The White Hall, Kola Peninsula.
The Frozen Dominion.
The hall had been built in 1919, in the first winter after the Revolution, when the Reds and the Whites were killing each other all across the frozen north and nobody had time to notice a few hundred vampires moving into an abandoned salt mine on the shore of the Barents Sea.
It had been a mine.
Now it was a palace.
A long, vaulted cavern of white salt and blue ice, lit by torches in iron brackets, with a floor of polished black stone and walls hung with the furs of animals that had not walked the earth in a long time.
At the far end, on a dais of bone, stood a throne made of antlers.
Hundreds of them.
Elk and reindeer and moose and things larger, older, stranger, woven together into a great branching thicket of white, like a frozen forest.
Viktor Sokolov sat in it, and listened, and did not move.
He was very large.
Not tall, merely.
Large, in the way that a cliff is large: broad, flat-faced, heavy-shouldered, with a short pale beard and close-cropped pale hair and a face that looked as if it had been cut from the same stone as the hall.
He wore no crown.
He wore a plain gray military greatcoat, buttoned to the throat, of a cut that had not been fashionable since the Tsar.
His eyes were the red of frozen blood.
They were fixed on the vampire kneeling before the dais.
Vasily had healed, mostly.
It had been six weeks since he stood on a ridge in the Carpathians and watched the Ashen Court burn, and six weeks was long enough for a vampire of three hundred years to grow new skin over a face that had been set on fire with lamp oil.
But the new skin was pink and shiny and tight, and it pulled at the corners of his eyes and his mouth, and he would carry the shape of those flames, faintly, for a century.
“Again,” said Viktor Sokolov.
“From the beginning.
All of it.” So Vasily told it again.
The castle.
The ghoul who had killed a Lord.
The smell of him, old, older than Veyr.
The silver bullet pulled from his own chest with his own fingers.
The wound closing like water.
The speed.
The way the shadows moved for him.
Dmitri and Pavel dead in the hall, Pavel drained white.
Then he told the rest, the parts he had gathered since, from the whispers moving through the courts like wind through dry grass.
Prague.
The church.
Ferrante’s ruined hand.
The Black Rose, and thirty vampires bowing without knowing why.
Vienna.
The Hidden City.
And the market square, three weeks ago, and a single word that had broken a Crimson Court baron’s bond to his ghoul like snapping a twig.
When he was done, the hall was silent.
The vampires standing in ranks along the walls, two hundred of them, in gray coats, did not move.
They did not look at each other.
They looked at the throne.
Viktor Sokolov looked at nothing for a long time.
Then he stood up.
“Leave us,” he said.
“All of you.
Vasily, stay.” When the hall was empty, the Voivode of the North came down from his throne of antlers and walked, slowly, the length of the black stone floor, to the far wall.
There was a door there, low and narrow, cut into the salt.
He opened it.
Beyond it was a small cold room with nothing in it but a single wooden chair and, on the wall facing the chair, an iron bar.
It was old and pitted and black, as long as a man was tall, as thick as a man’s wrist.
A gate bar.
It had been hung on two iron hooks, horizontally, at the height of a man’s eyes, the way some men hung a sword.
Viktor stood in front of it for a long time.
Vasily, waiting in the doorway, did not know what it was.
Nobody in the Frozen Dominion did.
The Voivode had brought it with him when he founded the White Hall, in 1919, and no one had ever been permitted into this room, and no one had ever dared to ask.
Some of the younger ones whispered that it was a trophy.
Some whispered that it was a curse.
Some said that on the night of the sixth of November, every year, the Voivode came and sat in the wooden chair in front of it, all night, and did not move.
“You said it smelled old,” said Viktor Sokolov, without turning around.
His voice was very low.
“The blood.” “Yes, Voivode.” “How old?” Vasily hesitated.
“Older than anything I have smelled, Voivode.
Older than you.” He swallowed.
“Forgive me.” Viktor did not answer.
He reached out, slowly, and laid one broad hand flat on the iron bar, the way another man might lay his hand on a gravestone.
Vasily saw his fingers tighten on it.
“Hellsing kept him,” said the Voivode quietly, to the bar.
“The body.
They kept it.
I always wondered.
All these years.” A long pause.
“And now they have put him in a boy.” He turned around.
His face was perfectly calm.
But his frozen red eyes were not calm at all.
“Take the hound,” he said.
“Take twenty.
Take the best.
Go to Vienna.
I don’t care about the sanctuary.
I don’t care about the Warden.
I don’t care about the Crimson Court or the Night Laws or anything else.” He walked back toward the door.
“Find the boy.
Cut out whatever they put in his chest.
And bring it to me.” “And the boy, Voivode?” Viktor Sokolov stopped in the doorway of the little cold room, with his back to the iron bar.
“Burn him,” he said.
“Burn everything.
And scatter what’s left in the sea.” Palazzo Moretti, Venice.
Isabella Moretti was bored, and when Isabella Moretti was bored, people died.
She was lying on a chaise longue in the long room on the piano nobile of her palazzo on the Grand Canal, with a view through tall Gothic windows of the black water and the lights of the gondolas and the dome of the Salute across the way, glowing white under its floodlights.
She was wearing a dressing gown of black silk and nothing else, and she was eating chocolates, very slowly, one at a time, from a silver dish.
She could not taste them.
She liked the way they melted on her tongue.
She was small, and dark, and lovely, in the manner of a Renaissance painting of a saint about to be martyred: a heart-shaped face, enormous dark eyes, a little pointed chin, a cloud of black hair.
She had been turned in 1630, in the plague year, at the age of nineteen, by a man she later had drowned in this same canal, and she had spent the four centuries since building the most profitable criminal enterprise in the supernatural world.
Blood trade.
Ghoul markets.
Smuggling.
Information.
If something could be sold, Isabella Moretti sold it, and she sold it at the best price, and she never, ever, gave anything away.
Luca Ferrante stood in front of her with his hands behind his back.
His left hand was still bandaged.
It had been six weeks, and it had not healed.
Vampire wounds that came from blood magic healed slowly, if they healed at all, and Ferrante had begun to suspect that this one would never heal.
That he would carry a dead, black, withered claw at the end of his left wrist for the rest of his very long life.
“So,” said Isabella.
“Let me make sure I understand.
You found him.
In Prague.
You had twenty people.
And he walked away.” “The Vale boy interfered.
And the American hacker.
And they invoked sanctuary law—” “Sanctuary law.” Isabella laughed.
It was a lovely laugh, like silver bells, and it made Ferrante’s blood run cold.
“Luca, darling, you’ve been killing people in sanctuaries for two hundred years.
You killed a Justiciar in the sanctuary of Kraków in 1871.
I was there.
You used his own walking stick.” She ate another chocolate.
“Don’t tell me about sanctuary law.
You were afraid.” Ferrante said nothing.
“And now,” said Isabella, “he’s in Vienna.
In the Hidden City.
Where we can’t touch him, because the Warden’s old and sentimental but he has nine thousand people who’d die for him, and they’d die for that boy too, after what he did in the market.” She sighed.
“And Seraphine’s invited him to a ball.
A ball, Luca.
She’s going to make him her pet.
She’s going to put a little red ribbon round his neck and walk him through Paris and all the old fools who still dream about the King are going to fall at her feet.” She threw the chocolate dish across the room.
It hit the wall and shattered.
“And Viktor’s sending his dogs.
And the Japanese are making noises.
And the Arabs.
Everyone wants a piece of him.
And I can’t get anywhere near him.” She lay back on the chaise longue and stared at the ceiling, which was painted with gods and goddesses in pink clouds.
“So I won’t,” she said.
Ferrante looked at her.
“I’ll let someone else do it,” said Isabella.
“Someone who wants him more than I do.
Someone who’ll pay.” She sat up.
Her enormous dark eyes were shining.
“Hellsing.” Ferrante went very still.
“Madame,” he said carefully.
“We have never—in four hundred years, no court has ever—” “No court has ever had anything Hellsing wanted this badly.” Isabella smiled.
“And no court has ever had what I have.
The Hidden City’s doors, Luca.
All of them.
Every entrance.
Every tunnel.
Every passage.
My people have been mapping that city for a hundred years, for the smuggling.
Hellsing doesn’t even know where it is.” She stood up and walked to the window.
“I’ll sell them the map.
And in exchange, they’ll leave my Venice alone.
My ships.
My markets.
For fifty years.
Signed.
And,” she turned round, “they’ll give me a vial of his blood.
When they have him.
Just one.” “They’ll never agree to that.” “Of course they will.
Not the Director.
He’s a prig.
But there’s a man in that Foundation called Mordane, who’d sell his own mother for a sample of that boy.
I’ve been selling him vampire tissue through a cut-out in Zurich for ten years.” Isabella smiled.
“He’ll agree.
He’ll agree to anything.” She turned back to the window, to the black water and the white dome.
“Make the call,” she said.
The Eastern Court.
Kyoto.
In a dojo of black cedar beneath a temple in the hills above the old capital, Akira Kurogane knelt alone on the polished floor before a single lit candle, with a sword across his knees, and did not move for six hours.
When the candle burned down, he opened his eyes, and spoke to the dark.
“If it is true,” he said, “I will go and see him with my own eyes.
And if he is worthy, I will kneel.” He drew the sword an inch from its scabbard.
The steel was very old.
It caught the last of the candlelight.
“And if he is not,” said Akira Kurogane, “I will kill him myself, and spare the world another tyrant.” The Red Desert Dominion.
Beneath the old city of Fez.
In a library carved out of the living rock, among ten thousand books and a hundred thousand scrolls, by the light of a single brass lamp, Malik Al-Rashid sat at his desk and looked at the vessel.
It was brass too.
Old, dented, the size of a wine jug, stoppered with lead and sealed with wax.
The wax bore a crowned dragon.
It had sat on this desk, untouched, for three hundred years.
Tonight, for the first time in three hundred years, it was trembling.
Very faintly.
A small, steady vibration, like the purr of a cat, that made the lamp flame shiver.
Malik Al-Rashid was very old, and very careful, and he knew a great many things that no one else alive knew.
He watched the vessel tremble for a long time.
Then he took out a book from the drawer of his desk, a very old book, bound in red leather, and opened it to the last page, and dipped a pen in ink, and wrote one line beneath the last line written there, which was dated the sixth of November, 1897.
He wrote: The blood has returned.
Then he closed the book, and sat back in his chair, and waited, as he had been waiting for a hundred and twenty-nine years.
The Hidden City.
Vienna.
The invitation came on a Tuesday.
It arrived the old way, the way invitations had arrived in the courts of the night for three hundred years: by hand, carried by a ghoul in Crimson Court livery who came through the Sanctuary Gate at midnight, bowed to the Warden’s guards, crossed the market square without looking left or right, climbed the stairs of the wine cellar, knocked on the door, and handed Adrian an envelope.
Then he bowed again, and turned, and left without a word.
The envelope was heavy cream paper, thick as card.
It was sealed with deep red wax, pressed with a seal: a rose, entwined with a crown.
It was addressed, in an elegant copperplate hand, to Monsieur Magnus, of the Sanctuary of Vienna.
Adrian looked at it for a long time without opening it.
Then he gave it to Magnus.
“That,” he said, “is Seraphine’s seal.
Her personal one.
She hasn’t used it since 1945.” Magnus opened it.
Inside was a card.
Gilt-edged.
Engraved.
Madame Seraphine Valemont, Lady of the Crimson Court, Sovereign of the Western Marches, requests the honor of your presence at the Bal de la Couronne, to be held at the Hôtel Valemont, Paris, on the night of the twenty-first of December.
Dress: Traditional.
Masks will be worn.
And beneath, in a different hand, small and quick and slanting, in ink the color of dried blood: I so look forward to meeting you.
Bring Adrian.
His mother misses him terribly.
—S.
Magnus read it twice.
Then he handed it to Lyra, who read it once and swore.
“The Crown Ball,” said Adrian quietly.
“She hasn’t held one of those since 1897 either.
It was his.
The King’s.
Every winter solstice, every Lord of the Crown came to the castle and danced, to show their loyalty.
After he died, nobody dared hold it.
It would be like announcing that you thought you were him.” He shook his head.
“She’s not inviting you to a party, Magnus.
She’s announcing you.
To every court in Europe.
She’s going to stand you in the middle of her ballroom on the longest night of the year and let everyone see what she’s found.” “And then what?” “And then she’s going to offer you her hand,” said Adrian.
“And if you take it, she’ll have the King’s blood on her arm, and every old vampire who’s ever dreamed about the Crown will come to her.
And if you don’t—” He stopped.
“Then what?” Adrian didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
“You should not go,” said the Warden.
They were in the cold room at the top of the four hundred and twelve stairs.
Konstantin Rauch was in his chair by the unlit fire, with the blanket over his knees.
He looked older than he had a month ago.
Smaller.
The skin of his face had gone thin and papery over the bones, and his hands, on the head of his stick, were trembling, a little, all the time now.
Noah had been up to see him four times that week.
Noah would not say why.
“If I don’t go,” said Magnus, “it’s an insult to the Crimson Court.
Adrian says she’ll take it as a declaration.
That I’m siding with someone else.
Or that I think I’m above her.” “Adrian is right.” “And if I go?” “If you go,” said the Warden, “you will walk into a room full of the most dangerous people in the world, on the longest night of the year, with nothing to protect you but a mask and a dead man’s heart.
And Seraphine Valemont will try to buy you.
And if she cannot buy you, she will try to break you.
And if she cannot break you, she will try to make sure that no one else can have you either.” He looked at Magnus with his faded blue eyes.
“I have known Seraphine for four hundred years.
I danced with her at the last Crown Ball, in 1896.
She was the most beautiful woman in the room, and the most intelligent, and the most loyal to the King of anyone at that table.
Or so I thought.” A long pause.
“She did not come to the council in 1897.
Nobody did.
But she was the closest to him.
She had a key to his castle.” Magnus went cold.
“You think she opened the gate.” “I think,” said Konstantin Rauch slowly, “that I have spent a hundred and twenty-nine years not knowing.
And that I am very tired of it.” He shifted in his chair, and winced.
“Go, if you must.
Take Adrian.
Take Lyra.
Watch.
Listen.
Find out what she wants.
Find out who else is there.
Do not take anything she offers you.
Do not drink anything.
Do not dance with anyone who has not danced with Adrian first.” “Why?” The Warden almost smiled.
“Because in the Crimson Court,” he said, “a waltz is a contract.
And you have not read the small print.” Magnus went down the four hundred and twelve stairs very slowly that night, and across the market square, and stopped in front of the wall where the crowned dragon was painted.
Somebody had added something underneath it, since the night of the Command.
Small, in white chalk, in a clumsy hand.
A football.
And a name.
KIT.
He stood there for a long time.
Mara found him there, eventually, on her way back from the clinic.
She stood beside him and looked up at the dragon, and the football, and the name, and didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t do the football,” she said after a while.
“Some of the lads from the Sunday team did it.
They come and touch it, before matches.
For luck.” She swallowed.
“He’d have loved that.” “Yes,” said Magnus.
“Are you going to Paris?” “I think so.” Mara nodded slowly.
She looked at the dragon for a long time.
“Then make it count,” she said quietly.
“Whatever you do there.
Make it count for something.
For him.” She turned to go, and then turned back.
“He’d want you to wear the scarf.
If you still had it.” A faint, wet smile.
“Very traditional.” She walked away across the square.
And far away, in the dark, on the motorway coming south out of Poland in a convoy of three black vans with Russian plates, twenty vampires in gray coats and one figure in the back of the last van, in the dark, chained hand and foot and neck with silver, were coming.
Magnus did not feel them yet.
They were still too far away.
But the figure in the chains, in the back of the van, lifted its head in the dark, and breathed in, and smelled something on the wind from the south.
Something old.
Something that should not be.
And for the first time in nine years, she began to growl.