Chương 258: BECMI Chapter 257 – Of Kings and Things

The Council room where he often sat with his advisors when suffering through the long and boring business of managing his kingdom proved more than large enough to fit everyone. Nonessential pleasantries were exchanged, and things progressed rapidly.

"That is you?" Tarna Elmbright blurted out, the druidess unable to keep the hostility out of her voice as for the first time the holdings of Eismoor were displayed on the map. Brucall was aghast at the extent of the territory revealed. Most of the former Teuthonic Freeholds had been liberated and absorbed into its territory, and everything within a hundred miles of Eisfall was completely in its grip, with another hundred miles being pacified as they sat here!

"You are razing entire forests and completely displacing entire populations of plants and animals!" the druidess immediately spit out, her anger unconstrained.

"You use unnatural constructs and alien magic enslaved to your wills!" she accused him. King Antius was magnificently unperturbed and completely unfazed by the druidess.

"That is an utterly inflammatory lie, one perpetrated by your brethren to the south," he answered coldly, his voice like steel and his eyes like ice.

"We have cleared sections of woodlands to open new farms and expand villages, but we have never razed 'entire forests'." The scorn and disgust in his voice was completely apparent.

"We know how to manage woodlands and appreciate the life and vitality they bring to our lands… but we will not allow your reverence of wild and untamed lands to restrict our ability to defend ourselves and our territory. If you care to join your fellows in taking violent action and sabotage against our people, you may join them in enriching the Land with your blood. Territorialism is the natural way of things."

The brown-haired woman's hands clenched upon her Staff, but the king opposite her was utterly unafraid of her. That he hadn't even bothered to acknowledge her claims as to alien machines enslaved to them was telling.

"We have not heard from some of the Circles down there for months…" she uttered in a low, grim voice.

"Some of the local druids there chose extinction over ceding to the more powerful predators who came into their midst," Sama Rantha spoke up with a deadly purr to her voice, and the druidess shook in outrage.

"They lacked the wisdom of the simplest beasts in such matters, gravely overestimating their power and ability." The lethal edge to the implied foolishness was not lost on the druidess, who fell into sullen silence as she looked at the standing illusion displaying the whole of Eislas and its territories in a magnificent detail she'd never seen the like of. The way it zoomed in and out to display the landscape bespoke an awareness of the Land that likely exceeded that of her own Druidic Order.

She snuck a glance at the aloof elfin wielding the magic, although King Antius and Sama both were able to manipulate the illusion through devices of their own, the King wielding a Bracelet on his wrist, and the swordswoman the Dagger now floating next to her shoulder on its own.

"You have certainly been discreet and circumspect in your actions," King Brucall murmured, impressed and uneasy at the rapid expansion of his peer. It was clearly outpacing his own efforts in this area, although he was fairly certain that the population of such an area did not equal that of his own kingdom as yet.

"And you are not affiliated with Siricil?" He glanced tellingly at the Golden Hag, known to dwell in their capital.

"We just took that pigsty of a pirate port from them, regardless if there was a token Delphan in charge, and in doing so gutted Siricil's influence on the whole of the Eislas Coast," Sama sniffed at that.

"Magni is very irritated with us, and that won't change once he finds out my husband and I are involved. We do not and have never had official positions with Siricil's government, as if we did, my husband would now be Emperor, not Magni." Her smile gleamed, the fascinating extra canines looking like a predator ready to rip out throats. She also called the Siricilan Emperor by name, instead of station, without much respect, if any, in her voice.

"There are many barbarian tribes in that area, thousands of free and unruly folk," Seer Markoll spoke up, as if poking a hole in their claims of territory and authority.

"Can you truly say you have subdued them all, without wholesale slaughter?" he challenged them.

"Well, the descendants of the Ertobolle are really not too much different from their ancestors in how they handle others coming in to rule them," King Antius replied calmly.

"The easiest way to subdue them is to prove to them over and over again that despite what their gods say, they are weak, primitive, crude, uneducated, unskilled, and that willingness to fight does not mean ability to fight. It turns out that beating the stuffing out of them by multiple means and methods does absolute wonders for changing their attitude of southerners and soft outsiders to one of grudging respect.

Slaughtering dozens of their best one after another if they prove to be too stubborn is also incredibly demoralizing, and teaching them that massively outnumbering an opponent is running yourself into a slaughterhouse to be butchered does wonders for the survivors. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"We are coming. They can kneel, they can fight, or they can flee. We will accommodate them any way they wish to go." King Antius paused significantly.

"I note that you are not asking about the elven and dwarven communities in the area. Perhaps you did not know of them?" he inquired reasonably. They are pragmatic and ruthless in pursuit of their ambitions, Brucall realized, his uneasiness growing. This was an organized and very efficient territorial expansion managed by those who knew what they were doing, and weren't going to put up with any interference in their plans. They were also letting him know that by implication right up front.

"And how are the elves and dwarves taking your intrusion?" Brucall asked carefully.

"Once their territories were acknowledged? Not much different than the same in Delpha," King Antius answered easily.

"A little uneasy at the idea of humans being in force and numbers all around them, but willing to work with us and enter into a spirit of cooperation instead of subjugation. That we already had a fair number of members of both species among our own was a strong factor in our favor." And willingness to share the greater magic of their own peoples with them, he noted in silent amusement, but his expression did not change.

His eyes flickered over the completely human group opposite him, while they in turn glanced at Lady Edge, who looked back with ruby eyes in black, as unmoved by them as she was by most anything here. Antius had noted that the wizard was completely intimidated by her, perhaps feeling more of her power than the others. The druidess, on the other hand, was being cowed by Sama's predatory nature, which the faintest hint of violence tended to bring to the fore. A nature-lover responding to primal danger, as it were…

He had nothing personally against druids. If they wanted to keep to wild places and enjoy rolling around with the beasts and talking to trees, that was fine with him. But if they started interfering with him saving his people, well, that was just natural competition for resources, in this context living space, and may the best beast win! He'd noted that when it was put like that and the druids came out on the losing end, they tended to take it much more personally than animals did. Strange, that.

The young king (well, technically not young, but he definitely wasn't mature in Antius' eyes) looked quite pensive as he considered the detail of the map, perhaps even understanding some of the magical ability that was necessary to make a map with that level of accuracy. Certainly his spymaster, the 'Counselor' from Kheper, was studying it all in fascination, trying to drink in every detail.

"May I ask for your intentions towards myself and my kingdom, King Antius?" Brucall asked politely but warily.

"We have no intentions for good or ill for you and your holdings at this time, King Brucall. Those intentions are completely dependent upon your own actions," Antius responded honestly.

"Our intentions are to push forward the clearing of land and establishment of settlements between the coast and the mountains of the Last Range up until we reach the edge of lands that are loyal to Seacall." The Aetlans there bristled. That was basically claiming almost all the southern inhabitable lands of Eislas! What was left would be areas overrun with magical beasts, giants, and even dragons, which would have to be cleared valley by valley and held against great dangers!

"I see," sighed Brucall.

"And if I were to inform you that I intended to expand my own kingdom, to include all the inhabitable lands of Eislas?" he asked, fixing the other man with a grim expression.

"I would first ask where Your Majesty is going to get the inhabitants to do so," King Antius said, unruffled by his words.

"We have approximately one thousand settlers a month coming into our territory to claim the new land. Aetla is strong and secure with its population where it is. Start spreading them out, and you become quite vulnerable," he noted, to the younger man's discomfort. It turned out there were far too many slaves in Siricil, and so Briggs' network had begun liberating the best of them and spiriting them off to the North, along with making job offers to Good souls in Siricil and the surrounding lands.

The big man was a very hard person to say no to, and the absolute absence of transportation costs for what was effectively instant moves covering thousands of miles helped tremendously. Immigrants from Darkmoor, slaves from Siricil, Forsaken from Zanzyr, colonists from Federyn… and quietly enough, now a flow of people from the dispossessed of Delpha, eager to claim their own lives and get out from under the magocracy and embrace a new type of 'magic': the wonders of alchemy's other branch, science!

"We were intending to-""Your Majesty!" Counselor Olgmaithan interrupted him with a warning glance. Brucall only paused a moment, considering his words.

"They have given us their intentions plainly, come here and shared information that literally no other power in Eislas knows. Perhaps reciprocating would be a better stance than holding secrets and repaying such trust with secrecy?" he inquired of his spymaster. The Kheperan looked somewhat ill, but did not press his objections.

"I was intending to announce an open call to settlers of the southern nations to come and settle Eislas, with my encouragement and recognition of their claims," Brucall informed the newcomers firmly.

"Our announcements are nearly ready to go out, but your appearance, and claiming of, ah, Eisfall, prompted us to extend an invitation to you first."

"Your Majesty, I'm sure you realize that we require no recognition from you to settle these lands. If you start encouraging people to settle in the lands we intend to claim, you are basically telling them to invade and there will be war, or they will capitulate to us and become citizens of Eismoor, neither of which strengthens your realm and people," King Antius pointed out without the slightest flicker of surprise or fear of such happening.

"It's also foolishness on a grandly breathtaking scale," Sama nearly spat bluntly, making all of the Aetlans twitch.

"How are you possibly going to vet the horde of thieves, con men, reavers, bandits, brigands, marauders, and other criminals who are going to flood your way to claim holdings where they can make their miserable wills law, or simply run and hide from the dastardly deeds they've done in the past?

The sheer number of spies, thieves, and assassins alone will overwhelm your paltry excuses for law enforcement and intelligence operations, and that is absolutely ignoring the fact that in this room, the only people loyal to your cause... is you, King Brucall," she stated thinly.