++If a Vampire Barony cannot be reclaimed by the Warder from which its territory was seized, then it is to be cut off from all trade. To deal with a settlement as wretched as theirs is, itself, the height of betrayal.++

  Book 2: Chapter 25

  The wall kept Reggie busy for a while, but no more than a day. Most of his work was actually on experimenting with Necromancy II and figuring out exactly how fine his control over the undead had become.

  As it turned out, pretty damned fine.

  His most obvious benefit was a reduction in the ichor needed to sustain any given amount of reanimated corpses. It wasn’t huge, but Reggie estimated a good quarter or perhaps a third had been sheared off it. That made a big difference for him, even now. There weren’t so many farm animals around Norvhan that Reggie could afford to just gorge himself and burn up whatever blood he wanted, eventually the livestock would be running too dry and dying. In practice, this made the difference of raising how many undead he could command by a few dozen.

  That wasn’t the most important, though. Reggie had noticed before that some of his reanimates were standing like the soldiers they’d been in life, and as he watched them more closely now he saw that this was the mark of a universal improvement. They were all more dextrous and coordinated than they had been, more…intelligent.

  Forget smashing their heads against a wall unto death, they seemed to be exercising the skeletal remnants of good judgement in carrying out their tasks.

  If a reanimate found its path unexpectedly blocked, it would walk around it. If it was given orders to place a thing in a given position, it would experiment with different ways of planting it until it remained firmly still. It wasn’t anything like having humans who knew their business, of course, but Reggie also doubted that they were altogether worse than untrained people would’ve been.

  Not much dumber in practice, but far more productive. Tireless, uncomplaining about cold or boredom. A man could get lots done in a 10 hour work day.

  A peeler could get lots more done in 24.

  Which didn’t mean that Reggie had nothing to do. It turned out there were a great many concerns you had to turn your attention to when control over a whole town had suddenly become yours.

  Winter was still a month from ending, and the town’s food stores had been nastily depleted by the months of chaos and the extra weight of supporting several hundred soldiers who weren’t nearly as good at rationing as its locals. People would go hungry, which wasn’t such a big problem for most. Except that there were always a good few in Norvhan who died when people went hungry. Reggie knew this, because he was often rubbing shoulders with them as a kid. In fact, feeding his need for knowledge and hope for a better future, he’d been one of them.

  Lord…

  Norvhan was his, now. Reggie said he didn’t want his people to starve, so they wouldn’t starve.

  He couldn’t just expand their measly crops, though. The small section of soil that Norvhan was able to reliably grow from relied, apparently, on treatment from elven Class holders to improve its fertility. Which meant that in a few years even that would stop being renewable, giving Reggie a far-off but pretty damned crucial time limit on finding an alternative to it. He racked his brains for the short-term solution and ended up stumbling onto a pretty obvious one.

  Grimwoods were full of meat, right? It had genuinely slipped Reggie’s mind that the things he’d been draining for blood and leaving strewn about had things that vampires didn’t need. A warning sign of his isolation from humanity, maybe?

  Meh. Humanity were dicks, isolation from them could only do good as far as Reggie was concerned. The important thing was that he had a potential solution now. The only question was how to enact it.

  Then he remembered that he’d recently gained control of several dozen professional soldiers who, after glutting themselves on his ichor, also happened to possess mildly superhuman physical abilities. Being a vampire was starting to look like it actually made things pretty damned easy for Reggie.

  He didn’t let himself relax there though, after having Ludvich come up with a suitable method of sending the thralls out into grimwoods for hunting trips, he started returning to some old studies of his.

  Blasting crystals, that ‘angry mercury’ Reggie had made to start the chain of events that eventually ruined his life. Now of course he knew that it was dangerous stuff, that it was a threat to eleven kind and, thus, something they would stamp out with a vengeance.

  But so what? They already wanted to stamp him out with a vengeance so it wasn’t like there was anything to lose by taking advantage of the extra resources. The hard part was supplying himself with the means to do so.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Reggie had enough spiritus vini and the other shit that he could make a fair amount of his quicksilver explosive for quite some time. He didn’t have a guaranteed way to replenish that, though, and it was this problem which brought him onto the greatest issue currently plaguing Norvhan.

  It wasn’t a town that had, in the past, ever had to be wholly self-sufficient. Its alchemists and surgeons always relied on imports from other, larger settlements to supply their exotic ingredients.

  This meant only that Reggie had to be a little careful with how he rationed out his ingredients, for now. While working on the solution he ended up calling a few of the town’s alchemists to watch him work, and was surprised to find one among them with a strong resemblance to William. He had the man’s nose, had a bunch of the man’s other facial features, and considering he also had the man’s difficult-to-enter profession it wasn’t hard to guess why.

  “I knew your dad,” Reggie told the man.

  His face went pale as a sheet, eyes widening, lips trembling. “Knew him,” William’s kid gasped. “Past tense, as in…he’s…he’s dead?”

  “What? Oh, shit uh, I mean I didn’t kill him, I just assumed he’d gotten old and died. Was he still alive when you last saw him?”

  Slowly, the alchemist nodded. “T…This morning.”

  “Then he’s probably still alive now.” Reggie was actually kind of disappointed, William was a dick. Of course William’s son was far happier, almost seeming to deflate with the news as his stress melted out. Reggie realised they’d gotten somewhat sidetracked, however.

  “Back to business,” he sighed. “Where do you get your spiritus vini, quicksilver and aqua fortis from?”

  Apparently the question wasn’t expected. No, more than that. The alchemists were more than just surprised, seeming confused.

  “Where did you…learn those words?” one of the ones at the back asked Reggie.

  “I read them in a book,” Reggie shrugged. “And I remember the things I read. Now answer the question.”

  Apparently remembering that they were talking to a big, scary vampire, the alchemists’ professional curiosity withered and died to make way for their newly-grown useful streaks.

  Several dozen answers were thrown at Reggie within the span of about five seconds, averaging multiple per alchemist. He actually heard each one on an individual level, his Celerity high enough that the rapid-fire babble was pretty easy to discern. This was made easier by the fact that the babbling in question all agreed on a single answer; the alchemical components came in deliveries from Lorwick.

  Reggie’s stomach sank at that.

  “And where else produces them?”

  He looked around the room, waiting expectantly. Then his expectancy turned to hope, then denial, then irritation.

  “There must be somewhere that produces this stuff other than Lorwick,” Reggie growled. But growling didn’t change the facts, it seemed, and only made the people telling them to him flinch. It wasn’t William’s kid who ended up speaking next, but an older man.

  “None that we do business with,” he explained.

  The man winced, apparently under the impression that he’d just misspoken and drawn Reggie’s attention to another option anyway. This was, of course, completely true.

  “So what don’t you do business with,” Reggie asked.

  He saw the older alchemists start growing uncomfortable and dropping their gazes, while the younger ones appeared to be just as confused as Reggie himself. Whatever this was, it was a status quo that had been in place for a good long while. Longer than the newest generation of alchemists had even been making business decisions.

  “We…Forgive me, my lord, but to speak of such things would be dangerous,” one of them tried.

  Lord.

  “You’re already under the rule of a vampire and failing to try and overthrow him,” Reggie pointed out. “About half the Circumscribers would kill you for that alone, and the other half wouldn’t care enough to interfere.”

  He was fairly sure that was overstating things, but then it wasn’t like most people had even met a Circumscriber to verify his little fib. Hell Reggie had probably spent more time speaking with them than everyone else in this room combined, even with that time itself consisting of about five minutes’ conversation total.

  And of course, nobody here was going to call that particular bluff. Of course they weren’t. You just didn’t gamble with your life like that, not when you were a living person with all the mortality that came with it. Reggie had only recently started to realise just how much the average person was motivated by fear.

  He was no different, of course. With literal eternity to lose he’d spent a lot of his unlife being painfully cautious, even while Ludvich chafed at his risk-taking. Everything was a balancing act.

  And now, it looked like the fear of him was outweighing the fear of whatever consequences these alchemists hoped to avoid by keeping their alternative sources of material a secret.

  “Ilgran,” one of the men said at last. His being the first to speak earned him a cacophony of hisses and glares, not the least, Reggie saw, from those men who’d seemed closest to sharing first.

  Ilgran. Reggie had heard the name of course, it was a town not so far from Norvhan. A mining town as he remembered, built right on top of a huge set of caves that stretched far beneath the skin of the earth.

  Reggie had never had much mind to think of it in the past, but he did now.

  “Ilgran,” he echoed. “And why is getting the ingredients from Ilgran such a problem?”

  More shuffling and lowered gazes from the alchemists, which was starting to get really annoying. Reggie had never liked wasting time and these men seemed eager to throw it away by the fistful.

  “Because…” more gazes exchanged by the alchemists, then Reggie got tired of waiting. He walked over to a wall, calmly tore a brick out of it and then bit it in half. While all the alchemists were still gawping at him, he took the section still left in his hand and started squeezing. For a moment Reggie was worried it would hold, he’d have looked like a right tit, but after a few seconds the pressure built and the stone proved inferior to a Vampire Baron’s grip. It split in half, then into quarters and fell from his hand amid a shower of chips and mortar.

  “I’m getting impatient,” Reggie told the group.

  That hurried them up of course.

  “Ilgran was cut off from us by the order of the elves, my lord,” one of the eldest present sighed. “This was thirty, maybe closer to forty years ago now. We weren’t told why, just that any contact with them was forbidden for…for the safety of all.”

  Reggie drew a lot of conclusions fast, and sighed in an old reflex of lungs and lips.

  “I see.”

  Just his luck, the one settlement near him that he could hope to get mercury and aqua fortis from and it was another damned Vampire Barony.