Calliope leaned back, considering the question. Outside the storm raged at full force, lightning crashing around the keep, rattling the sconces. They had signaled the Weather Witch with a flare of arcane light to let them know that the keep was secure and had received the acknowledging flashing of lanterns from Sketti. It would have been impossible to transfer the cannons now, even if they had wanted too. The seas were too rough for the Witch to leave her sheltered anchorage, though if the wind shifted direction radically Sketti would have no choice but to cut the anchor loose and head out into open water to ride out the storm and then find his way back when the weather settled. When things calmed down it should be possible to bring the ship into the main dock, where the derrick would make bringing the cannon down the cliffs much easier.

“I had planned to cast my eye to the south east and the cities of Arayak and Kushdi on the Arad Luin coast,” she explained as she leafed through a dry chronicle of life in the colonies. If the keep had a magical literature she was yet to find it.

“The emirs of booth those cities have an overabundance of ambitious sons, I had been writing to them, encouraging them to plot with promises of support.” Calaverde didn’t have a strong army but it had gold enough that she could have raised mercenaries for the purpose. Now that the wars were over the northern lands were swarming with unpaid men at arms looking for an outlet.

“Once they were ready to move I could have betrayed them to their fathers and waited for the civil wars to weaken them, then swept in and taken the cities,” she went on, swirling the wine in the goblet. Such a plan would have been her a chance to refill the treasury of Calaverde long enought to make her rule absolute and put every corsair from the Teeth of Mubara to the Vrettonian Coast under her banner. Who knows what she could have accomplished with a fleet like that. It seemed like an impossibly distant goal now. Well she had started from nothing before and she could rise up again. It was a game of a sort, though a hard and brutal one. Just like a sword fight, a single step could mean death.

“Funny thing about power,” she mused, “the more you have, the more you want.” It must have been her imagination but she could have sworn she felt the amulet at her breast pulse in agreement with the sentiment.