Something in his expression must have warned Vesetshen she’d crossed a line. Her challenging demeanor changed. Her head lowered as did the proud set of her shoulders, and her gaze flickered down and to the side, unconsciously seeking support from her fellow vicegerents. There was none to be had, and she suddenly found herself occupying a solitary space directly across the table from Brishen as her peers edged back.
He stared until her shifting gaze finally settled on her feet. “Whom are you addressing?” His inquiry fell softly into the room’s hush.
A fine shiver shook her frame before she lifted her head to meet his regard. Deeper color rode along her cheekbones and striped her neck. “Forgive me, Herceges. The shock of your news made me forget?—”
He cut her off midsentence. “I asked you a question. Whom are you addressing?”
Vesetshen licked her bottom lip, her throat visibly flexing as she gulped before answering. “I am addressing you, Your Highness,” she said and this time offered no excuses.
This woman had been trouble from the start. Consumed with ambition and self-importance, she’d made the same mistakes others had made: assuming his amiable nature made him a weak ruler, and forgetting he was the son and executioner of the Shadow Queen of Bast-Haradis. He had lived years under his mother’s malevolent scrutiny and survived. Vesetshen Senemset was barely a moth compared to the hawk that had been Secmis Khaskem. She was no match for him.
“Had we failed,” he said in the same soft voice, “there would be no Bast-Haradis. This meeting would not take place. There would be no one to grieve our dead because we would all be dead. Our entire world would be overrun, human and Kai alike,devoured by abominations whose hungers are never sated.” The space around Vesetshen widened incrementally as Brishen continued and the other Kai drew ever further away from the table. “As for King Djedor—” He paused, allowing the silence to grow even fatter with tension. “What would you, Madam Senemset, daughter of lower gentry and invisible to the old royal court, know of my father?”
The ice encasing each of his words might have frozen a hearth fire had one been lit in the chamber. The color in Vesetshen’s face bled away, leaving her hideously waxen. With her head bowed, he couldn’t see her eyes or the expression in them, but the way her claws dug bloody crescent moons into the backs of her clasped hands told him what her eyes did not. He’d embarrassed her in front of her peers, and whether she wrung her hands from rage or humiliation, or a combination of the two, he couldn’t say. If she was as intelligent as he assumed, she’d just learned a lesson about crossing him. If she did it a second time—and he suspected she might—she’d strike hard. It was then he’d have to show her he wasn’t only the son of Djedor, but also the son of Secmis. There would be no third time.
He released her from the rack of his regard and turned his attentions to the others. They, in turn, eyed him with a mixture of surprise, fear, and wary respect. There were even a few faint smiles from those councilors and vassals who, for their own reasons, didn’t like the Senemset matriarch any more than he did. “As I was saying, a galla was discovered roaming the ruins. My cousin, Anhuset, barely escaped its ravages while on a scouting mission inside the city in early spring.”
He’d expressly forbidden her from entering Haradis while on her ambassadorial trip with Serovek Pangion to the Lobak Valley. She’d defied his order, but for good reason. He still wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled for doing so andnearly getting herself devoured, but the foray into the city had revealed a danger he’d hoped no longer existed.
Anhuset hadn’t made her harrowing escape from Haradis alone. Serovek had been with her, but Brishen felt it unnecessary to mention that part. This group wasn’t much going to like the idea of human Beladine farmers encroaching on the land surrounding the city as it was, much less learning a Beladine margrave had walked its streets, even if he’d been there before as an eidolon himself.
There were no more interruptions after Vesetshen’s dressing-down as he gave a brief summary of what Anhuset saw in and around Haradis. He spent most of the time describing the rough waterways dug out by Beladine citizens whose farmsteads weren’t far from Kai territory and on the wrong side of the river where they didn’t have water to stop the galla invasion.
“We need to treat this encroachment as an opportunity and build on it. A team of laborers building better, more permanent canals and dams that would allow us to control the influx of water from the Absu during both droughts and rainy seasons will allow us to trap any galla within the city walls.”
“Why not just let the Beladine finish the work they started?” one justiciar asked with a shrug. “They have as much at stake as we do.”
Brishen sighed inwardly. This Kai was a decent sort but not much of a strategist when it came to long-term planning or the game of kings. “As regent, I can temporarily ignore a group of Beladine farmers with good intentions crossing into Bast-Haradis in an attempt to stop the galla. However, if I don’t send Kai to finish the work, it will be more than a few farmers. If word gets back to Rodan of Belawat that even one galla lurks inside of Haradis and there’s nothing to keep it trapped there, he’ll send in an army to do our job for us.”
Cephren spoke up, dread in his voice. “An invasion.”
Brishen nodded. “And as regent, I’ll be forced to counter it by declaring war on Belawat. How many more Kai are we willing to sacrifice to the galla in one form or another? And all for a dead city?”
“But is it necessary to flood Haradis itself if we build this great earthwork surrounding it?” Cephren pointed to the second map with the labyrinth of canals.
Unlike Vesetshen, who asked questions as a means to challenge Brishen, Cephren asked them to better understand. Brishen had infinite patience for such inquiries. “It is,” he said. “The breach between worlds is in a chamber below-ground in the palace.” The memory of that foul place still sickened him. “We don’t know how this galla escaped, but if there’s a new crack in the breach, flooding the city itself will keep the rest from breaking free.”
“A prison of water,” one clan matriarch said as she bent over the maps for a better look. “This will take an enormous numbers to complete in a timely fashion, Herceges. An army of laborers working in overlapping shifts so there’s no stoppage until it’s done.”
“And that’s why I’ve brought you all here,” he replied. “While Saggara is now the capital of Bast-Haradis, we’re first and foremost a garrison. I can field an army from here, but a workforce of the size needed for this project must come from your estates.”
He’d anticipated their consternation. Serovek and Anhuset had discovered the galla roaming Haradis in early spring, right before spring plowing began. It was now summer, and every prefecture was eyebrow-deep in haymaking, with sheep shearing soon to follow. The work would only intensify as the season progressed and every able-bodied Kai not in military service was called to weed, harvest, process, plow, and pannage before winter set in. Taking any part of that labor force for another taskposed a hardship. Midsummer was always the lean time for food stores prior to the late summer harvest in any year. Not having enough hands in the field to harvest at summer’s end and plant cold-weather crops in autumn risked a starving winter. There wasn’t a Kai in the council chamber who wasn’t aware of it, and that worry reflected on their faces.
“I didn’t tell you of this until now because we needed an uninterrupted spring planting,” he said. “And I needed the time for my engineers and mapmakers to design and map these canals. You know your number of workers best—how to divide them between tasks such as harvesting and building canals. This challenge before us presents two mountains to climb: imprison the galla and not starve in the process. We have to work together. I have a small contingent of troops watching Haradis now, but I can’t empty out this garrison to dig trenches and still be able to defend our borders if necessary.”
“I have a question, Herceges.” Brishen braced for another round of sparring with Vesetshen. He’d cowed her into silence but only temporarily. At least she used an honorific this time, and her tone and expression remained studiously bland. “Since the galla drained the Kai of magic, are they even still a danger to our people? Was it not our sorcery that made them feed upon us?”
He only wished that were so. “They’re a danger to all living things, with or without sorcery. Magic only makes their prey that much sweeter and easier to hunt.”
The gods forbid any of these Kai ever discovered it had been he, not the galla, who’d stolen their birthright. Good intentions and victorious outcomes would instantly burn to ash in the face of a primal fury that would view him not as a savior but as the worst thief ever born of Elder blood.
Another vicegerent spoke. “How many workers do you need to accomplish this task in the fastest time possible withoutmaking it look like Bast-Haradis is amassing an army near Belawat’s southern border?”
Finally. A productive question. Brishen tried not to let his shoulders slump with relief. “That will be the greatest challenge and require a constant rotation of labor working night and day in all manner of weather.” He moved to the opposite side of the table so that he could view the maps right-side up. Mertok hovered nearby while the others kept a respectful distance but close enough to follow his descriptions of the maps’ details as he traced them with one claw. “To start, here’s what we’ll need.”
Over the next several hours, he and the summoned gathering made timetables for phases of project completion, estimated how many workers each estate could afford to send to Haradis and for how long, and made the master of the royal treasury tremble in sheer horror at the cost.
Brishen allowed only brief breaks for nature’s calls until his wife who sent servants in with food, drink, and a note for him.
