V3Ch78-A Chat with Mariella

It was the following day.

Tybalt sat on the Whadesgart outer wall, a pair of zombies fanning him to fend off the persistent desert heat, observing his troops training in the sands below.

Beside him, Esmerelda and Liora were working together to teach Esmerelda the Vampiric Gaze skill, a mildly humorous process, because it involved Esmerelda repeatedly allowing herself to be placed under Liora’s hypnosis and then breaking free and attempting to do the same back to the high elf vampire.

“Bark like a dog,” Liora said, sharing a little grin with Tybalt.

The vampire knight made a little “woof” sound before she escaped Liora’s control, then glared at them both as if daring either Tybalt or Liora to say a word.

“Seems like you’re making progress,” the necromancer said after a moment.

Esmerelda clenched her jaw and shook her head. She couldn’t do anything to her master, but Tybalt sensed a little desire in her to grab him by the collar and shake him or something to that effect. She wasn’t very interested in being teased at the moment.

“When I master this, I will order you both to leap from this wall,” Esmerelda said after a moment.

“A power that’s only effective against the weak-willed?” Tybalt said. “And trying to use it against your master?”

“My master, a great and powerful necromancer who follows his, um, masculinity, wherever it leads,” Esmerelda said in a tone of voice that became suddenly more diplomatic as she neared the end of the sentence.

“If he did that, he would have already…” Liora began, then allowed herself to trail off, a hint of pink rising in her cheeks.

“Even if I was as weak-willed as a newborn, your domination wouldn’t work on the one who created you,” Tybalt said before the vampire knight could pick up the thread of what Liora had been saying. “That was why Colin offered to turn me into a vampire when we met. It was a way of ensuring his future ability to influence me… or at least his ability to avoid being influenced by me.”

Esmerelda bared her teeth. “Well, a girl can dream.”

“If you master this power, I’m going to do something for your quality of life, as a reward,” Tybalt said. “Well, assuming you’re interested.”

“What?” she asked suspiciously.

“Can I assume that you like men?”

“That’s a loaded question, given the way you treat the women under your command,” Esmerelda replied after a moment.

“I’m not asking if you like me,” Tybalt said, wrinkling his nose. “In fact, just rule me out. The power dynamics between us are too skewed, because you’re incapable of disobeying me.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m as fond of men as anyone, though I wouldn’t… I never let any of the other bandits—”

“Then you’ll be happy about what I’m planning to do. Colin gave me a book on vampiric biology. I’m going to restore your reproductive system to full functioning. It should be useful when you have a relationship someday, if you might want to reproduce.”

“With nothing in it for you?” Esmerelda asked suspiciously.

“It’s a reward for you,” the necromancer replied. But the vampire knight still looked at him doubtfully. “I promise it’s not so that I can impregnate you. By Lord Mudo, you’re slow to trust.” He shook his head and looked away, back to the troops on the ground.

Of course, there was something in this for Tybalt. The value of knowledge. If the procedure worked on Esmerelda, it would work on Liora and any subsequent vampires he might want to perform it on. That was a powerful capability to hold in his back pocket. He might even be able to use it as leverage over King Colin to secure more troops. He could offer to make a few of the High Elf King’s vampire elites fertile again, so they could continue their bloodlines and expand his force.

King Colin often seemed to play the long game to the detriment of his own effectiveness, but the idea of having more troops in fifty or a hundred years was exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to him.

As Tybalt’s eyes focused on the spectacle in the sand, Liora and Esmerelda resumed practicing to the side of him.

Below, Kistana and Mariella put Tybalt’s elite units through their paces. They led them, one squad at a time, in taking turns at attacking Aoife. For maximum cohesion, the groups were broken up into units composed entirely of undead, units of beastfolk, and units of high elves. They moved one squad at a time, whittling down the dragon’s defenses as best they could under Kistana’s or Mariella’s direction respectively.

The catgirl kept looking up in Tybalt’s direction whenever she or those under her command executed a particularly clever maneuver for putting the dragon on the back foot. The necromancer smiled and nodded appropriately to show his approval.

Interestingly, Aoife seemed to do the same thing whenever she completely outmatched one of the squads. She whipped her tail forward, sweeping all the legs out from under the latest group of zombies, loomed over them with smoke curling from underneath her jaws - a position that made it obvious she could have destroyed them - and looked upward toward Tybalt.

“Nicely done!” he called after a moment.

She uttered a muffled phrase, mouth tilted toward the ground, that sounded like, “Of course,” but her posture betrayed some pride at receiving his praise.

That was interesting.

Of the three people leading the exercises below, only Mariella did not look up as if seeking Tybalt’s approval of her maneuvers. She was focused, and her attack plans were just as effective as Kistana’s, if not more so, but he sensed a tension in her body. Like she was in fight or flight, despite the fact that they were only training. The necromancer recalled his resolve of the previous day, to talk to her about her feelings regarding the coming fight.

It seemed that conversation still needed to happen.

After a couple of hours of drilling, they took a break.

Tybalt hopped down from the top of the wall and approached.

“Nice work, everyone,” he said, looking at Kistana, Aoife, and Mariella in particular. “Ella, can we talk for a minute?”

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

“Not at all. This isn’t about the exercises.”

She nodded with a grim expression and then followed him a short ways away, out of hearing range.

“I’m glad you decided to help with this stuff,” he said, gesturing back over at the others. “But you seem to have some… tension inside.”

“What we’re practicing is high stakes,” Mariella replied. “We have a battle to win. If we lose, that’s literally the end of the world for just about everyone concerned.”

He looked her in the eyes.

“I wanted to talk to you about yesterday. Your feelings about staying away from the fighting.”

“It’s utterly pointless,” she said bluntly. “Unless you’re also staying away.”

He sighed. “Explain your reasoning, please.”

“I’ve never regretted choosing you, Tybalt, even though this is far from the path I ever imagined for myself. I’m happy to be carrying your child, happy to stand beside you. I… I even feel pride. Gradually, I came to believe in what we were fighting for, more than I ever believed in the Kingdom. But I won’t raise our son alone.”

“Our son?”

“Woman’s intuition,” she replied, shrugging. “It’s going to be a boy. Anyway, if you want me to keep out of danger, you have to agree to do the same. Avoid any unnecessary move that would put you in harm’s way. If you do make any moves like that, I want to be right beside you.”

“It’s not the same. You’re actually carrying our child into battle in your belly. The baby could die, and then—”

“We’re more likely to both survive if we’re standing together,” Mariella interjected. “It’s not like I’m proposing to go duel one on one with the enemy General, with swords.” She glared at him. “Your crazy backup plan.”

“At least it is a backup plan. Not my first choice.”

“What do you think will happen to me and our child, to all of us, if you die? This notion of designating survivors so your bloodline remains on the throne—”

“I know it’s vanity, worrying about the succession when I don’t even have a real Kingdom yet—”

“It’s just delusional. You do have the makings of a nation, you have everything you need to win as a conqueror, but none of us could hold this coalition of forces together without you. If you want a system that keeps moving after you die, you have to lay the groundwork for that. Yes, a line of succession is part of that, but you also need institutions that protect it. You haven’t done that.” He opened his mouth to speak, but she kept going. “It’s a basic element of governance, but we haven’t had the time for it yet, I get it.” He closed his mouth again. “We haven’t needed that, but only because you, personally, are alive. How well do you think this alliance of groups will survive without you? Beastfolk, undead, dark elves, high elves, humans, ogres - how many of them would still help us if the leader was dead?”

He let out a slightly frustrated sigh. “Not enough.”

“The elves didn’t even want you to consummate your relationship with Liora. From what Dero’s said, the high elves are skittish of any commitment. They’re just waiting for you to falter, and they’ll grab Liora and run. The Mayor of this town and the peoples of the Salt Waste rolled over for you pretty easily, but that also means they’ll fall back into line for the Kingdom just as easily. And Ragga. Her kind are inherently difficult to control. Not like the stupid stereotypes about the beastfolk. Actual cannibalism! Ragga submitted to you, because you beat her in a fight. A much closer fight than it should have been, was what I thought at the time, but now I’m glad you made that extra effort to spare her.”

“Me too.”

“So, which one of us will beat Ragga in a one on one duel to secure her loyalty after you die?”

You’re on a roll, maybe it will be you, Tybalt thought, beginning to be a little annoyed. Talk her to death.

He forced himself to give a serious answer.

“One of the Beastkings could do it.”

“Their skills are too limited to win without killing her,” Mariella retorted immediately. “Maybe Kistana could do it, but if you die, it’s likely she’ll have died protecting you. So I guess Aoife could try to take control of the horde. Will that be the Kingdom you wanted? Ruled by a dragon with no connection to you? No reason to follow your will or preserve your descendants?”

Tybalt scowled. “You know the answer to that perfectly well.”

“Vicky and Vidalia will be left with just the beastfolk, the undead, and some noncombatants, less than half your current force - and not the stronger half, frankly, from this afternoon’s exercises. Even if we have someone on our side who can kill Ragga and keep Aoife in line, killing Ragga would probably disband her horde. I asked Andric about how Ragga and the ogres work before they left. She keeps them in line through a mix of fear, brute force, ogre custom, battle accomplishments, and sheer charisma. They don’t automatically remain a horde. They could easily devolve into in-fighting tribes, their usual default. If you and Ragga are both dead, we wouldn’t even be close to being able to control them. So we could wind up getting killed by ogres even before the Kingdom and Divine Trust come after those of us who are left protecting your children. Honestly, I think Dero has probably figured this out too, but she doesn’t want to rain on the parade, given there’s not much we can change right now. Everyone else on our side just has faith in you, and I do, too, but…”

He let out a long sigh. The darker vision of the future was all too plausible. How ironic it would be if Whadesgart was besieged by the ogres he’d just struggled to win to his cause, because he was no longer there to keep them in line.

“Do you have any solutions to these issues? It’s not all things I haven’t anticipated; they’re real problems.”

“You see what I mean about the designated survivor thing being pointless?”

He sighed again. “It’s not pointless to me. It’s impossible for me to avoid all risk. In the event that something happens to me, I want all of you to live on. Even if you become refugees and can’t stay in control of this territory we’ve seized.”

“Or you could prioritize your own safety over all of ours and put yourself in as safe a place as possible in the battle,” Mariella said. “Because your life is more valuable than any of ours individually, no matter how you feel about that. At the very least, instead of trying to send me away, I should be between you and any attacker, just like Kistana will be. I can burn a few people to death before our lives are all ended or ruined.”

“I see.”

“And?”

“I’ll take it under advisement. I also prefer not to be in danger, Mariella.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

Tybalt let that pass.

“Anything else you want to get off your chest?” he asked.

“The exercises are showing some weaknesses in this organization scheme. You need to mix and match the unit types more. Let a few undead join the beastfolk units, a few high elves join the undead, a few beastfolk join the high elves, mix it up a bit. Aoife isn’t playing for keeps here, but if she had any kind of holy power from Vika or Astara, she’d kill the undead unit as a body by accident. The high elves have a much better time with her because of their higher levels, and the beastfolk just don’t have as many special tricks. You need to split the high elves up between the other groups to get things more balanced.”

“All right, that sounds like a good change. Try it out on Aoife.”

He frowned as he considered the resources he had at his disposal.

The High Elf King hadn’t sent him as many troops as he had initially expected - as many as they had agreed to. The claim conveyed by the seniormost official, a count, was that this was just the first set of warriors and mages Colin could free up, since he was dealing with some minor unrest from the wood elves. But it was still enough to make a big difference. The hundreds Tybalt actually had, almost a thousand, substantially outleveled the rest of his army.

Individually, they weren’t stronger than Tybalt or his innermost circle, but they might be powerful enough that they were a match, toe to toe, for the Kingdom’s heavy hitters. The same people who would be with General Caracalla.

Mariella just nodded and started to walk back to the troops. The necromancer’s eyes followed the sway of her hips with approval. Pregnancy hadn’t taken anything from her.

What do I need to do to ensure we get to continue this life? Tybalt thought. If I can just manipulate the flow of the battle… Then we can move on to the attack on Enh. I think that will go better, since I’ll be able to bring my full force to bear, and no one will be anticipating our moves the way this guy probably can. If I can just get past General Caracalla…