The next few days were busy ones. Lucas sent messengers to various places in the city and secured himself molds, double boilers, and several sacks of sugar, which was a very expensive substance in a world that hadn’t invented sugar cane.
No one understood why he bought the candy making equipment and bribed a few talented members of the confectioners guild to understand the most important parts of caramelizing sugar. Not until after days spent making more caramel than blue he tossed Adin a lozenge of condensed Blue narcotic and said “Here man, try this.”
Candy of Mana Intoxication (pure) (1 dose): Euphoria 9, poison 2, intelligence -1, mana regeneration decreased by 190% for 1 hour. Sweet.
Adin did exactly as he was told, like Pavlov’s Noble, and passed out with a look of bliss on his face almost immediately. The fact that the noble lay there in a stupor for several hours afterward certainly spoke to the effectiveness of the new variety of the drug. “I think you might have killed him,” Kar’gandin said at one point after he kicked the man, and he didn’t respond.
“Nah,” Lucas answered with a shit-eating grin, “But that asshole is going to be fiending for a while after this. I can promise you that.”
For a long time, Lucas had been trying to wean Adin off of the hard stuff with the very best intentions. Lately, he’d only been giving him potions that were euphoria 3 and 4.
Those numbers were typical of the quality he gave to the Knights of Brass, though they probably watered that down in half before they sold it cheap to the peasants. Nobles, on the other hand, typically got a much higher quality of Blue that was closer to 7 to make sure they stayed customers for a long time to come.
Lucas could have done the same thing with Adin, but for months, he’d felt bad enough getting him hooked in the first place, and he wanted the man to have a good shot at getting clean. However, with everything that was going to happen now, Lucas decided that letting the man think he might be able to break free of his addiction was a bad move. After all, at this point, he had no idea what sort of poison his fiancée might be pouring into his ear, and the easiest way to secure the noble’s loyalty was to reinforce his addiction, for better or worse.
In his mind, inflicting this on someone, even someone as selfish and wretched as the Viscount, was almost as bad as slitting Garren’s throat had been. It was unquestionably wrong. In this case, the only bright side was that he expected this wouldn’t haunt his dreams quite as badly as the murder had.
In fact, looking at Adin laying there, he was surprised to find that it didn’t bother him at all because the man deserved it. All he did was treat other people like pawns, so it was only fair that he became one.
Of course, strengthening his leash on someone who was spending entirely too much time with his fiancée to be trusted was a sensible precaution, but it wasn’t the only reason he was doing it. The fact that they were now only a few days out from the engagement dinner, and after that, all hell might break loose. Soon, several members of both the Whisperers and the Tovrin family would be here, and Lucas was sure that things would start to move fast after that.
Of course, that wasn’t all he was working on. Now that his visits into the country were slowing down because all of his biggest customers had been topped up so recently, he finally had some time to focus on alchemy.
Since he’d already improved the duration of his boost potions and made recipes for any number of specialized healing products for Cassara to make both the manor and the village, Lucas had spent the last few days working on a new product to appease Danaria: Cosmetics.
Not for her, of course. She hardly needed anything to make herself even prettier, but other than booze and drugs, it was one of the few things on Earth that made more money than drugs, so until he perfected the recipe for magic Viagra or potion of eternal youth, face creams and beauty products were pretty high up on the list of things that might make enough money that they might eventually be able to get out of the drug business.
That was a vain hope, of course, especially with everything that was going to happen next, but he still believed that he might be able to limit his narcotic deprivations to the upper crust. If they could leave the working stiffs to lesser vices, that was enough for him.
His partners weren’t the least bit interested, they didn’t even care for Adin’s idea of trying to research new and better drugs to sell to more people. It was obvious that they considered it to be a waste of time. Kar’Gandin was fond of saying, “We already have a golden goose! It would be downright ready to go off in search of another!”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Even the idea of a dwarf calling someone else greedy wasn’t enough to dissuade him, though. It changed nothing as far as Lucas was concerned. It wasn’t like they could stop him from cooking up whatever the hell felt like anyway. It was the main thing he got out of this relationship: complete freedom to do what he wanted as long as he gave them the good shit.
He hadn’t promised Danaria that he would get out of the drug business, but he had promised her that he would try to find another way, and this was part of that, or at the very least, a good faith dead end if it didn’t go anywhere.
Sweet Red Berries: Beauty 2, Intelligence -1, sweet.
White River Clay: Endurance 2, poison -1, beauty 1.
Thickened Cream: Beauty 1, agility -1.
So far his only success he’d managed to make was a skin cream out of white river clay, cream, and red berries, but as a nighttime mask it was promising, considering that most of the richer members of the nobility used white power with a toxic lead base to make their completions clearer and smoother.
Nighttime Face Mask of Moisturization: If worn for at least 1 hour, it increases the user’s appearance by 1 for 12 hours. If worn for 8 hours, it increases the user’s appearance by 2 for 24 hours.
It wasn’t a bad start, of course, but true cosmetics would require more knowledge about how they were made, and those were secrets that the alchemists in those industries guarded very carefully. He vowed to do just that, or maybe even reach out to the Red Lantern gang and see about mending fences now that the gang war between the Butchers and the Blind was slowly dying down.
Other than keeping an eye out for new talent, that’s mostly what Hura’gh did for them these days. He kept his ear to the ground and provided them regular updates. To hear him talk, things were quiet, and there hadn’t been any new wanted posters for Lucas in weeks. It would seem they’d given up hunting their mysterious alchemist.
More interestingly, though, was that the Blind were practically an endangered species at this point. “After the watch got sick of their shit, the other gangs in the area basically declared open season on ‘em,” the half-orc explained that night as the three of them sat around having dinner in the cider house.
“This was when you were dying in the forest, of course, but it weren’t like you woulda gone to Lordanin to check it out, would you? So it wasn’t like you missed much,” he said between bites. “Anyway, they shut the whole market district down for a couple of days, and the Butchers, the Knights, and the Illuminated just went in there and beat the snot out of them until there was practically no one left that was willing to claim allegiance to the dead gang. Now, the territory that was theirs is split between the other three gangs, more or less, and the Orphans got a bit larger. Other than that, everything is pretty much back to normal.”
“There’s a lesson to be learned there,” Lucas said.
“Aye,” Kar’gandin agreed with a laugh. “Never be weaker than yer enemies or yer neighbors, lest they take advantage.”
“More like, never become a big enough public nuisance that they feel the need to make an example out of you,” Lucas shot back. “It’s bad for business.”
“You sayin’ we just got to cower and hope we ain’t next?” Hura’gh asked. “Because, as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the quickest ways to paint a target on your back.”
“It is,” Lucas agreed. “We can’t show weakness, but in my mind, whenever it's possible, I prefer not to show ourselves at all, you know? The Whisperers might not have the right of it in general, but they have the right of it there, and if Adin plans on allying with them, I play on stealing from their playbook in a big way. It’s the only way to make sure they don’t swallow us whole.”
“Yeah, I confess I do not care for the way this is playing out either,” the dwarf agreed, gesturing to Adin’s empty chair in the cider house. “A man that is too good to eat with us is probably too good to work with us for much longer.”
Lucas thought about reminding them that the house food was much better but decided against it. Honestly, he was tempted to eat in the manor sometimes. Only his desire to avoid Danaria before things got even weirder made him avoid the place.
“It’s not like he can just quit and go somewhere else,” Lucas shrugged, taking another drink. “If he turns on us, he’ll never find another drop of Blue, and I have a feeling that’s a choice he’d regret for a long time to come.”
“Only until he manages to steal the recipe and give it to his new wife,” Hura’gh said. “You’re always sending him to fetch ingredients. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows how to make it already.”
Lucas laughed at that. “The man can’t make a healing potion, and he gets the plants wrong half the time anyway. We have twelve-year-old boys working for us now who are more dutiful and attentive than our Viscount!” Lucas smiled at that. “No, I think my secrets are shielded by, among other things, his incompetence and ego. We’ll be fine.”
“We’ll to me, it sounds like yer cookin’ something up there Lucas,” Kar’gandin said. “Perhaps not the words, but certainly the tone in which ye say them…”
“Rest assured that both of you will be included in any plans I cook up,” Lucas said with a smile, “And truthfully, right now, I’m only cooking up a few things: Blue, beauty products, and preparations for Adin’s announcement dinner toward the end of the week.”