At the depot, several dozen tons of coal, ore, and mercenaries traded places with half a dozen cast bronze bells, a gear the size of a small mech, and a large number of sealed crates marked with abbreviations and numbers that meant nothing to me. Then we headed down to a compound just over a mile from the depot, accompanied by relieved-looking oxen pulling empty wagons. This was a slightly inconvenient distance, but not a long one. It was sort of a modern village, a collection of a dozen boxy buildings set beside a fast-moving stream, surrounded by a low wall to discourage wildlife from wandering in. (My first priority, I decided, was raising the height of the wall in case of more serious trouble than wandering wildlife.)

It was, I learned, an exceptionally clever arrangement, made possible only by an exchange of favors between the actual owner of the land (the margrave) and the industrialist. The industrialist, in spite of his wealth, was a lesser variety of noble, one not high enough to merit being called “your lordship” or dispense high justice in his own name, but could act as the higher noble’s proxy by appointment.

Specifically, he referred to himself as a baron, which Gavreau explained to me as being a sort of French title comparable to the local title of freiherr. I pointed out that the industrialist in question looked like he’d grown up on the wrong side of the Gothic Empire’s border with Lithuania rather than west of the Istros; at that point, Gavreau assumed a mournful look, saying the industrialist was likely a “jumped-up merchant with blood more gold than blue.”

I don’t think I will ever quite understand nobles.

The shrewdness of the baron in locating his factory in the middle of the countryside and purchasing the right to act as a lord over the lands in the area requires some explanation. It would have been initially less expensive for the baron to have set up his factory in Dab or one of the other towns clustered together in the area, but there were a lot of costs associated with being in a city in the long run. This included taxes, criminal activity, competitors stealing his trade secrets, and increased expenses on his own workers.

This had to be explained to me at length before I believed it. It turned out he wasn’t paying his workers less than they would earn in the city. Instead, he was paying them slightly more than the going wage, a measure necessary to convince skilled workers to move to a more isolated location. At least on paper; in practice, much of it ended up back in his pockets. Beyond charging roughly a third of their base pay rate for food and lodging (a rate that he claimed was a heavy discount), he also sold them various goods and services.

The workers could pay to take a train to Dab when they had days off, shop in Dab, and return; or they could buy things directly from the industrialist’s own general store. His general store carried everything from candy to drinks to books to clothing; the prices were a little higher than in town, but not so high as to outweigh the cost of a train ticket for anything less than a major shopping expedition. There was a public house for drinking, separate from the mess hall. Drinks were rationed out carefully by the bartender, as the baron did not want his workers to drink to excess (any who did so more than once were likely to be fired), but even so, the gross take from alcohol sales alone was roughly one-fifth of his workers’ payroll.

He had an apothecary, a church, and even a small school, which mostly operated at night. His more ambitious workers could sit basic lessons for free and could pay to be tutored privately. A quarter of the fee went back to the baron, a quarter to the sole full-time teacher in the baron’s employ, and half went to whoever was actually teaching the lesson (sometimes, but not always, the teacher, who preferred quarter-pay for doing nothing). The baron’s accountant regularly taught mathematics and finance, and visiting aristocratic youngsters commonly made arrangements to earn a little extra pocket money on the side by teaching. It wasn’t just a scheme to get money back out of the hands of workers; it helped the baron identify workers who were ambitious and capable, who were then good prospects for promotion (and likely to leave to try to find better work elsewhere otherwise, once they had more of an education). It also helped cast the baron in a more positive light.

All in all, about four-fifths of what he paid his permanent employees didn’t leave the compound before getting spent in one way or another. I know this because I got his accountant very drunk one evening. Most of the time close to a fifth of his workers were in debt to him. On top of managing to get back most of his workers’ salaries, the control he exercised over his workers’ lives by isolating them from the outside world meant less absenteeism, fewer trained workers being recruited away by competitors, and less theft. Exactly how the baron had come up with this arrangement in the first place, I don’t know; but he seemed to be making money hand over fist with his foundry.

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I describe the setting of the baron’s compound carefully because, as it turns out, when you have constructed a carefully planned community that amounts to a modern industrial village where everybody works for you like one large well-oiled machine, suddenly introducing a large number of strangers at once who don’t have a thing to do with smelting, casting, and machining metal is a little disruptive.

To start with, there was the matter of housing. We were not only a mercenary company, but a large one, one large and with enough heavy equipment that I could afford to use the word “battalion” without getting laughed at very much. We had filled up two warehouses in Dab. Even with a reduced quantity of livestock, we required a significant amount of space, which required shuffling about furniture, people, and materials in order to make room. Those people and things that were displaced would become uncomfortably crowded, and this would in turn lead to dissatisfaction with our presence.

After some discussion with the baron’s castellan and a little consultation of the precise terms of our contract, we ended up occupying the smallest and oldest of the workers’ dormitories (bunking two to a room, mostly), and most of the guest quarters in the baron’s mansion. The latter were far more luxurious than the former, so they became officers’ housing. I was a little uneasy at the idea of sleeping in a separate building from most of my men – emergencies could arrive at any time of night – but being an officer is almost like being a noble. If I wanted to maintain an air of social prestige, I could not simply tuck myself, Katya, and Yuri away in a small room with a single bed.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Since it wouldn’t do for one of my junior officers to have something grander than I, that meant I ended up in the baron’s third-best bedroom. The canopied bed was the size of a small hut in a poorer village, and unbelievably soft, softer than any mattress I had ever slept on. My first morning waking from the bed was memorable.

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“You may go. I will ring if I need anything.” The voice that woke me was unfamiliar and muffled-sounding, as was the sensation of feeling like I was buried in silk. It was a woman’s voice, but not Katya’s. I could smell a rich breakfast laid out – tea, eggs, toast, griddle cakes, and sausages. The firm weight on my stomach was a woman’s head, and the warm soft weight sprawled over part of my leg was, logically, the arm and shoulder of the same woman.

Another moment, and I woke enough to be confident that while the muffled voice had not been Katya’s, Katya was indeed the woman using my stomach for a pillow and half-sprawled over my leg, an unusual position that suggested I was sleeping in something far less cramped than her tent or the makeshift straw mattress at headquarters. I opened my eyes, seeing the surrounding canopy blocking most of the light of morning, and finally woke up enough to remember where I was and why. The sheer size of the bed still amazed me. Yuri had laid down in the corner of it and wasn’t even near to touching me or Katya, as sprawled out as we were among (mostly underneath, especially in Katya’s case) a variety of pillows and blankets.

So who was the woman outside the bed? The voice sounded a little bit familiar, I was sure I had heard it before. A small delicate hand, one not much used in manual labor, grabbed hold of a section of canopy and pulled it aside. A familiar face peered in – it was the young lady with hair roughly the color of well-aged cheese, with whom I had danced several times at the party several nights ago.

She looked down at me (or, more particularly, such of me as was visible underneath the covers, mostly the upper part of my torso), and blushed fetchingly (presumably because I wasn’t wearing anything). “Ah, I see you are awake, Mr. Raven.” She spoke softly. She reached out and tentatively touched my shoulder. “I thought I might breakfast with you this morning.”

Katya got up rather quickly at this point in the conversation, her head coming out of concealing blankets and pillows, revealing herself and most of the portions of my body that had been previously covered. If looks could kill, she would have added a young Gothic noblewoman to her body count right then and there. The unfriendly sound she made woke up Yuri, the dog thumping to the floor with a dull thud and a scrabble of surprised claws.

The young noblewoman’s mouth gaped open in surprise. “I’ll just, um.” She let the curtain drop closed. “There’s breakfast over there and ring the bell when you’re done for the servants to clear it,” she added, rushing through the words, embarrassment lending haste to her articulation.

Katya glared back at the closed canopy. The sound of a door closing and receding footsteps announced the young woman’s hasty departure from the room. “Mine,” Katya declared quietly in the general direction of the doorway, gripping me possessively with her hand as she sat on my leg. Yuri flicked an ear and circled twice before lying down in the corner of the room, letting out a soft exasperated whuffling noise.

“Yes, yours,” I said, smiling and running a hand through her hair.

Katya decided to spend a certain amount of time securing her claim to me before we ate breakfast. I am not sure if she wanted more to reassure me or herself that her declaration of possession was true or if she wanted, somehow, to prove something to the now-absent blonde noblewoman who had woken us up.

By the time we got to breakfast, the eggs were cold and the tea lukewarm, but we had built up enough of an appetite to make up for that. There was no meat on the breakfast tray, though I had been certain I had smelled sausages; an empty plate with a tracery of canine saliva and a slightly guilty look on Yuri’s face suggested that my nose hadn’t been playing tricks on me.

My thoughts returned to the woman who had woken us up. What was she doing here? I went through what I knew about her, which was not very much. She was an attractive and healthy young noblewoman, with very soft hands. She was more curvaceous than Katya, though not, in truth, much thicker around the waist (and likely not at all once Katya recovered the weight she had lost on short rations). She was shorter and less muscular than Katya, but this is not measured against a woman in the ranks of society (if anything, the opposite is true).

What about the people around her? Her friends were unkind enough to her to shove her at a man they hoped would embarrass her on the dance floor. I thought on that for a minute and felt quite sorry for her.

Finally, I remembered that the young noblewoman’s father owned a foundry that cast bronze bells. She had spent a little time talking about bells. I remembered seeing bells loaded onto the train when we disembarked, considered the probability that there were two bell-casting foundries in the neighborhood, and reached the appropriate conclusion: The young noblewoman was most likely either the baron’s daughter or the daughter of the higher noble who owned the land underneath the baron’s compound. The second possibility seemed less likely in the light of the cruelty of her supposed friends, but I could not eliminate it.

So. My employer’s daughter – or possibly the daughter of the higher noble on whose good graces his business operations relied upon – had come into my bedchambers with breakfast, dismissed the servants, and then went to wake me up. Katya had snarled at her, distressing her and sending her fleeing from the room, and I had lain there blinking sleep out of my eyes as this happened in front of me.

This would have to be handled delicately, I thought to myself. “I think we should befriend her,” I told Katya.

Katya bristled. “She is already too friendly to you. I do not like her.”

I explained that the young lady’s father was someone whose goodwill resulted, directly or indirectly, in us getting paid, and pointed out that she could cause us a great deal of trouble if she was upset.

Katya suggested permanently removing her capability to make mischief.

I returned that this was likely to cause immediate trouble for us and that this would really not be very nice.

Katya scowled.

I told Katya that I didn’t care if she wasn’t endowed with the more generous physical assets that the young noblewoman possessed.

Katya looked upset. Our conversation spiraled downwards from there. A lesson I should pass on: If your lover is concerned with a potential rival who has certain attributes generally considered more attractive, I recommend you refrain from commenting on them. Most especially, do not give your lover a specific list of such attributes, and do not supply any estimated measurements.