Book 3 Chapter 50: Ultimatum
Book 3 Chapter 50: Ultimatum
++Isabel Vornholt was, in the end, a force. A thing of twinned excellence. Power and intellect, trickery and insight, life and death. I could not have wished to have a more notable mother.++
- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.
Instinct and long habit told me to spend the next few weeks flying after my vanquished enemies and systematically killing them. To inflict an elemental vengeance upon them for daring to attack Lord Dread, to paint the plains in their blood and leave their mangled remains hanging up as a reminder to all who may come next.
Not having been born a God, however, I knew better than to act on mere instinct and long habit. We mere mortals had to be more intelligent about the use of our powers.
At least for now.
Rather than cut across Poloira, I decided instead to make my way right to the heart of this problem. I had one victory behind me, certainly better than the threat of defeat I had been saddled with before, and for the time being my enemy would still remain shocked, perhaps even fearful. They, unlike me, had not possessed even the slightest idea that things would go the way they did. I would have to act quickly and leverage that disbelief, before they could come to terms with it and calm themselves.
And so it was that I took Blakely, always the useful subordinate, and the now-shackled Aravon Voret, still presently too drained of mana and injured of form to free himself from the heavy aether bindings I had encased him in, and flew my way back to Garamon.
It was time to negotiate, once more, with the Vorets. And this time from a position of strength.
I would have felt more dignified in my approach if Blakely’s teeth had not been chattering with a volume that was audible even over the wind currents while we flew. He seemed to have gotten somewhat used to heights, and the sheer speed of my flight spell, but was still far from happy about either.
To be entirely fair, I supposed he was just superhuman enough that few things in day to day life would present nearly as much of a threat to his ongoing existence as this. He would probably survive a fifty foot fall from a building, even if he landed on solid stone, but a supersonic impact would treat his body effectively the same as any common human. His was a small and limited advantage over wider humanity.
Larger than my physical advantage, still. Far larger. But I had plans to work on that too, and to do it soon.
Garamon was a strange sight as I flew past its border. Some part of me felt sure the place ought to have different. That after seeing the unchecked brutality of one of its oldest families, their willingness to strike at me beyond the scope of law and their ability to get away with it, I should have found the place transformed.
It was not of course, no change had come to the Empire and no change was necessary for what I had experienced. I had simply gotten a taste of what it was like to be in Garamon’s scope, rather than under its protection.
I then got another taste of how big the difference in power between my own family, even at their height, and the greatest houses of Garamon truly was. The Voret family’s estate was easily found, but upon approaching it I found the air surrounded by humming threads of mana all bound to some mighty core built at the centre of the place.
The magic here was not unknown to me, though more than I could achieve just yet. What shocked me was the scale and congruity of it, how much power had been bound and how well. I could not begin to unravel the spells this energy powered, even with my arcane vision. It was like looking at the ground while I stood at sea level and attempting to eyeball the shape of a continent under my feet. The scale, and my scope, just did not permit a full view.
What I did get a full view of was the house’s security. I was forced out of the air more than a quarter-mile from the building itself by strange, and magnificently made, aerial golems which wasted no time in taking off and making a beeline for me as I approached. They had features that were reptilian as much as avian, though were made from a bright metal in their totality. Aluminium, I believed it was. Probably to minimize weight and aid in take-off. I made notes as they encircled me.
“You have some bloody nerve,” I heard a man snarl from one side. Turning, I saw…ah, yes, one of the idiots who had accompanied Exyria Voret on her trip to threaten me at my refinery. By the deathly pale mask of his face, I could only assume he knew of his family’s defeat. “Parading the body of my father here to—”
“This is not your father’s corpse,” I cut in, before the idiot could do something we would both regret. I unbound Aravon Voret only after letting him fall onto his face with a thud. The man groaned and writhed where he landed, still very clearly injured and, fortunately, even more clearly alive. “He is hurt, but not permanently so. I imagine it is more mental exhaustion and pain that keeps him from using his powers, but it is possible the gibbering buffoon managed to damage his Vessel somehow while we were fighting.”
I decided to be as up-front as possible while explaining things. In my experience, Vorets tended to be a rather mentally stunted breed. Perhaps their centuries of inbreeding for the sake of magical talent had taken some sort of toll.
This one, at least, possessed enough neurons to understand that he had misread the situation, and enough self-awareness that his pale face soon started brightening into an embarrassed red at the realisation.
“I see,” he grumbled. “Well…your returning him to us is…uh, appreciated.”
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“That is not why I am here,” I told him flatly.
Making the idiot understand that I would not be explaining myself to him, and was in fact not requesting an audience with his grandmother, took a lot of time and effort, and involved making use of skills I had actually ended up honing years earlier when I grew accustomed to handling my younger siblings. Fortunately, he seemed to eventually decide that whatever business I had brought was above his paygrade and reluctantly accompanied me into the mansion proper.
It was big. It was very, very big. The Vorets were known to be prolific even among other magician families, with it being expected for each of them to average five or more children. To call their family extended was an understatement. Even so, despite the veritable army of literally thousands of blonde-haired brats and brat-producers occupying the place, it all felt empty as I made my way through it.
There were palaces smaller than this mansion, including in Garamon itself. The wealth of the Vorets was clearly seen with every step deeper I took. They were not businessmen or tycoons, but it seemed the rumours were true that, through sheer dominance in the field of magic, the Vorets boasted material wealth comparable to the very richest of all Garamon’s great families.
Silver and silk, that was what I passed as I headed further in. Silver and silk, and an endless variety of other substances procured either with great effort or in spite of great scarcity. If it was expensive, they had it displayed.
I could understand this much at least. Power was made to be displayed. It was not that the truly mighty ought to care what their lessers thought, simply that demonstrating the gulf between them was necessary to crush those foolish enough to defy and, even more important, to inspire those gifted enough to surpass the current peak.
The Gods did not understand that simple moral, but at the very least they sewed it through their actions all the same. And here I was.
“Do you see, now, how petty the wealth of that refinery is compared to—” I interrupted the Voret boy by raising a hand sharply.
“Dogs do not speak,” I told him. “Be quiet and take me to your masters.”
He glared at me in the way I was accustomed to from men who knew they were not powerful enough to physically express their hatred, and we reached our destination within a few more minutes. Exyria Voret’s office was actually larger than that of the Duke of Wolsingham, and the small old woman sitting inside made the room seem bigger still.
This effect was undercut only somewhat by her expression. Total bafflement and unmasked surprise did not sit well on a face as weathered as hers, and I found my opinion of the woman chipped away slightly as I beheld it.
“I have come to negotiate,” I told her.
Her eyes flicked to the Voret standing beside me first. “Out,” she demanded.
He left without protest or hesitation, leaving me alone with the matriarch.
“Close the door,” she told me. Then paused. “...If you please.”
I did so, then moved to the seat just in front of her desk, drawing it back and…pausing.
“May I?”
She affirmed it with a nod, and I took my seat opposite her. We stared at one another in silence for a moment. She broke it first.
“Is Aravon alive?” There was an edge to her voice that told me, in a single instant, I had made the right decision to spare him in his moment of helplessness.
“He is. And I have returned him. As I said, I am here to negotiate. Not to hold a hostage over your heads.” It was largely the truth, though of course I did not bother pointing out all the reasons for which self-interest was motivating me to do this.
I could see Exyria Voret calming herself. Deep breaths made quiet and hidden as best she could. How hard must her heart be thundering? That was the trouble with organic bodies, they could do so much to distract an organic mind.
“I am here to negotiate,” I repeated. “And we shall start with recompense for your attack on my property.”
The good thing about talking to women, at least in my experience, was that they did not feel nearly as much like they had to prove something with every sentence. If Exyria Voret were a man, she may have considered herself to be losing face just at hearing such a demand from a young woman.
But she was used to losing face, and so she did not lash out. I saw her stiffen and consider the demand, turning over cards in her head. Which ones would she play, I wondered. There was no doubt that she had more than me, but far fewer than she had thought before receiving news of her family’s defeat in Poloira.
“We are still more powerful than you, girl,” she said at last.
“You think that?” I challenged her. “You must not have heard the reports from your surviving family members.” This was actually not a surprise, none could have gotten back here yet unless they travelled by cloudscraper. They had fled my refinery so swiftly that I could only assume most of them were still in Poloira, trying to regroup.
It was the reason I had brought Aravon Voret back with me.
“Call on the leader of your assault, Aravon,” I told her. “I will wait until you have heard what he has to say.”
She did, and I did. And I enjoyed very much seeing the old woman return with the expression of one who had just found out about the existence of death. She fell into her seat and stared at me.
I stared back. It was me who broke the silence first.
“What happened to your forces was a mere inevitability. The consequences of attacking someone who sits in the favour of a Demigod. No doubt you recall the things Aryqatan has publicly stated about me, and now you have seen the things she will privately do to defend me. I am protected.”
Aryqatan would probably not like me brazenly lying about her willingness to protect me, of course. But the good thing about the ongoing animosity between Garamon’s magicians and Demigods was that it had left the former rather unlikely to just ask straight answers of the latter.
So Voret had absolutely no way to disprove what I had just told her, nor, by the look on her face, would she have attempted to do so even if she had. More than a thousand soldiers, warriors and magicians had died in a minute by the hand of something rife with divine magic. What other explanation could there be but the one I had given her?
“You will compensate me to the sum of two hundred thousand crowns,” I said at last. “And you will not antagonise me again.”
Exyria Voret did not argue.