Read Novel Full Chapter 1929: Silent Conquest
Chapter 1929: Silent Conquest
Gorruk said them.
"I walked his granaries. I counted the beds in his children’s house. I stood a day and a night in the open on his ground, the lord of an enemy nation, and no one so much as set a watcher on me."
The bearkin lord set the ridge report down on the stack with all the others.
"I have read enemies the whole of my long life. There is no war in that valley, and nothing in it that needs us beaten."
"And there is a market in it," Vargis sighed. "All the other peoples on this continent are already trading with each other under his watch. We are the only ones out here with our arms crossed, being proud at a wall nobody is coming to."
"We hold the walls," Skarn snarled, pacing the fire’s edge. "We double the watch. We drill the dens, we stockpile, we..."
He heard himself.
The pacing stopped.
In front of the whole circle, in front of the soldiers along the palisade, the wolfkin lord ran out of sentence, and the drums outside filled the quiet where the rest of his argument should have been.
"...This is a mistake," Skarn said at last, without heat, which no one at that fire had ever heard from him.
"Name the better one," Gorruk rumbled.
Silence answered for everyone.
Then Skarn stood still in front of his own soldiers, and when he spoke again his voice came out level. The circle went stiller than any snarl had ever made it.
"Hear the shape of what was done to us."
He looked around the fire, lord to lord.
"He swore never to raise a claw against our people, and he kept it to the letter. He put schools where we put drills. He armored wagon drivers past our champions."
"He rebuilt our dead villages with his own coin, let our best eyes watch every hour of the work, and when there was nothing left to show us, he paid his bill and closed the road."
His claws flexed once against nothing.
"There was no siege, no ultimatum, and no enemy for a single horn to call. We mobilized our people, mounting a defense against invasion, but we hadn’t realized that he was already attacking us."
"A conquest of politics," Rajah exhaled.
They all knew what the Villain was: a cold-hearted killer just like them, a man driven by his selfish goals.
They assumed he was sending the reparations so diligently because he had to.
But he was showing off, telling them what they would miss should they resist him any longer, in a language only rulers understood.
"Kindness or conquest, it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same. All that remains to decide is whether our pride keeps our children out of the world," Gorruk rumbled.
Vargis Ironfang had not touched his whetstone since the delegation returned. Now he looked into the fire and offered the council the only counsel he had given since the drums began.
"For the future of our people, I choose the cubs."
The fire cracked, and the sentence stood where he had put it.
"Then it is said." Gorruk rose to his feet, and the circle rose with him. "Send for him."
...
Quinlan Elysiar came on the first true morning of spring, with the pass streams running loud and the forests on the empire’s side of the border already waking green.
He walked the pass road alone, hands at his sides, taking his time.
Halfway up, without breaking stride, Quinlan took a small crystal from his pocket: the Consortium’s age-artifact, the same one that had read a certain nobody at seven weeks old back at the Phenom Trials.
He turned it over his knuckles once and let it taste his palm. The runes woke, circled, and settled on their answer.
[Age: 365 days]
’One year old finally, huh?’
Quinlan smiled at the crystal, pocketed it, and kept walking.
One horn note lifted off the western pass at midday.
The sentries had a call for a column and a call for danger, and the horn blew neither. It blew the single note that meant one traveler, walking.
Every claw the Confederation owned packed the western wall to watch him come. He nodded up at them as he climbed, to no one in particular, and the wall did not know what to do with it.
Skarn waited over the gate, looking down at him.
"Open the gate," Skarn said.
They received him at the fire circle, the four great lords on their own ground. Behind them the heartlands had emptied themselves into the compound: den upon den, ring upon ring, every soul the Confederation could gather standing silent in the spring dusk.
For the first time since the mountain fell, no drums were beating anywhere in the heartlands.
Gorruk spoke for the council, and the council had weighed every word.
"Quinlan Elysiar. The Beastman Confederation wishes to end the non-aggression pact and make an offer." The bearkin lord’s rumble reached the last ring of the assembly. "We would enter your empire as its fourth people. Equal in standing to the humans, the dwarves, and the elves."
"Our dens keep their lands and their customs. Our young enter your programs. Our goods ride your roads."
"And we ask one oath in return," Vargis said from beside him. "That a beastkin cub in your empire stands wherever any other child stands. Swear that, and the Confederation is yours."
Quinlan stood at their fire and let the last free nation of Iskaris finish offering itself to him.
"I, Quinlan Elysiar, swear it on my life and all those I cherish. The beastkin people shall be equal to all other races inside the realm I govern, and any internal hand that treats yours as less shall answer for it. Any outside hand raised against your people will be treated as an attack on my person. This I promise."
Then Skarn came forward, the last argument the Confederation had ever owned, and stopped across the fire from the Villain.
"Before my people kneel to you, I will have one honesty." His hackles stood the length of his spine, and he made no attempt to smooth them.
"Say it plainly, Villain. Here, in front of my people. Give the thing that was done to us its true name."
The compound did not breathe.
Ring upon ring, cubs, mothers, and soldiers, an entire people waited on one man’s answer.
The Primordial Villain smiled.
"Conquest."
The word went over the rings the way cold goes through wet fur.
Then Vargis Ironfang came forward.
The dogkin lord unslung the great war axe, looked down its edge once, and laid it flat on the bare trampled earth between himself and the Primordial Villain.
"The dogkin kneel to Quinlan Elysiar," he said, and went down on one knee, and a winter of carrying went out of his shoulders as he did.
Gorruk followed him down, mountain joints cracking, head bowed to the man across the fire.
"The bearkin kneel to Quinlan Elysiar."
"Ah, well." Rajah flowed onto one knee beside them, with a theatrical grace that fooled no one present. "The tigerkin kneel to Quinlan Elysiar. My people have always enjoyed a winning side. I have simply never stood on one this large."
Skarn stood alone, looking at the man who had answered him honestly.
The howl that had ridden his spine since the Villain’s first step onto beastkin soil went still at last, as though it had never wanted anything else.
In the dens’ oldest law, the law that sits under all the others, no wolf is shamed by lowering its head to the apex.
Pretending otherwise is what shames a predator, and Skarn was done pretending.
"The wolfkin kneel to Quinlan Elysiar," he said, and knelt to the Villain, last of the four, and his hackles, risen since the mobilization’s first horn, finally lay down.
Ring by ring, the Beastman Confederation went down after its lords, to the man standing at their fire.
The sound that moved through the rings was the sound of a den after a storm passes over it.
The last free people of Iskaris had been conquered with granaries, schools, and one silent road, and not a single drop of their blood had paid for it.
"The pact between the Beastman Confederation and Quinlan Elysiar ends today," Gorruk said from his knee, formally, before all the dens. "By our own word. With no clause of it broken."
[Ding!]
[The beastman people of Iskaris have acknowledged your dominion.]
[Peoples of Iskaris conquered: 4/4]
[Ding!]
[Reward unlocked!]
...
Author: The month is over and Iskaris is conquered! Hope you enjoyed. We’ve reached the end of the Iskaris Saga. Now it’s time to look outward! Thanks for all the support!