Sweep of the Blade (Innkeeper Chronicles #4) - Ilona Andrews Page 0,17

the gate.

“What’s bothering you?” he asked quietly.

“You told your mother.”

“Of course I did. You’re not some shameful secret I’m going to hide.”

“No, I’m a disgraced exile who had the audacity to turn down the most beloved son of House Krahr.”

He considered it. “Not the most beloved. My cousin is much more adorable than me. He is two and his hair is curly.”

“Lord Arland…”

His eyes sparkled with humor. “You could always remedy it and say yes.”

“No.”

Helen was looking at them. Maud realized they were standing in front of the summoning gate and bickering.

“Do you remember this?” Arland asked Helen.

Helen nodded and eyed the gate. “It makes my tummy sick.”

“Do you want to hold my hand?” Maud asked.

“We have to do it quick, like charging a castle.” Arland reached out, swung Helen onto his shoulder, and ducked through the gate.

“Arland!” she snapped.

He was gone. She was on her own on the arrival deck with half of Arland’s crew gaping at her. She clenched her teeth and walked into the crimson glow.

3

The red radiance of the summoning gate died behind Maud. She blinked, fighting the vertigo, and walked away from it on autopilot to keep from blocking other arrivals.

To the right, about twenty-five yards away, Arland stopped to speak to three vampires. He’d taken Helen off his shoulders—thank you, universe—and she gaped at the spaceport.

Maud looked around and stopped to gape, too. She stood in a cavernous rectangular chamber. Daylight flooded it through long, narrow rectangular windows cut in the gray stone walls twenty feet above. She turned slowly, trying to take it all in.

To her left, the summoning gate glowed, about to release another traveler into the spaceport. To her right, small craft, sleek fighters and a few light civilian vessels, perched on the floor, and beyond them enormous hangar doors stood wide open, filled with blue sky. Above the hangar doors, a stone relief depicted a snarling krahr. The massive predator, its wide head a cross between a bear and a tiger, roared at the visitors, its maw gaping open, its sabretooth fangs a fatal promise. A thin crack down the krahr’s left side had chipped a bit of stone fur from its jaw. Nobody had fixed it.

It hit her. House Krahr was an old House.

Melizard’s House, House Ervan, was much younger. Noceen was a prosperous planet, with a gentle climate, colonized only two hundred years ago, and House Ervan had emerged as one of the prominent vampire clans due mostly to sheer luck. They had arrived with the first wave of settlers and the land they’d claimed happened to contain rich mineral deposits. Their wealth bought them weapons, equipment, and infrastructure. Everything on Noceen had been of the highest quality, modern and slick, especially the spaceport, where the traditional vampire stone was a veneer and the wood had been artificially distressed. She’d thought it rather grand when she first saw it. But this…This was the real thing.

All vampire spaceports were castles. Easily defended to allow for evacuation to orbit, easily contained if a threat were to arrive via the summoning gate. The spaceport of House Krahr had been built hundreds of years ago. The weathered stones under her feet, the massive wooden beams above, darkened by time, the thick stone walls, all of it emanated age. This was a stronghold, raised when strongholds had a purpose. Here and there modernization showed, but its touch was subtle and light: upgraded windows of transparent plastisteel, sensors high in the walls, and the massive blast-proof hangar gates. But the stronghold itself breathed an overwhelming sense of ancientness. It spoke to the visitors without uttering a word.

We’ve built this. It’s endured for centuries. Countless generations of us have walked across its threshold and still we own it, for no one is strong enough to take it away from us.

It wasn’t about money. It was a statement of power, harsh and brutal. It demanded respect, especially from a vampire, to whom tradition and family meant everything. It commanded awe and took it as its due.

She was so in over her head, it wasn’t even funny.

Arland strode to her, Helen at his side. “My lady.”

Clipped, formal words. The easy familiarity she’d become accustomed to was gone. She had expected as much.

“My lord.”

“I must apologize. A matter requires my urgent attention.” He leaned closer to her. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

“I mean it,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

He seemed genuinely worried she would disappear. “Helen and I will wait for