There was screaming, and burning, and all manner of horrible racket before Teo’s carriage lurched forward. The sudden jolt as the horses surged ahead slammed Teo into his seat and cracked the icy cocoon of fear that immobilized him. As the din of combat receded into the distance, Teo waited for his nerves to steady themselves. An inner voice that sounded like the Duke’s told him that he should feel relieved that he was safe once again, and that the attack had been redirected. Instead his hands shook.

There was no one else in the carriage, a fact for which Teo was miserably grateful. Running away from the battle was bad enough, but the fear that lingered would have been unbearable if anyone had seen it.

A thousand, million, lessons as a boy taught him that brave men leapt out of carriages and crushed their enemies for daring to assault them in situations like the one he’d been in. Only weaklings cowered when they were threatened. Teo didn’t want to believe that he was a coward but he hadn’t jumped out to fight beside Officer Kor. He could have. The door wasn’t locked, despite his being “under arrest”. He could have, but he hadn’t. And he hadn’t wanted to.  

Struggling with the paralysis that was still sending shivers down his body, Teo drew his knees to his chest and curled into as small a space as he could. The first arrows that were fired hadn’t reached him but if the assassins were working with enchanted arrow heads, then they might have any manner of unpleasant tools to employ against him.

In time, as they rode steadily on, the flames of the arrows that transfixed the side of the carriage fizzled away and the metal heads cooled so that their bright orange heat dulled to a dim red. For longer than Teo could count, the carriage raced as fast as the horses could pull it and the sounds of the battle faded to silence as the fight fell miles behind them.

With the passing of the hours, Teo’s stomach grumbled, the needs of the body not wholly suppressed by the turmoil of the mind. He hugged his knees tighter to his chest and tried not to think of how long it had been since he’d last fed.

Ren’s life force was bright and strong. After a feeding, he seemed barely diminished outwardly, but in Teo’s eyes the spark within the Duke’s son was noticeably dimmer for days afterwards. It was why Teo insisted that they wait so long between “nibbles” as Ren called their blood giving sessions.

They hadn’t been nibbling when the Duke “caught” them together, though it might have been better if they were. That would have solidified Teo’s claim that his “vampiric nature” overwhelmed him and perhaps allowed Ren to return to his father’s good graces.

The more Teo ran that horrible day over in his mind though, the less sure he was that anything about his relationship with Ren was really at fault for the Duke’s reaction. On the surface the Duke’s ranting and verbal abuse had been directed at a commoner who presumed above his station.

To the Duke, his children were little more than resources to use in the private wars noblemen were always waging against each other. Ren was a second son, and the youngest born which left him as a pawn of lesser worth than his siblings but still potentially useful to secure an alliance with another house or sell to a faction which needed a noble figurehead. His relationship with Teo was problematic on a number of levels, with the two biggest being the severe lapse in judgment he showed involving himself with someone so far below his station and the second, and less forgivable one, being the fact that Teo was a vampire.

Few people knew about the feeding requirements of Teo’s bloodline, and fewer cared. What most saw was an undead monster that drew its strength from the blood of the living and, when properly fed, was a match for even a Pact Warrior. Where most Pact Warriors could only maintain their transformation for a limited time though, vampires were effectively transformed permanently and were believed to be less-than-sane as a result. This belief wasn’t unfounded either. There were many who took the transformation poorly, and some bloodlines that were composed primarily of monsters. Teo himself knew that in certain areas he was no longer capable of acting with reasonable self-control. Only physical restraint and direct pleas from Ren had held Teo back from taking the lives of a pair of noblemen who disparaged Ren’s character within Teo’s earshot a week after he was first turned.

That incident, and others like it, couldn’t have escaped the Duke’s attention, but he hadn’t deigned to notice or comment on any of them before the night he barged into Ren’s bed chamber. Something about the fear that Teo felt then, helped him navigate the fear he felt while curled up in the back of the carriage.

Then he’d lost the person he loved most in the world. Then he’d been beaten and cast out of the only home he had. Then he’d been left starving in a ravine. Compared to that, his current fear was still miserable, but it was a misery that he could survive.

Reflecting on himself, Teo felt his fear yield to shame and then to absurd and shallow mirth. Vampires were supposed to be unholy terrors. Creatures of power and mystery who were untouchable and unkillable. Teo knew that none of those things were true. Without blood, and the life force it carried, he was weaker than he’d been even as a boy. The Duke’s assault had been well timed in that sense. Teo had gone so long not feeding from Ren that he’d lacked anything like the strength to fight back.

The Duke could have killed Teo in front of his son, and was possibly intending to, but Ren’s pleading had caused the nobleman to stay his hand. The death sentence was converted to banishment on pain of Ren following every one of his father’s directives and Teo never again seeing Ren.

In many senses a death sentence would have been a kinder fate for Teo, but it would have hurt Ren more and Teo couldn’t bear the thought of that.

The carriage slowed to a halt and Teo felt a fresh stab of fear lance through him. They’d left Officer Kor far behind them. If there was another ambush, no unexpected savior was going to spring up to fight for him.

“What’s happened?” he asked, calling out more softly than he meant to.

“We’re far enough away from the fray and the horses need a rest,” the driver said. “No good hiding spots here either, so we can wait a bit and see if the captain catches up with us.”

“The captain?” Teo asked.

“You call her ‘Officer Kor’,” the driver said. Teo heard him get down off the front seat and walk forward.

“Do you need any help with the horses?” Teo asked, raising his voice so the driver could hear him.

“Sure, if you know how to set a harness,” the driver said.

“I do,” Teo said and pushed himself through the last vestiges of icy fear that froze him to the seat.

Outside, he saw that the carriage was resting in a large sloping field. The driver had moved them over to a well trampled area near a small stream that ran beside the road. Beyond that, short blue and yellow and green grasses swayed in the breeze.

Here and there flocks of sheep wandered about, kept together by grey elven shepherds and their canine companions. The other side of the road was much the same, but without the stream and with the added presence of small, sparsely placed houses woven together from isolated stands of trees. Ambushers might hide in the tree houses but even from there they would face a long gap to get to their targets on the road.

“We had a hard run, make sure none of the leathers come loose,” the driver said.

Teo took the horse the driver wasn’t working on and began to inspect the harness and gear that tied it to the carriage as he had done countless times with the Telli horses. Pages didn’t normally have duties like that, but Teo was so inseparable from Ren, that he would up attending to a variety of duties to buy them more time together.

“Why do you call Officer Kor ‘the Captain’?” Teo asked as he worked on the horse.

“Whatever rank she holds, she’ll always be my Captain,” the driver said.

“You’ve served with her before?” Teo asked.

“Served under,” the driver said. “She was our leader at Star’s Watch Keep when it fell.”

“What happened to Star’s Watch Keep?” Teo asked. Beyond the fact that his life had been focused on Ren for the last few years, Teo had never been one to pay much attention to the various skirmishes his adopted kingdom became embroiled in. Aside from a brief period six years previous when a bloody civil war had flared across the kingdom, Teo’s life had been untouched by the ravages of armed conflict.

“Paxmer,” the driver said. “Paxmer happened to Star’s Watch Keep.”

Pieces of overheard information fell into place, enough for Teo to hazard a guess at what had occurred.

“Star’s Watch was a border keep wasn’t it?” Teo asked. “It was one of the ones lost during the Unification War.”

“Unification War, heh. That’s what people call it now,” the driver said. “The war we fought was never about unification though.”

The driver spit the word “unification” out like it was formed of toxic bile.

“I don’t mean to pry, but I gather that Officer Kor deserves more recognition for the role she played than she’s received?” Teo asked.

“She’d disagree with that notion, but I don’t.” the driver said.

“What did she do there?” Teo asked, trying to picture what a conflict on the border between Gallagrin and its neighboring country to the south would look like.

“I could you tell you stories, lot’s of stories, but the big thing is what she didn’t do,” the driver said.

“I think I’d like to hear those stories,” Teo said. “Unless I miss my guess they’re the kind of stories more people should know about than do.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” the driver said. “What’s your name vampire?”

“Joe,” Teo said, thinking of the advice he’d received. “Though if you’re a friend Officer Kor’s then it would be more accurate to call me Teo.”

The driver smiled, a twinkle in his eye suggesting that he recognized Teo’s reference.

“Well you can call me Joe too,” the driver said, “Or if you want to be accurate then you could go with Sol.”

“So what was it that your Captain didn’t do that stands out for you Sol?” Teo asked.

“She didn’t run,” Sol said.

“That’s an admirable quality in a leader, but Star’s Watch was destroyed anyways wasn’t it?” Teo asked.

“It was burned,” Sol said.

“Why?” Teo asked. “I thought, when border keeps were captured, the invading army tried to keep them intact to use against the enemy side?”

“That’s the standard doctrine,” Sol said. “It’s how changes in the boundaries are made to stick, and in Gallagrin’s case, if you don’t have a stronghold to work from, the mountains will kill you.”

“I’m confused then, why take the town only to destroy it?” Teo asked. “Especially when we wound up as allies with Paxmer by the end of the war. The attackers had to know that was coming, didn’t they?”

“I’m sure they knew that was one of the plans,” Sol said. “But in the early days of the civil war, it wasn’t clear who was going to win, so when Paxmer decided to join into the little duskup we were having, they came with the main purpose of destroying our ability to invade them, just in case the wrong side won. I think they didn’t care about claiming territory at that point because it might have united us all against them instead of letting us fight each other..”

“Oh yes, that’s what started the whole civil war wasn’t it?” Teo asked. “The Butcher King wanted to invade Paxmer.”

“Sure, that’s one of the stories they put out,” Sol said. “But we didn’t hear about that until after the war was done. All we knew was that one morning we were in the clear and then next there were forty thousand troops advancing on our gates.”

“That’s a big army isn’t it?” Teo asked.

“Big enough,” Sol said. “Star’s Watch was designed to hold the pass it sat in against any army Paxmer could assault the place with, but that was before people knew about the kind of siege weapons you could make by binding pact spirits to catapults and trebuchets.”

“They smashed through the walls?” Teo asked, guessing at why the keep had fallen.

“They could have, but the Captain led a night raid out and burned all the ones they’d moved up to the front lines,” Sol said.

“That sounds incredibly dangerous,” Teo said picturing a raiding party fighting into a camp of forty thousand soldiers to destroy heavy machinery.

“It was,” Sol said. “The Captain fights like a damn demon, but even that only got half the raid party back to the keep.”

“You said she burned all the siege weapons, so how did the keep fall?” Teo asked.

“After they lost the siege machines, the Paxers called one of their Dragon Generals to the front lines,” Sol said.

“Dragon General?” Teo asked. “Is that like a Pact Knight?”

“Yes and no,” Sol said. “Dragon Generals are as tough as our Pact Knights, so about ten times better than your standard Pact Warrior, but they don’t bind themselves to a pact spirit.”

“Ten times better than a Pact Warrior?” Teo asked. “Who can stand against something like that?”

Even well fed, and driven by the deepest blood compulsion, Teo wasn’t sure he would be able to fight something as powerful as what Sol described.

“The Captain, for one,” Sol said. “That’s why she took his challenge when he issued it.”

“What was the challenge for?” Teo asked.

“The terms were single combat, between the two of them,” Sol said. “The prize was the loser’s life.”

“Why would your Captain take a fight on terms like that?” Teo asked.

“Because when it came to a battle, the General was going to be able to kill a lot of us regular troops before she was able to join with him,” Sol said. “She could do the same to their side but they had a lot more troops to spend on a fight than we did.”

“So dueling with him was her best chance to end the threat that he posed.”

“It was,” Sol said. “Or it should have been.”

“What happened?”

“They met outside the gate to the Keep, just the two of them,” Sol said. “We were all watching from the keep’s walls but the Captain told us she would personally flay us alive if we interfered in the fight.”

“Did she win?” Teo asked. “I mean she’s still alive so she must have right?”

“She should have won,” Sol said. “Watching them two of them fight was like nothing I’d ever seen, and to be honest I have no idea which of the two was better, but by all that’s holy, the Captain should have won.”

“But she didn’t?” Teo said.

“She didn’t,” Sol said. “She was doing well, but then the General called in his trump and everything fell apart.”

Teo tried to put together what Sol had told him so far and came up with one horrifying possibility.

“You said he was a Dragon General?” Teo said.

“Yes, and I’m betting you can guess what that means,” Sol said.

“He called in a dragon,” Teo said, blinking in disbelief at the idea.

“One of the Ancients. Like I said Star’s Watch didn’t fall.”

Teo saw tears well up in the older man’s eyes as the memories drew Sol back to that day six years prior.

“It burned.”

Teo sat in the back of the armored carriage, staring through the tight, iron bars that secured the windows and wondered which of the many poor life choices he’d made were to blame for his current predicament.

Trusting in the odd Dawn March officer who’d saved his life and rented him a secure room had seemed like a reasonable choice. She couldn’t be on the Duke’s side, not if the Duke was having her followed by an assassin. She hadn’t acted like she was following the same master as the rest of the Dawn March either. Their conversations, both in the alley and at the monberry shop held the wrong tenor for that.

But she’d arrested him. It wasn’t even an arrest-in-name-only either. He’d tried to leave the monberry shop on his own and Officer Kor had produced her pact blade and marched him at swordpoint into the Dawn March barracks. There’d been paperwork and a deposition and a flurry of legal things which Teo had never even heard of. All he was certain of in the end was that the woman he’d thought could be a valuable ally had made sure to drag as many of the Dawn March through the tiny interrogation room as she could.

Over and over she’d had him repeat the basics of his story, each time allowing the Dawn March personnel to ask whatever questions they wished. Most seemed to be intrigued by his relationship with Ren, but none of them had the first inkling of how a vampire bond worked.

That wasn’t entirely surprising. Vampires didn’t tend to go out of their way to describe their feeding habits. There was no rule against speaking on the subject, but in Teo’s case, the act was so intimate that he had no desire to discuss it with strangers.

When they asked, as they inevitably did, about how much blood he drank and how his “victim” survived the feeding, he responded with the barest of facts.

When he fed, Teo drank less than a pint of blood. His partner, and he always corrected “victim” to “partner”, was tired and spent afterwards but within a day was feeling better and within a week was back to their full strength. Teo “fed” like that only once a month at most, and often went longer to ensure his partner’s safety.

That sort of routine was at odds with what people expected to hear. In their minds vampires fed constantly and were the most unrepentant of killers when they did so. Teo couldn’t deny that there were unrepentant vampiric killers but that tended to occur when you took an unrepentant mortal killer and converted them to vampirism.

For those more knowledgeable about vampires, this wasn’t that surprising. While a vampire was given greatly enhanced physical capabilities and senses, their core persona remained as it was. Those who fell into corrupt and violent behaviors were either practicing such before hand or wished to do so but were constrained by their lack of power.

Teo had an added advantage there however, his bloodline was looked on as being one of the “safe” breeds. All vampires were driven by a passion that was central to their nature. That was was what allowed them to survive the transition from mortal to undying. In Teo’s case that passion, his core hunger, was for intimacy.

The Dawn March officers joked that he was a ‘sex vampire” and not so different from any of them. In practice though, sex was only the barest, least sustaining part of what Teo hungered for. The connection he needed was one of the mind, body and spirit. It wasn’t love, or at least not the sort that people wrote pretty poems about.

When he’d been given the gift, the Blood Mother who woke him explained that what she offered was not a peaceful, harmonious blessing. There were horrible people who bore the Blood of the Bare Heart, vampires who had bonded with a mortal and then turned their backs on the rest of the Mindful Races entirely. Teo had scoffed at the idea but in the years since then he’d seen how easy it could take root. With Ren at the center of his life, it would have been easy to lose care or interest in anyone else.

Even under the current circumstances, Teo knew that it if came to choosing between Ren and kingdom, then the kingdom would burn. The sole hold that he had on his sanity was the line of thought that ran from the Duke banishing Ren to the notion that so long as Ren was away from his father’s sphere of influence then the Duke would have no reason to do his son any harm.

If that changed though? Teo knew he would do something idiotic. The best that he could hope for would be to take down some of the threats to Ren before being put down himself. It wasn’t much to hope for, but Teo knew his limitations.

He kept that particular kernel of his psyche hidden from the Dawn March. No sense letting the Duke know that he could control Teo that easily if he turned his mind to it. Not that the Duke needed a vampire on his payroll. As far as Teo knew, Duke Telli had the Nath division of the Dawn March to draw on in time of need, in addition to his own personal troops, the city guard and quite probably a contingent of the royal forces, given the favor King Halreck showed him.

With that sort of backing there was very little that could inconvenience the Duke and nothing that Teo could think of that could seriously threaten him.

Not even a vampire on a mission of vengeance.

When he was a boy, Teo couldn’t have imagined seeking vengeance on the Duke. The Telli family had been his salvation when his natural one failed him. He was never clear on the specifics, he’d been too young to know at the time, but what he’d pieced together later was that his Inchesso family had wound up on the wrong side of a vendetta. Knowing that the end was nigh, they’d shipped several of their children off to other countries as pages or clerics assistants or even pact squires.

Teo had spent months longing to return home when he first arrived at Elinspire, the resort estate for the Telli family. That changed the day the final letter arrived from Inchesso for him. It told him in clear, simple terms that his home was gone. His family had fallen before a bigger, more powerful syndicate and his title and position were no more.

There was an attempted assassination a month later, spies for the rival family managed to infiltrate the castle and were ready to put an end to an errant heir who might cause trouble a generation down the line. The attempt would have succeeded to but the Telli house guards caught the assassins and the Duke made such a brutal public spectacle of them that no more attempts were made.

Even at a young age, Teo understood that the Duke’s reaction was not because he wished to protect Teo but because the assassins had threatened something that Duke Telli considered part of his property.

At the time Teo was delighted to think of himself as belonging to the Duke. It made him feel protected and worthy. As the years passed though, he began to see what it meant to be someone else’s property.

Strangely perhaps, it was the Duke’s behavior towards his children that bothered Teo far more than how the Duke treated him. Each of them were mishandled and mal-cared for by the nobleman and each showed the scars he left on them in their own manner.

Ren, the youngest son, drew inwards, his voice vanishing for weeks at a time without anyone being aware that he hadn’t spoke a single word. Or at least anyone except Teo.

Their relationship had started at different times. For Teo, the first time he saw Ren, he was struck by the boys quiet presence. Teo saw the wordless youth and yearned to bridge the silent chasm between them. Their time together was limited at first, but it grew over the years, as did their regard for each other. The beginning of their acknowledged relationship was hard to place as well. Ren suggested it was the first time they’d kissed, but that had been on a dare and signified little at the time except for their solidarity against the mad whims of Ren’s sister.

Rather than a single event, Teo thought of it as the gentle changing of the seasons. The two of them had been close, and then moved closer in such small steps that no one day held a particularly important declaration of love. Teo couldn’t even remember the first time he’d told Ren that he loved him. The words passed easily between them, changing naturally from professions of companionable affection to a deeper more enduring acknowledgement of the commitment they’d made to each other through their deeds rather than mere words.

There wasn’t anyone else Teo could imagine giving his heart to, so when the Blood Mother had told him what the price would be for his continued life the only question he’d asked had been addressed to Ren.

It hadn’t been a proposal. It hadn’t been a declaration of passion either. Not precisely at any rate.

“We’ve been together for a long time,” Teo said. “I won’t leave you now. I will take the gift the Blessed One offers. But I will not ask that you take the other end of the burden. Will you stay free of this pledge? May we continue with each other as we have been? You are too precious to me for there to be any yoke of obligation laid between us.”

Ren had answered in his customary soft voice but with a firmness to his words which Teo rarely heard there.

“No. We cannot continue on as we have been,” Ren said. “All things change, and so must we. Already I carry an obligation to you. With no one else can I find the joy that I can with you. No one else lives within me as you do. You are forever in my thoughts and forever in my heart. There is no burden that you can carry which I will not feel the weight of as well. If you will have me, I will carry your heart, as you already carry mine.”

Of all the decisions Teo ever made, that one alone he was perfectly sure of, even though it had led him eventually to a cage of misery, far from the one he loved.

A cage which abruptly shuddered and came to a rough stop.

“What happened?” Teo asked the carriage driver.

“A tree just fell across the road,” the driver said, a disturbing lack of surprise in his voice.

There was a thunk on the side of the carriage, followed by three more just like it. Arrows. They’d punched through the walls of the carriage. So they were enchanted. The searing hot flames on their tips gave that away too.

“And there would be the archers, right on queue,” the driver said.

“We’re under attack?” Tero asked, knowing that it was a foolish question. Officer Kor had assured him that she would would be the first target of any assassins that were sent out, but the Duke apparently had enough that he could afford to detail a contingent to deal with an errant ex-page as well.

Not that Teo knew for certain the Duke was connected with the assassins or their misdoings, but after the beating the Duke gave him, not to mention separating Teo from Ren, the vampire wasn’t in a particularly charitable mood towards the nobleman.

“You’re on your own for this one,” the carriage driver said.

“Wait! I’m still locked in here!” Teo said.

“He wasn’t talking to you,” Daelynne said from on top of the carriage. Her voice sounded strange and inhuman. As a vampire, Teo wasn’t used to unnatural things sending a chill down his spine but he shivered at her words nonetheless.

A moment later, as she dropped from the top of the carriage to the ground and began advancing on the ambushers, Teo saw why he’d been instinctively afraid.

Daelynne was garbed in her armor and she walked with a bearing that screamed for mayhem. The ambushers had one hope of surviving the encounter. They needed their own Pact Warrior. Even if they had one though Teo wasn’t sure if that would be enough to save them. There was a hunger that radiated off Daelynne that put his own vampire constitution to shame.

The monberry shop on the corner of the Dyemakers Road and Lowhill Street offered no defenses for the patrons and no protection for eavesdropping. The colorful wooden tables and chairs were laid out within a moderately-sized railed-in area that allowed the customers to both see and be seen. For those seeking to rendezvous with friends or associates the setup was ideal. For those seeking to hold a clandestine conversation it was decidedly less so.

“I have to confess,” Teo said. “This is not quite what I expected when you said we needed to continue our conversation somewhere safer.”

“You don’t feel safe here?” Dae asked. She took a long, slow pull from her lemon water and watched the vampire fidget.

“I feel exposed,” Teo said. “This is too public, we’re going to be seen.”

“There are a number of spots we could be observed from,” Dae said. “And with most of them we couldn’t even tell if someone was watching us.”

“And yet you brought us here from that lovely, little, secluded alley,” Teo said. “Shouldn’t I at least be wearing my hat?”

“Not with the great big umbrella we have overhead,” Dae said. “Plus that would defeat the purpose of this.”

“You want us to be seen,” Teo said, understanding flickering to life in his eyes. “You want anyone who was following you to know you’ve spoken to me specifically.”

“It’s for your own good,” Dae said.

“How do I profit from this?” Teo asked.

“You have information I lack,” Dae said. “If you give it all to me, then it will be too late for anyone to kill you.”

“I think anyone foolish enough to tail a member of the Dawn March in her own city would be happy to kill me out of spite,” Teo said.

“Probably,” Dae said. “You’re could be the one loose end they need to tie up , but if I’m right and you’re seen talking with me now there won’t be quite the sense of urgency involved in silencing you.”

“You seem to know quite a lot about what’s going on,” Teo said. “Do you even need the information I carry?”

“I don’t know all that much,” Dae said. “What I have is a lot of guesses based on weak evidence. With luck, you can help turn those into actual clues.”

“I’m afraid what I know is largely unsupported as well,” Teo said.

“I’m not looking for trial-ready testimony,” Dae said. “I just need to know who to keep an eye on.”

“That will be challenging in this instance,” Teo said. “I’m gifted at tracking people and the one following you eluded me.”

“We’ll see about that in a bit,” Dae said. “For now though explain why you were out in the tempest last night?”

“As I said, I was searching for a group of merchants from Inchesso,” Teo said. “Or at least people who were traveling as merchants.”

“Since you don’t seem the type to follow people for their snack potential, I’m going to assume that there was something special about these merchants which attracted your attention?” Dae placed her lemon water on the table and stretched her left arm across her chest to loosen  her shoulder muscles. A glance around the plaza they were in confirmed her suspicions that her quarry wasn’t in place yet.

“They carried no merchandise,” Teo said. He drank from his cup of hot monberry as though the stuff was as precious as the blood his body actually craved. With any other drink such behavior would have attracted attention but it was how the rest of the patrons of the shop consumed the beverage as well.

“Perhaps they were traveling to purchase their wares in Nath and bring the merchandise back to Inchesso?” Dae asked.

“Possible, but unusual,” Teo said. “Most merchants try to make money in both directions of a trading route. Bring to Gallagrin goods that are plentiful in Inchesso and then return to Inchesso with goods found only here.”

“Odd to pass up that sort of profit but you saw something else that tipped you off, didn’t you?” Dae said.

“I was traveling to Nath on the roads from Elinspire when I first met them at a Traders house where road from the Inchesso border joins up,” Teo said. “I overheard them muttering in Cascalain, one of the dialects I’m familiar with. I tried to join in on their conversation but they rebuked me and fled to their rooms for the evening.”

“Not an atypical response to encountering a vampire on the road I would imagine?” Dae asked.

“In hindsight, no, it was not, but it did pique my interest in them,” Teo said. “I might have forgotten all about them though as the hurt feelings faded if I hadn’t run into them one more time, at the Gailman’s Bridge checkpoint.”

“Did they see you there?” Dae asked.

“No,” Teo said. “I was being somewhat aloof. I didn’t have the toll needed to pass the bridge.”

“Gailman’s is a Royal bridge,” Dae said. “There’s not supposed to be a toll to use Royal bridges.”

With Gallagrin being a land of mountains, and gorges, and wide, powerful rivers, the maintenance and defense of its bridges was a serious cause for a concern. And a serious opportunity for those seeking to supplement their income.

“Yes, someone should tell the Duke about it,” Teo said. “Though it’s probable that he already knows as the ‘merchants’ bore a letter which allowed them to pass unhindered.”

“And you believe he wrote it?” Dae asked.

“Gailman’s Bridge is on Telli land. Apart from the Duke’s, the only seal a letter like that could carry which would have enough force to carry the bearer through is the King’s or Queen’s and as you say, the Royal bridges are supposed to allow free passage, so why would they pen a writ of passage for just one group?”

“Several possible reasons I can think of,” Dae said. “At least on the King’s side. But I can tell that you’re story is not done yet.”

“Indeed,” Teo said. “The incident at the bridge left me with a deeper curiosity as to the merchants motivations and connections so I followed them.”

“I’ve read that vampires are superlative hunters,” Dae said, stretching her right shoulder muscles. Her eyes glanced briefly upwards as she did so and a predatory grin rippled over her lips.

All of the curtains on the second floor of the Hotel Weskette which lay across the plaza were drawn open. All of them except one.

Dae was delighted to see this because it was just the kind of mistake an out-of-towner might make when doing a quick survey of the environment. Twenty minutes earlier the curtains at the Weskette had all been drawn shut. The second floor rooms were rented by the hour though, so the cleaning staff did multiple passes through them and left the curtains open to show their availability for occupancy, a fact Dae had learned on an earlier case which had taken nearly a crate of the worst bilge she could find to blur her memories of. She would have to check with the reception desk at the Weskette, but her gut told her that it was very likely that her mystery pursuer was watching her and Teo as they spoke.

“Hunting prowess is an innate aspect of our condition,” Teo said. “It’s much easier to be silent when your heart is absent.”

“And what did your pursuit reveal?” Dae asked.

“That for as talented as my natural abilities make me, the ‘merchants’ are somehow better,” Teo said. “I lost them twice on the trip to Nath. Both times I recovered their trail only by exerting myself to get ahead of them and lying in wait at choke points they were required to pass through.”

“That’s unusually skillful for a group of merchants,” Dae said and asked, “How many traveled in their company.”

“A half dozen,” Teo said. “Or a half dozen that I could see. As things went, I can’t swear that there weren’t other traveling with them as outriders. That may have been how they were able to throw me off the trail.”

“That’s an impressively large group to hide from a pursuing vampire,” Dae said. “What did they do once they reached Nath?”

“They took up residence in the Low Quarters,” Teo said. “They didn’t stay in any one location long, but they visited the same taverns repeatedly.”

“Did you approach them again?” Dae asked. They were too far from the Weskette for any observer to understand what they were saying, but luring her mark in closer seemed an unlikely prospect from Dae’s perspective. Whatever her pursuers orders were they didn’t include open mayhem in the light of day on the streets of Nath by all appearances.

“No, I wanted to get a sense of what brought them to Nath and I doubted they would be very forthcoming,” Teo said.

“Why the trip into the rain then?” Dae asked.

“I followed them earlier that day to the Duke’s castle,” Teo said. “I feared his life might be in danger but they proceeded into the palace under the same letter they showed at the bridge checkpoint.”

“Why would you fear for the Duke’s life?” Dae asked.

“My countrymen’s reputation as poisoners and cutthroats is largely incorrect but not wholly unearned,” Teo said. “When someone wishes to hire an assassin, I am afraid to say that Inchesso is often where they turn.”

“So what happened when the merchants left the castle?” Dae asked.

“I don’t know,” Teo said. “I waited for the rest of the morning, and through the afternoon for them to emerge but I saw no further sign of them. That’s why I was revisiting the locales I’d seen them in and inquiring if they’d been by that evening.”

“And then you ran afoul of the Watch,” Dae said.

“Not to mention a most unusual member of the Dawn March,” Teo said. “This morning, when I felt recovered, I returned to my roost overlooking the castle’s main gate. I saw you enter and I saw one of the ‘merchants’ take up a perch perilously near my own. When you emerged he began to follow you, and I to follow him, and that brings us to where we sit presently.”

“Not quite,” Dae said. “There’s some bad blood between you and the Duke otherwise you would have gone to him with your concerns right away.”

“Once, maybe,” Teo said. “But I am no longer welcome in his home or his holdings. By rights I shouldn’t even be here.”

“What offense did you commit against him?” Dae asked.

“I loved unwisely,” Teo said.

“That would be Ren I take it?” Dae asked.

Teo nodded, but didn’t speak.

“What was your position in the household?” Dae asked.

“I was given to Duke Telli as a page when I was young,” Teo said. “I rarely saw him, so I can not claim to have much connection with the man, but I attended to his children often.”

“As a vampire?” Dae asked.

“No, that came later,” Teo said. “I was badly injured in a hunt when I was fifteen. The Duke ordered me left where I lay, believing my wounds to be fatal. He was probably correct but Ren disagreed with him and stayed behind to tend to me. He kept me alive until the witching hour stole in and the Blood Mother found us.”

“Is that why Ren has your heart?” Dae asked.

“No,” Teo said. “It was his long before then.”

“And the Duke wasn’t fond of this arrangement I take it?” Dae asked.

“Duke Telli doesn’t pay much attention to his youngest son,” Teo said. “We were together for years and nothing was said of it. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that he ‘discovered’ us and cast me out.”

“And what happened to Ren?” Dae asked.

“I don’t know,” Teo said. “I imagine at least banished from their home at Elinspire. The Duke was ranting about that as he beat me.”

“Does Ren have somewhere else to go?” Dae asked.

“His mother’s kin, though the Duke did not provide for them overly well from what I have overheard,” Teo said.

“You were traveling to Nath when you encountered your countrymen,” Dae said. “Why?”

“I sought to plead with the Duke,” Teo said. “Not for myself but for Ren. I thought he might believe that everything he saw and heard was because my vampiric nature had taken over and that Ren was blameless.”

“That would have left  quite a burden on you,” Dae said.

“Yes, well, I planned to leap into the great fire pit in the center of the Duke’s hall to prove my words,” Teo said, “But it’s come to me that such a plan may not produce quite the result I was hoping for.”

“No, I suspect it wouldn’t,” Dae said.

“So where does that leave us?” Teo asked.

“That leaves me to track down some more information and, hopefully, be assaulted by one or more Inchesso assassins,” Dae said. “You on the other hand will get to enjoy the Queen’s hospitality while you are under arrest.”

There are times when people make innocent, harmless mistakes which nonetheless cost them their lives. Trying to appear at Dae’s side in a nonchalant manner was nearly such an error in judgement on Teo’s part. Dae released a long slow breath, grateful for the warning Kirios had provided her. Without that she would have acted on reflex, and an unthinking response from a Pact Warrior could have lethal consequences.

“Hello Teo,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. “Why are you here?”

The continued to walk forward, passing through the crowded streets without drawing much interest from the people of Nath who scurried around them to errands and chores and the business of everyday life. In Dae’s case that was because her cloak covered all of the Dawn March heraldry she wore. As far as anyone in the crowds was concerned she was just another brown figure in a sea of brown and grey and green cloaks. Perhaps noticeably shorter than most humans and nearly a halfling when compared to the elves around her, but that made her even less of a concern to them.

Teo would have stood out more. He was tall and lean and handsome. And also a vampire. In particular point of fact, a starving vampire, so that his skin was drawn in and his eyes were solid red pools with throbbing lines of blood radiating from them like a spider web mask. People didn’t pay others much attention in Nath, but hungry predators garner interest no matter where they might be. Unless, of course, their features are concealed behind the sort of half-mask which nobles tend to employ when they need to venture out in the morning sunlight while bearing a terrible hangover. The wide brimmed hat Teo wore, to further shield himself from the day’s bright and clear rays, also served the dual purposes of practicality and camouflage. Beyond disguising him and reducing his exposure, it allowed him to blend in with the crowd easily as the look had caught on in Nath after His Grace the Duke Telli was seen favoring the broad and shady head coverings following his return from a trip to Paxmer and Inchesso.

“You’ve been to the castle,” Teo said. “Have a nice chat with the Duke?”

“No,” Dae said and stepped out into the road to move around a group of customers at a sidewalk sweets stall. The aroma of freshly ground monberry tugged at her, but her steps didn’t waver. The hot beverage smelled so delicious and yet tasted like rat vomit to her. People swore by its effects but the vile black goop held no allure for her beyond its damnable scent.

“That’s a shame,” Teo said. “I’m sure he found it stimulating.”

“Why were you following me Teo?” Dae asked. They were still a significant distance from the barracks. That complicated Dae’s desire to drag the vampire into a holding cell by his ears and shake him until he gave her the straight answers he clearly possessed.

“I wasn’t,” Teo said. For the day being a bright and sunny one, he was still moving well and able to keep up with her, despite Dae quickening her pace. “I was following the man who was following you.”

Dae felt her blood warm and the ghost of an old smile dance along her lips. She hadn’t expected the players to start moving so quickly, but then they’d already claimed their first victim, so the game was well along and it seemed she was the one who running slow still.

“And why were you following him?” Dae asked. She checked with Kirios but her spirit offered no sense of someone else observing them. Dae knew her Pact’s limitations though. She was not a bloodhound or a spy. Kirios could alert her to potential dangers, sometimes, but he was not infallible or preternaturally observant.

“Because I don’t trust him,” Teo said. “Or the company which he travels with.”

“And you’re telling me this because?” Dae asked. The crowds were denser along Riverman’s Road, which offered a chance to shake off anyone who was following her, but Dae held to the main thoroughfare. The Riverman’s Road was a terrible place for a battle, and Dae held a faint hope that Teo’s pursuer might prove to be both real and stupid enough to attack her before she reached the Dawn March barracks. She could learn so very much from someone who made that sort of mistake.

“Because no one followed you into the castle but someone followed you out, and they weren’t watching for me or anyone else who was following you,” Teo said.

Meaning the person who followed her from the castle wasn’t a guard or an unseen wingman.

“Where did you lose sight of them?” Dae asked.

“On top of the Chapel of the Green Mother,” Teo said.

“Were you both traveling by rooftop?” Dae asked.

“Yes,” Teo answered and split away from her to allow a mule and the wagon behind it to pass in the opposite direction. Dae kept her attention focused forward but she felt a pang that Teo wouldn’t rejoin her at the other side of the train of mule carts. If someone was working against her, they couldn’t afford to allow her any access to information and taking Teo out immediately would be the smartest play they could make.

Paranoia sounded could make her think things like that, but Dae felt a sense of calm that didn’t normally co-exist with with unreasoning fear. She’d been absorbing details and information since Javan dragged her out of her apartment and in the back of her mind small pieces were falling into place. It wasn’t accurate to say that gave her a picture of what was going on, more that she could see the outlines of the board the events were occurring on.

She walked forward, letting her awareness drift outwards and taking in as much as she could while one heavily laden cart after another passed her by, heading back towards the castle to restock the party deleted larders therein.

By her side Lorenzo Lialarus walked, if not in body or ectoplasmic ghostly form, then as a quieter sort of spirit. Through the small elements of his life and death, Dae felt the Inchesso prince speaking to her, helping her unravel the mystery that his passing left behind.

Hours in the water does hideous things to a body. So do knife wounds to the throat. More importantly though, Lorenzo said, neither was the result of impetuous action.

If the boy had angered someone enough to kill him in a fit of rage he would bear one or more stab wounds. That’s what people with sharp weapons did when their blood was boiling. The Dawn March chirurgeon would be able to tell her for certain, but Dae hadn’t seen signs of puncture wounds on Lorenzo’s body when castle workers pulled it from the moat.

The wound to the neck was singular and deep. The kind of cut that someone makes when they are very sure of what they are doing. A skilled fencer could manage a slice like that in certain circumstances, but the most likely explanation was that Lorenzo’s murderer had been able to get into position near the boy either via stealth or because the Inchesso prince had lacked any reason to suspect an attack.

A hand over the mouth, a blade drawn rapidly across an exposed neck, and Lorenzo could have been dead before he was even aware he was in danger. Dae hoped that was the case. Better that he perish at the hands of an expert than to endure the pain and terror of a fumbling attempt on his life which ultimately succeeded.

It would be impossible to know how quickly the work was done, only Lorenzo’s ghost and the one who held the blade could tell that tale, but there was another part to the story that might still be revealed; where the murder had taken place.

Lorenzo would have had no reason to venture outside into the storm wracked castle grounds. Not on a night of lively dancing and music. Even a brief trip out into the tempest would have left his clothes unsuitable for further merriment. By the same token however, he must have left the party at some point as, drunk though they might have been, the revelers would have noticed a sudden arterial spray in the midst.

If all had gone according to a usual festival plan, the boy would have departed the castle with the entourage he arrived with, the Denarius Consortium. They might tell any number of stories as to the boy’s fate. As his sponsors for the event there were only a few that might excuse them from responsibility for the prince’s demise.

Dae assumed they would try for a story that the boy had not left with them at all but had been beguiled by a Gallagrin noble woman and had left in her company instead. The request of a Gallagrin noble would be outside the scope of a foreign merchant company to refuse or contest and many judges would have sympathy for the lurid subtext of sending a young boy off with an experienced woman.

Whatever story the Denarius Consortium told though, their connection to Lorenzo was a thread to tease and pull on until the truth was revealed. Dae didn’t know if the Consortium held the boy’s murderer but she was certain they were connected to the matter somehow. What she needed was as many threads of information as she could find to help trip them up in the little lies they would feel compelled to tell.

“My apologies,” Teo said, rejoining her as the last of the mule carts passed. “There are so many about this morning that unimpeded traffic is difficult.”

“But you didn’t fly away,” Dae said  glancing over and catching his gaze. “That’s good.”

Teo’s eyes widened and his stride took him an extra inch or two away from her, the sort of positioning one might adopt if running away seemed unexpectedly called for but might also provoke a dangerous creature into giving chase.

“There is an unkindness in your eyes,” Teo said, looking resolutely ahead.

“That’s because I’m thinking unkind thoughts,” Dae said. She didn’t need to scare Teo, but she hoped her honesty might shake him out of his need to be cryptic and mysterious.

“Having seen what you’re unkindness can do, I find myself unsettled,” Teo said.

“Last night I was in a forgiving mood,” Dae said. “You haven’t seen me be unkind yet.”

“Perhaps that will be called for before this is over,” Teo said. “I merely hope that your ire will be well focused when directed at those who are deserving of it.”

“That’s a nice thing to hope for,” Dae said and changed course, leading them down a narrow alley which ran perpendicular to the road towards the barracks.

“I’m not sure this is safe,” Teo said. “I lost the man who was following you, but I cannot say that he was alone.”

“I hope he wasn’t,” Dae said. “But it’s looking like I might be disappointed.”

“Disappointed in what?” Teo asked.

“In you? In the person following me? Who’s to say,” Dae stopped and blocked Teo’s progress in the alley.

“What are we doing here?” Teo asked.

“We need somewhere to talk and before we do that, I need to know how you’re connected to all this,” Dae said.

“And so you chose this place to question me?” Teo asked.

“Look at the walls here,” Dae said. “What do you notice?”

“They are brick,” Teo said.

“Yes, and what don’t they have?” Dae asked.

“Oh, I see,” Teo said. “No windows, so no one can listen to us easily.”

“Also the roofs are high enough that someone perched above won’t hear us over the din of the street traffic,” Dae said.

“How do you know?” Teo asked.

“Because I’ve trailed people to this alley before and tried to eavesdrop on them and it was miserable,” Dae said. “But that’s not important. What I need to know is why were you in the Low Quarter last night?”

“I was searching for some men,” Teo said.

“And you found some, but not the ones you were looking for,” Dae said.

“This is true,” Teo said. “The ones I was looking for were foreigners from Inchesso. Dressed as merchants, but they were not.”

“And why were you looking for them?” Dae asked.

“Because they were dangerous and they seemed intent on bringing that danger to the Duke’s court,” Teo said.

Dae considered that for a long moment. Did she have any specific reason to trust the vampire aside from her instincts? Maybe. The beating he’d taken had been real and he still bore the signs of it. Of all the people in the city, he was the one person who couldn’t have killed Lorenzo.

“Why didn’t you warn the Duke of them directly?” Dae asked. “Or speak to the guard captain at least.”

“I am known to the Duke,” Lorenzo said, looking away from her. “He bears no love for me, though that is due to my own folly.”

“How did you offend His Grace?” Dae asked.

“Rendolan, his second son,” the words were slow to come, as though they had to cross a vast divide to reach Teo’s lips.

“I hadn’t heard of any trouble with Duke’s children?” Dae asked.

“Trouble comes in many forms,” Teo said. “Ren is my…was my…I am bound to him.”

“Bound to him?” Dae asked. Her lessons in vampires were sketchy enough that she couldn’t be certain that she knew exactly what he meant, and with magicked creatures it was never wise to be anything less than perfectly clear with meanings.

“When you offered to let me take your blood,” Teo said. “I couldn’t. I can only share in his life.”

The vampire looks up and though his eyes were the pure crimson lakes, Dae saw not hunger but fear and hope mingled there.

“So long as he keeps my heart.”

While the noble family connected to a castle might differ from other families, there were similar patterns that played out in the day to day running of any such fortress which Dae found comforting. In the wake of the Royal Celebration, the staff of Castle Nath was working at a rapid pace, cleaning up and restocking to return things to a semblance of their normal mode of operation.

Years, or a lifetime ago, Dae had loved the lazy, slow day the aftermath of a grand feast brought. With the excitement of the feast passed, the nobility could enjoy a brief serenity after days of hussle and bussle. The staff did not have that luxury though. The meals still needed to be made, the rooms still needed to be cleaned, and so cooks chopped and skinned and sliced and cleaners swept and washed and dusted.

With their near ubiquitous presence, any of the castle’s personnel might have been able to recognize the dead boy, and a large fraction of those could probably put a name to his face as well. The number who would admit that however was much smaller. Officially, the staff had no presence or interaction with the nobles or their guests outside of a few very specific roles the staff could play. To question them directly about one of the guests would be to pull them into a dangerous arena where anyone who was unhappy with their testimony was likely to be able to silence them without any real effort.

Being unable, or at least unwilling, to question the staff however did not mean Dae couldn’t observe them as she walked through the castle. The chamberlain had bid her to meet him at his office, an area she had yet to visit in her previous trips to the castle. While the chamberlain had provided clear directions, Dae found it enlightening to delay her arrival and get a bit lost inside the noble environs. With her Dawn March heraldry clearly visible, all she needed to do was walk as though heading somewhere purposefully and no one questioned her passing.

In her travels through the grand structure of Castle Nath, she observed a pensive air that hung around everyone from the groundskeepers to the candle tenders to the laundry women. People were quieter than they should have been. The feast would certainly have left everyone exhausted but in Dae’s experience that didn’t breed silence so much as grumbling and grousing.

Mulling it over, Dae didn’t think that even the murder would explain the behavior in question. Whoever found the body was likely horrified but for the rest of the castle, the dead boy wasn’t someone they would have had a deep personal connection with. Secrets lurked in Castle Nath, but then that was true of all castles. The question on Dae’s mind was whether she needed to care about those secrets, or whether she could leave the castle and its inhabitants to resolve them on their own.

She entered the chamberlain’s office with that thought occupying her attention only to discover that the chamberlain wasn’t the one waiting for her. In his place, Duke Telli, the lord of the castle, sat reading through the ledgers on the chamberlain’s desk. He looked up when she entered and favored her with a nod of acceptance as to her presence in the room. Dae offered the nobleman a smile return, though it was a grin driven by the thought of how mad Javan would be to learn that she was speaking to the Duke more than any genuine pleasure at seeing the man himself.

“Welcome, Officer Kor is it?” Duke Telli asked.

“Yes, Your Grace,” Dae answered and bowed as befitted a Pact Warrior addressing a lord of the realm.

“I hear there was some excitement in the castle last night?” Duke Telli asked.

“Yes,” Dae said. “And potentially a murder as well.”

“Potentially a murder?” the Duke said. “I was led to believe that there was a body in my moat?”

“There was,” Dae said. “The corpse is being taken to the Dawn March barracks for inspection, with no eyewitnesses to the murder however we can’t say if the killer committed the crime within the castle or not.”

“I see, and what have you ascertained so far about the killing?” the Duke asked.

“Very little,” Dae said. “I had hoped to meet with the chamberlain to see if anyone could identify the body. Once we know the victim’s identity, answering the question of who might want to kill them and why will become easier.”

“Was it one of my guests?” the Duke asked. “I thought they all left safely last night?”

“I won’t be able to say until the body is identified Your Grace,” Dae said.

“I will send for Kenal then,” the Duke said. He didn’t rise, but instead rang a small bell that rested on the chamberlain’s desk. Out in the hall, Dae heard someone, a page most likely, scamper off at the sound of the bell to fetch Kenal, the absent chamberlain.

“If I may ask Your Grace,” Dae said. “You appear to be in traveling clothes. Were you intent on leaving the city today?”

“No,” the Duke said. “I have just returned. Though we hosted a celebration here, I was called on to attend the principal festival in Highcrest.”

At the mention of Highcrest, Dae glimpsed the memory of a broad avenue leading up to the iridescent walls of the Royal Palace. Her first visit to Highcrest had been a tumultuous time, but despite all the pain that followed, that initial glimpse of the Gallagrin Royal Castle had left a deep and abiding impression of awe in her.

“You traveled by sky carriage?” Dae asked. Castle Nath wasn’t far from the Royal Castle as far as provinces and politics went but for to travel there and back in so short a time would have been difficult for even a noble’s ground carriage.

“Yes, fortunately we were blessed with clear skies on the trip out,” the Duke said. “The storm delayed our return till the morning which may be a kindness as well.”

“You traveled with your family?” Dae asked.

“Only my daughter,” the Duke said. “She is not one for loud parties, but I am pleased she remained at the palace. To return home to discover a murder had occurred on our very doorstep would trouble her greatly.”

Dae’s response was interrupted by the arrival of the chamberlain.

“Your Grace!” Kenal said. “My apologies, I was putting together a full briefing for you. I did not have word that you had returned yet.”

Dae frowned at that but held her disbelief off her face. If anyone would be alerted to the arrival of the Duke, especially via sky carriage, it would be his chamberlain.

“Hello chamberlain,” Dae said, in place of the impolitic questions she wanted to ask him.

“Officer Kor,” Kenal said. “I have questioned my staff as you requested, we believe we know the identity of the boy found in moat this morning.”

Dae hide her shock and amazement by feeling none whatsoever. Of course the staff knew who he was. That was why they’d dragged the Dawn March into the mess.

“Your Grace, I’m afraid that Prince Lorenzo Lialarus, one of the Queen’s pages, has been the victim of a heinous crime,” the chamberlain said.

Lialarus was a foreign name. From Inchesso if Dae remembered her lessons properly. Which made the dead boy a Queen’s Page and the prince of a wealthy and powerful foreign family.

“You are smiling Officer,” the Duke said. “Did you know the boy?”

“No Your Grace, I did not.” Dae said. “I merely find myself on familiar terrain.”

“I suppose investigating murders becomes routine for someone in your order,” the Duke said.

“Each one presents its own challenges,” Dae said.

In most cases those challenges involved simply finding the killer who had fled the scene of the crime. Usually people killed those they knew. It took a certain amount of familiarity to breed the kind of bone deep rage and hatred that led to taking another’s life. Unless of course money was involved. Chasing down highwaymen and bandits was not part of the Dawn March’s writ however so Dae had little cause to concern herself with that form of misery.

Lorenzo presented other challenges though. No one killed a Queen’s Page and a Prince over something trivial. The blood price for his murder would bankrupt anyone short of a lord of the realm. Which meant either someone very stupid had done in the poor prince or someone was playing a very specific sort of game. Dae often found cause to bet on stupidity in cases like that but the timing and the placement of Lorenzo’s body was particular enough to lead her to favor malice as the primary motivation for a change.

“The Queen will not be pleased with this,” the Duke said.

“I imagine she’ll be eager to find out who was responsible for the killing,” Dae said.

She left unvoiced that Queen Alari would likely be quite willing to authorize a great deal more killing in the pursuit of that information. She had come by her monicker as the Bloody Handed Queen in the most literal and direct way possible after all.

“Was Prince Lialarus particularly beloved by the Queen?” Chamberlain Kenal asked.

“The Queen loves all of those who serve under her,” the Duke said, repeating the statement as though reading it out of a textbook.

Dae knew the rhetoric the nobility used to keep the populace believing pretty lies so that they would stay docile enough to rule. She knew that few of the words which escaped their lips could be trusted. But she also knew the Queen. Alari did love her people. Through fire and pain and madness and blood, the one thing Dae knew down to the core of her soul was the passion the Queen felt for the people of her realm.

“We need to know who Prince Lialarus was here with and why he was in Nath rather than in Highcrest,” Dae said.

“Do you have the list of the invited guests?” the Duke asked his chamberlain.

“Of course lord,” Kenal said and produced a tome from the pile on his desk. After a few minutes of searching he added,  “I do not see the Prince’s name on the invitation roster.”

Which wasn’t surprising. Royal Pages, though in some senses high in station, especially when they were foreign princes, were not typically recognized as entities in their own right. Even Dae in her capacity as an officer of the Dawn March would have merited the attention of an invitation to a noble event before a page like Lorenzo. In his role as Prince Lialarus, Lorenzo might have have been extended an invitation but the fact that he was serving as a page meant that he was young enough to be considered little more than an appendage of his family. If House Lialarus had a reason to be present at the festivities, or needed an representative, Lorenzo might have been included but even that wasn’t a certainty.

“And in the registry of guests?” the Duke asked.

Chamberlain Kenal searched on one of the following pages of the tome he held for another minute before he located what he was looking for.

“Yes my lord,” Kenal said. “He is here. He is listed as appearing within your court under the invitation extended to the Denarius Consortium.”

“The Inchesso merchants?” the Duke asked.

“Yes, they brought a sizeable party last night, as requested by Your Grace,” the chamberlain said.

“We have the first link in the chain then,” Dae said. “I will speak with the Watch about bringing the people in their party in for questioning.”

“Agreed,” the Duke said. “But they will brought here.”

“I believe it would be in Your Grace’s best interest to allow the Dawn March to handle this,” Dae said.

“The Queen will expect more from me than to turn it over to another’s hands,” Duke Telli said. “If I am to carry news to her of a murder this foul then I aim to carry the culprit with me as well.”

Dae refrained from commenting on how Lorenzo’s murder was no more foul than any other, and quite a bit less so than some. The question of what value to place on spilled noble blood had been long since resolved for her after she’d seen it mixed together with the blood of commoners with no differences visible between the two.

“Once the consortium members are collected, one or more will need to be sent to the Dawn March barracks to identify the body,” Dae said. “Before formal accusations are made we should confirm that the boy wearing the prince’s clothes is indeed the prince.”

“That is prudent,” Duke Telli said. “I will also order the checkpoints closed until tomorrow. I do not want our murderer slipping away while we are struggling to find the trail to him.”

Dae offered no comment on that. With the murder having been committed the previous evening and the body not being discovered until after dawn, plus the time it took to get Javan and herself there, the killer had been given plenty of time flee the city already. The only reason he would still be within Nath’s borders was if he could be certain he would not be discovered.

“I need to get back to the barracks and inform Commander Kekel what we’ve discovered,” Dae said. She also wanted to check on what, if anything, the investigation into the corpse had turned up.

“I will send word to the Commander when we have the Consortium members rounded up,” Duke Telli said.

Dae took her leave of the Duke and his chamberlain and headed back to the Dawn March barracks on foot. In part it was to give herself time to think and in part because she had little desire to deal with either Kekel or Javan.

An Inchesso trading consortium might have reasons to move against an Inchesso prince that didn’t involve Gallagrin, the Queen or anything Dae cared about. It was just possible that her instincts had been wrong and the murder was part of a feud that didn’t touch on her at all. Questions nagged at her though. If it was an internal Inchesso feud, why make the body so obvious. There were dozens of better places to hide a body in Nath. Leaving the corpse in the moat had been designed to attract attention without making a specific statement. It was the kind of action that would turn both Inchesso and Gallagrin against whatever party was responsible. Dae knew most of the major political players in the Blessed Realms and none of them seemed like they would benefit from picking a fight with Inchesso and Gallagrin. That argued that some other plan was at work, but chew on it though she might, Dae couldn’t make a guess at what that plan might be.

Her pondering was disturbed by an awareness from Kirios, her pact spirit. Clearing the distractions from her mind she pinpointed the feeling that had called her back to the present.

Someone was following her.

“You return from the belly of the beast,” Teo, the vampire said, stepping up beside her casually as she walked down the street. “But do you return with true treasures or with delicately spun lies?”

A dead body makes for the sort of problem that doesn’t go away no matter how hard you wish it would. Dae knew that from repeated personal experience, but that knowledge didn’t stop her from closing her eyes, shaking her head and trying to will herself to be anywhere other than where she was.  Denial wasn’t a luxury she could afford though, and Dae’s history with wishes was spotty at best.

“Looks like we caught a nice simple one this time, doesn’t it?” Javan asked, bending down to inspect the deep slice across the corpse’s throat. Dae clenched her jaw and fought back a wave of anger. Javan held two decades more experience in the March than Dae did. The March wasn’t a physically dangerous duty on most occasions, but it still took a fair degree of wit to survive in it for as long as Javan had. That ruled out the possibility that he was stupid enough to believe what he’d said.

“Have the body wrapped up and delivered, with care, to the Dawn March barracks,” Dae said, addressing the castle’s chamberlain.

“I will have to clear that with the Duke,” the chamberlain said, looking at Dae and then quickly away from her.

“This isn’t a matter for the Duke,” Dae said.

“The murder was committed in his castle!” the chamberlain said. “I’m sure the Duke will want to see the matter handled properly.”

“Then you’ll work with us here,” Dae said. “We don’t know where the murder was committed, only where the body was found. And this boy wasn’t one of the Duke’s subjects. Which is lucky for the Duke. Trust me, he doesn’t want any part of this.”

“How do you know the boy isn’t the Duke’s subject?” the chamberlain asked.

“Does anyone here recognize him?” Javan asked.

The chamberlain turned and searched the crowd that had gathered but no one stepped forward or volunteered any information.

“You called us here to do our job,” Dae said. “Let us do it and there’ll be less headaches for everyone.”

The chamberlain wavered, the fear of his master’s unknown desires in the matter written in the worry lines that creased his forehead.

“We need to have the official chirugeon’s conduct their examination,” Javan said. “If the Duke wants the body back after that, I’m sure he and our commander can work something out.”

The relationship between Duke Telli and the Dawn March commander was well known, and with the reminded of it, the chamberlain breathed easier.

“We shall follow the official protocol in this case then,” he said and called for a wagon and sheets to transport the body in. While he and the castle guards made their preparations, Javan pulled Dae aside. The small wooden shed didn’t block out the sound of the crowd that had gathered but was enough to let them talk without people watching them. Javan tried to pin Dae to the wall, presumably so he could cow her into submission. It had never worked on her before, but Javan enjoyed enough success with it on other people that he kept giving the maneuver another shot in his dealings with his “partner”.

Dae side-stepped away from the hut and turned to give the proceedings with the dead boy her attention.

“Why do you want that body?” he asked. “We could rule on this and be off the case by the time we get back to the barracks.”

“It’s not going to be that simple,” Dae said. “It was never going to be that simple.” A murder at any noble family’s castle required an investigation by the Dawn March but with the cozy relationship between Duke Telli and Commander Kekel, that could have occurred over a bottle of fine brandy on an evening when neither was busy, presuming the victim was someone without connections able to make demands that would need to be addressed.

That the castle had called in the Dawn March so early meant someone knew who the boy was, or at least who he was supposed to be, and, in either case, who he was connected to.

“Cut throat’s a pretty simple verdict from what I’m standing,” Javan said.

“Cut throat’s not a verdict, it’s a cause of death, and it might not even be the real one.” Dae said. “A verdict is what we get when we find out who did the deed and can prove why they did it.”

“That asking a lot in a case like this,” Javan said. “You know as well as I do, with the body in the water that long, the chirurgeons aren’t going find much apart from the obvious.”

“I don’t care what they can find,” Dae said. “We just can’t let this corpse disappear until someone’s been able to identify who it is.”

“Who the hell’s going to steal a corpse?” Javan asked.

“If we’re luck, whoever killed the boy or was responsible for having him killed,” Dae said.

“You’re seeing something here,” Javan said. “Something I think neither one of us should be looking at all that closely.”

“Don’t really have a choice,” Dae said. “You saw the insignia the kid had on him, didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t tell for sure,” Javan said. “The muck from the river had it covered up pretty well.”

The tension around his eyes pleaded with Dae to drop the matter. Playing dumb was more than an excuse for laziness, in some situations it was a survival technique. The Dawn March had a lot of authority on paper, but in practice there were levels of society where their ability to enforce the law was far more limited than it was meant to be. Officers who probed too deeply into the wrong areas tended to wind up as a casefile that other, smarter, officers ignored.

Dae knew that, but she thought back to another man who’d plead ignorance as a defense. The image of feet struggling in the wind and, ultimately, swinging limply back and forth sliced through her mind, lancing into a deeper cut than the one on the boy’s throat.

She didn’t play dumb. Ever.

“The symbol was clean enough for me to recognize it,” she said. “If we’re extremely lucky, the rightful owner of those clothes is off somewhere else, and the poor thing getting wrapped in blankets over there was dragged into this to provide the original a chance to get away from a horrible family life.”

“That’s a pretty wild and unlikely theory you’ve got there,” Javan said, raising his voice to where the crowd noticed the two officers talking.

“Yeah, that’s cause I don’t want to think about the real one,” Dae said, keeping her voice low enough that only Javan could hear it.

“Why?” he asked, leaning in but lowering his voice as he did.

“Because if what I really think is true, I’m going to wind up killing a whole lot of people,” Dae said.

“It’s just one dead boy, Kor,” Javan said, stepping back. They’d worked together long enough that he knew Dae didn’t make claims like that as a mere expression. “It was a horrible thing, a terrible tragedy sure, probably a hefty blood price to be paid too, but no need to start a war over it or anything.”

“I don’t start wars,” Dae said. In her mind’s eye, she glimpsed the memory of a border castle burning. She didn’t start wars, and she didn’t finish them. No matter how hard she’d fought to.

“You try to blow this up into something big and you’re gonna make it your funeral,” Javan said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Dae said, a smile reaching up to tug at the corners of her eyes.

“You pull me into your little death wish and I’ll make sure it’s a bad thing,” Javan said.

“You never did understand me Kael,” Dae said. “And anyways, stop whining. The commander wasn’t going to let this one rest with us saying it was murder, case closed.”

“That’s true, but it doesn’t mean he couldn’t put someone else on it,” Javan said. “I’ve got kickback money saved up just for an occasion like this.”

“Lucky you,” Dae said. “Maybe you can cut a deal once we get back to the back to the barracks.”

“You’re really not going to let this go?” Javan asked. “You know the commander wanted this to be simple.”

“I hope he gets his wish then,” Dae said. “It’s always possible I’m wrong about everything here right? I could just be jumping at shadows.”

“Yeah, sure,” Javan said. “All just shadows.”

They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, testing who would blink first. In the end it was Javan who rolled his eyes and sighed. If anyone was close enough to hear them, they might have mistaken the exchange for Dae giving in to Javan’s point. The mandate of the Dawn March however was to “chase away the shadows of corruption from the land of Gallagrin”. If shadows moved across the face of Gallagin and struck down one of the Queen’s pages, then it was the Dawn March’s job to stand against them, for the good of the realm.

Dae doubted the Dawn March had ever been quite so sterling an organization as to place the life of a page on par with the security of a nation, and she knew that most of the officers in the March’s ranks shared Javan’s opinion when it came to choosing between duty and personal prosperity. Even looking at herself, Dae held no illusions that a duty to Gallagrin called her to service. She’d tried to stand for her country, to be its shield against all enemies within and without and she’d broken. Shattered on the anvil of naivety and impossible dreams.

There was a life beyond those broken dreams though. For as bad as her worst day had been, the sun still came up the next morning.

“You want to play escort for the body?” Dae asked. “That’ll give you first shot at Kekel to ask about transferring off this case.”

“And what are you planning to do in that time?” Javan asked.

“If the boy was in the castle,” Dae said, leaving out ‘and we both know that he was’, “someone in there should be able to recognize him.”

“You’re going to interrogate the Duke? Alone?” Javan asked.

“I thought I might start with the chamberlain’s staff,” Dae said. “The Duke probably has no idea who was in attendance at the big party last night, but chamberlain’s people should know who the guests were.”

“Tell you what,” Javan said. “You promise me you’re not going to go hunt down the Duke and cause us a world of pain and I’ll take good care of the corpse until you get back to the barracks.”

“I’m going to talk to the chamberlain’s staff,” Dae said. “And if the corpse is missing or disfigured when I get there, I’ll know who to blame, won’t I?”

“Is that a threat?” Javan asked.

“Not technically,” Dae said. “I’d have to mention what I was planning to do about it for it to be a threat.”

“I’m older and smarter than you,” Javan said, “and my pact is a hell of a lot stronger than yours.”

“Then you’re probably safe, right?” Dae said. “But still, don’t let anything happen to the body.”

Javan rolled his  eyes again and turned away. The commander wasn’t going to let him buy himself out of the assignment, but he might get kicked off it (and out of the Dawn March) for leaving Dae all by herself near the Duke’s castle. That didn’t especially trouble Dae, but she did start formulating the questions she would need to ask the chamberlain’s staff, rather than the one’s she’d assault the Duke with if the need arose. Dealing with (or, rather, upsetting) Duke Telli could wait until she had a clearer picture of what his involvement in the murder might be. If that worked out in Javan’s favor then so be it.

Turning the questions about what had occurred over in her mind. part of Dae prayed that the Duke would turn out to be a hapless victim of circumstance and that the killing had been enacted in his domain because of a rare alignment of schedules brought on by the royal celebration.

Duke Telli was shrewd though and there wasn’t much that went on his domain that he wasn’t aware of.  If that were true, then it meant he was involved, and if he was involved then that said things about the relationship between the Tel family and the royal throne that Dae didn’t want to know but knew she had to discover.

The Dawn March barracks were as abuzz with activity as a beehive would have been at the bottom of a lake of cheap wine. The major distinction between the two was that the cheap wine was on the inside of the various March officers who bothered to turn up that day. The general level of sapience was otherwise about the same though.

That didn’t bother Dae. It was typical behavior for the March after a major celebration. Except for her diversion with the vampire and Half-Cut Joe diluting his cheap whiskey to the point where it was indistinguishable from the Low Quarter’s general sewage, Dae would have been in the same state as the rest of the Dawn March officers. Instead she was conscious and alert and without any pounding internal headaches, which meant a lot of external ones were going to seek her out.

The one island of sobriety in the sea of half-asleep, drunken louts was the Dawn March’s commander, Sendrick Ketel. That boded poorly for Dae. Sendrick was as prone to excess as any of the personnel who served under him. If he was still clear headed it meant real trouble was brewing.

“The hell have you been Kor?” Sendrick asked, addressing Dae by her surname as she opened the door to his office.

“Derelict and absent from duty,” she said, sliding into one of the seats in front of Sendrick’s desk. Javan slid into the other chair and leaned it back. Like the rest of the office, and the barracks as a whole, the chair had seen better days. The padded leather cushions that were once meant to look posh and high quality were betrayed by the ravages of time which revealed the poor workmanship that went into their construction. Dae knew the kind of money the Dawn March collected from the royal treasury and knew the kind of furnishings the office should have boasted. Whoever was pocketing the difference was supplementing their income generously.

The same was true with whoever pocketed the difference in what was allocated for the Dawn March officers’ payroll and what the average officer actually received. Graft, bribery and general corruption did a reasonable job making up the difference, though there were always the holdouts like Dae who either didn’t care enough to sell out or had such low expenses that they didn’t see the need to.

Javan, Dae’s theoretical mentor, had worked for a few years to convince her to follow the natural order of things and find a family to put her “on retainer”. He never quite gave up on that, but Dae’s dull and disinterested lack of a response to his suggestions made it a difficult matter to pursue.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Sendrick asked.

“You sent your errand boy here to demand my presence,” Dae said.

“I sent your partner to bring you in,” Sendrick said. “And do you know why I did that?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Dae said.

“Well you’re wrong,” Sendrick said. “Kael, explore to Officer Kor why she is here.”

“The commander was concerned for your safety,” Javan said.

“That was nice of him,” Dae said. “Clearly he is dedicated to helping each and every one of us.”

“It was bring you here or turn you over to the Watch’s custody,” Javan said.

“What does the Watch want with me?” Dae asked, fishing to discover what the Watch had told the March.

“There were multiple assaults on watch personnel by a Pact Warrior bearing the March’s heraldry,” Javan said.

“That sound just tragic,” Dae said. “I hope they catch the guy who was masquerading as one of us. Sounds like he’s really dangerous.”

“I’m glad we see things the same,” Sendrick said. “Supposedly the assaults happened within the vicinity of one of your favorite haunts. Don’t suppose you saw anything?”

“I’ve seen lots of things,” Dae said. “Last night I remember seeing the bottom of a very cheap bottle of whiskey, and some truly unpleasant whiskey dreams. If the Watch wants more than that you would probably need to bill them for my time as an investigator right?”

“Hey now, we have a good understanding with the Watch,” Sendrick said. “Professional courtesy between organizations. Normally that’d means we’d help them out however was required.”

By which Dae heard him saying that normally he’d turn her over to them unless she made him a better offer.  Something wasn’t normal today though, in fact it was abnormal enough that her commander was willing to forego a chance at a cheap payoff. That captured her full attention.

“Professional courtesy only goes so far though right?” Dae asked.

“Today anyways,” Javan said.

“What’s special about today?” Dae asked.

“Today we’re being called to the castle,” Sendrick said.

“Called to the Castle?” Dae asked. “Didn’t know we worked for the Duke.”

In theory, the Dawn March reported to a royal overseer. In practice, each of the central barracks was given a wide autonomy in how it managed its affairs and that generally meant that the commanders were effectively employees of the Dukes whose territories they served in.

“You don’t seem to work for anyone,” Sendrick said. “But you know how to curtsy, so you get to head up to the castle and see what the fuss is all about.”

“Aren’t you lucky?” Javan asked.

“You’re going with her,” Sendrick said. “We’ve got a nice understanding with the Castle Guards too. I don’t want to have to extend them any Professional Courtesy, if I make myself clear?”

“Yeah,” Dae said. “If we have to assault the Castle Guards, we’ll be sure to be professional about it.”

Without waiting for a dismissal, Dae rose and left Sendrick’s office. As a Pacted officer, Dae warranted an oversized carrel where her desk and the paperwork that she was ostensibly responsible for waited. Since most of the paperwork on the desk had been there six years prior when she joined the Dawn March, she saw little need disturb it unless she needed writing space and that happened only rarely.

Most of the “work” of a Dawn March officer involved the implicit threat their presence in a city represented. People knew that if they stepped outside the rules they would have to pay for it. Of course the Dawn March’s rates were pretty reasonable so long as the rule being broken wasn’t one which would cause mass rioting, or one which a wealthier power wished to have enforced.

“You’ve got a talent for landing in trouble don’t you?” Javan asked as he caught up with her.

“Maybe trouble’s got a talent for finding me,” Dae said.

“Could be,” Javan said. “Either or, you’re a miserable specimen to hang around.”

“Never said I needed a partner,” Dae said.

“Try proving that to the commander,” Javan said. “He still seems to think you need a babysitter.”

“He’s not worried about me,” Dae said.

“Of course not,” Javan said. “He’s worried about next week’s gratuity from Duke Telli. If you screw that up there’s going to be nine hells to pay.”

“That would be a terrible shame,” Dae said, digging her official Dawn Watch paraphernalia out of her desk. “What’s the deal with the Castle though? If we’re going to pay for nine hells, I’d at least like to know if we’re walking into one of them.”

“Sounds like they’ve got a dead body they want us to check out,” Javan said as he strapped on a shoulder guard with the Dawn Watch logo emblazoned on the side.

“Sounds delightful,” Dae said. “Anything special about this dead body?”

There was something special about every dead body of course, but Dae blocked those thoughts from her mind with practiced ease. She had too many memories that were “special” in that precise manner to allow herself to dwell on the “special” things a corpse gave testimony to.

“That’s why they want us there I imagine,” Javan said.

“Bet you next week’s wage they want us there because someone’s head is going to roll and they’d rather it be ours than theirs,” Dae said, securing her shoulder guard in place. Neither she nor Javan needed the shoulder guards for armor. The ceremonial swords they wore on their hip which boasted beautiful filigree and glass-steel blades were similarly unnecessary from a tactical perspective.

Their use was meant for outside of combat though. Pact armor and weapons were surpassingly powerful, but not even the greatest Pact binders could hold the transformation indefinitely. Not without losing memory, mind and personality at least.

Instead, the Dawn March relied on their heraldry and symbols. The logos and recognizable blades reminded the people the March  interacted with of the officer’s considerable power. The physical reminder was surprising effective too. Intellectually, someone might know that the person before them was gifted with vast and terrible abilities, but the message was more viscerally understood when that someone had a sword inches away from their throat, even if the sword was more ornamental than practical.

“That’s not a bet,” Javan said.

“And yet we’re going to head there anyways, aren’t we?” Dae asked.

“You got anything better to do this morning?” Javan asked.

“Nothing and no one,” Dae said, kicking the lowest drawer of her desk closed. It closed with a too familiar hollow thump. Dae frowned. She wasn’t a desk.

She spent the trip to Castle Tel working on that frown, layering ever more unpleasant thoughts on top of each other.

A body at the Castle was likely to be one of two things; it belonged to a servant, in which case involving the Dawn March was unlikely, or it belonged to a member of the Telli family, in which case getting involved was exactly within the Dawn March’s wheelhouse and entirely outside of Dae’s interests.

She thought back to her interactions with the Tellis. They governed the province of Tel’Ap’Sai. Duke Telli  had been in power even back when Dae was at the Royal castle so she’d seen him a number of times, though only from a distance. He was a weaselly sort of man in her estimation, shrewd and calculating (which weren’t necessarily bad qualities in a nobleman) and disrespectful towards any he considered his lesser (which wasn’t necessarily an uncommon in a nobleman).

If the corpse was his, Dae knew she would not have been assigned to the case. Sendrick would have handled the matter personally in order to ingratiate himself with the next ruler of the Telli family.

The Duchess Telli was also not a possibility, as Dae recalled, having died in birthing her third child.

One of the children then perhaps? Not the heir certainly. There’d be a true investigation if an heir was killed. So that ruled out the first born son.

The daughter, second born was a more plausible alternative. Dae didn’t recall much about her except that her debut at court had been delayed twice for “reasons of health”. That was over a decade ago however and while the daughter hadn’t married yet, it wasn’t uncommon for a nobleman like Telli to reserve an asset like that until a suitably strategic engagement could be made which would benefit the family.

The most likely option though was the third child, the younger son. Just important enough to demand an official investigation, just unnecessary and useless enough that a half-hearted effort would suffice for all involved.

Dae remembered meeting the boy, Ren, when she was at the Royal Castle. He was quiet and reserved, in every measure the opposite of his outspoken and entitled brother. Where his elder brother took after their father, Ren seemed to avoid that fate, to his own detriment.

Dae wondered if perhaps a worse fate had befallen him. And on the evening of the Royal Unification Gala. That didn’t bode well at all.

The carriage that Javan and Dae rode in reached Castle Telli minutes after they left from the Dawn March barracks. The High Quarter was situated close to the Castle for a variety of reasons, easy access to their paid enforcers being one of the many minor perks the nobles routinely overlooked.

When the two Dawn March officers arrived though they were not taken within the castle. Instead the chamberlain and a party of minor officials led them a quarter of the distance around the castle moat to where a crowd had gathered.

Floating in the water, face down was the body they had come in search of.

“We wanted to leave it as it was so that you could examine it for yourself,” the chamberlain said.

Dae praised the silent and hidden stars. It was exceedingly rare to find someone as sensible as the chamberlain in charge of a death scene.

Javan had the chamberlain clear away the crowd and together they spent a solid twenty minutes observing the body and recording the details of what they saw. It was the basic foundation work any sort of good investigation was built on and which most bad investigations would file and ignore forever.

Once they had spotted all that they could and made what measurements they could make, Dae called for the body to be lifted ashore. A group of burly workers from the crowd stepped forward to earn a copper coin each by pulling the body onto the banks. When they settled it onto the shore and turned it over Dae discovered several unsettling things.

First, the body did not belong to any of the nobles of the Telli family. He was a young boy, younger than the youngest Telli son and barely into the beginnings of his manhood, from the neighboring country of Inchesso if his bloated and swollen features were still enough of a clue as to his origin.

That meant he was someone special and outside the purview of Dae’s familiarity which left her in uncertain waters.

What wasn’t uncertain though was the thin line that ran across his neck. From where they found the body, the boy could have been killed by a fall into the moat from the castle parapets. Or drowned if he’d slipped in from ground level. However he entered the moat though, it was slash across the throat which claimed his life. No accident created the corpse that lay on the ground at Dae’s feet and suicide wasn’t a possibility either.

For as worrisome as that was though, a small flag on the shoulder of the boy’s uniform filled Dae with even greater dread.

The boy bore the heraldry of a Queen’s Page. Only the elite were allowed to become direct servants to the Queen, and for a foreigner to hold that position meant that he was someone very important in his home nation.

Dae stared down at the corpse and bit back each of the thousand curses she knew. No matter what they found, this wasn’t going to be a simple case.

Daelynne and her vampire baggage arrived at the Sleeping Courtier well after both had been soaked to the bone. Their entrance to the inn was remarkable only because so few in the Low Quarter chose to brave the weather that night. The sight of someone being carried in on someone else’s back drew little interest and less concern though. Anyone who noticed whatever problem the two were having had to fear that they’d be drawn into the matter and no one wanted that.

It came as no surprise to Dae that her vampire backpack had chosen a room on the second floor. She briefly considered transforming into her armor, but before she could commit that transgression for a second time in less than an hour, the vampire spoke up.

“You’ve done enough,” he said. “I don’t think either one of us wants to go up the stairs like this.”

“I could manage it if they would hold still for a second,” Dae said.

“I assure you that is not necessary,” the vampire said. “I am recovered enough to walk on my own.”

He slid off her back and rose to stand on his own. With his first step though he pitched forward, clutching his side in pain. Daelynne caught him before he crashed to the ground but had to fight to retain her balance as the world drunkenly bobbed before her eyes.

“Almost recovered enough,” he said and leaned on her, forcing his breathing to an even rhythm.

“You can recover in your room behind a locked door,” Dae said and dragged him towards the stairs. The vampire winced as they moved but managed to keep up thanks to Dae supporting most of his weight.

“Are you always this painfully stubborn when helping people?” the vampire asked.

“I can just be painful if you’d prefer?” she said.

“No, that’s alright,” the vampire said. “I believe I have painful covered quite well already.”

At the epic conclusion to the odyssey of “climbing the stairs”, the two of them were out of breath and in need of a long rest. Daelynne pulled the vampire down the hall without pausing though, intent on maintaining what little momentum they had built up.

“The second door on the left,” the vampire said.

“You went for one of the cheap bunks?” Dae asked.

“It seemed sufficient,” the vampire said.

“It’s not,” Dae said. “There’s no lock on the doors for the cheap rooms. Gods above, you were determined to get yourself killed tonight weren’t you?”

“I can take care of myself,” the vampire said.

“Clearly,” Dae said and shook his arm off her shoulder. The vampire remained standing but just barely. “Wait here, I’ll get the key to one of the private rooms.”

Without waiting for the inevitable argument the vampire would make, she spun on her heels, lurched left, lurched right, caught herself on a wall and used that as a guide to make it back down the hallway to the stairs.

Due to the storm, the inn was doing poor business for the evening despite the royal holiday. Thanks to the storm though, the inn’s proprietor knew that anyone seeking shelter at his establishment was more desperate than the usual traveler. Daelynne escaped her encounter with him richer by one room key but poorer by a noticeable chunk of the coins she’d taken from the watchmen.

By the time she returned to the second floor, she expected to discover that the vampire had slunk away either into the room he claimed he’d rented or back out into the night. Instead she found him sitting right where she left him.

“Get up,” she said. “You’re room’s down at the end of the hall.”

The vampire groaned but did as he was told.

“You are not what I expected,” the vampire said as they reached the door to his new room. “And for that I am grateful.”

“You’re welcome,” Dae said. “Now don’t die and don’t get lost. If I have to come find you when I need a witness, I’ll be grumpy about it.”

“I imagine that would be unpleasant,” he said.

“Not for me,” Dae said. She smiled but it wasn’t a warm smile or a deep one. “Here’s the key, for the love of every sainted thing, keep the door locked, especially at night. There’s things out there that are a lot worse than you and most of them walk on two legs and know how to turn a door handle.”

“I understand,” the vampire said. “In a general sense at least. I’ll take tonight’s object lesson to heart.”

“A heart? You still have one of those worthless things?” Dae asked.

“Of course I…” the vampire started to say and caught the smile that had reached Dae’s eyes. “Definitely not what I expected.”

“Good night vampire,” Dae said.

“Good night Warrior,” the vampire said. “And my apologies, I didn’t mean to be mysterious before. Only careful. You may call me Teo, though if you need to file any official reports I believe your suggestion of Joe will do perfectly well for those.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking it probably will,” Dae said. She nodded her head, which was as close as she could get under the circumstances to a formal bow without toppling over, and then staggered off down the hallway.

The storm outside the tavern had not changed its overall mood though it had lost some of its rage and spite. Dae entered its embrace cold, wet, and miserable and arrived at her rooms in the High Quarter in much the same condition.

As a member of the Dawn’s March, Dae had no claim to royal position, but she was expected to represent a higher caliber of personage than the denizens of either the Low Quarter or the Tradesmen’s Wards. The Low Quarter offered comfort and escape in that sense because it meant her chances of encountering one of her fellows from the Dawn’s March was low and even if she did neither would be inclined to acknowledge the other in such circumstances.

Stripping out of her sodden clothes, Dae grabbed a towel from her small bath area to dry off. The collection of purses she had liberated from the downed watchman sat on the simple desk that shared space with her bed and the chest where she kept her better garments and valuable personal belongings.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” she said, regretting the rotten whiskey, the pointless indulgence in violence and most of the rest of the evening. Royal galas didn’t put her in the best of moods, but she’d walked the road she was on enough times to know that it never lead anywhere good.

“They’re probably still there,” she said, knowing that the watchmen were probably long gone.

“I could go back and drop their money on them,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t.

“No one would care then,” she said, knowing that it was too late to take back her mistakes.

The watchmen had been found already. The ones that fell down easy were already awake and telling their story. They’d only seen her in armor but they’d know she was with the Dawn’s March from the heraldry she wore. Their injuries were deeper than the wounds on their bodies. In breaking the watchmen, Dae had bruised the Watch’s pride, and worse, she’d punched them in their most tender spot. Right in the wallet. The theft of the purses was one thing. That was chump change and everyone knew it. Paying for the chirurgeon to set broken bones wasn’t cheap though. Nor were the extra shifts for already overworked Watchmen to cover the leave time for the injured. For that the Watch captain would raise a fuss. Which meant Dae’s commander would raise a fuss.

The world spun around her, but it was merely annoying rather than overwhelming. Dae fought against the induced dizziness and grabbed a fresh set of clothes from the closet that contained her day to day wearables. Once she’d possessed an array of nightgowns and fine undergarments. She’d maintained that frivolity longer than she should have perhaps, but her time to enjoy the soft things in life was years in the past, cut off from her by blood and fire and betrayal.

Possessed by a host of maudlin thoughts which ran in that vein, Dae stumbled out into the receiving room of her apartment, verified the door was locked, bolted and braced and then stumbled two feet backs toward her bed before settling on the couch as an acceptable alternative.

She didn’t want to dream, that was part of the reason for the bottle she’d downed, but her ghosts and demons didn’t care to indulge her and couldn’t be submerged under the thin layer of intoxication she’d covered herself in.

When the dreams came there was no sense to them. No narrative to lead her to a moment of clarity once she woke. They tore at her with crazed images, distorting her into a thousand different forms and people. She was butcher and the butchered, fallen hero and risen monster. Each image, each tableau, was wrapped in so many layers of symbolism and indirection that only the raw emotions they held touched on reality.

In the midst of the maelstrom of despair, pain, and rage, Dae found one image that she couldn’t approach at all and it made the least sense of any of them. She stood in a castle room she’d never been in and which never existed. The room was filled with crawling, scuttling things, but she knew with the certainty of a dream that none of them were an issue. She could best any monster in the room. It wasn’t the monsters that scared her though. It was a simple panel of wood. It rested against the wall of the room and beyond it lay something that froze the marrow of her bones. It was nameless. Unknowable. Except Dae knew what it was. It was annihilation. It was the thing her strength didn’t exist against. It was the foe she could never be victorious over.

She reached out for it and then saw what she was doing. With a scream, she put all of her will into stopping her traitorous hand, but against the force that drew her towards the other side of the wooden plank, she was like a child trying to wrestle with the tide.

Where her mind couldn’t save her though, her heart did. It stopped. For a too long beat she was paralyzed, dying, and then sleep shredded around her and she drew in a fresh breath.

A minute later her breathing was still ragged but under her control.

“Better than the last three times,” she whispered and clenched her fists.

She twisted and forced herself to sit on the couch, becoming dimly aware in the process that the sun was long risen. That wasn’t a good sign. She had the early shift to report to and while actual attendance for duty was not a habit among the Dawn March elite, failure to be available when her commander expected to lay into her for the problems of the prior evening was likely to raise his ire even further.

With the unpleasantness of her dream before waking, Dae had little desire to crawl into bed and wish the world away, but it was still a struggle to make it to the kitchen and pour herself a glass of water for her breakfast.

On the back of her left hand she felt a restless buzz. Kirios, her pact spirit, was restored and energized by the night’s activities. The banter with the vampire. The crazy maelstrom of her dreams. Every intense moment she experienced, good or bad, fed the spirit’s appetite.

It was why the spirits joined with the Pact Makers in the first place. To share in their lives. To feel and grow and experience things when by their nature they felt nothing, they changed only with the passing of the ages, and across those ages they held no connection to the world as it changed around them and molded them into new forms.

Attached to one of the Mindful Races, the spirits came as close as they could to the mortal world and as close as they could to living. Through the lives they shared together, the Pact Makers gained wondrous powers and the spirits gained memories and a sense of self, bounded in both cases by how much each was capable of unifying with the other.

In the wake of her dreams, Daelynne did not feel very unified with her spirit though. It craved more excitement, more misery, more everything, where she just wanted to forget the past twenty four hours and move on to as quiet a day as she could find.

The series of hammer blows that rang out against her door thrilled Kirios therefor while filling Dae with expected dread.

“Wake the hell up, the commander wants you at the barracks an hour ago,” Javan Kael, her “mentor” in the Dawn’s March called out from the hallway.

Sighing, Dae went into her bedroom and grabbed the pouches. Her clothes were wrinkled from sleeping in them but no one was going to care about that. All they’d be interested in was getting their cut of the loot she’d taken from the watchmen. That wasn’t the kind of fight that Kirios was looking forward to but Dae was pretty sure it would keep him content for a while anyways.

When Daelynne was a young girl, she’d dreamed of glorious battles and amazing feats of prowess. Though clad in the fine gowns of a royal handmaiden, she’d raced through castle halls and along stone parapets reenacting the wildest tales of daring the court bards dared tell in her presence. If the guards allowed that sort of behavior at all, it was only because the princess was there with her, and was often the one leading the charge.

Alari, then a princess, now a Queen. Then so close, now so distant. The rain wracked alley in Nath wasn’t far from the royal castle when the miles were measured by a bird on the wing. From where Daelynne stood though, a gap wider than the Uncrossable Ocean cut her off from the life she’d once known.

That was her own fault, the product of her own failings. She knew it to be true but she still missed the dreams she once had.

In their place, the years had shown her only cold, unforgiving reality. The battle against the watchmen who interrupted her drinking held no glory or amazing feats. They were six poorly armed, if violent, men and she was a Pact Warrior. The outcome of the battle was no more in doubt than if she had sparred against particularly fragile training dummys.

“There’s no need to slay them if you’ve come for me,” the vampire said. He struggled to push himself into a seating position and orient his gaze on Daelynne but he wasn’t able to keep his head from swaying irregularly.

“They’re not dead,” Daelynne said. “Dead’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

She reached down to the nearest watchman and cut his purse away from his belt. It was lighter than she hoped but there was still a good handful of coins inside.

“My apologies,” the vampire said. “I thought you were with the Dawn March. I’m afraid I don’t have any coins on me. I would guess that everyone tells you that though.”

“I am with the Dawn March,” Daelynne said. “And this isn’t a mugging.”

Or at least she wasn’t planning to take the vampire’s money. She needed him to play the part of “the innocent victim” that she was defending.

“Why are you here?” the vampire asked. His head was wobbling less but from his expression that was through a sheer act of will.

“They skipped out on paying their bar tab,” Daelynne said. “Can’t have the watch cheating the locals. That would be unjust.”

She collected three more purses and found their contents similarly wanting. Either the men laying sprawled at her feet were intensely bad at managing their money or they had families to support. Daelynne reflected on those options and decided there was no reason both couldn’t be true. Even in that case though, it was unlikely the coins in their purses were intended to support children or spouses. More likely was the scenario where the men would waste the coin on cheap entertainment as they’d tried to do tonight or spend the money on the chirurgeon who tended to their wounds.

The shards of Daelynne’s dream of being a great champion of justice cut into her again, for the ten thousandth time. She’d been kind, in a sense, to the watchman. None of them were dead. Just broken and bleeding. A few might recover in a week or so, but the rest would be a month or more in healing from their injuries. In theory the Nath Watch had provisions for dealing with wounded watchmen, but in reality those provisions often took the form of official reprimands for poor performance of their duties and an early termination from the force.

Even if the men themselves were terrible and they deserved such a fate, Dae wondered if the same could be said for their families. A watchman losing their position would mean more than the loss of a single week’s pay for their families. A loss like that brought with it hunger, insecurity and, from the worst individuals, violence.

It had been just for Dae to stop the men from brutalizing the vampire. It was just for her to take their wealth to pay off their debts. It was even, arguably, just for her to extract recompense for her own time and effort. All of that justice though wasn’t going to prevent more people from being hurt.

With a frown, Dae pushed the thought from her mind. She couldn’t save everyone. She’d proven that already. If tonight she could save herself, a vampire and a dwarven bartender, that would be enough. It was all she could do, so it would have to be enough.

“Am I free to leave?” the vampire asked. He watched Dae with an expression of disbelief and confusion overwhelming the pain that was etched into his features.

“Are you capable of leaving?” she asked. For as bad of a beating as she’d given the watchmen, they’d inflicted a worse one on the vampire.

“Not currently,” the vampire said and looked away from the fallen watchmen.

Dae thought back to her lessons. The ones she wasn’t, technically, supposed to have been taught. The musty aroma of the castle library came unbidden to her nostrils as she teased forth her knowledge of the creature that sat with his back pressed against the alley wall.

“You look terrible,” Dae said. “When did you eat last.”

“I don’t kill people,” the vampire said and tried to rise by bracing against the wall. His strength wasn’t up to the task though and, before he was able to rise even halfway, he collapsed back into the sitting position he started from.

“That’s obvious,” Dae said. “Here, take what you need.”

The vampire turned to find that she’d released her Pact armor and was offering her naked wrist to him.

“I can’t,” he said and turned away again.

“You’re going to have to,” she said. “You don’t want to be here when the on-duty watchman arrive.”

“I can’t feed with you,” he said.

“What’s wrong with my blood?” Dae asked, offended. Being fed on by a vampire wasn’t a thrilling prospect but she’d pledged to save at least him and Half-Cut Joe. “You need to heal. You can’t do that without taking in some life force. Or is there some crime that you’re starving yourself in penance for?”

“No crime,” the vampire said. “But feeding’s not like you think it is.”

“Yeah, if you lose control you could hurt me,” Dae said. The prospect was unpleasant but also unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

“No,” he said. “Each bloodline is different. I can’t share in your life force. I’m already pledged to another.”

Dae closed her eyes and shook her head. This was typical luck for her. Completely typical.

“Do you have a room somewhere?” she asked, trying to think of the easiest option she had for making this someone else’s problem.

“Yes,” the vampire said. “It’s not far away. I’ll be able to make it there in little bit.”

“You don’t have a little bit,” Dae said. She bent down to lift him up and had to fight not to topple over herself. The transformation to her Pact Warrior form had cleared away most of the intoxication she was affected by when she changed, but there was still a lot of alcohol in her system and it was happy to begin retoxifying her brain as soon as she left the embrace of her mystical armor.

“You can’t carry me,” the vampire said.

“Watch me,” Dae said and hoisted the tall man onto her back.

Neither of them was happy with the arrangement. For Dae, the vampire weighed a ton and was an unwieldy package that reduced her walking speed tremendously. For the vampire, Dae was a horse built of rocky muscle whose back crushed into his wounded ribs while she pulled his arms out of their sockets to keep him in place. Despite the awkward arrangement though, they did manage to get out of the alley without crushing any of the watchmen in the process.

“Why are you doing this?” the vampire asked.

Dae was silent for a long moment until thunder boomed over their head.

“The storm’s getting closer,” Dae said. “Where’s your place?”

Another rumble of thunder covered the vampire’s lack of an answer, but the splattering rain which followed was insufficient to disguise his continuing silence.

“Hey, no passing out,” Dae said and shook the vampire on her back. “And no dying either.”

The vampire chuffed out a tiny laugh.

“That’s an unusual request to make given what I am,” he said.

“I don’t really care what you are,” Dae said. “I just care that you’re breaking my back here.”

“Put me down then,” he said.

“No problem, just tell me where you’re room is.”

“First tell me why you’re doing this,” he said.

“You’re pretty demanding for a nearly dead guy,” Dae said. “Listen, if I leave you out here then my story of protecting you from the watch is going to fly to pieces. Oh, and you’ll wind up dead before this storm passes. As long as you’re alive I’ve got a witness who can support my side of the story and in this case that’s all I need to make the idiots go away.”

“So, I’m your alibi?” the vampire asked.

“Sure, we’ll go with that,” Dae said.

“I can’t testify in court,” the vampire said.

“You’re a citizen of Gallagrin aren’t you?” Dae asked. “You’ve got a bit of an Inchessian accent but it’s mild enough that you must have lived here for a while right?”

“You’re correct,” the vampire said. “I’ve lived in this country since I was a young boy.”

“Don’t suppose anyone gave you a name at some point did they?” Dae asked.

The vampire paused for a long moment before responding to that question.

“I’m noone important,” he said at last.

“That’s the wrong answer,” Dae said. “But I’m tired of standing in the rain. Tell me where your place is or I’ll bring you back to mine and tie you up in a box until I need you.”

“I have a room at the Sleeping Courtier,” the vampire said. “It’s at the next plaza down the road on our left.”

“I know where it is,” Dae said.

The next plaza was significantly farther away than either of the two remembered, thanks in part to the glacial pace the encumbered Dae set.

“You are an unusual member of the Dawn Watch to know this part of Nath so well,” the vampire said after they had traveled for a minute in silence.

“That’s me,” Dae. “Unusual.”

“What did you mean before?” the vampire asked, “About my answer being the wrong one?”

“It was stupid,” Dae said. “You can’t pass yourself as a normal guy. If the watch thugs back there didn’t drive that point home, then take a look in a mirror at some point.”

“I didn’t say I was normal,” the vampire said. “Just unimportant.”

“Right,” Dae said. “And that’s stupid. It screams that you’ve got something to hide. Regular people would just give their name. Smart people would make up a name. Try Del, or Joe. Those are fine names. Nice and generic. But no, you’ve got to be mysterious.”

“My apologies,” the vampire said. “I am confused and I think my brain is addled.”

“That’s good,” Dae said. “Much more believable. It’s not true, but it’s at least a decent lie and I appreciate that.”

“You saw the wounds I was given,” the vampire said. “The watchmen were not gentle with their blows.”

“I would hope not,” Dae said. “It was six on one, but they still needed to make sure they kept their edge on you.”

“Then why would you say I am lying?” the vampire asked.

“Because you’re following this conversation perfectly well,” Dae said. “No slurred words, no loss of focus, your responses are quick and on point. In short, even if they did mess up your brains, you’ve taken the time to fix the damage back up.”

“Can you blame me?” the vampire asked.

“Of course not,” Dae said. “But given that you fixed the trauma to your head before the rest of your body, I would guess that you’re more concerned about revealing something than being caught by the watch. And given what the watch would definitely do to you if they caught you, that tells me you’ve got a secret that you’re willing to die for.”

“Or perhaps I’m merely stupid, as you suggested,” the vampire said.

“Can never rule that out,” Dae said. “But it’s bad to count on that too. I think the most likely scenario though is that you don’t trust me, despite the fact that I saved your life.”

“They wouldn’t have killed me,” the vampire said. “They just wanted someone to vent their frustration on.”

“That might have been true if you were human,” Dae said. “But you’re not a person to them. You’re a corpse that’s still moving around.”

“But I’m not dead, that’s a misconception,” the vampire said.

“Do you think they care?” Dae asked. “You must have grown up somewhere very sheltered if you think violence like that has a limit.”

“You seem able to discern so much about me,” the vampire said. “I can’t imagine why you would need my name.”

“I don’t,” Dae said. “But I am curious why you hate the Dawn March so much?”

“But…I…” the vampire said. “I don’t hate them.”

“Really?” Dae said. “I do.”

Daelynne’s attention didn’t leave her bottle of celebratory whiskey when the vampire entered the tavern’s common room. His arrival only registered in her awareness because of the spray of rain the raging wind outside carried in before he could close the door. Nature had little joy to share on the night of the Sixth Unification Gala it seemed.

Or maybe the tavern was sunk under Daelynne’s own personal little storm cloud. A faint upwards flicker tugged at her lips. She could appreciate a little hate from nature. It would fit her mood so charmingly.

So would more whiskey, she decided. She reached for the bottle to refill the cheap glass she was forcing herself to sip from. Drinking straight from the bottle would have been more efficient, but she’d done that before and the bottle always emptied out well before she was ready to stop drinking. The forced pacing of filling the shot glass ensured that she’d get to enjoy every miserable, bitter drop of the nameless rotgut she hadn’t yet paid for.

It also ensured that Half-Cut Joe, the dwarf who ran the place wouldn’t try to double charge her, claiming he’d taken the first bottle away and brought her a second one. She’d had a discussion with Joe about that sort of thing before, but since they’d only broken each others faces and not any of the furniture or liqueur stock, Daelynne was still tolerated as a patron and Joe wasn’t doing time in the Watch’s jail.

The vampire intruded on Daelynne’s consciousness again when he made the mistake of bumping her table. To his eternal good fortune, she’d just lifted the whiskey bottle but hadn’t yet begun pouring the next drink.

Daelynne snaked a hand out, fast as a lightning bolt, to catch the empty shot glass. That she managed to do that only after the table tumbled over and shot glass glass hit the floor was a was a reflection where the missing two thirds of the bottle had gone, but she wasn’t in the mood to contemplate that.

Sparks of rage flared in the depths of her soul as she looked up at the vampire and forced the wheels in her mind to turn.

He hadn’t slammed her table intentionally. The idiots standing to his side had shoved him. These were the same idiots who’d been bragging all night at their prowess with women when not a single one of them was with a female on a night of authorized excess and wanton abandon.

“Watch it,” Daelynne said, the drink rendering her voice deeper and more hoarse than she’d guessed it would.

“My apologies,” the vampire said.

He was tall, but thin and pale, like many of his kind were. Daelynne didn’t look many people in the eyes, and vampires in particular were dangerous in that regards, but she scanned his face anyways.

His features were solid and handsome enough. A good balance and symmetry between cheeks and eyes, nose and mouth and chin. A touch too angular to fit Daelynne’s tastes but he could have been popular enough based on appearance if not for the overwhelming red of his eyes and the pulsing red veins that spread outwards from them.

The vampire was smart enough to close his mouth after speaking but Daelynne knew his fangs would show the moment he spoke. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t a threat.

Satisfied with his answer, she turned her gaze away from him and focused instead on the bottle in her hand. The vampire hadn’t feed in days from what she saw, but the tavern wasn’t a place for feeding. She wasn’t in any danger and, more importantly, neither was the whiskey, so she could let him slip away, the same as she wanted the rest of the world to do.

“That’s right you’re sorry,” one of the bravos from the other table said.

The vampire tried to ignore the men, but another one of them grabbed his hand as he

started to walk towards the bar.

“We don’t like your kind here,” the second bravo said, in case his gesture was mistaken for a mark of affection.

“Then let me pass, and I will be out of here sooner,” the vampire said and snapped his hand free from the bravo’s hold. Without waiting for an agreement from the table of boisterous men, the vampire crossed the room to the bar and began speaking quietly to the bartender.

Daelynne looked around for her shot glass, but it had rolled somewhere, or shattered, or possibly both. She was two thirds of a bottle past caring, and since her plans for pacing her consumption had fallen through so tragically, she got to work on disposing of the unsightly third that remained.

“Should have made him leave right now!” one of the men at the table said. He made sure his voice was loud enough to resound to the bar and back. Everyone in the small tavern had to hear what he wanted to say, most especially the target of his ire, who was ignoring the men in favor of his conversation with Half-Cut Joe.

It was a mistake. Daelynne wasn’t interested in either party, but she could see the mistake the vampire was making even from the depths of the bottle she was plumbing.

Ignoring the men wouldn’t get him anywhere. They were too worked up. It was a gala night, a kingdom-wide celebration of the beginning of the king and queen’s rule six years ago. People were supposed to be partaking in wild, unruly fun and yet the men were stuck in a meaningless little bar, drinking the same horrid crud they drank every night, with the same horrid, cruddy company they were always saddled with.

It’s always possible to fall farther in life. Even hitting rock bottom allows people to keep digging their hole deeper, but that wasn’t the problem these men had. They had jobs and lives and responsibilities but that wasn’t enough. They wanted power, and in the vampire they found a target they could abuse with little expectation of societal scorn.

Daelynne was willing to bet that half the men across from her truly believed that they were in the right to be up in arms against the intruder. Vampires had a terrible reputation and there were certainly ones that strove to live down to the worst that was said about them.

The one at the bar wasn’t in that mode though. He might have been terrible on any other night, but either natural inclination or his present circumstances kept him restrained. The men who were convinced of their righteousness wouldn’t believe that, and the other men didn’t care in the first place.

Whiskey sloshed around Daelynne’s mouth and no burning sensation followed it. It was just sour, bitter, foul swill that should be spit back into the bottle it came from. The cap had rolled away long ago though, so Daelynne swallowed and took another swig. No matter how awful the stuff was, it was never quite awful enough.

Another few sips and at the bar, the vampire and Half-Cut Joe concluded their brief business. Daelynne didn’t bother looking to see if either was happy. No one else in the tavern was, and there didn’t seem to be a reason for them to be the exception.

While Daelynne struggled to down another gulp of the ruinous sludge in her bottle, the vampire left, taking the side door in preference to another encounter with the table of belligerent drunks. Sensing their prey escaping, the men stood in unison, a silent signal passing between them, the collective urge towards violence given release and form.

Duty tugged on Daelynne’s unwilling sleeve. Beneath her cloak, the sigil she wore called to her to stand up, to stop what was absolutely about to occur.

The weight of duty’s tug was less than the weight of the bottle in her hand though, and far less than the weight of the contents she’d already imbibed. No one would care. Either way. She could sit in the bar or she could venture into the storm. No would comment or even notice what course of action she chose.

Once, maybe, the sigil of the Dawn March had been a true promise, an unbroken oath. If so though that was far before Daelynne’s enrollment in their ranks. Since she’d donned the All Seeing Badge, it had looked outwards with nothing more than a blind eye. The mark of office on her breast was so tarnished that it’s call was drowned by even the last falling drops in an empty bottle.

With a sigh, Daelynne sagged into her seat and tipped her head back. The swimming, falling, emptiness that she sought eluded her though and her thoughts remained. She was trapped with herself until whatever pitiful dregs of alcohol there were in the whiskey could rally and overwhelm her senses.

“Want another?” Half-Cut Joe asked. He was clearing the table of the men who’d left but had an eye on Daelynne’s empty bottle.

“Sure, reinforcements are always good,” she said.

“Fine,” Joe said. “Pay for that one and I’ll find its twin.”

Daelynne grunted. The idiots had left without paying, so Joe was worried about the night’s take. Somehow, everything always become her problem.

She reached to her waist and slumped into her chair further. The commander had docked her pay for the last week, and so she’d run up dry. Through the too-thin haze of the cheap whiskey, she remembered her empty purse being the reason she’d settled on Joe’s place to spend the gala evening.

“Just bring the bottle,” she said. “I’ll pay for them both later.”

“Got a shipment coming in tomorrow,” Joe said. “You’ll pay now.”

“Two bottles now, and I’ll pay you for four,” Daelynne said.

“You’ll pay now or I’ll have those Watch boys back for your hide,” Joe said.

“Those guys were Watch?” Daelynne asked, her lassitude and disinterest taking on a new hue that was speckled with a dollop greed, and a smattering of repressed aggravation.

Nominally speaking the Dawn March’s charter involved oversight of the local Watch. So it was Daelynne’s professional responsibility to ensure the Watch was acting in an ethical and responsible manner. More importantly though, the Watch was paid before the gala. Which meant each of those men were flush with their week’s pay.

Daelynne rose onto feet that should have been more unsteady and rolled her shoulders.

“Where are you going?” Joe asked.

“Need to get your money,” Daelynne said, looking towards the door the vampire and the men had left through.

“That’s the Watch you’re dealing with there,” Joe said.

“I don’t think they ever told me that,” Daelynne said. “Maybe one of them will mention it if it’s important.”

Half-Cut Joe looked up at her and rolled his eyes.

“Bring back enough for their drinks too then,” he said.

Daelynne threw the hood of her cloak up over her head and didn’t make any promises. A full purse was nice to have, and Joe’s accounting for the watchman’s tab would inflate based on however much he could guess she took from them.

It didn’t take the “All Seeing Brilliance” of the Dawn March’s motto to observe where the vampire and the men had gone. The road was empty thanks to the pounding storm, but the sounds of a struggle were clearly audible over the rain and thunder.

Whispering simple words, Daelynne advanced on the alley and felt the mantle of her Pact settle into the material world.

Mystical energy coursed through her, energizing her body and mind as she soared through an inner transformation and joined with the slumbering spirit bound to the glyph on the back of her left hand.

When she stepped into the alley, she saw the half dozen men of the watch and she saw the vampire. The watchmen were smiling, demon grins of violence and power and the lust for both surging from their hearts. The vampire was not so cheerful. He lay against the wall, pain etched in every corner of his face and throughout his body. The watchmen hadn’t been able to work on him long, but they’d begun their task in earnest and without reservation.

That’s what Daelynne saw when she entered the alley. What the watchmen and the vampire saw was something very different. As Daelynne stepped into the mouth of the small space, they saw a figure clad head to toe in armor. In her hands lay a blade of flat iron with a seething glow. When she moved, she didn’t so much walk forward as slice through the air and space between them.

With six on one odds, the men had felt comfortable in their chances against a starving vampire. Against the Pact Warrior who stood before them, they would have fled even if they’d had ten times their number.

But she was blocking the only path out of the alley.