The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 746

The state recorded it at four minutes past six that evening.

White Tower and Regent Group, plaintiff. Black Tower, defendant. Cause found and entered: false accusation, unprovoked assault, and confession of the same in open session.

In four hundred years of that glass, no tower had ever gone to war with a cleaner reason than the one White had.

Minister Penn set the only condition the state ever sets.

Twenty-four hours. From the moment both sides accept, nothing moves for a full day — time for the old, the sick, and the children to be got out of the way. It is the one part of a tower war that has never once been broken, because the towers that broke it stopped existing.

Both sides accepted at seven that evening.

The clock started.

Ashe knew it before he was out of the building.

He was in a carriage nine minutes later, and the first thing he did was call Silas Kessler.

...

"They'll all come in," Ashe said. "Every one of them. Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown — he stood in front of a minister and offered them money and they took it at the table, in front of me, like men buying fish."

"Then buy them back."

"With what?" Ashe's voice cracked on it. "He has Regent. I have a tower that can't sell a curse."

"You have me," Kessler said.

There was a pause on the line.

"Silas—"

"Don't thank me yet. I'm not doing it for you."

Kessler had spent two days looking at an order book with nothing in it, and somewhere in that time the tired part of him had gone quiet and something colder had sat down in its place.

"I'll make the offer myself," he said. "Tonight."

...

The offer went out to four tower masters before midnight, and it was beautifully simple.

Ferrowgate would pay ten million dollars.

Not to fight.

Ten million a day, to every tower that stayed out of it — every single day the war ran, for as long as it ran, paid in advance each morning, no questions, no obligations, nothing required of them at all except to sit still and do nothing whatsoever.

Blue had it read out twice.

"Say the terms again."

"We do nothing. We take ten million a day."

"For doing nothing."

"For doing nothing."

The Blue master looked around his own hall and started laughing, and behind him three of his elders were already doing the arithmetic that everyone in every tower did that night.

Because everybody knew how long a tower war lasted.

Six months. Sometimes eight. That was the shape of the thing — sieges and stalemates and lawyers, formal challenges, wounded pride, negotiated withdrawals. Nobody had ever finished one quickly, because nobody could.

Six months at ten million a day.

Nearly two billion dollars, to keep your people at home.

"White pays us to fight and die," Green's master said. "Ferrowgate pays us to sit in a chair."

Yellow accepted before dawn. Brown accepted at breakfast, on condition of payment upfront. Blue and Green took until noon only because they were pretending to think about it.

And underneath all of it, unspoken, was the part that made the decision easy.

They all believed White was going to lose.

Not might lose. Was going to. White Tower was the poorest, smallest, weakest tower in the United State of Magic — nine students a year, a leaking roof, an old man who couldn't afford a stonemason. Money had rebuilt the walls. Money had not made them magicians.

Black had five hundred years of necromancy and thirty thousand people who could use it.

You don't bet against that. You take the ten million and you look away.

...

"Sire, are you certain we can bear this expense? Ten million gold a day will bleed our coffers dry in under a week."

Kessler sneered. "You told me the White Tower was fragile. Stop holding back. Rally every legion you have and crush them in forty-eight hours before I go bankrupt. Strike with total force from the first horn."

"As you command, Sire." The Black Tower’s commander hardened his gaze. There would be no siege—only a massacre.

…

Somebody put it to Alex directly, on the third floor at Regent, with the acceptance letters spread across the desk.

"All four of them took the money."

"I know."

"You wanted to pay them yesterday, and Ferrowgate outbid you overnight." Beatrix's jaw tightened. "You're alone in this. Completely alone. It's the White Tower against the Black Tower, and Black has more than two thousand soldiers while you have—"

She paused, unsure of his actual numbers. Best-case scenario? Maybe a hundred combat mages, a thousand max.

"But if we can hold out longer, they'll bleed money. Shouldn't defense be our priority?"...

"The best defense is a good offense," Alex said with a smirk.

...

Alex did not sleep during those twenty-four hours, and he was not idle for one minute of them.

But the first order he gave, at six the next morning, went out to every White Tower branch in the country and stopped the elders' hearts.

Close the schools. Send every student home. Five days' holiday, effective immediately, no exceptions, nobody stays.

Nineteen thousand students, out of the buildings by dusk.

Elias came to find him personally.

"Grandmaster. Please tell me I've misunderstood the order."

"You haven't."

"Then say it plainly to me, because I'm old." Elias's hands were shaking and he didn't bother hiding it. "You are emptying thirty towers of every able body in them on the night before a war."

"Yes."

"Those students are the only people we have. Without them there's nobody in those buildings at all — no watch, no wards, no one to hold a door." He was almost shouting now, and Elias White had not raised his voice in thirty-four years. "Black will walk into every branch we own and take them apart brick by brick, and there will be nobody there to even see it happen."

"The students are helpless. Evacuate them so they don't get caught in the slaughter. Assign four or five true combatants to each tower; that will be plenty."

"Grandmaster—"

"Elias." Alex raised his eyes from the desk, his gaze icy. "Let them come."

And a nineteen-year-old teaching assistant named Pell, who had been ordered home twice and had come back both times.

They stood in the courtyard and watched four thousand come through the gate.

"How many," one of the cooks said.

"Don't count," the groundsman said.

"How many?"

Pell was counting anyway. She couldn't stop. She got to somewhere past four hundred before the numbers stopped meaning anything, and then she just watched the dead ones come, rank after rank after rank, filling the gate and spilling around both sides of the wall, and the whole time she was thinking one clear and childish thought.

We are going to die here in about ninety seconds.

She reached over and took the old groundsman's hand. He let her.

...

Fifty miles away, in a room under the main White Tower that eleven people in the world knew existed, a wall of screens showed thirty gates at once.

Thirty gates. Thirty columns coming through them.

Alex stood in the middle of it with his hands behind his back and watched four thousand shapes flood the Amberly courtyard, and watched a girl of nineteen take an old man's hand.

"Gaia," he said.

The room's light shifted very slightly.

"They're on our land."

He didn't raise his voice at all.

"Do something about it."

...

Out in the Amberly courtyard, Merrick had gotten eleven steps past the gate when he noticed the ground.

There was a line in the stone.

He'd walked over it without seeing it — a thin channel cut into the flags, running away left and right into the dark, too straight to be a crack and too clean to be old. He looked down at it because there was nothing else to look at.

It was filling with light.

"What is that," he said.

Nobody answered him, because by then the whole courtyard was doing it.

The line ran out under four thousand feet, and where it went, other lines woke up to meet it — a pattern nobody had seen laid down, spreading across the entire grounds, under the walls, out into the fields beyond, further than the eye could follow, an array so enormous that the gate they'd come through was somewhere near the edge of it.

It had been there the whole time.

It had been there since the drones finished the walls.

The light came up white.

And every dead thing in that courtyard stopped at once.

Three thousand of them. Mid-step, mid-reach, all together, as if a hand had come down on all of it — and then, with that same dry reed-sound going wrong in a way that made living men scream, they began to come apart. Not burning. Not blasted.

Unmade.

Whatever Black Tower had put into those bodies to make them walk was being lifted back out of them, cleanly, the way you lift a stone out of a wall — and there was nothing at all left in the empty parts of that spell, because the light had already filled them.

Merrick stood in the middle of his own army with his mouth open as two hundred years of Black Tower's dead went down around him like wheat.