“They are serfs. They farm. Humans are excellent farmers, but they are also excellent tax evaders. We’ve found it very difficult to extract what is owed. They have tendencies to hide their products, or sometimes not bother to harvest at all if they feel the taxes are too high.”
Smithers shifted uncomfortably.
This once again harkened to the scurrilous court myth that Archon’s mother had been part human. It was a ridiculous lie, no doubt concocted by detractors who wanted his cousin to take the throne instead of him when his many older brothers died. The argument became moot when his cousin happened to fall off a bridge with a rope wrapped around a fairly important body part.
“I don’t like the idea of killing humans. They are poor sport. Too soft. Too fleshy. Too weak,” Archon mused. “And yet I suppose I may as well do something about the situation, having come all this way…”
There was a long silence.
“Alright,” Archon said. “I’ve got it. We pretend.”
“Pretend, sire?” Naxus barely bothered to hide his derision.
Smithers shifted uncomfortably. It was one thing to have crowned Archon, and to have the officials and courtiers and nobles accept that he was king of all Archaeus. But it was something else for the king to earn the respect, or at least, fear, of the myriad of lesser officials, like Naxus, who had control over a vast number of small pieces of the kingdom. These remote outposts had a tendency to become unruly if the officials did not properly respect the king.
“We will put on a show for them,” Archon declared. “We will make it look good. Take every single one of the rebellious villagers, put them on the ship, then burn the village. Make it look good. The rest of the villages will not know any better, and they will behave themselves.”
“That is an excellent idea, your highness,” Naxus said. He sounded surprised.
“Yes. Almost the sort of idea you could have had yourself,” Archon remarked dryly.
Again, Naxus had the grace and good sense to avoid acknowledging the king’s tone.
“Did you bring the dragon, Smithers?”
They had left the obnoxious palace, and returned to the shuttle from which war could be waged. Or, in this case, the semblance of war.
“Always, sir. Always.”
Archon smiled for the first time in a very long time. He was looking forward to teaching the humans a lesson. They had dragged him a very long way, and he intended to make the most of it.
The dragon was modeled after the ancient dragon, Energon. It was, of course, not actually Energon. It was also not actually a dragon, but it definitely looked like one in the eyes of someone who didn’t know what a real dragon looked like. Archon imagined that applied to all the humans in the village below.
From the sky the village looked small. Because it was small. No more than a dozen or so hovels in a circle around a large central fire. It looked intimate and cozy, and for a moment Archon felt a strange pang of longing for something he had never actually experienced.
“We have surveillance, King Archon,” Smithers said. “We dispatched a spy drone, no bigger than a fly, to take images and relay them along with audio to the ship.”
“I know how surveillance works,” Archon reminded him. “There are primitives down there, not up here.”
“That’s debatable.”
Smithers said the words so softly under his breath that the king was able to pretend that he hadn’t heard them.
The surveillance feed was of far more interest to the king than the mutterings of his dubiously loyal courtier. Archon was a king without many allies, and that made him vulnerable. But it also made him strong. A king with many alliances never knew from which quarter betrayal would come, but a king who kept his own counsel could never be let down.
Smithers put the surveillance feed on screen, and a series of images appeared before their eyes. The village had been barricaded by several rows of wood palings, roughly hewn, pushed into the ground, and sharpened to dangerous points. They were impressive defenses for simple people, and apparently quite effective at keeping the tax man at bay.
Archon was well aware that Naxus could have crushed this rebellion with a flamethrower and a single tank. The fact that the general had chosen to drag the king into a petty local dispute pointed either to incompetence, or something akin to a trap.
Maybe he was here to be killed. Or maybe he was here because there was something else happening in the kingdom that they were conspiring to keep him from noticing. There were an infinite number of maybes, but one certainty: some very disobedient humans were about to be taught a lesson they would never forget by a creature they did not acknowledge as their king.