Book 4 Chapter 41: Retaliation

++Power is its own justification. Never confuse the acquisition of knowledge for the acquisition of power. The former is a means, the latter an end. The former leaves you bettered and vulnerable, the latter leaves you bettered and secure.++

- Attributed to the mythological ‘Sakhent the Doom Lord’.

I left Alira and headed to my own office—back at the refinery. It was marginally less irritating than the Institute positioned some five miles away, though I scarcely noticed it being any closer. Five miles was less than a minute’s flight for me if I could go in a straight line.

I paced. Fists clenched and tightened, veins jumped in my skin. At one point I took a page right out of Baron Agrian’s book and threw an angry punch at the wall. The granite wall. It hurt a lot, and did not so much as mark the stone. I massaged my throbbing knuckles as I continued my brooding, in no mood to have demonstrated the current limits of my strength in quite so inarguable a way.

Only five minutes after I started, Sethira entered and slithered up behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I shoved her off me, in no mood for her contact. By her grin, I could see that she had been hoping to provoke just that reaction. “What’s the matter?” she repeated after a moment, growing slightly more serious.

I decided to tell her, if only because I considered two brains to be very fractionally better than just my one. At least when one of those brains was Sakhent’s.

She listened and understood, then listened some more while I went over the possible counters as they emerged in my mind.

To my growing annoyance, Sethira did not seem to be really listening to most of my suggestions. She just watched and nodded, and slowly smiled wider with each new one. I finally broke when she let out an audible giggle, slamming my hand down on the wooden desk beside me.

This time my fist proved of superior make to its target, and the dense ebony cratered inwards. Sethira eyed the damage.

“When am I getting one of those?” she asked.

She was referring to a vat-grown body, of course.

“You are third on my list,” I told her. “After my brother, who needs to start practicing magic as soon as possible, and my mother in law, who is actually giving me something in exchange. Do you want to be fourth? Fifth? Then explain why you are laughing and take this seriously.”

I could see that she was considering calling me cute. She did that often when I got angry. If she had done that today, she would have been in more danger than any other lifeform in the world. Sethira seemed to know better than to push that far and just gave me the answer I had demanded, though still with that annoying smirk.

“You’re missing the obvious,” she told me. “Too much time playing politics with the mortals, it’s eroded your mind. You’re not thinking like a lich anymore.”

“Stop with your word games and explain!”

“Fine,” she sighed. “Why do you need to play his game and try to find an economic solution to this? Just use the cult.”

Everything she had said must have been right, because it took me a few moments to finally understand what she was getting at.

And, of course, it was obvious. The cult had been carefully intertwined with the fabric of Garamon’s society for several years now. It was not omnipotent, far from it. If it tangled with affairs on the state level, or some ancient institution like the Winzorth Institute, whose scions were both powerful and used to practicing subterfuge, it would be exposed more likely than not. But Earl Elqarth did not have the power of Garamon’s government, and he did not have half the wit of an average Winzorth professor.

Used carefully, and with restraint, there was no reason at all the cult could not sabotage his ability to actually wield the vast fortune that made him so inconvenient to me. A damaged steam engine here, a memory-wiped order there. A dozen misfortunes a day perhaps, spread across his own financial empire and all subtle enough to miss, but critical enough to do some damage.

Having now gained control of quite a portion of assets myself, I did not take long to devise a way the Earl’s own capital might be interfered with. Perhaps he would even lose money when it was all said and done, depending on how long the idiot took to realise he could no longer afford to distract himself and his people by targeting me.

“There you go,” Sethira sighed as she lounged back on my desk. “What would you do without me?”

I ignored that remark, already thinking more about how I might make the most use of her cult. She interrupted that, too.

“Of course, given that it’s my own people you’ll be using, I expect compensation. My own body, like yours, as soon as possible.”

I pretended to be more annoyed than I was. “I have already started work on Exyria Voret’s body,” I told Sethira. “And by presenting that to her I will create an extremely powerful ally, and simultaneously generate a good deal of blackmail material over them with the threat of exposure.”

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In truth, most of my work on Voret was applicable to any other work I might start on a new body. Still, it is usually good to both keep others from being too familiar with what your limits are, and to make every concession you make seem like a larger one than it is. Negotiation is all about getting the most for each favour in the end.

And I was under no illusions about where I stood with Sethira. We were allies now, lovers even, but one day, one of us would kill the other. Such is the destiny of any partnership between people who both wish to rule the world.

“If I didn’t know any better,” Sethira continued idly. “I’d say you were intentionally limiting my power in fear that giving me access to such a body would allow me to replicate it myself.”

I rolled my eyes. “Now you just sound ridiculously paranoid,” I sighed.

She was, of course, completely correct. That had been among my countless concerns.

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Sethira said idly as she lounged back on the desk, her legs kicking out lightly. “What’s your plan for that Institute, by the way? You have plenty of little geniuses there, or at least what passes for a genius these days, but I hardly think you’ll be churning out footsoldiers right?”

“You are right about that,” I replied. “This is a long term investment. If I can gently tweak the culture of magicians in the Vornholt Institute, one generation at a time, then they will spread these tweaks to their own apprentices, one day even to other Institutes as they take up teaching positions of their own.”

“You’re playing the long game,” Sethira noted at last. “Setting up dominos to fall generations later.”

“That you need to even make such a banal observation out loud shows that I am not the only one who has started to think less like a lich,” I said dryly.

Sethira huffed at that, but did not retort. She seemed to consider it a point scored. “We won’t topple our enemies with culture alone. You know that.”

“That is what my other experiments are for,” I told her.

“Those won’t do it either,” Sethira’s smile slipped. She seemed to be getting frustrated now. “That’s your problem, you’re far too materially-minded. You can’t fight a God with material means—didn’t that little tour through the museum of your failures make that clear? They don’t play by the same rules everything else in creation does, so you won’t beat one by exploiting those rules.”

“Nonsense,” I frowned. “Gods are beings of extraordinary power, but that is all they are. In a world without them you or I would already be considered Gods. There may be other planes where their power is as close to the dominant rulers as an insect’s is to theirs. There is no reason to assume anything about them.”

“It’s not an assumption that they can do things mana can’t, it’s a fact,” Sethira snapped. “Rather than trying to stack on petty little advantages to widen the gap between yourself and already-helpless mortals, you should be looking to subvert the Gods at their source.”

Ah, this again.

“You neglect the material in favour of the immaterial, just as I do the reverse,” I said evenly. “We both have our methods. So far only mine have yielded fruit.”

I almost had her. I knew Sethira must have been experimenting in secret herself, just as I was. Sakhent had not become the second mightiest of all our kind by sitting idle where the rest of us worked to an obsession. But pride alone was not enough to shake the secrets free from her, she just swallowed and let the remark slide.

“We have an opportunity here that you’re neglecting,” she told me at last.

I remained silent, inviting her to continue.

“We both owe Zameka a debt. Actually, we owe her two. A debt of gratitude and a debt of vengeance. We do not need to satisfy the former before the latter.”

“If you are suggesting what I think you are,” I began, “then we cannot satisfy the former after the latter. You wish to consume her power?”

“Ideally yes, but as you said, that would violate the principles by which we have both led our existences. Instead I would wait before satisfying the debt of gratitude. Take her essence captive, while it remains inert and unresisting, and then experiment directly upon it.”

What she was suggesting had crossed my mind before. I had decided not to do it only because I was not sure how.

“You are saying you have some means of trapping a God?”

“I think so,” Sethira told me. “An unresisting one, I should note.”

That essentially answered the question, in my mind, of what she had been working on in secret. Or at least it gave me one answer, no doubt she had other projects of varying success.

“Is this means ready?” I asked her.

“I think so. We will only truly know by using it.”

That made me rather less enthusiastic about the idea. “I do not want to fail at trapping a God, only to wake her up and leave her with cause for retaliation,” I frowned.

“Would you rather voluntarily bring that God back into the physical world, fully cognisant and alert, and then rely on its good nature to keep us from being attacked?”

Obviously I did not. Even if Zameka remained at odds with the rest of her kind, one God was hardly more manageable than one dozen, or one hundred. She had never been as potent as Nglaru, but the disparity in power between a God and their own Demigods was no smaller than the gap between those same Demigods and a common human.

It may even have been larger.

Sakhent, myself, Sascithius and Shuo Meg all throwing our power into the fight together would not be enough to mount a resistance, regardless of how we prepared or how many enchanted items we brought into it.

Sethira knew that, and I had to admit the fact that she was willing to risk imprisoning such a being in spite of this fact made me somewhat more confident in her suggestion.

“I will consider it,” I said at last, which I thought was an entirely generous concession given the lack of details I had been given about the means through which we would achieve this goal.

Sethira nodded in satisfaction, then turned over on the desk to lie on her front. “Are you busy now?” she asked.

“Believe it or not, there are more important things in my existence than sexual intercourse,” I told her with a sigh. She grinned again.

“Liar.”