Jasper Kent - The Third Section

It was dark now. The moon outside was a thin crescent, shining its light through the doorway and through several holes in the ceiling, cutting through the cave in glowing, ethereal columns. The skin of the dead Russian, lying in one such ray of moonlight, looked as grey as the rocks beside him. Next to the body stood the figure of a man

1855 . After forty years of peace in Europe, war rages. In the Crimea, the city of Sevastopol is under siege. To the north, Saint Petersburg is blockaded. But in Moscow there is one who sits and waits for the death of a tsar, and for the curse upon his blood to be passed to a new generation.

As their country grows weaker, a man and a woman unaware of the hidden ties that bind them must come to terms with their shared legacy.

In Moscow, Tamara Valentinovna Komarova an agent of the tsar uncovers a brutal murder. It seems this is not the first death of its kind, but the most recent in a sequence of similar killings committed by one who has stalked the city since 1812.

And in the ruins of Sevastopol, Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov confronts not only the guns of the British and French but also another, unnatural enemy those creatures his father had thought buried beneath the earth, thirty years before

A verst is a Russian unit of distance, slightly greater than a kilometre.

During the nineteenth century, Russians based their dates on the old Julian Calendar, which in the 1850s was twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar used in Western Europe. All dates in the text are given in the Russian form and so, for example, the coronation of Alexander II is placed on 26 August 1856, where Western history books have it on 7 September.

A list of characters in the Danilov Quintet appears .

Thanks to Stphane Marsan and Hilary Casey for assistance with French and German.

In 1853 Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire for the eleventh time in three hundred years. The difference on this occasion was that Great Britain and France allied with the Turks, leading to a European war on a scale not seen since the time of Napoleon. There were major engagements around the Danube, in the Baltic and the White Sea, in the Caucasus and even in the Pacific, but the most significant theatre of conflict was the Black Sea, where the Allies attempted to destroy the Russian fleet harboured in Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Hence in the West at least, the conflict became known as the Crimean War.

The immediate cause of the war was the argument over who should have control of the Christian holy sites within the Muslim Ottoman Empire; the Catholic Church, championed by France, or the Orthodox Church, by Russia. More generally, antagonism between the two sides was due to fears of Russian expansion into the British Empire. Russia had the potential of reaching British India over land, while Britains access was by sea, over the circuitous route around the Cape of Good Hope. Turkish influence in the east acted as a buffer against Russian ambitions, but the anticipated collapse of the Ottoman Empire nicknamed by Tsar Nicholas I as the Sick Man of Europe would mean that Russia could gain much of the Turkish territory and take a step closer to the subcontinent.

While the French had little interest in this dispute, the French Emperor, Napoleon III, was, like the British, concerned over Russian naval access to the Mediterranean, through the Black Sea. Moreover, Napoleon III saw that making a stand against Russia might consolidate his recently acquired position (he became emperor in the coup dtat of 1851) as well as offering a chance to take revenge for his uncle Napoleon Bonapartes defeat by Russia in 1812 and Tsar Nicholas failure to properly recognize Napoleon IIIs claim to be emperor.

To test Turkeys determination during negotiations over the holy sites, Nicholas I ordered the Russian occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia autonomous principalities within the Ottoman Empire and historically the lands over which the two nations had often clashed. The Conference of Vienna led to a proposed compromise which gave Russia limited authority over the holy sites. This was enough for Russia, which began to withdraw from the principalities, but not for Turkey, which declared war on Russia. The remaining players began to take sides.

Austria and Prussia remained neutral, but in March 1854 Britain and France jointly declared war on Russia. Within six months their troops landed in the Crimea and had soon besieged the naval base of Sevastopol. By the end of 1855, Sevastopol had fallen, and in 1856 the Treaty of Paris brought the war to an end. The most significant result was the demilitarization of the Black Sea, which applied equally to Russia and Turkey. However, the Turks had coastline on the Mediterranean itself, whereas Russia was denied a southern fleet for a quarter of a century.