Lucas was no judge of these things, but if he had to say so, he would have called the whole winter feast an unmitigated success. The guests were merry, the house was full, and by the end of it, the food had largely vanished. It was only after dinner was complete, and Lucas had stuffed himself so full of desserts that he knew he would regret it, that he finally rejoined Adin and the Torvins for the part of the night he’d been dreading the most.
He would have loved to say that was the reason why he’d gone back for thirds on Ms. Darrinsons mixed berry pie. That hadn’t been a delaying tactic, though. That had been all gluttony on his part.
Still, when it couldn’t be delayed any longer, he went with Adin, at least until they started to go to the Viscount’s study. That was when Lucas said, “Nah, not here. There’s way too many people in the house to talk business right now.”
“Are you suggesting we meet outside? It’s freezing,” Arissa complained.
“Well, I was thinking we’d go to the cider house so we could meet with a couple of my other associates if that’s not too long a walk for you, Your Highness,” Lucas said, trying to keep a straight face.
He knew it wasn’t wise to antagonize the woman, especially under the hard eyes of her father. He just couldn’t help it. Something about her entitled attitude, even when she’d been his prisoner, made him want to put her in her place. It was going to be very hard to be nice to her once she was married and became a Parin.
“But that’s…” Adin started to say before he remembered himself. “That place is filthy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s also where we keep our pet demi-humans because they aren’t housebroken, isn’t it,” Lucas answered dismissively, “And if you guys want to get strategic, my pet dwarf is going to be in the loop, alright.”
Lucas had already warned Hura’gh and Kar’gandin that this might happen and what to expect, but Lucas still didn’t like it. He could be a jerk to Arissa all day, but referring to Kar’gandin as ‘his dwarf’ made Lucas cringe inwardly.
Still, in the end, no one protested any further, so they all went to the entrance to get dressed for the cold. In fact, Lord Torvin seemed like he was unbothered by the change of plans, but Lucas knew better than to trust that. The man was obviously biding his time for something.
As they crunched through the snow to the cider house, the Count casually remarked. “You should know, I checked, and it’s true, there’s no record of the Parin’s having any cousins anywhere in the east. No legitimate ones, anyway. So, if you’re from Esterbrock, then you’re certainly not related to them.”
“And when I leave Lordanin for whatever my next port of call happens to be, I won’t be related to whatever good family I choose as my camouflage either,” Lucas answered with a shrug, ignoring the man’s attempts to show off his shady resources. “That’s just the way this business works.”
“I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of wealth left to savor in Lordanin,” Arissa shot back, trying to be relevant.
“There might yet be,” Lucas agreed half-heartedly. “Weather aside, it's a nice place. I’m in no rush to leave quicker than I have to.”
In the cider house, Lucas found his colleagues drinking and dicing. They’d been complaining about something, but they stopped as the door opened. He glared at the half-orc in an attempt to remind him about their earlier conversation. Complain about mistreatment and act offended all you like, but leave talk about the business to me and the dwarf.
The last thing he wanted was for the half-orc to mention anything about alchemy or the lab, which might blow the game, but at the same time, he knew that the man’s very presence was distasteful to people like the Torvins and that just being here would throw them off their game.
Lucas made introductions for everyone while he watched Arissa squirm. Then he sat in the far chair and leaned it back against one of the posts that held up the roof on its two rear legs while everyone tried to pretend like this was normal. “So, what’s so important that we can’t wait until sometime closer to spring to start planning all this out,” Lucas said, trying to be as dismissive as possible. This time, he earned himself a rebuke from Adin, in addition to the Torvins, but the man knew the game.
Adin was good cop, and Lucas was bad cop. The Viscount sought to appease and ingratiate, and Lucas tried to rile them up to get a glimpse at whatever their real plans were. Apparently, this wasn’t a common tactic around here, but Lucas thought he would do okay; if there were two things in this world that Adin was good at, they were self-aggrandizement and ingratiation.
Count Torvin said, “Are you really saying you planned to take the whole winter off?” He seemed more offended by that than anything that Lucas had said so far. “While it’s true that business slows down, especially at the ports, now is precisely the time we should be planning for our future priorities.”
“Hey, I’ve made a lot of money this year thanks to everyone’s hard work,” Lucas said flippantly, “And if I want to take a month off to go drinking and whoring, well, most of that money is just going to come right back to me anyway. Junkies never keep their coins for long.”
“Spend enough gold publicly like that, and a tax collector will be up yer ass in no time,” Kar’gandin cautioned, doing a pretty good job of acting like he didn’t care at all for Lucas. “Trust me on that one.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas waved off the concern. “We’ve paid plenty to the port authorities for various imports, and they’d have a hard time proving I made much money here beyond that.”
“Anyway,” lord Torvin said, trying to return the conversation to the main thrust of the argument. “The ports are one of the places I want to firm up our control. We don’t have many inroads at present with the Illustrated Men, and though we have connections with a few tax collectors, the harbor masters…”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The man droned on and on, talking about a complicated network of people and offices that all sort of blended together for Lucas. He nodded along like he knew who it was the Count was talking about, but really, he didn’t have a clue. In the end, his plan seemed to be a simple one. He wanted to dose three of the more important officials and put them on the payroll, whether they wanted to be or not.
“To what end?” Lucas finally asked.
“To what end?” Count Torvin sighed, repeating the question. “Once they are beholden to us, there’s no limit to what we might do. We could siphon off a portion of the kingdom’s revenues or simply get tipped off when valuable cargo worth disappearing comes into the city.”
Lucas thought about making a joke about how those tips had worked out the last time they’d found out where something valuable had been stored. He decided against that, though. He wanted the Torvins off balance, not infuriated. So, he stayed silent, which the Count took as tacit agreement, and moved on to other topics.
One by one, he covered the whole city in a web of intrigue. Every district was covered, one by one, and only the King’s castle directly was spared. They had machinations with how the market district had been divided up by the recent gang war; they wanted an in with the bargemen on the river, and even the inns were not spared. Those, at least, they didn’t want to steal from directly; Lord Torvin just wanted a heads up when someone foreign was staying the night so that his minions could decide if it was a loose thread worth pulling on.
Everything the man was focused on seemed to be about more information, more loyalty, and, most of all, undermining the influences of other families. It was all so fucking devious that if Lucas tried something half so complicated, he’d end up tied in knots inside of a week.
No, he thought to himself, con’s should be nice and simple, and this ain’t it.
He sat there for a moment, letting the silence grow uncomfortable before he finally leaned forward and looked around the table. “Is this your way of trying to get me out of your town sooner rather than later?” Lucas asked. “Are you trying to say you want me to take my blue and seek greener pastures?”
“I don’t understand,” Lord Torvin said, legitimately caught off guard by Lucas’s less-than-enthusiastic response. “These are long-term plans here. By this time next year, I believe we can—”
“Strangle the city to death? Make all our customers broke?” Lucas said, slamming the table with a fist. “We got a golden goose right here, and every plan you offer is a way to cut it to pieces and devour the scraps.”
“A golden goose?” Adin asked with confusion, making it clear to Lucas that the story he was referring to had never been told in this world.
“Alright, I guess that little child’s tale hasn’t made it to this foreign shore yet,” Lucas answered, pretending that such a story might be normal somewhere far away. “Let’s say that one day you open up your chicken coop and go out to collect eggs, and you find one of them is solid gold. After checking to make sure you aren’t dreaming, you figure out it's your prize goose that laid it. What do you do?”
“You consult a mage?” Arissa asked?
“You wait for it to make more eggs.” Adin volunteered hesitantly.
“You build a better fence so that the foxes can’t get it, and you feed it well until the day it dies,” Lord Torvin said finally. “And before you sell a single egg, you melt them down so you don’t have to tell a soul where you got them.”
“Ding, ding, ding, you got it in one chief!” Lucas said, with one finger on his nose, while he pointed to the older man, who was suddenly looking quite perplexed. “In the story, the man who owns the goose tries to do just that, but when he tells his wife, she gets greedy. One egg every few days is simply no longer enough, so she resolves to cut it open and get all the eggs it has left.”
“But that’s an incredibly short-sighted strategy,” the man said, missing the point. “She’d get far more gold if she only exercised a little more patience and—”
“I agree,” Lucas said, “Which is why your plans are complete shit. You want me to start cranking out what, another forty doses a weak so you can control two dozen people, so you can what… play power games?”
Both Lord Torvin and his daughter opened their mouths to protest, but Lucas continued talking over them. “If you steal enough from the system, it collapses, just like a lake that’s been overfished or a forest that’s been overhunted. One minute you’re rolling in gold, and the next… well, there ain’t no more gold to get.”
“How dare you,” Arissa said finally, making Hura’gh laugh. “My father—”
“Can speak for himself,” he said gruffly, cutting her off. “While I see your point, it’s hard to argue that you do any differently, isn’t it?”
“Of course, I’m doing exactly that,” Lucas laughed. “But I know my limits. I know what we can do for a long time. Take the blue I sell you - I could charge you ten dragons a pop. You wouldn’t like it, but you’d find a way to pay it until you either figured out how to get your own source so you could bump me off or until House Torvin was flat broke. Since I don’t want either of those things to happen… well, I charge a much more modest price.”
“So you want to keep Lordanin on the hook forever?” Lord Torvin asked, a little less skeptically than before.
“Ideally,” Lucas smiled. “That’s why I employ the dwarf, among other reasons. He keeps me apprised of the financial lifeblood of the city, and according to him, it’s not doing so hot.”
Kar’gandin said nothing. Instead, he shook his head from side to side with a sour look on his face.
“He thinks that even our current rate of graft might have to be cut back if we don’t want to wheels to come off too soon,” Lucas said with a shrug, “and I didn’t hear one goddamned thing in your big plans that was going to help change that.”
“Wha…” the Count said, entirely baffled. “It’s not my job to make Lordanin a better place or make sure the people are fed. That is a duty of the King, and if he’s too ill to rise from his sick bed, then that falls to the Prince. My job is to advance my house and—”
Count Torvin stopped, and a look of fury briefly stole over his features when Lucas started to laugh. For a second, he looked like he was about to rise to his feet and deck Lucas for his insolence, which would have been funny if the man probably didn’t have three different magic items that could murder him in seconds. The noble’s rage was just enough to put Hura’gh on edge before he forced himself to calm down.
“Your nobility is inextricably interconnected with the Kingdom’s health,” Lucas said finally. “If you win your little shadow war and get all the power, you still die when it dies, and since your peers are doing the same thing, it all happens that much faster. You’re pretty much the same as the Blind and the Butchers if you get right down to it, just on a bigger scale, but that’s not what I want from you.”
“And what is it you want from us?” Arissa asked.
“I want you to do just enough to earn your keep,” Lucas said. “I don’t want you to make the world a better place or anything, but I want to do what we can to keep the blood pumping in this place so we can bleed it dry as long as possible. If that means doing a little good for the peasants while we bleed their masters’ dry, then so fucking be it.”