Read Novel Full Chapter 1911: Council of Hammers
Chapter 1911: Council of Hammers
The anger came up the galleries like a wave. Quinlan’s laughter rolled out over it, loud and genuinely delighted, and broke it apart.
"Let the greedy ones rest now. Every one of them is dead, and every coin they hoarded is going back into the mountain they starved."
Then he let the grin fade, and the hall quieted with it.
"We have long work ahead of us, and tomorrow we begin. But tonight..." His voice reached the deepest gallery without rising at all. "...tonight, we honor our dead, and we celebrate our living."
Torvek heard it from the wall, and his split knuckles closed hard against the flagstones.
Our dead. Some of tonight’s dead had fallen to the Villain’s own saber, guardsmen who had held their posts to the last order. Their killer had just claimed all of them, rebel and loyalist alike, as his own loss.
Their new sovereign would cut down anyone who stood against him, then mourn the fallen as his own people in the same night, and he saw no contradiction in any of it.
"So take the rest of this night off." The energy came back into the Villain’s voice. "Tend to your wounded. Mourn your fallen. And, naturally, we open the liquor stores and we drink to a better tomorrow!"
And just like that, the mountain came apart.
The hymn crashed back up the shaft, tens of thousands of voices colliding with tens of thousands more. Somewhere in the surge, the first barrel was already rolling toward the hall with religious purpose.
"He’s getting frighteningly good at motivating the masses," Aurora remarked from the foot of the table. "He just finished killing their brethren and they’re singing his praise."
"He promised alcohol to a race of alcoholics," Serika chuckled, watching a hundred thousand dwarves lose their minds over it.
"Shh. Let him have this." Lucille had her chin propped on her knuckles, watching her man win a mountain, deeply and hopelessly fond of him.
...
The hours after midnight belonged to smaller things.
The wounded came down the galleries in relays, rebel and guardsman side by side on the same stretchers. The healers refused to sort them, and after the third attempt the veterans who could still stand stopped asking them to.
Liora’s station by the processional stair burned through vials and mana at a rate that made both apprentice alchemists and mages cry, and Shallan’s voice had gone hoarse redirecting traffic somewhere around the thousandth patient.
Between Liora’s station and Shallan’s, a blonde tail moved through the stretcher rows at a steady trot.
"This one’s bleeding faster than he smells like he should be!" Blossom announced, depositing a protesting tunnel-warden in front of Liora. "Blossom sniffed out four hidden bleeders and carried sixteen grumpy dwarves!"
"Thanks. Your nose is truly amazing," Liora smiled. "I could use your help more often."
The tail achieved blur. "Whenever Blossom is free!!"
Two guardsmen on the nearest stretcher line followed the little dogkin assassin as she wagged her way in among the wounded again, and quietly decided not to understand their conquerors all at once.
"Four," the old bone-setter told the tunnel-warden’s wrist, still holding it. "Four bleeders my own people walked straight past."
He looked after the dog ears bobbing away between the rows.
"We’ve had healers under this mountain since there was a mountain, and it took a girl with dog ears to smell out those four."
"Perhaps the Villain has a point," the old bone-setter said, half to the wrist he was still holding. "Different races, different advantages... When working together..."
He didn’t finish the sentence.
...
Quinlan felt the last knot of the night loosen in his chest at the adorable sight of his dogkin lover rushing off to help more of his newly gained people. He set off after the one meeting that couldn’t wait for morning.
He found Brokk alone in the royal smithy, standing over her own anvil with the hammer Everwright laid flat across it and the helmet she had forged during the rising set aside.
The First Hammer did not turn when the most powerful being on the continent walked into her hall.
"Back down at the bottom, huh?" Quinlan grinned. "You could’ve stayed with your companions. They’re busy getting drunk."
"These few hours might be the last quiet I get for a very long time."
Quinlan leaned a shoulder against the door-post. "You probably got that one right."
Brokk turned. "...You didn’t come down here to chat."
"True," Quinlan nodded.
He strolled along her racks of tools with his hands clasped behind him, browsing everything and touching nothing.
"I’m not seating another council of lords. I want a Council of Hammers. Every hall that works raises its own master. Smiths, artificers, brewers, masons, miners, the tunnel-wardens."
He stopped at the end of the rack and turned to face her.
"They run the mountain’s affairs in the mountain’s interest and answer to me and mine for the rest."
Brokk’s face did not move for a long moment.
"Every hall raises its own master..." Her voice had gone quiet and very exact, the forge register. "The hall picks its own master."
"I’ll never once vote in it," Quinlan confirmed cheerfully. "Though I’ll be having my own requests. I’m the Primordial Villain, not the God of Charity. I have expectations in exchange for the freedom and protection I provide."
"...That’s only natural. We never asked for a free handout, just the opportunity to work properly."
"That you’ll have. You have my word."
Brokk’s thumbs came out of her belt. "So who sits at the head of it? If you put all these different craftsman masters at a table and don’t have a voice that is above theirs, the arguments will never end."
Quinlan’s smile had teeth in it.
"Take a wild guess."
It took a moment to land, because there had never been a hammer at that council table.
Hammers made the mountain. Lords decided what the mountain was for.
And the man who had ended those lords was now offering her the head seat with a straight face.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
It closed, and tried again. The First Hammer of the royal smithy, who had stared down war-notices and lords without blinking, stood in her own hall looking like she’d bitten into a mouthful of quench-water.
Refuse, and the lords had been right about hammers all along. Accept, and she would rot in a chair three tiers above her anvil, running meetings until somebody buried her in one.
"I." The word came out like a nail being pulled. "It would be. An honor."
Quinlan burst out laughing.
It bent him sideways against her tool rack, loud and delighted, rolling around the royal smithy wall to wall while Brokk’s glare climbed toward working temperature.
"That’s a wonderful face you’re making, First Hammer," he managed at last.
"You were joking." Her voice promised violence. "You offered me the mountain as a joke."
"The offer was real. But I knew you would hate it." He straightened, entirely unrepentant. "I’m not hauling a smith in her prime off her anvil to argue seating orders, unless she’s happy to be there. Here’s the shape I actually propose."
"Why didn’t you start with this...?" Brokk grumbled under her breath, and was ignored.
"Every hall has its old masters. The retired ones, the ones whose backs gave out before their craft did, who carry the whole trade in their heads and have nothing left to do all day but argue about it."
"The halls raise them to the seats. Retirement suddenly becomes a promotion. You’re allowed to pursue the craft you love even after your body can’t."
"And beside them, a few competent administrators, [Subjugated] for efficient communication..."
"Efficient communication..." Brokk repeated with a wry tone, though the violence had left her. By now, she, too, was grinning.
"Yes, of course. I wouldn’t enslave anyone just to hold more power in my hands. What am I, a tyrant?"
Brokk’s eyes were drier than a desert.
"So the elders keep the council honest about what the mountain needs. The administrators keep it running. The workers stay at their forges. And when I want something from this mountain, I don’t even need to lift a finger. Doesn’t it sound wonderful?"
"As for the head seat, it stays empty. Deadlocks come to my administrators, and my administrators come to me."
"..."
Every hall would be governed by the hands that built it, and the seats would go to the old masters who had been discarded for growing old. Brokk had spent her whole life being told the world did not come in that shape.
She looked at him for a long moment, then exhaled.
"You’re one hell of a smug bastard, if I may."
It turned into laughter.
"But I agree! That’s a good shape. My people will love it."
"Good," the Villain smiled.
...
Dawn didn’t exist under the mountain, but the shift-bells did, and when they rang, the mountain went back to work.
It went back to work strangely.
The trade halls opened to queues of dwarves holding a winter’s worth of the old council’s paper, and they left weeping over fistfuls of honest coin. In the galleries, masons argued over which dead lord’s terrace to strip for the under-tier’s rebuilding, an argument conducted at a volume that suggested profound happiness.
High above all of it, Quinlan leaned on the terrace rail with Ayame at his shoulder, the shaft glowing under them like a lit forge the size of a city.
"You’ve gone and built an empire and you haven’t even given it a name. Honestly. All that primordial ambition and not one drop of follow-through."
"It’s not finished yet," Quinlan said simply. "It doesn’t get its name until it is."
His eyes drifted past the shaft’s glow, past the mountain’s bones, toward the lands of the Beastman Confederation, the last stretch of the continent that was not yet his. His grin sharpened at its edges.
’One left.’