Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1050: King of the South(2)

Nibadur sighed.

"I see you have yet to understand me."

Zayneth’s heart lodged in his throat, a cold lump of dread. "Your Grace, I—"

"Why do you think I am doing all of this?" Nibadur interrupted. He turned, and for a fleeting second, his expression bore a loneliness so vast it seemed it might crush the very room. "I am not measuring the outcome by what I will gain. My reasons are not found in the vanity of a map bearing my colors."

The Spymaster hesitated, why else would he do any of it? Wasn’t ambition what moved mankind?

"Because..." he began carefully, "we are in need of a strong hand to steady the realm, and you alone are the one worthy of the scepter."

He met Nibadur’s eyes and felt the temperature of the room drop. It was the wrong answer. Zayneth felt a flicker of genuine confusion, was it not the wish of every Great Lord to become King? What other desire existed in the hearts of men? What Prince didn’t crave the ultimate crown?

The Prince’s chair was suddenly pushed back, its legs screeching against the floor like a woman’s wail in a silent house. Nibadur rose and walked, ignored the confused stare of his servant, and moved toward the far wall where a vast collection of vellum and leather was showcased.

He traced a finger along the wooden trim, humming a low, tuneless melody until his finger stopped beneath a specific, unassuming volume. He yanked it from the shelf and threw it at Zayneth. The Spymaster caught it awkwardly, his hands fumbling with the heavy binding.

"Pages 25, 76, 121, and 133," Nibadur commanded.

"Your Grace... I do not understand," Zayneth stammered. In the distance, an owl screeched into the night, a jagged sound that mirrored the tension in the solar.

"Page 25," Nibadur started, his voice taking on the cadence of a dark historian. "Aeron the Misfooted. Two hundred and twenty-six years after the Unification by the Red. Freshly crowned, he organizes an expedition south to annex Herculia, citing some dusty dynastic claim.About some aunt that should have inherited before a cousin...

After a few shallow victories, in the second year of the war, Aeron ’befalls an accident.’ His horse, in a fit of madness, charges toward the very cliff where the young Emperor liked to hawk. Some stories say he threw himself from the saddle only to miss his footing and tumble to his death regardless. A promising expansion, cut short by a stumble."

The barest ghost of a smile appeared on Nibadur’s face, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

"If you ask me, it was his brother who preferred to take matters in his own hands before Aeron got an heir.

Page 76.

Right at the turn of the third century. Eanor the Misguided. He was bewitched by a concubine, a princess of Reshania, who convinced him to waste his legions aiding her father against Hashandeia. The war ended in a Reshanian victory, and the only reason Eanor did not press his true interests in the south was because that girl convinced him to return home to her bed, so he just took some rights of trade and left with a battered army behind and empty balls.

He dictated state matters by what was between his legs, and the empire’s opportunity was traded for a silk skirt."

Nibadur paced back toward the center of the room, his shadow stretching long and thin.

"It happened again at 121. And again at 133. Time and time again, the Empire has reached for the south. Sometimes it failed due to the strength of arms from a few desperate alliances; sometimes it was just a stroke of damned, miserable luck. Once even those rats of the seas tried to make fall on lands, before being defeated by my father.

But why, Zayneth? Why does the south invite such danger to itself century after century, only to survive by the skin of its teeth and a series of fortunate accidents?"

Zayneth finally spoke the truth he had been circling, his voice barely a whisper in the candlelit solar. "It is because the south is a garden of beautiful, bickering children, Your Grace."

Nibadur nodded, relieved the man could see as such. "Exactly. We boast a population that rivals Romelia; our iron mines run deeper and richer than anything in the north. And while we may lack their silver caves, that is a trifle, wealth is easily beckoned through the right trade routes and the right hands. So why? Why is it that we are perpetually the prize, and they are the hunters? Why is the history of our people written in the ink of our own blood?"

He began to pace again, his boots echoing with a steady, haunting rhythm. "It is because a garden without a wall is merely a pantry for the hungry.

Miratio Paleface understood this better than any of us. Instead of marching his legions south and risking the collective wrath of a dozen panicked princes, he simply arrived with a smile and a demand for trade concessions. He let us keep our petty titles and our vanity, knowing full well that if he left us to our own troubles, we would do his work for him. We would stagnate. We would bicker. We would rot.And we did, Romelia flooded us with their low-cost manufactures, overtaking our own productions of oil and wine, until they had a monopoly over half the known world."

Nibadur paused, leaning his weight against the heavy oak of his desk. "All these centuries of humiliation were invited by us. We may not have held the dagger that gutted our ancestors, but we were the ones who unlocked the gate and invited the assassin to dine.

We could easily overtake Romelia in might, we could eclipse the Empire itself, if we simply unified our strength into a single, crushing fist. But of course, that is a dream for poets and fools. Which prince with a sound mind would bend his sovereignty to another, unless that other’s might was so overwhelming that resistance became a form of suicide?"

He looked at Zayneth, his gray eyes piercingly bright. "And unfortunately, while we are mighty, we are not yet overwhelming. Not enough to break the pride of Oizen and Kakunia through words alone. Unifying all these lands under one king... it is a task that would take three lifetimes of blood. I do not have three lifetimes. I have one. Which means we must find another way. We must make compromises with reality."

He raised his head, looking out the window at the distant silhouette of the mountains that guarded the border. He stared as if he could see through the stone, through the fog, into the very heart of the coming fire.

"Yarzat... Alpheo... they have given us the catalyst," Nibadur whispered, his voice trembling with a rare passion "The threat of the Fox is the fire that will force the children to huddle together. We are moments away from that dream of mine, Zayneth.

We are so damn close I can feel the heat of the forge. If we play this hand correctly, we won’t just defeat a neighbor; we will forge a shield that the Empire will never dare to strike again.

The world outside was in a sickly grey darkness. Unlike the temperate lowlands of the coast, Habadia gripped the cold with a harsher, more possessive hand; it was a land where the wind wasn’t a caress, and the arrival of a week-long snow was a frequent, silent conqueror during the height of a harsh winter.

"Since we cannot have a king, not yet, we shall forge a confederation," Nibadur said, his hand closing and opening on its sword-hilt. "A league of states, bound by blood and iron... much like the rats of the Sea did some centuries ago. It is not the optimal solution, I admit. It lacks the singular, divine clarity of a crown. But it is the most potent alternative we can manifest in this fractured age."

He stood still for a long moment, the flickering torchlight catching the hard lines of his face. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a precipice, staring down at the shape of the world he intended to break and remold.

"I wasn’t the only one with such a vision, you know," he continued, his voice a low, rhythmic hum. "Better men than I have dreamt of a unified front. But they lacked the right theater. It is only in our time, under the shadow of the Yarzat threat, that we have the perfect confluence of desperation and greed. We have the best chance history will ever grant us."

He turned back to the map, his fingers hovering over the territories like a sculptor over clay. "The Crownless Prince of Oizen is already drowning in our debt. Once our ’advisors’ move in to save his hide from the Fox, he will have no choice but to acquiesce. In fact, I shall ensure it is he who proposes the league.

It would not be proper for Habadia to appear the one with such a dream it must look like a plea for protection from a humbled neighbor. He will lay the first brick of my temple, and he will do it with a smile of gratitude."

Nibadur’s eyes shifted to the Kakunian borders. "The Kakunians will follow the same path. They are terrified; they need me to put down the maddened bull of Kakunia before it gores them with his hornes in their beds. You can say what you wish about him, but the man has a singular gift for inciting primal terror in the hearts of men. I will use that terror. I will offer them safety, and in exchange, they will surrender their political independence to the League."

He traced a line further south, his movements growing more fluid, more certain. "Ezvania will fall in line; we are blood, and blood knows its master. When the news breaks that our member states are prohibited from attacking one another, Hashandeia will scramble to join, for they have no wish to earn the collective displeasure of a unified wall. Then, only Ashan, Regania, and Shandeja will remain."He thought a bit. And chuckled ’’And of course Yarzat will follow...’’

He tapped the region of Shandeja with a sharp, final click of his ring against the table. "The Shandejans are pragmatic. Once they are surrounded by the League, they will find the invitation more than palatable. And if they do not?" A cold, predatory light flickered in his eyes. "Then we shall have the perfect excuse to seize their iron mines and return them to Ozenian administration, under our supervision, of course."

Nibadur leaned over the desk, his shadow swallowing the fractured south in a single being. He looked at Zayneth, and for the first time, a genuine bright smile broke across his face, a smile of a man who had finally seen the end of a long war.

"The cycle ends with us, Zayneth," he whispered, the words sounding like a prayer in a temple. "A unified south. A shield of states. A wall that will finally, finally make the Empire tremble when they look toward the sun instead of greedily looking to steal their light.It is in our grasp, in our lifetimes do you realise the weight of what this means?

We hold in our hands the key for a history that we have always been able to strive for. Until now we had the stars in our grasp and we let them go for the pitifulness in our hearts.

No more."