The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

The revolutionaries earned themselves a short-lived moniker of White Coats. In the years following, there was an astounding effort to suppress this, which led to more than a few hangings. They wanted to symbolic connection between themselves and the church of the central kingdom, such was their atheistic slant, but the name originated with no religious meaning at all.

Austin Feugard's hub of command was the bowels of a bakery. Their coats were continually dusted with flour as they had to dig into bags to extract buried missives brought to them by porters ignorant of their complicity. An ignorance perhaps unnecessary. Bakers, as is true across time, are both poor and well-fed. Their work is hard and their bodies surprisingly brawny from the hours upon hours of labor it takes to knead a city's worth of bread. Many proved capable thugs, but it cost Feugard next to nothing to keep them ignorant.

The Feugard heir insisted on keeping his business clothes on despite the need for secrecy. It's true that he wasn't parading about in a polished breastplate, his family insignia embroidered into a silk cloak, but by the end of the summer, the king would have been wise to arrest every young, blonde man with a good face. Eventually he would have gotten the rebellion's mastermind. Instead, the king believed he could quell the anti-noble uprising through broad force.

After the fall of Donjon, however, he had nowhere to put the unwashed masses, and not enough gallows rope to hang them. Not that it's advisable for a monarch to decimate his own subjects. The King in Yellow proved that for all time. Thus, the Feugard boy was able to operate in a flexible swarm of unreliable information. He adopted a strategy of incremental advantage. He had little ability to plan a masterstroke action, and thus couldn't be exposed to the risk of such an action failing–as had the Bureaucrat's Coup.

The revolution fought a war of a thousand cuts, orchestrated largely by one man with extraordinary instinct for who to wrong and how. While there were now thousands of people ready to take up arms against the king, there were many times more people willing to cancel contracts with the palace, or lose shipments of goods. There was the undetectable poison of sabotage via corruption as much as there were outright attacks like the raid which took the lives of the Montisferro women.

Few things were able to pull him away from his desk, littered with letters, smudged by ink, and–like everything else–powdered in flour. Even his trireme board was barely distinguishable between black and white pieces. One day, he called in Aria. The man looked a mess, less composed than a soldier returning from battle. His hair was matted with sweat and his cravat tie had been undone. In one hand was a wine glass and the other a letter from the south.

Aria herself was barely recognizable. Fashion among women had grown taut. Unexpected widows were turning to prostitution in the streets, and shocked to find that for all the men in the city there were no husbands to be had. Makeup that would have been the work of performers and clowns now simply marked a woman of low moral fiber. For a brief, retrospectively humiliating, period, courtiers had painted themselves in much the same fashion, but recently it had become fashionable to eschew makeup entirely(1). Thus, Aria vi Solhart could have been mistaken for any of a hundred thousand town girls across the kingdom, had times been more peaceful.

Austin glowered at her and crushed the parchment with his thumb. "Do you know how many men at arms your brother has?"

Fear twisted in her gut, enough to make her wish to go running out of the bakery. There was no sanctuary for her, though. The city would turn on her and the king would turn her away. "How should I know? And he's not my brother!"

Austin snarled at her. "Lucius is the most dangerous man in the kingdom right now. This report here says he has somewhere between five and fifteen thousand soldiers at his command!"

"He's not Lucius!" she snapped back.

Austin laughed at her and drank his wine. "What's the bloody difference, girl? The whole world knows him as Lucius, even if he's not a Solhart. His army is real enough. You expect me to call him fucking Jarnpojke? Little Iron Boy? You're out of your mind."

"He killed my mother," she said, voice low and trembling with anger.

"He had her killed because she was a danger. For what it's worth, I'm sorry for your loss. You know that. Lord Raymi was already killed. Those same people would have gone for her if she had returned to the south sooner."

She scoffed and took the wine bottle for herself. It only had dregs, but she drank them anyways. "I still can't tell if you see that man as an enemy or an ally."

Austin sank in his chair, eyes on the trireme board. He hadn't had an opponent. Moving the black and white pieces was nothing more than a focus exercise for him as he tinkered with a composed board state and thought about the revolution. "He's whatever he decides to be, that's the problem. If the king steps down on our throats, he will be the crown's dog. If we drag out the king, then he will be our champion. And, if his army is as big as these reports claim, he can do whatever he wishes."

"Fifteen thousand isn't enough to stand against the king's army," Aria said, leaning against the bookshelf that had been dragged into the man's makeshift office. There were hardly any books on it, just maps and letters that belonged in a fire.

Austin teetered one of the ivory ships with his finger. "It is if there's dissent in the ranks."

"Acheliah wouldn't let it happen."

Austin's laugh had no levity. It was the forced outburst of a despairing man, his grin manic. "Acheliah left the city, didn't you hear? Didn't you see? Or were you busy hiding in the room I pay for? Letting my men keep you safe?"

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"Why do you always say it like that?" she snapped back, her mind not yet processing that the guardian angel of the kingdom had abdicated her post. "You say it like you're indignant about it, when you're the one causing this chaos!"

The man rose. His inkwell spilled, blotting over several pages as he stalked toward her. She retreated against the bookshelf but had nowhere to run as he grabbed her by the face and drew close. "I took you in because I thought I was doing Lucius a favor. Nothing more. You have no value to me, Aria vi Solhart. You're a liability."

She glared back, but her body lacked the will to fight. "Why? Because I know how to find you?"

His next laugh was true. "And what would you tell the king? That I'm in a bakery? One of hundreds. You'd never even make it to the palace. A girl like you would be taken even if they didn't know you were a noble. And suppose you made it there, you wouldn't be able to guide them back here before we moved. Don't you forget for a moment that your only value is if you can say something that entertains me, and the hope that Lucius cares about you."

She worked up the courage to knock his hand away. "I should have never left him."

"Even though he killed your mother?" Austin asked as he slunk back to his chair.

"You don't know the things he's done for this kingdom," she said.

He met her gaze. The man knew Lucius worked directly with Acheliah, but even the mastermind of the rebellion did not know the monsters Lucius fought. That gap of information was an uncontrolled variable. "He may have kept you at his side, but you weren't in his privy."

"He trusted me with his child, did you forget that?"

"Are you for him or against him? Make up your damn mind!" Austin roared. The door to his room cracked open, enough for one of the thugs acting as a guard to peer inside. Before the man could excuse himself, Austin ordered, "Take her to her room. I've had enough of this woman's nonsense."

Relief flooded through Aria as the door opened, though she did not recognize the large man. She was at least spared more of Austin's temper. Though he had been a genuine companion while at Forum, her only companion was the cloak of fear she could no longer shed. The guard's rumbling voice filled the room, despite his meek tone. "If you say so, sir."

Before she stepped out, Aria glanced over her shoulder and said, "Lucius doesn't tolerate threats. All he wants is safety."

"And he'll march to war for safety?"

"Yes," she said, and ascended the steps to the storefront of the bakery. She wasn't taken to the second floor where the living quarters were. The guard in fact barred her way. "Louie and I will be taking you to the new quarters. You know how it is, right? Always on the move?" he said as another man joined them. He was a swaggering fellow, although months of tension and made him gaunt of cheek. They were strangers to Aria, and the turmoil of revolution had reshaped them such that even Felicia would not have recognized the scoundrels.

"Come along, won't you? We have a wonderful place to take you," Louie said, forcing his arm around hers. The other men of Feugard's cohort watched and exchanged a round of communique through glances and grunts that sent a shiver down Aria's back, for she knew she no longer had the man's favor, and everyone else knew it too.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked as he used his grip on her arm to drag her into the rear alley.

The large man fell in behind them and a third dropped in from the street to take the front, effectively pinning her in with them. Louie kept a cheerful tone even as he kept his grip iron. "Dangerous times, m'lady. Dangerous times. People are going missing. It is just too bad the few people who know you're here are convinced you're going to run off and get yourself killed. You see? Not like you know your way around a blade, much less how to barter passage on a ship south. I suppose you could sell your body, but a girl like you'd probably open her own wrists before doing that, wouldn't you?"

"I can scream," she said as they emerged onto a larger street, but the press of bodies around them was but an opaque fence around the churning rush of wagon drivers. Their wheels scythed through the street muck.

Louie sighed. "You know, the last pretty girl like you I met tried screaming. We had to kill… Paul, what was it? Seven men?"

The man in front groaned. "Oh, come on, Louie. We said we couldn't be held accountable for those that would have frozen."

"It was nine bodies," the one called Paul said.

"Nine, give or take a blizzard," Louie said as he grinned down at her. "All because a young girl like you decided to scream when all we wanted was to keep her safe. Or did Lucius not tell you about that night?"

Aria lost her footing as her face paled, but Louie dragged her along, taking her weight to make the illusion she was coming with him. "Who are you people? Do you realize who you just took me from?"

Louie sighed as he waited for the congestion of the road to clear, then continued taking her away. "Why do nobles think us poor common folk are stupid? Perhaps I should ask you if you know the sort of man you were just in the room with? Paul, what did he call her?"

"A liability," the large man answered.

"See? All those trips to the library were good for you, Paul! What we have on our hands right now is a liability. One who might scream and cause a fuss because she doesn't realize we're trying to help her," Louie said, shaking his head and clicking his tongue.

"I'll scream. I'll get the guards to come. You'll all be hanged and I'll tell them everything!" she hissed, trying to jerk her arm away.

Then a fourth man leaned out of the balcony and called down, "Oh would you shut up you silly little girl?" She knew the voice. She knew the tired face tied to the voice. Relief weakened Aria so much she was able to be shoved into the rundown home and the door shut behind her.

"Golden!?" she blurted out as the former angel wandered down the steps.

He had to lean heavily on the railing, blood still dripping from bandages across his chest. "Girl, if you keep shouting, I'll kill you myself and blame the Feugard boy. I was just beaten within an inch of my life by a vindictive woman and a woman's voice is the last thing I want to hear. And if you open my wounds up, you'll have the doctor's wrath to deal with."

"Oh, thank the goddess. Am I actually safe?" she asked, sinking to her knees as the three men who brought her to the house went about locking doors and sealing windows.

Golden laughed. "Safe? Do you think we're leaving the city or something? I only went to the effort of having you extracted–and it will be quite an exhausting effort, if the Feugard boy attempts to retrieve you–because I need to know what he's doing. We have our own schemes to plot, girl."

This change to 'natural' appearances happened to coincide with an outbreak of illnesses and miscarriages, later attributed to toxins in the crudely-produced makeups. That death toll likely would have been greater than every revolutionary hanged by the neck.