Chapter 455 — The Summons

"Seventy thousand men, running all over the plains—there are bound to be some who slip through," Gawain said, shaking his head. "And those seventy thousand Horseman raised could never have been the whole of the noble armies anyway. Every noble would have left at least a few gate-keeping knights and soldiers in his castle, wouldn't he? Once word of the coalition's collapse got back, the sharper ones among those garrison knights ran almost at once—and they became exiled knights."

"What a headache..." Amber's head ached at the very mention of such things. "It didn't take you a few days to conquer the whole South, so how is keeping order more trouble than conquering it..."

"Governing is harder than occupying," Gawain said with a sidelong glance at Amber. "It takes me one second to haul you down off a windowsill, but it's been over a year and you still climb in through the window, don't you?"

Amber: "...Hey, what did I ever do to you..."

Gawain ignored Amber's protest and went on of his own accord: "The troubles we face are indeed all thorny, and some of them, mishandled, could even cause setbacks and reversals in building our new order. Some will last a long while—perhaps a full generation or two... But I am not worried in the least."

Many footsteps came from the great hall next door. Gawain smiled faintly and rose to his feet.

"Apart from problems that can only be solved by time—customs hard to change, hearts hard to cultivate—most of the rest come down to those nobles and the traditional order they uphold. And I am precisely the origin of those nobles and that traditional order."

The attendant stood before the doors of the great council hall and cried out in a loud, powerful voice—

"The Warden of the South, Trailblazer of Ansu, Founder of the Kingdom, Ruler of the Duchy of Cecil, Archduke Gawain Cecil—arriving!"

Beside the long table in the great council hall, the Southern nobles—their faces still steeped in unease, still whispering to one another a moment before—all fell silent at almost the same instant, as though dozens of invisible hands had clamped shut their throats at once, making them raise their heads in perfect unison and turn toward the direction of the hall's main doors.

Their craning necks made them look like dozens of absurd ducks.

Gao Yang walked into the hall in a black ducal cloak. He looked at those Southern nobles stretching their necks on both sides of the long table—he had deliberately left these men to stew in the prisoner camp for a long while, the longest of them for over forty days; apart from the few just dragged back from Boulderkeep, the rest had long since had their spirits thoroughly broken. The moment he saw the look in their eyes, Gao Yang knew that today's business would be easy.

The nobles rose one after another. Though they had sat in prison for dozens of days, the courtesies carved into their muscle memory still made them perform the most standard salutation almost by instinct.

Gao Yang accepted these losers' salutes with equanimity and strode to the head of the council table. Without any exchange of pleasantries, he waved a hand at the clerks who had followed him in: "Hand them out."

The two clerks, carrying dozens of documents in their arms, began distributing them to every noble present. The nobles watched this scene with astonishment and curiosity, some even daring to mutter in low voices—this was utterly different from the "summons" procedure they had anticipated; this "Cecil-style" protocol left them at a loss.

Those who received the documents immediately fixed their attention on the printed sheets before them: the first thing they noticed was the incredible uniformity of the printing—every character, every line, every paragraph precise beyond reproach; even the finest block carver could never have cut such a printing plate. But soon their curiosity about the "printed matter" was scattered by the actual content of the documents.

Every noble who saw the contents of the documents wore an expression of astonishment.