The Kingmakers(3)

Greyfriar gave the young man a quick nod. “Well done. You will have the chance to fight again soon.”

The war with the vampires was dragging into its fifth month. And the humans were losing.





OILY SMOKE AND thick fog the colors of blood and snow engulfed Grenoble. The city was situated on the confluence of two rivers, the lion and serpent, the Drac and the Isère. To the right of the lion, a huge human army huddled on the rolling countryside south of the city, now largely stripped of trees. The sprawling camp was hemmed in by the river on the west and by steep mountain cliffs on the other side.

In the frozen filthy trenches, numb fingers clutched steel weapons as the breath of men hung in the air, mixing with the smoke drifting over the machine-gun nests whose guns had just stilled. Eyes were raised overhead, scanning the grey sky for the slightest hint of shadows.

General Mehmet Anhalt emerged from his command bunker dug deep into the frozen earth. He was relatively short and stocky, but moved with vigor and agility. He was Gurkha, olive-skinned and clean-shaven, reserved and calm. He wore a heavy wool coat over a uniform, tattered but kept pressed as sharply as possible, with mud-caked boots and a peaked helmet whose khaki wrap was showing wear.

Anhalt made his way through the trench system, eight feet below the surface of the hard ground. Some stretches of the trenchworks were covered with metal sheeting or rough wood planks to help shield the soldiers from the claws of the enemy, but most of the network was open to the sky. Even in the thin morning light, the muddy gashes were places of unhealthy shadow and stench.

Anhalt's helmet bore the scarab badge marking him as the holder of the revived title of sirdar, lord commander of the Imperial Equatorian Army, and commander in chief of the Grand Expeditionary Force in Europe. He strode past infantry troopers, some of whom stood and saluted, while others merely stared or nodded a greeting while continuing to smoke or preparing meager breakfasts while huddled around makeshift braziers trying to warm themselves. He hopped onto the fire step next to a young man, trembling either from the cold or nerves, with his head down on his arm. The boy looked up wearily and his eyes widened at the unexpected sight of the general standing next to him. Anhalt saw fear in the boy's face, and not just the reasonable fear of war. The trooper was drenched in terror.

No matter how strongly the command staff had attempted to indoctrinate the soldiers that the enemy was nothing more than a subspecies of humanity, bloody myths and spook stories crowded the Equatorian mind. Lectures in the sunbaked camps of Egypt were one thing; grey shadow creatures flitting unnaturally through the icy air of Europe were quite another.

Anhalt placed a hand on the trooper's shoulder, and through the khaki tunic more suited for desert service than the Alpine winter, he felt the roughness of chain mail. Many troopers wore mail, akin to the knights of old, because it afforded some protection from the claws of the vampires even though it hampered movement and agility. The general exchanged a brief smile with the young man, who stilled his trembling and stared with renewed resolve over the battlefield.

Through his field glasses, Anhalt saw that a light blanket of wet, heavy snow lay everywhere, partially shrouding bodies, both human and vampire. The eastern light was just appearing over the mountain peaks, illuminating the aftermath of another long, bloody night of fighting.

Anhalt dropped back into the trench and moved quickly toward the artillery command on the eastern flank of the sprawling Equatorian encampment. He eventually climbed out of the man-made canyons onto level ground where lines of eighteen-pound cannons were placed, surrounded by sandbags and earthen bulwarks. He approached Colonel Eugene Mobius, who sat outside a tent, sipping a metal cup of steaming tea. Mobius rose and saluted sharply. He was a tall, thin man with close-cropped brown hair and a long jaw. He rotated a shoulder, which made his chain undershirt clank and grind. He was a capable soldier, and directed the artillery units with much discipline and rigor.

“We gave them a thrashing they won't soon forget,” Mobius proclaimed loudly, more for the morale of the men within earshot than for the sirdar. They both knew that they had barely held their line under the last vampire assault.

Anhalt merely nodded, his expression giving no indication as to his disposition. He climbed onto a berm thrown up in front of the cannons, and stared at the distant mist-shrouded roofs and steeples of Grenoble, which were beginning to glow orange in the rising sun. On the scarred plains between the glistening city and Anhalt's icy observation post, ghostly shades of trench-coated soldiers drifted across the field, searching for dying or dead companions.

Colonel Mobius joined him and said, a bit more quietly, “Our odds would improve, sir, if we could pound the bloody beasts to soften them up.”