++What would come of elves or vampires if we were not so fractious. If we could cooperate en masse? An ant hill, that’s what. Inert, doing nothing save for exist. Competition is the nature of intelligence.++

  Book 2: Chapter 27

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Vital Arcanist [Inheritor Race, Tier 3]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 51(+12)/56

  (P)Speed 51(+12)/62

  (P)Celerity 50(+12)/62

  (S)Toughness 50(+12)/56

  (P)Charisma 27(-12)/62

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic II

  Form of the Beast II

  Royal Presence I

  Necromancy II

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration II

  Addictive Ichor II

  Enhanced Magick I

  Reggie felt the same shot of excitement he always did when something got better about his supernatural powers.

  “What does this do?” he asked Sycily. Reggie hadn’t expected an answer, oftentimes she wasn’t quite able to tell him things like this for reasons that he still hadn’t managed to glean. His luck was still up, though, because this time she came back with a shot of information that hit his ears like musical notes.

  Your ichor will now linger inside a thrall’s body for twice as long, and can now affect animals as well as sapient beings. All other limits still apply.

  Reggie was clearly slow, that day, because it took him a moment to realise the true implications of that. If his ichor spent twice as long inside a thrall before wearing off, then there was at the very least a theoretical chance for him to make his way to Ilgran and back without having his own army desert him in the meantime. He had to hold back his excitement at that fact.

  He had to hold it back, because Reggie hadn’t quite abandoned the idea of finding a way to produce large quantities of his blasting crystals just yet. It was simply too good to pass up, and even when he’d known it was impractical the idea of what it could mean was ensnaring his thoughts. Now it was all he could do to barely make himself think about anything else at all, to slow down and do things properly.

  Reggie called on Ludvich first, then, after a moment’s thought, he had one of the thralls tell his little Council of Cunts to send one among them to discuss matters with him too. Norvhan’s representatives probably hated him more than ever, and he felt that even through their sudden politeness, but if nothing else they were still doing their job and giving him insight into the town from the perspective of someone who both lived in it and needed to consume food to stay alive.

  Ludvich was more enthusiastic about the news than Reggie himself, while the Council of Cunts’ representative was far less so. Reggie didn’t notice that about her as much as the fact that Anne had been chosen.

  Anne. He felt a certain way around her, still. Anne had been the only person in Norvhan save Ludvich to show him any real kindness, even if it had only been in retrospect and unknowing that he was even alive when she did. Once she’d known Reggie was alive, or undead rather, she’d even tried to broker a peace between him and the townsfolk surrounding him with spears and pitchforks.

  Then she’d been screaming for everyone to kill him. Reggie had cut a person in half between those two events, of course, but that person had already been trying to skewer him. So Anne would be nice to Reggie on the condition that he remained docile and didn’t defend himself from attempted murder.

  Making her an enemy of his.

  Reggie kept that in mind as he awaited her response. He saw the fact reinforced across her face, betrayed by the disgust as she considered his words and responded to them.

  “You can hold humans under your command for longer than ever, then,” she croaked. There was an edge of hatred in that tone that Anne wasn’t quite able to hide. She thought Reggie was doing wrong, thought he was proving everyone right by making slaves of the men who put down rebellions against elven tyranny for money.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Yep,” Reggie grinned. “Which means my reign of terror is even more secure than I thought. Which also means that I have the option of heading out of town to go and…investigate a possible source of improving our armaments.”

  “You mean your armaments,” Anne noted. She didn’t seem to fear him. She was cautious, sure, and clearly had a healthy respect for his power, but she wasn’t afraid of Reggie. Not like everyone else had been. Maybe that was why her hostility hurt so much, he couldn’t explain it away as stupidity or animal panic.

  “I mean ours actually,” he shot back. “Unless you think the elves will take kindly to all of you for not trying to force me out once their Circumscribers are gone, or that they’ll be understanding about why you’re so frightened of the big, scary vampire.”

  She glared at him, and he smiled back. Weird that this woman in particular annoyed him so much, but Reggie didn’t have the time to start introspecting and trying to figure out why that was.

  At least he seemed to annoy her too. “What do you want with me?” Anne snapped. To the point, more so than everyone else in Norvhan. Good.

  “I need you to come with me,” Reggie told her.

  Ludvich inhaled sharply, which really said a lot about his surprise. Vampires needed quite the shock for undead lungs to even briefly forget they were no longer among the living.

  “What are you talking about?” the ex-Witchfinder growled.

  “He can’t take a thrall for the same reason he hasn’t made any of the town’s notables thralls. Too easy to tell, they feel so strongly about their owners that even an idiot could spot it, right? And he wants to go there incognito, which means he needs a human to keep watch on things by day and keep him from being caught out. So he’s going to bring me, one of the only people here who’s not scared enough of him to do something stupid.”

  She looked smug as she said that, which Reggie had to admit was at least partly justified given that she’d essentially read his mind.

  [Wow. She’s way smarter than you are, Reggie!]

  “Most people are, now shut up.”

  Anne had already figured out that Reggie talked to voices nobody else could hear, and if she agreed with everybody else on him being crazy for it, she also didn’t bother showing that fact with any visible reaction most of the time. Ludvich knew, obviously, and also didn’t care.

  “She’s right,” Reggie shrugged as he turned to Ludvich now. “It makes sense, right?”

  “Send me there instead,” the ex-Witchfinder demanded. “You need to stay here in case the Warden makes his move.”

  “Several reasons I’m not going to do that,” Reggie countered. “The first is that you’re way easier to kill than me, and we don’t know what we’re heading into over there. The second is that I can make it back much quicker in a pinch, since I’ll feel if my undead die while I’m gone and I can kind of fly.”

  “I can tell if we’re attacked anyway,” Ludvich shot back. “We can communicate with Sycily.”

  “That still leaves the problem of you not being able to fly.”

  Ludvich’s face started sort of spasming, like it always did when he was confronted with a point he couldn’t defeat with either argumentation or by simply shooting the one making it.

  “I don’t like this,” he spat.

  “I don’t like lots of things, like being limited to non-explosive bullets,” Reggie shrugged. It occurred to him, then, that he hadn’t even asked Anne if she’d come with him.

  He considered just making it an order but ended up deciding against that.

  “Will you help me with this?” he asked the woman. She glared at him like he’d just punched her.

  “I don’t have a choice, so don’t pretend that I do. Thanks to you the elves will kill me and everyone I know if they retake this town. Yes, I’ll help. Fuck you.”

  Not exactly an enthusiastic agreement, but then Reggie didn’t really need her enthusiasm to keep him alive. He was actually getting a bit tired of enthusiastic subordinates with all the fucking thralls running around.

  “Then we’ll set off as soon as we can,” he smiled.

  Turned out that wasn’t as soon as he’d have liked, there was a lot of preparation to do.

  Chief among it all, flying practice. Reggie should’ve been doing this more than he had, he’d figured out how to take to the damn skies during his seizing of Norvhan, but the fact was that he didn’t like flying with blood. Hated it in fact. It scared the shit out of him, which was dumb because he was basically impossible to kill in one impact at this point. One impact that he could produce, at least.

  It hadn’t just been fear that kept Reggie from flying to Ilgran, though. The main reason was practicality. Flying was fast, but it was also exhausting and, more importantly, exactly as subtle as a grown man shooting through the air at high speeds. Lots of elves had night vision, or some other way of detecting things in the dark, and practically every vampire did, so if Reggie chose that as his mode of transportation he’d be giving up subtlety.

  Maybe that would be worth it, but he wouldn’t know without more information. So Reggie readied a carriage and approached with that, opting to scope the area out with as much secrecy as he could manage. Secrecy could be abandoned, if it proved unnecessary, but announcing himself by flying in a streak of blood would be letting the cat right out of the bag.

  Reggie also had another matter to balance in regards to subtlety; was he bringing thralls? Some experimentation of dubious ethics convinced him no. As enthusiastic as they were, thralls couldn’t be made to hold still in a cramped carriage in the dark for hours at a time without making some kind of noise. Reggie discovered this limitation of theirs by…well, anyway, they’d give the game up if he got unlucky, couldn’t be trusted to walk around openly without drawing attention, and a handful of them wouldn’t be all that useful in combat anyway.

  Other details arose, mostly smaller things. Food for Anne and a bit more food for Reggie. The latter was more difficult to sort out than the former, since he didn’t actually know of any ways to preserve blood once it was out of the vein. Nor did the town’s butchers, surgeons or anyone else.

  In the end he settled on a pretty simple solution, hurrying into the grimwoods and leaving a soldier ant hogtied in the back with him. He’d drain a bit of it every day to keep his hunger at bay, then finish it off before they reached Ilgran. It wouldn’t nearly keep him sated, but if he left with a full stomach it would do something at least.

  Then he ran out of reasons to dawdle, realised he’d been looking for more, and set off out of spite.

  ***

  The Eastern territories had been polite enough to send Oleri an excuse, claiming they feared the emergence of a new Vampire Barony in their lands as cause to withhold their forces. She might have laughed at that, under different circumstances. Every elven domain was in perpetual fear of a Vampire Barony emerging, and yet they seemed only to mention that fact when they were called upon to do something they did not wish to.

  That she was writing to her father’s subordinates seemed to mean nothing, the ties of loyalty were thin and easily broken against the cutting edge of weakness. Warden Erindor’s influence and military power was waning, and now that fact had gotten out. It was the beginning of the end for him.

  A dozen Circumscribers, that was what they could muster in totality. And without the risk of leaving Erindor’s domain entirely undefended, they could afford to send little over half against Norvhan in an assault.

  Oleri felt her heart beating like a hummingbird’s. Were they doomed?