"Under compulsion, you led me to sites you said my quarry might be but selected them for your own ends. One might call that a lie. As for whether they would be right to—"

A voice plays back from everywhere. Sadde's voice, though it sounds lower than her voice right now. "Human beings respond terribly to threats and torture. We just lie."

"—you seemed to think so.

I presume you invited me to your trap with terms in mind. I want you to know that your position is not a strong one."

"Flimsy justification, using an out-of-context quote. I give it a four out of ten," she says, shrugging. "I had ulterior motives, obviously, you were hunting my girlfriend, but I said no falsehood and did not lead you anywhere I did not truly believe 'your quarry,' as you put it, was most likely to have been.

"But I'm tired of playing your childish word games. What started this all was the fact that you cannot understand other forms of conquest than complete subjugation and the breaking of one's spirit and will. That's completely unsophisticated, there are so many more ways to conquer someone or something and you limit yourself to the most mindless ones. So I'm going to teach you some sophistication. You can agree now to step down from Lordship and bind yourself to me as my familiar. Or you can fight me, and when I inevitably win you will then bind yourself to me as my familiar."

"No. I do not and will not surrender. If you want to change how I understand Conquest, you will need a better offer than that. And a better claim on it being worth making such a deal with you."

"And the prize of least surprising reaction goes to..."

"Maybe next time you will offer serious terms. If not, consider the fight begun. You may spring the trap you have such faith in."

He turns to the others with him. "You four, keep warding off interference but leave her to me." Then he starts advancing toward Sadde. He's moving at an ordinary walking pace, keeping an eye out for the snare or ambush or whatever it is but mostly just keeping his rifle leveled at her.

She raises one hand towards him, in a finger-gun shape. "You know," she says, casually, "lots of people here would close one eye. But what do you know, it turns out that closing one eye isn't very good for aim! Something about depth perception. So I won't. Bang."

Conquest steps aside to avoid it, and positions his weapon so the sword-sized bayonet would deflect a straight line from Sadde's finger. None of which means anything, since the answering bang comes from behind him.

He turns around, in the process giving Sadde a view of the large hole leaking a dark fluid from the base of his neck. He sees Matthew leveling a smoking gun, eyes wide.

At the Lord's gesture, the Eye of the Storm creates an explosion of hot air that knocks Matthew to the ground. "Donald. Malcolm. Bind him. Any of you, explain why he is not forsworn." They move to obey, but their mouths stay shut.

The hole from the shotgun slug is already starting to shrink. Conquest turns back around. "Did you think that would stop me?" The air shakes as he fires his own weapon in Sadde's general direction. But only the general direction. It splinters a tree branch behind her.

She doesn't flinch, just grins more widely. "Something wrong, Concon? Aim not what it used to be when your hold over your conquest prizes isn't as strong as you thought?"

I meant to do that is the worst, most defensive-sounding sentence in English even when it's true. So instead he finishes closing the distance across the clearing and rams the bayonet at Sadde's throat.

And she shatters into a hundred pieces of glass, a broken mirror on the ground.

"Oh no! Breaking a mirror is said to give you seven years' bad luck, don't you know?" Sadde's voice echoes, coming from no obvious direction.

Conquest orders his minions to direct him to her, but the practitioners stay tight-lipped and the Eye of the Storm can't sense anything out of place. So he tries a different tack.

"I know you see Attwell as a resource, and a person. Perhaps an ally, depending on why he was able to shoot me. He is also a hostage. Show yourself before I wound him enough to destroy his usefulness."

"I swear that he has not betrayed you. So if you do that, you will be destroying one of your own trophies, declaring your past conquest unfit to yourself. Doesn't speak much of you, does it, to conquer things you don't even find that useful? Or are you that desperate for every scrap of power?"

"It is not him I am acting against." Conquest fires another shot. Matthew's face contorts and he writhes but he does not scream. Donald and Malcolm are just as horrified, but neither of them speaks. They do both rush to see to his shattered ankle as best as they can. "Do you or do you not want to spare our shared pawn more of the same. Show yourself and fight."

"It's totally him you're acting against, he's still yours, still your tool. You're crippling yourself."

Suddenly, there's a loud crack—

—and the clearing disappears out from under them.

Even the thickest areas of the Hyena's old grounds were passable with more obstacles than visibility. This is more like being caught in mostly vertical wooden bars. The new trees filling the space are very out of place here, deciduous and with a full set of leaves in midwinter, but there is no clearing here anymore.

Sadde's real location is nearly as cramped as Conquest's, but at least she's better at worming through and out.

But more than anything, this means Conquest can't see his pawns, and if someone in a whole 'nother city decides to teleport them out of his reach while they're knocked out, well, he can't stop them, can he? It's a gamble; each time they use this skill, Conquest might notice. But Sadde walked into this war willingly and with her eyes open, while Matthew and his sons had no such choice. If they were threatened, they would be rescued, and Sadde would find a way to get out of the city later if need be.

For now, though: "By the by, I hope you realise Matthew's sons were just as compromised as Matthew himself was. Guess your control over your minions isn't as thorough as you'd have thought, is it? If only you had been slightly smarter about it..."

They aren't unconscious, but they're temporarily not moving either and aren't terribly inclined to try to think of a way out. All three have a decent guess who's doing this.

"I knew from the moment they refused the order to track you. I was rather hoping you would try another bullet." Conquest pauses to splinter a tree, buying himself a bit more mobility. 

He holds for longer when Johannes responds to Sadde's signal. But after he forces his way back out to the normal-density trees he says to the empty space where the Attwells aren't, "I don't believe we've met. But we will if you try that in my city again."

And to Sadde, "Trying to stall me? You know I can outlast you. You have a finite supply of the glamour hiding you, and how have you been replenishing it? Bleeding squirrels? Perhaps deer? As much as I can appreciate the barbarism, you can only have killed so many. And I know how slowly it increases even with a supply." He takes a familiar-looking bottle from a pocket and smears some Bob on the back of his neck, then turns around to show the lack of injury.

"I'm not so sure you can outlast me," she says, but there's a twinge of worry in her voice, and... the glamour might be running out, because the sound is slightly more directional than it was before.

It could be a fake direction. He heads there anyway, because encouraging his adversary to spend a scarce resource on delays is useful.

"I can. I am not reliant on such a tool, and I do not tire. In an endurance battle you have no chance, so fight face to face or make a real offer of terms."

"Fine. You become my familiar and don't step down."

"I said a real offer. You have not shown yourself capable enough to stand beside me."

He continues searching the direction Sadde implied she was in. This far from his seat of power it's not easy to sense what genuinely belongs in his city and what's an illusion, but he only needs a flicker in the glamour...

There's a flicker over there, though the voice comes mostly from a different direction: "I think you're suffering from a lack of creativity."

Conquest goes for the visible flicker. The voice might have been set up ahead of time, but he knows glamour works best at close range. He sends his weapon on a wide arc through and around the point.

"Suffering? I am doing nothing of the kind."

The glamour there breaks, revealing a Sadde that's stumbling backwards, narrowly escaping the slash. "—fuck," she says, trying to get to her feet as fast as she can.

The success from breaking an enemy's defenses really should be giving him a second wind here. And instead he's feeling drained. But he has his target, and swings to disable. She's quick, but he's fast and already in range. The butt of his rifle rams down toward her shoulder. Weaker than he'd like it to be.