Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) by Gene Doucette

I don’t know how I ended up in Vienna.
    This happens more often than it probably should.  It’s fair to say I simply don’t recall what circumstances resulted in my being there because I’m talking about 1814, and that was a long time ago.  It’s equally reasonable to say that history is full of little gray periods in which nothing happened, nobody did anything, and everybody died quietly and unnoticed.  Furthermore, it’s entirely fair to assume that a man who has been alive for sixty-odd thousand years—hi, that’s me—is going to have a gap or two in his memory.
    However, in my case I probably can’t remember because I had been drinking.
    This is not to say there’s no merit to the “gray periods” argument, because that’s also sort of true.  If you want to know what it’s like living as long as I have, try and imagine the most bored you have ever been in your entire life.  Now imagine what it’s like to be that bored for entire centuries.
    When you’ve reached that level of bored, there are going to be gaps in the record, where you can’t remember what happened because absolutely nothing did happen and your brain didn’t bother to record the minutia.  This is why it’s not all that hard to convince someone they could have been abducted by aliens and had their memories erased, because that explanation is much more interesting than the possibility their life was so incredibly boring their own brain wasn’t even paying attention.
    Not that I’m saying there are aliens.  There probably aren’t.  I’ve never met one, though, and I’ve met an awful lot of weird things.
    I’m digressing.  The point I wanted to make is that history, as a whole, was powerfully boring.  Sure, every few months something a little memorable can happen, and every couple of years there may be a genuinely exciting event.  Once or twice a generation, just to break things up, there’s an outbreak of abject terror, which is exciting only not in a really good way.  Like volcanoes, or Huns.  But mostly?  Dull and boring.  History is written about the exciting things, but life is mostly lived in the boring parts in-between.
    Vienna in 1814 wasn’t one of the dull moments, because that was when a number of important people showed up to figure out how to divide Europe before someone started another war.  This happened all the time—war I mean—and would continue to happen after the congress was over, even when France ran out of Napoleons.  Every civilized collection of city-states goes through the same cycle that only ends when everyone gets together to discuss why it is they keep having wars if nobody is enjoying themselves, and they all agree to work on their anger management and megalomania, and then things are quiet for a while until they aren’t any more.  Repeat. 
    But the congress was still a nice idea.  And as I said, there were a lot of important people in Vienna for this congress, which has nothing to do with my being there.  I know I’ve already said I don’t know how I ended up in Vienna, but I can state for a fact that my importance had nothing to do with it, because I’m not an important person.  Or, I should say, I’m not a publicly important person.  This is mostly by design.
    On average, important people don’t enjoy long lives.  Some of them don’t even survive their tribe’s first bad crop.  Since I don’t care to be blamed for things that are out of my control—blight, comets, plagues of locust, and so on—I strive to be unimportant.  I would rather be the guy in the back of the room that nobody knows the name of than the one at the front of the room taking responsibility for big decisions and leading people into battle.  Also, I’d rather not go into battle.
    But despite being often unimportant, I do find myself in situations now and then that require me to do semi-important things.  Vienna was one of those times.  You can read all you want about the Congress and