++Human soldiers have their uses. More, in many ways, than the Witchfinders. When a vampire must be rooted out from one’s own city, subtlety and intellect is called for and only the heavy training of a Witchfinder will do. But when ìràwà’s armies are at your gates, you must meet like for like and wield the clumsy hammer-blow of an army yourself. The elves are too scant in numbers to muster such a force. And so we train humans.++

  Book 2: Chapter 34

  Reggie was braced for something crazy. ‘Kill a dragon’ or ‘get rid of Warden Erindor’ or something like that, it was how these things tended to go. He wanted something, and in order to get it other people made him stick his dick in a bonfire. That was his experience, at least, and he’d earned every scrap of that pessimism by crawling his way through this much of life and remaining alive.

  Undead. Whatever.

  However Krieg had something else planned. As the seconds ticked by, Reggie saw his disgust bleed away and a sort of resignation run itself across his features. At last, he turned and gestured to the book shelves behind him.

  “Books,” he said. Reggie nodded.

  “I agree, yeah. They are.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Krieg snapped. “I want you to go through these.”

  That was…unexpected. It wasn’t that Krieg struck Reggie as stupid, more that he seemed to have about as much intellectual curiosity as a lynch mob.

  “How come?” he asked, suddenly suspicious that one of the books would eat him or something. Silly, perhaps, but they were old things owned by a vampire. Reggie wasn’t taking chances.

  Krieg looked suddenly awkward as he tried to answer, though. Less sure of himself.

  “They were my sire’s,” he explained. “Given to me to secure here some decades ago, I haven’t seen him since. I hope to learn what they hold in their pages.”

  “You can’t read them?” Reggie asked.

  “They’re written in the text of alchemists.”

  Ah. Not many people could read Latin, for Reggie it’d been one of his biggest hitches on finding out how to set up his lab. Right next to getting extrajudicially killed by the Circumscribers.

  “I can do that,” Reggie told him. “But it’ll take a lot of time.” His hint was picked up, and Krieg sighed.

  “I will start having my minions extract the materials you seek. You know what they look like?”

  An odd question, but then Reggie realised that the people in this mining town probably didn’t actually know what the inside of a mine looked like. All those generations of labour had gone to the wind when Krieg took over, and whatever lessons their grandparents learned by doing it might have been completely lost.

  Something sad about that. But no time to dwell on it, as usual. Reggie told Krieg what he needed and described it all, the two of them came to an agreement and he got to work on the books. At first, he hadn’t expected much. Old tomes, right? Kept for sentimental value, not like the ones covering rare topics he’d deliberately sought out from the peddlers who so rarely came to Norvhan.

  He’d been right, for the most part. The pages were poorly kept and starting to show their age, a consequence of Krieg maintaining his town about as well as a village idiot, but still perfectly legible. Except they didn’t say a whole lot of practical use. Reggie wasn’t exactly bored reading them, though.

  Some talked of recent events, shifts in regional power around Engyr. Those were the ones that interested him less, and sadly the most common. Others, though, went back farther.

  Reggie lost track of time soon, as he read about wars he’d never even heard of for nations he couldn’t even name. Guns that spat out a dozen bullets with every trigger pull, mounts of metal that were controlled from the inside and could crush houses beneath them, magic weapons that would unleash the heart of a star wherever they struck and, if the books were being honest, could strike a target from across oceans.

  Reggie had never even seen an ocean, now he was reading about tools that crossed them in minutes? Insane.

  Literally insane. More insane than him, really. There was no way even half of this was true, and he couldn’t possibly estimate when it was written down since even the aged paper he now held could easily be just a transcription of a transcription. Almost certainly was. And still, he read. Even finding histories mingled with myths was fascinating.

  Vampiric libraries, who would’ve guessed they’d be such a wealth of knowledge? Actually, that wasn’t such a hard shot to make all things considered. Let nobody accuse Reginald Smith of spotting the obvious.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  After a while he was forced to take a break, only because Anne entered.

  “You’re reading,” she said. It somehow had the weight of an accusation in her voice, like she’d caught Reggie doing something untowards.

  “Yes,” he replied. “You see, outside of Norvhan people use toilet paper with ink on it to actually store information for other people to learn later. They don’t set babies on fire for being weird, either.”

  She scowled at him as she stepped further in.

  “Like you’re so much better than us.”

  “I am,” Reggie pointed out. “I’ve never tried to burn a baby alive.” Maybe it was a mood thing, maybe talking to Krieg—someone who actually did just see him as an equal—had put him out of a mind to tolerate Norvhan’s bullshit, but right now he was enjoying being upfront about everything. He was especially enjoying how irritated it made Anne.

  Then she had to go and ruin it all.

  “You just drag thousands of babies into the firing lines of an elf Warden,” she hissed.

  “Fuck you,” Reggie replied. “I’m reading history books. A favour for Krieg, he wants me to scan them for anything relevant to his sire or him.”

  “Can I help?” Anne asked.

  “Probably not,” Reggie grinned. “They’re all written in—”

  —”Latin,” she cut in, flicking through a book and reciting a few sentences. “Huh. Not alchemical works though? Just general history it seems.”

  Reggie tried to hide his irritation.

  ***

  Something had gone wrong with a hunting party, and apparently it was Ludvich’s problem.

  Well, it actually was in fairness. Just about everything was Ludvich’s problem now, with Reggie gone he had to take care of the whole damned town himself. This was one of the hitches that he didn’t mind so much. Running through the grimwoods and finding a potential threat was basically what he’d trained to do for his whole life.

  Ludvich took the time to pick out his equipment, like the olden days. The reports he’d gotten were unclear, mostly just a group of hunters and a thrall being scared of something they claimed was fast but not big. Speed meant Ludvich would be best getting a reach advantage on the enemy, to give himself more time before it was past his weapon and on him. His hunting pike was a natural choice.

  After that he needed to consider what he knew of the creatures common in grimwoods as young as these. The locals knew to recognise a woodlouse or wolf spider, and a necromantic angler wouldn’t have attacked the way it did, so he’d rule all those out. It could’ve been a vampire, that would be just typical, or some other humanoid-ish creature. Wights, Ludvich knew, had a tendency to appear at odd times, and one might’ve been attracted by all the necromancy Reggie had been doing lately.

  If it was a vampire, Ludvich would need something to impede magical Regeneration and slash through an exceptionally Tough target—the elven sword. A wight would require that he be able to deal heavy damage to bone and armour, so the elven sword again. Then there was the issue of high Speed popping back up, best to have a light weapon like the elven sword.

  In fact, the more he thought, the more he realised his best option was really just that, regardless of what he ran into.

  Almost took the satisfaction out of everything. No, not almost. It did, flat-out. There was no thinking involved with a weapon like this, it was always the best choice. And so Ludvich was stalking his way into the grimwoods with that damned sword in one hand, somehow managing to be wielding the deadliest weapon—or at least second deadliest— he’d ever seen and feeling grumpy about the fact.

  Things could be worse, of course. He could have had no elven blade.

  Ludvich hadn’t wandered the grimwoods alone for a while, he realised. Not since reuniting with Reggie. It didn’t take long for all the old reflexes to come back.

  Then for even older ones to come back. It was odd. The last time he’d done this; moved silently, kept his ears out, practised all the thousand little things that kept him alive in so deadly an environment, he’d been a withered old man. Now, all at once, that age had been scrubbed away and left only skin-deep.

  It wasn’t even that Ludvich just moved as he had in his youth, because he’d never been this adept. He’d regained all the skills withered by time, and retained all the expertise brought by long practice. Was it possible for any human to become so adept within a normal lifespan? He didn’t know, but he was that adept now and he moved like a damned spectre.

  Within only half an hour, Ludvich was at the area he’d been told to search for the mysterious encounter. He’d moved twice as fast, and with half the noise, than he would have a year ago.

  He didn’t have a hard time seeing precisely where it had happened, the hunters had claimed to witness something moving between tree trunks with greater Speed than any human could muster, and sure enough there were several stretches of earth that looked as though a bloody cannonball had skimmed along them.

  Actually, the Speed was enough that it produced a bit of a problem for Ludvich by making it hard to identify just what it was he was looking at. The tracks were shorter than he’d have expected from a humanoid, at least, the skids broad but stunted. He could clearly tell it was bipedal and…yes, less than six feet tall. Much less, closer to five. He’d almost have thought it was…

  The sound of twigs snapping wouldn’t have registered to him, as a human, and so Ludvich never found out if the one trying to sneak up on him had superior skill, or would have been foiled by his own Witchfinder’s expertise were it not bolstered by undeath. Either way, he wasn’t going to waste his initiative in having heard them already.

  He turned and swung his sword in the same motion. Witchfinders weren’t trained to fight with blades the way duelists were, for them the sabre was a weapon of convenience. It could stab, it could hack, it could slice and twist and do all sorts while being easily carried around under a coat. There was no great surprise when his amateurish strike was caught by the edge of another blade and turned away.

  What did shock Ludvich was seeing his enemy wielding a weapon made sturdily enough to survive doing so. Then there was a blur of metal, and no time for any more thinking. Swords leapt at each other so rapidly and violently that it was like he and his opponent were leashing out-of-control dogs locked in a fight between them, simply watching the conflict happen. Sparks flew and the air rang where inhuman Strength met its match and sent shocks of impact reverberating through the grimwood.

  It was a fight that would’ve quickly tired him, not long ago. Ludvich didn’t even notice himself transforming, it just happened as he felt his grip surrendering against the superior Strength of his attacker. Everything was happening so fast and with such urgent brutality that it took him long moments to even recognise the woman striking at him.

  “...You’re Ajoke,” Ludvich gasped in his garbled vampire-tongue. Then the blade was knocked from his hand, and Ajoke swung for his neck.