Elford had…mistreated her. Badly. His ministrations had left her damaged in ways she’d been unsure would ever heal. But despite the lingering discomfort, heal they had, for the most part. Enough that she could wear the revealing gown the prince had presented her. The gloves were a fortunate accessory, and luckily the back did not swoop too low. She was continually amazed by the power of blood—the very stuff of life itself—once it entered her undead form. Even so, the sheer amount of blood that had been required had appalled her…afterward, when she realized what she’d done.
But spilt milk, and all that, she thought.
The elevator had buttons for the first five floors. Garlotte inserted a key that allowed access to the sixth and seventh.
“I issued the summons, as you requested,” said the prince, turning to business at last.
Victoria, too, set her mind to the matters at hand. She squeezed his arm playfully. “Invitations, my dear. Invitations. We’re not holding these darlings for trial.” As she chided him for his authoritarian manner, her thoughts were ranging in another direction.
Fourteen. There had been fourteen sailors. She could move forward with her plans. The ship’s register had listed nineteen crew members, which would have been disastrous, or if not disastrous would at least have caused Victoria to abort her current course of action. The captain, with some gentle encouragement, had admitted to her that he’d fabricated five sailors in the records so that he could draw their wages for himself. Good old-fashioned, South American industry and graft. Victoria had been quite heartened.
Before Garlotte had left her on the ship, she’d asked him to call together whatever Kindred he could, especially survivors and refugees—such as herself—from the Sabbat attacks to the south. Her dear Setite rescuers, before she’d abandoned them at the airport, had told her more of the irresistible attacks that, from nowhere, had swept across much of the eastern seaboard over the past nights. Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia—all had fallen in short order. Whatever Kindred had survived—and from Atlanta, as of yet, she knew of none other than herself—would find their previous domiciles patently inhospitable, she imagined. Some might flee west, to Chattanooga, Knoxville or, more likely, New Orleans. But many would head north, especially if they were unaware of the northward progression of the Sabbat forces on their heels. Also likely.
Such forced migration, Victoria knew, would result in chaos—princes were destroyed or, at the least, turned out of their cities; the masses were uprooted and fearful—and whoever managed to reassert order in the midst of bedlam would achieve significant laurels indeed.
So she’d asked Garlotte to call the Kindred together, and he’d done her bidding in this. She would rally the troops, so to speak; she’d selflessly provide herself, refugee in her own right, as the shepherd of lost souls…and they would adore her. They would beg her to lead them. She had been so close to the reins of power in Atlanta, only to have them snatched away by the damnable Sabbat interference. The players had all been assembled and primed. It had been obvious that Prince Benison would either have fallen to Julius, or would have been deposed by the Camarilla if he’d managed to destroy the Brujah archon. Thelonious and Benjamin had come together in an uneasy alliance; the prince’s whorish wife Eleanor would have met an unfortunate end, and perhaps taken one of the conspirators with her. The doors to the halls of power would have opened wide, and Victoria would have stridden in unopposed.
If the thrice-damned Sabbat hadn’t crashed her party (quite literally), and churned all of her careful preparations to ruin.
More troubling, however, than the failure of her plans, more frightening than the torture she’d undergone at the hands of the vile Tzimisce, was a vague suspicion she couldn’t shake from her bones—namely, that she was a mere pawn. True, it was a concern she’d carried with her for many years, and a justifiable worry it was. Just as most mortals were completely unaware of the shadow-society of undead beings who held sway over the night and greatly influenced through mortal agents the events of the day, most Kindred had little to no inkling of the far older and more powerful forces in the world, those who pulled the strings of those who pulled the strings. Victoria was not so ignorant of the elder beings. Not that she had definitive proof…but then no one did. Her intuition in the matter, however, was so strong, so undeniable, that the knowledge passed as a certainty for her.
And so she had long guarded the integrity of her actions and sought to insure that her plans were her own, not the whim of some unseen player in the Jyhad—that struggle of the hidden powers, to whom even the Camarilla and the Sabbat were but mere pieces on the board. Victoria had determined to be unpredictable, to make sure than no person, no creature, could idly count on her to play a certain role in any endeavor. On the surface, those around her expected a mistress of Clan Toreador to be flighty. So much the better if, in fulfilling their shallow expectations, she secured a much deeper purpose.
Even her most simplistic, low-risk, high-yield schemes were subject to the gauge of randomness. As was her custom, she had held her plans in Atlanta up to such a test of independence. The giant embellished doors covered with friezes at the High Museum of Art had served that purpose. Heaven and Hell. Victoria had watched who entered and by which door. Leopold, the pathetic fop, had chosen Hell, and so as dictated by her elaborate formula involving that and other criteria, Victoria entered the gallery through Heaven.
Yet the evening had turned against her, and in a quite dramatic way. Coincidence? Victoria put very little stock in that concept.
Luckily, she changed, discarded, and tried on new plans as easily as she did clothes or lovers, and since her more Byzantine test of randomness had failed her in Atlanta, Victoria undertook a much simpler test to validate or preclude her Baltimore plans. Rather than a complex equation of minutiae, she had determined to rely solely on one unambiguous factor—the number of sailors on the ship; odd or even. If it had been odd, she would have skipped this gathering of Kindred altogether, never mind that she had instructed Garlotte to arrange it. But there’d been fourteen—not only an even number, but equally divisible by seven, the number of clans making up the Camarilla. How much clearer could the result of her test be? Victoria divined that she was destined to rise to greatness leading her fellow Kindred in the aftermath of the vicious Sabbat attacks, the first of which had dashed her earlier plans. So in a way, the destruction of her efforts in Atlanta had led directly to her current opportunity. Perhaps she had merely descended into Hell so that she might now ascend to Heaven.
“Don’t you agree, Victoria?”
She looked up at Garlotte for a moment, realizing that she’d completely missed whatever he’d just asked. She patted his arm. “Of course, my dear.” It didn’t really matter. Garlotte never asked important questions.
The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Beyond the doors, the corridor was conspicuously lined by a dozen men in tuxedos. Security. Ghouls, no doubt. Garlotte escorted Victoria past them, and though handsome to a man, none of them cut as fine a figure as the prince in his dark, tailored suit. She labored to keep from her face any betrayal of the physical pain that plagued her with each step.
At the far end of the corridor stood double doors behind one final sentinel. This was no ghoul, but Kindred—a disheveled, wild-eyed creature who looked very much out of place in the posh surroundings, despite someone’s attempt to dress him up in a blazer and khakis.
“Victoria,” said the prince, “may I present to you Malachi, assistant to the sheriff, and respected representative of Clan Gangrel.”
Scourge, thought Victoria. It made sense. Obviously, this one was the teeth behind Sheriff Goldwin. Isaac was no enforcer; he would make the political decisions. Probably Garlotte was grooming his childe as his eventual successor, but the dirty work they would relegate to this unfortunate. A Gangrel retainer, if one of the beasts could be enticed to serve, generally proved as loyal as any dog, twice as useful, and more intelligent than most breeds.
Victoria ignored the Gangrel and straightened Garlotte’s tie. “Shall we join the unwashed masses, my prince?”
She took his arm again, and they entered the small auditorium, leaving Malachi to close the doors and sniff at the air.
Saturday, 26 June 1999, 1:44 AM
McHenry Auditorium, Lord Baltimore Inn
Baltimore, Maryland
Chaos. Sheer, unadulterated chaos.
The auditorium was more a glorified conference room, modeled after an amphitheater, with five ascending, curved rows of ten to eighteen seats each, and nearly every seat, at present, was filled with a screaming banshee straight from the pits of hell. Or so it seemed to Garlotte. After an hour and a half, the mood of the “conference” was growing only uglier.
“You might see my point,” Victoria insisted over the din to one of the Brujah back-benchers, “if you weren’t such an obstinate, imbecilic, disrespectful cad.”
The young Brujah waggled his tongue through the “v” of his index and middle fingers. The rest of the rabble roared approvingly and took up his gesture as well.
Perhaps, Garlotte surmised, Victoria is not completely in her element. One on one, she could undoubtedly wrap any of these whelps around her little finger, stake him out for the morning sun, all only to have him beg for more. In this more public forum, however, with each insurgent supported by his comrades, she seemed somewhat at a loss. Seeing that neither charm nor reason were destined to carry the evening, she had proceeded onward to pure invective.
“Why should we expect any of you to understand, you bilious collection of lobotomized perverts?”
Garlotte stood front and center. Victoria was off to his left, near the edge of the well of the auditorium. She’d initially taken a seat as Garlotte had commenced the conference, welcomed the guests to his city, and proceeded with introductions of the notable attendees. The preliminary niceties having concluded without incident, Victoria had risen and briefly ruminated upon the recent unpleasantness initiated by the Sabbat, and the need for a unified response from members of the Camarilla. When one of the Brujah ruffians, all testosterone beneath his too-tight T-shirt, broke in and voiced his support for “busting the balls” of every Sabbat vampire within a thousand miles, Victoria had questioned the prudence of such a strategy.
“Like we need advice from backwoods refugees who already got their asses kicked,” the Brujah had replied, and the discourse promptly deteriorated from that point.
Though Garlotte was unsure why Victoria had allowed herself to be drawn into such an acrimonious and ill-focused debate, he was growing increasingly perturbed with the behavior of the rougher element. Most were Brujah, of course. Generally, they led the existence of Anarchs, roaming freely between Baltimore and Washington, shirking clan responsibilities, and only bothering to show up at Kindred functions when there was trouble to be made or what they considered entitlements to be claimed. To this point, Garlotte had allowed them to express their views unhindered for two reasons: first, he himself was uncomfortable with some of the implications of what Victoria suggested, and he didn’t wish to create the impression that he supported her unconditionally; second, to quash the incendiary element prematurely might draw the ire of conference’s most notable participant.
Perhaps participant was too generous a description. Thus far, Theo Bell had not uttered a word. He sat in the right end-seat on the third row, though as archon to Brujah Justicar Pascek he was entitled to a central seat on the first row. Only partially hidden by his mirrored sunglasses and black, low-pulled baseball cap was the seemingly perpetual scowl on his ebony face. He was a big, muscular man, and his bulky leather jacket and crossed arms heightened that impression. His very presence necessitated restraint in dealing with the other Brujah. Even so, Garlotte’s patience was near its limit.
The back-benchers were again directing indelicate gestures toward Victoria. In their midst, someone began to stomp, and within seconds a score of booted feet had joined in.
Garlotte stepped forward and raised a hand. The uproar quickly died down to a few lingering stomps. One of the less unruly among the Brujah—Garlotte recalled her as Lydia—smacked the offender on the back of the head, and the stomping ceased altogether.
“There are those,” said the prince calmly, at the same time his iron gaze bore into the Anarch crowd, “from whom we have not yet heard.” He intentionally avoided looking in Victoria’s direction—she would be displeased that he had not come to her aid earlier—as he then turned to the other side of the auditorium with a most inviting expression pasted on his face.
In response, Maria Chin, the sole representative of Clan Tremere ordered to the gathering, stood and coolly surveyed the chamber to make sure she had the attention of at least most of those present. The Brujah rowdies were cowed, if not rendered completely reticent, by the prince’s intervention. “Ms. Ash,” began the witch from the clan’s Washington chantry, “you speak of a unified response, or concerted action, but it seems to us that at present we lack a complete assessment of the situation.”
Victoria’s spirits rose noticeably. “A remarkably insightful statement…at last,” she added, glancing toward the upper reaches of the chamber. A collective hiss emanated from that section, but quickly died away with a pointed glare from Garlotte.
“If we are to respond to these incursions of the Sabbat, as we must,” Victoria insisted, “we must first gather as much information as possible. I imagine you might be able to enlighten us regarding how the Tremere have fared over the past nights…?”
Chin measured carefully the words of her response. No trace of emotion crossed her eastern features. “Like every other clan, we have suffered …some damage.”
Garlotte was not surprised by the vague nature of Chin’s answer. The Tremere was not about to reveal to anyone outside her clan the degree to which the warlocks might or might not have been weakened by the Sabbat’s attentions. Victoria must know that, he thought.
Now another Toreador, and one of Garlotte’s own subjects, spoke up. “Certainly no clan has navigated the past week unscathed,” Robert Gainesmil conceded. “But how many chantries still function among the aggrieved cities?” he asked more pointedly. “If we are to stand against the beasts, then we first must know where we ourselves stand.”
“Screw the warlocks!” one of the Brujah shouted, and a new uproar of support filled the auditorium.
Garlotte waited patiently this time. He also took note of the fact that Gainesmil, a longstanding and staunch supporter of the prince, was supporting Victoria, for whatever good it would do them. The secretive Tremere would not, on the grounds of sect loyalty or anything else, be berated into giving away what she—and more importantly, her superiors—considered to be privileged information.
Chin, meanwhile, remained as unruffled as the plain, gray skirtsuit she wore. The caterwauling of the Anarchs affected her no more than the insinuations of disloyalty to the Camarilla from the two Toreador.
“We agree,” said Chin, “that assembling the proper information is vital.”
Proper, thought Garlotte. There’s the rub.
“Do we have a reliable listing of the cities that have fallen?” Chin asked.
“Atlanta, Savannah.” The new, deep and powerful voice instantly gained the attention of all present, rowdies in the back notwithstanding. Theo Bell matter-of-factly ticked off the cities on his fingers. “Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, Asheville. Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, fell last night. Norfolk is under attack tonight; the press’ll call it labor unrest with the shipbuilders. Communication is broken with Charlottesville and Fredericksburg.”
“Dear Lord,” Gainesmil whispered in awe at the recitation as he slouched in his seat. “The barbarians are at the gate.”
“Bring ’em on!” shouted the same Brujah who’d disparaged the Tremere before. His kin echoed his sentiments. Theo crossed his arms again and returned to his earlier impassive attitude.
Chin resumed her seat as well, now
that the focus of the conference had shifted from her perceived recalcitrance to the frightening progress of the Sabbat.
“It should be obvious,” said Victoria, seizing the initiative again, “that we must stand against them.”
“What exactly do you propose?” Garlotte asked. He had a suspicion, but had heard only generalities so far. “Surely Prince Vitel in Washington and Prince Thatchet in Richmond, and others, are taking the necessary precautions. As am I.”
“But can any one prince,” Gainesmil interjected, “prepare sufficiently, considering…?” He waved his hand, as if tracing a line of the fallen cities, and looked uneasily back and forth between Garlotte and the again silent Theo Bell.
The prince suppressed a scowl. That his subject would question his ability to protect the city was galling, though it appeared that Gainesmil’s blunt questioning stemmed from worry rather than from any desire to damage Garlotte’s standing.
“My point exactly,” said Victoria. “One by one, our cities will fall—”
“They can’t keep doing like they been doing,” interrupted Lydia the Brujah. “They don’t have it in them.”
“They seem to have had it in them so far,” Victoria said. “They had it in them enough to kill Archon Julius.”
The resulting shocked silence quickly gave way as the back-benchers erupted at this insult. As the rougher element of Brujah hurled unflattering epithets at Victoria with reckless abandon, Garlotte cast a wary glance toward Bell. The leather-clad official of their clan seemed to have taken no umbrage at Victoria’s throwing the demise of his fellow archon in their faces. Then again, Bell was notoriously difficult to read.
Victoria somehow made herself heard above her detractors. “This assembly must take responsibility for the resistance to these attacks. We must coordinate a defense. Otherwise, our cities will fall like dominoes.”
Clan Novel Ventrue: Book 5 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 2