Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Torghan set the bowl of warm milk, freshly drawn and mercifully unfermented, back onto the fur rug. He took his time, wiping the white mustache from his upper lip with the back of his hand, acutely aware of the suffocating weight of the stares directed at him.

He was after all the only translator fluent enough in the room

None of the Valakii dared to rush him. To them, he was a ghost of a traitor’s line; to the Yarzat, he was the loyal fist of the Crown.

”We have squandered enough of the morning on silence,” Torghan announced, his voice carrying the resonant authority of a judge. ”Let the accounting begin.”

He turned to the Yarzat party. Serafim, the Envoy whose dignity had been so roughly handled, offered a curt, professional nod.

”We shall commence by illuminating the standard of conduct expected of you,” Torghan translated, his eyes locking onto Korgas. ”Understand this: the iron wall you see at your doorstep is merely our Prince’s way of clearing his throat. It is a gentle admonition for your lack of manners. Should you fail to internalize this lesson, the next time the horizon ripples, it will be with four times the number, and by then, the time for learning will have been replaced by the time for burying.”

Volar leaned in, his elbow catching his father’s ribs in a sharp, urgent nudge.

Korgas swallowed a grumble that sounded like grinding stones, but he forced the words out. ”As the Chieftain of the Valakii, I... I offer my apology for the manner in which your Envoy was received. We swear upon the peaks and its spirits that he shall henceforth be treated as an honored guest of our hearth, wherever he treads.”

Volar let out a breath of relief. It had been a monumental task to drag those words from his father’s throat. However, across the table, the Yarzat party remained a wall of cold indifference. An apology was the lowest bar.

”With that pebble removed from our boots, let us set the true terms,” Torghan continued, his voice taking on a sharper, more clinical edge. ”First: a parcel of land, to be selected by the Chieftain but deeded to Yarzat in perpetuity, shall be established as the sovereign residence of the Crown’s representative. It must be within sight of your main settlement. We do not wish for our Envoy to be lonely.”

A ripple of unease moved through the Valakii elders, but Torghan pressed on.

”Second: all parties swear an oath of diplomatic immunity. You shall renounce any right to sentence, , or punish Serafim or his staff, regardless of the circumstance or the alleged crime. Though you may detain him for a maximum of two weeks while awaiting preparation for his judgment.In all cases, however he walks outside the reach of your laws.”

”What is the meaning of this madness?!” Korgas’s voice erupted, the sound echoing off the timber walls of the hut.

”Does the Chieftain find the grammar of the Crown difficult to understand ?” Torghan asked, his tone harmless, even as his father, Varaku, shifted uncomfortably beside him.

”I find the idiocy difficult to understand!” Korgas roared, air whistling through his nostrils. ”He cannot be judged? If this man takes a knife to one of my kin, or steals a man’s livelihood, we must simply wave him on with a smile? We have promised him the safety of a guest, not the divinity of a god! If a man walks my land and commits a crime, he pays the price of my land! That is the law of the hills!”

Torghan waited for the echo of the shout to die down before he leaned forward, the firelight catching the scars on his knuckles.

”Peace, Korgas. Your anger is a fire without a hearth,” Torghan said, his voice lowering into a soothing, patronizing calm. ”No one is saying the man is a god, nor that he is above the reach of justice. But a man of the Crown cannot be judged by your tribal council.”

Truth be told Torghan did not understand how important the term he was fighting for truly was, as after diplomatic immunity was one of the borderline of the diplomacy Alpheo wanted to bring to the tribes. Not really to make it more comfortable the way Alpheo was used for it to be, but really because he wanted to impart on the tribe the notion that Yarzat was above them, and what better way than this?

Alpheo, after all, had planned for this land to be his little piggybank. He held the only port into the land, and would influence all the tribes near the coast to accept no outsider that didn’t bear the falcon of Yarzat.

In this way, what circumstances would there be in which another power would get its hand on Yarzat’s back garden?

Alpheo planned for the mountains land to be his own personal British India. Rich in silver, poor in metallurgy, poor in arable farmland, and fragmented into numberous small powers that he would make sure would only known to hug the thigh of Yarzat.

That however was still a long road.

Torghan held up a hand to still the Chieftain’s next outburst. ”If a crime is committed, there shall be an accounting, but it will be handled by a magistrate appointed by the Prince, presiding within the Yarzat jurisdiction at Salthold. We do not ask for lawlessness; we ask for a judge who speaks the language of our people, rather than the dialect of the vendetta.Still,it is a small price to pay for the security of your people, is it not?”

The fire in Korgas’s eyes had shifted from the roaring blaze of defiance to the smoldering, suffocating embers of a man who realizes the cage is already locked. Behind him, the elders stood like ancient, weathered statues; their knuckles were white as they gripped their thighs, but their gaze remained fixed upon the dirt floor.

Before the silence could curdle into a second outburst that would surely bring the Legion’s boots to their door, Volar stepped into the breach.

”And what of justice?” Volar asked, his voice steady. ”How can my father or these esteemed elders trust that a man will be punished by his own kinsman? If the judge and the criminal share the same master, the verdict is written before the trial begins. That is the dagger that stays pressed against our ribs.”

”On that point, let me offer you reassurence” Torghan replied, straightening his spine until he seemed to loom over the low table. ”It is the Prince’s deepest mandate that your tribe flourishes as a vibrant limb of the Yarzat body. Do you truly believe we would appoint a judge so cataclysmically stupid as to pardon a heinous crime? To do so would be to poison the well of our alliance for a single, replaceable man.

Understand this: to you, the Envoy is a giant. To the Crown, he is an instrument, a pen to be used until the ink runs dry or the nib breaks. If he proves himself a liability to the Prince’s peace, the Crown will not slap his wrist; they will break his hand to show you that Yarzat law is as heavy for us as it is for you. It is in our vital interest to deliver a sentence that keeps your spears unraised against ours’.”

Korgas let out a long, slow exhale that sounded like a leak in a bellows. He looked at the faces of his elders and saw only the reflection of his own powerlessness. They were fighting a tide with wooden buckets. With a curt nod, he leaned back into the shadows of the hut. He accepted the terms for he knew he could do nothing to oppose them, as the odds of power were firmly against their side.

With the bitter pill of immunity swallowed, the remaining links of the chain were forged with swiftness

The tribe was to be held responsible for the sustenance of the Envoy’s household. Furthermore, he was to be recognized as the singular gatekeeper of the Valakii’s future. Any tribal project, any request for steel from Salthold, or any attempt to send a Valakii messenger to the Prince’s court had to pass through the Envoy’s quill, with the envoy also being the one to manage whoever would want to take part in the project the Yarzat’s emissaries were getting ready to expose to said councilmen and, of course, getting ready to extinguish the flames it would undoubtedly rise.

Anyway, the sum of it all was that the envoy of Yarzat was no longer to be just a guest; he was the lens through which the Valakii could watch and open the door to the princedom’s wealth.

One that they were close enough to know just how hard it was to get.