The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 755

Weeks earlier, in the middle of a war with the Black Tower, Beatrix put a stack of purchase orders on Alex’s desk and did not sit down.

Rain was coming down the fourth-floor windows in sheets. Below them New Avalon was all wet lamplight and moving umbrellas, and every one of those orders had a Red Tower address within two miles of it.

“Explain these to me.”

“They’re land purchases.”

“I can read.” She pushed the top sheet across. “Warehouse leases. Ninety of them. Every single one sits inside walking distance of a Red Tower branch, and we are currently at war with a completely different tower.”

Alex didn’t look up.

“Then it’s a good week to buy warehouses. Nobody’s paying attention.”

“Alex.”

“Sit down, Beatrix.”

She sat.

…

“There are three organisations in this country that want to destroy us,” he said. “Black. Red. Ferrowgate. All three of them are talking to each other and all three of them are waiting to see how the first one goes.”

“So you’re preparing for Red before Black is finished.”

“I’m preparing for Red because Black is already finished.” He finally looked up. “The day we win is the day the second one moves. So we need to be prepared from now.”

Beatrix turned a lease over in her hands.

“And if Red never comes?”

“Then I own ninety warehouses with my drones inside.” He shrugged. “But they’ll come. Men like that always wait until they think we are celebrating.”

“And when they do?”

Alex thought about how to say it, and then didn’t bother softening it.

“When someone raises a hand against me, I don’t trade blows,” he said. “I crush him under carriage wheels. I make sure he never stands again, then I take his house, his coin, and his wife. He made the first move. The audience just needs to remember what happens on the second.”

Beatrix looked at him for a long moment.

She didn’t put it in the minutes.

…

Weeks later, three hundred Red Tower magicians walked up a ridge above a banquet hall and set fire to a roof that had a six-dollar sticker on it.

They had brought a fist.

Alex had spent weeks parking the carriage.

…

By two in the morning the Red Tower’s buildings belonged to other people.

Ex-Black magicians held the gates in their old colours, one night only, standing in the courtyards of the tower that had refused to fight beside them two weeks ago.

Upstairs, the drones went through the record rooms.

Not searching. Photographing.

A hundred machines to a building, moving down the shelves at reading speed, and every roll they opened was the same one: enrolment ledgers, stipend rolls, route sheets. Names. Registration numbers. Home addresses, because Red paid a housing allowance and Red kept receipts.

Two hundred seventy-five branches. One hour. Every file went straight up to Gaia.

“How complete?” Alex asked.

“Twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and forty individual members,” Gaia said. “Ninety-six percent have a current residential address on file. I have a route plan.”

“Show me the problem first.”

“The problem is that they are asleep in their own beds tonight and they will not be tomorrow.”

…

That was the whole of it, and Elias worked it out standing at Alex’s shoulder in the control room with his hands behind his back.

“Thirty thousand people,” the old man said.

“Twenty-nine and a half.”

“We have their buildings. We don’t have them.” Elias’s voice was very careful. “In three days they’ll have found each other. Market halls, guild rooms, somebody’s back garden. And then it won’t be three hundred caretakers, Grandmaster. It’ll be thirty thousand angry professionals who know exactly where our thirty branches are.”

“Yes.”

“They’d stretch us thin enough to break.”

“Yes.”

Elias let out a breath.

“Then what do we do about it?”

Alex looked at the wall of screens.

“We do it tonight,” he said. “While they’re still thirty thousand separate men sleeping in thirty thousand separate rooms.”

…

The drones went out at half past two, and they came into the red tower members through open windows, kitchen vents and the gaps that nobody has ever bothered to seal.

In a cottage on the east road, a Red magician named Doret was asleep on his side with his wife beside him.

Something came in over the sill and hovered by the bedpost for two seconds.

It fired the sleeping needle once.

He didn’t wake. He wouldn’t have woken for an hour after that, which was more time than it needed.

Then the second one came down and put a thin clear patch on the back of his neck, just under the hairline, and pressed it flat.

…

The Gaia patch is where it stops being a story about magic.

What goes into it is small enough that there is no word for it in any of the seven towers.

“We will bring this before the High Council,” he said. “Every part of it. This was an unprovoked and illegal annexation of two hundred and seventy-five lawful properties in a single night, carried out against a tower that did nothing—”

“Nothing,” Alex said.

“—and we demand the immediate return of every branch, every asset, and every member of our order currently being held.”

Alex looked at Elias. Elias looked at Alex.

Both of them laughed.

…

It was not a polite laugh and it went on slightly too long, and Vail’s colour went up his neck while it did.

“You find this funny.”

“I find you funny.” Alex sat forward. “Last nights you sent three hundred battle magicians to a private dinner. Two hundred Forty guests. Nine of them were White Tower elders in their eighties. You set fire to the roof for forty-one minutes and you did not stop until your own tower called you and told you it was gone.”

“That is not—”

“It’s in the glass.” Alex pointed up at it without looking. “All of it. Your commander is in state custody and he has already made a statement.”

Vail said nothing.

“So no, Elder Vail. You don’t get to come in here and cry about injustice because your murder didn’t work.”

…

Minister Penn cleared his throat.

He had been in his post for nineteen years and had buried four tower masters in that time, and he was not, by nature, a corrupt man. He was a tired one.

At four o’clock that morning, in a private room with the curtains shut, the chairman of Ferrowgate had sat across from him and explained what a man’s family could be worth if the White Tower were made to give two hundred and seventy-five buildings back.

Silas Kessler had spoken for eleven minutes about the stability of the nation.

Not one person in that room had mentioned that Ferrowgate itself had been signed away on a wager eleven days ago and legally belonged to Beatrix Hargrove.

Kessler had offered the Minister of Magic a fortune out of a company he no longer owned, and the Minister had said yes.

…

“White Tower leadership.” Penn stood up, and his voice came out almost steady. “The state acknowledges that you were attacked. But the response was disproportionate. Two hundred and seventy-five properties, taken in one night, is not retaliation — it is annexation, and it violates every convention this country has held to for four hundred years.”

The hall was completely silent.

“I must therefore formally demand that the White Tower withdraw from the occupied branches and return them to Red administration by the end of the week.”

Alex stood up.

He didn’t hurry about it. He put his fingertips on the table, and he looked down the length of four hundred years of dark wood at a small tired man in a good coat, and the room got the temperature drop about a second before Penn did.

“Minister,” he said.

“…Yes?”

“Do you want to die?”