Empire of the Vampire

by Jay Kristoff

  “‘And yet she wasn’t above bedding a vampire.’

  “De Coste fell silent as Theo Petit stepped through the doorway. The big lad was dressed in his leathers, but his tunic was unlaced, and I could see a hint of metallic ink beneath. A beautiful angel was tattooed from knuckles to elbow on his left forearm, and what looked to be a snarling bear was scribed on his chest. He had a plate of chicken legs in hand, and he flopped into bed, chewing noisily.

  “‘That’s the funny thing about highborn women,’ Theo mused. ‘They’re the same height as any other when they’re down on all fours.’

  “‘Blood from the gutter and a mouth from the sewer,’ de Séverin sneered. ‘If it isn’t Theo Petit. The answer to the question no one was asking.’

  “‘We’re all the Dead’s bastards here, Aaron. We’re all shit on the bottom of the Emperor’s boots. We’re all damned.’ Theo stuffed a chicken leg into his face and spoke to de Coste with his mouth full. ‘So give the tortured nobleson sermon a rest, eh?’

  “Aaron only scowled. ‘Just because you lost your master to the sangirè doesn’t give you leave to forget your manners, Petit. I am the senior initiate of this company.’

  “Theo stopped chewing a moment, eyes flashing.

  “‘You make mention of my master again, we might have to test that theory, Aaron.’

  “De Coste looked the big lad up and down, but didn’t seem keen to press. Instead, he lay back on his pillow, muttering beneath his breath. ‘Softcock…’

  “Theo scoffed, put his boots up on the bed. ‘Your sister sings a different tune.’

  “I chuckled softly, marking the ledger in my head.

  “‘What the hell are you laughing at, Kitten?’ Aaron snarled.

  “I shot a poisoned glance at de Coste, but the matter seemed settled for now. I met Theo’s eyes, nodding silent thanks, but the big boy simply shrugged in return—I guessed the quarrel was less about Theo defending me, and more about his dislike of de Coste. And so, silent and bruised and still friendless, I returned to cleaning my boots, trying not to think too much about my failure in the Gauntlet. I had no line and no gifts to call my own, save that which we all shared. I’d learned nothing of my father. But despite all Aaron said, despite the Trial, I still felt I was fated to be there. God did want me in San Michon. Frailblood or no.”

  Gabriel paused a moment, lacing his fingers as he stared down at his hands.

  “But you want to know the awful thing, coldblood?”

  “Tell me the awful thing, Silversaint,” Jean-François replied.

  “I lay in bed later that night, my wounds nothing but a memory, and I thought on what de Coste had told me about his brother in the army. About the restoration of this monastery being only an Empress’s whim. And my first thought wasn’t for the people who might be spared if the Forever King was crushed by the Golden Host. It wasn’t of the soldiers who might die defeating him, or the horror that this conflict had come at all. My first thought was to pray that the war wouldn’t be over by the time I got there.”

  Gabriel sighed, and met the historian’s eyes.

  “Can you believe that? I was actually afraid I was going to miss out.”

  “Is such not the desire of all young men with swords? Win glory, or glorious death?”

  “Glory,” Gabriel scoffed. “Tell me something, vampire. If death is so glorious, how is it meted so cheaply and so often by the most worthless of men?”

  The Last Silversaint shook his head.

  “I’d no idea what was coming. No clue what they were going to make of me. But I did know this was my life now. And so, I vowed again to make the best of it. Whatever Aaron said, I felt in my bones that San Michon would be the salvation of the empire. I truly believed that I’d been chosen, that all this—my sister’s murder, what I’d done to Ilsa, the cursed and bastard blood in my veins—all of it was part of God’s plan. And if I trusted in him, if I said my prayers and praised his name and followed his word, all would be well.”

  Gabriel scoffed, staring down at the sevenstar on his palm.

  “What a fucking fool I was.”

  “Take heart, de León.” The coldblood’s voice was soft as the scratching of his pen. “You were not alone in your hopes. But none can best a foe that cannot die.”

  “The snows at Augustin weren’t soaked red with mortal blood alone. You died in droves that night, coldblood.”

  A slender shrug. “Our dead stay dead, Silversaint. Yours rise against you.”

  “And you believe that a good thing? Tell me, do you never wonder where all this ends? After the monsters you’ve birthed drain these lands dry of every man, woman, and child, all of you will starve. Wretched and highblood alike.”

  “Hence the need for a firm rule.” Pale fingers brushed the embroidered wolves on the vampire’s frockcoat. “An empress with the foresight to build, rather than destroy. Fabién Voss was wise to harness the foulbloods as a weapon. But their time is at an end.”

  “The wretched outnumber you fifty to one. There are four major kith bloodlines, and all have corpse armies in thrall. You think those vipers are going to give up their legions without a struggle?”

  “They may struggle all they wish. They shall fail.”

  Gabriel looked to the monster then, cold calculation in his eyes. The bloodhymn still thrummed in his veins, sharpening his mind as well as his senses. The coldblood’s face was stone, his eyes, liquid darkness. But even the barest rock can tell a story to those with the teaching to see it. Despite it all—the carnage, the betrayal, the failure—Gabriel de León was a hunter who knew his quarry. And in a blinking, he saw the answer, as clear and crisp as if the monster had written the words in that damnable book.

  “That’s why you seek the Grail,” he breathed. “You think the cup can bring you victory against the other bloodlines.”

  “Children’s stories hold no interest for my Empress, Silversaint. But your story does.” The monster tapped the book in his lap. “So return to it, if you’d be so kind. You were a fifteen-year-old boy. The halfbreed bastard of a vampire father, dragged from provincial squalor to the impregnable walls of San Michon. You grew to be a paragon of the Order, just as you vowed. They sang songs about you, de León. The Black Lion. Wielder of the Ashdrinker. Slayer of the Forever King. How does one rise from beginnings so low to become legend?” The monster’s lip curled. “And then fall so very far?”

  Gabriel looked to the lantern flame, his mouth pressed thin. The bloodsmoke roiled inside him, sharpening not only his mind, but his memory. He ran one thumb across his tattooed fingers, the word P A T I E N C E etched below his knuckles.

  The years at his back seemed mere moments, and those moments were clear as crystal. He could smell silverbell on the air, see candleflame reflected in his mind’s eye. He could feel smooth hips swaying beneath his hands. Eyes dark with want, lips red as cherries open against his, fingernails clawing his naked back. He heard a whisper then, hot and desperate, and he echoed it without thinking, the words slipping over his lips in a sigh.

  “We cannot do this.”

  Jean-François’s head tilted. “No?”

  Gabriel blinked, found himself back in that cold tower with that dead thing. He could taste ashes. Hear the screams of monsters that had denied death for centuries, delivered at last by his hand. And he met the coldblood’s gaze, his voice tinged with shadow and flame.

  “No,” he said.

  “De León—”

  “No. I’ve no more wish to speak of San Michon just now, if it please you.”

  “It does not please me.” A thin frown marred Jean-François’s flawless brow. “I wish to hear of your years in the paleblood monastery. Your apprenticeship. Your ascendance.”

  “And you’ll hear about all of it in time,” Gabriel growled. “We have all night, you and I. And all the nights we’ll need thereafter, I’d wager. But if you seek knowledge of the Grail, then we should return to the day I found it.”

  “That is not the
way stories work, Silversaint.”

  “This is my story, coldblood. And if I have the right of it, these will be the last words I’ll ever speak upon this earth. So if this is to be my last confession, and you my priest, trust that I know how best to impart the tally of my own fucking sins. By the time the telling is done, we’ll have returned to Lorson. The Charbourg. The red snows of Augustin. And oui, even San Michon. But for now, I’ll speak of the Grail. How it came to me. How I lost it. And all between. Believe me when I say your Empress will have her answers by the end.”

  Jean-François of the Blood Chastain was displeased, a hint of fangs in his silent snarl. But in the end, the monster ran his tapered fingertips over the feathers at his throat and acquiesced with a tilt of his chin.

  “Very well, de León. Have it your way.”

  “I always did, coldblood. That was half the fucking problem.”

  The Last Silversaint leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers at his chin.

  “So,” he sighed. “It all began with a rabbit hole.”

  BOOK TWO

  THIS ENDLESS NIGHT

  A great and terrible host were come upon the walls, and the city’s defenders quailed, for among the Dead could be seen faces of those known them; loved ones slain and comrades in arms fallen. But the Black Lion raised his sword to heaven, and his princely countenance was grim, and at the sound of his voice, their faithless hearts were raised up.

  “No fear,” he bid them. “Only fury.”

  —JEAN-SÉBASTIEN RICARD

  The Battle of Báih Sìde

  I

  INJUSTICE

  “NIGHT WAS A good two hours off when it happened,” Gabriel said. “I was riding north through ruined farmlands, soaked with grey drizzle. The first bitter bite of winter was in the wind, and the land about me had a haunted air. Dead trees were hung with ropes of pale fungus, the road naught but miles of empty black slurry. The villages I passed through were ghost towns—buildings empty and cemeteries full. I hadn’t seen a living person in days. It’d been more than a decade since I traveled through the realm of Emperor Alexandre, Third of His Name. And all seemed worse than when I’d abandoned it.”

  “How long ago was this, exactly?” Jean-François asked.

  “Three years back. I was thirty-two years old.”

  “Where had you been?”

  “South.” Gabriel shrugged. “Down in Sūdhaem.”

  “And why did you leave your beloved Nordlund?”

  “Patience, coldblood.”

  The vampire pursed his lips, but made no reply.

  “I wore my old greatcoat to keep off the rain. Faded bloodstains. Black leather. Tricorn pulled low, collar laced high, like my old master taught me. It’d been years since I’d put that kit on, but it still fit like a glove. My sword hung in a beaten scabbard at my waist, my head bowed against the weather as we rode through the miserable so-called day.

  “Justice hated the rain. Always had. But he rode hard as he always did, on into the cold and empty quiet. A beauty he was: black and brave and solid as a castle wall. For a gelding, that horse had more balls than most stallions I’d ever met.”

  Jean-François glanced upward. “You still had the same horse?”

  Gabriel nodded. “He was a little creakier than he used to be. Just as I was. But it was as Abbot Khalid had told me—Justice was my truest friend. He’d saved my life more times than I could count by then. We’d ridden all the way through hell together, and he’d brought me all the way home. I loved him like a brother.”

  “And you kept the name that foulmouthed sisternovice gave him? Astrid Rennier?”

  “Oui.”

  “Why? Was the girl of some significance to you?”

  Gabriel turned his eyes to the lantern, the flame dancing in his pupils.

  “Patience, coldblood.”

  Quiet hung in the cell, the only sound the whisper of nib on parchment. It was a long while before the silversaint continued.

  “I’d been riding months without much rest. I’d planned to be over the Volta before wintersdeep struck, but the roads were harder going than I expected, and the map I carried well out of date. The locals had ripped down the tollway at Hafti and destroyed the bridge over the Keff, for starters. There were no ferrymen plying trade that I could find, no living soul for fucking miles. So, I’d been forced to double back and head upstream.”

  “Why?” Jean-François asked.

  Gabriel blinked. “Why did I double back?”

  “Why did the locals destroy the bridge over the river Keff?”

  “As I said, this was just three years ago. It’d been twenty-four years since daysdeath. The lords of the Blood had turned the realm into a slaughterhouse by then. Nordlund was a wasteland. Save for a few coastal duns, the Ossway had fallen. The Forever King’s armies were drawing ever closer to Augustin, and masterless wretched crawled northern Sūdhaem like lice on a dockside jezebel. The locals had smashed the bridge to cut off their advance.”

  The vampire tapped his quill, brow creased. “I told you, de León. Speak as if to a child. For what reason did the locals tear down the bridge?”

  The silversaint stared hard, his jaw clenched. Then he spoke, not only as if to a child, but as if to one who’d been dropped repeatedly and enthusiastically on the head by its mother.

  “Vampires can’t cross running water. Except at bridges, or buried in cold earth. The most powerful among them might manage it with a supreme act of will. But to the newborn Dead, a fast-flowing river may as well be a wall of flame.”

  “Merci. Please, continue.”

  “You sure? No other fuckmumblery to which you already know the answer?”

  The vampire smiled. “Patience, Chevalier.”

  Gabriel breathed deep and marched on. “So. I hadn’t smoked since morning, and my thirst was quietly creeping up on me. I knew I’d not make it much farther that day. But consulting my old map, I saw that the town of Dhahaeth lay not an hour’s ride north. Presuming the place was still standing, the promise of a fire and something hot in my belly was enough to keep the shakes at bay. So, hoping to make up lost time, I cut off road, through a rolling carpet of whitecaps and into a forest of living fungus and long-dead trees.

  “I was barely ten minutes into the woods before the first wretched found me.

  “A woman. Perhaps thirty when she was murdered. She was silent as ghosts, but Justice caught wind of her, ears pressed against his skull. A second later I saw her, moving like a hunter, right at me. Her hair was a wild blonde tangle, and she came at me wolf-quick, thin and naked, skin hanging in damp folds around a gaping wound at her neck.

  “She was running quick. Far quicker than a mortal man. I’d no fear of a single wretched, but these bastards are like minstrels—where there’s one, there’s always others, and the more that find you, the more aggravating they get. So I gave Justice a nudge and we were running, off through the shipwrecked trees.

  “I loosened my sword in its sheath as I saw another wretched off to my right. A little Sūdhaemi boy, dashing through the tall spires of tubers and toadstools. I spied another ahead, then. And another. All quiet as corpses. All running swift. None of them moved quick as Justice, mind you. But I could tell they were a pack. Each at least a decade old.”

  Jean-François raised one eyebrow, tapped his quill. “As if to a child, de León.”

  Gabriel sighed.

  “Newborn wretched are dangerous, don’t mistake me. But on a scale of one to ten, with one being your average Ossway pub brawl, and ten being the most fearsome nightmare hell’s belly can spit, they rate about a four. Not even the eldest among them is a match for a highblood. But older wretched can’t be underestimated. Your kind grow more powerful the longer your blood has to thicken. These ones were dangerous, and they were many. But Justice charged on through the deadwood, weaving through the mushroom thickets at full gallop. His hooves were thunder and his heart was dauntless, and we soon left those bloodless bastards in our wake.
>
  “We burst from the woods a while later, damp with sweat, out into the rain. A chill grey valley lay below us, thick with fog. A little way northeast, I could see a dark ribbon of road in the gloom. A few miles beyond lay the river ford, and safety.

  “I patted Justice as he galloped down into the valley, murmured into his ear.

  “‘My brother. My best boy.’

  “And then his hoof found the rabbit hole. His foreleg sank into the earth, the joint snapped with an awful craaack, his screams filling my ears as we fell. I smashed into the ground, felt something break, gasping with agony as I rolled to rest against a rotten stump. My sword had slipped from its scabbard and was lying in the muck. My skull was ringing, fire raging down my arm. I knew in a heartbeat I’d snapped it—that familiar broken-glass grind under my skin. Not so bad it wouldn’t be healed by morning. But the same couldn’t be said for poor Justice.”

  Gabriel sighed, long and deep.

  “I rose up from my boy’s wreck, hands and chin blacked with mud. Looking at the shank of bone torn through his fetlock as he tried to rise, brave to the last.

  “‘Oh no,’ I breathed. ‘No, no.’

  “Justice screamed again, wild with agony. I turned my face to the heavens above, a familiar rage swelling in my chest. I looked down at my friend, my arm bleeding, throat tightening, heart breaking. He’d been with me since that first day in San Michon. Through blood and war, fire and fury. Seventeen years. He was all I had left. And now … this?

  “‘God fucking hates me,’ I whispered.

  “And why think ye that might be, m-might be?

  “The voice came as it always did. Silver-soft ripples inside my head. I ignored it best I could, watching as my brother tried to stand on his broken leg. His fetlock bent wrong, and down he went again, big brown eyes rolling in his skull. His agony was my agony.

  “Know ye what must be d-done, Gabriel, came the silvered voice again.