The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 743

The day Regent's four products went on sale, three men in three different rooms heard the news and laughed.

At Red Tower, Garrick Vail read the price list out to his elders the way you read out a joke you've already heard.

"Twenty dollars," he said. "A brick. That's their answer to five hundred years."

"They're saying it replaces a flame-charm entirely."

"They can say what they like." Vail dropped the sheet on the table. "You know what a Red flame-charm actually is? It's the man who comes to your door on the first of the month. Same man who came to your father's door. Three generations of a family have taken their tea with our people while the charm gets renewed." He smiled. "You don't replace that with a brick."

At Black Tower, Dorren Ashe barely looked up.

"Let them sell rods to farmers," he said. "Nobody's afraid of a farmer."

And in a glass office sixty miles away, Silas Kessler was told that Regent had launched a flying car at four thousand dollars. He said the one sentence that would follow him for the rest of the year.

"Nobody buys a cheap car. They buy a Meridian."

...

The switching started quietly, the way it always does.

Not out of disloyalty. Out of arithmetic.

A blacksmith in the fishing district sat down with a stub of chalk and worked it out. Nine dollars a month came to a hundred and eight a year. The brick cost twenty and lasted the whole year. He looked at the number twice. Then he put the chalk down and sat back, because it meant meat on the table twice a week, and he had not felt that particular loosening in his chest since he was a boy.

He wasn't betraying anyone. He was just a man who owned a stove now.

He told his brother. His brother told two others.

That was the thing nobody in either tower understood in time. Not one person who switched felt like a traitor. Every single one of them felt like somebody who'd finally been handed a break.

One month later, it wasn't a trickle.

...

Red Tower called an emergency session, and it didn't start with shouting. It started with a young accountant standing at the end of a five-hundred-year-old table with a page shaking in his hands.

"Renewals cancelled this month," he said. "Fourteen thousand, two hundred and six."

Somebody made a small sound down the far end.

"Forges converted to a flame core — that we know of — nine hundred and forty. That's not homes. That's working forges. The ones that pay a premium rate."

"Get to the end," Vail said.

"Sir—"

"Get to the end of the page."

The young man looked up.

"At the current rate of loss," he said, "this tower has eleven months of reserve."

Nobody spoke. Vail sat very still, and what finally came out of him wasn't anger. It was quieter than that, and much worse.

"Say that again."

"Eleven months, Elder."

"Three weeks ago it was forever," Vail said.

...

Black Tower's numbers were smaller, and Dorren Ashe understood immediately that his situation was far worse.

"We can survive losing demolition," he told the room. "It's ugly work, it pays well, someone will always need a wall taken down. We'll take it back eventually."

"And the other side of the house?"

Ashe didn't answer straight away.

Because the other side of the house was the whole house. For five hundred years Black Tower had sold curses. Everyone in the states knew a curse could be bought, and knew roughly what one cost, and lay awake now and then wondering whether a rival had already bought one.

That was the product. Not the hex. The lying awake.

"A hundred and eleven cancellations this week," his second said. "Paid work. Clients wanting refunds because the target bought a charm and nothing happened. One of them said the man he'd hexed came to his shop personally. To say hello."

"To say hello."

"He was smiling, apparently."

Ashe put his hands flat on the table.

"Then we're finished," he said. "Not falling. Finished. A tower nobody fears isn't a tower."

"Elder—"

"It's a building," Ashe said. "Four hundred rooms and a very old roof."

...

Silas Kessler was the largest patron Red and Black Tower had ever had.

Ferrowgate money paid for Red's east wing. Ferrowgate money paid the stipend of every Black student who couldn't cover his own. Every year for ten years the cheque arrived before anyone had to ask, and every year for ten years neither tower had to sit down and work out what it would do without one.

Weeks ago they'd both put out a statement calling Regent's products spiritually contaminated — worded almost identically, an hour apart, neither one asking the other first.

That was when they still had the luxury of pride.

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