"There's a woman on my ship," Taisen said, before he could stop himself, "who would tell you the whole argument is rotten at its foundation.
That there's a third answer neither of us has named tonight, one that doesn't require either your ceiling or the absence of one. Alita would say the weak don't survive men like you through better arithmetic at all.
She'd say they survive by refusing to play the same game, by choosing each other over the numbers every single time, until enough of them refuse together that the numbers stop mattering."
"I've heard that argument too," Malkor said, and something almost like fondness moved across his face, the particular, distant fondness of a man remembering an old and thoroughly settled debate.
"I heard a version of it from a Quinian elder on Avaros, once, before I burned the fields around his village to remind the rest of his people what refusing me actually costs.
I've heard it from pacifist councils on eleven separate worlds, delivered with real conviction, by people who believed, sincerely, that goodness was its own kind of weapon. I have never once seen it stop a single ship from landing. It is a beautiful argument, Commander, and it has never once, in the entire history of every people who've tried it against me, produced anything but a very well-behaved graveyard.
I don't say that to mock her for believing it.
I say it because you clearly haven't fully decided whether you believe it yourself, or you wouldn't have reached for it as a shield in the middle of losing an argument to me."
"I'm not losing this argument," Taisen said.
"No," Malkor agreed, mildly.
"You're doing something considerably rarer than losing it, which is refusing to let either of us declare a winner, and calling that refusal a virtue instead of naming it what it actually is, which is uncertainty you haven't finished sitting with yet.
I find I don't mind that in you either.
It's the most honest thing you've done all evening, and I've noticed, across tonight's whole conversation, that you're considerably more honest with me than I suspect you've ever managed to be with the people who actually love you."
Taisen said nothing to that, because there was no clean answer to it that wouldn't have cost him something to give, and after a moment he simply said, flat and final, the only response he had left that didn't require conceding ground he wasn't prepared to concede: "You said you wanted to know about the ring.
Ask, and stop circling it."
Malkor studied him a moment longer, and then, unhurried, reached into the collar of his plain dark coat and drew out, on a thin chain, a small disc of the same pale, silvery metal as the ring itself, worn smooth at the edges by what looked like centuries of handling, and held it up between two fingers so the last of the dying light caught the same faint, coiled shapes worked into its surface that Uros's ring bore at its center.
"Do you know what this is," he asked.
"No," Taisen said.
"I assume you're about to tell me, since you clearly went to some trouble to bring it."
"It's a promise," Malkor said, "made a very long time ago, by someone who no longer exists in any form you'd recognize as a person, to a people who have spent every year since trying to decide whether the promise still means anything at all.
Long before the Reza were the Reza, Commander, before I was whatever it is you're currently looking at, there was a war between what your archives would call the Reza's ancestors and the people who called themselves, then, simply the Monjit, a war that very nearly ended both peoples entirely, and ended instead in a treaty neither side has ever fully honored, sealed by an exchange of these."
He turned the disc slowly between his fingers, watching the light move across it.
"Two halves of the same oath.
One kept by whoever led my people at the treaty's signing, passed down, generation to generation, to whoever leads them next. The other kept by the Monjit royal line, passed the same way, mother to daughter, father to son, for as long as any single line among them survived to receive it. The terms were simple, and old, and considerably more binding on my people than I suspect you'd expect from everything else you've learned about me tonight.
So long as a free hand holds that ring, uncoerced, unconquered, the Monjit bloodline that carries it cannot be enslaved, cannot be harvested, cannot be bred for whatever use my empire has found for the gifted and the useful across every other conquered world it has ever swallowed. The oath doesn't require me to free them.
It only requires me to leave the ones the ring still marks as free, actually free, for as long as the ring itself remains in hands that were never forced to hold it."
Taisen felt something cold settle low in his stomach, colder than the wind, colder than the grey already climbing past his second knuckle.
"Uros," he said.
"Uros," Malkor agreed, "and his daughter, and every child of that particular line I have not yet been able to touch, precisely because of the small piece of metal currently sitting in your coat pocket, given to you by a man who understood exactly what he was risking and gave it to you anyway, because he judged you, correctly, as it turns out, more likely than his own desperate people to actually keep it out of the wrong hands."
He let that sit a moment, watching Taisen absorb it, and then continued, unhurried, the way a man continues a story he has told himself he intends to finish regardless of how the listener receives it.
"Every other Monjit who was ever born without that particular bloodline in their veins, I hold exactly as I please.
Venemis's daughter, and her daughter after her, are Falmeri by blood and Monjit only by the accident of geography that put them in a camp on that world when my people came for it. The oath does not shield them. Nothing shields them, except whatever use I've decided to make of the fear their existence buys me from their mother.
But Uros's line is different, Commander.
Uros's line is the one piece of that entire miserable planet I cannot simply take, so long as that ring stays where it currently is, in a pocket belonging to a man no oath was ever sworn to protect."