++There are many dark things underground, almost as many as in the grimwoods. Darkness breeds darkness.++

  Book 2: Chapter 37

  Krieg had been hard to persuade into doing something as common as manual labour. Not really, though, because he had the intellectual capacity of a half-eaten rat, so Reggie had just implied he knew he’d lose in a competition, started lifting rocks, and quickly found himself receiving help.

  The Varenthor wasn’t as physically powerful as Reggie, funnily enough. At least not when Reggie was fully transformed. Despite that, he was making it a contest. The difference between their raw strength wasn’t that big, and the cave was pretty damn cramped. Reggie was already tall in human form, having a good few inches on most men, and Form of The Beast added easily half a foot to him. Most doorframes were lower off the ground than the top of his head.

  He had to slouch, and his arms—made disproportionately long by the transformation—didn’t have quite the room of Krieg’s relatively stubby little limbs. Reggie’s talons kept scraping against stone and grinding chunks off it, filling the air with debris and sparks.

  “You know, this is actually pretty fun.” Reggie hadn’t noticed himself grinning until he heard that, but damn it was. There was always satisfaction in finding his own Strength proven, it had all been hard-won after all. And this let him do that proving without killing anything.

  Granted, there was a bit more risk than Reggie would’ve liked. It was an old mine, old enough to have long since collapsed on its own as shitty wooden support beams eroded over time, and mines in general were treacherous. More than once, they cut through into an empty pocket only to hear the stone shivering above them.

  Even Krieg looked a bit panicked as they fled, when that happened. Reggie understood why. He was strong as shit, now, but if a hundred tons of rock pinned him down from above, he doubted he’d be wriggling out from under it any easier than a person. Undeath would become a curse, then. He’d survive, only to spend eternity entombed.

  Fortunately it didn’t come to that, and as they worked they had new beams installed. They didn’t have anyone on hand who’d personally done the work before, and as Reggie feared almost all of the previous generations’ knowledge had long since been lost to time and atrophy. They compensated by just using a shit ton more wood than they probably needed.

  Slow work, but not nearly as slow as it could have been. There were really only so many ways a job could drag when it was being done by two Vampire Barons.

  They got most of it done within an hour or two, and there was only really one incident of interest to occur across the whole time. It came pretty fast but in two distinct stages. The first was Reggie smelling something weird in the air, some vaguely sterile thing with a different texture and a different weight to it than the rest of the air around them. The second was him figuring out his vampiric senses were identifying a natural gas pocket they’d hit, which unfortunately happened at the exact moment of his claws scraping against the wall again and throwing out sparks.

  Being caught in the middle of a violent explosion was not pleasant, but it was, however, really fucking cool. It helped that Reggie wasn’t actually that injured, too. It was less of a blast and more of a reasonably fast combustion, over too quick to ignite anything flammable or transfer very much heat to Reggie.

  Neither he, nor Krieg, even had so much as a singed eyebrow between them, and the disorientation was over fairly soon.

  After that, the digging was mostly finished and they didn’t take much longer to finally extricate themselves from the mine and let Krieg’s humans flood in to make sure the place wouldn’t collapse again.

  ***

  “It hasn’t changed much,” Ajoke growled. She tended to growl just about everything that came out of her mouth, Ludvich had learned. Which he didn’t mind one bit, having very much the same habit himself and already being long used to it. It was common among the Witchfinders and Circumscribers he’d mostly surrounded himself with earlier in life.

  Her remark, though, pissed him off a little.

  “It’s changed plenty,” he snapped. “Nobody’s starving anymore, and nobody’s being ruled by elves.”

  “They’re just being ruled by vampires, instead,” she noted.

  “Yes.”

  “Which is different how, exactly?”

  “It’s different because we’re not cunts. What would you do instead?”

  She glared at him. “Let people govern themselves?”

  Ludvich actually started laughing. “Right. I’ve met enough people to know why that’s a bad bloody idea, maybe you haven’t yet.” He spat at his feet, a glob of bloody foam conjured up just for the act of spitting. People. Ludvich had seen many things in his travels across Engyr, but a group of humans who’d be content to sit around without murdering each other? That was the stuff of legend.

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  Ajoke’s mood seemed to grow fouler as they walked through the streets, which was just fine by him.

  “How did you even take this place over?” she scowled. Ludvich could see her eyes flicking across the peelers, now. It wasn’t any great surprise to find her just as disgusted with them as most people were.

  Most people, not myself?

  Funny, he’d never even noticed when he started to accept their presence. For a while now they’d just been useful assets and nothing more.

  “We attacked it, killed the Circumscribers and squatted in it. Pretty much everyone left did as we told them.” Ludvich decided not to mention the thralls, at least not yet. He was pretty confident that Ajoke would soften up to the place if she got a look at how the people were actually living, here. As wary as many of them still were to be under vampires, their actual conditions were so far improved that he couldn’t imagine it not making at least some kind of difference to her view.

  But as they walked around, more present concerns soon took precedent over the ethics of what was going on.

  “Not very defensible,” Ajoke sighed. “The outer wall, that looks somewhat new.”

  “You haven’t seen the newly-made part, yet,” Ludvich told her. “In another few weeks we plan to have the whole thing remade, its exterior is going to be reinforced with cobbled stone, and its interior will be better suited for active defence against human attackers.”

  “How many do you have to hold it?” Ajoke asked.

  Ludvich couldn’t help but wince. “A few dozen, all…thralls. Vampire blood makes them less fearful and heightens their physical Attributes.”

  As he might have expected, her lip curled at the very mention, but Ajoke didn’t latch onto the ‘slavery’ part, evidently having her own priorities ordered on the present, too.

  “That won’t be enough,” she grunted. “Not nearly.”

  “I know. But what’s there to do about it?”

  She looked at him like he was a moron. “Put together an actual militia from the other townsfolk?”

  “I already started that,” Ludvich snapped. “You think two months is enough time to turn people into fighters?”

  Ajoke smirked, at that. “It’d be enough time for me and my people.”

  Ludvich eyed her. “Is that an offer?”

  Her smile disappeared instantly, and she took a step back from him with both eyes frosting over.

  “No. Maybe? I need to ask the others first. Remember this is just me scoping the place out to make a report for them.”

  “And what are you going to report so far?” Ludvich asked her. She seemed to weigh him with her gaze for a moment before replying.

  “That it’s fully under the command of vampires, that the people here have no more freedom than they do under elves, that there are men whose wills are dominated and erased, that it is, all in all, just another Vampire Barony. But that we could use you as an ally.”

  Ludvich didn’t have the time or energy for an argument, so he just focused on the practical facts that actually mattered.

  “Alright then, you’ll go and tell them that?”

  “I will,” Ajoke said after a moment. She started heading off, then paused. Took a glance back Ludvich’s way.

  “You know, Reggie had me wondering if maybe the stories I’d heard about your kind were wrong, for a while. I should’ve trusted my training more.”

  “What the fuck would you know?” Ludvich spat. “You’ve been in an army your whole life. He’s been alone.”

  ***

  It was nearly day when, at last, the mine was properly secured enough for a venture down into its depths, so Reggie retired to Krieg’s estate. Fortunately the other vampire didn’t insist upon rest this time, and was content to just retire to his own coffin while Reggie kept flicking through the tomes.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t find anything more of tangible use this time around. He’d not really been expecting to, of course, not every random venture recorded by some old vampire would turn into an opportunity.

  Granted, Reggie imagined that as you got more powerful, you just ran into opportunities more. It seemed right, somehow, and not just because all of his had started emerging once he became a vampire. For something as strong as Krieg’s sire to even consider an event of note, it would have to involve the kinds of power that naturally turned into a chance at changing things big-time, right?

  Well, right or not, Reggie had his one lucky break already.

  He worked without incident for a few more hours, before something disturbed him. Lots of somethings, actually. Screams, then urgent calls on the mansion with reports of…something. Reggie would’ve liked to go outside and take a look directly, but with only a few minutes before his skin started sloughing off he’d long since resolved himself not to risk full day exposure for even a moment if he could help it. And the mines were on the other side of town.

  So he was forced to get all his info second-hand, which meant talking to people. Reggie hated that. People were insane. Creatures of evil. A person would sooner strangle a baby than do a single good deed in its entire life.

  On the other hand, people could go out in the day without catching fire, which meant they’d actually seen the weird shit Reggie was only hearing distant echoes of without line of sight to. That pretty much made his decision for him, unfortunately.

  What bothered him more was that, despite his concession of talking to the people, Reggie wasn’t actually getting much useful information. After half an hour spent interrogating everyone he could, he succeeded in extracting about five contradictory accounts featuring about twenty fluctuating details. Even something as simple as the time of occurrence was lost to him.

  Then he experienced a rare stroke of luck, Anne woke up. This resolved everything nicely by giving Reggie an actually reliable set of sun-retardant eyeballs to send out.

  Except she wasn’t cooperating.

  “You want me to leave the safety of this building, walk out into the streets, where I was almost killed, eaten and possibly mollested just a day and a half ago, all to head over to a long-abandoned mine and poke around it to find out what it was that drove dozens of big, burly men into fleeing from it like they were about to die?”

  Anne sounded somewhat indignant, for some reason.

  “Basically, yeah,” Reggie told her. “Everyone else here is an idiot.”

  “And so are you if you think I’m throwing my life away over this. Do it yourself, it’ll be dark in a few hours.”

  Reggie met her eye. “In a few hours, whatever’s there could have prepared a trap, or left for somewhere else. The few hours I’d be delayed by in doing anything about this might be the difference between saving and losing Norvhan.”

  Anne spat at her feet, glared right up at him, and swore. That was how Reggie knew he had her.

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