Prologue

* * *

Alat didn't like cities. He and Zervan had once been at odds on that ground.

The rambunctious and intemperate Elder often preferred the comfort of a secret lair to the dangerous freedom of the woodlands, a passion shared by many of his retinues. Yes, there is more prey in the city. But there are guards, regular and covert, curious townspeople, sticking their noses into their affairs, temple interrogators, agents of Mistress, finally. Hiding oneself and hiding one's "amusements" is much more difficult. At the same time, no one will pay attention to the disappearance of one or two peasants, or even a completely butchered family, they'll put it down to wolves or demons or something else. It's just business as usual. Besides, successful hunting of various magical creatures not only raised the status of a subordinate in the eyes of Zervan but also brought quite a good income, because mages always lacked ingredients and gave a good price for them.

Not all, of course. Some were struggling from bread to water themselves.

However, Master Hustin and his disciples had if not unlimited access to the treasury of the non-dead community, then very close to it, so in most cases, Alat preferred to sell the loot to his own. Easier, more reliable, faster, and it wouldn't hurt to appear useful in the eyes of a second Elder. Unlike most of Zervan's servants, he had no fear of magic, and in the laboratory of the warlocks came down without trepidation.

"Dark Night," the hunter stumbled through the narrow door with some difficulty, greeting his host from behind a bulky bag. "Take the loot."

"Dark, dark." The blond boy pushed aside the jars of dried herbs he'd been going through before Alat's arrival and pointed to the table in front of him. "Put it there. What have you got there?"

"Bellychewer. You asked for a whole one, I brought a whole one. Only without paws."

"I don't need paws. Oh, he's still alive!"

"Yeah." The hunter sat down on a stool, waiting for the mage to evaluate his prey. "I didn't beat him with silver, I didn't poison him with poisons... He'll get over it."

"He won't make it. We don't need him, we need his guts freshly extracted."

"It's up to you. Vador, do you need a fresh Firestarter? I came across a sprout on the way back."

"Come on," the undead alchemist agreed. "I'll make it all worthwhile. Ten gold pieces for the carcass, ten dinars for the weed, plus a shipping bonus. That makes eleven gold pieces. Will that be okay?"

Alat nodded, agreeing to the price. Perhaps the priests of some temples would give more for a conditionally living creature, but he didn't want to mess with them. It was risky. Other would-be purchasers, be they merchants of forbidden goods, clandestine practitioners of magic, or leaders of cults, would be very reluctant to shell out eleven yellow blobs. Gold is expensive. In the old days, when there was only Taleya, it was almost as expensive as silver because the mines were running. Now it's over, there's no place to mine it, and the deposits are depleted.

Vador also concocted a kind of liquid that could affect even vampires insensitive to poisons, and he paid for it with trusted suppliers. Which, in Alat's eyes, was the most powerful argument for being friends with an alchemist.

"Did you hear the latest?" The adolescent-looking warlock was deftly dragging the Bellychewer into the small back room. "About the Dungeon?"

"No, I just got back to the Capital. Haven't even gone into the lair yet. What's in there?"

"Our diggers have dug a network of caves, all artificial. The protection there is terrible. I don't know what rituals were going on in them, but there's a lot of power poured into them, and it's unclear for what purpose. It looks like the ancestral system of the Dukes of Taleya."

"Their secret sanctuary?"

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"It could very well be. After Irrhan the Fool, the dynasty had forgotten a lot of legacy of its ancestors." The sorcerer put the lock on the door and went deep into the shelter, inviting Alat to follow him. "Work is suspended, Maestro and Messen Latham are now trying to determine whether it would be best to wall up the passageways that have already been opened."

In principle, the Taleya catacombs were more than satisfactory to the undead who inhabited them. The intricate tiered labyrinth successfully discouraged explorers from taking a closer look at the risens' possessions, in three out of four cases with their lives. Traps, demons, bandits, cultists - you can't count all the dangers. However, despite the precautions and regular collapses or, on the contrary, the construction of additional tunnels, human structures managed to send squads to map the dungeons. According to the vampires themselves, the same temples of the Saints and Marrh the Swordsman possessed plans for more than eighty percent of the first floor and at least sixty percent of the second floor. This gave rise to apprehension.

The Mistress, in her great wisdom, decided that although the ideal was not attainable, it was necessary to strive for it. So she began construction. Beneath the city, directly beneath the Royal Palace, there was a powerful rock layer thick enough to become something like a central base for the risen community. Or, globally speaking, all the civilized undead of the modern oikumene. Because of its great depth and the need to operate covertly, the task was initially very difficult and took several decades to complete. They found miners in Bardi who knew how to build at great depths. Their loyalty was ensured by a considerable amount of money to families and a mental web imposed on the personality, while experience and a large number of workers provided by their employers allowed them to put up with some irregularity of the order. Then, after a long design, the construction itself began. The budget grumbled under the expense of materials, security, bribes, and payoffs to the mass of officials and guards, food and medical care for the workers...

And now the surprises began.

"So we won't have an underground palace?" Alat wondered aloud.

His feelings were contradictory. On the one hand, he didn't like working with a pick. For safety reasons, mortals were involved in the construction to a minimum, only specialists. So the dirty work was done by the risens themselves in a large company of brainwashed cultists or the living dead raised by Maestro Hustin. On the other hand, he had seen the drawings of the future heart of the bloodline, and the architects' design touched him. No one had ever created such a thing before, at least not since the Plague. Hunter liked the feeling of belonging to something great, capable of standing for not even centuries, but millennia. And he just liked the distraction from the usual struggle for existence.

"I still hope for the best," the long corridor ended, and now Vador was fumbling at the door to the inner chambers. He seemed to be calling off the guards. The presence of magic always tingled in the back of Alat's head, and now the familiar sensation made him stay away from the silently cursing alchemist. "The Elders are experienced. Any protection can be removed, given time and a calm environment, and both seemed to be present now."

Hunter stepped through the door that finally opened before answering it:

"Well, yes. The priests are fighting amongst themselves, and the aristocrats don't care about us either. It's been so quiet for the last hundred years... Except for the steppes."

"The steppes are not our problem," Vador disagreed. "They're bothering humans, not us."

"The steppe lies between us and Seven Rivers. Which, by the way, seems to have strong risen communities." Alat grinned. "They're preparing an expedition there, recruiting those with high resistance against the sun. They've recruited me, too."

"I thought we were doing the Archipelago now."

"Well, one does not prevent the other."

In addition to the three largest communities in Taleya, Bardi, and Zonna, the risens had two other cities in their special position - Lascaris, the gateway to the west, and Deep Harbor, the largest port of the Good Sea. And while in Lascaris the bloodline's position was fairly stable due to longstanding ties with the ruling dynasty, things didn't go smoothly in Harbor. First, is the island position. The flowing water did not have the best effect on the undead, and the crowding and the large number of prying eyes prevented the creation of normal conditions for post-life. Of course, one could feed on sailors and dump corpses into the sea, but here the "second" - the Lord Captain's perfectly organized intelligence service - intervened. Professionals who carefully monitored any unusual occurrences had more than once thwarted the Taleya vampires' attempts to gain a foothold on a strategically advantageous piece of land. The community was badly needed here. They needed a base to continue their expansion; without a solid rear, there was no point in trying to reach the eastern seaboard.

Both Vador and Alat were old enough and experienced enough. They understood the obvious - in the lands nearest to them, the dominion of the Mistress was firm. Neither in Lanak nor in the Land of the Blueness, or the mountain principalities, let alone in the Taleya Kingdom itself, were there any serious forces left that challenged her decisions. There may be tiny communities somewhere, rather risen loners who do not wish to live by the laws set by the Night Mistress, but there is no point in considering them. Moreover. In the last hundred years, there has been no mention of incidents in which the risen have suffered serious casualties. One might say that no effort has been expended - it has only been accumulated.

And now there are enough of them to think about a new rush.

* * *