Sahid Empire

The garden argument¶

The Sahid do not consider conquest cruel. They consider it necessary, and they have a long, coherent, deeply unwelcome argument for the position.

Foreign lands are ill-tended gardens, wasted by whoever currently holds them. A weak hand cannot hold a blade, nor a crown, nor a river valley that could be feeding four times as many people as it does. From the burning heart of the desert the host rides out to correct this, and it rides out convinced, which is the part that unsettles everyone. The Empire is not looking for an excuse. It has a thesis, it has been refining the thesis for three hundred years, and it would very much like to discuss it with you.

The land was always fertile. Only the hands were wrong.

Inscription over the gate of a Sahid colonial garrison

Discipline as the whole of the state¶

Colonies are forged with spear and fire and then administered with an exactness that astonishes everyone who only met the spear.

Sahid provinces are famously well ordered, famously well drilled, and famously unpleasant to be conquered by twice, because there is rarely a second time. Roads get built. Registers get kept. Grain gets stored against a bad year and is actually there in the bad year. The garrison is a school as much as a fortress, and the children of the conquered are taught in it, in Sahid, free of charge, which is either the Empire's greatest kindness or its most effective weapon depending on which generation you ask.

Qal Sahid governs by circuit rather than by correspondence. Inspectors arrive without notice, read everything, and leave. A governor is not asked how the province is doing. He is told.

The cheapest army in the world¶

The state faith is the School of War, and its effect on the Empire's finances is the single most important fact in Sahid strategy.

Ragundian soldiery serves without wages and retires without a pension. Blades bow to duty and no gold binds them, and so there are always soldiers under arms, in peace, in famine, in years when no rival can afford to keep a tenth as many. Every calculation any enemy of the Empire makes has to begin with the fact that the Sahid host does not have to be paid for and therefore does not have to be disbanded.

The Empire did not design this. It inherited it, and then built a state that would fall over without it.

The savannah, and what the church did with it¶

Three expeditions went onto the plain to teach the Gorehorn herds what a weak hand cannot hold. None came back.

Any other power would have recorded a defeat. A faith whose central claim is that every death proves the strength of the faithful had nowhere to file three lost armies except as scripture, and the battle-priests duly concluded that the minotaurs were Ragundiazal's own handiwork and had been walking the savannah long before the Empire thought to carry him there.

So the Empire stands ten points above neutral with a people who buried three of its armies, its priests go to the savannah on pilgrimage, and there has never been a fourth expedition. The Crown has never been entirely comfortable with its own church, and the church has never much needed it to be.

Governing under this flag¶

You will hold what you take, and you will pay for it in wages you do not owe and grievance you do.

The standing feuds with Aethrassia and Lyaud arrive with the seal. Expect raids, expect to win them, and expect Qal Sahid to be more interested in your registers than in your victories, because the Empire has never had a shortage of victories and has frequently had a shortage of grain.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.