Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  Despite my continued labours, I still have no clue as to why the elixir will not work upon my own flesh, nor that of those few unfortunate others who share my stubborn mortality. Perhaps that God, in which Quintus and you believe so firmly, loves this miserable unbeliever so ardently that He cannot bear to delay the moment when I shall be delivered into His care. Or it may be that He wishes to hurry me into the care of that Other, whom the Gregorians assert to be the parent and master of the vampire race. I cannot tell.

  In any case, I have become reconciled to the fact that I belong to that company which is marked for early death. With things as they are in Europe, I believe that there will be many vampires who will precede me to the grave, for there is burgeoning violence everywhere now that common men are hungry for the blood of those who have preyed upon them for a thousand years.

  The deterioration in my eyesight has continued, and although I wear spectacles at all times, save when I am at my microscope, I cannot obtain proper relief I believe that I must have some disease which is affecting the interior of my eye, and I think that I might soon go blind. I cannot help but consider this a suitably ironic fate. I remain convinced that all diseases are caused by tiny living agents which penetrate the body and disturb its operation, and yet I have not identified with confidence even a handful of such creatures, despite the aid of the instrument which you forged for me so long ago. I have tried since coming to Malta to obtain better and more powerful combinations of lenses, in the hope of looking yet deeper into the heart of things, but it seems that these agents, if they do exist, are determined to strike back at me, and frustrate my quest.

  In spite of these difficulties, I have continued with experiments with the transformed semen which vampires produce, and have not contented myself with attempts to enhance the power of the elixir. I dare not say now what I think I may achieve, but I am embarked upon a series of investigations which may give us more power over the forces of life and death. Quintus knows what I am doing, and the Grandmaster too, but I have not told many others, because I think that it would alarm them, and because I fear to fail. I have retired to Mdina in order to carry out this work, and I think that la Valette and his fighting men have not been sorry to see me leave the region of the Grand Harbour, for I have such a reputation as wizard and alchemist as makes me fearful in spite of my frailty. Vampires dislike to be in the company of ugliness, and I have to say that no one could now believe that I was once the worthy son of the handsomest man in England.

  Quintus is not with me just now, having gone to the south of the island to examine a stone unearthed at Marsa Xloqq, which carries an inscription in two different tongues – one the Greek which he already knows, the other a tongue which is foreign to him, which may be the language which the islanders spoke when they were part of the empire of Carthage. If Quintus is right about its nature, that stone was lost long before St. Paul was driven here by tempestuous Euroclydon and shipwrecked on the island. It is a link to a more distant past than any vampire of the order remembers.

  Quintus has said to me that the strange stone circles which can be found on the island are as ancient as any in England, and he has been fascinated too by certain bones exhumed from the caves of Ghar Dalam, which the islanders claim to be the bones of giants. Gigantic they certainly are, but Quintus believes them to be the bones of elephants rather than men, and wonders if the Carthaginians brought such beasts here when they were the island’s governors. Immortality has made him not one whit less avid for the wisdom and understanding which he has always craved, and I cannot believe that he will ever fall into the kind of waking dream which claimed so many vampires in Adamawara. I can say with confidence that in the centuries of life which stretch before you, there will be time enough for all the matters of state and science to which your ambition and your curiosity bid you. A man such as you, I think, would not waste a single day of life no matter how long he might live, nor be led to desolation by the tedium of eternity.

  Write to me again as soon as your duties will give you time. Send me news of your new parliament, and of the Commonwealth which you have built in England, and of the progress of explorations in Atlantis. Tell me all that you can which is good and bright and hopeful, for that is the kind of news which we desperately need.

  Remember, I beg you, to pray for all of us, that we might prevail against the assaults of Gaul and Walachia.

  Fare well, my friend, and be happy.

  Noell Cordery

  ONE

  The Voivode Vlad the Fifth – whose scribes signed him Dragulya, and who was known to the world as Vlad Tepes, the Impaler – returned in a poor temper from the council of war to his lodgings on the outskirts of the city of Naples.

  There had been a time, perhaps two hundred years earlier, when the news that Vlad Tepes was in a poor temper would have set his entire entourage trembling, and struck terror into the heart of anyone who might have incurred his wrath. Those were the days in which he had earned his name, and earned it full well, first in putting down the only serious rebellion which Attila’s empire had ever faced, and then in his historic victory over the Turks who had taken advantage of Walachia’s trouble to mount an invasion. Vlad’s army had clashed with the army of Mohammed II at the Danube, and had won a great victory for Attila, for Walachia and for Christendom.

  Dragulya’s enemies then had been treated utterly without mercy, and he had been a man ever eager to find more enemies, whose opposition to his will could be quickly snuffed out. His dark fame had been spread throughout Europe by the poet Michael Beheim, who had carried blood-curdling tales of his deeds to all the courts in Walachia, causing more anxiety than relief to Attila’s long-lived princes, who feared that this upstart might outshine them all in the emperor’s favour.

  Centuries had passed since Dragulya had last planted a forest of stakes whose sharpened points were to be driven remorselessly into the bodies of his enemies. He was by no means averse to arranging the odd impalement, but he had lately kept the habit within the bounds that might be expected of a civilised man, and usually did it somewhat in the spirit of a jest – for he liked to think himself a very humorous man, after his own fashion.

  His followers nowadays liked to tell the tales of his most famous jests x2013; when he had had the caps of a group of cardinals nailed to their heads because they would not doff them in his presence; or when he flayed the soles of Mohammed’s faithless messengers and let goats lick salt from the raw wounds x2013; and they laughed more freely at such incidents than once they had. In those times when Dragulya’s cruel jokes were of more common occurrence, and were feared as fates which might befall any visitor or member of his household, none had taken much pleasure in the telling of the stories, though that had not prevented their being told.

  The response of his servants now to news of his annoyance was a very ordinary determination to be careful, and Dragulya, when he saw it, regretted that he had not better maintained his reputation for horrors. His opinion was that if he and others had more diligently followed the examples he had set in his treatment of the Turks, the enemies which were within Attila’s empire would not be so eager to make their bid to topple it. This opinion had been brought to the forefront of his mind by his meeting with the man sent by Charlemagne to be his partner in the enterprise which faced him. If Richard the Norman had ever honestly won the right to be called Lionheart (which Dragulya doubted) then he had surely lost it during the last year.

  When Dragulya had removed his quilted armour, which he had been forced by protocol to wear despite the oppressive heat, he sent immediately for Beheim, who was now his friend and adviser. That had been one of his kinder jests, for when the minstrel had first been brought to Dragulya’s court he had fully expected the Impaler to drive a pointed stick up his arse and stand him up in the courtyard to die – uncomfortably slowly – as his own weight dragged his guts downwards about the point. Instead, it had been something else entirely that the noble prince had stuck into his anus, and instead of b
eing killed he had been made immortal. And why? Because the princes of Gaul, inspired by Charlemagne, all had their minstrels to flatter them with music and wit, and Vlad Tepes had desired a minstrel to suit his own peculiar temper – a poet who would celebrate the power of his wrath as he wished to hear it celebrated.

  Perhaps, thought Dragulya, now, there was not difference enough in choosing to be painted a monster instead of a hero. To accept a flatterer at all was to admit a Gaulish weakness that should have been condemned.

  Michael Beheim came not hurriedly in answer to his master’s summons, but not because he was apprehensive of the voivode’s mood. He had learned through the long years that what Dragulya most valued in him was his insolence – an impudence which he alone was licensed to possess — and he always liked to be lazy in responding when he was called. On this occasion, though, his late arrival was greeted by a scowl more ominous than was usual

  ‘How went the celebrations?’ asked the poet of the warlord, uneasily.

  Dragulya was relaxing in a lukewarm bath, with only his face and beard protruding from the scummy water. He did not seem very relaxed as yet, and his eyes – as Beheim might have described them in his poetic manner – were smouldering with anger. ‘We met to plan a campaign,’ he growled, ‘not to celebrate a victory.’

  ‘Most certainly,’ replied Beheim. ‘But the victory is never greater than in the planning, nor the celebration more joyous than in the anticipation. We poor artists, who can only tell the stories of battles once they have been fought, cannot paint so fabulous a picture as the schemes of the generals who have yet to take the field. Or am I wrong, and was there naught in your meeting with great Lionheart but strife and mistrust? That would be a pity and a vexation, not least for Blondel and I, who must tell it differently when our time comes to sing the praises of your triumph, when Malta is destroyed?’

  The voivode raised his hand above the surface of the water, and brought it down again to make a dull splash. ‘Lionheart!’ he exclaimed, with disgust.

  ‘You do not like Prince Richard,’ observed Michael Beheim, deliberately calm in his statement of the obvious.

  ‘The man is a fool! He has done the empires of our kind more damage with one act of monumental cowardice than all our enemies have inflicted in a thousand years of warfare. It is bad enough that this fool must be foisted on me, but intolerable that he looks at me with a distaste which he cannot conceal. He speaks to me with condescension, as if he believes me to be stupid. You could never guess, to hear this Richard talk, which one of us had lost his crown and accepted exile from his homeland. I do believe he takes a certain pride in his retreat, thinking that his reluctance to shed English blood reflects some noble regard for the cattle over which he reigned, and a degree of civilisation which we of the East are too crude to savour. Civilisation! I could not believe that this was a man who once fought the Mohammedans as fiercely as any, and I swear that his cursed Blondel must have told far bolder lies in singing his master’s praises than ever you told of me.’

  ‘But he has brought a thousand vampire knights to Cagliari,’ Michael Beheim pointed out. ‘We hardly dared to hope that the West could spare so many, with the Dutch and the Danes in open revolt, and all of Gaul in turmoil. Who else could Charlemagne send, when all his other princes are so urgently occupied? These Norman are not cowards, for all that they departed England without attempting to fight against unreasonable odds – and the slur upon their honour will make it all the more vital for them to distinguish themselves in the coming fight. I think they will serve us well, my lord.’

  ‘Ach!’ said Dragulya. ‘I do not believe that these self-elected heroes know how to fight. I no longer trust their accounts of those crusades which once they fought. Their code of chivalry makes me sick with its vanities and posturings. Their tournaments have accustomed them to play at fighting instead of making war; of their thousand knights there can only be two hundred who have ever been in battle, and they like all the rest are spoiled by dreams and illusions. They have brought their warhorses and lances, but they leave nearly all their muskets to be carried by common soldiers, because they do not consider it honourable to bear such arms. Nor are all his common soldiers armed with guns – he has brought four hundred common men who are trained to fight with longbows!’

  ‘Longbows, my lord?’

  ‘Oh yes! Perhaps Richard was a fine fighter when the business of war was all swords and longbows, but he does not truly belong to our world. How else do you think he could have woken up one morning to find that those English cannon which are said to be the finest in the world were aimed against him instead of being set to defend him? Betrayed by his own mechanicians, unable or unwilling to keep a check on his common generals – the man is an imbecile! And then to surrender his citadel without a fight!’

  ‘If the reports are true,’ said Beheim, drily, ‘all the vampire knights in England would have been slaughtered to a man, had he resisted.’ ‘So be it!’ cried Dragulya. ‘They’d have taken ten thousand commoners with them – and what those commoners had done would be a crime against nature which Gaul could punish in due course with a hundred thousand executions and the burning of every city in England. What Richard did made it not a crime and a blasphemy but a victory in ordinary war, and gave the message to the world that common men could fight against vampires, iron against iron. We have lost our standing as a legion of demons, and have become mere men of hardy flesh. We have lost the greatest ally we ever had – the dread of superstition – and it was Richard the Norman who betrayed us.’

  ‘If he had stood his ground and submitted to annihilation,’ said Beheim, ‘England would still be lost to Gaul, and where would Charles have found a thousand knights to add to our strength in this coming conflict? Would you rather the Spanish and Italian ships were manned by the common scum of Europe?’

  ‘I’d have none of them!’ replied Dragulya, without hesitation. ‘I’d rather fight with my thousand vampire Walachians, and a like number of my own common men, than have that number matched by any that Charles might give me. Attila was a fool to divide his empire with the Roman general in the days of the first conquest. In Gaul they still consider theirs the true empire, and Walachia a nest of barbarians. They have laughed at us behind their hands even while our kinsmen have built Khanates in India and Cathay, while our armies have defended Byzantium against the Sultans, and while our merchants have made safe the trade routes that connect them with the East. Attila should have sacked Rome, made one empire out of all the world, and proved himself a greater man than Alexander.’

  ‘But Attila is not a man as great as that,’ the poet reminded him, gently, ‘as you know full well.’

  ‘He was old before I ever knew him,’ the voivode replied. ‘Aye, and mad too. But in his own day … he was not always the stricken creature that he now is … I do not believe it.’

  ‘If he had not been mad before he was made a vampire,’ said Beheim, ‘then likely he would not be mad today. No doubt he was a fiercer fighting man in the days of his conquests, but he was not a man who might really rule the world. It is not he whose authority has secured the fortunes of Walachia, but men like Frederick Barbarossa and your own father – aye, and men like yourself. Yours is the real power, and the true wonder is that you proclaim allegiance to Attila while you wield it. But still, that is history. What of tomorrow? You surely do not fear to lose this crusade against the Order of St. John, no matter how poorly Richard may support you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Dragulya, sarcastically. ‘We cannot lose. Has not the pope himself come to bless our fighting men? The new vampires which this troublesome alchemist has made with his elixir cannot stand against an army such as ours – there can be no doubt of it. But who will be the real victors? Who will drink a full measure of strength and power in the blood of the defeated, now that England is lost to Gaul and Charlemagne’s empire is crumbling like a house of cards? It is too late, Michael, too late.’

  ‘The victory, my lord, will be
measured by the songs of praise which are sung by such as I,’ said Beheim, though he knew that the voivode had not his future fame in mind. ‘If we sing it loudly enough, we may yet cast doubt upon the ambitions of our enemies, and turn the tide for Charles and for Walachia.’

  ‘Our armies are combined to tell the world that Gaul and Walachia will stand together against a common enemy,’ said Dragulya, ‘but I fear that we will tell a different story to those who watch keenly. Even our friends may see a competition between Richard and myself, to see how we will answer those who stand against us, and even our victory might show us divided. We cannot destroy the secret which this Maltese alchemist has given to the world – we can only seek to use it more efficiently than our enemies, and in so doing we must give away our power by degrees. We are too late now to make an example of destruction sufficient to terrify the world.’

  ‘Then march your men back home again. I for one would thank you if I had not to set foot on these creaking ships.’

  ‘That I cannot do,’ replied the voivode, rising from his bath and wrapping a cloak about himself. ‘It would seem infinitely worse to turn around than to go on, and would surely encourage a rebellion in Walachia like the one which has already taken root in Gaul. We must take what small advantage is left for us to take, or our world might easily shatter, instead of submitting to a gradual decay which will let us keep our power for a while.’

  ‘I have never seen you so concerned with seeming, my lord,’ said the minstrel, unhappily. ‘In the past, you have left the seeming of things to me, and have attended to the doing. I fear, sire, that long life is making you into a statesman.’

  ‘I am a vampire prince,’ retorted Dragulya, relating himself to the book by Niccolo Machiavelli, which was even more admired in the east than in the author’s homeland. Indeed, the Voivode Vlad V was a vampire prince, who had learned to use cruelty and destruction most carefully. Even in his youth, when his wrath had held greater sway over his actions, he had always appreciated the virtue of being feared. Now, if his conscience troubled him at all, it troubled him because he had grown indolent in his cruelty, and had taken insufficient care to strike terror in the hearts of common men.