NOVEL NEXT Chapter 32: A Threat
Dominic sighed and then released his elbows, allowing his arms to return to his sides.
“You say you need me as much as I need you? Then promise that you won’t declare a Holy Crusade if I, or any of those I might convert to follow you too, choose to leave. Promise that now and I’ll agree to follow you.”
The goddess tapped her furry thigh with one hand.
“As long as you promise in return that neither you nor any of those you might convert to following me will betray me to an enemy, then I agree.” Dominic considered that carefully.
“What does ‘betray to an enemy’ mean? What if I then decide to follow an enemy of yours after leaving your service?” Dominic asked, his memory returning of the trouble his uncle had had after leaving one company to join another company, only to be sued by his original company over a non-competition clause in his original contract.
“As long as you don’t willingly reveal secrets about myself or my organisation to that enemy, I suppose you could join my enemy without it counting as betrayal.”
Dominic considered it for a long moment.
“As long as you indicate clearly what is considered a ‘secret’. I don’t want to accidentally say the wrong thing because I didn’t know it was meant to be confidential.”
Selessa shrugged.
“I am not trying to trick you. Nothing so far discussed is a secret. It is no hardship to inform you when you have been made privy to one.”
Dominic nodded slowly.
“Alright, then I guess we have a deal.”
“Finally,” Selessa answered with a hint of impatience. “But the discussion has taken so long that I am too drained now to actually do the conversion. Return when the sun is setting tomorrow and we will finalise it all. You will need to touch the Place of Power again to return to this space.”
“OK, fine,” Dominic agreed.
“Just make sure not to let anyone else touch the Place of Power,” Selessa warned.
“Why not?” Dominic asked, wondering if it would disrupt the conversion in some way
“Well, you can if you wish, but don’t let anyone you actually care about do it – if any but the controller of the Place of Power touches it they will be sucked inside. Actually, maybe do it if you want to kill a few of your enemies – I benefit from the sacrifice, as does the Place of Power itself which means that you indirectly benefit from it too. Though be warned that if they’re a higher level than you, they can fight you for control. The bigger the difference between your levels, the higher their chance of success. Now, sundown tomorrow – don’t forget.”
With that, the world abruptly fractured around Dominic and, still reeling from the last minute information, the human was ejected from the conversation. And not just the conversation, he realised, but the Place of Power itself entirely.
He had only just recognised that he was once more standing on four paws below the moon in the forest of the ameshek and kesh when he spotted the leader standing before him. Anger abruptly surging, he found himself leaping at the wolven creature, snarling loudly.
She was taken unaware by the sudden attack, and he managed to bowl her over onto her side with a single pounce.
‘You tried to kill me!’ he mentally yelled at her.
‘What are you doing?’ asked two voices, one, he was glad to hear was Leo’s, though only at the periphery of his mind, and the other was the ameshek’s surprised one.
There were a number of other surprised growls both leonine and alien in origin. The sound of paws on the ground hurrying towards their location indicated that their respective groups were rapidly approaching. Dominic ignored them.
‘Did you know that the Place of Power would kill me if I wasn’t the controller of it when I touched it?” Dominic demanded from the ameshek. She wasn't trying to move away from him, not struggling at all. At the same time, Dominic hadn’t actually landed with his claws bared, so his hit hadn’t actually done any damage – he still had enough wits about him to know that starting the fight unnecessarily wasn’t a good idea. But he did want an answer.
‘I didn’t know,’ the ameshek answered remarkably calmly for having a snarling lion near her neck. Dominic waited – she hadn’t sounded like she was finished. ‘Though, I did suspect that something bad would happen if any other than the territorial pack leader touched it,’ she admitted a moment later.
Dominic’s snarls increased in volume.
‘And you were telling me it was safe!’
‘I sensed that it was – if you had indeed gained control over the Place of Power in our battle.’ Dominic’s snarls reduced in volume, his lips dropping slightly.
‘It was a test,’ he realised. ‘A test to see if our battle meant as much as we thought it did.’
‘A not-entirely intended one, yes,’ the ameshek agreed, a little reluctantly. Dominic just stared down at her for a long moment. Part of him was urging him to rip her throat out then and there. She had broken their deal, in intention, if not in actual deed.
At the same time, the reasons for keeping her alive still stood, not to mention that this was not a good place to do this, not when he abruptly realised that he was surrounded by her pack, his lionesses bristling for a fight too.
Dominic understood why she had sort of tried to kill him, even if Leo didn’t seem to, still snarling in the back of his mind and telling Dominic how he should have killed the canine-ish creature at the start. It was a good way of seeing just where their limits lay. And perhaps, also, in seeing how Dominic responded to this.
How should he respond?
‘Kill her! She’s a threat!’ yelled Leo, apparently incensed that Dominic wasn’t responding to him.
‘It’s not that simple,’ Dominic snapped back at him, the lion giving him a headache. ‘The moment we attack for real, the other ameshek will be on us.’
‘The females will support us – we will attack as a pride.’
‘And be right back where we started? No.’
‘I told you we should have chosen to kill the other leader,’ Leo said for the nth time.
‘I heard you the first time!’ Dominic ground out before forcibly pushing Leo away. It wouldn’t last very long – neither of them had enough power over their shared mental space to clear it of the other more than temporarily. But at least he had a moment to think without the lion yammering away at him.
Even aside from the issues surrounding actually genuinely attacking the ameshek right now, there was another problem. Namely, that he still had a use for the sonic canines – indeed, he wasn’t sure how he was going to deal with the kesh without them. He had a couple of ideas, but they were very much half-baked and not at all guaranteed to work.
So he didn’t want to break the vassalship just yet. But at the same time, did that mean he had to just let the ameshek leader get away with almost killing him?
Though, how could he punish the creature for it? He was momentarily tempted to order her to choose one ameshek within her pack to touch the rock, to inflict on one of her pack the same fate as she had risked him having.
After that one moment, though, he dismissed it. Not only was it probably more vicious than he probably should allow himself to be – even within the body of an apex predator and member of a species known to play with their food – but it would probably have consequences which he wouldn’t like. Certainly, if someone threatened one of his lionesses, he would do his best to destroy them – just as he intended to do to the hyena matriarch one day.
The ameshek leader had seemed very protective of her pack, just like him, so threatening one of its members would probably just drive her to find other loopholes. After all, this was probably a loophole right here – if he had genuinely won the battle and therefore the Place of Power, then he shouldn’t have been at risk from being absorbed. And besides, he didn’t even know whether she would comply.
Sighing mentally, Dominic realised that there was nothing he could do to his ‘vassal’, not without punishing himself at the same time. He stepped backwards off the ameshek, letting her rise, but promising himself that he would remember this.
‘The next time you pull something like that, I will kill you,’ he warned the ameshek seriously. ‘I’m only willing to overlook it this time because no one was hurt. And I understand the need to test boundaries. But I’m telling you now that this here is the limit. Work with me and we can grow together. Work against me, even by exploiting loopholes, and we are going to have issues. Clear?’
‘I understand,’ said the ameshek, though Dominic didn’t know whether that meant that she would listen. ‘It’s OK,’ he sent in the Pride chat to try to calm down his lionesses who looked to be one wrong move away from restarting the brawl. ‘We had a disagreement but we’ve sorted it out.’
‘What happened?’ demanded Sekhmet, the others chiming in with the same question or the support of Sekhmet’s.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Dominic replied, putting them off temporarily, then linked again to the ameshek leader’s mind.
‘I will need to come back here later, but for now, let us return to where we were before,’ he suggested to her. Even before she replied with agreement, Dominic started leading the way back to the area near the battlefield where they had been resting.
He pretended that he couldn’t see the hostility among the ameshek followers, and that his back didn’t prickle with having the leader behind him. They needed to believe he was confidently in control, and so that’s what he pretended he was.
‘Is that why you kept the leader alive? To deal with the kesh?’ asked Leo quietly in his mind. Evidently, he’d been able to pull his way back into their conscious space.
‘As an immediate benefit, yes. You remember how their attack pinned us in place before – imagine that used against the kesh.’
‘Though we wouldn’t be able to be anywhere near the area,’ Leo pointed out. ‘Nor would the females. Otherwise we’d be attacked as much as the kesh.’
‘I know. I was hoping we could send the ameshek out to attack the kesh but this stunt of the leader makes me wonder if we can trust them to do even that much.’
‘Maybe we should just kill them and take their Ability to do it ourselves.’
‘Except that one, we don’t know whether we’d amass enough Cores to earn the Ability at all. Two, what if the Ability is incompatible with our body? Three, what if it only has its strength because of the number of ameshek with the same Ability? On our own, we probably wouldn’t have enough power to deal with the kesh. Then we’d be almost back to square one on that as well.’
The lion was silent.
‘Anyway, what happened to you when we were pulled into that odd substance?’ Dominic asked curiously.
‘Nothing?’ Leo answered with a little confusion. ‘One moment we were being pulled in; the next, we were being expelled outwards.’
‘So you didn’t see any blackness, or red jungle, or weird goddess?’
‘...No?’
‘Interesting.’
‘You mean that you did see some sort of ‘red jungle’ and ‘weird goddess’?’ Leo asked with interest.
‘Yeah, it was a whole thing. That’s how I know what the ameshek leader was trying to pull – the goddess told me.’
‘I was wondering how you had any idea about that – I certainly didn’t. But then humans do some very strange things; I imagined that being pulled into and pushed out of strange substances is practically a rite of passage for you odd monkeys.’
‘I hate to say it, but you might have a point,’ Dominic admitted with a bit of amusement, thinking about the water, mud, sand, dirt, and even a pile of manure that he’d been pushed into on various occasions. All but the last had been in – mostly – good fun. ‘Though at least we don’t clean our butts with our tongue afterwards,’ he pointed out.
‘Don’t judge – you’ve done it yourself and enjoyed it,’ Leo shot back at him. They were approaching the lionesses, so Dominic decided to stop the conversation there.
‘Anyway, take a look at this and see what you think,’ he told the lion, shoving the memory of his conversation with Selessa at his companion. Then, focussing on the lionesses, he decided how to explain things to them.
