Brian Stableford brilliantly imagines a world ruled by a powerful aristocracy of vampires: long-lived, extraordinarily handsome humans who are immune to pain but must drink the blood of their common subjects.

The story begins in seventeenth-century London and spans three hundred years — moving from England to the heart of Africa, to Malta, and finally to the New World.

Edmund Cordery, Mechanician to the court of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, believes that vampire beings must have a natural explanation. But when his discoveries make him dangerous in the eyes of his masters, Edmund entrusts his learned secrets to his son, Noell, who in turn becomes a fugitive. When he returns to Europe he faces the awesome might of Coeur-de-Lion and the infamous Vlad the Impaler.