++When you strike at a Vampire Barony, make it swift and devastating. Lay waste to all of it at once. If even a scrap of corruption remains, it will fester like any other rot.++

  Book 2: Chapter 33

  …And he is currently sleeping, or rather waiting, through the day in the vampire’s chambers beneath the ground.

  Ludvich listened to Sycily’s report and committed it all to memory, something that he found blessedly easy of late. It was certainly not the disaster he’d been anticipating.

  But that didn’t relax him. Actually, the disaster would’ve been relaxing. When things had gone wrong you could stop worrying, get down to business. When things were going well, it was only ever because the universe was trying to lull you into a false sense of security. You learned lessons like these in a career of Witchfinding. You’d fucking better, because it wasn’t like cutting people’s throats in their sleep did much to teach anything else.

  “Tell him that things are going well in town,” Ludvich said by way of burying his lingering doubts. It wasn’t a lie, either, really. Things were going smoothly simply because Reggie had done a pretty damned good job of assuring that they would in his absence. The thralls were well fed, for the time being, which meant that their behaviour was as erratic as it was going to get, and yet there’d been no further incidents. Ludvich hadn’t had as much time to hunt, which was unfortunate, but he’d not really needed to either. Food stockpiles were stacking high and people even seemed to be relaxing.

  He wasn’t sure what it was, just exposure to the vampires maybe, but Norvhan’s human residents appeared to finally be coming to the conclusion that they weren’t going to be spontaneously massacred in some satanic blood-orgy. That was neat.

  People went around and did their work, and Ludvich mostly just had to watch over them. A few incidents demanded his attention, mostly the idiots of the town who hadn’t yet adjusted to their new reality seeing a chance to revert it. Only one group got so far as actually arming themselves with torches and pitchforks.

  They seemed quite surprised to find Ludvich waiting for them outside the house they were meeting up in, a nasty smile on his face and two of the least-unstable thralls behind him. For the next half-hour Ludvich explained to those poor, misled idiots just how bad an idea it was to anger a fucking Witchfinder-turned-vampire, as well as conveying a few choice pieces of trivia, such as the best way to remove all the skin from a man’s genitals without killing him, or how long a properly cared-for person could dangle from a meathook before his heart gave out.

  After that, he let them go and told them they could feel free to try again whenever they wanted. For some odd reason, there didn’t seem to be any takers on his offer. That left Ludvich free to continue attending more important matters.

  He couldn’t directly control Reggie’s undead, but fortunately the new level of mastery the lad had over them was enough that he’d been able to leave a standing order to obey Ludvich’s words. This meant that, despite Reggie’s absence, construction hadn’t really even been slowed.

  And that feeling kept creeping up on Ludvich, the certainty that things would go wrong. He buried it as best he could, which wasn’t well, and made himself focus on work.

  It wasn’t doing much to dilute it.

  ***

  Reggie killed the time spent waiting out day, and Krieg’s sleep, by listening to Ludvich’s reports regarding Norvhan. So far it all seemed to be going pretty good, which made him more nervous than not. The elves hadn’t made their move yet, apparently. And if they hadn’t made their move yet, more than a month later, it was because they were building up for a big one. Just how powerful was Warden Erindor?

  Either weak enough that he was struggling to even seize control of his military forces for one push, or strong enough that he was delayed just by the time they took to reconvene in a single region. Reggie decided to assume it was the former, since he was basically just fucked if it was the latter.

  It occurred to him that he didn’t need to be resting the way he was, either. Sleeping in coffins was nice, and apparently the soil in Ilgran still just about counted as the soil of his homeland, but for him it was more of a weekly, if not monthly affair.

  Granted, Reggie had been feeling the pull more than before since he’d reached Tier 3. Maybe that was it. Krieg appeared to be higher than him, Tier 4 maybe, was that the reason he was insistent on retiring? Did Reggie have a crippling need to do this daily to look forwards to when he hit Tier 4 himself?

  Well, he’d definitely still be reaching it either way.

  Thinking his way through that killed maybe ten minutes, communicating with Ludvich killed another few hours. Beyond that Reggie just lay there bored. He was starting to get hungry, too. Not good. Each new Tier had brought an upsurge to how often he needed to eat, and at Tier 3 it felt like he had to drain a human every day just to keep from starving.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Not that he’d be draining any humans, of course. In practice it turned into drinking a modest amount from 10 of them. One of the earlier experiments he’d actually done in Norvhan was using his Blood Magic to test the amount of blood in livestock’s veins, and its so-called ‘quality’ after feeding and seeing how long it took to replenish. If he took only a tenth or so, then that timeframe was around 6 weeks. 6 weeks for 10 people a day meant that he needed roughly 400 humans to keep him well fed. Exponentially more farm animals, the 2,000 or so in town now were barely sufficient.

  Embarrassingly, Reggie only just then started considering the implications of that. When he went up another Tier, his blood requirements would grow, too. As would they for each new vampire he made, and for each Tier those vampires gained. If Ludvich needed to feed as much as Reggie once he hit Tier 3, they wouldn’t have nearly enough from just the animals in town.

  More and more, Reggie was realising, vampirism made things complicated. And he could see now why his kind so invariably ended up running towns and regions—it was literally just the easiest, simplest way to keep themselves supplied with blood without needing to win a fucking fight every time they were hungry.

  It all came down to blood. Always, every time. Everything about Reggie’s existence now was blood.

  Well at least he had a lot of it. Actually, if Ludvich’s reports were anything to go by, Reggie was hoping he could functionally expand his supply of blood soon by introducing a scheme where townsfolk could stand to gain extra rations by offering theirs to him. No doubt it’d still erode some of the good will he’d won so far, but not nearly as much as people waking up with bite marks after not consenting to receive them.

  Maybe Reggie ought to look into procuring a few luxury goods, after this, too. If he had chocolate and sugar coming into Norvhan, strictly under his control along with everything else, then he could use that as the carrot for his feeding scheme. Though now he was just counting chickens before they hatched, and the problem with that of course was that you never knew when the chickens would spontaneously enter a demented pact to ruin your life.

  His parents had learned that the hard way.

  Night couldn’t come soon enough, and yet the hours between it and Reggie slithered by slow and steadily. When it was finally time to emerge from his resting chambers he felt a little bit over-rested. Anne, of course, was still fast asleep, this time of year there was only 10 or so hours of daylight and she had a good deal of rest to catch up on. Reggie left her where she was as one of Krieg’s thralls came to fetch him, following the servant out.

  This, he realised, was a chance to study one of the people living most close to Krieg, to get his measure by comparison with how he treated his underlings. So far it…didn’t look good.

  Reggie liked Krieg. Or, rather, he liked the idea of liking Krieg, but by the sight of this thrall the guy was a cock. The man was shorter than most people in Norvhan—in fact practically everyone in this town was—and walked with an odd sort of shuffle to his step, seeming perpetually on the brink of darting back from phantoms in the air around him. His eyes were kept low and his shoulders hunched, like he wanted to make himself as small and easily missed as possible.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine why all that was. Actually just a conversation with Krieg had been enough for Reggie to predict this sort of thing, the vampire didn’t seem to even see humans as…well, human. To his thinking they were just things that served him, pack animals if they were lucky and livestock if not.

  Krieg didn’t seem like the sort to shy away from slaughter, either.

  Why has every other vampire I’ve met been such an asshole?

  Reggie would’ve liked to think of his own sire as the exception to that rule, but he doubted even she was. She’d talked about his potential purely in terms of what he might manage once turned into a vampire, and even then seemed more amused than passionate about it. He thought he’d caught a glimmer of frustration with the treatment of humans under elves, from her, but that itself might’ve just been wishful thinking.

  Or a lie. He had to imagine you got good at lying, doing it for however many years. He chewed on that until nightfall.

  Krieg was waiting for Reggie in, of all places, a library. He looked up as Reggie stepped in with his face buried thoroughly in a book, brows arched.

  “Aqua fortis and quicksilver,” the vampire incanted. “Expensive, the quicksilver. You’re not expecting to get too much from my mines, I hope?”

  For a second there, Reggie had been sure he’d be confronted with his plans to make the blasting crystals. He hadn’t exactly discovered that stuff, in fact he’d first read about the formula in some old text going over instabilities in various substances. He was apparently just the first one to have any significant plans for it.

  But Krieg had fortunately not figured out what was going on. If Reggie still took in breaths, he’d have let one out in relief.

  “I have goods to trade for them,” Reggie assured him. “Depending on what you need here, that is.”

  Krieg looked thoughtful. “What do you think I need?”

  God, was he testing him? Reggie had enough of fucking tests already. First Ludvich, then the Circumscribers—then the Circumscribers had killed him—and then he’d gotten more bullshit tests from the vampires of Lorwick. Was it so hard to just ask him what he was capable of?

  [Wouldn’t you just lie, Reggie? You’re hiding so much already.]

  Shut up.

  “Your mansion,” Reggie said abruptly. “It’s seen better days, right? I have…means of repairing it. You asked me if I was an Irazhtan. I’m not, just to be clear, but I have picked up one of their tricks. Necromancy.”

  Krieg’s face fell and twisted with disgust at once.

  “You want me to invite an army of zombies into my domain?”

  “I’m offering you to have them tirelessly work to maintain your buildings, taking pointers from some of my subjects,” Reggie countered. “You could have this mansion back to perfect condition within a month or two. You could have it better than it ever was within six. I just want the quicksilver and aqua fortis.”

  He was winning the vampire over, that much Reggie could see at least.

  “Very well,” Krieg replied. “Provided you do something else for me.”