The Storm King

Chapter 828: Imperial Manipulations

“Leon,” the Director stated, his tone neutral, but coming with the subtlest undercurrent of surprise as Leon walked into his office. The elder man was sitting behind his desk, but as Leon entered, he sat for only a moment longer before he slowly got to his feet and walked around his desk. “What’s going on?”

Leon recognized a slight tinge of concern in the Director’s voice at this point, so he held up his hand in a conciliatory gesture and hurriedly said, “Nothing immediate, but… of some concern nonetheless.”

“I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with what we discussed yesterday,” the Director replied.

“No,” Leon said. “Actually, it’s a problem that has come up a few times before, but I never thought it important enough to bring up. That’s changed.”

“Please, fill me in.”

Leon nodded and quickly told the Director of the Lord Protector and Grand Druid’s increasingly frequent ‘warnings’ about elements in their respective Empires growing more and more nervous about Leon’s rising power.

The Director didn’t verbally respond immediately. His expression, while still fairly clinical, had shifted to something just a little more thoughtful.

“Have you heard anything about this?” Leon asked.

“Nothing immediately springs to mind,” the Director answered. “Though, the inner workings of the Empires can be opaque, even to us in Heaven’s Eye. We are not all-knowing, though we likely know far more about the Empires than they’d like. If what these two told you is true, and let’s just assume for the moment that it is, then there are only a handful of people who might have these opinions that we won’t have heard about. High ministers privy to the most sensitive of meetings, men and women accustomed to speaking privately and not sharing secrets for any reason whatsoever.”

“Can we move against them?”

The Director gave Leon a look of displeased surprise. “No. These people are too highly placed for us to move against publicly—”

“Not what I meant. Was too brief, I guess. I mean, if they’re actually worried about me—and us, by extension—then if they were to make their… lack of trust, shall we say, more keenly felt, then what might our options be to protect ourselves?”

“You ask as if you have a preference for a particular course of action?”

“Action is my preference.” Leon smiled and let his prodigious killing intent spill out just a little bit. “My patience for these games is limited. I’ve already considered… other, less-than-attractive options, but since we’re in a partnership, I wanted to know what options we might have that wouldn’t involve me looking for someone more powerful than the Empires, or launching an all-out attack on an Imperial Palace or something.”

“Try not to do that latter one, it would be terrible for business.”

“I’ll keep your preference in mind.”

“I’m sure you will. Violence isn’t a tool that Heaven’s Eye frequently employs outside of peacekeeping operations in Occulara. We pay others to do that for us. And no one we could possibly pay, aside from certain groups that I would not have us associate with—anymore, at any rate—might be more willing to dirty their hands in some back-alley skullduggery, but at the level we’re speaking of, it would make an assault on the villa of the Chief of Security of Heaven’s Eye by some desperate vampires look like a sane idea in comparison.”

Leon did his best to hide his disappointment, but he couldn’t help but smile self-deprecatingly. “Thought that might be the case. Still… don’t like it, but not surprised. But, to go back to what you said earlier, there are only a few people to who this information might apply, and it’s possible that it was a lie in the first place?”

The Director was silent for a long moment, his eyes narrowing slightly the only outward sign that he was thinking particularly intensely about the problem.

“The way I see it, Leon,” he eventually said, “there are a couple of options here. The least likely, in my opinion, is that the Lord Protector and the Grand Druid were telling the truth. Or the whole truth, at any rate. They are akin to gods in their Empires. If they vouched for you, then few would have the audacity to advise against their set course of action.”

“Few, but not none.”

“Not none. But let me ask you, Leon: what would you do in these ministers’ positions? Someone potentially dangerous has entered your territory. They haven’t shown themselves to be hostile yet, but you know of them. What do you do?”

“Frustratingly vague answer with many possible answers depending on context,” Leon grumbled. “I suppose I might want to keep an eye on them. Maybe task some subordinates with devising a contingency plan for if this dangerous person chooses hostility.”

“Heh. You landed on the answer I wanted.”

“I aim to please.”

“So, contingencies. If people were complaining to either the Grand Druid or the Lord Protector, then we might expect them to be preparing some kind of contingencies against you, would we not?”

“A reasonable expectation, I think.”

“Depends on the contingency. But so far, Heaven’s Eye hasn’t picked up on anything that might suggest any contingencies have been put into place. They’re keeping an eye on you, of course, but as far as we can tell, there are no special task forces devoted to remaining on standby in case you show yourself a conqueror, as your ancestors were. There have been no allocations of vast resources, secret or otherwise that Heaven’s Eye can detect that might suggest they’re preparing to deal with you in a more permanent manner—and given how integrated we are with the plane’s logistics, we would detect just about anything.”

“Would we be able to separate any potential task force with those ‘just’ keeping an eye on me?”

“The people we put on this are competent, serious, and they take their jobs seriously.”

“Guess I’ll take your word for it, then.”

“So, if there are people complaining behind the scenes, then nothing practical is being done to move against you—or us. Which means the Lord Protector and the Grand Druid are merely using those complaints to apply pressure.”

Leon grimaced, but his lack of surprise was, in itself, no longer surprising. “What do you think is more likely, then?” he asked.

“That the Lord Protector and the Grand Druid simply lied to you in order to put more pressure on you to do what they want while you’re still weak enough to be manipulated like this.”

“If that’s the case, then what should I do? Turn them down when they ask me to fulfill the terms of our agreement to keep the Keeper off of us? I don’t think that would go over well.”

“Certainly not, and I would not suggest such a thing. But we need to at least discuss what we ought to do, which will inform any responses we might be more capable of giving later on.”

Leon smiled. He and the Director were both ninth-tier mages. Mages of such power were common enough in the Empires that they weren’t a military threat to the Imperial order, and they had no real answer for the Empires’ tenth-tier mages. That would change entirely if both he and the Director managed to reach the tenth-tier, however. Suddenly, Heaven’s Eye would be able to match an Empire and even exceed any one of them in certain respects. Beyond that, they had both Jason Keraunos’ personal ark and Nestor.

To put it simply, while their options to move against the Empires were much more limited now, they wouldn’t always be so.

‘Of course, the Empires would be fools not to plan for such a change in the status quo,’ Leon contemplated, though given what the Director had just said, it seemed that whatever their plans were for dealing with an ascendant Heaven’s Eye hadn’t been meaningfully changed by his presence within the guild.

“If anything’s most likely, I would think they’re just trying to squeeze you for anything they can get before you leave, as you’ve so often made clear is your intention.”

Leon hummed

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