Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
“I want your opinion on this house I have inherited,” Kendrick told Dominic the next night. He had arrived on his friend’s doorstep a half hour after dusk. “I could find the tunnel entrance, but I’d like to see it from the street as well.”
“I know where it is,” Dominic said. “But we’ll need keys to avoid looking like housebreakers to humans.”
“Who would have the keys, if all Rupert’s cronies are dead or fled?”
“Not all,” Dominic said, giving him an odd look. “There is Joseph.”
“I wouldn’t describe him as a crony,” Kendrick said, thinking of the silent man who had alerted him to the onset of madness in a vampire.
“Perhaps not,” Dominic murmured.
“Where would we find him?”
The dingy chop house teemed with clerks and laborers eating bread and meat after a long day. Men sat elbow to elbow at long tables, putting away food as efficiently as possible. Kendrick spotted Joseph towards the back, staring into the middle distance with a tankard in front of him.
Kendrick weaved through the crowd and stopped in front of the table. “What are you doing here, Joseph?” Kendrick asked conversationally, doffing his baldric and swinging a leg over the bench to sit.
The human masticating his bread beside Joseph stared at the sword Kendrick rested on the table. He lifted his head and opened his mouth.
Kendrick caught his eye and shook his head.
The man blinked and looked down, sliding farther away. Dominic silently sat in the open space.
Joseph blinked, focusing on Kendrick. “I’m listening,” he murmured at a pitch only the vampires would be able to hear in the cacophony. “The petty squabbles, the earnest conversations, the bad jokes… They make me remember being alive.”
“Good,” Kendrick said. “Those who forget go mad. Have you heard of any more madness incidents?”
“No, thankfully,” Joseph said. “These last few years, there have been far more than usual.”
Kendrick leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “Do you know who would have the keys to Rupert’s house?”
Joseph shot him a long look. Finally, he said, “I have them, Master.”
The word churned in Kendrick’s gut. “Not ‘Master.’ I don’t choose that title.”
“What, then, if not Draugodrottin?” Joseph asked quietly.
Rupert’s title, though stupid, had been designed to instill a mythos of fear. Master, though—that was a brutal, bully’s title. A master implied that those under him were slaves, Kendrick realized, disquieted. That was why the word stuck so in his craw.
“I don’t know, but not ‘Master,’” Kendrick said firmly.
One long blink from the scarred man. Then, “Yes, my liege.”
Kendrick nodded, his shoulders easing.
“We’d like to look at the house,” Dominic said, picking up the thread of conversation.
Joseph put his palms flat on the table. “I can take you there now.”
Kendrick picked up his sword and stood. “Let us go.”
Joseph led them to a grand, terraced townhouse in Mayfair, just off Berkley Square.
It had a fine facade and impressive stonework, and the nameplate by the door read, “Carmine House.” It loomed over the houses on either side like a shadowy vulture.
No lights lit the windows. Joseph placed a great iron key in Kendrick’s hand.
Ascending the steps, Kendrick turned the bolt. The door opened with a low groan of protest from the hinges, as if unused to anyone passing this way.
Past the threshold, Kendrick stepped into silence. Not the sorrowful, neat silence of Dominic’s Fernside, or the cozy quiet of Etienne’s new abode—but a held breath. Like a silent sob.
Here and there, conspicuous furnishings were missing, Kendrick noted as he walked through the hallways.
The silver was gone from the butler’s pantry—if they had ever had any to begin with—and any small ornaments or porcelain knickknacks that had been in the house had disappeared.
Pictures were missing from the walls. As if any residents or servants had scarpered with whatever they had been able to set their hands on.
It was in the upper floors, the non-public rooms, where Kendrick smelled the fear and the blood. And it was in the attics that he found the stained straw pallets, and the shackles. Some iron. Some silver.
Someone had broken them open and let the prisoners loose.
Good, Kendrick thought, his clenched fingers twisting the metal shackles into something unrecognizable.
He should have come here sooner. He should have sought out the cancer of Rupert’s reign sooner.
He took hold of the silver chain and squeezed. His flesh sizzled against the metal.
A floorboard behind him creaked. “My liege,” Joseph said in a carefully neutral voice.
“Did you unlock these chains, Joseph?” Kendrick asked. His skin slowly turned red and blistered from the silver.
“Those that still remained when we returned from the north, yes.”
“Good.” Kendrick threw down the mangled chains and straightened. “Why were they imprisoned?”
“Punishment for various infractions, my liege. Or in the case of the humans, as food. Or entertainment.” Joseph’s voice was very dry.
“And no one did anything?”
“He was the Draugadrottin. We were all bound to him.”
That was obfuscation. “What function did you serve in his court?”
“Broadly, I was his majordomo. It allowed me to…” He faltered. “I did what I could. For them.” He glanced towards the chains.
“And for us, too, if I am not mistaken.”
Joseph shot him a look.
Kendrick raised an eyebrow. He had not forgotten that Joseph had spoken up for Ophelia when they had all been captured by Rupert’s woman, Gisela.
“It wasn’t enough,” Joseph burst out. “It was never enough.”
“We have the chance now to do more. The both of us,” Kendrick rumbled. “Will you help me?”
Joseph stood there a long moment in the dark before he bowed his head. “Yes, my liege.”
“It occurs to me,” Kendrick said, “that I am not truly your liege lord. Not yet.”
Miss Dryden’s words about oaths and laws came back to him.
The Ossuary had functioned on a bloody principle of strength for centuries.
But maybe he could forge a different way.
Not based on vampire traditions, but human ones.
A master could do whatever he liked to those under him because he wielded absolute power over their lives.
A liege lord or king, however, owed his subjects security and justice.
“I shall have to do something about that.” He offered Joseph his hand, and after a second of hesitation, Joseph clasped it.
They descended the stairs to find Dominic.
On the second floor, Kendrick heard a far-off chorus of voices lift in song.
He went to the window, and when he found the curtains were nailed down, he yanked, ripping them back.
Through the dingy glass, he could see a church steeple a few blocks away.
He lifted the stiff latch and pushed the window open.
“God rest you merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour
Was born upon this day,
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray…”
“Caroler practice,” Joseph said. “At St. Alban’s.”
“That’s right,” Kendrick said. “It’s December, isn’t it?” He let the curtain fall back as Dominic paced up the hallway towards them.
“It’s a good thing you have the keys because the door down into the Ossuary tunnels is locked.
But the back half of the house and the basements are disgusting,” Dominic said without preamble.
“Absolutely abhorrent. Was Rupert continually feeding off his household staff? And there are…bodies. Old ones.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Kendrick muttered. “The attics are similarly foul.”
Anger animated Dominic, his eyes flashing red. “Did he have no care for his household?”
“They were human,” Joseph said, which seemed to be the only answer.
“Human or not, you don’t do this kind of thing to your own people. By God, you don’t do it to anyone. We have laws about killing humans!”
Joseph passed a hand over his face. “Laws do not apply to you if you are the one making them.”
“You’re right,” Kendrick said. “Laws should apply to everyone, or they are not truly fair or just. I have taken over as ruler of the Ossuary, but—as someone recently pointed out—I have not made it clear how my rule will be different. I want to make oaths to the populace and receive their oaths, to bind us together.” He flexed his hands, feeling vigor flow through him, as if he were waking up after a long time asleep.
“I also want to find all the laws set in place for the vampires of London and discover out just what I am expecting the populace to obey so I can make changes if needed. I’d like your help, the both of you.
I have found several of the law books in the Ossuary, but they are old and incomplete.
I don’t know if there are any in this house. And if it’s as disgusting as you say—”
“You’ll need to scour the whole building,” Dominic said darkly. “I’d suggest fire, but flame is not kind to London or vampires.”
“And for such a large building, we’d need a lot of help. Let me think on it,” Kendrick said. “But if the both of you are willing, we can comb through the law codes and find which are still in effect, and what—if anything—Rupert was using to govern.”
“Yes,” Joseph said immediately.
“It will be a large undertaking.” Dominic rubbed his chin in thought.
“I am confident,” Kendrick said, “that you are up to the challenge.”
They left the house the way they came, and Kendrick re-locked the door.
“I will not ask you to name names of the survivors who left this place,” he told Joseph. “And I would not ask them to return. But for the humans—they will keep silent?”
“The few still alive?” Joseph nodded. “They were controlled by fear, the threat of death to any they cared about. They will do their best to disappear. I did not know, at the time, what number of Rupert’s circle were still extant, and I told them so.
Besides,” he said heavily as the wind picked up, “who would believe them?”
Kendrick bade them a good night and walked east, past the fashionable streets and carriages coming and going, through the throngs of people still out in the late evening.
Even though he walked through their spaces and moved through their crowds, he was still at a remove from humanity.
As if they were all inside a warm and cheerful pub with a crackling fire and good company, and he watched them from outside the window, the sound tricking to his ears with a muffled quality as rain chilled him to the bone.
What a painful thought.
After a millennium, was he still lonely?
He didn’t even remember his own humanity.
But he saw it, every day, through the window.
The trouble was, some vampires simply stopped looking and went on their own way, into the dark. And because of it, a necessary part of them died.
Kendrick kept walking, unbothered as the wind picked up and cut through his layers of clothing like a knife. He had never been able to resist the lure of a good fire and a story told around it.