The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, Book 1) by Clay & Susan Griffith;Clay Griffith;Susan Griffith (12 page)

The senator eyed the book, then hummed with dissatisfaction and
flicked ash onto the intricate parquet mahogany floor. "Mmhmm. Also,
your protocol man was a little hazy on when I would see Adele."

Kelvin aimed his impassive hatchet face at Clark. "The wedding
with Her Imperial Highness the princess Adele is scheduled for one
month and two days from this day."

Clark grinned. "I know that, Prime Minister. But I'd kinda like to
see her before the actual wedding day. I'd like to arrange a dinner of
some sort. That seems only right."

"It does?" Though empowered by the familiar walls of the council
chamber, Kelvin still felt a bit put off by Clark's use of Prime Minister
rather than the more proper Your Lordship. He was therefore disinclined
to be less obtuse than he might normally appear.

The American laughed and stared lovingly at his cigar. "It's
customary where I come from to at least see the bride before the
wedding."

"Most interesting," Lord Kelvin murmured. "However, Her Imperial Highness the princess is away at the present."

"What?" Clark's chair thumped to the floor as he sat up and stared
hard at the eel-like prime minister. "She's not even here when I arrive?"

Kelvin sensed Admiral Kilwas tensing from Clark's outburst. But
His Lordship merely flipped a page and said in an even voice, "She is
touring the frontier, Senator. She may be your Intended, but she has constant duties of state. She wished to be here, but of course, the state must
always come first. You will find Her Imperial Highness the princess
Adele embraces that fact completely. As, I'm sure, do you."

Lord Aden spoke again with businesslike precision. "It seemed prudent to shore up imperial goodwill on the frontier, with the coming hostilities nearly upon us. Many of the free cities to the north have never
seen a member of the royal family. The court wished to judge their
receptiveness, in case annexation becomes a necessary option."

"Yeah." Clark clamped down on his cigar. "But surely a tour of the
frontier could have been scheduled for some other time. My arrival here
was arranged months ago."

Lord Kelvin smiled without mirth. "There was no slight intended,
I assure you, Senator. Her Imperial Highness's tour was scheduled
months ago. Before arrangements for your nuptials were concluded."

The massive door opened, and an orderly made straight for Lord
Kelvin, handed him an envelope, and then stood back against the wall
to wait for a reply. Kelvin was perplexed that a message would come by
special courier and not through the multiple ranks of pneumatic tubes
that served as the communications array for the palace. Hundreds of
such pipes ran through the vast building, and their clunking could be
heard echoing day and night. Kelvin opened the envelope purposefully and pulled out a sheet of heavy paper, scanning it. His brow clouded and
he read it again.

Kelvin then handed the note to Admiral Kilwas, who read it quickly
and leapt to his feet in alarm. Clark stood too, his hand going instinctively to his holster.

"What's wrong?" the senator barked.

Lord Kelvin looked at the admiral's ashen face for confirmation. Clearly
he hadn't misread the message. It was, in fact, the end of the world.

The prime minister regarded Senator Clark and said with dour precision, "The court has just received a message from Colonel Anhalt, the
commander of Her Imperial Highness the princess's household guard.
Her Imperial Highness the princess Adele's ship was attacked. It went
down with great loss of life. Her Imperial Highness the princess is
missing. It is assumed she was taken by the vampires."

"Oh no," Lord Aden breathed.

"Taken? Or killed?" Clark asked coldly.

"We do not know. We have no idea where she is. Or if she is alive now."

"Well then for now we'll assume she's alive." Clark straightened his
saber. "Take me to the emperor. It's time to start a war."

Lord Kelvin nodded sadly and closed his schedule book.

O WAS A charnel house.

Adele smelled the city long before she saw it. Desolate hours had
passed locked in the cabin of the squalid airship with only her thoughts of
her poor brother for company. With the sunrise, she was allowed on deck
under watchful eyes. She wra pped herself in a stinking blanket to ward
off trembling that was only partly caused by the damp chill air.

When the shadow of the airship had passed from the slate sea onto
the rolling green of southern England, Adele felt a spark of fascination
growing that gratefully distanced her from her situation. The country
far below was the land of her father's ancestors, a realm of legends and
heroes held in highest esteem by her family. Of course, no one in the
royal family had living memory of Britain, but many treasured relics had
been spirited away in the chaotic years of the vampire onslaught. The
imperial palace in Alexandria held paintings of the English landscape
that, to Adele, might as well have been another planet. But here now she
gazed down on that mythic landscape. It had grown much wilder since
those grand days of gentlemanly squires showing their prize heifers, but
the lines of fields and pastures were still visible from the air. However,
towns and villages were ruined and largely abandoned, with only rare and infrequent trails of smoke betraying the existence of the vampires'
human herds.

Suddenly, a wretched stench overwhelmed Adele. She coughed and
covered her face with the disgusting blanket. Nothing she had ever
experienced matched the vile odor wafting up toward her-not even the
slums of Cairo in summer. The reason for the stench loomed on the
northern horizon. A dark shape squatted along the shining line of a
river. It was London, the great city. London, the seat of the vampire clan
that ruled Britain.

There were many accounts of nineteenth-century London as it had
been before the vampires came. The young princess had been amazed by
descriptions and pictures of the city's grandeur. It had been the center of
art and science and technology, the center of the world. Now it was the
heart of a cadaverous kingdom. Centuries before, travelers often complained that London smelled, stinking of smoke and chemicals and compressed humanity. Adele could testify that it still smelled, but now it
was the stench of blood and decomposition.

She possessed an intellectual concept of what she was going to see.
For years, ghastly reports had come south on the wretched state of the
great cities of northern Europe. Adele had experienced chills reading the
grisly communiques in her warm, lemon-scented gardens. But those
reports in no way prepared the princess for the visceral reaction she had
to the evidence of her own senses.

The ramshackle airship descended, approaching the spires and
domes and the horrid slate grey blocks of buildings. Adele saw dark
mounds scattered on the avenues, streets, and alleys. A closer examination revealed that the mounds were piles of dead bodies. The city's wide
circles and narrow courtyards were heaped with bones. The turgid river
Thames was at low tide and, as the airship skimmed over it, Adele saw
white femurs and rib cages protruding from the muck along the shoreline. Nearly all the glass windows in the city were smashed, except,
amazingly, some of the stained glass of Westminster. Green grass
sprouted through the cobblestones while lush vines grew without
restraint, hiding edifices and obscuring the statues of the formerly great
humans. The airship glided over the collapsed roof of Parliament. Dark figures clung to the outside of the ivy-choked ruins of the Big Ben clock
tower and rose into the air like blowflies from a cadaver. Adele's heart
raced with terror and despair to see so many.

The airship captain shouted orders, breaking Adele's grim reverie,
and the bloodmen scrambled into the rigging. The ship reduced sail,
heeling slightly, starting its turn over a large expanse of trees that were
just beginning to leaf out with spring. The land below was once a park,
but now it was fenced and the ground beneath the trees was brown and
worn. Then Adele saw why. Crowds of humans, naked or clad in rags,
shuffled aimlessly among the trees-food for the city's vampire lords.
Only a few of them troubled to gaze up at the passing ship; then they
quickly returned to pacing or drinking from a pond. Their distant,
uncomprehending faces were blank like livestock. Adele felt sick.

The airship leveled off over sprawling, decrepit Buckingham Palace.
A lone figure ascended from the roof of the palace and seized the shrouds
of the airship with amazing grace and swung aboard. It was Flay. Adele
was suddenly enraged by the memory of her brother hurled carelessly
against a tree like a toy, and the careless slaughter of the people who had
thought nothing of sheltering her as Greyfriar's ward. The bloodmen
shuffled away from Flay, who was now wearing a man's heavy brocade
coat with broad cuffs, garish green, that made her pale flesh underneath
even more translucent.

"Princess Adele," the female vampire said. "Welcome to London."

Adele ignored the early evening chill and dropped the blanket,
unwilling to accept any comfort from the enemy. She stared contemptuously into the female's eyes without flinching. The imperial heir wouldn't
give the vampire the satisfaction of seeing fear. The confident public face
that her father adopted during private crises became hers to emulate.

Flay slowly stooped and lifted the blanket from the deck. The creature
held Adele's cold stare and deliberately dropped the blanket over the rail.
"Princess, I shall no longer burden you with comfort. I am Flay, the war
chief of Prince Cesare, lord of Ireland. And you are his prisoner."

In the twilight, Adele paced a dingy outer courtyard in the Tower of
London, where she had been deposited without further word. Numerous
vampires crouched on the parapets, looking down at her with animal
curiosity. A bloodman emerged from a dank doorway carrying a large
sack over his back. He stared at her too, but surreptitiously, from under
downturned brows like a born servant. The miserable drone emptied the
sack of skeletal remains into a cart that was already full of bones, and
appeared as if he wanted to say something to her, if he was even capable
of proper language, but his nerve failed. Adele was grateful not to have
to interact with the filthy thing. Two bloodmen put their shoulders to
the cart and pushed it under an archway out of her sight. Ravens rose
from the crumbling ruins with excited cries and followed the creaking
bone cart.

As Adele's eyes lifted with the black birds, she spotted two vampires
drifting toward her over the wall. One was the warlord, Flay. The second
was a fine-boned male, dressed in a passable formal suit with a long
swallow-tailed morning coat. The male was a few inches shorter than
Flay, but as they settled noiselessly to the cobblestones, the female
showed the deference of distance.

"I am Cesare," the male said as he walked past Adele.

This was the one, the princess thought as she stared at him. Cesare.
This creature had every soul in Ireland put to death. He was one of history's greatest monsters. And she was in his hands. She wondered what
his game was. If she had been captured for food, surely she'd be a drained
husk by now. Perhaps Cesare was saving her for himself. Maybe he
intended to torture her slowly to death. There was no way to know the
mind of one of these animals. But Adele was sure she would give them
no pleasure by pleading or crying.