Blood Royal Page 20

  “As yes, you did indeed see me impaled on a tree branch,” she smiled, “that is correct. But as you can see for yourself, I am not dead. You see the branch failed to pierce my heart.”

  “B-But... You’re a...” Ulysses stammered.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But what’s a vampire doing on the trail of a crazy Russian noble?” Ulysses floundered.

  Agent K looked thoughtful for a moment as she undid the last strap and helped him down from the cross-frame.

  “You... How do you say? Ah, yes. You set a thief to catch a thief.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Dark Discoveries

  “WELL I THINK she got the point, don’t you?” Ulysses said as he looked down at the decapitated body of Lilith de Báthory, a startled look of surprise locked on her features forevermore. What looked like a broken chair leg had been rammed into her heart. “Was she a... you know...?”

  “Do all your relationships end so abruptly?” Katarina asked.

  “I hope not,” he said.

  “You might be wanting this,” she said, passing him his sword-stick.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Thank you.”

  He slowly found his gaze being drawn back to the savage wound in her chest.

  “Do you mind?” the vampire said, pulling her jacket tight about her.

  “Sorry, it’s just that... well...”

  Katarina fixed the exhausted Ulysses with those piercing eyes of hers. “Our quarry is getting away.”

  “H-He is? How do you know?”

  “I saw him leave, along with that one-eyed bodyguard of his.”

  “The Cossack?”

  “They left by train, from the prince’s own private station.”

  “He has Caliban with him.”

  “He has what?”

  Ulysses hesitated for only a moment before telling Katarina everything. After all, he decided, he owed her. She had saved his life twice now.

  “Do you know what he plans to do with the Caliban bio-weapon?”she asked when he had finished.

  “He only wants to wipe out the monarchy of Magna Britannia.”

  “But why?”

  “Who knows, but we can’t risk finding out the hard way. We’d both be out of a job for a start.”

  “Then there’s all the more reason to leave now.”

  “No, we can’t.” Ulysses stopped at the door to Lilith de Báthory’s chamber.

  “What? Why not?”

  “The child,” he said, “Miranda. She’ll be here, somewhere.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s the key to all of this. She is as much an artificial creation as the weapon. She’s the antithesis. She’s the cure. If we’re going to take on Vladimir and win, I have a feeling we’re going to need Miranda with us.”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, how did you intend us to chase after the prince if he’s travelling by train with the Potemkin gone?”

  “One does not survive as a vampire throughout the darkest three centuries of the history of our kind without learning a trick or two. We’ll find a way.”

  “Or we could just find the airship that led us here in the first place and put that to good use.”

  “Very well,” the vampire replied.

  “Then if we are going to look for this child, we had best get moving.”

  THEY FOUND HER deep within the dungeons of the Winter Palace, in a laboratory, hooked up to some arcane piece of machinery that was all wheezing compressors, gurgling pumps and rusted valves.

  It was there that Ulysses also found the enigmatic Dr Pavlov. The moon-faced man was working at a bank of monitoring equipment when the dandy and the vampire entered the humid chamber.

  “So, we meet again,” Ulysses growled and then flung himself at the porcelain pale doctor, who simply snarled and hurled the clipboard he was holding at him. Ulysses batted it aside and was on the doctor in a second.

  Pavlov fumbled for something in a pocket until Ulysses wrenched his arm free, slamming his wrist against the edge of a cogitator unit. The man gave a cry and the hypodermic in his hand fell from his hand, smashing on the stone-flagged floor.

  Ulysses grabbed the doctor around the throat with his free hand, pushing the man’s head back.

  “Why?” he shouted into the doctor’s face. “Why? Just answer me that!”

  Ulysses felt Katarina’s hand firm on his arm, holding him back.

  “We won’t learn anything like this. Let me talk to him.”

  Ulysses glared at her and then the tension in his face eased. “Use your womanly wiles on him, you mean. Good idea.”

  Relaxing his grip on the man, Ulysses took a step backwards. Agent K stepped forward, fixing the panting man with her aquamarine gaze.

  The scalpel was in Pavlov’s hand in a second, its blade shining silver in the strange light of the chamber. He sprang at the vampire, the tip of the scalpel pointing directly at her heart.

  As the point appeared about to enter the gaping hole in the vampire’s chest, Ulysses was suddenly between the two of them again, pushing Katarina out of the way and sending Dr Pavlov tripping over his legs to land awkwardly on the floor.

  He lay there, doubled up, groaning.

  “Right, I want some answers,” Ulysses said, pulling the doctor over onto his back. The end of the scalpel protruded from the man’s side, blood soaking his clothing all around it. There was only an inch of the surgical instrument still showing. The rest of it was sunk into the man’s lung.

  With one final rattling breath, Pavlov’s eyes glazed over and the sadistic doctor took whatever secrets he was party to, to the grave.

  Grabbing the limp body by the lapels, Ulysses pulled Pavlov’s slack-jawed moon-face close to his and screamed, “Damn you to hell!” Then he let the corpse drop.

  A faint whimper drew his attention back to the arcane contraption fixed to the wall and the helpless child suspended within it.

  Miranda was still alive, but only barely.

  Tubing attached to her wrists was draining her very lifeblood drop by precious drop. She was dressed in nothing more than the nightie she had been wearing when she had been whisked away from her berth aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.

  She was deathly pale, her twitching eyes sunken within deep black rings. Beneath her, bottles caked in crumbling brown deposits were filled with sticky, red liquid.

  Having released her from the giant wheel of the arcane device, they laid her on a gurney and Ulysses set about extracting the catheters and tubes. He cleaned and dressed the wounds as quickly as he could. Then, with the girl laid across his shoulders, the two of them set off for the stairs that would lead to the upper levels, where they hoped they would find the prince’s private airship hangar.

  “I can hear something.” Katrina brought them to a halt.

  Ulysses listened. All he could hear was the echo of dripping water and the distant wheezing and gurgling of unknowable mechanical processes.

  “There’s someone else down here.”

  Before Ulysses could comment, Katarina was away, moving swiftly through the labyrinthine tunnels of the Winter Palace dungeons.

  Ulysses hesitated, but only for a moment, before following.

  Katarina stopped again at an iron-banded dungeon door. “Can you hear it now?” she asked, turning to Ulysses. Not waiting for an answer, she tested the door. It was locked.

  Laying the unconscious Miranda on a table, Ulysses helped Katarina search for a means of opening the door. As they searched, Ulysses noticed that a number of untarnished copper pipes fed through the ceiling of the deeply buried chamber, through the wall and into the room that lay beyond the door.

  “I have it!” Katarina said and Ulysses, hearing a key rattling in the lock, turned his attention to the door, sword-cane in hand.

  “Smells worse than an open sewer,” Ulysses pronounced as the stink of the cell hit him.

  As the light from the wall-lamps in the main chamber wormed its way into
the cell, what looked like a pile of sacking and hair shifted and gave voice to a pitiful wail.

  “What is that?” Ulysses said, peering in fascination at the decrepit creature. “Is it even human?”

  But he could see what it was now that the light had reached it. It was, or once had been, a man, but now was little more than skin and bone buried beneath the unruly mass of a beard run wild.

  Slowly Katarina approached the cell. She was repeating something over and over in her native tongue as the wretch incarcerated within muttered and gibbered away incoherently. The old man abruptly ceased his muttering and looked at Katarina through the red slits of his eyes.

  “Not what, but who?” the agent said, eyes fixed on the wretched thing.

  The old man was silent for a moment and then mumbled something into the messy growth of his beard. Katarina heard, put a hand to her mouth and staggered away from the door.

  The man mumbled again, but this time Ulysses heard him clearly.

  “Rasputin. Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Curse of Rasputin

  “DID HE JUST say what I think he just said?” Ulysses asked.

  “Yes,” Katarina replied. “Rasputin.”

  “But he can’t be. I mean, that’s impossible. He would have to be 130 years old!”

  “The evidence would suggest otherwise. And he would be 129, actually.”

  “But I’ve visited his tomb.”

  “And was he there?” Katarina asked.

  “Well no, now you come to mention it.” He paused. “It must be a set-up, he can’t possibly be the Grigori Rasputin. Can he?”

  “The world is full of impossible things, Ulysses. I would have thought a man like you knew that already.”

  “Alright, so assuming that this is the original mad monk himself, what’s he doing here?”

  As he continued to stare at the dishevelled specimen, Ulysses noticed how the curious pipework that he had already spotted came down inside the cell, ending at what looked like a water dispenser. Only it wasn’t water that had dried in black flakes around the tap.

  Turning back to the mad old man, Katarina spoke to him again in Russian, but he simply stared at her, uncomprehending.

  She repeated herself once more, fixing him with her penetrating stare.

  She sighed. “His mind is gone, broken by decades of captivity,” she explained, her shoulders sagging. Her mask slipped, just for a moment, and Ulysses saw how tired and weak she was.

  “Look, you don’t need to do this,” he said gently, putting a hand to her arm.

  “It’s alright, Ulysses,” she said, managing a faint smile. “He might know something that could be of use to us.”

  Turning back to the stinking old man squatting amidst the filth of his squalid cell, she struggled to wheedle the truth out of him, matching her hypnotic gaze with his dead-eyed stare.

  At last the old man began to talk. And now that Katarina had got him talking, there was no stopping the bearded bag of bones.

  As Rasputin talked, Katarina listened and translated for Ulysses’ benefit, teasing the truth from the old man’s lunatic gibbering.

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER, LIKE any educated Englishman, knew the story of the mad monk Grigori Rasputin. He had been born in 1869, in Siberia, and a vision of the Virgin Mary set him on the path to become a wandering pilgrim-mystic.

  But it was when he came into contact with the banned Christian sect known as the khlysty – an orgiastic sect who favoured the practices of self-flagellation and the mortification of the flesh as well as unnatural carnal couplings – that his life was changed forever. For the sect was merely a facade of something even darker - and this was where accepted history and the old man’s recollections began to diverge dramatically.

  The young Rasputin had actually joined a blood cult that venerated its own dark pantheon of diabolical saints, along with the first of their line, the fifteenth century Prince of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes himself. History also remembered this bloodthirsty tyrant as Vlad the Impaler, but to his own people, those who suffered the nightmarish consequences of his murderous psychoses, he was known by another name. Dracula.

  In time Rasputin rose to a position of power within the cult, and under his charismatic influence the khlysty regained the sense of purpose that had been undermined by the baser instincts and appetites of its devotees. Their original ambition had been forgotten, but Rasputin made them remember and desire it again.

  And so it was that, in 1903, Rasputin arrived in Saint Petersburg and his reputation as a holy healer and prophet developed and grew.

  The story went that Rasputin was travelling through Siberia when he heard of Tsarevich Alexei’s illness. The legacy of the Tsar’s great-grandmother, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, was a blight upon the Russian royal family, for Tsar Nicholas’s only son and heir to the throne of Imperial Russia suffered from haemophilia. Rasputin already had the Russian royal family in his sights and the Tsarevich’s condition provided him with the perfect means of infiltrating the Tsar’s inner circle.

  And so the famed peasant healer came to court and laid his healing hands upon the Tsarevich Alexei and worked his charismatic magic on the boy’s mother and father as well. Thanks to the monk’s ministrations, Alexei did indeed begin to show signs of improved health. Steadily Father Grigori worked his way into the family’s affections and that was how a peasant mystic managed to come to exert such control over the ruling house of Russia.

  Nicholas’s wife, the Tsritsa Alexandra, came to believe that God spoke to her through Rasputin and so his personal and political influence upon her continued to grow. Controversy followed.

  And all the while, in the shadows, Rasputin and his fellow cultists prepared for the time when one of Dracula’s bloodline would ascend to the throne of Russia. Slowly but surely Rasputin moved his pawns into position, in readiness for the moment when their scheme would at last bear bloody fruit.

  Even the onset of the First Great War did not halt Rasputin’s schemes. And then, one night, Rasputin imparted his healing gift to the young Tsarevich Alexei, curing him with a kiss. And so, the boy was inducted into the bloodline of the great Vlad Tepes. But where Tepes had merely been Prince of Wallachia, the destiny laid out for Alexei was for him to be nothing less than the ruler of all the Russias, with Rasputin the real power behind the Imperial throne.

  But Rasputin’s rise to power had not gone unobserved. In fact it had been closely followed from several different quarters. On the night of December 16, 1916, his enemies made their move against him and the khlysty. Quite possibly having uncovered the cult’s plan for the empire, with help from the British secret service, the now infamous group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the right-wing politician Vladimir Purishkevich, lured Rasputin to the Moika Palace and set about trying to do away with the beast, not understanding his true nature.

  But Rasputin’s vampiric metabolism meant that he survived the conspirators’ attempt to poison him with cyanide and their vain efforts to shoot him. When they discovered that he was still alive, he was beaten, castrated, bound and bundled up inside a carpet before being thrown into the icy Neva River.

  When his body was recovered from the river three days later, an autopsy was carried out, with the coroner declaring that Rasputin’s supposed death had been the result of drowning.

  As soon as was seemly, the Tsaritsa Alexandra – a member of the cult herself by this point and aware of Rasputin’s true nature – had his body taken to Tsarskoye Selo and had Rasputin interred inside his own vault, along with the bloody means by which his body might continue to reconstitute itself.

  After the devastating events of the failed February Revolution, Rasputin’s enemies, also now aware of Father Grigori’s true nature, broke into it and dragged his body into the woods where they attempted to finish the job begun by the vampire’s would-be murderers, by consigning his mortal remains to the cremating flames of a funeral pyre.<
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  His body aflame, Rasputin was roused from his sleep of ages. In excruciating agony, he leapt from his pyre and fled the scene. Those who had attempted to burn his body set off in pursuit, but the vampire evaded them and managed to escape at last. Not wanting the world to know of their failure, the conspirators perpetuated the story that Rasputin was dead, his body burnt, and then waited for the day when he would surely re-emerge once more.

  Rasputin went into hiding, along with the rest of the cult. Two years later – during the turmoil of the attempted Bolshevik Revolution – the enemies of the khlysty made their move on the Russian royal family itself. Captured at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, the cultists were eliminated, but other survivors of the vampiric purges, sent by their overlord Rasputin, came to the Romanov’s aid. Alexei went into hiding, along with his father in darkness, the latter having made sure to fake the death of the young prince, while Anastasia, his sister, survived to continue the royal Romanov line, although the rest of her family did not.

  The boy grew to manhood, but the vampirism affected him in ways that Rasputin could not have imagined, resulting in mutations that only occurred in one out of thousands, rather like the haemophilia he had suffered from in the first place. Alexei developed albinism and, rather than curing his haemophilia, the vampirism merely gave him an unusual means of compensating for it, the prince having to undergo regular and painful blood transfusions simply to maintain his cursed twilight existence.

  Condemned to such a miserable and painful existence by the mad monk’s actions, driven to the brink of madness by this endless torment, as Alexei grew so did his hatred of the man who had cursed him.

  In time the ‘son’ had usurped the ‘father’ – as is the way of things – and his first act upon seizing control of what remained of the degenerate khlysty cult was to denounce Rasputin as their enemy, betrayer of them all, sentencing him to an eternity of incarceration. And so he had been interred within the deepest dungeon beneath the Winter Palace, the arcane machinery drip-feeding him the blood he needed to survive, but only enough to keep him alive to endure his eternal sentence, and never enough to give him the strength he needed to escape his bonds.