In the morning, Lucas told his crew the news between mouthfuls of ham steak and piping hot biscuits. Adin kept asking about irrelevant details like who was there with whom or what the lady of such and such was wearing. Lucas tried to answer the first couple of times, but when he realized that each answer would only lead to more questions, he ended that topic by grabbing his cushion sack and dumping it out in the center of the table between the four of them.
“None of that matters. You know why? Because we’re rich, bitch!” Lucas declared.
That caused a momentary lull in the conversation, but after that, there was a storm of questions. Lucas just smiled and let them pass over him.
“How many of those vials did ye take with ya lad?” Kar’gandin asked.
“Who’d you kill for all this scratch?” Hura’gh bellowed.
Adin asked a number of questions about who bought and how much they paid. By the end, though, he was sputtering and simply sat there staring.
Lucas told them all about the long, strange trip to 69 dragons with 17 vials of blue, but when he told them what a nice number that was, no one got the joke.
“I kann’a believe you gave yer coachman a whole dragon just to watch yer purse!” Kar’gandin growled when Lucas got to that point, but when he calmed down he saw that it made sense.
After that, it became less about the money and more about what they needed to do to safeguard and make more of it. Getting a strong box for the carriage and a few full-time guards for the house were the first order of business, of course, but when Lucas started talking about planting some sagethorn hedgerows around the perimeter of the estate, Adin drew the line.
“Sagethorn is very low class,” he insisted, “It’s a weed and an ugly one at that.”
“Are you even listening?” Lucas asked. “This is your house, man. That’s your sister I went to a party last night with. I sold drugs under your name. I made sure to tell everyone that I was sold out until the next ship came in, so nothing bad is going to happen tomorrow or anything, probably, but the minute one of those rich boys gets a craving or runs low on cash, we’re going to have problems.”
“Yes, well—” Adin started to answer, but Lucas cut him off.
“But someday, someone is going to dime us out to the powers that be or make a run at us,” Lucas continued willing away thoughts about how long it was going to take the Whisperers to track him down after this. “So while hiding the lab is a start, we got a shit load of other things to do if you want to see this through. This place has to become a fortress.”
Of course, it had to be a nice looking fortress, with discretely hidden guards, and defenses disguised as ornamentation. It had to be both functional and impressive, because he’d put out a lot of vials last night, and later this week half a dozen of those guys were going to send him calling cards to invite him to lunch or stop by with offers of going into business together and a thousand other things.
The four of them spent the next half hour arguing as they hashed out their to do list. At the top of it was finishing the new lab, and returning the cider house to some modicum of usefulness. While that was being worked on, Hura’gh would go recruit half a dozen warriors looking for work. Lucas was vaguely concerned that this would end up with a whole gang of orc bloods running the show, but for the time being that wasn’t his focus.
He and Kar’gandin were going to have to go talk to some local artisans. They’d been planning to buy a glassblower’s shop, or at least an interest in one. Now they were going to have to add a blacksmith to that list at least, along with more laborers and various artisans.
After all that, Lucas could feel all the money he’d made last night slipping further and further away as they added up the costs associated with each activity. By the time they finished all the necessary investments all of that was going to be gone, and that was after they decided, in a vote of three against one that the purely cosmetic improvements should be paid for by Adin’s share.
“How am I supposed to buy my way back into the Prince’s good graces by paying off my back taxes if you spend all my money on painting the manor and hiring gardeners?” the noble asked plaintively.
Lucas ticked another check mark next to the category in his mind labeled ‘Viscount’s ever-changing story’ but didn’t call him on it. He’d mentioned unfair taxation and dredging rights before along with his sister, but back taxes were a first, and Lucas decided to dig a little further into that when the two of them were alone.
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For now, he just had the noble do what he was best at: write missives so that Lucas could do more important things. The Viscount wrote five letters when all was said and done, soliciting a bid for services in the fancy way that only a member of the court could do. He wrote one to the iron works to query about the costs of wrought iron fencing, two to importers asking for bids on a number of necessary reagents, one to the carpenters union for the coming major repairs, and one to the brickmaker's guild, because now that they had all this money they certainly weren’t about to dig up the whole damn riverbed themselves again for all the upcoming projects.
While he did all that, Kar’gandin was beneath the cider house and as soon as he’d given his men instructions on where to dig and put up shoring, he and Lucas were off to Meadowin. “How much longer do you think it’s going to take to get the lab where we need it to be?” Lucas asked as their feet crunched on the gravel of the front walk.
More than anything, he suddenly felt exposed, and he’d like to have everything hidden pretty quick. At least, plausibly. True secrecy with secret passages, and maybe even illusion magic could come later.
“I mean, ye could cook down there tomorrow if ye like,” the dwarf mused, stroking his chin, “I figure we’ll have ourselves a working chimney by then, though if ye want to wait for stone floors to keep the dust down, that will take a bit longer I suppose.”
The dwarf listed off all the things that still needed to be done on his stubby little fingers, and the longer he went on, the more concerned Lucas got. “A month?” he demanded finally when the dwarf was done. “That’s an awful long remodel, man. What do we have to do to speed that shit up?”
“I said two weeks to a month, laddie, and really, we can’t do much more than that,” Kar’gandin answered with a shrug. “Ye can only fit so many people down there working. I suppose we could hire more bodies and work 'em in shifts, but I ain’t sleeping through that racket, I can tell you that!”
When they reached the village, Lucas was surprised to find that more than one person waved at him or called him by name as they wished him good morning. It was confusing but not unpleasant.
They met with the blacksmith, Mr. Hardeson, and though he wasn’t amenable to being bought out, he was happy to prioritize whatever they needed done on account of all the good they’d done for the village to date. Fortunately, Kar’gandin had brought a list that included everything from nails and hinges to locks and swords.
The blacksmith insisted a few of the items were beyond him, but only the complex mechanical workings. After that, they went to the next village over, and after a little haggling, they convinced the glassblower to leave his run-down shop behind and come and work for them. Kargandin promised to have a new shop built to his specifications on the Parin grounds within a single season.
The only sticking point came when they got around to discussing what it was he’d actually be making. “So, you don’t want jugs or bottles, but vials and flasks?” the man asked, confused. “Do you mind if I ask what for exactly?”
“Well, in addition to cider, we plan on producing healing tinctures for the masses,” Lucas said, playing the philanthropist. “Health has reached an unprecedented low, especially in the poorer parts of the country and the city slums. I am to correct that with a… revitalizing tonic! Truly a miracle cure, but every patient will need only a tiny amount, so we must make the bottles very small.”
The man seemed unconvinced but nodded anyway. He didn’t seem to care what he made so long as he got paid, and when Kar’gandin had started to discuss volume requirements, the glassblower had struggled to keep a straight face. Even with a serious discount, this dude was going to make bank.
After that was complete, Lucas hired a number of village boys a copper bushel basket a piece to run the messages Adin had prepared to all of the various offices in the trade quarter. The dwarf accused him of overpaying, but Lucas was glad to do it.
“I’d rather send massagers at a silver king a pop rather than walk by another guard holding a wanted poster of me,” he told Kar’gandin. “At a copper apiece, it's a damn bargain, is what it is. As far as I’m concerned, we should open a damn messenger service with them. That’s what we should do.”
“Well, if ye want to run deliveries of Blue with the wee lads, I ain’t going to stop ye, but a copper a run is too damn much,” the dwarf cursed. “It should be no more than a third of that!”
The dwarf’s words stunned Lucas into stopping for a moment as they walked back down the dirt road toward Parin Manor. “Let’s get one thing straight,” Lucas said as he started walking again. “We aren’t getting kids involved in this. No way, no how. It’s just wrong.”
“That’s a fine notion,” Kar’gandin said, “But didn’t you just get them involved? Paying them in drug money to perform a task that will lead to more drug sales seems involved to me.”
“What?” Lucas practically shouted. “Running a message for some petty cash isn’t involved.”
“What about paying them to pick mushrooms?” the dwarf asked, “Would that be involved? How about delivering empty vials or notes about when and where a deal was going to go down. Maybe—”
“Fine,” Lucas grumbled. “I get it, okay?”
“You just tell me where connected and unconnected gets,” Kar’gandin shrugs, “Because if everything goes to hell I’m taking my 47 dragons, 18 kings, and 9 bushels, and going right back to the clanhold. Ye should do the same, o’ course, but for some reason, I get the feeling ye’d actually try to stay and fight.”
“Hey, we’re building something here,” Lucas said defensively. “You’ll see when those nobles come crawling for another dose or two. We can get all the gold we want. We can probably get more than gold too. It’s just a matter of figuring out who’s good for what.”
They debated those points all the way home, but at no point did Kar’gandin convince Lucas that he had anything but a big ole lump of coal where his heart should be.