The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 746

The state recorded it at four minutes past six that evening.

White Tower and Regent Group, plaintiff. Black Tower, defendant. Cause found and entered: false accusation, unprovoked assault, and confession of the same in open session.

In four hundred years of that glass, no tower had ever gone to war with a cleaner reason than the one White had.

Minister Penn set the only condition the state ever sets.

Twenty-four hours. From the moment both sides accept, nothing moves for a full day — time for the old, the sick, and the children to be got out of the way. It is the one part of a tower war that has never once been broken, because the towers that broke it stopped existing.

Both sides accepted at seven that evening.

The clock started.

Ashe knew it before he was out of the building.

He was in a carriage nine minutes later, and the first thing he did was call Silas Kessler.

...

"They'll all come in," Ashe said. "Every one of them. Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown — he stood in front of a minister and offered them money and they took it at the table, in front of me, like men buying fish."

"Then buy them back."

"With what?" Ashe's voice cracked on it. "He has Regent. I have a tower that can't sell a curse."

"You have me," Kessler said.

There was a pause on the line.

"Silas—"

"Don't thank me yet. I'm not doing it for you."

Kessler had spent two days looking at an order book with nothing in it, and somewhere in that time the tired part of him had gone quiet and something colder had sat down in its place.

"I'll make the offer myself," he said. "Tonight."

...

The offer went out to four tower masters before midnight, and it was beautifully simple.

Ferrowgate would pay ten million dollars.

Not to fight.

Ten million a day, to every tower that stayed out of it — every single day the war ran, for as long as it ran, paid in advance each morning, no questions, no obligations, nothing required of them at all except to sit still and do nothing whatsoever.

Blue had it read out twice.

"Say the terms again."

"We do nothing. We take ten million a day."

"For doing nothing."

"For doing nothing."

The Blue master looked around his own hall and started laughing, and behind him three of his elders were already doing the arithmetic that everyone in every tower did that night.

Because everybody knew how long a tower war lasted.

Six months. Sometimes eight. That was the shape of the thing — sieges and stalemates and lawyers, formal challenges, wounded pride, negotiated withdrawals. Nobody had ever finished one quickly, because nobody could.

Six months at ten million a day.

Nearly two billion dollars, to keep your people at home.

"White pays us to fight and die," Green's master said. "Ferrowgate pays us to sit in a chair."

Yellow accepted before dawn. Brown accepted at breakfast, on condition of payment upfront. Blue and Green took until noon only because they were pretending to think about it.

And underneath all of it, unspoken, was the part that made the decision easy.

They all believed White was going to lose.

Not might lose. Was going to. White Tower was the poorest, smallest, weakest tower in the United State of Magic — nine students a year, a leaking roof, an old man who couldn't afford a stonemason. Money had rebuilt the walls. Money had not made them magicians.

Black had five hundred years of necromancy and thirty thousand people who could use it.

You don't bet against that. You take the ten million and you look away.

...

"Sire, are you certain we can bear this expense? Ten million gold a day will bleed our coffers dry in under a week."

Kessler sneered. "You told me the White Tower was fragile. Stop holding back. Rally every legion you have and crush them in forty-eight hours before I go bankrupt. Strike with total force from the first horn."

"As you command, Sire." The Black Tower’s commander hardened his gaze. There would be no siege—only a massacre.

…

Somebody put it to Alex directly, on the third floor at Regent, with the acceptance letters spread across the desk.

"All four of them took the money."

"I know."

"You wanted to pay them yesterday, and Ferrowgate outbid you overnight." Beatrix's jaw tightened. "You're alone in this. Completely alone. It's the White Tower against the Black Tower, and Black has more than two thousand soldiers while you have—"

She paused, unsure of his actual numbers. Best-case scenario? Maybe a hundred combat mages, a thousand max.

"But if we can hold out longer, they'll bleed money. Shouldn't defense be our priority?"...

"The best defense is a good offense," Alex said with a smirk.

...

Alex did not sleep during those twenty-four hours, and he was not idle for one minute of them.

But the first order he gave, at six the next morning, went out to every White Tower branch in the country and stopped the elders' hearts.

Close the schools. Send every student home. Five days' holiday, effective immediately, no exceptions, nobody stays.

Nineteen thousand students, out of the buildings by dusk.

Elias came to find him personally.

"Grandmaster. Please tell me I've misunderstood the order."

"You haven't."

"Then say it plainly to me, because I'm old." Elias's hands were shaking and he didn't bother hiding it. "You are emptying thirty towers of every able body in them on the night before a war."

"Yes."

"Those students are the only people we have. Without them there's nobody in those buildings at all — no watch, no wards, no one to hold a door." He was almost shouting now, and Elias White had not raised his voice in thirty-four years. "Black will walk into every branch we own and take them apart brick by brick, and there will be nobody there to even see it happen."

"The students are helpless. Evacuate them so they don't get caught in the slaughter. Assign four or five true combatants to each tower; that will be plenty."

"Grandmaster—"

"Elias." Alex raised his eyes from the desk, his gaze icy. "Let them come."

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