Valkyrie's Shadow

Winter's Crown: Act 6, Chapter 2

Chapter 2

After stopping by her city manor to check if any urgent matters from Warden’s Vale required her attention, Ludmila strolled out of the north gate of the central district and into the common area of E-Rantel. She was accompanied by a new hire who went by the name of Lisette – an orphan raised in the city under the auspices of the cathedral – who now worked under Terah as a chambermaid.

Ludmila could almost feel the nervousness coming off of the young woman behind her, though she guessed it was probably due to her being unaccustomed to her new position. Then again, she was hired under the recommendation of the cathedral, and most of the temple staff there treated Ludmila with a strange sort of reverence that she thought more appropriately directed towards a saint rather than a noble. Sooner or later, however, she figured that Lisette would come to understand how plain and unassuming the lady of House Zahradnik was and settle into a sense of normalcy.

If Lisette was determined to be a trustworthy and capable household servant, Ludmila would send her to the temple to follow in Aemilia’s footsteps as a maid with divine magic. After a month of study, her lady’s maid reported that she was beginning to grasp basic orisons, though the temple staff noted that it still meant that she was at least months away from harnessing First Tier magic. Even so, Ludmila took it as promising news and an avenue to earnestly explore and promote in her household for the long term.

They came to the intersection leading to the Demihuman quarter, and Ludmila felt Lisette draw closer to her as an Ogre with a handcart suited to its hulking form came out onto the street leading out towards the northern gate of the city. More and more nonhuman races were moving into the repurposed pauper’s quarter of E-Rantel, but simply having them appear was not enough to acclimate the Human citizens to their presence. As with many other long-standing customs and perceptions, only time would probably accustom the residents to radical change.

Strangely enough, she thought that her own people, and those who worshipped The Six in the duchy at large, were faring better in respect to the rapidly realigning realities of the Sorcerous Kingdom. They were a religious minority here in the first place and had a long history of needing to ignore or put up with many things. Be it heathens, heretics, or nonhuman beings altogether, it practically amounted to the same thing when it came to their daily lives in the Duchy of E-Rantel. As long as their faithful weren’t being actively persecuted – and as long as something wasn’t trying to eat them – they had grown to be a fairly tolerant lot over the generations. freew(e)bnove(l)

Ludmila and Lisette turned off of the northern street – and out from behind the odoriferous Ogre and its cart – into the western sections of the city. Five minutes later, they walked up to the front of LeNez, and Lisette came forward to open the door to the sound of brass chimes.

Much like the first time she had come to the shop, a wave of heat sweltering heat accompanied the cacophony of scents that billowed out of the entrance. If anything, summer made the experience three times worse. Within was the slovenly figure of Germaine LeNez, who very much looked like she had melted into a puddle over her countertop. contemporary romance

“Welcome…” The perfumer half-spoke into the glass, “Oh, hey Baroness.”

“What happened with those cooling boxes that you bought?” Ludmila asked, fanning herself as the prickle of sweat spread over her skin.

“I had ‘em for a while, but…”

“…but?” freew(e)bnove(l)

“I wanted to figure out how they made them,” Germaine said, “so I tried taking one apart.”

“I see,” Ludmila frowned, “so it broke?”

“It blew up!” The perfumer sat up in her seat with a pout, “The assholes that made it took measures against others copying their work by making sure the thing would destroy itself if anyone tinkered around with it!”

Ludmila blinked at her outburst. Was that even legal? What if children tried tampering with the magical item?

“Wait,” she said, “how large was this explosion? Were you hurt?”

“Nothing a potion or two didn’t fix,” Germaine said as she stood up to walk around the counter. “Problem was that it took out half of my warehouse. Ugh…I’m so behind now.”

“I can’t believe they’re allowed to sell something like that here,” Ludmila said. “Does the Empire allow the use of this…protection in their markets as well?”

“They sure do. I hear the Imperial Ministry of Magic and their affiliates use the same protections for their own stuff, or at least something similar. ‘Buyer beware’ indeed.”

She wondered if every magic item was like that. Would all of the streetlamps in E-Rantel explode if someone fiddled around with them? For that matter, she had set the newly-migrated members of Zurrernorn to task creating magic items for the everyday use of her subjects. Hopefully, there wasn’t anything absurd attached to them…

“Your stuff’s in the back,” the jingle of keys accompanied Germaine’s words, “just come around the counter – the warehouse door is wrecked, anyways.”

They followed the perfumer through a door at the back of the shop, and Ludmila eyed the row of alchemical burners adding to the summer heat trapped within the store. Efforts to turn her demesne into a more cosmopolitan form that would turn it into a place of note on the map were proceeding apace, but it was often such a vague and colossal undertaking that she just couldn’t hold even a fraction of the pieces together in her head.

Under the illumination of a row of magical lamps, Germaine led them through a cluttered row of broken shelves and half-swept debris. On the far side lay her order: hundreds of hollow glass arrows, filled with various alchemical oils. She stopped at the edge of the shelves where they were placed.

“Luckily, I started on your order after I blew myself up,” the perfumer let out a nervous laugh, “else the entire block might have gone up in elemental splendour and pieces of yours truly would still be raining down on the street. You can start stowing ‘em away; if you have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer.”

Ludmila took a step forward, then stopped. She had handled the arrows before, but, now that they were filled with volatile alchemical oils, everything seemed just that much more dangerous.

“How much force is required to break these now?” She asked.

“Hasn’t changed from when you’ve dropped ‘em off,” the perfumer answered. “I get how ya feel, though. Glass is inert, as far as almost all other materials go, so you won’t have problems like acid eating through it while it’s sitting in storage. Hm…have you used any of these before?”

“I’ve used a vial of Alchemists’ Fire to kill some Cockroaches, once.”

“Uh, Cockroaches?”

“They were blocking the entire passage that we were trying to get through.”

Germaine peered at her suspiciously, but in the end, said nothing. Ludmila lifted the first arrow from the padded surface of the shelf and held it up at eye level. The hollow point was filled with a clear liquid, and it occurred to her that she had no idea how to distinguish one arrow from another. She went up and down the shelves, taking a few arrows randomly and placing them into her Infinite Haversack. Returning to the front of the aisle, she stuck her fingers into the magical container, bringing a particular type of arrow to mind.

Ludmila felt a shaft brush against her fingers, and she withdrew it from the Infinite Haversack and held the point up between herself and the perfumer.

“Is this filled with Alchemist’s Fire?” She asked.

Rather than look at the head, Germaine bent forward and eyed the fletching on the other end.

“Hmm, yeah, that’s right,” she said. “I was gonna say that you should have figured out a way to distinguish one arrow from the other. Usually, people tint the glass, but I ended up marking the fletching to tell you which one is which.”

Ludmila flipped the arrow over. One of the feathers was marked with a bright red line.

“Blue is for frost,” Germaine offered helpfully. “Light green is acid; purple is lightning and white is holy water. Yellow is for signal arrows, dark greens are tanglefoot and black ones are thunderclap. The ones with more volume follow the same scheme, but the effects are, well, bigger.”

Replacing the arrow in her bag, Ludmila went through drawing different arrows until she was satisfied that the Infinite Haversack worked the way that Lady Shalltear had described to her. Bringing to mind the arrow type or the colour of its fletching called the appropriate one to her fingers, but she decided that drawing them by their content would result in a lower risk of retrieving the wrong arrow.

“That bag of yours is really something,” the perfumer said. “Containers like that are one of the big goals of every enchanter.”

“I take it that they’re not very common.”

“Ahaha…yeah, right. If they could be so easily made, economies would be turned upside-down. An enchanter of sufficient skill has to also have access to fifth-tier magic to make them. I’ve just started learning how to enchant things this year, but, well, my research has been pretty catastrophic, as you can see.”

The perfumer made a sweeping motion behind her, to the broken shelves, ruined equipment and shattered glass. Ludmila still couldn’t figure out how such severe security measures could be legal.

“Was Re-Estize aware that all these magical items being imported from the Empire had the potential to be violently explosive?”

“Re-Estize?” Germaine scoffed, “Maybe one in a hundred nobles in Re-Estize could tell you the difference between a Magic Arrow and a Fireball. Even fewer care for anything beyond a loose description. It’s just parlour tricks or a convenience to them: something that either saves them coin, provides entertainment, heals their ouchies, or makes expensive things that they can tax. That’s as far as magic laws go in Re-Estize.”

Ludmila briefly reviewed her knowledge of Re-Estize law, deciding that the perfumer’s statement was not far off of the mark. Utility magic was at the forefront of what could be considered common knowledge of magic in Re-Estize, and few laws were in place for anything beyond how magical goods and services were taxed. The fees for divine magic were entirely out of the hands of the administration, being one of the sole rights held by the temples.

She couldn’t decide what led to this prevailing attitude amongst the nobility of her former nation. Even after a few months of study as a noble of the Sorcerous Kingdom, it felt like terminally fatal ignorance in hindsight. Her prevailing notion was that the lack of acceptance and institutions that promoted magic were probably the true culprits – if one did not know, then one did not know, and the collective mindset of one’s peers, entrenched by generations of ignorance, turned into a giant roadblock on the path of knowledge for the entire nation.

Breaking this chain of ignorance was central to her fief’s policies, as it was the first problem that needed to be remedied if she wanted to promote magical development in her demesne.

Germaine’s tired sigh drew Ludmila’s attention away from collecting her arrows, and she saw the perfumer frowning out at the ruined half of her warehouse.

“…if you don’t mind my asking,” Ludmila said, “are you alright? I mean, your business and all.”

“I’ll survive, if that’s what you’re asking,” Germaine replied. “Arcane vocations make a handy amount at my degree of expertise, so it’s not as if I’m going to go out of business and starve. What’s really bugging me is that this ‘accident’ is like having three or four years of my work go up in smoke.”

“Did your purchase come with any sort of warning?”

“Nope, not a peep. Just ‘thank you for your patronage, ma’am’ and off I went. Maybe it’s actually on purpose: the ‘feature’ only triggers if you take it apart in a way that another enchanter would if they’re studying it. It’s built to destroy their competition – literally.”

Ludmila frowned. Every day magical items were looking more and more like malicious attempts to undermine rival industries.

“How do you know that?” She asked.

“Well,” Germaine answered, “after the damn thing blew up on me, I was hoppin’ mad. I didn’t want any more explosions, so I took the other two boxes, flew up and dropped ‘em into a rocky field outside of the city. Things just busted apart like normal, with no explosions. After that, I smashed ‘em up really good just in case, but nothing happened. Now maybe I’m just sour over everything, but I think it clearly proves that it was done that way on purpose.”

“I see,” Ludmila said. “Maybe there should be an advisory for this…did you let anyone know?”

“I went to the Alchemist Guild to see if they could do anything about my losses – they couldn’t – then I went to the Merchant Guild to bitch. Not that they could do anything: they didn’t make the things in the first place, and the Empire has a vested interest in protecting their magic item industry.”

“They probably also have a vested interest in not blowing up the property of their Suzerain.”

“Maybe. Stuff like that is out of us merchants’ reach, though. Maybe you could put in a grievance for me, eh, my lady?”

“Actually…have you given any thought to my proposal from back then?”

“…you’re evil, you know?”

Ludmila turned away from Germaine’s glower and resumed gathering arrows from the shelves. She had made her offer before the perfumer suffered her setback – several times, in fact. The vision for her demesne grew in depth and complexity as time passed, which in turn allowed her to go into further detail into what she was looking for and what she could offer, yet she was always met with flat refusal.

She didn’t believe that she was exploiting her in a moment of weakness. Far from it, she believed that they both had much to gain from the relationship, and would be better off in the long run for it. Still, it probably didn’t sound that way from someone in Germaine’s current circumstances.

The last of the arrows on the shelves were gathered, then Ludmila tried retrieving a few from her Infinite Haversack again.

“So what was your offer again?” Germaine asked quietly.

Ludmila returned the arrow and mentally fumbled around for an answer to the unexpected question. Dealing with business arrangements was really not her thing; she received a great deal of help from her friends when figuring out how she would structure her proposals.

“I would like to acquire your business,” she said after a moment of silence, “and your services as a talented arcane craftsman. Your shop and warehouse will be retained as a storefront in the city, and you may hire shopkeepers to manage sales and marketing. A new, larger facility will be constructed in my demesne to manufacture your products, and you’ll move in with a number of apprentices of your choosing. Accommodations will be provided as a part of the terms of your tenure.”

“Tenure…so I’ll be your vassal?”

“Well, technically every citizen in the demesne is my subject, but yes – you’ll have a formal contract of tenure in the form of an honour…i-if it’s not to your liking, I can lower your position to that of a company employee…”

It was something her friends warned her about. Talented and powerful individuals tended to enjoy their independence, so being formally inducted into a noble house’s rigid structure was something that might turn them off from an otherwise attractive proposal. Still, Ludmila was uncomfortable with the workings of a company, so she at least wanted the heads of the various ventures as her vassals.

“An honour…so I’ll be a member of the gentry? Dame LeNez – or something like that.”

“One of my longer-term goals is to promote a thriving community of magic casters in my territory. While the temples have their own organizational structure, arcane casters have nothing to speak of here. I haven’t given much thought to the actual titles themselves, but the title would be independent of your position within the institution that you work for.”

“Y’know, creating a ‘community’ of magic casters might be just a bit harder than you think.”

“A few others have mentioned that to me as well,” Ludmila replied, “even the Magician Guild says that the number of magic casters capable of performing Second Tier magic is extremely low. With so many mages fleeing after the annexation of the duchy, we’ve been left in dire straits – the tally made at the beginning of the new administration indicated that there are barely three dozen Human mages capable of casting Second Tier magic or better in the entire Sorcerous Kingdom. This includes Adventurers and crafters like yourself.”

“Okay, so you know…but you make it sound like you’ve got some sort of trick to deal with that.”

“It may seem like a trick to some,” Ludmila smiled slightly. “But I’m just doing it in the only ways I know how. We’ll be attracting as many as we can from elsewhere and identifying children who qualify to be raised as Apprentices. They’re not exactly novel ideas – the temples have been raising Acolytes using the latter method for centuries. I believe that the low rate of professional mages is not due to the inability to rise above the first tier of magic, but the lack of opportunity. It is difficult to make a living wage with low tier magic due to its oversupply in most places. This, in turn, makes magic casters pursue other professions instead to survive. They never advance because they cannot afford to.”

“So…what, you just plan on paying for all of them?”

“Yes?”

“That’s crazy,” Germaine laughed.

“It’s not,” Ludmila said. “The changes brought about by the Sorcerous Kingdom – the effects of Undead labour in particular – create a scenario where I can do exactly that. It doesn’t even strain my revenues due to the situation of my demesne.”

“I’d have to see that with my own two eyes – I hear most of the nobles are in a bind when it comes to implementing Undead labour. They got too many tenants and not enough land to adopt the new systems properly.”

“Does that mean you’ll be coming to Warden’s Vale?” Ludmila asked hopefully.

Germaine’s smile vanished, replaced by an uncertain frown.

“What about my research?” She asked, “That’s the entire purpose of this shop – to fund all the things that I wanted to learn in the future.”

“I wanted you more for that than anything else,” Ludmila said. “Once you get your new manufactory up and running, you may propose new projects that you’d like to pursue. You might even be able to lead entire teams of researchers if things go well.”

“Everything I come up with will belong to the company?”

“Yes. You’ll be credited for your achievements, of course. I don’t know too many mages yet, but the freedom to pursue their craft and the recognition of their peers seem to be more valuable than mere material wealth.”

“I guess that sums it up pretty well,” Germaine admitted. “I’ll be upfront and say that what you’ve been offering me this entire time has been a pretty good deal – too good, actually – but entering the service of a noble means giving up your freedom. I started from scratch: working hard as an apprentice since I was eight, then buying this place and building up my dreams…and then the work that meant the most to me went kaboom. I probably don’t have to tell you how much it hurts. Then, an opportunistic noble walks in and offers the chance to get it all back…uh, that’s what you’re offering, right?”

“I don’t know precisely what it is that you’ve lost, but if it can be replaced by new purchases from somewhere, then yes. As for the idea of freedom, well, my current subjects would say that there are plenty of benefits to being under the protection of a noble…and personally, I have different views on the subject.”

“Oh yeah?” Germaine raised an eyebrow, “Then if I’m to be your vassal, I’d at least like to know what they are.”

Ludmila met her look, wondering what she could say to a talented and independent individual like Germaine LeNez. They lived in the same world – the same duchy, even – yet it seemed that they also lived a world apart.

“Then...as a liege to a promising new vassal,” she said. “I would tell them that the idea of pure freedom is a childish notion. Though one might not be a literal slave, no one is truly ‘free’. All actions have consequences; all things are bound to one another in some way, and the world does not care how you feel about it or if you are even aware of the fact. Those who insist on ignoring this basic truth are some of the most dangerous individuals that can exist. The whimsical notion of freedom that so many feel that they have the right to has no inherent value. It is the price that the world exacts upon you, or what others have paid on your behalf, that ultimately determine what your measure of ‘freedom’ is worth.”

『Baroness Zahradnik, a Class B Advisory has been issued for Warden’s Vale.』

Ludmila froze for a heartbeat, then placed a hand over her ear to indicate that she was receiving a Message before turning away.

『How long ago was this?』

『The Bone Vultures on extended patrol reported in less than a minute ago.』

『Has the advisory been issued to the territory at large?』

『We are awaiting your confirmation.』

『Then what is it, how far away, and how long have they been there for?』

『A large force of Demihumans was spotted entering the upper reaches from the wilderness to the west. The Bone Vultures aren’t intelligent enough to make a comprehensive report, but it is at least enough to fill the main pass.』

According to the maps provided to her by Lady Aura, the main pass into the upper reaches was actually the vestige of an ancient highway, built by some civilization lost to time. If the entire pass was filled, then there would be thousands of Demihumans. It was a fair distance away from her borders, but swift raiders with Ranger skills could potentially make the trek in mere hours.

『Then go ahead and issue the advisory. It’s well into the evening, but make sure there aren’t any loose people out there before you close things up. Send an escort to the logging camp to get the woodcutters safely home.』

『It will be done. Will you be commanding the defence?』

『Yes, of course. I will contact Lady Shalltear before anything else. For now, redeploy the Bone Vultures and Death Knights working for the villages – keep the fields and harbour secure.』

『Understood.』

The Message spell abruptly cut off. Ludmila turned back to face Lisette and Germaine.

“The price of freedom?” The perfumer asked.

Every generation of her family had sacrificed their entire lives, paying that price on behalf of so many that barely spared a thought for them...and now her turn had come. Understanding that only those who shared the same history could probably empathize, Ludmila could only respond with a mirthless smile.

“Something like that.”

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