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impress me?” I demanded of him.
         He blanched.  Lupus the Conqueror was a killer. They all knew what I had done to Sammin.
         “Leave me,” I demanded.  “Court for the day is adjourned.”
         One of the Oligarchs approached me but I glared him away.  A mural of Alekanna to the left behind the throne worked as a door and I used it.  Let the masons make a new secret entrance for the security of the Heir.  I wasn’t in the mood to be protected.
         This is beneath you.
         “Apparently it is not,” I snarled, knowing that the one I snarled at had the pain.  That if He invoked the pain, then I would be helpless and do anything He wanted. 
         You are the instrument of War, he informed me .  You do what you must, and what no one else can.
         “Whatever that is.”
         I took long strides down the back halls, to the King’s quarters, from where I could get to my own.  I could hear the steps of the squires who attended me – no less than three for the Heir, no less than five for the King.
         The Fovean Kings underestimate your ambitions.  They still believe that they can control Eldador politically .
         “I am sure that Constantine XI thought the ambitions of a twenty-one-year-old Sultan could be solved politically until Mehmed II overran Constantinople in 1453.”
         As you have demonstrated with Outpost IX.
         “I didn’t think it would be lost on You,” I said.  “I thought the world should see what I would do to anyone who came after me.”
         Which is not the only reason that I did it, and which He surely knew.  People love to follow men who are ‘fearless’, because they can lose themselves in their maniac ambition.  It is a lie to say that if you have nothing then you have nothing to lose.  If you have nothing then you have everything to gain with the right person leading you.
         My whole life demonstrated that. 
         You near your purpose, then, instrument.
         Would I make the world better if I controlled it all?  I would certainly make it better for me.  History showed that kind of thing wouldn’t benefit too many more people. 
         The Egyptians had enslaved entire races at the height of their power.  They had buried their wealth in giant pyramids just to prove that they could do it.
         The Eldadorians held apartheid-style dominance over their subjected Uman people.  They enjoyed a better lifestyle now, but if this capitalist experiment were to fail, would it be Man or Uman whose children did without?  Would I have or want Uman nobles in my realm?  Would Sammin be dead now if he were a Man?
         As for me…
         I pushed open another concealed door and I entered the King’s apartments.  Glennen wasn’t here – there were too many drinking hours left in the day for that.  His squires would drag his drunken body in here, shave him and bathe him and put him to bed, when the booze had overwhelmed him.
         I was kidding myself thinking that I could have plied him off with some tea.
         “There is a price for everything, my love,” Shela had told me.
         When I had prayed to War, he had warned, “You have barely begun to do as I desire .”
         Now I thought I knew what he wanted.
         “The gifts of War are not without price,” I quoted my wife.
         Nor should they be.
         “I was a loser about to die, and you made Lupus the Conqueror, the White Wolf, Scourge of Trenbon, blooded bounty hunter, the Killer of Conflu.”
         I made nothing.  That is not the way it works.
         “But there is also Rancor the Just, the liberator, the avenger.  The one who humbled Outpost IX – the only one.”
         That is as much you as the other, but this is made of your own choosing, your own free will.  That is how it works, instrument.  It is all free will.
         “And now it is before me to take the