Since it was rebuilt after the last great fire, London has been divided into two territories, with the Thames acting as an inviolate border between the two vampires that call the city home. But before the fire, its districts and boroughs were divided between six different masters in a triumph of power-sharing which hasn’t been replicated in Europe since. Nobody’s quite sure what conditions give rise to these temporary detentes . It may simply be an unstable equilibrium destined to fail from its very beginning, though some have lasted decades. Paris in the 10th Century had fourteen vampires co-existing. Rome under Marcus Aurelias had seven. New Orleans, before the Civil War, had nine. But the grand-daddy of them all was Babylon under Hammurabi. It is said that the king who wrote the first laws of man also wrote another set of laws; that he codified the rules that first brought stability to the vampire community, though another school of thought said that the vampires who lived under his