by H. G. Parry
Information. Here it is. I am, as I’ve indicated, going to do what you told me not to, and confront Robespierre with what I know. My allegiance is to France—and, yes, to Robespierre—not to you. But I also did what you suggested. I took my place at the guillotine one last time, and this time, when my magic touched Robespierre’s, I felt for the third presence lurking in our midst. I had felt it once before by accident; this time, I looked for it on purpose. It was hiding very deeply, but I found it. You were right. It’s there. It’s always been here: before the Revolution, before I was born, for hundreds of years. But—and here is the interesting part—it’s not here.
I can’t give you a geographical location, but I can guess. It’s somewhere very hot, surrounded by water; I can hear distinct sounds of revolution in the background. (Believe me, I know what a revolution sounds like by now. It’s very angry, and there are slogans.) The West Indies, probably. I would say Saint-Domingue, judging by the upheaval, but that is no longer a French colony, surely. Or is it? I suspect your friend Pitt would know better than me. My knowledge of intrigues is fairly domestic. That is all I have, and I’m giving it to you, an honorary citizen of the Republic and yet the friend of its greatest enemy. It goes against everything I am to do it, but then, if what you say is true, I no longer know who I am.
No. I know who I am. I am Camille Desmoulins, the spark that ignited a revolution, and if I speak to you now, I speak to you from the dead. I have married a wife celestial by her virtues; I have been a good husband, a good son; I would have been also a good father. I carry with me the esteem and the regrets of all true Republicans, of all lovers of virtue and of liberty. I may die at thirty-four years of age, but it is a miracle that I have passed unscathed during the last two years, over so many of the precipices of the Revolution, without falling, and that I still live. I rest my head calmly upon the pillow of my writings—too numerous, but which all breathe the same love of mankind, the same desire to render my fellow countrymen happy and free, and which the axe of tyrants cannot touch.
Sound of tumultuous applause now. Robespierre’s finally finished. I need to get back.
Don’t you dare let me down.
Camille Desmoulins
“Saint-Domingue,” Pitt said. “I should have thought of it. I knew vampires like to stay within their territory; the French colonies are still its territory.”
“We thought it was in France,” Wilberforce pointed out. “It was in France, the last we knew of it being anywhere in particular. It was in Arras when Robespierre created his very first undead.”
“And that’s exactly how I should have known it was no longer there. When Robespierre and the enemy created that first undead, the king’s magic went into revolt against it. It could feel that there was a vampire king—or at least an aspiring one—just across the Channel engaging in powerful magic. Then it settled again. It’s still relatively settled even though Robespierre and his shadowmancers are sending armies of the undead across Europe. Something obviously changed—something more than just the enemy no longer being directly involved in the creation of the undead. The enemy must have left France around the time of the king’s recovery. I should have thought of it.”
Wilberforce sighed. “Well, I don’t see what difference it would have made if you had thought of it. It would have been a guess until now. You would have told me, I would have told you it was a very interesting guess, and we could have done nothing about it. I’m not sure what we can do now.”
The Downing Street library had one large window, and by Pitt’s count Wilberforce had paced to it and back eight times over the course of the last few minutes. It was the first opportunity they had found to discuss the contents of the letter all night. Wilberforce had brought it in the early evening, just as a collection of generals and war ministers arrived for dinner; as they were there in part to discuss the army of the dead, they couldn’t exactly be abandoned to their own devices, even if politeness had allowed it. Fortunately Wilberforce was more than capable of animating any discussion; by the second course, most of the table was enthusiastically outlining for him the difficulties in facing magical combatants, and he was listening with entirely unfeigned interest. Still, more than once he had caught Pitt’s eye meaningfully, and Pitt had found himself longing more than usual for the duties of entertaining to be over.
It was near midnight by the time the two of them were left alone. It was a cold night, and the London streets outside were like frosted glass in the lamplight.
“And you say a shadow brought this all the way from Paris?” Pitt asked, from where he sat by the fire with the letter. He felt the heat only distantly. Possibly it was the three daemon-stone messages he’d received, but his head had been aching all day, and he couldn’t seem to get warm.
“I presume it must have,” Wilberforce said. “It dispersed almost as soon as I had removed the paper from its center. Camille would have been braceleted as soon as they took him prisoner, and he would have had very little warning beforehand; I can only assume that he had the letter waiting, and when the knock came at the door, he called forth the shadow and sent it on its way to me. It must have taken days to cross France, and then the Channel, and then find its way to Clapham.”
“Shadows can’t usually carry things at all, much less for any distance,” Pitt said. “They’re too insubstantial. To summon one of that strength—I know he was a strong magician and a talented one, but it must have nearly killed him.”
“He knew it would be the last act of magic of his life,” Wilberforce said. “I doubt he cared what it cost him. He did it. Then they took his magic from him, and then they took everything else.”
“Don’t feel too much sympathy for him. He called for the deaths of countless men and women, many of them for no other cause than that they were born Aristocrats.”
“His wife is dead now,” Wilberforce said. “Did you read that in the papers? They claimed she was conspiring to start an uprising to free him. They cut off her head the day before yesterday.”
“I know.” Pitt sighed. “I feel too much sympathy too.”
“We can’t let them down. We simply can’t. We need to end this.”
Pitt did not trouble to answer this; Wilberforce would not expect him to. He returned his attention to the paper, trying to find some new meaning in it. It was eerie reading. In the last year, he had read many reports from men who had died in battle before their words had reached him, but they had been different: those men had not known they would die when they wrote. Camille Desmoulins wrote as one already speaking from beyond the grave. Except, of course, that he had no grave. His body was on its way to battle as they spoke.
“He says it’s been here for hundreds of years,” he said, almost without meaning to. It was what they had feared from the start, and never quite put into words.
“The list of names my Templar friend Holt gave me,” Wilberforce said hesitantly. “The list of vampires killed after the war. I realized what was wrong with it. I meant to tell you—well, I suppose I am.”
“Wrong with it?”
“It was my fault for dividing the list. If it had all been together, we might have realized it earlier. There are 650 names on that list, all recorded by family, rank, and age. It’s meticulous, as the Templars always are, even back then. And none of them are under two years old.”
It took a moment for the import of that to sink in. “Might they not have left the children’s deaths unrecorded?”
“Perhaps that is indeed all it is. Or perhaps they left the infants to die of natural causes—though I can’t imagine they would take that risk in order to avoid spilling blood they’d never shown any qualms about spilling. But the other possibility—”
“Is that they kept them alive for some purpose of their own,” Pitt finished. “Dear God. What could they possibly have been doing?”
“If one survived, then as long as it was fed on lifeblood, it could still be alive today. Which would mean we were indeed dealing with a pure-bloo
ded vampire.”
Strangely, the cold fist around Pitt’s stomach didn’t tighten or loosen at that information. On some level, perhaps, he had always known.
“It would explain why its magic was powerful enough to reach from Saint-Domingue,” he said, because he had to say something.
“But not what he was doing with Saint-Domingue in the first place,” Wilberforce said. “That’s still the part that puzzles me. I understand the war, and the army of the dead. But I can’t understand why he would want to help enable a rebellion.”
“Nor I. I don’t understand why it sent an undead to delay abolition in 1788 either—although we can assume that it left for Saint-Domingue almost immediately afterward, given the king’s recovery.”
“If that was indeed why he sent it. It might have been aimed at you. You are the rival vampire, in this instance.”
“We don’t know that.” He said it as firmly as he could. He wasn’t even quite sure why. But if it were true, then they were fighting something far more terrible than he was ready to deal with. “We have no evidence it knows I exist at all.”
Wilberforce seemed about to argue, then looked at him. Whatever he saw, he let the argument die and exhaled it as a sigh. “I don’t know. There’s something very big and very dangerous looming just out of sight, and I can’t see it.”
“No.” He rubbed his temples absently. “Wilberforce, if you must pace, I wish you’d pace over to my desk, pick up that decanter, and pace it over here.”
“Is that one of those wishes that is really an order?”
“I’m prime minister—all my wishes are orders. If you would be so kind.”
“I’d be a better friend if I paced over and tipped it out the window,” Wilberforce said, doing what he asked anyway. “You’ve already had a full bottle at dinner, and I don’t believe you ate three bites. Are you still not feeling well?”
“All the best strategies are formed when things are slightly blurred around the edges. That’s how my government has always been run.”
“You’ve just lost my vote. Right there and then. I’m going over to Fox. You heard it here first.”
“Oh, the fickle nature of the British people. Thank you.” He took the decanter from Wilberforce and refilled his empty glass. “In any case, Fox drinks more than I do, and I’m fairly sure he’s not thinking of the defense of the nation as he does so.”
Wilberforce snorted; then a shadow passed over his face. “The defense of the nation.” He fell into the chair opposite Pitt, with far more force than that chair had probably ever encountered before. “That’s the pressing issue, isn’t it? What are we going to do to defend the nation? Especially if we’re correct, and our enemy is a pure vampire.”
“In some ways it makes it easier,” Pitt said. “We know its capabilities.”
Wilberforce laughed. “We do. We know they’re virtually without limit.”
Pitt had to smile, wryly. “Well, not quite. If it was indeed an infant during the Vampire Wars, it means that it probably has little more knowledge of that time than we do—aside from the secret to creating an undead, which it must have discovered somewhere. Its natural abilities aren’t so unlimited. And more to the point, if it’s a true vampire, then its powers are tied far more closely to its territory than they might be otherwise.”
“And how does that help? What can we do about it?”
“We can do the most simple of all things,” Pitt said, after a moment’s thought. He took a sip from his glass and tried to focus his mind. “We know where it is. We can trap it there. We have ships and men amassed in the West Indies, many of them already on the shores of Saint-Domingue. I can send others to reinforce them. If we can take Saint-Domingue once and for all, and prevent any ship from leaving it…”
“We can’t comb every inch of Saint-Domingue looking for a vampire that has successfully hidden itself for hundreds of years.”
“No. But if we take Saint-Domingue, it becomes a British colony. The enemy will, at one stroke, be trapped outside its territory. That’s very dangerous for a true vampire—far more dangerous than it would be for me. It might not break its power over France, but it will certainly weaken it. And it will make it very, very vulnerable. That has to be worth something.”
Wilberforce nodded slowly. “You mean ‘he.’”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said ‘it’ would be vulnerable. You mean ‘he.’”
“I do. Does it matter?”
“Not practically. I just want to remember that we’re fighting a human being. Not a shadow, or a monster. Do you think our fleet capable of taking Saint-Domingue? Completely, I mean. We’ve barely held on to a few provinces in the south, from my understanding.”
“If we concentrate all our efforts on it, then yes. I do.” And he did, of course. He had to. They simply didn’t have another plan.
“Then I suppose it must be attempted.” Wilberforce didn’t sound happy.
“What is it?” Pitt asked.
“Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“No, really. What is it?”
“If we take Saint-Domingue,” Wilberforce said, “it means a reinstatement of slavery over the island.”
“It depends on the terms.” He saw where this was leading. “We might end up needing to negotiate with the insurrectionists, in which case—”
“But if we take the colony now, with the help of the planters. If all goes according to plan.”
“It’s the most likely outcome, yes. For now. And it’s considered the most advisable, in order to stop the revolts from spreading to our colonies out there. The rebel armies are moving to liberate others, once they’ve secured their own freedom. They might spread across the sea to Jamaica, if they chose.”
“Do you think it’s the most advisable?”
“For now? While we’re at war?” Of course he’d thought about the question, over and over. But when he spoke, he still wasn’t certain if he had the answer. “Yes. It doesn’t mean I don’t want the end of slavery. I do; you know I do. I supported you against the trade again only last week. But I don’t want it like this. I want it legal, binding, and honorable, not through bloodshed and dark magic and chaos.”
“I understand. I want that too. But what if we can’t have all those things? What if we can’t have freedom without chaos?”
For one rare moment, Pitt could have wished he was a thousand miles away, and a different person, who had nothing more to worry about than his own household, who didn’t have to wonder if you could have freedom without chaos, and who, if he was really still not feeling well, could just go to bed and sleep. But he hadn’t been that person for more than a decade, if he had ever been at all. The moment didn’t last very long, and he didn’t wish it.
“And how would you answer that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Wilberforce said. “I wish I did. I’m not a revolutionary. Perhaps I should be, but I can’t be. I don’t have that kind of anger in me. But quelling a rebellion is an act of violence as well. It’s quite a different thing from preventing one. And you said once that ‘just this once’ is the most dangerous phrase in the English language.”
“I don’t think I’m saying ‘just this once.’ I’m saying ‘just for now.’ Just for now, we need to maintain political stability. Just for now, we need to prevent magical uprisings. And just for now, yes, we may need to reinstate slavery on an island that’s fought very hard to free itself, if that’s what it takes. We can go back and set it right afterward, and we will, if we come through this. But first we need to come through this.”
“I imagine that Robespierre is saying much the same things about the Reign of Terror.”
“I know he is. That’s because, repulsive as his methods may be, and as different as his personal vision may be to mine, we both want to keep our countries safe.”
Wilberforce smiled very slightly. “‘If we cannot expect a magician to refrain from magic in the defense of their own lives, how can we possibly expec
t them to do so in the defense of those they love?’”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It should. You said it, ten years ago. You argued that people were allowed to defend others as well as themselves, through magical means if necessary.”
“I remember now. Dundas warned me when this started that it could be read as an invitation to break the Concord. You weren’t even in the House that day.”
“I read it in the papers afterward. It’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? It’s how you see the war. It’s a fight to defend what you love.”
“It sounds rather sentimental, put like that.” He said it as lightly as he could, knowing that it wouldn’t fool Wilberforce for a moment. He didn’t even want it to.
“No,” Wilberforce said. “No, it isn’t sentimental at all. But how far are you willing to go to do it?”
“As far as is honorable and right. And before you ask, Wilberforce, I can’t say how far that is. For one thing, I’m a part of a larger political process. It isn’t my decision alone.”
“It could be. Mesmerizing any opposition could be just for now too.”
“No. It couldn’t. I believe in the system of government we have, and the processes it goes through. It’s far from perfect; our job is to continually refine it and make it better, but those refinements need to themselves come through the system. They reflect the will of the country, its Parliament, and its king. You and your friends at Clapham aren’t the only ones who see yourselves as an instrument of something greater than any one individual, you know.”