"The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist" - Benjamin Disraeli
While Lenore's mission to Venice played out, Hector sat alone in her chambers in Styria as he tried to figure out how to tackle the situation with Morana. Before him was a map and a set of instructions Lenore had left him. Morana's suspected location, who to contact, what the mercenaries should do next should they succeed in extricating her. All the business-related groundwork was laid out for their plan to save Morana. All Hector had to do was somehow translate it into reality. Despite the geographic distances, the convoy's guards, and the fact that their location wasn't even a sure thing.
"Why did you rope yourself into this? You really are her obedient little tool," A more selfish part of his mind scoffed. Hector ignored the thought. He wasn't going to waste time arguing with himself anymore.
Staring at the papers and plans, Hector realized a new problem. Even if Lenore had exactly pinpointed the convoy's location, how on earth would he account for its subsequent movements or get this information to the mercenaries fast enough to use it? It was true, Lenore had managed to secure an arrangement with Codintero for Hector to gain secret access to the distance mirrors, but what use would that be for communication if the other side lacked one? A messenger on horseback would drain precious time Morana could not afford.
Hector made a resolution. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right. He needed a messenger bird, one that needed neither rest nor roads. And since he no longer had his owl and certainly no idea how to train a live bird, there was only one option. Steeling himself ahead of what he was about to do, he went to the library and asked the new assistant librarian who had replaced Elansa if there were any books on catching small game. Amazingly enough for a library originally catering to vampires, there was one.
"If I may ask… Why?" The assistant librarian couldn't conceal his confused curiosity as he gave Hector permission to borrow the book.
"I have my reasons," Hector responded. He took the book and found the section on birds. With this information, he took his leave from the castle and hiked a mile or so to a small thicket. There, using the book as a guide, he set up several snare traps and baited them with the berries Isaac somehow always had on hand. Now, he just needed to wait. Hector looked up. It was getting late. He would have to check back the next day. Hector made the trek back to Styria Keep and retired to Lenore's chambers. He wanted to write, read, or do something, but all he could do was think about what he was about to do.
The next day, Hector got up early. He hiked to the thicket and checked on his traps. To his simultaneous delight and despair, one of his snares had caught a pigeon. Exhausted from a night of trying to escape, it feebly flapped in vain as it saw Hector approaching, fear filling its small eyes. Kneeling down beside it, he cringed inwardly as he put his hand around its head. It was one thing to revive an already dead animal. To kill such a small creature for this expressed purpose felt different.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered. It had to be done though. With a forceful twist, he snapped the bird's neck. Its body jerked for two seconds and then went limp. Hector put the lifeless pigeon in a bag and returned to Styria Keep. He felt dirty in a way that he never had with human corpses. When he reached Lenore's chamber. he gently took the bird out and laid it on her desk. Hector pulled out a pair of coins and clapped them together. A faint blue light briefly appeared, and then that familiar unlife he was used to seeing returned to the pigeon's vacant eyes. It stood up and obediently stared at him.
It was no different from creating a night creature, he kept telling himself. Patting the undead bird on the head, he then went over to the room where the distance mirrors were kept. Just as Lenore had indicated, the room was unguarded and unlocked. He went inside and closed the door. One of the four mirrors was missing, loaned out to Lenore strictly so that she may communicate with Isaac. Since one of Isaac's night creatures accompanied Lenore's missions to ensure her loyalty, attempting to contact her could prove dangerous for both of them. The night creature Hector had made for her for this mission was but a caged diplomatic gift, no match for Isaac's.
He wasn't here for lovesickness though. Instead, he went up to a mirror, quietly clapped twice, and said "Morana's cell." The shards arose and formed the image of the sealed carriage serving as her prison. He repeated the triangulation process Lenore had laid out, annotating a small map of northern Italy. He grimaced. Lenore made it sound so easy.
When Hector felt reasonably confident of the convoy's current location, he went over to carry out the next step. Surprisingly the point man for hiring mercenaries was not Codintero, according to Lenore's notes. He either could not or would not refer anyone in that area. Instead, it was Thomas Burginus, Isaac's man of coin. Apparently, he had contacts in this type of area, and was willing to help.
After retrieving the specified amount of silver, Hector made his way to the room where Minister Burginus had established his workspace. The plan was all worked out. The hundred mercenaries would station themselves between the convoy's suspected location and their suspected destination. After they intercepted it and overpowered the guards, they would inform Styria that they have Morana and are willing to bring her back for a small fee, in reality their bonus if they were successful. Lenore was adamant on something like this to provide deniability. Hopefully it actually worked.
When Hector found Burginus, the balding middle-aged man looked up from a double entry accounting sheet. "Ah, Hector, we meet again. Lady Lenore told me to expect you."
"Indeed. Pleasure to see you again," said Hector as he closed the door behind him. "I understand that you know some people in Northern Italy who could help save one of Lenore's fellow vampires from her captors?"
"Yes, that is the case," Burginus responded with a nod. "It is nice not to deal with the nobility or politics for once. Those things always make me a little nervous."
"I can relate. Regardless, we are ready. I brought the money."
At this point, Burginus sighed. "Uh, about that… Well, I am actually going to have to raise the price. I'll need an extra one hundred silver on top of the existing cost."
Hector was taken aback. "But you had an agreement with us. You can't just raise the price!"
"Well, we hadn't taken into account the need for secrecy. If our king finds out about this and disapproves, I could face some unpleasant consequences. I think this is fair for the added danger."
"You've got to be kidding me," Hector responded incredulously. "You seriously hadn't thought about this until now?"
"I swear to god, I hadn't," answered Burginus in a sincere sounding voice. "I'll tell you what. I'll reduce the increase to eighty silvers… but if I go down, I am taking you with me. So, is our deal still on, or are you going to call off the entire operation and leave this Morana vampire to her death?"
Hector clenched his fist. He wanted to consult Lenore – she had a distance mirror with her, after all. But then he remembered that she was strictly to use that for communication with Isaac, and he did not want to find out how the accompanying night creature might react.
Eyes narrowing, Hector finally responded, "Fine. You'll get your extra money… But you're only seeing half of this highway robbery if you actually come through and bring Morana here safely."
"I see Lenore has rubbed off on you a bit," sighed Burginus. "Very well. Deal." The two men warily shook hands. The topic then shifted to the details. "So, what is your exact plan, Hector?"
Hector briefly questioned the wisdom of responding at all before vaguely answering, "The mercenaries will try to intercept the convoy, and then bring her back."
"Not going to divulge the details, I see. Fair enough. You don't trust me anymore, I get it," shrugged Burginus. "How are you going to get the message out to them fast enough? I can get a courier, but I don't know if he'd be fast enough for your needs.
"I have a special bird that can fly ahead of your person transporting their up-front pay and deliver the message quickly, if you can tell me where it must go." Hector paused. "Your contact won't be freaked out by an undead bird, will he?"
Burginus appeared remarkably unphased. "No, he shouldn't. He knows me and the type of people I often do business with." Burginus drew a dot on Hector's map of northern Italy, placed his seal on a letter he had written in advance, and then wrote down a name. "Have your little zombie bird go here, if it knows how to follow that command."
Hector took the documents back and nodded. "Very well. Thank you, Minister Burginus. I must go now." Leaving the money behind as well as the new surcharge, Hector went back to Lenore's chambers, reminded anew of his old misanthropy. But that was of no matter now. He found his undead pigeon sitting calmly in the room. It looked up when it saw Hector.
"Hey there, little guy," Hector said, still feeling somewhat guilty. He grabbed a small tube with a harness attached and loaded the instructions and everything else for the mercenaries into it. "I have something I need you to do for me." The bird compliantly allowed Hector to put the harness onto its cold little body. Hector then pointed to a map and the name Burginus wrote. "I need you to fly to this man and deliver the stuff I just gave to you. Can you do that, little guy?"
Although the bird could neither read nor understand maps, it nonetheless picked up Hector's wishes directly through its otherworldly link, fashioned by its undeath. Hector smiled as he opened a window, sensing that the bird understood. Without so much as a coo, the bird silently turned around and flew off into the darkening sky.
Weeks passed. Hector waited nervously for news either on his partner or the mission she gave him. Lenore's diplomatic trip was likely a fairly safe matter, although he did come to miss her. It was the latter topic that generated fretting. Yet with the bird en route, there was not much else he could do except wait and hope for the best.
To pass the days, Hector found himself spending more and more time with Elansa, writing together in the library and in Lenore's chambers. After all, both had writing projects on human vampire relations, even if with quite different theses. Furthermore, once you got past Elansa's quirks, she really was an interesting and arguably well-meaning vampire, as far removed from the violence orchestrated by Dracula and the Council of Sisters as a human clerk was from his king's wars. Exchanges with her were so different from those with Lenore, trading quick-footed verbal witticism for a kind of plodding sincerity. Still, they voiced their disagreements. Hector couldn't figure out if he had made a friend or a friendly rival.
"What do you think of what I have so far?" Hector asked Elansa after letting her read the outline of his book on human-vampire coexistence.
Elansa looked up, a single eyebrow raised. "You're citing present day Styria as a model?"
Hector realized he probably needed to clarify. "I wouldn't say a model, given the history. But the laws right now, with voluntary blood for cash combined with animal blood sourced from the same livestock humans eat, do offer an equitable framework, no?"
"You can't decontextualize the present situation from the past history."
"Okay then," Hector responded in a slightly challenging tone. "Why do you think humans hate vampires so much, even in Styria?"
Elansa thought and said, "I think we're perceived as predators, perhaps? The Church certainly isn't helping matters. Finally, I guess to some extent, humans just naturally dislike anyone different from themselves."
"What about things that the vampires could have done differently?" Hector retorted. "Things like treating humans like cattle in the first place, taking so much blood that it left them anemic, feasting on young children? Have you ever tried thinking about those things from a human perspective, and how it may have exacerbated any of the earlier reasons you just laid out?"
Elansa thought. Her first instinct was to respond defensively, but for the sake of argument she let herself chew on the thought for a moment, imagining herself in a human's shoes. "That would only make them want to kill us more. The situation is even worse then."
Hector sighed as Elansa's retort forced him against his own latent misanthropy. "Well, I hope you're wrong."
"It would be nice if I was wrong too, but I don't see grounds for your optimism." Only in Elansa's macabre mind was Hector's take on life "optimistic," of course. The conversation wound down as the day did so too. Yet as she parted ways, something bothered Elansa. For her, history was always an amoral phenomenon. Perhaps it still was… but what if Hector was right, that human attitudes towards vampires were in part the product of vampire behavior. They'd still hate us anyway, she internally scoffed. Besides, it was too late to fix those things... Right?
The thought persisted in her head like an unwelcome houseguest.
A few days later, Hector was still in Lenore's room, writing. His project, originally a flight of fancy while debating Elansa, had entrenched itself as a serious endeavor. He increasingly found himself needing to wrangle with more technical questions of minute policy that he lacked an innate interest in, but the end question – the coexistence of two deeply flawed races whose struggles so defined his life – made it worth it.
As he paused to think, someone knocked. Hector looked up and saw Elansa letting herself into the chamber. She kept on her full dayware, as Hector had left the windows open for himself, safe for him but deadly for her. Sitting in Elansa's gloved hands was a platter with a loaf of bread… and a cup of blood.
"Is that for me?" he asked with a look of confusion and difficultly concealed revulsion.
"Yes." The diminutive vampire simply responded as she placed the platter down besides Hector's papers. "Bread and dipping blood, for you. I saved the blood from my own provisions." She saw Hector's grimace and sought to assure him: "It's just chicken blood. Humans eat chicken, no?" Her reassurance was to no avail for some reason. Elansa didn't understand.
Looking at the confusion on the face of Lenore's vampire assistant, Hector sighed as he figured out the misunderstanding. "Elansa, you're right, humans do eat chicken, but we don't drink their blood or use it as a sauce. It's, well… we just don't like blood."
Elansa's pale grey skin turned slightly pink with embarrassment at her mistake. "Oh, uh, I'm sorry," she sputtered. In the heat of the moment, she grabbed the chicken blood and choked it down herself, literally trying to drink away her social faux pas. Realizing she just compounded her slip-up, Elansa reddened further and simply blurted "I'm going to the library," and bolted out the door, leaving Hector with a loaf of bread and an empty, red stained bowl.
It took Hector a second to process everything that just happened before he shook his head to himself. Recalling their conversation about whether vampires' behavior fueled humanity's ire at them, he wondered if this was Elansa's earnest attempt to show goodwill towards the most easily accessible human she knew. Then again, sometimes there truly was no predicting Elansa.
Partly to shake the awkwardness of the encounter, Hector decided to check on Morana. Lenore had impressed on him the danger of using the mirrors too many times – after all, every instance of using it created another opportunity to be caught. That said, Hector really hadn't used it much at all. As he had last time, he approached the room where the distance mirrors resided, waited for the coast to be clear, and then slipped inside. "Morana," he said, clapping twice before a mirror.
The shards showed the near total darkness of the cell holding her. Perhaps the operation had failed? No. More likely it needed more time. At least that is what Hector wanted to believe. He also checked on his messenger bird and saw that it was perched somewhere near a camp. If the operation had failed, presumably it would be flying back to deliver the bad news.
Satisfied, Hector departed the room. Yet as he did, he found himself staring at a surprised looking human servant. The human servant knew that no one ever seemed to enter that room, save Isaac and his monsters. After several painfully awkward seconds, the servant went his way, but Hector knew that he had been compromised. It was only a matter of time now before Isaac found out about the operation taking place underneath his nose.
He decided that he only had one option. He had to be the one to tell Isaac, before anyone else. Searching around the castle, Hector found Isaac taking a walk through the courtyard, unaccompanied for once. He joined him. "Ah, Hector! It has been a while since we've been able to chat," said the self-proclaimed king.
"It certainly has been." They passed by a large fountain as they engaged in some small talk, about old times, about the present, about the weather. Then, Hector said "Your Highness, I have something to tell you."
"What is it, my friend?"
Hector hesitated, gathering his courage. "Shortly before departing, Lenore accessed and used the distance mirrors to try and find out her sister Morana's whereabouts. And I helped her."
Isaac stopped. A look of indignation bordering anger appeared on his face as memories of Hector's plotting with Carmilla flowed back. He could practically see the marionette strings connected to Hector's head and limbs, leading far off to a pair of pale hands presently in Northern Italy. "Why that scheming little..." He cut himself off and looked back up at Hector. "Hector… Why? Why did you do this? Did you not know that I forbade Lenore from using them without expressed permission?"
"We're working on a plan to save Morana. It has nothing to do with undermining you or your rule."
"So then why didn't Lenore go to me for permission then?"
The silver haired forgemaster responded, "Because time was so short, and she feared you would refuse."
Isaac clenched his fist. Not only Lenore, but his own friend had kept him in the dark about a matter as sensitive as the mirrors. "Hector, are you that infatuated to not understand the severity of this? Of her going around me and you helping her do so? I had explicit orders for Lenore not to have access to the distance mirrors, and you of all people should understand why this is necessary!"
"I know you don't trust Styria's vampires, but there truly is no ulterior motive beyond doing what she can to help someone close to her. It really is that simple, Your Highness."
"Even if that is the case, to go behind a king's back is in and of itself to subvert him, and seldom does it stop there," retorted Isaac. "Mark my words: Lenore will answer for this."
Hector stood his ground. "Lenore's most important contribution to your rule, the stabilization of Styria's blood supply, came from her going behind your back. She went behind your back and found Hungarian prisoners to help feed the most important castle staff. She read that ultimatum without you asking and found the loopholes needed to replace the system it abolished. None of this would have come about had she blindly followed orders and did no more."
"And this new adventure, whatever your plan is?" the king intoned challengingly. "This too is somehow to my benefit? Trying to rescue a vampire with no loyalty towards the new government at the potential risk of entangling Styria in even more problems abroad?"
"It is not to your detriment, that much she assured. The plan is to have mercenaries intercept whatever sort of carriage is transporting her, but she already laid out the groundwork for deniability should it fail. The men on the ground are of foreign origin and hired by her own coin. And should it succeed, I am sure that she would try and find a way to make Morana as useful to you as possible." Hector saw that feelings of broken trust still swirled in Isaac's eyes. "I'm not asking you to give this your blessing, but your pardon. I'll be the first to admit that Lenore can be ruthless and cutthroat, but self-serving she is not. If anything, her recent actions show a level of loyalty to Styria and her adoptive family far greater than all of Dracula's scheming council put together."
Isaac took a deep breath. "How do you know for sure that Lenore is doing what you think she is doing?"
"I was there, going over the maps with her, dividing up the tasks. I know."
The king sighed and then said, "I will be foolish and take your word." The rest of the walk was short and silent, before Hector parted ways to escape the icy chill still emanating from Isaac. The conversation certainly had stung. Yet Hector also felt relief. The truth was now, out, and it hadn't harmed anyone. No, it was more than that. There was a small element of vindication. Lenore always preferred to operate with a level of subterfuge, cloaking her agenda in secrecy and half-truths. This never sat well with Hector though, even without memories of that damned control ring that nearly destroyed him – and ultimately her too. Today, telling the truth had proven the best strategy.
His thoughts turned to Burginus, and the extra fee he had extorted for secrecy. Why that little greedy… Hector made up his mind. He was going to confront Burginus, demand the funds back. In his head, he envisioned the finance minister at a loss for words, trying in vain to find some excuse to keep the money, before throwing down the coins and storming off in a huff. Perhaps that was the best-case scenario. But it was a fantasy Hector decided to entertain until the last possible moment.
Just as he was about to reach Burginus' chamber though, a messenger caught up with him. "Hector," he said, panting, "King Isaac wants to see you immediately. He received a transmission from Lenore."
Hector almost completely forgot about Burginus. "What? Is she coming back? Is everything okay?"
The messenger hesitated. "Yes and no." Hector suddenly found seconds stretching into what felt like centuries. "Her mission was a success, she obtained everything she needed from Venice… But she was also seriously hurt."
"What happened?" Hector asked, filling with dread.
"Someone threw holy water at her."