Published at 3rd of October 2023 12:04 pm

Chapter 4.9 In Which the Dark Lord Threads the Needle

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“A Rhaedswyth Velvet?” Captain Norovena had accepted the bottle from me with something very like reverence and now held it up, gazing in awe at the label. “Hell’s revels, man. You know what a nubile silverblend brandy like this is worth?”

“Nubile?” Surely I was missing something; my Blessing of Wisdom had never translated a word wrong, per se, but the complex interactions of language and culture meant I didn’t always understand the things I…understood.

The Captain turned his head toward me with a wink and one of those just-between-us-guys looks that for some reason I didn’t see very much in my organization these days. “You know, over fifteen years old. Marriageable age.”

“Ah, of course.” Fucking Fflyr. Actually I think the legal age in Japan is close to that, but that’s with parental consent, which means people aren’t out there doing it willy nilly because Japanese parents are not, as a rule, negligent maniacs. Something told me there were no similar mitigating factors in Dlemathlys. “Truthfully, no. I acquired that as part of a business deal which included enough other miscellany that I’m not entirely sure of the value of most of it. I take it this is a good bottle, then?”

“Lord Seiji,” he said solemnly, setting it down on his desk with care, “there are connoisseurs in this country who would demand you meet them on the field of honor for calling a Rhaedswyth Velvet merely good.”

“Yourself among them, I take it?”

“Absolutely not. Were I to so forget my stations as to begin trying to duel my superiors, I would certainly not start with you, nor over this. Especially not since you brought one into my very office.”

“See, I knew I’d come to the right place. After all, what’s the point of drinking a good vintage by oneself? You’ve never let me down yet, Captain.”

“I am even more pleased to be of service than usual. All right, this calls for the good glasses. Well, as good as I bother to keep around here, and may the Goddess forgive us for desecrating this bounty with such pedestrian housing.”

It didn’t come as a huge surprise that Captain Norovena did keep some fairly nice shot glasses in his office. I hadn’t had much opportunity to acquaint myself with Fflyr drinking culture, so I was actually quite interested in the designs. They were about the size of shot glasses I was familiar with, but square in shape and smoky gold in color. The actual glass part, I mean; they were elevated like wineglasses, but instead of a single glass stem each was held up by an intricate housing of carved green akornin forming four tall legs.

“I’m afraid I only have the two in this set, Miss Delavada,” he said apologetically, “but we can improvise…?”

“I’m on duty, Captain,” Aster said with a faint smile from the station she had taken up by the closed door of his office.

“Well, so am I, but my daily tasks shouldn’t call for as much need to scan for threats or swing a sword. At least, that’s the excuse I’ll go with.”

He removed the stopper with the same reverent attitude as before; it required no tool, being attached to a hinged apparatus of metal. An expensive vintage indeed. Norovena poured us each two fingers and handed me a glass, then lifted his own.

“Her light on us.”

“Kanpai,” I agreed, raising mine.

I was worried, I’ll admit it. It was with purely delighted surprise that I let the brandy wash across my tongue, savoring the gentle burn as it made its way down. So smooth, it was almost like…like burning ice cream. A steady herbal flavor that reminded me of vanilla and nutmeg, with high notes of cinnamon and citrus. At least, that was the best my uneducated palate could discern; I had the strong feeling a vintage like this was wasted on the likes of me. Here I was, just happy to be experiencing something flavored with that combination of spicy and sweet the Fflyr loved that was actually pleasing to experience.

“Holy shit,” I murmured, momentarily forgetting the nice formal manners I usually put on in front of Norovena.

He didn’t mind. The captain had his eyes closed, savoring. After a moment he inhaled slowly and let out a wistful little sigh. “There are the moments, my lord. One in a rare while, there’s a little spark of joy that makes all the bullshit seem worth it.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He poured us each two more fingers, and I hoped Aster had enough restraint not to roll her eyes like I knew she wanted to, at least not right in front of him. “This is a welcome surprise. I have to admit to you, Captain, after my experiences with Fflyr wine I was nervous. It’s all sour, or in some cases spicy. I mean, come on. What sort of lunatic even thinks of spicy wine?”

“Ah, you’ve stumbled across an interesting little bit of our history there, Lord Seiji,” he said with a faintly mischievous smile. “That was actually made as a joke by one of the country’s best vintners, when he got tired of foreign merchants complaining about spicy food. It turned out to be a profitable joke; it’s become a Fflyr tradition to spring firewine on unsuspecting foreigners. But over the decades, quite a few Fflyr decided they unironically like it, and…well, we’re stuck with the stuff now.”

“Madness.” I was pretty sure the combination of capsaicin and alcohol was literally a chemical weapon, in the right proportions.

“We have no shortage of that around here,” he agreed. “It’s a relatively gentle madness, though, compared to some. In any case, my lord, after not seeing you for some time I’m relieved to find you apparently the beneficiary of some success.”

“It’s been a rough few weeks for everyone on this island, myself not excluded. But I did have a few strokes of luck amid the chaos and managed to wrangle out a few victories. Overall, I’m not about to complain—for once. After being fully preoccupied out there in the countryside, though, I find myself very curious how things have been going here in town. And I figured, if I’m going to ask no less than the Captain of the Kingsguard to catch me up on the news, I had better show up with a pretty nice incentive.”

“For a foreigner, Lord Seiji, you’ve always shown a very intuitive grasp of how we Fflyr do things,” he said with a smile as smooth as the brandy. “Truth be told, I have also been bogged down out in the countryside, so to speak. Thanks to the great generosity of of our neighbors in Lancor—and of course the King, may She watch over him—there have been whole wagon trains of food, medicines, and other supplies that needed escorting to the various Clan fortresses.”

“Where,” I said more quietly, “they will undoubtedly sit until they all rot while the lowborn starve en masse in the snow.”

“Far be it from me to comment upon the designs of my betters,” he intoned with just enough of a hint of bitterness that I took it as a sign of great trust. These were the kinds of sentiments that could get a man like him much worse than fired if the wrong ears overheard. “The highborn are bestowed their positions by the divine plan of the Goddess Herself, as we all know. Whether they choose to feed their people or play in silos of unused grain like children splashing in puddles, this must be according to Her design. And what fool would dare gainsay a Goddess? But like your own news, Lord Seiji, mine isn’t all bad. Yes, the loss of crops and early onset of the cold are hurting people, but some of the stranger recent developments in the Gutters are helping alleviate the pinch.”

“Stranger?”

“Well, public health has taken a sharp upswing for the most peculiar reasons. You would probably have noticed at least one when you passed through the Gutters, my lord.”

“It didn’t smell nearly as bad,” I nodded. “I figured the cold helped with that…”

“Perhaps, but it is mostly due to…and I cannot believe I am saying this…the canals being full of slimes. I haven’t had men to spare for monitoring the likes of that, but I’ve made sure to stay abreast of the gossip. The things are staying in the water, and they’ve cleaned it with astonishing effectiveness. The Gutters used to be built around filthy waters, with all the health hazards that causes, and now…they aren’t. In just a couple of weeks, outbreaks of sickness have dropped amazingly.”

“Hum. Well, that’s a useful trick, and no mistake. What about that Healer character who did it, what’s he been up to?”

Norovena regarded me without expression for a moment, then paused to take a sip of his brandy—and savor it, of course. Yeah, he knew who the Healer was. He’d broadly hinted at it before, and others had warned me that there were plenty of signs there for anybody who’d seen the both of us in action to follow. Still, it wasn’t yet time to acknowledge these things openly. As much as that would make everything easier, we both needed the deniability, until a great deal more trust had been built between us. And that was a thing that could only happen with time. Gizmit was right, I needed to put in some diligent work here.

“The man himself has not put in an appearance in a while,” he finally said in the most performatively neutral tone I’d ever heard. “Which I can’t say I mind, given the ruckus he tends to create during his appearances. The Healer’s one who makes his presence felt even when he’s gone, though. That…healing slime he gave the Convocation has been making ripples all over.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that,” I said lightly. “Hard to credit, having heard it described. Why slimes, of all the damn things?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” I was seriously impressed at the evenness of his tone. “Though at least one benefit is that slimes are pretty easy to get to reproduce, as long as you’ve got trash even crawns wouldn’t eat. By now there’s one of those in every temple in Gwyllthean, and they’ve sent some down to Fflyrdylle. Even better, the Convocation is not stingy with providing healing to those in need. I’m sure it won’t be long until Lancor and whoever else gets their hands on their own healing slimes, but for this one brief moment in history, Fflyr Dlemathlys actually has something better than any other nation on Ephemera. It’s…quite a thing to live through.”

“I’m honestly surprised they weren’t all immediately seized by the Clans.”

“Oh, attempts were made, and quickly rebuffed. The Convocation has recruited the King’s Guild to back them up on this. Don’t mistake me, my lord: the higher-ups in the Convocation are politically-minded creatures, but the organization itself is devoted to the principles of the Goddess. That’s an inevitable drawback to filling your power structure with people of principle. Sometimes you have to let them do the right thing just to keep them pacified.”

“Sounds like a pretty good time for the Gutters… I mean, hunger and cold aside.”

“Mm.” He sipped his drink, gazing abstractly at the wall. “For other and stranger reasons. You know, for some reason, the shake-up with the Gutters gangs as they’ve settled down from their recent transition of power has apparently shut down all the drug pushers. Or at least, redirected them.”

Damn right it had. My advisors had talked me down from trying to get out of the drug business entirely by pointing out that drug trafficking was impossible to stamp out; the combination of eternal demand and general economic desperation meant a supply would be provided, and all I could do by trying to shut it down was lock myself out of it. By remaining in charge, I was able to exercise some controls. By, for example, dictating that hard drugs—which, not to my surprise, turned out to be created almost entirely by goblin alchemists—could still be made and sold, but all efforts to recruit new users were to cease on pain of broken kneecaps.

“Redirected them?” I asked innocently.

Norovena turned his gaze back to me. Still inscrutable, and now contemplative. “The greasy bastards who used to push have switched to recruiting for back-alley doctors. Goblin doctors—the same little shits who make the hard dust, as far as anyone can tell them apart. They’ve branched out into medicine, of all the damned things. I highly doubt their cures are anywhere near as good as what’s made by middle ring alchemists, but they’re a lot cheaper and to Gutter folk, more accessible. More and more help for the helpless crawling out of the crawnholes, right as the Clans are not providing the help they are specifically supposed to. I’m of two minds, Lord Seiji. All of this is extremely good here and now for maintaining the peace, but it’s setting up a situation that could get extremely dicey down the line.”

I was pretty proud of my idea to repurpose the goblin drug dealers into…well, more wholesome drug dealers. Also of the way I was setting this whole island up for a big reversal of power. Less pleased that someone this connected to the power structure had seen what was taking shape.

“Dicey?” I prompted.

“All those whores the Healer spirited out of Cat Alley,” he said suddenly, again gazing into the distance past me, “never turned up again. Isn’t that peculiar? Of course, Dount is half wild; people disappear all the time. Not usually that many at a time, though, nor a recognizable group. Oh, well, at least it’s a group that nobody in power would miss. It’s a funny thing, Lord Seiji—I haven’t had much time to patrol the Gutters myself, of course, but my men who’ve been eyeballing the gangs’ movements keep reporting that there are an awful lot of women among them these days. There had always been the odd one or two, and a bit more than that ever since Lady Gray took over, but now it’s well more than half. I find myself curious what’s going to happen when the gangsters and the Kingsguard start encountering each other at close enough range to recognize faces. There are a lot of louts in my command who were intimately familiar with the population of Cat Alley.”

Shit. Shit fuck shit. I knew Norovena was capable, but I’d seriously underestimated him. I treated myself to another sip of the velvety brandy, watching him in silence with my expression firmly under control.

“The dilemma for me,” he ruminated, “is that all of this, here and now, seems great. Fewer dustheads on the street—those bastards are always a nightmare when they go berserk, it takes three soldiers on average to restrain a man with a laborer’s muscles and a head full of dust. More health, less pressure, less tension. Peace and quiet, exactly what I like. Just the sort of thing I might expect someone who took a liking to Dount but didn’t quite understand it would try to arrange. The thing is, Lord Seiji… There is a hierarchy in Fflyr Dlemathlys. Lowborn are on the bottom, and the likes of whores, bandits, and druggies on the bottom of them. Goblins below the bottom. If you start to elevate those on the lowest rungs on the ladder, it raises the prospect that the ladder itself is…malleable. I don’t know any quicker way to make the people higher up on that ladder go completely berserk.”

I breathed in and out. Man, even the after-vapor of that brandy was delicious. The alcohol wasn’t helping me think, of course, but I hadn’t had enough to really mess me up, and none of the thoughts occupying me right now were new. Only my perspective on the immediacy of the issue.

As Gizmit had advised, I considered the matter from Captain Norovena’s perspective, as best I could imagine it. He was a frustratingly opaque man, a social chameleon whose inner thoughts were a mystery, but I had worked with him enough on actually productive tasks to have an idea of his priorities. He had to keep order in Gwyllthean because it was his job, and failure would invite not only the loss of the privileges he’d worked so hard to accrue, but likely severe punishment from his unpredictable monster of an Archlord. He didn’t get enough credit, or respect, or compensation. His job was fundamentally not possible—you can’t truly keep order in a corrupt system, even when that corrupt system is what’s demanding that you keep order. His life was a sequence of high-stakes compromises.

And then, along came this Lord Seiji character.

Okay, I’m Captain Norovena. What do I think about Seiji? Well, he has the capacity to lay and execute complicated plans, and is clearly working toward something larger. Something that involves taking over organized crime on the island, but it looks like his ambitions might be even bigger than that. Working with him is profitable. I think I like him better than the existing structure—whether or not I like him personally (Norovena’s inner perspective wasn’t that apparent to me) he’s a more amiable option in a lot of ways to any of the current ones. He seems to have a soft spot for the vulnerable—either that, or is willing to exploit them for his own benefit. Possibly—probably—both. And I definitely don’t want to piss him off. This motherfucker is a powerful sorcerer who nails people to walls. Lord Seiji seems like a big risk, but also a big opportunity, if carefully handled.

So it’s a question of who to side with. Lord Seiji is a scary bastard—but so is Caludon Aelthwyn and the whole system he represents.

And that was how I had to tip the scales, just as Gizmit had seen. If you have to pick one scary bastard to back against the other, pick the one who can win, and who makes it worth your while.

“It’s funny,” I said aloud. “I wouldn’t have thought Highlord Olumnach was so civic-minded.”

Norovena’s eyes snapped back to mine. “Highlord Olumnach?”

“Don’t worry, Captain,” I said graciously. “Obviously a man in your position can’t voice certain statements about a powerful member of the aristocracy. I would understand if you feel the need to defend him, even; let nobody claim that Captain Norovena has ever been anything less than a credit to his office. Still, we all know who runs crime on Dount, now that Lady Gray is out of the picture.”

He stared at me in silence for a few beats.

“Yes,” he said at last, not blinking. “I suppose we do, don’t we?”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though,” I mused, lounging back in my chair. “After all, you yourself pointed out to me that Olumnach is… How to put it? Ambitious, and resentful. If he were cooking up some grandiose scheme to unseat Clan Aelthwyn, well, that wouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, now would it?”

“It…is certainly consistent with established facts that are widely known,” he said slowly. Still staring at me, expressionless. But catching up, and playing along.

“As civic-minded citizens, clearly it behooves us to do what we can, in our own small way, for the overall peace of Dount, and the well-being of its people. Having spotted the early warnings of a plot by Highlord Olumnach against the Archlord… Why, we’ll just have to be ready for him to make his move, will we not?”

“Not too ready, of course,” Norovena said. “Anything that might be taken as an accusation against a Highlord would have severe consequences, both legal and otherwise. Anything he caught wind of which smelled like a threat to his plans would have consequences entirely of the ‘otherwise’ variety.”

“Indeed so. Absolute discretion is necessary when it comes to matters like this.”

“I think you and I both have a capacity for that, Lord Seiji.”

“Yes, I think it’s not too conceited to say we have mutually demonstrated it by now.”

We shared a bland, meaningless little smile.

“Of course,” I continued, “the risk is that the Highlord’s eyes are too big for his belly. I have heard it observed that he is…less than careful. The Archlord, or even the power structure in general, might perceive a threat just such as you describe and move against it before he is ready to put his plan into effect.”

“That is not improbable,” he said gravely. “These are always the most difficult and complicated moments for a man in my position, Lord Seiji, when the intricate movements of my superiors take shape around my own humble attempts to execute my duties. I wonder, my lord, if you would indulge me by sharing your insight. Were such a…complicated situation to arise, what would you make of it?”

“Hmmm.” I made a show of thinking, tilting my head back and slowly tapping my empty glass against my lower lip. “Well, you’re right, Captain. These things are complicated, both strategically and ethically. It’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do is, let alone the best thing.”

“Indeed so, my lord.”

“Is a crime really a crime, if it’s in service to the greater good?” I pontificated. “If everyone knows Highlord Olumnach is to blame for the sorry state of this island, and yet he is too clever to let his tracks be found… Well, if and when the Archlord, the Clans, the King’s Guild or Convocation or whoever else takes note of a social upset on the island and moves against it, is it not the right thing to…gently direct their attention his way? Even if, just for example, the necessary evidence has to be…creatively acquired. Clearly, you would be recognized and rewarded for such a feat, but of course a principled man such as yourself would not be swayed by such considerations. It is, after all, simply the right thing to do.”

Norovena studied me through a long, weighted silence, the only movement his forefinger slowly tapping against the rim of his glass.

“I believe,” he said at long last, “you are onto something, Lord Seiji. That is…one way, indeed, of securing a peaceful future for Dount. Perhaps the only way.”

Acknowledgment was not agreement, but we were getting there. I’d made him understand that siding with me led to plausible success, but the risks of turning on his current masters remained forbidding. Time to emphasize that I was not only the smarter horse to back, but the better one.

“Then in the meantime,” I said pleasantly, “we must simply continue being good citizens. You know, I think I’ll take a page out of the Healer’s book. Do something good for the community. We do all have to live here, after all.”

“Oh?” A note of wariness returned to his eyes. “Do remember, Lord Seiji, that the Healer’s book contains a lot of…volatile recipes.”

“Quite, quite, but I had in mind something a bit more in keeping with the established order around here. Rhydion has been after me for a while to come along on his zombie-hunting expedition as…ah, magical support.” Somehow, saying the word healer out loud felt a bit too on the nose, even if we both knew what was up. “I was thinking of going down to the King’s Guild and taking him up on it. That’s a worthwhile thing to do, surely, and… What’s the matter?”

Norovena had straightened up with the first expression of open surprise he’d shown me.

“Oh, that’s right, my lord, you have been out of town. I guess you haven’t heard.”

Oh, come the fuck on. What now?!

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