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filthiest, and the poorest in Europe.
    Asher wondered if they had changed as little as the city’s center had, in the seventeen years since he had been here last. Street after unpaved street of squalid tenements, the slums sprawled into what had been the countryside, the air above and the dirty snow underfoot reeking alike of coal smoke and sewage. Even here you could smell it.
    And within that ring of squalor were all the offices of the government’s thousand petty bureaux – offices of the Church, offices of the regulation of each province, offices of the railroad and of Army procurement and of the regulation of schools and the regulation of finances and the regulation of Jews. Clerks in tight-buttoned coats shivered like Bob Cratchit as they scurried to catch trams, trailing banners of smoky breath. Students lurking along the pavement pushed crudely-printed handbills into their hands, for a rally or a revolution. Elderly men hawked hot pies, cups of tea, aprons, scissors, umbrellas, second-hand shoes. Gray-faced shadowy men from the Third Section took surreptitious notes on everything they saw.
    Daylight dwindled. By ten it was dark, and Asher made his way to the chilly electric glitter of the Nevsky Prospect, which led towards the river.
    ‘I have spoke with the Master of Petersburg,’ stated Ysidro’s quiet voice at his elbow. ‘Neither he nor any of his fledglings has seen the Lady Irene since the full moon of February.’ His words laid no cloud of steam in the ghostly bluish light of the street lamps, and he spoke as if of a stranger.
    As if he had not come eighteen hundred miles, at risk of his life, to learn her fate.
    ‘And the man she saw at the Obolenskys’, before she disappeared?’
    ‘Count Golenischev – the Master of Petersburg – was certain that none of his fledglings would have the poor taste to do anything with a jumped-up German tradesman but drink his blood, if that, nor the temerity to attend a ball at the Obolenskys’ or anywhere else without him – Golenischev – at their side. And he knew of no living man or woman, he said, with whom she associated, as the Undead sometimes do. Like us all, she was a watcher in the shadows.’
    ‘Do you believe him?’
    Ysidro considered the matter. ‘I do not disbelieve,’ he said at length. ‘There is very little, you understand, that the Kaiser or any other monarch can offer a vampire master that it would be safe for that master to accept, and he seemed ready enough to tell me what he knew. I did not say ’twas a scientist or a doctor that we sought.’
    ‘Have we permission to visit her residence?’
    ‘We have.’ With a gray-gloved fastidious finger, Ysidro touched the lap robe in the smelly little box of the cab they hailed, but forbore to take advantage of it. Asher suspected that the same would have been true even had the vampire not been impervious to the freezing night.
    ‘When she had been missing a week,’ Ysidro went on, slipping one narrow shoulder from beneath the strap of his heavy satchel, ‘Golenischev broke into her house, but found, he said, no trace of violence or misfortune or indeed of anything amiss. He holds it more probable that she has simply gone to the Crimea, as many of the Petersburg nobility do, both living and Undead.’
    ‘But he does not know this for certain?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘She is not his fledgling then either?’
    ‘The Lady Irene was something of an outsider here.’ Ysidro’s yellow gaze rested on the distance beyond the frost-rimmed window-glass, as if it could follow those shadowy forms that hurried, late and shivering, along the wide thoroughfare. ‘She came to Russia after the defeat of Napoleon and was made vampire by the former master of this city, who had the misfortune to perish while in the Crimea some sixty years ago. The peasantry there are more primitive than the inhabitants of Petersburg or Moscow, and more ready to act upon their suspicions.’ He did not sound particularly grieved