Chapter 155 Proceedings in Castelcicala
POV: Contessa Vittoria | European Covenant Chambers, Venice
The chamber beneath the Palazzo had not changed in four hundred years, which was the point of it.
The walls were the same stone, the table the same dark wood, the light the same arrangement of candles that the Covenant's founders had specified when the organization was established in 1387 and which no subsequent member had seen fit to update. Consistency was a message. When you were old enough, consistency became its own form of authority.
Contessa Vittoria was twelve hundred and six years old, which made her the eldest member currently seated, which meant the chamber belonged to her in every sense that mattered. She had been alive when the Palazzo above them was built. She had attended the founding meeting of the Covenant as the youngest member present and had watched every other person in that room eventually die.
She found the British situation more interesting than alarming, which was a minority position among her current colleagues and she was comfortable with that.
The report from their London observer had arrived three days ago. She had read it twice, not because she needed to read it twice but because it was the kind of document that rewarded a second pass, the details settling differently once you had the shape of the whole. Rookeries battle. Parliamentary fracture. Extermination order rescinded. Hybrid program exposed. Autonomous zone established. All of this inside eighteen months.
"They're losing control," said Lord Davorin, who was seated to her right and was only four hundred and twelve years old, which in Covenant terms made him something of a junior member. He said it with the particular satisfaction of someone who had been predicting British weakness for decades.
"They had control of a situation that was increasingly unstable," Vittoria said. "Losing control of that is not the same as collapse."
"A packless wolf organized two hundred supernaturals and fought Parliament to a draw." Davorin set his copy of the report on the table. "In London. If that isn't collapse, what does collapse look like?"
"More dramatic," she said. "And faster."
Around the table, eight other Covenant members were in various stages of the same conversation, the same report producing the same two positions it always produced when a member state showed weakness. Opportunity or threat. The Covenant had been having this debate about different situations for six hundred years and had never fully resolved it, which was appropriate because both answers were always partially correct.
The argument for intervention as opportunity: British Parliament's weakness opened territorial access that the Covenant had wanted for a century. Blood trade routes through the channel. Feeding agreements. Influence over British supernatural governance that had historically operated with a degree of independence the Covenant found inconvenient.
The argument for intervention as stabilization: instability spread. The Covenant had learned this from the last time British supernatural governance had fractured seriously, which was 1645, and the chaos had taken forty years to contain and had cost the Covenant three member states in the process.
She let both sides run for twenty minutes before she spoke again, which was the correct amount of time to let a debate establish itself before redirecting it.
"The question isn't whether to intervene," she said. "The question is what form intervention takes." She looked around the table. "Observers first. We need current intelligence before any decision about action. What we have is three weeks old and London moves quickly at the moment."
Davorin looked like he wanted to argue for something more decisive. He was four hundred years old and still believed in decisive action, which was a phase most vampires grew out of around the six century mark.
"Observers," she said again, and it was not a suggestion.
The vote went her way, which votes at this table generally did.
She was gathering her copy of the report when the second item came up, which her secretary had flagged as relevant and had been holding until the primary discussion concluded. A message from their contacts in the American supernatural community. The Montana Confederation, which was the largest werewolf governance structure in North America, had been monitoring the London situation with what their message characterized as significant interest.
She read the message twice.
The Montana Confederation was not interested in London as a problem to solve. They were interested in Callum Brennan's Rookeries as a model. A packless wolf organizing a functional community outside traditional pack hierarchy. The Montana Confederation had its own population of non-pack wolves and had been struggling with the question of how to integrate them into governance for thirty years.
They wanted to send an observer too. Not a vampire observer. A wolf.
She thought about that for a moment.
Then she made a note on her copy of the report and passed it to her secretary.
"Send word to London," she said. "The Covenant offers assistance. For appropriate compensation." She paused. "And send a separate message to Montana. Tell them their observer is welcome, provided they share what they learn."
Her secretary nodded and left.
She sat alone in the chamber for a moment after the other members had filed out, looking at the candles her predecessors had specified in 1387, still burning in their same positions on the same table.
London was changing. The question was whether what it was changing into was something the old structures could absorb or something they had never encountered before.
She had been alive long enough to have seen both outcomes.
She was, quietly, curious which this would be.