Chapter 1920: Emperor

On the palisade, Skarn stared down with his claws still out. "You are requesting entry."

"Yes, my lord," the herald said, with dignity. "The deal between the Beastman Confederation and His Majesty-"

"I know the damn deal!" Skarn snapped. "Let them in."

What followed was, by the account of the soldiers on that wall, the strangest hour of the mobilization.

The gates opened. The mule train came in under a guard that outnumbered it twenty to one.

Dwarven crews unloaded crate after crate with parade precision, stacking them in rows and checking the seals twice. They plainly hoped an enemy would open one and judge it.

The tigerkin quartermaster, ladle abandoned, pried the first crate open, lifted out a sword blank, and went still. She bent the blade against her knee, read its flex, and dragged one claw down the length of it.

"This is excellent quality," she said. "They’re showing off."

The nearest dwarf did not look up from his stacking. "That’s the standard run, ma’am."

"Standard."

"Export grade." He smoothed the crate seal down, and there was no mistaking the pride in it. "Mind the edges, please. We don’t want the emperor’s steel to hurt his respected neighbors."

Rajah took the manifest from a quartermaster who had carried the page across the compound like a live coal, held it between two claws, and read it aloud in a voice stripped of all its play.

"’By declaration of Emperor Quinlan Elysiar. The reparations owed the Beastman Confederation for its part in the late war: first installment, paid in full.’"

He read it a second time. The page said the same thing again.

He had spoken the test himself, at this same fire: the Villain had promised to reach out, and if he did, the Confederation would learn what his word was worth.

The answer had now walked over the pass under white banners, mere days after Quinlan had conquered a nation, priced in steel their own forges could not follow.

"He offered us these reparations at the war’s end, and this council deferred him," Gorruk noted. "He gave me his word he would raise the matter again." The rumble settled over the fire. "He’s doing it."

"Emperor Quinlan Elysiar is a man who keeps his promises," the herald said proudly.

"Emperor." Skarn spat the word into the flames. "There is no such throne. There has never been such a throne on Iskaris. He is a king with extra provinces, and his clerks flatter him on paper."

Grumbles of agreement ran the circle, from soldiers grateful to be handed a thing they were allowed to agree with.

"The elves dissolved their own crown for him, becoming a theocracy," Gorruk said.

The grumbling died.

"The human queen holds her throne at his pleasure and calls it an honor. The mountain swore itself to him, singing." Gorruk’s rumble stayed level the whole way through.

"Three peoples on the Confederation’s scale kneel to him. What is he if not more than king?"

"Careful, bear." Rajah’s drawl slid back on, and it fit badly.

Skarn’s hackles lifted. Across the fire, Vargis’s whetstone never changed its stroke.

The delegation did not leave.

When the last crate stood stacked, the herald opened his ledger to a second page, and for the first time all day he looked apologetic about what was written on it.

"There is a further matter, great lords. The steel is only the first half of the installment. The second half is labor." He turned the ledger around, as if the lords across the fire could read it from there.

"His Majesty instructs that the villages destroyed in the old war, the ones overrun by the lionkin and by the necromancer’s horde, are to be rebuilt at our cost. The wagons behind the steel carry timber and tools."

He closed the ledger. "We would ask the lords’ leave to travel to the ruins and begin, if it pleases the Confederation. We are instructed to build to dwarven standard while ensuring the result will please its future inhabitants."

Nobody at the fire had an answer ready for him.

The ruins of the old war had stood black and empty since the burning. No tribe had found the hands or the coin to raise them again. Mourning them had been cheaper.

Skarn watched the herald fold his ledger shut, and his hackles did not come down.

"The walls go higher," he said at last. "The watch doubles. The reserve dens stay woken. And those crews do not draw one breath on our ground unwatched."

"Our best eyes go with them, to every ruin, every camp they pitch, every hour they stand on Confederation soil. If the Villain hides a knife inside his gifts, we will be prepared when it comes out."

The drums took up again at dark: sharpen, stockpile, drill. On the near field the cubs returned to their forms, wooden claws rising and falling in the torchlight.

Beyond them, the first dwarven wagons rolled out toward the dead villages of the old war, under an escort of the Confederation’s finest killers, sent to guard their people from carpenters.

No soul on that field let itself look at both sights at once.

...

Quinlan Elysiar flew his family up out of the labyrinth and held them in the air over Aldoria, watching the streets from high above.

The snow that had lain clean in banks along the shopfronts when the family went down was gray at the edges now, rotten under the awnings, packed to ice across the square where the explorer queues had trampled it.

Around him, his family blinked against the daylight, hair full of dungeon dust.

"Sunlight," Serika groaned, stretching until her spine crackled. "I’d almost forgotten what it tastes like."

"You basically produce sunlight at will," Lucille grinned.

"That doesn’t count!" the tanned redhead laughed.

The rhythm had set itself in the first days of the grind and had not changed since: dive until they were properly exhausted, surface, and spend the rest day however each of them desired.

All of them spent it moving.

Quinlan landed his family on the nearest hill, raised a hand, and a warp gate opened on the slope in front of them.

"Do try to actually rest," he said, without any hope.

His girls scattered through the gates he summoned one after the other in the space of ten heartbeats, each toward her own idea of an afternoon rest. Vex went last, and not alone. She hooked her arm through Black Fang’s on the way past, cheerful as a thief taking a purse.

The gate swallowed them both mid-objection.

Quinlan looked at the one woman remaining. Kitsara smiled up at him, five tails swaying, wearing the expression of a fox with plans.

"Quinnie, my rest day involves you, a hot bath, and no witnesses. Well, no witnesses who judge me for what I’ll make you do to me."

"We’re going back down the stairs."

"Oooh~ Kinky labyrinth seggs!!"

...

The river town on Vraven’s southern trade road had a dockside cellar its own town watch had learned not to ask about.

Iris Ravenclaw stood across the street from it in the thin winter light, arms crossed, listening to a nervous man in a ledger-keeper’s coat. Blossom crouched at the corner beside her with her nose up, reading the air off the cellar grate.