“We got conquered by ants,” Wallace admitted freely.
Yasmine choked on a cough as her boss threw their carefully planned negotiating tactic out the window. Before she could tactically stomp on his foot, she found he’d pre-emptively blocked her leg with his own! Damned man!
“What Mr. Dalton means to say,” she tried to recover the moment, “is that there was a… a shift in the direction of the city.”
“I’ll say,” Wallace grunted.
The lord of Ironwall leaned back and beheld the two in front of him warily.
“I’d heard that it was monsters. In truth, I’d actually expected the entire city had been wiped out. We haven’t been able to open a gate into Rylleh for months, and we heard little to nothing from your people. Now you come to tell me that you were conquered? By ants?”
“Yes,” Wallace confirmed, ignoring Yasmine’s subtle elbow digging. “They overwhelmed the city in just a few hours. The ants rule over it now. It’s theirs.”
Korbell looked at him for a long moment.
“They rule it…” he said.
Wallace nodded. “Yes.”
“…The ants do.”
“Yes.”
Another long pause.
“So… is Rylleh some kind of monster hellscape now? You’ve come to warn me of the looming threat of ants? To plead for shelter for your people?”
The young lord appeared wary and confused. Wallace moved to set him at ease.
“No, of course it isn’t some hellscape. The ants take good care of the place, actually. Much better than the previous management. No, I’ve come to deliver you a message. The Colony has sent me as their emissary.”
“You? Wallace? An emissary?” Korbell laughed. “The very idea is ridiculous.”
“I quite agree,” Wallace chuckled, “but I can see their reasoning.”
“Alright then. Deliver this message from your monster overlords,” the lord shook his head at the absurdity of it. “What do the ants want?”
Wallace smiled slowly.
“Your city.”
149. Emissary, Part 2
The city of Ironwall gained its name in the days following its founding. The first lord had been a skilled earth mage, capable of shifting and compressing metals to a high degree. Having made his fortune delving and being paid handsomely for his skills in fortification, he decided the time had come to put his money to good use. Together with the extended family, he funded an expedition and found a location on the frontier to establish his own independent city.
The stone here was rich with minerals, particularly iron, and over a period of decades, the first lord excavated and compressed the outer shell of the city into an unbreakable wall. Surrounded by a sphere of almost pure, hardened metal, the city was renowned as an unbreakable fortress, a rare island of safety in the wild and undeveloped frontier. Combined with the prosperity gained from mining the rich Dungeon seams in the nearby expanse, the city grew to the relative powerhouse it had now become.
At least, that’s how the locals thought of it.
In Wallace’s eyes, the city was a fat calf just waiting to be slaughtered. The people had become complacent, confident that the work of the founder would keep them safe as wealth continued to accrue. Trade through the gate network might have made the people wealthy, but the lack of threat simultaneously made them indolent. The impregnable shell, the unbreachable gates, had complete faith amongst the citizens here. They could not imagine a world in which they would fall.
Thinking the only things that could exist in the Dungeon were those that they could imagine. That was their fatal sin.
“You want… my city?” Lord Korbell looked at him as if he were insane. “Is this some sort of joke?”
Yasmine glared at Wallace before she turned back to the lord with a more moderate tone.
“The Colony has sent us to inform you of their intentions. They conquered Rylleh some time ago, and they are now in the process of increasing their territory. It is unfortunate, but that includes your city.”
“Are you insulting me?” Korbell slammed a hand down on his desk. “You think you can just walk in here and tell me that some insects want to take my city from me?”
As if they are less dangerous because they’re insects. Isn’t the opposite true? Wallace thought to himself.
“We wouldn’t dream of insulting you,” Wallace drawled, “and I believe I can explain why this situation may seem so strange to you.”
The young lord settled back in his chair, anger still plain on his face.
“Speak,” he said curtly.
Wallace straightened himself in his chair before he went on.
“The Colony is quite young, in general terms. They’ve only been intelligent for around a year. Perhaps less, I don’t have the exact dates on hand. The point being, they are quite new to the idea of diplomacy and aren’t quite sure how to go about it.”
“These creatures are intelligent?”
“Of course they are. You can’t expect me to believe you haven’t had any scouting reports at all.”
“I lost several patrols trying to investigate what happened to Rylleh,” Korbell frowned. “I stopped trying and gave you up for dead.”
“I can’t say they aren’t competent,” Wallace nodded. “Well, I can more or less see how this has come as such a shock to you. The ants are trying to understand what you and I might consider ‘rules of war.’ They believe it would be detrimental to their future dealings if they were to gain a reputation for unscrupulous actions. The idea of reputation is important to them. Were your city to be conquered without having offered you an opportunity to surrender, it would sully their reputation.”
It was quite odd how quickly the ants accepted the concept of reputation. Although on the one hand, they didn’t really care what humans thought of them, they also refused to give others a reason to speak poorly of them. They would keep their dealings scrupulously clean as they saw it. If some misinterpreted their actions, then so be it, but they would always follow the ‘rules.’
Lord Korbell’s face darkened.
“Wallace,” he said, “I had a great deal of respect for you. You’ve battled hard on behalf of your city against the Dungeon, and I have a deep regard for your years of service. But now, to think you came here to mock me on the orders of the monsters you once swore to kill. You’re a mockery of yourself.”
“Oh, I quite agree,” Wallace said, a slight smile on his face. “Some days, I feel as if I left my sanity behind some time ago.”
“You must have,” the lord said, “to think this city could possibly fall to monsters such as those. This is Ironwall. We will never be defeated by those ants. No matter if they bring a hundred thousand. They’ll never break through our walls and will die in droves before our gates.”
Yasmine stood from her seat and tugged on Wallace’s arm to pull him out of his chair. It was clear their audience was at an end.
“I’m sorry to cause you any distress,” she tried to cover for her fellow emissary.
He was always going to make this difficult. Stupid old man! He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Wallace allowed himself to be pulled to standing as he reached into his left pocket and thumbed a crystal he had there.
“Well, Lord Korbell. It has been nice to see you again. I’ll be sure to catch up with you tomorrow. It won’t be as bad as you think at first. You’ll find they’re pretty easy to get along with. Though, you might find a fair portion of your wealth will end up redistributed. They can’t abide inefficient hoarding.”
“Get out, Wallace. Neither you nor any ant will set foot inside these walls ever again.”