The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 757

The inside of a minister’s carriage smells like lamp oil and old leather.

“Why,” Alex said, “do you want to make an enemy of the White Tower?”

The blade did not move. It lay along the side of Penn’s neck, above the collar, exactly where a man can feel his own pulse.

“Do you think we’re easy to bully?”

…

“You—” Penn’s voice came out in pieces. “You dare. You dare point a sword at a Minister of Magic.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Do you know what happens to a man who lays a hand on me?”

“So it’s like this.” Alex sat back a little, which somehow made it worse. “When you sit in a room upstairs and arrange for four towers to come and end me, that’s government. But when I answer it, that’s a crime.”

“That is not—”

“You can build the knife,” Alex said. “I’m just not allowed to look at it. Who exactly do you think you are?”

“You’ve already lost,” he said. “Do you understand that? It’s done. Four towers. Ferrowgate’s money behind every one of them. I signed it tonight, upstairs, over a good bottle, and there is not one thing you can do about it.”

“There it is.”

“Nobody will let the White Tower go now. Nobody. You should beg to me!”

“So you got three men drunk in a room above a restaurant,” Alex said, “and now you’re behaving like a man who’s already won.”

He tilted his head.

“Don’t count chickens that are still eggs, Minister.”

…

Penn’s hands had stopped shaking.

“If you harm me,” he said, “this entire country will hunt you for the rest of your life. Every Warden. Every tower. There is nowhere in the United State of Magic that will—”

“In about twenty seconds,” Alex said, “a fast carriage is going to come around that corner ahead of us.”

Penn stopped.

“It’s going to hit this one on the front left. And in the crash, you’re going to be thrown forward into the frame of that seat.” Alex nodded at it. “And your neck is going to break.”

Outside, the street was empty in both directions. One lamp burning at the corner. The horses shifting.

“You’re threatening me.”

“No.” Alex sounded almost patient. “I’m not threatening you.”

He leaned in.

“I’m going to break your neck now. And then the carriage is going to hit us. That way, when they find you, the injury will match the accident.”

Penn’s mouth opened.

Up the street, at the corner, a pair of lamps swung into view and came on fast.

Penn turned his head to look at them, which was the last decision he ever made.

…

There was a sound like a green branch going.

The carriage door opened, Alex stepped out into the night air and the sword was already under his feet, and he was forty feet up and climbing before the two vehicles met.

Behind him the street tore itself apart — wood, glass, a horse screaming, the long grinding slide of a wheel rim across cobbles — and the sound went up between the buildings and came back down and then there was nothing at all.

The driver came off the box hard and rolled and got up somehow, both hands bleeding, and wrenched the cabin door open.

“Minister? Minister—”

The Minister of Magic was lying half off the seat with his head at an angle heads do not go, and his coat was still buttoned, and there was not a mark on him anywhere else.

The driver sat down in the road.

Above him, nothing moved in the sky. There was nothing up there to see.

…

Sixty miles away, on the top floor of the Ferrowgate building, Silas Kessler was drinking the good bottle.

He had been saving it. Forty years old, laid down by his father, the sort of wine you open for something and he had spent two weeks deciding whether this counted.

Tonight it counted.

He carried the glass out through the tall doors onto the balcony, and the wind came in off the harbour and moved through his shirt, cold and clean, and below him the whole of New Avalon lay out in lamplight all the way to the water.

Four towers. The Minister. Every coin he could still raise, and a few he couldn’t.

Kessler raised the glass at the city.

“Regent Group,” he said. “You’ll be mine by winter.”

Then the phone rang inside.

It carried him up off the balcony and out.

Not far. Ten feet past the rail, no more, so that he hung there in the open with the whole city underneath him and the harbour wind going through his shirt, forty-one floors of nothing between his shoes and the street.

He could see. That was the thing they built into it. He could see perfectly.

The phone was still lying on the balcony where he’d dropped it, and the voice coming out of it was very calm.

“Goodbye.”

The machine let go.

…

Silas Kessler fell from the top of the building his grandfather built, and he came down on the roof of a carriage passing along the front of it, and the noise brought two hundred people out of the surrounding streets inside a minute.

By morning the story was everywhere, and it had already grown a shape. The chairman of a failing company.

A rare bottle, opened alone. A balcony, and no note.

…

Garrick Vail drove himself home that night, because there was nobody left to drive him.

That was the small humiliation he kept turning over on the road out. Red Tower had kept forty drivers on standing salary once. Now there was no tower to pay them from — two hundred and seventy-five buildings under somebody else’s colour, twenty-nine thousand names transferred to somebody else’s rolls, and a house he’d bought thirty years ago on the strength of a job that no longer existed.

Still. Tonight had been good.

Four towers. Kessler’s money. Penn’s signature.

He came up his own lane a little after one with the hedges black on both sides and his windows dark ahead of him, and he thought, for the first time in three weeks, that he might actually sleep.

The front door was unlocked.

…

He noticed it and told himself he’d forgotten, which is what everybody tells themselves.

The hallway was cold. He put his keys in the dish. He went through into his own front room, reaching for the lamp on the wall, and stopped, because the lamp was already lit and turned low.

There was a man sitting in the chair by the fireplace.

Coat off. Perfectly relaxed. A sword laid across his knees, and both hands resting on it.

Garrick Vail did not move at all.

“Elder Vail,” Alexander said pleasantly. “Would you be interested in a one-way ticket somewhere warm?”