‘When the big scary man stopped bending the bars, what happened then?’ asked a very perturbed and condescending king.
‘Well, the prisoners over-powered me, and walked out, saying something about finding their gear.’
‘Alright, you heard him men, get to the armory, now!’ said the king, gesturing out the doors of his throne room. Twenty men then filed out of the room only their intense training keeping them from bursting into laughter.
Another prisoner batch taken from the king, from right under his nose, and added to Cabal’s band. The soldiers and the King knew about the guild hierarchy in the Slum and Merchant Quarter, but could do nothing to intervene. The holy human colonization hadn’t begun quite as smoothly as Frederick had thought. He was better suited to the cloak and dagger streets of Frederikshire than kingship, and better suited than some of the guild masters that were down there now, sucking on expensive weed pipes and drinking Gungo wine, things that even he, as king, couldn’t lay his hands on. Life had been much better in the city of Aroughs, where he had been as a king, leader of a guild that wielded some power.
After a carefully planned coup, the baron had been killed, and Frederick struck out, populating a city that had been constructed in secret, a little but of marble disappearing there, a little bit of iron or wood there. Being king wasn’t what it looked like form a guild master’s point of view. From the Guildie’s view, there was only one rung higher on the social ladder; royalty. From the king, that rung is a little uncomfortable, and the king is always a little scared he will unceremoniously fall down the ladder, back to a smuggler or something equally as grueling.
That had been him in his younger days, a porter, carrying things from ships to the shady rooms. He didn’t know what he was carrying, and he didn’t care.
After a couple of months, the guild he was mainly working for, Baraconi, offered him a better job, a camel. Higher pay, higher respect, but also slightly illegal. He would pose as a cabin boy for ships, and drop their supplies overboard, in or tied to something buoyant. A smaller, more agile ship, usually a single square master, would follow the trading vessel and pick up the supplies.
Then after a year of that, the guild offered him a job in the guild proper, doing odd jobs, like assassinations, planting of evidence, occasionally the highway mask came out, and he did the dirty job himself, which became rarer and rarer as he climbed through the guild, becoming a favorite of Kyl Baraconi, the current Guildie, or guild master. The Baraconi guild owned the streets of Aroughs, and Kyl owned the guild, therefore he was the lord of all he saw, as long as he didn’t admire the view of the palace, but Kyl, ever over-ambitious, died in an attempted coup. Frederick had made arrangements for Kyl’s departure, from the guild, and from the world of the living.
When all the lieutenants returned a couple of hours later, taking The Long Way Home, they saw Frederick slouching on the throne, and all willingly bowed, recognizing the guild was his, and if they resisted, their heads would roll. Some even applauded Frederick’s unprecedented rise through to the top, a position that they had had their eyes on for long years.
Frederick had been lucky, befriending a young, though high ranking, assassin in the ranks of Baraconi. She had been a good friend, and though Frederick wanted to take the relationship further, she rejected his advances. That had been what inspired Frederick to take up kingship of the human race in Avalon. To leave the confines of the box Baraconi had built for himself and his successors. Now he had the Baron of Aroughs, Sumbadine, and Barnacle Landing under his thumb, something that Baraconi, practically Frederick’s father, could have only dreamed about.
The the three -now four- fiefs weren’t always an empire, they were just humans sorting out a hierarchy for themselves, letting the other races come and go as they pleased. But with Frederick’s empire, the humans imposed themselves upon other races, stealing peasant’s land, felling forests for resources, forests that housed elves, Frederick knew it was a miracle none of the other race’s leaders had challenged him about it.
