Ashley stood before me with a dour expression upon his face. I bade him stand before me to deliver his report.
"Mi'lord, I bring grave news," he began. "The Angel, Zarach, has escaped the city."
"Damn," I said, and gave a sigh. "Well, it's not a disaster, is it? We have broken up his loony band of rebels, and he won't be causing us any more trouble. Put out his description and any photographs we have of him. If ever he returns to Ha'Khun we shall have him." I gave my special smile.
"I have taken the liberty of doing that already, Mi'lord," he replied, "but I fear it will not come to much. You see, he has fled to Macura Province, sire."
I stared hard at Ashley, as he was behaving very strangely. In fact the only time I had seen him do anything remotely like this was in his rash youth, when he had incurred my wrath for his attempt to behead a then-disarmed assassin.
Ever since that day, he had devoted all his energies to proving himself, and by now was practically my right-hand man. To see him act so demurely must have meant he was very, very frightened.
"Go on," I said.
"He has fled to Macura, and... and made contact with your ancient enemies. They have now been taken into protective custody by Governor Khano of Macura, who is refusing to extradite them to Ha'Khun. He has caught two of our agents and executed them, Mi'lord." he gabbled.
"WHAT?!?" I screamed, my wings and headwings fluffing out in shock and fury. Ashley made a sound very much like a kitten being trodden on as I stood up, the deadly anger that burned upon my face clearly visible to all.
"Get up," I snapped. "Pull yourself together! They will not get away with that. Ashley, I want a strategy drawn up for an attack on the capital. Invading the governor's palace is to be our main strategic objective... I do not care what it takes.
"I will have those demons and their allies brought before me, Governor Khano included. When we have annexed this precious Province of his, I will show that fat bastard what happens to those who so blatantly defy Johan Cross!"
Ashley looked very shaken as he left, and on any other occasion I would have felt guilty. But the anger burned fierce in me that night and I was numb to all feelings except my desire for revenge.
By morning I felt quite different, subdued and unhappy as opposed to wrathful, and I summoned Ashley to my chamber.
"Perhaps I was a little hasty," I began. I could be completely frank with Ashley, even though I was a demon overlord and he was just a Being. "A war will likely cost hundreds of lives, maybe more."
"I fear it is too late now, Mi'lord," he said. "The battle plans are well advanced, and to back down now might be perceived as a weakness on your part. It could quite conceivably result in our own invasion if word of it were to get out, for your... reputation... is one of the key factors that keeps the region stable."
"You are right, as ever, my friend," I said, and Ashley turned away - he seemed to be rather embarrassed by this remark.
"And of course invading Macura would have its up-sides too... ridding the world of Khano, for example."
Governor Khano was a tiger, an exemplary specimen who went a long way to proving the old adage that felines tended to be cruel. That his ancestors had demon heritage did not help either, and had lengthened his years far beyond his natural span as a Being although in most other respects he seemed to be fairly ordinary.
While I was suspected of killing hundreds of dissidents, Khano didn't bother to hide behind such ambiguities, instead preferring to behead criminals in public. While this did achieve an even lower rate of crime than Ha'Khun, it had come at a price that even Johan Cross was not prepared to contemplate.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I hadn't done anything about him before. Probably it was because, as Ashley had said, the balance of power in the region was somewhat fragile.
This was still a concern, but if it allowed me to get my claws around the necks of those demons, regional instability would be worth the price, to say nothing of ending the death penalty in Macura Province. In any case, it was far too late to back out now.
"Tell me about the two agents who died," I said.
It was not a pleasant conversation, and squeamish as I am, I had to ask Ashley to skip some of the more explicit details. Nonetheless, I had their names, and the difficult task of informing their next-of-kin.
I cannot bring myself to speak in detail of the war which I embarked upon. There were many deaths, of foe and friend alike, and I consider it now to be one of the most hateful things I did in my career as ruler of Ha'Khun although my analyst, Delna, assures me that it ultimately turned out for the best.
One of the few consolations was that the bulk of the fighting lasted mere days, although sporadic fighting by small pockets of resistance persisted for a number of months following.
This remarkably quick operation was largely by virtue of the way we took them by surprise, aided not least by my strategy of warping my shock troops into the capital by means of the portal. Thus, the palace was captured almost immediately, decapitating the nation in a manner eerily reminiscent of what Khano was wont to do to his own enemies.
I was tempted to give him first-hand experience of why executions are wrong, but he escaped my justice, taking his own life before I could avenge his victims.
I think the main thing which upset me about the whole endeavour was the fact that the demons had vanished without trace. Since they were the cause of the war, it came as a bitter blow to me. Zarach too had fled, to the neighbouring realm of Port Okra, and I had sent agents to follow him also.
But in spite of these failures, I had doubled the size of my realm. I changed the name of my prize to "Khiann Province", after one of my dead agents, and the capital was henceforth known as "Tiera" in memory of his companion.
As with Ha'Khun city, I opened it up to all races, posting one of my more trusted men to act as Governor.
The real prize was Governor Khano's son, Bhalo - a spoiled and thoroughly obnoxious prince of about fifty. Supposedly the child of his tiger father (now recently deceased), he took more after his wife, a lynx who had been executed shortly after the birth in the apparent belief that she had been unfaithful. Khano had nonetheless grudgingly brought his son up as an heir, finally accepting him as his true son once it became clear that he was not ageing past twenty-five. This curious upbringing had instilled in Bhalo a hatred for all things lynx, and he had tried very hard to kill Ashley upon sight, slaying several of my guards in the attempt.
Wanton murder is one of the few things which makes me angry enough to take the lives of others, and I would have killed him then, but I had a better idea...
When Port Okra decided to invade us, the story was rather different to the invasion of Macura Province.
Whether they acted out of panic at seeing their neighbour fall, or whether as I would like to believe, they thought Ha'Khun to be weakened by our attack on Macura, I cannot say with any certainty. But I can safely say that they had no idea of what they were letting themselves in for.
Lacking Azrael's portal technology or my own personal skill at teleportation, they were forced to use the more conventional approach of sending troops. Many men died, the result of the enemy's own prowess, countered by the fact that we had a team of snipers upon the slopes of the Black Mountains.
This initial carnage only ceased when I intervened in person, my troops falling back as if in rout, leaving me alone to face them, armed only with a projectile shield.
Their leader simply could not believe my audacity and began to taunt and heckle me. When I finally grew bored of this, I snapped my fingers and his entire battalion slumped into a state of unconsciousness as I cut through their primitive mind-shields like butter. He most certainly did believe my audacity after that encounter.
Now I was the master of three realms, and unhappily, more were due to follow, not least because Zarach had fled yet again. In both cases there were Creatures who were in high favour with the previous administration and something had to be done about them.
Some reluctantly embraced my new regime, others refused and were expelled from the realm, their possessions confiscated and their egos savagely beaten.
One chose to rebel, and I slew her with my tentacles as I had slain the bosses of Zarista Clan over a century before... yet another face to haunt me when I ponder my old crimes.
Decades passed, and in due course Ashley came up for retirement.
I been planning this moment for some time, but I had not told him a word of it - after all, he might have refused. Chuckling to myself, I wondered what he'd make of it, but whatever he might have said before, once it was done I was pretty sure that he wasn't going to back out of it.
"I have a surprise for you, old friend," I said, entering his chamber to find him reading a book by the fire. He looked up at me, and suddenly his body went limp. With care, I removed his glasses and pocketing them, slung him over my shoulders and carried him down to my laboratory.
On a stone table there was another figure, breathing rhythmically as he lay in the same state of unconsciousness as Ashley. I placed my friend upon a second slab, and stood between them clutching a jewelled pendant. I placed a hand upon each cat's forehead, the pendant posing a slight problem in that it required a third hand, but one of my wing-tentacles served this purpose adequately enough.
The difficult part was going to be clearing off the residual memories in the brain so that they could be replaced with the personality data from his soul, but I was pretty sure I would be able to handle it. Basically it was either that or run the risk of losing Ashley altogether.
The entire operation took about 45 seconds of extreme concentration. Standing over the young man, I probed his mind gently. It was confused, but I had suspected as much. I left him to sleep for about an hour, examining the elder lynx in the meantime.
"Happy retirement," I said to Ashley as he awoke. "Of course, you might want to consider postponing it for another few hundred years or so."
"What are you on about?" he said, and stopped, because it wasn't his voice that came out. Sitting up, he turned to one side and saw his own body lying there.
"Oh my Gods," he whispered, and looked down at himself, pawing at his fur and examining the spot patterns.
"That's... I'm... the prince kid from Macura. How on Furrae did you manage that? Soul transference?" he shivered, remembering what 'cubi can do to souls, and stared at the lifeless body besides him with a look of dawning horror.
"Good guess," I said. "And before you ask, no, he is not soul-dead. I've managed a complete transfer and he should recover shortly, although what he'll say when he comes out of it is anyone's guess.
"I could have slain him outright of course, but then I realised how much he resembled you, and what a waste it would be given that his body should be good for a few more centuries at least.
"You know, Ashley, I don't think you quite realise how much I've come to depend upon you, and the prospect of losing you was not something I was willing to endure."
"Well, you certainly think long-term, I'll give you that. Where did you keep him all this time?"
"In a cupboard," I replied. Ashley's reaction was priceless.
"Let me get this straight," he said, growing more accustomed to his new body.
"You kept the part-demon heir to Khiann Province locked in a broom cupboard for the last thirty-odd years?"
"More-or-less. I cast a zero-tau field around him to keep his body in suspension. I could probably have just locked him up in one of my dungeons, there was a risk that he might decide to follow his father's way out. So I kept him in stasis. The only real problem was when I needed to revive him, as I couldn't remember exactly which cupboard it was."
While Ashley recovered from the operation quickly enough, the real Bhano was not so lucky. Although Ashley had once been younger himself, Bhano had never experienced old age and the shock deranged him. It was easy enough to have him committed to an asylum in Port Okra where no-one would recognise him, and he spent the rest of his days there telling everyone that he was the real governor of Macura.