Gul stared at him, at the easy way he had dismissed Farsia and himself. She had never seen him like this. “But father, surely we are at even footing in the alliance?” Gul inquired anxiously, worry twisting in her gut.
He looked up at her and said, “Barely, my dear, barely. We are yet at par, due to the great value of our Bijliz compound, but I am wary of giving my daughter to a man over whom I hold very little power.” His mouth twisted in a rueful grimace.
“I see,” she answered as she pondered the implications with a furrowed brow. Bijliz compound was the living heart of energy needed to be consumed by the Empires’ key weapons: Andrugai. The sorcerers acted as conduits for the most complicated military maneuvers and were the backbones of the Ghayyur imperial forces.
Tapping into the inherent power of the world was usually quite difficult, even were one born with the necessary potential, but the Bijliz compound mined and refined in Farsia, when consumed by the Andrugai, resulted in a temporary connection to the core of all power, resulting in a significant boost. It was through this that the Andrugai built the Ankhs – the Ten Thousand Towers of the Sultan’s imperial forces. Stationed evenly along the Ghayyur territories, they each were manned by a company of soldiers and sophisticated weapons formed through the application of Andrusia powered by Bijliz.
The Andrugai rode with the imperial forces, not as soldiers, though Andrusia had some military applications… They were the ones who, whenever the Sultan entered a new territory, instantly constructed the complicated and terrifying moving siege engines and the permanent Ankhs. It was through them that the empire’s military might was established and the constant oversight by the sultan was made possible. The threat of instant attack kept the vast lands of the empire glued together. No one outside of the imperial forces and the Andrugai, actually knew how the things actually worked, but they had always managed to quell even the hint of a whisper of rebellion.
The Sultan’s soldiers could just show up threw the tower, almost instantaneously, not to talk of the towers’ own power, the ability to join with a web of the other towers and create areas where the towers controlled the very air the people breathed. There had been two times in history when such tactics had been employed, in Mehmed’s father’s time, in the Oshimash region, and the Kasagano region of Selvia. She remembers the accounts of deadly clouds rising from the earth and killing everything they touched. It had been one the deadliest attacks in known history, killing upwards of 10000 people in the City of Oshimash alone. And the Sultan had not needed to send even a single soldier. None dared to rebel after that.
She frowned as she considered the implications that Farsia was soon to sign a treaty to ensure they were the main suppliers behind the power that created such devastation. She herself would become Sultana of such a harsh country, where the regions were always in conflict, the Sultan’s power absolute, yet the ground beneath his reign shaky and assassination attempts were common. She straightened her shoulders and spine, “Yes father, I will certainly keep your admonishments in mind. I shall go and meet my knight squad, and one last thing father, has the Sultan sent an express courier, and might he await my own letter to be added to the official mail? And may I be allowed Andrug Hashim’s services?” She inquired, already planning to go write to Mehmed, and ascertain his safety herself. She also had hundreds of questions regarding the campaign, as while he had mentioned something about the conflict, she had not anticipated the sheer danger he was riding into, it had seemed to her as just one more skirmish with barbarians, but now she suspected inside help…
She needed to convey these suspicions to him and so needed to find the court’s Andrug after writing her letter to seal it shut.
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