The People's Will by Jasper Kent

himself falling, then came to a halt with a crash.
    And then came more luck. In resurrecting him, the soldiers had moved him to almost precisely the spot where he desired to be. Once Osokin had had him turned it took only a few fine adjustments with his toes for him to be within inches of where he wanted.
    Now he waited, and allowed the Earth to continue its inexorable rotation. He remembered a room in an abandoned house in Moscow in 1812 and the sun’s slow progress across the floor, creating a tightening trap for any vampire. That was when he had first wondered whether Lyosha might prove a worthy opponent. Lyosha had proved more than worthy. Dmitry was a disappointment, as much to Iuda as an adversary as he would have been to Lyosha as a son, if only Lyosha had known the truth.
    He also remembered an escape, by a
voordalak
named Ruslan, who’d later gone by the name of Kyesha – the very creature that had eventually turned Iuda into a vampire. He had been Iuda’s prisoner, the subject of his experiments. He had been manacled in a cave in Chufut Kalye and exposed daily to sunlight so that Iuda could measure his reactions. And then, one day, he had vanished. It had taken Iuda hours to imagine how he might have done it, but once understood it had been obvious. Today Ruslan’s method needed only a little modification.
    The line between light and shade moved closer. Iuda could not perceive its movement directly, but every time he glanced down it had taken a step towards him. He felt a cold, visceral fear of it and became filled with the urge to flee, but even had he yielded to it his bonds would have held him in place.
    For nearly three years he had not moved from that chair. How would it feel to be free? He knew that the muscles of a vampire did not atrophy to the same degree as those of a man, but he would still be below his peak. He was well fed, at least. The Turcomans had been told to keep him alive, and they were too afraid to disobey. It was always the same procedure. They would loosenthe restraint to his head, allowing him some little movement, and then the victim would be held close and he would feed. It was, and was intended to be, a humiliation – being hand-fed like a baby rather than using his own arms to hold his prey close. But it kept him strong. He would need his strength for what was to come – regrowth demanded the greatest strength of all. Usually it had been some criminal that they gave him, who would have died anyway. The thought made it even less enjoyable. More recently they had brought him captured Russians. That had been enough for him to know that an attack was imminent. His last feed had been only the day before the assault.
    He felt a stinging pain in his ankle and tried to pull it away. The sunlight had reached him. If his foot were to burn, so be it, but it was not intended as his primary sacrifice to Apollo. The sunlight worked its way up the wooden chair leg, like a slow incoming tide, ready to engulf him as he sat, commanding the waves to go back. But he knew it would not engulf him, and he would not command it to stop. It would reach him, do its work and then recede. He had calculated its path, and seated himself accordingly.
    He felt a prickling in his leg as the sunlight squeezed through the weave of his trousers. He wondered how much damage would be caused. Would it be like sunburn? He wished he could look. Later he would experiment. Now the light had turned a corner. It crept stealthily along the top of the chair’s arms. Soon it would reach his hand.
    He braced himself and then watched, fascinated, as his fingers and then his hand and then his arm began to dissolve.
    Osokin sniffed and looked around. Whether it was the stench of the thousands of rotting corpses above or the few out in the corridor mattered little. He had smelt the aftermath of battle many times before, though this was a little different; not the usual miasma of putrefaction, but something more like mildew, mixed