Darren Shan - 02 Ocean of Blood

“Aye,” Larten muttered. “Congratulations. May the luck of the vampires be with you.”

Seba nodded, then said as lightly as he could,

“What will the pair of you do now? I do not expect you to stay. I imagine you will want to leave and-”

“No!” Wester exclaimed. “I’ll stay. I still have much to learn and nobody can teach me better than you.”

“Are you certain?” Seba asked, ignoring the flattery.

“It will be twenty or thirty years before you can become a General. That is a long time for a young vampire to spend caged inside a mountain.”

“I don’t care,” Wester said stubbornly. “I’m staying.

You will too, won’t you, Larten?” There was a faint, desperate edge to Wester’s voice. He was trying to sound casual, but he knew Larten was eager to leave.

He didn’t want to be forced to choose between his best friend and his mentor.

Larten didn’t reply immediately. His brow furrowed as he considered his options. Seba longed to advise Larten to leave, but thought it would be wrong of him to try to influence his uncertain assistant, so he held his tongue.

“Stay,” Wester hissed. “This place isn’t so bad.

You’d have to look for a new master if you left.”

“There are many who would accept you,” Seba murmured, interceding only to counter the pressure that Wester was exerting. “You made a fine impression at Council and would have your choice of tutors, perhaps even Paris Skyle or another Prince.”

Larten’s eyes narrowed. The Princes trained only those with great potential, the vampires who might become powerful Generals and replace them further down the line. This was the first indication he’d had that the path to the Hal of Princes might open up to him in the future. Mika Ver Leth would have jumped at such an opportunity, but Larten wasn’t Mika and he didn’t hunger for power. Yet it was tempting…

Larten glanced at Wester and saw both hope and fear in his blood brother’s eyes. It was ridiculous. The pair were in their sixties. They would have been great-grandfathers with at least one foot in the grave if they hadn’t been blooded. Men of their age should have long outgrown the need for a best friend.

But they were young as vampires measured such things, and hadn’t been apart since facing Murlough in the ruins of the old house. The pair had gone through much together, blooding, training, running with war packs. Larten would be lonely if they parted, but it would be harder on Wester. In the long run it might be better for him — Wester thought of himself too much as a lesser brother and maybe he needed some time apart from Larten to grow. But in the short term it would hurt.

Larten tried to distance himself from Wester’s feelings, to decide what he wanted. But it was difficult. He felt — wrongly — that Seba would be disappointed if he left. The old vampire might think that Larten hoped to learn more from another master. He should have known better — Seba had made it clear on many occasions that the time would come when his assistants would need to establish their own lives — but his thoughts were jumbled up.

Finally Larten sighed and went with the easiest option. “I will stay,” he said glumly.

Wester cheered and hugged him. Seba smiled, but inside he was troubled. When he retired to his coffin the following morning he lay awake for a long time, plagued by an uneasy feeling, wondering if he should have spoken up rather than let Larten make what he believed to be a potentially damaging call.

The next few years were difficult for Larten. Training to be a General was a hard time for any vampire. To start with, he had to master a variety of weapons, even though he would never use most of them. Larten looked forward to his knife and ax lessons but there were others — like the throwing stars Vancha favored, and a spiked, four-headed club — that he loathed. There was no such thing as an easy lesson. He was thrown in at the deep end every time and forced to defend himself in the face of a very real attack by his tutor. Larten spent many weeks nursing broken bones, and was concussed so often that he regularly couldn’t get to sleep because of the ringing in his ears.

What particularly depressed him was that Wester was making relatively smooth progress. His younger friend suffered a vast array of injuries, the same as every trainee, but nowhere near anything like Larten’s. And it didn’t seem to matter how hard the orange-haired assistant worked — he always came to more grief in his lessons than Wester or the others in their group.

What Larten didn’t know was that his tutors were working him harder than the rest. It wasn’t a conspiracy but simply the way they operated. When the taskmasters of Vampire Mountain trained someone with above-average ability, they gave him especially grueling tasks.

Vampires were ruthless. They had no time for weakness and weeded out those who would be of no benefit to the clan. This was widely known. But many of the trainees were unaware that their masters were as harsh with those who had the potential to become leaders. If a tutor thought a student had talent, he pushed the youth to his limit, to either exploit or exhaust his potential. If Larten stayed the course and proved himself worthy of the challenges he was given, he would find himself on the road to success. But if his tutors broke his spirit and he failed, they’d consider the clan well rid of him. More was always asked of those with more to offer.

Seba had no time to comfort or reassure his struggling assistant. The job of quartermaster was more demanding than he had imagined and his first few years were a hectic period of adjustment. There were so many details he had to stay on top of, from cultivating luminous lichen in tunnels where the glowing moss had died out, to maintaining the stocks of live animals, to ensuring coffins were kept clean for visitors, to dealing with the eerie Guardians of the Blood.

When Larten was injured and unable to train, he sometimes assisted Seba. It was while helping his master that he came to learn about the Guardians. He had always assumed that the blood in Vampire Mountain was shipped in and stored in vats, but now he found that most of it came from a tribe of humans living in the bowels of the mountain.

The Guardians were pale, strange creatures. In exchange for their blood, they took care of certain burial details when a vampire died, extracting each corpse’s inner organs and brains, draining its body dry. Many vampires chose to be sent down a mountain stream when they died. If their corpses weren’t fully cleaned out in advance, animals would feast on their poisonous organs and go insane.

Larten didn’t like the Guardians — they had an aloof air and seldom answered if spoken to — but he wanted to learn as much as he could about the clan and its workings, so he studied them as dispassionately as possible.

Memorizing facts about the clan was also part of his training. Vampires were expected to familiarize themselves with their history, learn the names of their past leaders, be able to recite the many legends of their gods. Most vampires were ill iterate. Books were for humans, not children of the night. Their history was recorded in tales and legends, passed on by word of mouth, and all had to help sustain it. If a disease or war ever wiped out the majority of the clan, the few who were left could at least keep their origins, achievements and myths alive.

Larten learned much about his race. Those were the nights he looked forward to most, when he and the other trainees sat around and listened to their elders wax lyrical about the past or chant ancient songs. He had a keen memory and was able to recount most of what he heard. Wester was even smarter and stored away details that Larten couldn’t retain, but his friend had always been mentally sharper, so Larten didn’t mind lagging behind in that department.