face upwards, the stone columns soaring above him. He sensed wooden walls at his sides, which made him feel secure, reminding him of a coffin. He tried to move, but found that he could not. He wondered if he might still be paralysed by the drug that he had drunk from the soldier’s body. He racked his memory for what the poison might be, but as his senses returned he realized that his immobility was due only to the fact that he was bound by heavy chains; not simply hand and foot – his whole body was wrapped in them, leaving only his head free, as though captured by some giant spider that spun a web of iron and steel instead of silk.
Ibrahim Edhem Pasha’s face leaned over him.
‘You’d have done better to have killed me,’ whispered Iuda, his voice weak.
‘I think it would be better to preserve that pleasure for someone who will really enjoy it.’
‘You’re going to ransom me? To Ţepeş?’
‘We’re going to try.’
‘You’re a fool. He will come here and take me, and you will get nothing.’
‘Here?’ There was a twinkle in the Pasha’s eye. ‘We’re not going to keep you here.’
‘Anywhere in the empire. Your people will not be safe.’
‘Then perhaps we should find you a prison outside the Ottoman Empire. We have friends. Ţepeş will not find you, unless we choose to hand you over to him.’ A pause. ‘Or you could simply tell us the whereabouts of Ascalon.’
Iuda said nothing. The Grand Vizier gave a signal to one of his men and a heavy wooden lid was placed over the crate in which Iuda lay. He’d listened to the sound of nails being hammered home, and then felt the rough shaking of being moved up the steps, on to a cart, on to a boat, and so on for many days. It was the same sensation he now felt as he was carried on the last leg of his journey away from Geok Tepe. Back then he had not known his destination, but he had been told on his arrival, as they strapped him into the chair that was to be his resting place for the next three years.
He often wondered if there was meant to be some joke in it, a connection between the name Ţepeş and Geok Tepe. But the words came from different languages. Tepe was the Turkic for hill – Geok Tepe meant ‘the Blue Hill’. Ţepeş was Romanian and meant something quite different – it meant ‘the Impaler’.
Iuda’s coffin was set down on the ground with a thump. He could hear no voices outside. Minutes passed. He tried to push away the memories of his betrayal and his three years in Geok Tepe, but he could not do so entirely.
It had been too long, and in all that time, one fact had remained. Ţepeş, or Zmyeevich, or whatever he might call himself, had not paid the ransom. He had chosen not to deal with the Ottomans and their Turcoman allies.
Iuda noticed the minutest change in air pressure within his coffin as the iron bands across its lid were unclamped. He saw a crack of light appear between the lid and the side, and feared for a moment that it would soon be the end of him, but then realized it was merely lamplight.
A hand reached inside and pushed up the lid, and as he saw it Iuda was sure of what he had previously suspected; Zmyeevich had not paid any ransom because he did not need to.
On the middle finger of the hand there was a ring; a ring in the form of a dragon, with a body of gold, emerald eyes and red, forked tongue.
CHAPTER VI
DMITRY TOOK LITTLE part in the torture. He would not have objected, but neither would he have drawn particular enjoyment from it. If the victim had been human, it would have been a different matter, but Iuda was a vampire, and Dmitry could experience little pleasure in his pain.
Zmyeevich, on the other hand, relished the concept. And so Dmitry was happy to sit and watch – and learn; learn both the techniques of a master and whatever information Iuda might reveal.
It would be familiar territory for Iuda. The wire rope that still dug tightly into the flesh of his neck – now the only thing restraining him – was fastened at its other end to an eyelet in the ceiling of an underground cell that lay deep beneath an office that had once