"Don't mind if I do."
Losham thought about the call and wondered why it had affected him so much. It had been routine, following an established pattern, but the events preceding it had been anything but. The collapse could have been a knockout.
Thankfully, he'd managed to salvage the situation, but just barely. What other surprises did his father have in store for him?
Navuh was still pulling the strings even when in the clan's captivity. But now Losham had another master, and every call reminded him that he was a puppet. A man who had spent two thousand years chafing under one master only to find himself collared by another, not instead of the first but in addition.
The clan's compeller was different than Navuh. He was polite, never cruel, and impersonal, more clinical. But the fundamental dynamic was the same. Someone else was pulling the strings, and Losham danced.
He had always danced.
That was the bitter truth that the cigars and the whiskey couldn't quite obscure. He had never been free. Not under Navuh, and not now. Freedom was a concept that he understood intellectually but had only gotten a few stolen bites of, like the businesses he'd started that poured money into his coffers and not the Brotherhood's, the houses he owned in various locations.
"The engineer clearing the site for work was good news," Rami said. "Did you thrall him to give his approval?"
The engineer was human, so thralling him would have been easy, but Kolhood and the other brothers would have known just as easily that Losham had done it. Even in the Brotherhood, some lines were not crossed, and falsifying reports was one of them.
Losham had done it plenty of times, but only when he had been on his own with no one breathing down his neck or with any way to prove that he had been skimming from the top. It had been survival after his father had kicked him off the island, putting him in charge of the Brotherhood's drug and prostitution networks. It had been such a humiliating demotion that Losham had felt compelled to retaliate in some form. That retaliation had made him a very rich male, so in the event of his falling from grace again, he had an impressive nest egg to cushion his fall.
"I didn't thrall him. But I impressed upon him the importance of cleaning up Lord Navuh's basement and fixing his home before he returned from his sojourn to the harem."
Rami chuckled. "That's a threat that would have immortals shake in their boots, let alone a human. No wonder he found a solution."
"A solution that will cost us three days, maybe more. The engineer is thorough, which I appreciate, but his caution costs time."
"Time we don't have."
"Time we have to take regardless." Losham tapped his cigar to dislodge the ashes. "Rushing leads to more collapses, more collapses lead to more emails from my father, more emails lead to more emergency meetings with my brothers, and more meetings with my brothers lead to me wanting to throw myself off the roof of the hotel."
Rami's lip twitched. "The hotel is only four stories. You'd survive."
"Which would make the entire exercise pointless. If I want to do it properly, I need to jump off the cliff on the harem grounds, but I can't go there again."
Losham drew on the cigar and watched the smoke dissolve into the darkness above. The stars were brilliant tonight. One of the few advantages of living on a remote island with next to no light pollution was the sky. On clear nights, the Milky Way was visible as a luminous band stretching from horizon to horizon.
Most of those constellations had been renamed so many times that the original designations were lost, which struck him as an apt metaphor for his own existence. The same male, redefined by successive eras.
Losham reached for his glass and took another sip. The ice had melted, diluting the whiskey, but he drank it anyway because the act of drinking was more important than the flavor. It was a ritual. Routine, the predictability of the actions keeping him anchored when everything else was spinning.
"Have you ever thought about what happens after?" Rami asked.
"After what?"
"After all of this. The excavation. The compulsion. Whatever the clan wants from us. After it's over. What then?"
"Then we rebuild," Losham said. "My father tried to kill the Brotherhood with his dead man's switches and his paranoid contingency plans, but he failed because the Brotherhood is bigger than him. It always was. He just couldn't see past his own ego to recognize it."
"The brothers might not agree with your vision."
"The brothers will agree because the alternative is chaos. Ten thousand warriors without purpose is a disaster that none of them wants. They'll follow whoever offers them direction, and I intend to be the one offering it."
"That's ambitious. Kolhood thinks that he should be the one to lead the Brotherhood, and as the general, he might have a point."
Losham wasn't angry at Rami for pointing that out, even if it implied mistrust in his ability. "There are things that Kolhood is better at than I am, but there are many more things that I'm better at than Kolhood, and he knows it. We might have to reach an agreement. Something that will satisfy his ambitions and mine."
The Brotherhood's mission, as articulated by Navuh, had always been world domination, the eradication of the clan, the subjugation of humanity, and the establishment of a global order with Navuh at its summit.
But that was Navuh's mission.
