by Derek Gunn
Now that the battle-lust had finally drained away and his rational mind had finally begun to resurface his actions over the last few weeks shocked him. He expected a summons from the Council at any moment. After all, they could hardly let his actions go without censure. He had killed another vampire, many hundreds in fact. If they did nothing the message would go out to all the other states that open warfare was again permitted and anarchy would reign once again. While one part of him yearned for such reckless anarchy, he knew that only death and destruction lay down that path. He understood this on a rational level but found to his surprise that he was not as concerned as he thought he should be. He had broken an ancient law that defined them as a race, and all he could do was yearn for the freedom of doing it again.
Once he had come out of the battle-haze he had immediately set his mind to work in protecting what his orgy of violence had wrought. He had deployed his remaining forces around his borders as best he could to proclaim his strength to any other Lords who might see the transition of control as an opportunity for expanding their own territories. He would have to suppress any such actions viciously if he was to give the right impression. And that included how he must respond to the Council. But the threat from outside his territory was only one element of the problems that now faced him.
He had found, to his shock, that his remaining vampire army was far smaller than he had expected. The carnage had taken a terrible toll as each side had lost themselves to a crazed battle-lust. Hundreds of vampires on both sides had perished over the last few weeks and the number still shocked him. He had tried to instigate a program of finishing the conversion of some of his thralls to full vampire lords to replenish his forces, but he had found, to his amazement, that the thralls had not been idle while he had carved his way through his enemies. They too had consolidated their position, and they had a far larger force than he had.
The thralls had taken their opportunity well while he was engaged in suppressing Wentworth’s forces and had now gathered their forces under one banner. He had underestimated them and they had grown in strength and in confidence over the last few weeks to the point that they had even demanded an audience with him. Negotiate - with a thrall! He was still incredulous as he remembered how the envoys had come into his camp, full of their own importance. He had, of course, killed the three ambassadors, but he knew that he would have to meet with the thralls at some stage or risk tying up his forces on internal squabbling. And their new leader, Carter, obviously knew this. The thralls were essential to the survival of all vampires, but they were no longer as malleable as they once had been.
As powerful as he was, he could not protect himself during daylight. This fact had become painfully obvious during the Human War when the vampires had been forced to increase the number of thralls allowed to exist by a huge margin or risk defeat by the humans. Since then, of course, it had been easier to keep the thralls around and let them police the food for them and take care of the housekeeping that the vampires now considered beneath them. But, in this, he could now see, the vampires had made a mistake. Instead of securing their futures, they had handed the keys to their very survival to others.
It had been accepted, of course, that thralls were completely subservient to their vampire masters and that they could never rebel against their masters, but something had changed. The thralls had somehow overcome their conditioning.
A thrall had never before disobeyed a vampire that he knew of, but this Carter had not just disobeyed - he had committed the unthinkable and killed vampires. If he went to war with the thralls within his territory then the forces gathered on his borders would move against him as well, and he could not hope to win a battle on two fronts. In fact, he was not entirely sure that he could survive a war with either side on their own at this point.
The thralls also controlled the human population that was the vampires’ food supply so he would have to grant them some autonomy; the devil was in the details though. He could, of course, attack the thralls whenever they wanted food, but they would then retaliate during the hours of daylight and this would only leave both sides vulnerable to attack from other quarters.
Carter had already shown he was a force to be taken seriously by retaliating for the killing of his ambassadors by killing three of his vampires while they slept. This could rapidly spiral out of control if he did not respond appropriately. On top of all of these problems, he also had a band of very dangerous humans hiding out somewhere inside his new kingdom, and they, potentially, could be the biggest threat of all.
The fact that they had survived free this long attested to their abilities, but his main fear centred on those bullets they had used. He shuddered as he remembered how his forces had been torn to pieces by mere bullets. How had they done it? And how did they continue to remain hidden from his forces? He had twenty vampires on search detail even now and all of them kept coming back empty-handed. In desperation he had even risked forays into neighbouring states in case the humans were hidden past his borders. He had ensured that these forays did not stretch too far into the other Lords’ territories and that they were of small enough numbers so as not to be misinterpreted as an act of war.
In most cases, his patrols had been chased back quickly by large numbers of vampire patrols almost as soon as they had crossed the border. This heightened awareness on the part of his neighbouring states would make it almost impossible for the humans to constantly cross the border as they still continued to do, so he had almost discounted that theory.
However, there was one area that did not meet these high standards of security. One of his vampires had come back from Nero’s territory and reported surprisingly lax, almost non-existent, security. The vampire had not seen any other vampires in his brief foray and Von Kruger had ordered him to return, but this time to venture further into the territory to see what might be causing this.
The vampire had not, as yet, returned. This, of course, could be because that bastard Nero merely tore him apart and left him to burn in the dawn. It would be just like Nero to do such a thing. If anyone had been likely to go against the council and kill another vampire he would have betted on it being Nero. It still surprised him that it was he who had embraced his anger with such relish and not Nero.
It was unlikely, though, that any humans could exist in Nero’s territory that were not caged and helpless. Nero was a particularly singular vampire who would happily kill an ally as quickly as an enemy, so he might have to consider other options.
These humans perplexed him, though. It just wasn’t possible to hide from a vampire’s senses. A thought struck him. They must be underground. Far underground, he thought, for his forces had found many survivors after the war who had tried to hide in cellars shielded by concrete. They had found them all. No, these humans had to be hidden in a very well shielded complex, and any such complex would have been registered with the government before he and his kind had swept them away.
He grinned. He did not have the knowledge to run the searches necessary, but he did have a number of vampires who were young enough to have this knowledge. He would set them the task of compiling a list, and then he would meet with this thrall captain and offer to share this information. If his information was correct then Carter would jump at the chance to wipe out these troublesome humans as well. With any luck, both sides would weaken the other sufficiently enough for him to sweep in and crush them both. He smiled as his rage began to subside.
Maybe it wasn’t all bad, after all.
Chapter 8
Von Richelieu regarded the aid in front of him with a cool gaze and then struck while the vampire was in mid sentence. The sudden violence had so taken the whole room by surprise that many of those present did not realise what had happened until the vampire fell to the floor. Even for a vampire, the killing stroke had been blindingly quick. He turned his head and swept the faces in front of him in silence, noting their different reactions.
Many of the vampires fidgeted in their seats.
He could tell that the sudden, pungent scent of blood was having a far greater effect on those vampires that still fed from the pool of humans still taking the serum while his closest aids, those who fed from the pool who were now clean, sat calmly and regarded their leader with interest. The humans certainly had something there. The tainted blood was definitely increasing the baser instincts of those vampires still using it. Steele had been right, after all. However, whether it would actually kill them or not had yet to be proven.
He brought his fingers to his mouth slowly and licked the blood from them. Vampire blood was very intoxicating. It was a strange mix of fresh, rich human blood tinged with decay from the vampire. There were rules which forbade the drinking of another vampire’s blood and he deliberately flaunted them now as he relished the taste. It was one of those ancient rules which had been brought in many centuries ago to ensure that vampires did not destroy each other.
There were many myths that told of how the blood of another vampire would strip a vampire of their powers and their strength, that it would drive a vampire insane. It was all rubbish of course. He was one of the few who actually remembered back to when vampires had fought regularly with each other, preferring the heady mix of another vampire’s tainted blood to the banal taste of that which coursed through the humans.
Vampires had not always been as cultured and aristocratic as they were to become. Once, they had been like creatures of the wild, individual and all-powerful among other beasts. They lived to feed and survived purely by instinct. They lived solitary lives and defended their territories viciously. Long before humans came to populate the earth, vampires ruled during the hours of darkness, though they remained too competitive to work together and remained prisoners of their own base hungers, unable to rise above their animalistic existence.
Until, that was, the coming of the first true vampire. Von Richelieu shook himself from his ruminations. That was a story he would ponder another day. It had taken many centuries but, by the time humans were beginning to spread across the world as little more than smart monkeys, the vampires were still in the throes of suppressing their base natures and developing their intelligence and their social structures. They kept their numbers small, their strong territorial instinct forcing them to keep their numbers manageable. Those who survived longest began to take charge and they became known as Elders.
The Elders had seen what the future might hold if they failed to adapt to the changing world. The humans had short lives but they adapted far more quickly to their environment. They had an uncanny knack of moulding their surroundings to work for them and they seemed to have a voracious appetite for war. The vampires were all powerful in the darkness but were far too vulnerable in the light, and so the Elders adapted too. They folded the shadows around themselves and pulled back from the world of man. Any tales of their existence were targeted and they worked hard through their agents to deride these as mere stories and, in time, their existence became myth. The Elders also turned their attention to their own troubled ranks and created legends for the vampires themselves to ensure that their own fledgling social structures would survive.
They put in place stories and myths of how vampire blood was poisonous to other vampires and, in time, these stories became accepted as fact. He had been young at the time but he remembered that time of chaos. Slowly the vampires grew strong. They accepted their place in the shadows and ruled their territories through guile and cunning. The Elders became a ruling council and their wisdom was sought in any disputes and their rulings were final. A class structure evolved and they enjoyed centuries of their secret existence, preying on the humans when and as they wished. Everything was going according to plan until the humans went too far and their raping of the planet began to threaten every living and undead thing on the earth.
Their ability to invent and create was amazing, though this too had proven to be something to fear. The centuries had passed and the planet suffered more and more under their dominion until, at last, the resources began to run short. The planet began to retaliate, summer became winter and winter gripped tighter than ever before. The humans’ empire began to wane.
The younger vampires argued that they would all die if they left the humans to continue to ruin the planet and, slowly, the Elders began to lose their influence. Vampires began to disobey the council and move against humans in their own territories. By this time the dwindling resources had forced the humans to revert to a more insular existence. Their amazing networks that allowed them to communicate instantly anywhere in the world were no longer viable and they became vulnerable.
The young vampires found it easy to take control of their small territories but their greed and inexperience made them crave for more than they could control. They began to expand but the humans were not so easily defeated. The vampires’ great secret was finally revealed. Soon all vampires were forced to join the war or risk the annihilation of their kind. And so the Human War had begun.
There were no Elder vampires left now, many of them having been killed in the war and others had simply disappeared, though, whether they had died or simply faded from sight was yet to be proven. The Elders had not been able to adapt to modern warfare as well as those who had been culled from the human ranks in recent centuries. The humans had a knack for war that true vampires did not have, and this had nearly been the death of them all.
Although the human body could eventually evolve to become a true vampire, it took many centuries for these changes to complete. Von Richelieu was a true vampire, though he had been born human. He could still remember the feel of the sun on his face and found that he still missed it. He remembered riding into battle against the Romans, his blood pumping with excitement, and he remembered his death…and re-birth. He wasn’t the oldest left by any means but he was the oldest who had travelled from the old country.
He still wondered if he had done the right thing as he looked with disdain on the
‘new’ vampires before him. Leaving his beloved country for this wild and sun-scorched land seemed a poor trade. It was a long way from the rolling hills of his youth. There were no scents of life here, no grass or flowers filling the air with their pungent perfumes. All he could smell here was death. The land was parched and barren. It never rained here, only day after day of relentless heat. Even the nights were too warm. He could, he supposed, have taken territory further north, but this was where the power was. This, for some reason, was where the new council had decided to build their base, and he could not change that at the moment. He had moved from his beloved homeland for one reason only. Survival.
If vampires were to lose this war with the humans then they would be hunted down and destroyed. No derision of their existence would work this time. By moving to America, the country which, at the time he had come here, had been the last remaining bastion for free humans, he had been able to lend his considerable expertise in battle to the war effort.
The humans had been winning when he came to this wretched country, but with his help, the vampires had begun to turn the tables. The humans, though, had proven too much for even his great experience. The vampires had been forced to grow the numbers of thralls to completely unmanageable numbers, vampires had begun to squabble among themselves again, and there was a real danger of them losing everything. And then, of course, the serum had been developed and human resistance had crumbled.
He shook himself from his ruminations and looked with regret at the dead vampire at his feet. It was a shame to let this messenger’s blood go to waste but he wanted to make a point, and losing himself in a feeding frenzy was not the image of control he wanted to portray. He could see some of the vampires around the table almost lose themselves to the scent of blood in the air only to be restrained by others who managed to retain more control over their desires.
Von Richelieu’s mind worked on many levels and he prided himself that he had survived centuries of attempts at ending his life by using his intellect. The fact that the serum-tainted blood
could have impeded his ability to think left him cold. Death was bad enough, even after centuries of existence he did not welcome death’s embrace. But to become a helpless, slobbering idiot was horrific to him.
He would have to punish his spy for not telling him of this. Not too severely, but an example would have to be made or he risked losing control of his little human experiment. And that would not do at all. The latest despatch was worrying, though. He did not like the fact that the community had split, he liked to know where they all were and what they were planning. Now that Harris was off the radar he was more dangerous than ever. He would have to press his spy to find out where they had gone or he might have to take a more direct hand. The last thing he wanted was a loose cannon of Harris’ capabilities surprising him at some point in the future.
He turned his attention back to his inner circle. He took a moment more to scan each of the council members. It was still strange for him to see beings of such power and majesty dress so strangely. In any meetings he had attended before the war, the vampires he had met with had always been centuries old and had always taken great pride in looking like the Lords they were. They were a proud race. They had set the fashion and had created the tone of the aristocracy among the humans for hundreds of years.
It had been they who had rubbed shoulders with royalty, they who had set the standards of what it meant to be the ruling classes. Humans had copied them, had tried to emulate their inherent confidence and their poise. It had been vampires who had epitomised the elite throughout history. Each vampire would dress and act according to his or her station. He remembered with fondness the flowing capes, crisp shirts and perfectly manicured hair of his colleagues. A vampire’s hair was not something that was easily crafted or maintained, it was, after all, dry and brittle, and many of the more vain elder Lords would spend quite some time gorging themselves on blood to ensure that their flesh would continue to support their lustrous hair. The fact that they had hair at all was something of a mystery, though. Yet he, too, was guilty of pandering to this vanity himself.