Behind them, off beyond the final tents of the extended city and onto the farmland eastwards, there were rather more than three, of course.
The man flanked by the soldiers was surprisingly young, surely only in his late twenties. Greenwise guessed at first he must be no more than a junior officer or a herald or some such, but there was something in his bearing that gave the lie to that. He had golden-red hair and a bright, open face full of edged smiles. No doubt he was the very darling of the Wasp-kinden womenfolk.
‘Are we all assembled?’ he enquired, clapping his hands together. Although the city’s councillors were raised above him he showed no sign of discomfort. By that demeanour he made it seem that, rather than seeking an audience, he had driven them up there as a wild beast might drive a man up a tree.
Greenwise glanced about him, because there was no spokesman in Helleron’s council. All were equal and as such none would trust the role to anyone else. One of his fellows was already stepping forward, though, a corpulent and balding man called Scordrey.
‘Young man,’ Scordrey said ponderously, ‘we are the Magnate Council of the great city of Helleron. Kindly give us the honour of your name and explain the purpose of. that presence.’ He waved a thick hand in the direction of the army to the east, as though it could all be dismissed so easily.
‘My apologies,’ said the young man, smiling up at them. ‘By the grace of His Imperial Majesty, I am General Malkan of the Imperial Seventh Army, also known as the Winged Furies.’ He had an odd way of speaking, self-aware and grinningly apologetic, that Greenwise saw instantly for a device. ‘I have come to you with a message and a proposal from my master. A choice, if you will.’
‘Now, look here. General, is it?’ Scordrey started, with the obvious intention of working towards delivering an insult. Greenwise stepped in quickly. ‘We are disturbed, General, that you appear to have brought a sizeable force to our gates,’ he said. ‘You must know that we of Helleron are not drawn into the wars of others.’
General Malkan’s smile did not diminish. ‘Forgive me, Masters Magnate, but I am unfamiliar with your local customs in that regard. You’ll find that we of the Empire tend to carry our own customs with us wherever we go. And, to correct you on one small point, we are not at your gates. You have no gates.’
‘Just what do you mean?’ Scordrey rumbled.
‘Shall I be plain, gentlemen? I am a man of honour and fairness. I pride myself on it. I would not dream of taking advantage of your good natures, just because I have been able to bring twenty-five thousand armed men to within striking distance of your homes without your taking up arms. I will, in the interests of equity, withdraw my men eastwards just as far as they can march before nightfall. Tomorrow, of course, we will return. I trust that will give you sufficient time to prepare yourself for any unpleasantness that might then occur.’
‘This is unspeakable!’ Scordrey bellowed.
‘And yet I have spoken it.’ Malkan’s smile was now painful to behold.
‘Unthinkable!’ echoed another of the magnates. ‘We have no interest in your wars.’
‘We have always traded with your Empire,’ added the only female member of the council. She was named Halewright and she had made her fortune in the silk trade. The Spider-kinden always paid better prices to women.
‘General!’ said Greenwise, loud enough to quiet the rest momentarily. ‘You mentioned a choice?’
Malkan gave him a little bow. He was practically dancing with his own cleverness, Greenwise saw sourly. He was a general, he had said. Greenwise did not know whether, in the Empire, that station could be attained by good family alone, or whether Malkan would have genuinely earned that rank in his few years of service. He suspected the latter, unfortunately.
‘The Emperor, His Imperial Majesty Alvdan, second of that name, has no wish to force or coerce the great and the good of Helleron,’ the general confirmed. ‘So he offers you this ultimatum — my error, sirs, this choice. When we return tomorrow you shall agree to make Helleron a city of the Empire; you shall make its manufacturing facilities available for the demands of the imperial war effort; you shall place its commercial affairs into the hands of the Consortium of the Honest; you shall submit to imperial governance and an imperial garrison. If all these things are agreed to, without conditions, without the lawyerly quibbles that I am sure you are so fond of, then His Imperial Majesty shall see no reason to disrupt further the everyday business of this admirable city of yours. You magnates yourselves shall form the advisory council to the imperial governor, and you shall be permitted entry into the Consortium of the Honest along with such of your factors as you should wish to so honour. You shall, in short, continue to hold the reins of this city’s trade so long as you conform to the requests of the governor and the Emperor.’
The magnates of Helleron stared at him, quite aghast. Greenwise looked from face to face and saw that no other one of them was going to say it.
‘We have heard no choice as yet, General Malkan,’ he pointed out.
‘Did I forget the other option? What a fool I am,’ Malkan said merrily. ‘If you wish, of course, you are perfectly entitled to reject these demands and meet us with armed force. I am sure this city can dredge up a fair number of mercenaries and malcontents at short notice. If, however, I am met with a less than friendly reception tomorrow then I have orders to take this city by force. It would make me unhappy if that should come to pass. To assuage my unhappiness I should be forced to ensure that every one of you that I see before me now would be taken and executed in some suitably complex manner. Your families, your business associates, your servants and employees would all then be seized by our slave corps and sent to the most distant corners of the Empire to die in misery and degradation. Before that I would have to see to it that your wives and daughters, even your mothers if still alive, would suffer beneath the bodies of my men, and that your sons were mutilated in the machines of my artificers. I would destroy you so utterly that none would ever dare speak your names. I would remove you from the face of the world, and reshape your city entirely to my wish. Have I made myself clear concerning the precise options you must choose between?’
Greenwise silently watched the three Wasps leave. Just three, he thought. There were a dozen men with crossbows in the retinues assembled behind him. They could have stretched General Malkan headlong on the ground and his bodyguards too, but nobody had any illusions about the consequences of that.
He looked around at his own men, who were uncertain and unhappy, and beckoned to a Fly-kinden lad in the fore. Around him the conversation, the inevitable murmur of conversation, had started. He heard one man say, almost apologetically, how he had been trading with the Empire, and they had always settled their accounts admirably.
‘A military presence would mean that we would not need to worry about. ’ started Scordrey, and tailed off because they had never had to worry about anything, until General Malkan and his twenty-five thousand.
‘The Consortium of the Honest have always seemed sound merchantmen,’ said Halewright slowly.
‘We would be able to expand our business into eastern markets much more easily,’ another added.
Greenwise turned to the Fly-kinden, stooping to speak quietly to him. ‘Are you in any doubt,’ he said, ‘about the response of the Council of Helleron to that general tomorrow?’
The diminutive Fly-kinden always seemed younger than they were, and this one looked barely fourteen, but the world of cynicism in his voice surprised even Greenwise. ‘Master Artector, no, sir.’