Nothing like a week spent trudging through the snow to make you appreciate an actual transportation system. The whole network wasn’t yet back to full functionality but fortunately there was a working line that stopped close to Caer Ardyllen, so barely an hour after my meeting with the squirrels, I was back in North Watch, sitting at my conference table with a cup of steaming blood tea and my command staff assembled. God, I loved goblins. Especially their trams.

Zhylvren and Vylkher were also impressed by the trams, as well as Kzidnak in general as we passed through. A bit less so by Ydleth, who had met us at the underworld entrance with my artifacts and a quick update from Sneppit—in short, things were under control, but management was having to work hard to defuse the sudden tension within the organization that had come from the swift incorporation of the cat and wolf tribes. Something told me the squirrels were not going to help with that; I was very glad I’d decided to just bring a couple of representatives to look around and send the rest back to their village for now. Also, Zhylvren’s expression when Ydleth asked to pet her tail was a work of art. If anyone could be counted on to flap the unflappable, it was our Ydleth.

“Oh, that is just demented,” Sneppit complained once I had brought everyone up to speed. “And I don’t mean the absolutely psychotic cruelty of it, that’s just Caludon being his usual fucked up self. Why the fuck would he set it up this way?! Auditors in every Clan hold, sure, you probably can’t trust them to self-report on something like this. But redistributing resources from every different location, progressively at the outcome of every ‘game,’ having to arrange…” She actually grabbed at her own head in confused frustration. “It’s logistical suicide! A fucking nightmare! Just recover the supplies and distribute them as needed from a central location! What is that idiot doing?!”

“The expectation of enemy action creates additional pressures that conventional logistics may not be suitable to counter,” Velaven said, her calm demeanor a counterpoint to Sneppit’s agitation. “If the supplies are moved to a central location, then that location—or, more likely, the transit route to and from it—is vulnerable to attack. The benefit of an over-complicated, multiply redundant system is that it has no single point of failure for an enemy to strike.”

“While I’m sure that’s true, Uncle Caludon isn’t a strategic thinker,” said Nazralind. “Wait, that’s not what… I mean, okay, he is a strategic thinker, he’s very good at board games and such. But his motives aren’t strategic. He is doing this to force Lord Seiji to engage with him, constantly, all over Dount, all winter long. The fact that it’s putting a massive burden of inconvenience on every single Clan and also his own administrators is just cream atop the cake to him. I’m sure he’s not blind to the strategic benefit this gives him, but never forget he’s not going to approach this the way a sane person would.”

She turned to meet my eyes directly, her expression intent and haunted.

“Caludon likes his games, but he doesn’t want to win them. He just wants to make sure everyone else has a miserable time.”

A glum pause ensued while everyone digested that, the only sound the soft scratch of Ydleth’s pencil from where she was taking minutes in the corner. I glanced around at the grim expressions—grim, and in the case of our beastfolk representatives, profoundly alarmed. Djast, Rath Kadora, and Zhylvren were sitting in on the council as the voice of their respective tribes, and it seemed they were acquainted with Fflyr cruelty mostly as an abstract fact of life, not in the extreme embodied by Archlord Caludon. I knew very well the impact his sadism could have on a person when revealed to them for the first time. Hearing about the winter games had visibly shocked all three.

“Naz,” I said slowly, “explain something to me. Why the hell hasn’t anyone killed his ass? And don’t tell me about the Convocation’s prohibition on spilling highborn blood, I was willing to accept that explanation before I met the guy in person. Assassination isn’t socially acceptable anywhere, but people much less dangerous than Caludon get taken out all the time. A ruler like that just isn’t…tolerable. Eventually someone would snap. Probably one of his household staff, if the rest of the highborn are too gutless.”

“I don’t think you appreciate how extreme the punishment is for a lowborn who murders a highborn,” Aster said quietly. “It only ends with their own drawn-out, horrible execution. Their entire family would be purged and them forced to watch first. Possibly their acquaintances, even their whole village… The specifics vary, but it’s enough to dissuade anyone remotely sane.”

“The thing is…” Nazralind sighed and looked down at the table. “It’s the same as the reason for basically everything else about this country: we’re kept this way because greater powers than ourselves find it useful. The first time a Highlord, let alone an Archlord, is assassinated and the guilty party not swiftly found and punished, Fflyr Dlemathlys will tear itself into a hundred minuscule warring kingdoms within two weeks. And that would be extremely bad for Godspire’s monopoly on the northern trade route, not to mention Lancor’s interest in keeping a subordinate client state on its border. So the two finest intelligence agencies on the archipelago have free reign throughout Dlemathlys, simultaneously eliminating any prospect of the Fflyr organizing into a stronger country and propping up the system that exists. Highborn do get assassinated from time to time—and the Radiant Convocation produces conclusive evidence of a rival Clan’s guilt within days, so the Clan in question is stripped of noble status. We all politely pretend they have the Goddess’s own providence ensuring justice and don’t acknowledge who actually does the investigation and tips them off, as if we don’t know.”

Fuck. It was just as the man himself said: literally everyone hated Caludon Aelthwyn, but no one was willing to do anything about it. He was too useful to the powerful and the implications of his removal were too frightening to those below him.

“Soft power,” I whispered. “It’s all soft power. I could personally walk into Gwyllthean and raze Caer Aelthwyn off the map with my brain, except I can’t because pulling any thread that hard collapses the entire deranged spider web and we’d be fighting the whole Lancor Empire within the week! So now I have to go play Robin Hood with this rabid dog of an elf. And not one of the cool Robin Hoods, I’m gonna end up as the Disney cartoon version with the talking animals, I just know it.”

“Leaving aside whatever any of that means,” said Minifrit, “you have in fact done extremely well at gathering soft power, Lord Seiji. It’s just that we’re in the position of comparing the result of a few months’ work to systems which have been built up over centuries. This…it’s a fight I believe you could win on Caludon’s own terms, in a few years.”

“It’s not in a few years, Min,” I said, exasperated. “It’s now, and we’re fucked.”

“You’re not wrong, but neither is she,” said Aster. “We’ll deal with it, somehow. Don’t despair, Lord Seiji, we are building something better. Bit by bit; it’s going to take time, and none of us ever thought the process would be smooth.”

“There’s…a loophole,” Nazralind whispered.

One look at her expression and I decided not to push it, just waiting for her to continue. Fortunately, everyone else seemed to come to the same conclusion.

“Any Clan which deliberately spills the blood of fellow highborn is considered bereft of the Goddess’s grace and will be stripped of their highborn status by the Convocation. That…includes their own blood. This provision isn’t invoked every time; usually violence within a family is left to that family to handle, as a courtesy. However, if Archlord Caludon were to be murdered by a member of Clan Aelthwyn, the Radiant Convocation has the option of declaring them anathema and removing the entire family from power. And… Let’s face it, the Convocation and in particular our local Archbishop hates him. Given the option…”

I leaned back in my chair, studying her. “That…changes a lot, yes. I can see how this would be a fraught prospect for you, Naz.”

“Oh, that’s not it,” she replied with a bitter little laugh. “Let me put it this way: removing Caludon is the most important thing, but if you send me to do it, I’m going to insist on taking out Aunt Naz too. The entire world just needs to not have those two twisted freaks in it any longer. The problem is… Well, I think Gizmit can explain better than I can.”

She turned to the goblin in question, who nodded and turned to me.

“Not all of our highborn have been disowned by their families, Lord Seiji; some of their Clans still have active retrieval efforts ongoing. Nothing I can’t easily deal with, don’t worry. It’s only been an issue as of this week, as they’ve had agents hovering around the Auldmaer Company trying to press information out of our girl Milennid. Auldmaer has handled that extremely well, shaming them into ordering some of his expensive shit instead of forcing a confrontation. Smart guy; he thinks like a goblin. What is important here is that you should not mistake an overall lack of focused effort for the highborn on Dount not knowing exactly who those girls are, and roughly what happened to them. They are deliberately keeping it quiet for the sake of their own reputations, and because the girls in question haven’t been drawing attention to themselves. But they were known to be engaged in banditry and sedition, and then disappeared. If their ringleader pops up again and takes out the Archlord right after he goes out of his way to force a confrontation with you…”

“Then,” I finished, “the Clans and everyone fucking else will realize that Dount’s highly effective new crime lord is working with a group of rebel highborn with a taste for insurrection. Fuck. That’ll bring Fflyrdylle down on us, with all the King’s Guild and the Convocation. Okay.” Not to mention those foreign intelligence agencies I’d just been warned about. I ran a hand over my face. “That’s still an important piece of the puzzle. Thanks for the information, Naz, and for, uh, volunteering. It sounds like we can’t afford to hang all our hopes on that option, but depending on how everything else lines up, it might still be…on the table.”

She nodded, expression darkly resolute. “I’ll do more than volunteer. If it comes down to physically taking out my uncle and there is not a specific reason I can’t… I’m claiming the privilege.”

“Just about everyone on this island has earned a crack at him,” I agreed, “but your claim is more…intimate. I will keep it in mind. The important question is what we are going to do. Obviously, we can’t just…let Caludon do this. What we need is a strategy that doesn’t involve playing along with his game. I’m open to ideas.”

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“What if…” Slowly, Aster leaned forward, resting her arms on the table and frowning. “What if soft power is the answer?”

“Go on?” I prompted.

“I think… Archbishop Naelloch may have given us the hint, Lord Seiji. I haven’t read Liau either, but that rule is pretty universally known: if you want to keep your authority, don’t give orders you know won’t be obeyed. Naz, you know highborn matters better than any of us. Caludon’s asshole scheme requires the Clans to cooperate with it. What if they just…don’t?”

Everyone paused again, absorbing that idea. I couldn’t help noticing a strangely universal reaction among the goblins: while the rest of us frowned in contemplation, Sneppit, Zui, and Gizmit all grinned approvingly.

“Let’s see… He’ll be relying on his taxation authority to do this,” Nazralind said thoughtfully. “Which is already a stretch, when it comes to distributing relief supplies given by the crown and foreign powers. If a Clan refused to cooperate with that, it would go to the courts, and then it becomes a matter of which magistrates and clerks and bailiffs have been bribed and/or intimidated by whom. Clan Aelthwyn does have a lot of influence there, but Caludon might actually not win that. Everyone hates him and the Convocation itself would throw its own weight against him.”

“This Archlord,” Rath Kadora rumbled. “He cannot force his will on the other Clans? Does he not have that power?”

“Over the lesser ones, yes,” Aster answered. “Like our friends the Yviredhs, for example. The ruling Clan isn’t allowed its own Clansguard, but that’s a formality that doesn’t matter much as the local Kingsguard detachment answers more directly to them than the actual King. Smaller Clans like Clan Yviredh can’t stand up to the Kingsguard.”

“But there are others,” Nazralind continued. “For example, Clan Olumnach and Clan Yldyllich have the military power to just plain ignore the Kingsguard. And even smaller ones for whom that would be a closer conflict occupy defensible homes, which is a militarily advantageous position. Huh. That is…that’s actually a real prospect, Lord Seiji. The only thing is it’ll be hard to convince any of them to be the first. But if we can somehow get a trend started, especially if we can get one of the bigger Clans on board… They’d all love to stand up to Caludon, as long as we can create the impression they can get away with it.”

I kept it firmly repressed, but I couldn’t deny the prickle of excited optimism that ran up my spine. “And not only do I have leverage with Clan Olumnach, my own plans for Highlord Caldimer involved goading him into a fight with Clan Aelthwyn anyway.”

“Yes, but the plan was for him to lose that fight,” Gizmit cautioned. “If he actually pushes Caludon out, we have another big problem. Caldimer’s not half the monster Caludon is, but he definitely intends to turn on us as soon as he has the governorship.”

“He’s not going to get the governorship,” Nazralind scoffed. “He’s almost as unpopular as my uncle—it’s not like everyone doesn’t know he was running the bandit gangs, and most people think he still is. And that was even before Lord Seiji goaded him into pissing off most of the smaller Clans.”

“We’ve been setting this up for a while,” I agreed, “pushing Caldimer to think he has a better chance than he does against Caludon. Even if we have to rally the other Clans behind him, actually sparking that confrontation presents…opportunities. Right, Gizmit?”

The goblin smiled coldly. “Indeed. If violence breaks out, so does chaos in general, and assassinating a Highlord or even Archlord becomes much easier. And even if they don’t come to blows, an opportunity is presented to remove one and frame the other. Decapitate one Clan and have the Convocation strip the other of its status. I like it.”

“Then we have a strategy,” I said, laying my hands flat on the table. “An overall one—there are a lot of details in this that still need to be ironed out, and the situation will continue to change. While pursuing that overarching program there are smaller battles to be fought, though. We have probably days at the most before Caludon’s little winter games actually kick off, and once that starts we will have to play along. I’m not going to just let him do this unopposed.”

“We’ll have to be a lot more careful,” Aster cautioned. “I assume you’re talking about disrupting these events themselves, and seizing any relief supplies that get redistributed. That’s exactly the kind of thing that draws attention we don’t want.”

“Which means not just war, but showtime,” I said grimly. “There’s no way not to draw that attention—so we’ll have to direct it somewhere else. All right, people, start laying plans. Aster, make sure our forces are ready to move; I want everyone on high alert across the island and prepared to respond wherever they’re needed.”

“They should be already, but I’ll put out the alert.”

“Sneppit, I assume all the underground entrances are fully defended? We’ll need to use them to cross the island faster than our opposition, and every use creates a new risk of one being discovered.”

“Please, what do you take me for?” she said disdainfully. “That was priority two right after getting the trams running again. I’ve got defenses placed at every spot, and the tunnels beyond them rigged to be collapsed at need. We’ve even pulled in artists to rig up fake living quarters in some of the bigger ones; that’s how we fool King’s Guild parties into thinking they’ve taken out an actual goblin settlement. The butts always fall for it. At worst, the tunnels will give us the ability to move invisibly to our enemies; the tram network is still being repaired but more lines are going up every day. We can get people across the island much faster than the opposition to…I’d say about a third of Fflyr territory, and that’s expanding all the time.”

“Attagirl. Gizmit, I know you’ve got your own resources and have been over all of Maugro’s files. Tomorrow I am going to move out and apply pressure to the two Clans under which I already have a lever. I need more options; whip me up a list of who can be potentially shifted to defy the Archlord, and what the best method is to use. Feel free to grill any of our highborn about any details they can provide—in fact, Naz, I want you to assign all of them who aren’t immediately necessary for messenger duty to help Gizmit with this.”

“You got it, Lord Seiji.”

“I’ll get on it immediately.”

“Good. That’s what we can do about that for right now, which leaves the fallout from our exciting trip into the deep forest to take care of. Kasser, I’ve got some assignments for you.”

“I’m all ears, Lord Seiji.”

“First, inform Youda that he’s gonna be dissecting some zombies for me. I need him to set up a suitable lab space, and he needs to have all necessary equipment on hand to experiment on slimes. It turns out that corrupted slimes are what make the zombies work.”

“They what?” Rath Kadora exclaimed. Zhylvren wrinkled her nose, reaching up to comfortingly pat her squirrel familiar.

“We’re going to catch him some zombies to play with. In a perfect world we’ll soon have their actual creator to compare notes with him, but she’s…let’s just say, not the most reasonable person I’ve ever met.”

Aster snorted loudly.

“And,” I continued, “I am unwilling to bank on the witch of the forest being cooperative. I want to know everything about those slimes and how they work that Youda can reverse-engineer. Which leads me to your second project: I need a containment system to capture and transport zombies.”

“So, a cage?” Kasser said dryly. “Actually, no—they don’t need to breathe and we do not want those filthy things reaching through bars at people. So you want me to build a box? I think I can manage that.”

“It’s not gonna be that simple, smartass. I need this ‘box’ to be transportable, not only through Kzidnak corridors but through the deep forest where the actual zombies are.”

“Okay, that’s more of a challenge,” he mused, frowning. “Wheels’ll work in Kzidnak, but out there… Shit, this is gonna require manpower, Lord Seiji. I can’t see any solution that doesn’t involve strong people picking this…containment system up and carrying it.”

“Call upon my people,” Rath Kadora said, thumping his own chest with one fist. “We are the largest of those under your command, Dark Lord. And we are eager for some retribution against those shambling horrors.”

“You heard the man, Kasser,” I said approvingly.

“So, a box with wheels and carrying poles,” he said, ostentatiously solemn. “Sneppit, I may need to requisition additional resources and personnel.”

She rolled her eyes and ignored him, fortunately unable to see Ydleth grinning as she scribbled notes. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure why Sneppit insisted on having her assistant take minutes of these meetings, but Sneppit had so far never failed to know what she was doing and it was my policy not to meddle with her instructions.

“The other thing,” I said, “is for Zeckl. Inform her I can now summon lightning slimes.”

Kasser leaned forward, suddenly interested and not at all jocular. “Did you say lightning—”

“So I need her to rig up something that can safely contain an electrified slime while using it as a power source. Basically any kind of waterproof non-conductive container with a metal rod stuck in it. Somewhat more complicated, I’ll need her to put together a containment system we can use to breed and move the things around, longer-term; I want living batteries that don’t require me to individually summon them. Tell her to be careful and ask me if she needs a refresher on what materials do and don’t conduct electricity.”

“Oh, she’s gonna be bouncing off the ceiling,” Kasser muttered. “This’ll advance goblin engineering almost as much as the truck.”

“Tomorrow I will deal with the Clans I can deal with,” I continued. “The day after, we move on Khariss. Biribo, I know you sensed the goblin tunnels we passed over on our way there and back; if I have Sneppit bring you a map of the underground in that part of the island, can you cross-reference it and find us the nearest tunnel exit to the zombie village?”

“Piece o’ cake, boss. I think I may’ve already spotted it on the way there, but checking a map would be a good idea before we commit to anything. I wasn’t exactly conducting a detailed survey.”

“I’ll get on that as soon as we’re done here,” Sneppit promised. “You’ll have your map within the hour, Lord Seiji.”

“Perfect. Aster, put together a force to move into the village. Our objectives are threefold: we are going to capture enough zombies for Youda and his team to experiment on, kill the shit out of the rest of them, and gently persuade Khariss to join our merry band.”

“Am I alone in seeing a slight contradiction there?” Zui asked pointedly.

“I fully intend to be as calm, kind, and considerate with Khariss as I possibly can,” I stated, “which I very much fear is going to be not fucking very. After everything we’ve learned I have a lot of sympathy for her, but the fact remains she is crazy from decades of isolation, she’s been making zombies and failing to properly contain them for most of that time, and I don’t even know what she was doing with that bandit gang that caused them to go cannibal but apparently that happened more than once.”

“More than ten times, across the years,” Zhylvren chimed in. “They tend not to last long once they reach that point. But more than half the human groups who had any consistent commerce with her turned to it in the end.”

“My own people kept a careful watch on the most recent group, the one you wiped out,” Djast added. “We never saw evidence of any fell magic—I have always suspected that it was just the mental effect of trafficking in human body parts that caused them to start seeing people as meat.”

“Right, whatever,” I agreed impatiently. “She may be a misunderstood little vampire cinnamon roll, but she’s got some shit to answer for. Since we’ve all got shit to answer for I don’t mean to be excessively hard on her, but I’m not going to coddle her undead ass either. Her nonsense cost the wolf tribe their home, just for fucking starters. I intend to negotiate with Khariss in good faith, after I have made it explicitly clear to her that the alternative is I blast her fucking house to kindling around her pointed ears. Aster, in addition to a larger force with heavy weapons to deal with the undead, I would like a smaller one representing the full diversity of the Dark Crusade. This elf knew and fought with Yomiko; I’m hoping the reminder will shake some sense into her. That necessarily means Nazralind and Velaven, but I’ll leave the rest of the assignments to you.”

Aster nodded. “I think I know just the people for the job.”

“Then unless anyone else has more business, we’re done here. Make your preparations and rest up while you can, people. As soon as everything’s in position, we go to war.”