Sweep of the Blade (Innkeeper Chronicles #4) - Ilona Andrews Page 0,1

bag out. “Water or cash?”

“Neither. I need the room till the end of the month.”

“It’s yours.” The barkeep put a large cup of mint tea on the counter. “The drink is on the house.”

“Thanks.”

Maud pulled the hood deeper over her face, took her tea, and made her way to the familiar ratty booth at the far wall, near the staircase. She slid into the metal seat and tapped the ancient remote terminal unit on her wrist. The piece of junk blinked and buzzed softly. Maud slapped it. The terminal blinked again and came to life. Maud pulled up the keyboard and sent a single glyph to the only other terminal connected to hers.

Safe.

Two glyphs appeared in response. Safe, Mommy.

Maud exhaled and sipped her tea. It was lukewarm, but free. She tapped the terminal again, running an integrity check on the armor. She could still remember the time when controlling her armor was intuitive and easy, almost as mindless as breathing. But to do that, she would have to have a crest of a vampire House. She had lost hers when her husband’s political machinations had gotten the three of them exiled to this anus of the Galaxy. No, not lost, Maud corrected herself. It was taken away from her when father-in-law had personally ripped it off her armor.

The memory of that day stabbed her, and Maud closed her eyes for a moment. She’d begged her mother-in-law for her daughter’s life. It was too late for Melizard and her, but Helen had been only two at the time and Karhari was an ugly, vicious place, the junkyard of vampire souls, where the Houses of the Holy Anocracy sent the garbage they didn’t bother killing. She’d pleaded on her knees and none of it mattered. House Ervan expelled them. Their names had been struck from the House scrolls. Their possessions were confiscated. Nobody had argued in their defense.

Helen was five now. The memories of their life before Karhari were so distant, sometimes Maud wondered if she had dreamed them.

She surveyed the dozen vampires getting drunk on caffeine. A predatory strain of the same genetic seed that had sprouted into humans, vampires were bigger, stronger, and more powerful than an average Homo sapiens. They occupied seven main planets and had colonies on a dozen other worlds, all of which together made up the Holy Cosmic Anocracy, governed by three powers: the military might of the Warlord, the religious guidance of the Hierophant, and the judicial wisdom of the Judge. Within the Anocracy, power lay with the Houses—clans, some with only a few dozen members, others numbering in hundreds of thousands.

The vampires had obtained the secret of interstellar flight when they were still in a feudal period, and their society had changed little since they launched their first ship into space. They still built castles, they wore armor, and they held on to the ideals of knighthood: honor, duty, and loyalty to the family and House. To the ragtag lot in the Lodge now, all those things were distant memories, vague and abandoned. One only had to look at their armor.

To a vampire knight, the syn-armor was almost holy. Deep black and glossy in mint condition, the high-tech nanothread mesh was custom made for each knight and paired with a sophisticated AI unit within their House crest. A vampire knight spent the majority of their time in armor, taking it off only in the privacy of their quarters. Repairing it was an art and keeping the armor in battle condition was a point of pride.

The vampires in Lodge still wore armor—they had been knights once, after all—but instead of sleek lines and glossy black, their suits were a dented mess of charcoal and grey, with sections from other suits tacked on to patch the holes where the nanothreads had been damaged beyond repair. They looked like they’d painted themselves with glue and rolled in a metal junkyard.

Her own armor was no longer black either, but at least she had managed to keep her nanothreads alive.

The door of the Lodge slid open, and a large vampire strode inside, swaddled in a black cloak. At 5’9” Maud was tall for a human woman, but he had almost a foot on her. The vampire pulled back his hood, releasing a black mane of hair that fell to his shoulders. The kind of hair that said that he was wealthy or could leave the planet to a place where water was plentiful enough to wash it. The only