++The potential merits of vampiric labour, given their tireless nature, have of course been long considered. In all cases, invariably, they have been deemed lesser than the potential dangers of vampiric proximity.++

  Book 2: Chapter 36

  Reggie had just been getting into his research when Ludvich’s message came through Sycily. It was about typical, really. Things were starting to go somewhat smoothly, which meant he was actually long overdue for some catastrophic disaster. If anything he should’ve been suspicious at the universe for managing to last as long as it had without hitting him with a meteorite or something.

  Then again, fucking thousands of soldiers wasn’t exactly less dangerous than a meteorite. In fact, on a grand scale, it might have been worse. A meteor hit once and was done, but if this army had its way then Reggie would lose Norvhan and be hounded across the region until finally being caught, then torn apart. If it won, there’d be enough people to properly search the grimwoods.

  And none of his refuges would stay hidden for long.

  Obviously, Reggie couldn’t just let his work go up in smoke. If he failed to keep Norvhan he’d probably never be given the chance to try again. Nevermind eternity, his lifespan would be measured in days if he was lucky, hours if he wasn’t.

  But he also couldn’t just go ahead and rush back, either. Or rather, he could…it just wouldn’t achieve anything. If he wanted to give himself the best odds possible, he had to stick with Krieg, for the time being, and try to work on that damned blasting crystal.

  It wasn’t as unpleasant a task as it could have been, even with Reggie’s new anxiety tainting it. Sitting around and reading old books was about his favourite passtime, and if he’d have preferred some natural philosophy or alchemical tomes to the messy histories actually provided, knowledge was still knowledge. In particular, the knowledge here was giving Reggie some points of interest to check out.

  “Read through this,” he suggested to Anne. She scowled at him, like she always did when hearing something that sounded like an order, but obeyed. It took her a lot longer than it had Reggie, partly because he was more fluent in Latin but mostly just because his ridiculous Celerity rating let him burn through full pages in a few seconds. By the time her sluggish study of the page was complete, Reggie was actually growing bored enough to consider picking up another tome and killing the time with that.

  “What am I looking at?” Anne asked him, irritated at not already knowing herself unless he was misreading her.

  The account he’d shown her was of a battle Krieg’s sire had taken part in some hundred years ago, no more than a dozen leagues from Norvhan. It wasn’t the actual conflict that interested Reggie, though he’d now been given a pretty good reason to start picking through any historic military engagements from these journals, but the specifics of its location.

  “Look at how the battle was spurred on,” he advised Anne. “An Irazhtan took over a Witchfinder training academy in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, so twenty Circumscribers and ten thousand soldiers run dick-first at it and take it back at the cost of forty percent casualties? Only to start burning the place down before the vampires started attacking other settlements and forced them to re-engage elsewhere?”

  In the end, Krieg’s sire had fucked off after the Irazhtan Baron he was with ended up dying in combat. There was no specification of why they’d taken the academy, nor what they’d done with it, but Reggie was painting a pretty clear picture by sliding things together himself.

  “Something in that academy interested the vampires, and the elves thought it was dangerous enough that they were willing to sacrifice thousands just to destroy the place rather than let vampires keep hold of it!” Anne’s realisation had her eyes wider than if she was trying to see in pitch darkness.

  “Something in a Witchfinder academy,” Reggie added. “What are you willing to bet there’s some really cool shit hidden there?”

  He’d never actually asked Ludvich about what such places were like, mostly because the old man had never given the impression he’d be willing to talk about his experience in one. Over the years Reggie had picked a few details up, but it was all more deduction and inference than hard knowledge.

  Fortunately, he didn’t need to go all the way back to Norvhan to get a run-down now.

  You want me to communicate with Ludvich for you, Reggie?

  He smiled. “You’re getting way better at thinking about stuff like this, you know.” Sycily didn’t have an expression he could see, and when she wasn’t talking Reggie had no tangible way of knowing her mood at all, but even in her silence he got the idea that she was happy. Good.

  It took a while for Ludvich to reply, twice as long as normal due to Sycily needing to wait and repeat everything he said essentially one sentence at a time. Fortunately, vampire brains were pretty damned good at retaining information. That the story was especially long just meant Reggie had to listen for a while.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  ***

  A smart question and a fearless look in the eyes was all it took for young Ludvich to be sized up as worthy of more than a commoner’s life. In later decades, he would look back on this fact and wish he’d been dumber and more scared, or at least smart enough to realise how much better off he’d be letting people think as much.

  But once an elf had decided you were of potential use, there wasn’t anything you could do to keep from being used. Ludvich said goodbye to his drunken cunt of a father, then said goodbye to the grave of the mother that father had beaten to death, and set off with all the other semi-smart and fullyfearless boys to begin his training. The first thing he saw at the academy was supremacy, a vast gulf separating elf from man. It was the first thing any human approaching it saw, and that much was by design. Everything about the elves is founded on power, so much so that even they must pretend to have more than they do or risk it slipping out from beneath them.

  Training started less than an hour after arrival, elves have never felt the need to wait when utilising new resources.

  Right from the beginning it was torturous. Physical training in every capacity; Strength, Speed, Toughness, Celerity. Toughness training, the worst of it. Dangling from a ceiling with all four limbs bound while trainers carefully beat them with wooden cudgels, holding hands against open flames, all very controlled and measured, all precise and safe. All agony. A man with Toughness in the mid 20s is a man whose mental fortitude exceeds that of his body by far. Between that and the other exertions, the constant screaming of strained muscle from too-many lifts, the burning lungs from running scores of miles every day, a fraction of potential trainees washed out on the basis of their physical talent alone.

  And the mental training was almost worse. Heavy memorisation of supernatural lore and history. Creatures of uncountable variance, subtle differences in behaviour, in power, in weaknesses and territory and nature. Gruelling tests to ensure the knowledge remained.

  More Toughness training, if a student failed to internalize the lessons of each day. More still washed out from this than the physical elements.

  And then there came the practicum, the investigation, the combat training, the hunting and fighting and killing. The readiness for dying. Ludvich was strong and swift and durable, but not unprecedentedly so. There were half a dozen out of the hundred graduates who could match him for bodily might. His power of memory and learning, too, was merely impressive rather than remarkable.

  Where he came into a tier of his own was in the application of his lessons. In the synthesis of knowledge, skill, strength and wit all mingled together and sharpened by that ephemeral trait known only as ‘instinct’.

  Ludvich’s mind was quicker than others, more unpredictable. He caught details others wouldn’t and guessed with a precision that belied his intuitive reasoning. No ambush could snare him, no caution could detect him. It did not take long for him to emerge a true Witchfinder and be unleashed into Engyr to do his work.

  And it did not take long for him to realise that training had not prepared him for even the half of it.

  ***

  Reggie waited for more, then, upon realising it wasn’t coming, got a little bit annoyed. “That’s it? That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  There was quite a long pause as Sycily presumably relayed the message, and when her voice rang out in Reggie’s mind again he got the distinct impression that she was filtering out quite a lot of what she’d been told to tell him.

  Ludvich wants to know what you were asking about, if not his experience with the place.

  Reggie suddenly felt bad. Ludvich had just opened up about something he’d kept to himself for years, maybe decades, and here he was stomping right past it. But it couldn’t be helped, they had things to do. Ludvich of all people would agree with that much.

  “What did he see in there, what was its layout like? What kind of…what kind of stuff was stored there? Books, artefacts, that sort of thing.”

  Another pause, longer.

  He says that he was never given access to them directly, but that all Witchfinder academies are used as repositories for illicit and dangerous items found by the Witchfinders themselves. They’re kept by the elves stationed there, rather than the Witchfinders, however.

  That made sense to Reggie. Convenient to have them stashed where the Witchfinders were reporting, but that didn’t mean the elves wanted those Witchfinders with a key.

  “So he can’t give me more specific pointers?”

  Another pause.

  No.

  “Tell him he’s already given me plenty,” Reggie replied. “And thanks for connecting us.”

  He wasn’t actually lying, either. Ludvich had given him a lot more than he’d had before: confirmation that there was something in the ruin he stood to gain from exploring. Now he knew it was worth checking out, that he wouldn’t just be wasting precious time testing an inference by doing so.

  That settled Reggie’s next course of action, all that was left now was his current one. He got up, stretching his legs for the first time in almost a full night and appreciating again how his vampiric body didn’t register cramps or pain like a living one. Outside was shockingly cold, another reminder of how well insulated Norvhan was compared to Ilgran. Despite the cold, though, people were still working.

  By the looks of it, there were maybe two hundred outside. Reggie couldn’t take a guess at how many were in the mine, he was looking from outside its largest entrance and watching as the humans swarmed in and out in ways that reminded him uncomfortably of the ant nest. It seemed, though, that there was some sort of impediment to their movements. From his angle he couldn’t see it, but that didn’t prove to be a problem.

  “Finally got curious about how it was going?” Came a voice behind him.

  Reggie screamed and threw a spin-kick at the air that probably would’ve cut a human in half, but entirely missed Krieg as the man watched him from just a few feet out of range. It wasn’t at all pleasant, meeting someone able to sneak up on him after just barely getting used to his new vampiric senses, and Reggie took a moment to recover his wits after the shock.

  “Are you okay?” Krieg asked him, looking more confused than angry.

  “Fine,” Reggie snapped. “Yeah. Got curious like you said, what’s the blockage?” He never liked dwelling on his outbursts, primarily because other people often tried to kill him for them.

  “The mine apparently collapsed some years ago,” Krieg said evenly. “I’m having the humans clear it out.”

  Reggie took a look at the mine in question, surveyed its size, and found he had a better idea.

  “Why don’t we give it a go?”

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