Chapter 32: Interlude 2. Sultan’s Woes

Salaadin snarled as he crumbled the latest report and threw it across the room, making the servant scamper after it. It's been a week since the curse had descended on his country, and in spite of himself, he was impressed by the sheer scope and insidiousness of it. And the worst of it was that he could not even seed mistrust by calling the bedamned woman a necromancer because there was clearly no soul left in the husks shambling through his realm. Just bees. Endless bees that would swarm anyone who dared to be seen armed or with a flower, and stung them into a ravening frenzy, crawling into their ears and nose and mouth when they'd fall down from pain and exhaustion, and eat their way into the brains of those unfortunates. Then the corpses would rise and shamble around while more bees spawned from within their empty skulls. It was terrifying and demoralizing for the whole realm, especially once the people had come to a collective realization they had NO guard to protect them from oddlaws and wild beasts.

No guards except for the bee husks, that is. He supposed it is a small consolation that husks would attack and repel any beasts approaching the settlements. Some of the criminals had also run afoul of bee husks. While they were content to shamble about otherwise, flashing a dagger was sufficient to be beset by bees and corpses, as several robbers across the country learned. The worst part of it was that he could not even send his armies out of the country - while bees did not prevent them from leaving, they would follow major ships and hover over them ominously. He had some limited success in shipping out most trusted batal one by one with foreign merchants, but Sultanate was not loved by any foreigners, and so the foreign merchants were both reluctant to take any passengers from the realm and asked great sums for it. And he could not even have them properly disciplined, because damned bees ignored foreigners brandishing weapons! It was just a matter of time, he surmised, before Sultanate would be subjected to series of retaliatory raids, ship seizures and outright conquest - and he could do preciously little about it.

Taking a box, he opened it gingerly. It contained several scrolls and letters - the grand total of what his spies could ferret about one Alyssa Gillespie. His initial communication from Abbas was painfully bare of details, he simply whined about how some "jumped up white whore refused to serve". The servants in the palace proved to be much more reliable, and were able to identify the person in question based on what they saw of the duel. That... did not enthuse him in the slightest. A woman capable of killing one of his batal in a martial bout? Very odd. A badge of honor for batal was a scale of a dragon fashioned into a pendant, which granted decent protection against battle magic. It was this advantage that permitted Sultanate to maintain its combat superiority - the availability of dragon scales with which fighters with a minimal grasp of magic could be turned into legitimate threats to any mage by simply having protection against magic and physical training to run the mages down and cut them down the old-fashioned way.

He had yelled at Abbas over trying to bed a daughter of a count, only to be rebuked by Abbas claiming he tried to bed the maid of the aforementioned daughter. Now that was something that shook Salaadin badly. A noble who would pick a fight with Sultanate over a servant's honor? Unbelievable. No, the maid was just a pretext, Alyssa Gillespie had clearly been preparing her attack on his homeland for quite a while and Abbas had foolishly given her the legit casus belli to do so... No, wait. Abbas had given her the opening, and he, Salaadin, had given her the actual cause to hurl a war curse their way. A stray thought crossed his mind - Abbas really was arrogant and disagreeable with anyone he considered lesser. Which was everyone except Salaadin himself. Maybe he should have remained silent and allowed the humiliation of Abbas as it stood.

Salaadin sighed and shook his head. As much as Abbas needed some lessons in humility, letting a foreigner noble administer them without any rebuke would have tainted the reputation and honor of his family and his country. The problem was that he, Salaadin, had grievously miscalculated how to administer the rebuke. He had thought to cow her into submission and have her become a wife of one of his trusted emirs. Maybe even one of his sons. Then she'd be taught proper obedience by husband's discipline and be a boon to Sultanate. Apparently, the witch had no respect for elders or the power Sultanate could bring to bear. Or couldn't bring to bear, as it turned out to be. Damn it! The more Salaadin thought about it, the less he liked his conclusions. Alyssa Gillespie had meant to start a war with Sultanate. Not try to grab a bit of land in a border skirmish, as it was common among border nobles. Certain isles near the coast of Champagne would change their current owner almost yearly, as barons and beys with their personal hosts fought over them nearly constantly.

But... this particular woman was clearly not aiming for an island or two. No, she had intentionally hobbled the whole of Sultanate and if Salaadin read it right, the lands she would want to be ceded to her would be more than just a few isles. It was, if he were to call it honestly, an attempt to cleave a part of Sultanate sufficient to crown herself a sovereign of an entirely new country - and one that had considerable chances of happening, at it. After all, if she had the personal power to cripple the greatest power like that, why would she settle for less than a nation of her own? And therefore, he sighed, she needed to die. As expeditiously as possible.

Picking up a quill and dipping it into an inkwell, Salaadin began to write a letter. Batal were great when you needed to batter down someone in an open fight. But for this? He would need to enlist some help from a certain old man on a mountain.

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