++Thralls are endlessly loyal to vampires, but that doesn’t make them perfect subordinates. Their passion and devotion is a double-edged sword, used right, and can be the key to manipulating them.++

  Book 2: Chapter 26

  Reggie went straight to Ludvich, obviously. The old man seemed to know something about everything, and Reggie saw no reason for Ilgran to be an exception to that. It wasn’t just that Ludvich was an experienced Witchfinder, though of course that job probably gave him more familiarity with all things vampiric than any other kind of human could hope to acquire, but that he seemed to have actually gone out of his way to learn a lot more beyond the standard stuff, too.

  Which Reggie could relate to, of course. Forbidden knowledge was usually forbidden for a reason, but that reason was almost never the kindness of elven hearts or a concern for the people who might acquire it.

  If anyone would know what was up with Ilgran, it was Ludvich.

  “No idea,” the ex-Witchfinder told him. “Sounds like it was before my time.”

  “It was forty years ago at most,” Reggie frowned. “You’d have been a teenager, at least.”

  Ludvich replied slowly, like he was talking to a colossal idiot.

  “When I was a teenager, I was still studying how to kill monsters in a city hundreds of miles from here. The only thing I can remember about Ilgran is that it’s on the list of red zones.”

  Apparently Reggie’s blank look said it all.

  “Areas that Witchfinders can’t safely go to,” Ludvich explained. “There’s a lot of reasons something can get called that. Usually it’s just some Warden who doesn’t want us poking around his business.”

  “Wardens doing illegal magic, necromancy and stuff?” Reggie asked.

  “No clue, I’ve never poked around their business. You need to understand that Witchfinders who have too much curiosity die even faster than the ones who have too little.”

  That much made sense, the first useful fact Reggie had really learned about elves was how readily they’d kill a human who they even suspected of being a danger to them. And pretty much any Witchfinder was pretty fucking dangerous.

  “So all you can tell me about the only place I’m able to get my magic explosive ingredients is that it’s vaguely dangerous for reasons that you’re unaware of, but also it might not be dangerous because it could just be illegal for reasons that don’t matter to a vampire.”

  Reggie had hoped to learn more about Ilgran on top of his deduction about it being a Vampire Barony, instead Ludvich had managed to somehow convince him that what little he thought he knew was potentially wrong. The younger vampire just shrugged.

  “If investigation was easy, they wouldn’t need to train all the idiots who tried to do it.”

  Ludvich’s quip did nothing for Reggie’s mood. He dropped himself down into a chair, sighing.

  “I thought things would be easy,” he admitted after a moment. “That I’d just sweep away Norvhan and then…I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t have a plan?” His progeny asked.

  “I had a plan, I just hadn’t thought about all the potential points of failure. I’m not suited for this, running a town, let alone expanding it. I have ideas and thoughts but all the steps to get there are…Fuck. I’m too stupid to do this.”

  Ludvich kicked him really hard in the face. Reggie was seated, and the old man put every scrap of his strength into it with about the best technique Reggie had ever seen.

  You throw that sort of kick at a person sitting down, with his head right in the perfect spot to take all its force, and you might just kill them. Of course Reggie’s Toughness was sitting a good 20 points or so higher than Ludvich’s Strength right now so he barely even felt it.

  But like with so many other things in life, it was the thought that counted. And the surprise. Reggie jumped as it hit him and ended up falling out of his chair, then stared angrily up at Ludvich as the ex-Witchfinder glowered down at him.

  “You’re not stupid,” was all he said.

  Reggie glared back as Ludvich stepped away and watched him stand.

  “Whether I am or not, I still don’t know what to do.”

  “Can you not go and poke around?” Ludvich suggested. “Have a look, even bring some thralls with you as a safeguard. The big danger of travelling normally was that you needed to know there was somewhere safe to rest by day, but now that you have so many protectors that’s hardly a concern. Hell there’s carriages in Norvhan that we could touch up a bit, make them look like some aristocrat’s procession and people would throw themselves out of your way rather than asking questions.”

  It was a nice idea, and one that Reggie had thought of already.

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  “Ilgran is what, a week away by carriage?”

  “A week and a half,” Ludvich winced.

  “So three weeks for a round trip assuming I don’t spend more than a day there, and assuming I’m not delayed on the road. Three weeks, the exact amount of time a thrall’s ichor supply lasts if they’re filled to maximum capacity. If I was delayed on the road, then if I filled all of the thralls up to their maximum blood capacity my ichor would still wear off before I got back. Which means all of them would clear out before I got back, which means we’d lose our most useful military asset overnight. Assuming they didn’t do even worse and kill you to take the town back, or something.”

  Now it was Ludvich’s turn to swear.

  “Then you can’t risk it,” he said at once. “If you can make this new explosive, what then? Explosive bullets or shells won’t go far enough to justify this sort of chance.”

  Reggie agreed with him, as painful as it was. “I’ll just have to focus on helping the town in more mundane ways, then,” he smiled irritably.

  Granted, as unexciting as that was, he ended up finding it satisfying all the same. The weeks drifted by and Reggie found that his thralls’ hunting expeditions were more successful than he’d even dared to hope. On average they were bringing home a good one or two corpses a day, mostly drone ants. Ludvich made a habit of going out with them at least once each day, too, and when he did so the output tended to increase.

  Not to mention his own strength improving as he glutted himself on their prey.

  In starkly practical terms, this meant that they’d be able to supply themselves with meat all year round. People couldn’t live off meat alone, of course, but increasing the amount of it in Norvhan’s diet meant that, for the common people at least, what grain they were taking in was going further. The big concern was in actually storing the stuff, but Reggie figured a work-around for that out too.

  He just made a shed in the grimwoods, right on their edge, and had a thrall guard it. It was a tough building, its walls a good two feet-thick and made of wood pinching dense stone chunks, partly built underground to reinforce it further with the dense earthen surroundings. It was as close to the grimwood’s edge as Reggie could build it while still maintaining the area’s strange effect of halting decay in all dead things.

  Fortunately, close enough to the outer wall that it was surveyed at all times by two more thralls on a cannon brought by the Circumscribers who’d tried to defend the town. If anything weaker than a wolf spider showed up to make a snack of its contents, the big gun would send a 4-pound iron ball smashing into them faster than the sound of its firing.

  If a wolf spider was what showed up, then they’d at least try to do the same thing. Reggie wasn’t sure if a mere few feet of wood and stone would delay one long enough for the artillery to score a hit. He wasn’t even sure if the hit in question would convince the spider to find its food elsewhere.

  So that was meat secure, he hoped. Meat and crops, in fact, because the grimwood prevented rot all year-round, and this new set-up meant that a good deal more storage could be managed over time. There were advantages to having military-grade firearms and scores of superpowered soldiers.

  The next step Reggie took towards resolving Norvhan’s food problem was a bit more drastic as far as the people were concerned.

  Fortunately, Norvhan produced most of its own food. The exception to this were luxury imports that Reggie didn’t really care about limiting, since they were mostly enjoyed by rich people. What this all meant was that the actual starvation problem was largely a distribution-based one.

  Which made it easy enough to fix. It was amazing how logical you could make everybody behave with nothing but the implicit threat of murder and cannibalism should they disobey you.

  Reggie didn’t even leave the better-off people starving, anyway. He imposed a limit on how much people were allowed to buy, at first. Then ended up realising he could just cut the middle-man out and ration food by default. Everybody got enough to eat, past that it cost money.

  Not that there was enough food to go around for money to buy much extra, either, but within about a week the number of people in Norvhan who were going regularly hungry had dropped to essentially zero. Reggie felt some way about that, tried imagining what Norman would’ve said.

  Probably that I should’ve let the wealthier, educated people have their fun and starve the poor ones since they were less useful.

  The cunt.

  With Norvhan’s new wall getting bigger by the day, and the undead’s presence becoming less of a novelty, there were a lot of other factors alongside the food that compounded and turned into a generally improving attitude among the people. They were not, of course, pleased to be under the heel of a vampire, and Reggie doubted that would ever change. But they seemed less panicked and dreading, if nothing else. The longer he stayed without killing anybody or something, the less people worried that he’d randomly start to do so.

  Surprisingly enough, it was the thralls who started causing issues first.

  Reggie wasn’t popular in Norvhan, and this unpopularity was palpable. That was fine by him, he’d never been popular in Norvhan. In fact the most highly he’d ever been regarded was when he’d pretended to be a foreign burn victim so that he could stay at Ludvich’s place without arousing questions.

  But now that was coming to bite him, because while he didn’t care what people thought and said about him, the 40 or so fanatically-loyal superhuman soldiers now living here absolutely did. When the thralls heard some of the rumours about him, they were furious.

  When they found out how he’d been treated in life, they were literally murderous.

  It wouldn’t do much for Reggie-Norvhan relations that several of his fanatics attempted to hang a man for calling him crazy, but Reggie could only hope that his openly ordering them to stand down smoothed things over slightly. To his surprise, the situation wasn’t resolved by just that. There were a dozen of the thralls involved, each of them a hardened man, armed and armoured and with eyes that seemed aglow with fury. Their de facto leader looked Reggie in the eye as he spoke, and there was no doubt in Reggie’s mind that he firmly believed every word of what he said.

  “He called you a demon, lord,” the man hissed. “So we were thinking we’d send him to hell, where he could meet some real demons to see how wrong he was.”

  Lord.

  There really wasn’t a rational argument against that. Or rather, no argument rational enough to oppose the suggestion would possibly persuade a man irrational enough to need persuading. Fortunately, with thralls at least, Reggie didn’t need to rely on argumentation.

  “Are you going to disobey me?” he asked simply.

  Reggie didn’t like being around thralls, because doing so always made him feel a little bit bad. The way all of these ones dropped their gazes and scrambled to apologize at the slightest hint he was displeased just rubbed him the wrong way.

  Not as much as the thought of losing out on 40 soldiers when the Warden’s inevitable attack came, though. He watched them leave and stayed a few minutes while townsfolk thanked him and it became clear the situation wouldn’t reignite, and only then, once Reggie started heading away from it all, did Sycily speak.

  Trait Improvement unlocked!