++It is when a vampire takes power that you see the true horror of their kind. The enslaving power of their blood, the endlessness of their ambition. Vampire Baronies do not last long, usually, but when they do they are a blight upon the world.++

  Book 2: Chapter 23

  All told, Reggie had gotten about a hundred people killed. He’d have preferred it if all those people were elves or soldiers, but of course the fighting had been too intense for that. His drained Wizard alone had ended up taking out about seven random bystanders just by trying and failing to smite Reggie, while stray shots and rampaging insects had slain two more. It was, one of his thralls informed him, still a good deal less fatal than the average siege.

  Naturally, the good people of Norvhan didn’t appreciate this fact. Reggie barely appreciated it himself, for that matter. It didn’t matter how abstractly bad a siege was, he’d never seen one. His only experience of anything comparable was what he’d done here, and that was about the most horrible discharge of violence Reggie could remember witnessing.

  But it was over now, the fighting done. Left over were maybe two scores of human soldiers, all of which at once wouldn’t have had a chance against him and Ludvich alone, and six thousand or so citizens.

  All of them at once were, in addition to this, terrified. Reggie didn’t get any questions about what would happen, any questions about summary executions or dismemberments or mass-feedings. He didn’t need to. He could see every single person wondering, but too scared to ask. Too desperate to avoid his eye, all hoping someone else would broach the topic so they could remain silent and unnoticed.

  He figured there was no harm in telling them all, with that in mind.

  “I am not going to kill any of you,” Reggie called out. He’d leapt up onto a building and transformed back into his human form to make the speech, figuring that nobody would be dumb enough to think that just because he wasn’t— someone shot him. The musket ball went a good deal deeper than normal, finding itself resisted by his weakened human-form flesh, but it was still trying to carve a path through something in the ballpark of stone’s toughness.

  Reggie looked down at the wound in his side, a tiny little thing barely deeper than the skin, and then looked over to the idiot still wielding the gun responsible. Black smoke trailed between its barrel and Reggie’s gut, so tracking the source was no hard thing.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t do that,” Reggie declared. The shooter actually passed out as he heard him say it, and Reggie ignored the insensible moron to address people who, he at least hoped, had brains.

  “Alright, uh, you all know me…” Reggie trailed off. “Wait, no you don’t. The older ones among you know me.” He swept an eye across the crowd and was satisfied to see several middle-aged or elderly folk wither back from it. “Everyone else probably has no memory of me other than maybe growing up hearing about the town lunatic who died fifteen years ago. That was me. I’m not a lunatic though, I’m also not possessed by a demon.” He paused, considered things for a moment. “I am a vampire, but that’s actually all of you lot’s fault because I only got turned after the elves murdered me for stuff I ended up doing to try and escape poverty. So if you think about it, this whole thing is actually self-inflicted.”

  Pure, searing hatred shot back at him from ten thousand eyes. Reggie had never had much of a way with words.

  “Oh don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. “This is all of your faults. Anyway, nothing much is going to change. I’m in charge now and sometimes I’ll give you all work, and the proceeds of the town get distributed as I say fit. Otherwise you can all live in peace. As long as you aren’t dicks. Try to betray me or kill me or something and I’ll eat you. Sound fair?”

  From the corner of his eye, Reggie caught the remaining soldiers, disarmed as they were, attempting to slip away. A single mental command sent his reanimates out to encircle them. By now the undead had a 2 : 1 numerical advantage. Easily overcome, by trained Workers with weapons. Not by ones with fists only.

  He’d get to them next, just had to focus up on the townsfolk first.

  “Someone important step forwards,” Reggie called out. Nothing happened. He sighed. “I’m giving you all a chance to pick a few people who you think can speak for you, would you all rather I choose instead?”

  He wouldn’t actually do that of course, Ludvich had still been living in Norvhan as recently as a few months ago, and if it came to that Reggie would just defer to his judgement. Still, he preferred to make it the townspeople’s choice. If nothing else, it would let them feel in control and maybe mollify them.

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  Reggie was kept waiting for a while until about half a dozen people ended up being settled on by the townsfolk, slowly trimmed down from the few hundred pushed forwards first. He gestured the chosen few over and moved down to speak with them more privately.

  “What would your plans be for this town next?” Reggie asked upfront, having no time or energy for anything other than straight questions and straighter answers.

  It was a woman who ended up speaking first, which didn’t surprise Reggie. Women were generally more accustomed to staring down a potentially violent, much stronger person than men were. For obvious reasons.

  “I don’t understand what you mean… lord.”

  Lord.

  She was Garwin’s daughter, Anne, but made no show of recognising him. Reggie ignored the irritation he felt at that.

  “What does this town need, now, to keep it going smoothly?” He asked. “I’m planning on having the outer walls fixed, my undead can do that easily enough. So what do the people need now?”

  That just seemed to confuse them even more. Clearly, being asked what they needed was not something they were used to. Wasn’t something they had the equipment to process. Reggie realised then just how little he knew about the people of Norvhan, in the grand scheme of things. He may have lived alongside them and grown up around them, but there’d always been a mile-wide gulf separating him from them.

  Not that Reggie was exactly used to wider society giving a shit about his needs, of course. It just hadn’t occurred to him that other people wouldn’t be, either.

  Fortunately, the town’s representatives were as quick to adjust as he himself was. Reggie saw them exchanging looks and watched them get together for a more hasty discussion.

  “Take your time,” he told them all as he started to move away. They were speaking in hushed tones, as if they didn’t want Reggie to hear. He could’ve probably listened in anyway. Humans didn’t tend to know how good a vampire’s senses were, and even if they’d been told most couldn’t put that into any practically accurate estimates. If he stood twice as far as a normal person would’ve needed, they’d just about be audible and probably none the wiser.

  But he headed off anyway. Reggie figured letting them speak without him anywhere near would relax them, and Ludvich would be eavesdropping anyway.

  Reggie’s biggest concern was never the townsfolk anyway, but the soldiers.

  They’d all been rounded up and boxed into a storage shed close to the outer wall, ringed by about thirty undead armed with pikes and axes. To Reggie’s surprise, several of the undead were holding those weapons the way they might have done in life. Their postures entirely human and crisply practiced. He realised after a moment of study that these were the ones he’d reanimated at the end of the fighting, after improving his Necromancy.

  Which was damned promising, if it meant what he thought it did, but would demand further testing to confirm.

  No time for that testing now, Reggie had to deal with other problems. Fortunately, like so many problems in the world, these ones cancelled each other out. He entered the shed and saw soldiers shy back from him. The men weren’t actually shackled, Norvhan didn’t exactly have a ready supply of chains or cuffs, but they huddled together as if they were all the same. He could see the terror scribbled across each of their faces and drank it in.

  This was a different sort of satisfaction to the one he got from dominating the townsfolk. None of these soldiers had ever done a thing to Reggie, and unlike the younger people of Norvhan none had even heard of him before he became a vampire. But they were still the enforcing arm of elven rule, they were still the guillotine blade held dangling over Reggie’s neck his whole life.

  “I need defenders for my new territory,” he told them all.

  They did not look pleased about this, which was fair enough. Reggie was planning on basically enslaving them all.

  “Are you going to kill us?” One of the men, either brave or stupid, demanded.

  “Why would I do that?” Reggie asked. “It’d be pointless and wasteful.”

  [But it would be so fun, Reggie!]

  “Shut up.”

  The man flinched. “I didn’t…say anything.”

  “Not you,” Reggie snapped. “I’m talking to the demonic voice that lives in my head.”

  The man started crying, and the air suddenly reeked of piss. Reggie looked past him, and the other weepers, and searched for the ones who seemed to be most composed. They were the biggest problem, he knew. Men who kept calm would be rational and clear, and given time they’d think of a way to screw him over.

  Spending time around Ludvich and watching him work had given Reggie a very strong appreciation for what a normal human could do if he kept his cool and applied himself to resolving a situation. There ended up being only a few Ludvichs among the group, and of them none seemed to match the Witchfinder’s composure. Reggie was hardly surprised there, one did not live to be an old Witchfinder if one was cut from any common cloth. Drawing the soldiers outside, he found himself confronted by one of them.

  “Is this where you drain us?” He growled, eyes wide and voice trembling despite the show of courage.

  Reggie didn’t answer, somehow it made things harder to talk to the man. He just grabbed him by the head with one hand and slit open his other palm, then forced it into his face. The soldier coughed and groaned as the ichor dripped out to fill his mouth, willed out of Reggie’s veins by a mental command, and the soldier seemed intent on spitting the fluid out. Reggie didn’t let him, holding it there until asphyxiation threatened the man enough to make him swallow. He let him fall back, knowing from past experience that it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes for his ichor to have its effects, and moved on to the remaining ones.

  Within half an hour, Reggie had a new squad of soldiers. He then got to work on the rest. Unfortunately he returned to the shed to find that several were dead, apparently having worked out what fate was awaiting them and chosen suicide as the preferable option.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” Reggie found himself snarling. “What, do you care so much about fucking me over that you’d rather die than do anything else?”

  Naturally, he didn’t get any reply to that. All the courageous soldiers had either been recognised in his first scan and already enthralled, or taken their own lives to escape that fate. He just sighed in the end.

  “Whatever, let’s get on with it.”