voices. He dared not descend, as his feet would be seen long before he could see what was in there. Instead he lay down flat on his front, his head just level with the top of the flight, one hand still clutching the arbalyet, the other underneath him, ready to push him to his feet if he needed to flee. It was an uncomfortable pose and he could not see everything, but he could see enough.
Dmitry and Zmyeevich were both there, sitting as if on opposite benches in a railway carriage, though in fact the objects upon which their weight rested were their own closed coffins. Zmyeevich was stripped to his waist, revealing a sturdy frame of which any man of his apparent age might be proud, except for the fact that his flesh sagged a little. He was not fat, but it was as if the skin were weak – tired. Dmitry had removed his coat and jacket and sat in his shirtsleeves. Zmyeevich was speaking.
‘Do not deny yourself,’ he said.
Dmitry looked at him and then reluctantly began to unbutton his shirt, like a girl hesitantly succumbing to her seducer. Soon he was in the same state of undress as Zmyeevich. Zmyeevich reached over to his coat, beside him, and withdrew a tiny object that glinted silver in the lamplight. It was a knife – some kind of scalpel. Zmyeevich placed his left hand flat against his chest, covering his nipple, and used his right to draw the blade across his skin just below it, leaving a horizontal line of red blood which oozed out and began to slither unevenly down his chest and towards his stomach. Despite his being a vampire, the wound did not seal itself, though a look of intense concentration appeared on his face as he prevented the healing process from occurring.
He handed the scalpel to Dmitry, who gazed at it in fascination, twisting it in the air so that both steel and the droplets of blood that clung to it gleamed as they caught the light. He opened his mouth and moved the blade towards it, stroking first one side of it and then the other against his tongue, as though he were buttering bread. When he was done, the knife was clean of the blood that had once stained it.
But it did not stop there. Now Dmitry mimicked Zmyeevich’s action, down to the smallest detail. He held the flesh of his breast taut with one hand and cut across it with the other. Again his faced strained, not from pain but as he focused his mind on keeping the wound open. He did not mirror Zmyeevich, but imitated him exactly; both their wounds were to the left. A moment later Mihail discovered why.
Dmitry lay back so that his body was now in the appropriate orientation with regard to the coffin on which he rested, except that he was above it rather than within it. His arms dropped limply to his sides and hung loosely, his knuckles just brushing against the ground. Zmyeevich moved forward, kneeling beside Dmitry and looking over him like a concerned nurse. He shuffled round so that he was now hovering over Dmitry’s head.
Then he leaned forward and his lips