by H. G. Parry
The venom in his voice was startling. It was laced with too much grief to be describing something he knew of only by record. “How old were you? You weren’t under two like the others missing from the records. You wouldn’t remember.”
“So you know about that? No. Most of them were, the ones the Templars took. But not me. I was seven. They thought it might work better with an older child, and they underestimated me. They had no idea how young I was taught, and what I knew how to do. I imagine people made the same mistake with you at times, when you were younger.”
“They thought what might work better?” A terrible suspicion was crystallizing in his mind. “What were they trying to do?”
“They thought they were being kind. They thought we would die anyway, without blood—why not see if they could save us and make us safe at the same time?” The irony bit painfully. “You know what they were trying to do. You wouldn’t be alive without it.”
He did know. “The elixir. It never worked on pure-blooded vampires.”
“No, it didn’t. Every one of those children starved to death. Something else you may have the opportunity to experience, if you live long enough. I nearly died myself. But, as I said, they underestimated me. I hope you understand, though, why your way of staying alive is as repugnant to me as mine is to you.”
The darkness was so thick about them it could have been a living thing. It was the air before a thunderstorm, heavy and rumbling and ready to crackle with energy.
“I’m sorry,” Pitt said, and meant it.
“Don’t be.” The air around them caught like a breath; as if by force, the skies lightened. The enemy laughed a little. “I suppose I should thank the Templars in one regard. I would have been nobody of much importance had the vampire kings lived. A blood magician with power over a country estate, five hundred and first in line to the throne. Now the whole of France is my territory, and one day soon it will be acknowledged as such. And so will yours. You know what rules I refer to. The rules of the Vampire Wars.”
“I have no intention of playing by the rules of vampiric territorial disputes.” Inwardly, his heart was racing, and so were his thoughts. It was very important that he admit nothing, but he didn’t think, in this state, it would be possible to lie. “I’m not one of you. This is a war between nations, and I am a British minister. Those are the rules by which this war is being fought. Your kind is extinct.”
“So I thought too. Then you came into my territory, a decade ago. I should thank you, too, by the way. I’d been content to hide until then. I’d forgotten how much we need this.”
“What do you need?”
“Not me. Us. We need power. We need intellectual stimulation. We need the knowledge that we’re changing the shape of history. You must admit, in that you’re a true vampire.”
“I admit nothing of the kind.”
“You can admit what you like.” Scorn entered its voice. “A war between nations, indeed. Haven’t you felt the magic stir in your blood? What did you think that was for? Budgetary considerations? We are at war. Not France and Great Britain—us. You and I. From now on, your magic will only get stronger. You’ll have to try to rein it in, or give it its head. Either one will probably take more strength than you have.”
He waited until he could trust himself to speak. “You’ve delivered your warning. Get out.”
“Oh, that wasn’t my warning. My warning is this: if you’re going to try to find me, I’m going to have to disappear again. This will be our last contact. You can forget about Robespierre: it was clever, whatever you did, but you won’t be able to use him again. And I have a surprise waiting for you on Saint-Domingue—or rather, for your fleet.”
“For the fleet?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about your fleet. But you should have known better. This isn’t a war you can end. This is a war you have to win.”
The darkness around them lifted, all at once, as though the sun had risen within the space between heartbeats. In that flash of light, the sky above was dizzying blue, and beneath them was a dazzling sea.
The sky he’d never seen. The seas he’d never been able to imagine. The West Indies. The seas in which his brother had drowned.
The waves were filled with bodies. Not the handful of men who had died with James. Thousands of them: bloated, pale, their eyes wide and staring. Seawater darkened their red coats. Around them was the splintered wood of two hundred ships.
Pitt’s eyes flew open. His bedroom was back around him. His heart was hammering so fast he couldn’t breathe; his stomach heaved, and bile rose in his throat. His magic screamed the awareness of one million bloodlines.
The advantage to his elder brother being first lord of the admiralty was that Pitt, unlike the officers waiting downstairs, did not feel at all guilty for intruding on his sleep. It was barely dawn when he arrived at his brother’s London town house, but it would have made little difference if he had waited: the Earl of Chatham was notorious for not rising until almost midday, preventing business from being done. His unpunctuality had, around the time of Dunkirk, earned him the nickname “the late Earl of Chatham”; this alone was enough to cause a breakdown in discipline, to say nothing of the mismanagement of naval affairs themselves. It was a problem for another time.
The late earl was hurriedly emerging from the covers as Pitt entered the room; the young footman sent to rouse him had just drawn back the curtain.
“Good God, William.” His brother’s handsome face registered more bewilderment than alarm. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. What’s wrong?”
Pitt barely waited for the footman to leave the room before he spoke. He didn’t answer the question; there was no time. “John. Is there any way to recall the ships we sent to Saint-Domingue before they reach its shores?”
“Wha—?” Chatham blinked and rubbed his eyes. “The… No. Of course not.”
“No, really. Don’t just say that reflexively. Is there really no way?”
“We can’t communicate directly with the West Indies. Daemon-stones won’t stretch that far across water, so it has to be done by ship. It takes weeks—months, if the tides are wrong. You know that. For all I know, the fleet is there already.”
“It isn’t.”
“How do you—? No matter. Very well, it isn’t. But it will be there soon, unless they’ve gone very far off course. You can’t stop them. Why would you want to stop them?”
“I can’t explain, I’m sorry. But I have reason to believe that if we don’t do something to turn them away from Saint-Domingue, every man on those ships will soon be dead.”
Chatham stared at him. His face was still puffy with sleep. “Then I’m afraid they’re going to die,” he said at last. “I’m sorry. There simply isn’t anything to be done.”
Pitt drew a deep breath and released it very slowly. In his head, he tried to consign thirty thousand men to the bottom of the ocean. Some people might have found the number impossible to visualize. His brain was used to numbers. He thought perhaps he might be sick after all.
“Really, William,” Chatham added. “What is this about? You can’t burst in here, tell me my men are going to die, and not tell me why. If it were anyone else, I’d think they’d gone mad.”
“Perhaps I have.”
Chatham snorted. “You’re my younger brother. I’ve known you since you were an infant. You’re not that interesting.”
Pitt managed to smile but also took it as a firm warning to get himself under control. Their father’s vampiric strain had wreaked havoc on his mind toward the end of his life, in ways that none of them had ever understood—and his father had been far stronger and more brilliant than Pitt. He couldn’t afford to have people suspecting the same of him.
“I truly can’t explain,” he said, more calmly. It was an imitation of himself. He was getting very practiced at those. “I received information this morning. It might be wrong. If what you say is correct, we’ll have to hope it is.”
John nodded slowly,
not quite convinced but placated for now. “If I think of anything, I’ll send word to you at once. Are you staying for breakfast?”
“No, thank you. But please, John, do get out of bed and go and speak to the officer waiting downstairs. I know it’s barely sunrise, but there is a war. It’s damaging to your credibility as first lord if they have to wait for you, and I truly don’t want to have to remove you from office.”
“You wouldn’t. I’m your brother.”
“And that’s precisely why I would, you know that. I’d have to. Besides, if I have to overcome my natural inclination to stay in bed until dinner, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
“I was about to get up.” Clearly, he knew this wasn’t the time to argue. “Where are you going?”
“If we can’t get a message to the fleet,” he said, “then I need to know if we can at least get a message to France, and how quickly. Then I need to speak to the king. And after that, all going as I expect, I need to arrange for an emergency sitting of the House of Commoners as soon as possible.”
Paris/London/Saint-Domingue
9 Thermidor, Year II of the French Republic of Magicians / 27 July 1794
The Paris guillotine was devouring larger batches than ever. A few weeks before, it had taken sixty-seven people on one day, an increase over sixty-one, the record set the week prior. Robespierre was there for each one. He was even more careful now to use only the weaker magicians, the ones who stood no chance of glimpsing his thoughts or anything else that might be in his head. This and the workload meant it sometimes took up to twenty different magicians to call forth the number of shadows required, yet Robespierre alone pushed them through to the corpses and awakened the dead. The batches were sent to Spain, where the British army would soon meet the French in combat. After that effort, Robespierre disappeared for a few hours, pale and shivering, but he was back at the Committee that night as usual.
He knew there was speculation that he was mad, and an unspoken belief that he was cursed. He was probably both. Shadows clustered around him constantly, whispering, so that he was always cold, and never at peace. Nobody else could see them, so perhaps he was indeed simply losing his mind. He didn’t think so, though. He had sent a vast number of shadows through his blood now; he suspected that each time he did, even after he pushed them out into their new headless bodies, part of them remained with him. Each one played upon his vision, taunted him, reminded him of what he had become. Nobody who summoned an army of the dead ever lived past thirty-five, Camille had said. Robespierre was two months past thirty-six, and the darkness was accumulating in his veins.
Yet the Revolution was not safe. The France in his head was being born, he still believed, but slowly, so slowly, and with so much pain. He could not stop.
Saint-Just agreed with him. Since Camille’s downfall, he had emerged as by far the strongest shadowmancer at the guillotine—the only strong shadowmancer, in fact, that Robespierre would let near him. He could stay at Robespierre’s side for up to thirty dead, sometimes more, and when at last his magic was spent, he would still remain at the scaffold. Few knew that he and Robespierre went to the Conciergerie every night, and none knew what they did there, but perhaps they noticed that Saint-Just’s young face had grown harder and more remote, like a star on a frosty night. They called him the Angel of Death. If he had noticed the touch of anyone else in Robespierre’s mind, as Camille had, he never said.
“We need to push through,” he said to Robespierre. They were in Robespierre’s room at the Duplays’, before the start of the meeting of the Convention. The last of the daylight played gently over the familiar furnishings: his desk cluttered with papers, the plain bookshelf Maurice Duplay had made for his books, the old memorial engravings from the start of the Revolution. “But be careful tonight. The Convention are scared. Some of them are starting to say that Danton and Camille were right. They blame you for their execution.”
“I know they do,” Robespierre said, with bitterness. “The cowards. Not one of them would speak for the Dantonists when they were alive. Now they all piously regret their deaths, as if they could have done nothing to save them. Do they think I don’t regret them? They were my friends. But it had to be done.”
“It had to be done,” Saint-Just agreed. “You know I don’t regret them. But watch what you say at the Convention tonight. You do have a tendency lately to be—”
“Go on,” he said as Saint-Just hesitated. “Hysterical? Half-mad?”
“Incautious. I mean it, Robespierre. The public mood is shifting. I really am concerned for your life.”
“My life has been in danger for a very long time,” Robespierre said. It didn’t seem as important now as it once had. He was so tired. “But it won’t end tonight. I’m still needed.”
It had been five years since the fall of the Bastille.
Éléonore was standing in the kitchen at her easel as the two of them left. Her brush was in her hand, but the canvas was barely smudged with color.
“Are you going?” she asked—both of them, presumably, but her eyes were only on Robespierre.
“Yes,” he said. His mouth managed a twitch that was not a smile. “I should return late, but I’ll see you all in the morning.”
She nodded, her face grave, and embraced him quickly. It was nothing unusual; the family all embraced him on occasion, as they would a brother or a son. It was only because he was so tired that he closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of turpentine and charcoal that hung about her like smoke. She was just a little taller than him, and the wispy bits of hair tucked behind her ear tickled his nose. Her grip tightened before she let him go.
“Good luck,” she said.
The Convention felt different this time. Not so very different—wrapped in his own pain and fear, Robespierre didn’t at first realize anything was amiss. It had certainly been hostile to him before; many on it had always wanted his death. Yet it felt, imperceptibly, as though a current had shifted, and darkness was stirring in its depths like silt from the bottom of a river.
Saint-Just felt it too. His frame was tense as he took his seat beside Robespierre.
“Be careful,” he repeated.
For once, Robespierre felt a flash of irritation at his protégé. “Saint-Just,” he said. “You weren’t here at the start of the Revolution; you’re too young. We didn’t begin it by being careful.”
And yet he hadn’t begun it, not really. He had been careful. Those who had not were far braver than him, and now they were dead.
Robespierre had been called on the day before to defend his stance on the Terror; this was nothing new, and he had required only short preparation the night before. Before he could stand to do so, however, another man shot to his feet. Robespierre’s glasses were still on his head, awaiting the moment he would need them for his notes; he couldn’t tell who it was until the figure spoke, and then he had only vague recollections of the owner. A new member. In the last five years, there had been a lot of changes in government.
“Citizen Robespierre,” he said. He was a young man, with high cheekbones and ginger hair rough about his face in the manner of the Commoners outside. “I’d like to ask you a question before you start.”
Robespierre gave him his coldest look and felt the room shiver.
The young man carried on regardless. “Not so long ago, in this room, you called for the Girondins to be removed from the Convention, and the people obeyed.”
“As I recall,” Robespierre said, still coldly, “the people spoke first.”
“Citizen Roland spoke on that day. He said that you were a magician, and you had enchanted them all. His wife had made similar claims.”
“They were traitors.”
“But they were right about you being a magician. You turned out to be a necromancer. You had been hiding that for years. Were they right about anything else? Have you been practicing illegal magic upon the people of France?”
It was the question he had always feared, the question
he had killed Madame Roland and her party to silence. Somehow, he had always known it would come back.
Are you there? he asked the voice in his head. I need you again. Help me.
Saint-Just spoke up over the rising excitement. “He can’t answer that. There’s no such thing as illegal magic anymore.”
“There is such a thing as betraying the principles of the Revolution. The sentence for that is death. And coercing the National Convention would be a betrayal.”
“You can’t kill me!” Robespierre snapped, his cold silence melting abruptly. “I animate the dead. Without me they’d be only corpses.”
A new voice. “So you admit you’ve committed crimes worthy of death?”
“No, I do not!” The Convention was stirring now, as were the crowds in the galley. He had to raise his voice, which hurt his throat these days. He recognized the sounds of a wakening mob too well. “How dare you even suggest it? Do you have any idea what I’ve given to this revolution?”
“It seems to have given you more.” The first speaker again, but with a rumble of agreement behind him. “You’re the most powerful man in France. Somehow, every step of this revolution has raised you higher and higher, while others die at your command.”
“Do you think I wanted this?” It had been a long time since anyone had dared to question him. Anger was rising in his chest, but also fear. “Do you think I wanted to be this?”
“What are you?” someone called, and chaos ensued.
It wasn’t one-sided chaos: many still spoke for him. Saint-Just; his brother, Augustin; Lebas, Babette’s new husband. But he didn’t like it.
“Stop it!” he ordered. It took all his strength to project over the mob, but they stopped. “I’ll answer your questions. Just let me speak.”
“Let him speak!” his brother echoed loyally, and many took up the cry—not, perhaps, all with friendly intentions. Robespierre drew a deep breath and made his way to the front of the room. All eyes were on him.
As he mounted the tribune, he stumbled. Everyone saw it; they noted it as a sign of his weakness. Nobody realized what they had actually seen. Robespierre did not realize himself what his sudden faintness portended, until he stood before the hostile eyes of the French Republic of Magicians. He reached deep inside himself for the well of mesmerism that had propelled him through the last few years, knowing he would need it as he never had before.