Chương 156: Chapter 153. Scheming Fiend

"Gentlemen, we need to kill the emperor." It came out of Kim in a rush, a little too loud for the room, and for a half-second afterward he looked mildly startled to have said it aloud — though not, Adom noted, sorry. Which was the worse part. Adom and the Archmage stared at him.

"Professor," Adom said.

"I know how that sound, I do, but—""You don't," Adom said, "or you wouldn't have said it in that voice."

"Sit down." Gaius hadn't raised his own voice at all. He set his teacup back in its saucer with a small click.

"And breathe, before you say something the wards remember." Kim, when something had its hooks in him, did not sit; he stood, moved and talked with his whole body, and right now he was up out of his chair and pacing the short stretch of stone in front of the blackboards, hands going.

"You're both about to tell me it's drastic," he said.

"It is drastic. I'm aware it's drastic. I'm not, ah, I haven't lost the thread here, I know exactly how it sounds." He turned, fingers drumming fast against his own thigh.

"But will one of you, just once, say the actual sentence out loud instead of dancing around it for an hour? We've been in this room three times this month talking around the same shape and calling it different things.

'The Imperial situation.'

'The strain on the Magisterium.' Pick a euphemism, we've used it."

"That's not the same as—""Ten years." Kim wasn't really hearing Adom; he was building.

"I've watched the man for ten years, Adom. You've had six. The wars in the east are going badly, they've been going badly for three years, he's lost ground every season, and a man who's losing a war the honest way starts looking for a dishonest way to win it fast. You know what he's been pushing through the council since spring?"

"The armament charter," Gaius said quietly.

"The armament charter." Kim jabbed a finger at him as though he'd won a point.

"Which is a very polite name for a piece of law that would let the crown commission weapons we have spent the last age agreeing not to build. And when the council balks, he pushes harder. And every time he pushes, he pushes on us, because he can't build the thing he wants without mages to build it, and the Magisterium keeps saying no." That part was true, and it was the part that kept Adom awake more than the rest of it. A weapon of the kind the emperor wanted did not stay one weapon for long.

Only a handful of powers on the continent had the mages, the materials, and the coin to make such a thing at all; but a handful was enough. The moment one of them held it, the others could not afford not to, and the race would be on: every great nation pouring its best minds and deepest vaults into building the means to unmake cities, each one certain it was only defending itself against the rest. Adom had watched exactly that happen once already.

In the life he'd left behind, the wars had grown so total and so clever that by the time the World Dungeon opened its mouth, there had been no one left strong enough or unbroken enough to answer it. The weapons hadn't ended the world on their own. They'd simply made certain the world was already on its knees when the thing that would end it arrived. And the charter wasn't even the worst of it. The Magisterium worked because it was not the empire, not quite, not all the way.

It governed the magical affairs of Sundar, but it answered to an older thing than Sundar: the accord that mages of every nation had kept for centuries, the shared and unwritten agreement about what magic would and would not be turned to. That accord was the only reason a mage of Sundar and a mage of Farmus could stand on opposite sides of a border war and still both refuse, on principle, to cross certain lines.

The day the emperor brought the Magisterium fully to heel — made it just another arm of the crown, building what the crown demanded — that accord broke. And once Sundar's mages broke it, every other nation's mages were freed to break it too. Chaos, on a scale that didn't have a clean name. And the emperor, cornered and losing, had begun saying a particular kind of thing in his particular kind of council. That the only safe war was the one you ended before the other side knew it had begun.

That a decisive strike, struck first and struck hard and without the courtesy of a warning, was a mercy compared to a long one.

"He's a danger to his own empire," Kim finished, and dropped back into his chair at last, spent.

"Not just to us. To the thing he's supposed to be protecting. He tried to STEAL our research, for God's sake!" For a while no one said anything as the waves worked against the rocks below the tower.

"You're not wrong about any of it," Gaius said finally.

"Which you know, or you wouldn't have the nerve to shout it at me." He turned the cup a slow quarter-turn in its saucer.

"I have spent the better part of a decade carrying these arguments to the capital myself. Politely and repeatedly. The only thing my counsel ever accomplished was to make my face a thing the court would rather not see across a table." There was a dry pause from the archmage.

"You may have wondered why the Magisterium's heart beats in Arkhos these days, and not in the capital where it was born. That is a large part of why. They didn't exile us. We simply found the air out here easier to breathe, and they found us easier to ignore at a distance."

"Then you agree he has to go, yes?" Kim asked.

"... I agree the quiet paths are spent." Gaius conceded it without heat.

"I'd know. I've walked most of them myself." And he had. Adom had spent three days walking the rest, and they all ended at the same wall. A warning meant nothing; the emperor had been collecting warnings for years and filing them where no one would ever have to read them again; protests from neighbouring crowns, petitions from guilds he'd taxed thin, careful letters from careful men, every one of them catalogued and ignored. Coin was worse than useless against him.

He held the treasury, the trade lanes, and most of the guilds with any weight, and could raise a levy or thin a coinage faster than anyone alive could put a squeeze on him. The council was his to the man — half of them owed him their chairs and the other half were too frightened to lose theirs — so working through the proper channels meant surrendering a year to committees and procedure while the thing you'd meant to prevent quietly became law.

And the army went wherever the wages and the warrant pointed, which made turning it a civil war: one that would bury more people than the emperor's worst season ever had, with no promise of winning at the end of it.

"And he doesn't remove easily, even by the ugly road," Adom said.

"Three attempts on his life, a palace coup, and a rebellion, all inside ten years. He's outlived every one of them."

"Which leaves precisely one lever that actually moves the man," Gaius said, "and it happens to be the one I refuse to reach for first." He set the cup aside, and the mildness in his voice didn't waver, which was how Adom knew he meant every word.

"We don't open with murder, Kim. Men who reach for that first stop being able to reach for anything else. What we build is a contingency. A thing we pray we never use and keep ready against the day we must. If he ratifies the charter, or breaks the accord, or throws the first stone in one of his decisive little wars. Then we will have the answer already on its feet and legitimate."

"Legitimate?" Kim said.

"That's the whole knot, though. You remove a man whose family has held the throne for four centuries, and it doesn't pass to whoever's nearest with good intentions. You break the line and you break the one thing every noble house in the empire has agreed to treat as sacred. The legitimacy question by itself could come apart in your hands and take the empire down with it."

"Which is exactly why a contingency without an answer to it is worthless," Gaius said.

"So. We agree that far."

"Then answer it." Kim was up again.

"We stop pretending the throne is the only chair in the room. The Magisterium takes the reins temporarily, with an end written into it from the start, just long enough to stand up something that isn't ruled by accident of birth—""No." Kim frowned.

"You haven't heard the—""I've heard all of it, Kim, because you've said most of it before, and the answer is the same as it was then." Gaius's voice stayed mild, which with him was the dangerous register.

"Mages take the throne by force, and every noble house in the empire is at war with us inside a week."

"Archamge, I think they couldn't win against the Magisterium and you know it."

"They wouldn't have to win. They'd only have to make the empire impossible to govern, which is far easier, and they're far more practiced at it than we are." He shook his head.

"The moment we hold power directly, we stop being the thing people grudgingly trust and become the thing they already fear. Every failed harvest is our doing, just like every bandit on every road is our negligence, and every lord with a grievance and a banner becomes a liberator. People are frightened enough of mages without our handing them the proof they've been right all along." Kim's jaw tightened.

"So we watch it burn? Because the politics are inconvenient?"

"I said we need legitimacy. I did not say we surrender." Gaius set the cup down for good.

"We need someone with a true claim. A name the houses can't simply laugh out of the room."

"Whose?" Kim spread his hands.

"Walk me through the bench. Princess Marene?"

"Marene is her father with twice the appetite and half the patience. Hand her the throne and she'd be worse inside a season."

"Prince Ghorin, then."

"Ghorin lives in Lord Varmond's pocket. Half the court already assumes Varmond does his thinking for him, and the other half is right." Gaius's mouth thinned.

"And Varmond keeps friends across borders we'd rather he didn't. Ghorin on the throne is Varmond on the throne, and Varmond on the throne is a problem with a foreign accent." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"The crown prince—""Is finished, and you know how. We were both there for it." That ended that line. Kim dropped back into his chair and drummed his fingers.

"Then there's no one. The heirs are a disaster, a puppet, and a ruin. The houses are bought or compromised. The army goes with whoever signs the warrant." He looked up.

"Unless you've gone soft enough to consider letting the scholars try their hand at—"" We are scholars," Gaius said.

"Which is the entire point. We understand magic. We do not understand granaries, or grain prices, or which border village will revolt if you tax its salt. We are the wrong tool. A brilliant, badly-shaped tool, reaching for a job that was never ours." The two of them had circled all the way back to where they'd started, and Adom watched them get there: Kim's gestures going sharper, Gaius's voice going quieter and more exact, both of them so fixed on the wall in front of them that neither had thought to look past it.

He'd been turning the thing over for three days. Not whether the emperor had to be answered, but what came after, and who. He'd kept it in because saying it would end the theoretical part of this conversation for good and start a different one, with a name in it and a road leading out of the country. But they weren't going to find it on their own. They couldn't, since they didn't know it was there.

"... Morgana Vi Savarnis is still alive," Adom said. The argument stopped mid-breath, both of them turning to Adom. Neither asked the obvious question. They just looked at him, and waited. Adom settled back in his chair.

"About six years ago, I freed a puma in the Dregs." He paused, weighing how much to tell. The whole of it would take an hour, and most of it didn't bear on the room.

"There was a gang dispute. People shooting at each other, the usual chaos, and a cage in the middle of it with an animal in it. I let her out during the mess and didn't think much more about it." He shrugged.

"She followed me afterward. Took me days to notice I'd picked up a shadow." Gaius's eyebrows rose.

"A puma trailing you through the city seems a difficult thing to overlook."

"She wasn't always a puma. She was cursed, like, she could shift between a black house cat and the full animal. The cat is what followed me home." Kim's eyes were widening.

"The cat… wait, you're telling me that cat, the one from back then, was…"

"Yes," Adom said.

"That was Morgana."

"By Law's beard." Kim sat back as though something had shoved him. Gaius leaned in.

"How?"

"How what?"

"How does the emperor's niece, burned to ash and mourned some eighteen years ago now, turn up in a cage in the Dregs?"

"She wouldn't tell me. Still won't, last I knew." Adom shook his head.

"I didn't even know who she was at first. I worked it out about five years ago, when I was reading a journal and there was an old plate of the imperial family in it, from when she was a girl. Same face, just older." Gaius's fingers tapped the table once.

"And you said nothing?"

"What was I going to say? It wasn't mine to tell." Kim was still catching up.

"The people who had her caged…"

"A criminal merchant outfit. The Silver Circle. They don't exist anymore."

"And after you freed her?" Gaius asked.

"I took her to the Veyshari. They looked at the curse and managed to lift it." Kim whistled.

"And once it was off?"

"She stayed a few weeks to get her strength back, then went. Said she wanted to see the world, after all that time as an animal, so she took to the sea with the Veyshari."

"Did you keep in contact?" Gaius asked.

"For a while. She used to send me and Sam letters fairly regularly. Nothing political, just travel stories. Descriptions of places she'd been, people she'd met. She seemed to be enjoying herself." Adom's expression darkened slightly.

"But the letters stopped coming about a year ago."

"Stopped how?" Kim asked.

"Did she say she was ending correspondence, or did they just—""They just stopped. Either she moved on without leaving a word, or..." He left the sentence hanging. There wasn't really a need to elaborate.

"Have you tried to locate her?" Gaius asked.

"I have some contacts in the merchant marine. They've been asking around, but discreetly. So far, nothing concrete. A few possible sightings in various port cities, but nothing we could confirm." Kim was leaning forward now, his earlier agitation replaced by intense focus.

"But she's definitely alive, yes? As of a year ago?"

"As far as we know. The last letter was dated about thirteen months back. She was in Veridian at the time, working as a translator for some trading company." Adom paused, his expression thoughtful.

"Though I think she might be building an army." Kim's eyebrows shot up.

"An army?"

"It's just... there's been talk. For the past year or so, merchants have been reporting strange things. Mercenary companies going quiet, private armies just disappearing. And it's always in the same places she was writing from." Adom rubbed his jaw.

"Could be coincidence, but the timing matches up too well."

"What kind of talk?" the Archmage asked.

"Stories about a woman gathering forces. Buying out entire mercenary outfits, recruiting from disbanded military units, that sort of thing. Nobody's gotten a good look at her, but wherever she goes, sellswords start vanishing from the usual hiring markets." Kim leaned forward.

"And you think it's her?"

"I don't know for certain. Her letters were all perfectly normal. Full of complaints about the weather, descriptions of local food, stories about interesting people she'd met. Nothing that would suggest she was doing anything more dangerous than sightseeing." Adom shrugged.

"But the pattern's there. She writes from a port city, and a few weeks later, half the mercenaries in the area have found new employment with some mysterious benefactor." The Archmage, who so far had been silent, finally spoke.

"Her father's death was never as clean as the histories pretend," he said. Adom looked at him sharply.

"What?"

"Morgana vanished the night General Soren died. Seventeen years ago. The emperor's younger brother." Gaius's gaze had turned inward.

"Soren had been gathering support among the military houses. Too much of it, in some opinions. The night it all came apart, his compound was ringed by his own men — armed, and ready to march on the capital."

"I always heard she was lost in some accident," Adom said, not liking the direction of this.

"Then a young diplomat arrived under a flag of truce. A persuasive man. He convinced the rebels to set down their arms and walk away — pardons, gold, a quiet life, in exchange for abandoning their general."

"The Chancellor," Kim said quietly.

"The very same. He was only an ambitious young man with a gift for words, in those days." Gaius's face had darkened.

"Every last rebel left. And the general was alone in his compound with his family and a handful of household guards."

"And then," Adom said.

"And then he went mad. So the story goes. When the Star Knights arrived, hours later, they found Soren in the great hall, soaked in blood. His wife dead across the table. His two sons on the floor beside her." Gaius's hands had stopped moving entirely.

"He was raving — traitors, conspiracies. He came at the knights with his bare hands, and they cut him down. A child's burned body was recovered from the family quarters. They named it Morgana, and buried the matter with her." The room had gone quiet.

"But if she's alive," Gaius said slowly, "if she lived through that night and saw it — then perhaps Soren wasn't mad at all. Perhaps the blood on him was his family's because he'd been trying to keep them alive. Against the men who came once the rebels had been so conveniently sent home." Adom felt something cold open in his stomach.

"So she's after revenge."

"The emperor gave the order. The Chancellor cleared the ground. The Star Knights arrived in time to find a madman ready-made to carry the blame." Gaius's voice was flat.

"Tidy. And entirely believable."

"... Oh." Gaius rose from his chair. Something in the room shifted with him; Kim straightened, and Adom found himself doing the same before he'd decided to.

"We are in a delicate position," Gaius said, and his voice had changed register.

"We need a contingency against an emperor who may yet prove unfit to hold his own throne. And the death of General Soren, it seems, may be a very different thing than the one the histories record." He crossed to the window. Rain had started, lashing the glass; somewhere out over the water a storm was building. He stood with it a moment, then spoke without turning.

"Adom. Do you know how the Vi Savarnis came to the throne?" Adom reached for it but came up with very little.

"Vaguely. There was a house before them. It ended somehow, and they were the nearest blood left, so the crown went to them." He rubbed the back of his head, slightly embarrassed to admit it.

"I never studied it past that. Palace genealogy never seemed like time well spent."

"Hmm, most days you'd be right, I suppose." Gaius turned back from the glass.

"Tonight it's the most important thing in this room. So listen." House Solaris, the founding house of Sundar, and imperial house before the Vi Savarnis had held the throne, he said, disappeared for a reason. In the empire's earlier days, during the reign of the Solaris dynasty, when an emperor died, the son who succeeded him did not merely mourn his brothers; he buried them. All of them.

A throne with a single claimant was a throne no one could contest, and so each new reign opened with the quiet killing of every other man who might have worn the crown instead.

"They believed they were protecting the succession," Gaius said.

"But really, what they were doing was harvesting their own line, one generation at a time. A house can only cut so much of itself away before there's nothing left to cut, so after enough reigns of it, an emperor died with no brother left to kill and no son fit to follow; and then there was no one of the blood at all. The oldest dynasty in the world put itself in the ground with its own knife, just like that." Well, that was not very smart. Adom thought.

"The Vi Savarnis were a cadet branch. Distant cousins, far enough from the throne that no one had ever thought them worth murdering; which is precisely why they were still breathing when it came time to inherit it." A dry note entered his voice.

"They came to a crown still wet, and they were not fools. Before the coronation, before anything else, they wrote a single law into the foundation of their rule, so that the throne could never again devour the family that held it. It's the one law no Vi Savarnis emperor in the four centuries of their reign has dared touch, because it is the same law that put them on the throne and keeps them there. Shed a sibling's blood to take the crown, or to hold it, and the crown is forfeit." The room had gone very quiet.

"So understand what we may be looking at." Gaius's gaze moved between them.

"If the emperor had his brother killed, then by the oldest and least forgiving law his own house ever wrote, he is no emperor. He's a fratricide in a chair that stopped being his the night Soren died." The air in the room suddenly shifted, for a reason Adom had yet to understand.

"Magus Adom Sylla." Ah, there was the reason. The Archmage formally calling him could only mean one thing.

"By the authority vested in me as Archmage of the Imperial Magisterium, and by the charge laid on this office since Archmage Law Borealis founded it — to keep the truth, and to keep the empire whole — I am sending you beyond our borders to find Morgana Vi Savarnis, daughter of the late General Soren, and to bring her home." A pause.

"You may take a team, if you judge you need one. Choose them well." Adom's mouth had gone dry.

"Yes, lord Archmage."

"If she lived through that night, she is the only living witness to what truly happened in that hall. The only person who can say whether her father died a kinslayer or a victim." Gaius stepped nearer.

"Which means she is the only person who can tell us, beyond doubt, whether we serve a murderer."

"And… if she can?" Adom already knew, but he wanted it said aloud.

"Then we have our contingency, and it has a name, a face and an actual true claim. Should the day ever come that the emperor forces our hand, Morgana Vi Savarnis stands ready to take the throne as its legitimate heir and the order the founders intended is restored, rather than broken." Gaius returned to his desk.

"Not a coup in the dark. A lawful answer, prepared in advance, for a crime we may be able to prove."

"... You're asking me to find the makings of a civil war."

"I'm asking you to find the thing that prevents one." Gaius sat.

"His reign grows less stable by the month. Far better we hold a legitimate heir in reserve than wait for the empire to come apart and reach for whatever's nearest."

"When should I start?"

"Anytime you see fit. Though I'd not dawdle. We do not know when exactly we might need her." Gaius had already drawn a fresh sheet of paper toward himself.

"Find her. Bring her home. And hope, when you do, that she's willing to help us mend what her uncle broke." Adom stayed still for a moment, almost laughing at the irony of it all. A few years back he'd helped put down the crown prince's coup against this same emperor, and had been one of the hands that kept the man on his throne, convinced at the time that a steady empire was worth more than a just one. And here he was now, charged with quietly assembling the means to take it from him.

Fate truly had a twisted sense of humor. When it was all said and done, he'd either be sitting closer to the Archmage's chair than he'd ever imagined, or he'd be a footnote, one more ambitious scheming fiend who'd reached for an empire and missed. There wasn't much room in between.