Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 9

Encouraging her company to begin training beyond their usual routines was a simple matter after they had witnessed the mob in the town and understood what had happened.

“Justice without strength is meaningless,” Neia told them. “If we want our justice to prevail, we must have the strength to ensure that injustice isn’t forced upon us!”

Her men didn’t yet understand what His Majesty’s justice was, but they understood that the new lives they had made for themselves were being threatened. Neia felt that that was fine for the time being so long as things were heading in the right direction. What didn’t feel right was that the whole affair had proven that imminent threats made her message come across infinitely easier than when her audience thought itself relatively secure. One would think that preventing problems before they happened would be common sense.

Just beyond her camp, the men pushed the limits of their mounted skills in the fields along the town. At first, she didn’t feel comfortable about the idea that it might be perceived as a belligerent threat to the neighbours, but Saye asserted that exercises along the border would make potential troublemakers think twice before trying anything. Mister Juárez went back to the villa first thing in the morning along with two men delivering word to Mister Lousa about what happened. Neia wasn’t sure how he would react to the news, but she hoped that he would at least take some precautions.

“You should have sent a stronger warning to Mister Lousa,” Saye told her.

“Stronger?” Neia frowned as she eyed the shaft of one of her arrows, “But we haven’t seen any signs of aggression from the town.”

Saye was pretty pessimistic as far as Bards went. Since the previous evening’s incident, she kept encouraging Neia to be more aggressive with her preparations, talking about the terrible things that happened elsewhere in the world. Some of her stories felt so ridiculous that they may as well have been a Bard’s tale and Neia supposed that they were technically just that.

The Holy Kingdom wasn’t a place steeped in crime and corruption like so many of Saye’s tales, however. Even the events in the town followed an understandable logic that adhered to the laws of the land. All they needed to do was make sure they left no openings for the Nobles to exploit.

“They’re called ‘blind spots’ for a reason,” Saye told her. “I understand that members of the Paladin order here are trained to be experts in the law, but Nobles are still better at it than you are. By the time you realise what they’re up to, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.”

“You keep saying that they’ll do something,” Neia replied, “but they don’t even have a motive to do anything like you suggest.”

“How do you know what their motives are?” Saye asked her.

“Patronage,” Neia said. “Good or bad, Nobles are all about that. Mister Lousa has been doing business with them since the end of the war. If they mess with his ranch, they’re messing with their investment in his operations.”

“Mister Juárez owed a debt to whoever controls that town,” Saye noted. “That didn’t protect him.”

“That’s…that’s because…as much as I hate to say it, that’s because Mister Juárez is small. What the Nobles thought they would gain by getting rid of him was worth more than his debt to them. Also, as you said, he served as a warning to everyone else about what happens when one denies the Nobles what they want. His debt also meant that he owed them a favour – turning them down meant he wasn’t willing to return that favour.”

It all made sense in the context of the Holy Kingdom’s legal and social order. The only thing different about it this time was that the system of patronage had taken an uncharacteristically ugly turn. In the Holy Kingdom, favours and debts were generally seen as the driver for positive things, encouraging people to pursue beneficial outcomes that both strengthened the bonds between families and facilitated the smooth growth of a fief.

The south’s support of the north was predicated on that concept. Debts were necessary to tide things over during the earliest phase of the recovery – the one that they were currently in. They weren’t incurred out of some fault of the debtor and weren’t financed to give the south a political and economic foothold in the north.

“Mister Lousa is different,” Neia continued. “He’s purchased ten thousand cattle from the nobility and he’s a huge source of continued business. He’s become one of the Nine Colours, too, and that’s an invaluable connection. I can’t imagine any reason why they would threaten anyone like that.”

Mister Lousa got along with everyone, so Neia couldn’t imagine anyone holding a grudge against him. The man was simply impossible to hate.

“If they’re willing to do what they did to Mister Juárez,” Saye said, “I think they’d be willing to do all sorts of things. But you’re the boss.”

The Bard got up and walked over to where the exercises were being conducted. Neia went and did her rounds, but the men at each camp reported nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her eyes kept going to the horizon for signs of trouble.

That evening, the sombre mood that hung over them grew even heavier. The men still sent regular glances at the town, as did she.

“Baraja,” Carlos asked, “you think this is happenin’ elsewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Neia replied. “We have no way to tell.”

The mob had gathered in the evening and the fire started after people in the nearby villages would have gone to sleep. There wasn’t a trace of smoke by morning, so the only way one could tell if anything had happened was to enter the town itself.

“We’re honin’ our skills,” another man said, “and that’s all fine and good, but what if someone does show up to cause trouble? We gonna fight ‘em?”

The other men looked up from their meals at Neia. Neia returned their grim looks with one of her own.

“I don’t like the idea of fighting our own people any more than you,” she said. “But if they come with the intent to do harm, what other choice do we have? It’s no different than when Demihumans came to raid our homes, except the threat now comes with twisted laws instead of teeth and claws.”

Strangely, that also provided her with a measure of comfort. Saye was right about her men showing their skills being a deterrent – Humans weren’t like Demihumans who would have taken it as a challenge. Most Humans did their best to stay away from even imagined violence.

As if to tread upon her hopes for an uneventful evening, the distant sound of pounding hooves roused them to their feet. One of the riders sent to escort Mister Juárez to the villa appeared on the horizon minutes later. He didn’t dismount, taking his horse just behind their seats around the campfire.

“What’s going on?” Neia asked.

“We spotted some men on the way back,” the rider said. “Comin’ up the east road. Gomez is holdin’ them up.”

“Who are they?”

“No colours that I know.”

The Nobles…

“What are they doing here?”

Since they were in unfamiliar colours, they were probably passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Please, just let it be that.

“They said they’re after some runaway debtors.”

“Dammit!”

Neia’s frustrated shout echoed into the twilight.

They got us…

She did her best to avoid looking in Saye’s direction. In hindsight, it was obvious. The pieces were all there, but she hadn’t been able to put them together.

Debts didn’t just go away when one moved to another territory. Those who financed those debts had every right to pursue them. She should have picked up on what the Nobles were up to when their men in the town allowed them to leave with Mister Juárez unchallenged. Every man, woman, and child who was indebted to the Nobles was an excuse for them to intrude upon another’s territory.

The entire north owed debts to the south. If she turned the Nobles away without suitable justification, the entire establishment would become her enemy. Worse than that, Mister Lousa and everyone who worked for him would be ruined.

How many people has Mister Lousa taken in?

Did he clear their debts or make some other arrangement? While he was a retired army officer who should have some sense of the law, he had also served as part of her father’s platoon. They were stationed at the wall and patrolled the wilderness rather than in the interior where one might be wise to the Nobles’ tricks.

It was the proverbial alchemical bomb just waiting to go off. If even one of the thousands that worked under Mister Lousa lashed out at the Nobles out of a sense of self-righteousness, they would instantly put everyone on the wrong side of the law.

“What do we do?” Carlos asked.

“I’ll figure something out on the way,” Neia answered. “We can’t leave Gomez alone with them.”

“You think they’d do something?”

If they assaulted one of my men, then at least we could…

She shook her head free of the thought. What was she asking for?

“I don’t know,” Neia said. “But I don’t want us caught off guard if they try. We’ll swing by a few camps before we talk to them. Don’t act rashly even if they try to provoke you – we don’t want to cause any trouble for Mister Lousa.”

They picked up ranchers from the three camps along their way. Thankfully, Gomez was still there and in one piece. On the road in front of him, a squad of liveried men rushed to form up behind their leader, who sat astride a black warhorse.

Neia took in the details of the men before dismounting beside her subordinate.

An emerald apple over a fess of gules and sable…who?

Unlike the Nobles who could memorise the heraldry of every single house in the kingdom, she only knew the houses that her work regularly brought her into contact with.

“Did they try anything?” She asked in a low voice.

“They tried starin’ me down, at first,” Gomez replied. “Then they got bored and started lazin’ about.”

“Good,” Neia nodded. “Thanks for keeping them here.”

Not only did they lack the discipline of an elite retinue, but they also lacked the equipment. Each of the men on foot was armoured in gambeson and kettle helm with daggers and cudgels as sidearms. None had bows or crossbows, though their spears would be a problem if they were allowed to close. There weren’t enough of them to do that, however. Her men could put them all on the ground before they took two steps, if necessary.

If they had come expecting – or looking for – a fight, they would have brought higher-quality retainers or at least more than a squad. They would probably back down if she figured out a legitimate reason to turn them away.

Neia left her mount with Gomez and approached the unfamiliar retinue. The squad eyed her curiously, but the man on the horse continued watching the fifteen mounted men behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, wondering if they were brandishing their arms, but they weren’t.

Well, a line of cavalry is far more threatening than a lone young woman on foot. I need to be polite so the situation doesn’t escalate.

It worried her that the man’s mindset didn’t completely discount the possibility of violence. Neia took her eyes off of her men and looked back up at the rider before her.

“Your name and house, good sir?” She asked.

The rider didn’t answer. Behind him, his squad visibly lost all of their tension.

“Excuse m–”

“If this is a joke,” the man’s voice went straight past her, “it is in extraordinarily poor taste.”

Huh?

Several moments passed in silence. The man scoffed.

“Surely, you do not mean to say that this disrespectful little girl is speaking for the lot of you? For Iago Lousa, one of the Nine Colours? Have you no one better qualified?”

Hey! I may not be a great beauty, but I’m a woman grown, thank you!

Neia bristled as a mire of ugly memories from the war rose to the forefront of her mind. Though she was known as the Sorcerer King’s Squire, that association was only really made amongst the leadership and those who had embraced His Majesty’s wisdom. When she went around the army camps without her equipment or surcoat, she just became another nameless woman. Random people would just dump camp chores on her and, despite her antagonistic appearance that would often invite belligerent reactions, she had even been propositioned a few times by officers looking to entertain their men.

It made her want to walk around all the time wearing the equipment borrowed from Sorcerer King, but, in the end, that just made her lose even more confidence in herself.

“We’ve wasted enough time here,” the man said. “I understand that many commoners harbour fantasies of serving as a ‘knight’ under some ‘princess’, but at least find a woman of proper breeding to offer your services to. Well, not that you have much of a choice.”

The squad leader nudged his mount forward. Neia didn’t move.

“You didn’t answer my question, good sir.”

“I don’t answer to delinquent girls.”

Fifteen crossbows came up in response to the man’s words. His warhorse stopped within two centimetres of Neia’s face. It was a stupid idea to stand inside his measure, but she couldn’t give up any ground. The man’s lip curled into a sneer.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“You’re trespassing on Iago Lousa’s land without just cause,” Neia told him.

“Did they not tell you, you stupid girl?” The man sneered, “Runaway debtors have crossed into Lousa’s land.”

“Would you happen to be carrying proof of each individual’s debt?”

The man glared down at her.

Eh? He doesn’t?

Neia thought he would have at least brought copies with him. She was just going down a checklist of things that she might be able to delay him with, but she had scored a telling blow with the very first point. Was the squad dispatched as a favour from one house to another? It would explain the unknown livery and incomplete preparations.

“In that case,” Neia took a step back so she could smile up at the man, “I am afraid we cannot grant you passage.”

“Are you questioning our honour?” The man grated.

“I cannot question the crown laws,” Neia replied. “If you have any grievances with those, I suggest that you take them up with the Royal Court. If you insist on continuing with your unjustified intrusion, we’ll be putting you down as a band of nameless brigands.”

“…”

She continued to smile under the man’s furious glare. It was only after the light of their torches disappeared over the hill to the east that she allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief. Still, in the end, he hadn’t given his name or that of the house that he served so she had no clue who they were dealing with.

“Neia,” Saye said.

“Hm?”

“You’re an idiot.”

Neia buried her face in her hands, going red to her ears. She really was an idiot. How could she let things escalate so quickly? Was she that easy to goad?

“I thought we’d have to toss their corpses in the kingswood,” Carlos said, “so I figure this is a win.”

“Killing them might have been better,” Saye said. “They’ll definitely be back. With how Miss Smiley Murderface here turned them away, it’ll be with a lot more men.”

Argh…

Her father’s smile had people assume he committed at least four atrocities per day and Neia inherited that part of him. Those men probably thought she was every bit the delinquent that their leader had labelled her as.

“It’s worse than that,” Neia said. “I sort of tricked them using their common sense.”

“How so?” Carlos asked.

“Mister Lousa isn’t a Noble,” Neia answered. “He’s just a really big tenant. I figure that he’ll be enfeoffed whenever his ceremonial induction into the Nine Colours is.”

“…why is that a problem? He’s still a direct tenant of the Holy King, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but he’s not a tenant-in-chief. In other words, not a Noble who directly answers to the Holy King. He has no right to enact laws or enforce them. He can’t grant titles, collect taxes, or do anything else that a Noble can do. That’s pretty much why he does things the way that he does. No one working for him has a tenancy because he legally can’t grant titles. They’re all just ‘employees’.”

Mister Lousa was in an unprecedented situation that was only made possible by the catastrophic sequence of events that came with Jaldabaoth’s invasion. The Holy Kingdom didn’t make laws on the assumption that the country would be half destroyed with barely functioning or entirely absent government institutions. Following the war, everyone assumed that things would return to normal within a few years, so enacting new legislation to address the problem was considered a needless effort for an administration that was already stretched thin.

“So the only organisations with judicial authority on Mister Lousa’s land are the Royal Army and the Holy Order?” Saye asked.

“On paper,” Neia replied. “In practice, it was just me and my partner back when I was still part of the Holy Order. We showed up once every two weeks as part of a big patrol around the north of Hoburns. I can’t imagine how long it takes now with just my former partner doing it. With the Royal Army out of the country, Mister Lousa can’t even petition the Holy King for protection because the Holy King has nothing to protect him with.”

The only thing she could be thankful for was that the ‘hole’ in the Holy Kingdom’s administrative and judicial framework was overlooked when the southern Nobles came to take up policing duties in the cities.

“You said that the Holy King doesn’t have anythin’ to protect us with since the Royal Army’s out of the country,” Carlos said. “But can’t he just tell whoever’s stirrin’ up trouble with us to stop?”

“No,” Neia said. “That’s why I specifically linked the issue to the crown laws. If I had framed things as a problem with Mister Lousa, we’d lose by default.”

“How? Those guys were clearly the ones lookin’ to start shit.”

“In every kingdom and empire that I know of,” Neia said, “a liege is obliged to defend their vassals in court. And by vassals, I mean the Noble sort. Since the dispute would be Lord whoever versus Iago Lousa, Mister Lousa wouldn’t have any representation because he’s just a tenant and tenants are supposed to be represented by their lords.”

“…and he doesn’t have a lord to represent him in court.”

“In a normal situation,” Neia replied, “Mister Lousa would be the lord, and a powerful one, at that. No one would dare to challenge him over anything that happens in his demesne.”

“So…where does that leave us?” Saye asked.

“Mister Lousa’s land is basically a weird pseudo-frontier where effectively no one has the legal right to uphold justice. We need to hold our own here until Mister Lousa is granted his title, and we have to do it in such a way that the Nobles can’t level substantial charges against him in the Royal Court. Even that’s iffy because, right now, the Nobles are operating as if they’re dealing with another Noble on that Noble’s land. If they ever realise that they’ve fallen victim to their own common sense, we’re going to be in trouble.”

“Then what do we do now, specifically?” Carlos asked, “What can we do? You make it sound as if we’ve been hogtied.”

“First of all, we’ll have to let Mister Lousa know what happened. Beyond that, we have to keep strengthening ourselves. You saw it just now. It’s as I said: justice without strength is meaningless. We all know that that squad is enough to convince entire villages to let them do what they want. That’s probably what they thought their task would be: searching villages for their targets.

“I know it troubles you that we’re resorting to the threat of force, but that’s ultimately the only sure way to make them stop and listen. That Knight was intent on riding right over me – a ‘little girl’. He’d have done the same to you, saying that he doesn’t answer to ‘peasants’. If any one of us had confronted him alone, we wouldn’t have had the strength to uphold our justice.”

“You keep sayin’ ‘our justice’,” one of her men said. “But what does that mean? Right now, it seems that we’re usin’ ‘strength’ to force a favourable outcome. We want to protect the lives that we’ve made here and that’s a pretty normal thing. You make it sound as if everyone should be lookin’ out for their own interests…but that’s a sure way to start a million feuds that’ll only end when one side stamps out the other.”

Most of the other ranchers nodded along with his words. How events had played out did make things seem like they were as he said.

“Jaldabaoth was strong,” Neia said. “Strong enough to do whatever he wanted. But Jaldabaoth was not justice. To find justice, we must look to His Majesty the Sorcerer King, who is the incarnation of justice! His Majesty used his strength not to torment the weak, but to aid us in our time of need. He risked himself to help strangers like us. It is obvious who we must look to for wisdom and guidance!”

“…I don’t think any of us can be like the Sorcerer King,” Carlos said.

“I’m not saying that we can be,” Neia replied. “At least not physically. But we can be like His Majesty in spirit! We must all strive to shed the sin of weakness – of complacency and powerlessness – and improve ourselves so that we are free to follow our justice! Unlike the Sorcerer King, our adversary is not Jaldabaoth. What we face are mere mortals like you and me: people who intend to inflict injustice upon us and everything we care about.”

Her men still seemed unconvinced, but Neia felt that she was making better progress than she had just a day ago. So long as she could keep nudging them on the right path, they would eventually come to see the truth.

Is it alright to use someone like this?

Saye was pretty sure that Neia Baraja was broken in the head. She never imagined that her assignment would involve unleashing a madwoman on an entire country.

Lord Demiurge’s orders were to assist her primary target – Neia Baraja – in the creation of an ‘ideological vanguard’ for her social movement, which would be instrumental in bringing change to the Holy Kingdom of Roble. This change was crucial in a country shaped by the heretical mess otherwise known as the Faith of the Four, which had a proven history of opposing the Sorcerer King wherever his influence expanded.

Since the end of Jaldabaoth’s invasion, a great deal of experimentation and observation had gone into determining the effect and extent of Neia Baraja’s capabilities. They concluded that, in addition to being a certain type of Paladin, she was some sort of Commander. It wasn’t a conventional military one: it instead seemed to be related to belief or conviction and had abilities themed along those lines – perhaps something like a Missionary or an Evangelist.

Lord Demiurge told her that the Sorcerer King hadn’t expressed any desire to be openly worshipped, however, so they were to facilitate the creation of an easily digestible moral philosophy rather than a religion. That, in turn, would guide the people of the Holy Kingdom into a worldview that was compatible with the culture developing in the Sorcerous Kingdom. That culture, of course, would also serve as a gateway to religious conversion should their god wish for it.

Saye’s current situation, however, was rife with challenges. Foremost amongst them was the fact that the current form of Neia’s ‘message’ wasn’t coherent at all. To Saye and anyone else who didn’t share the same experiences, it came across as deluded at best. The strangest thing about it was that Neia herself understood the problem and was a generally level-headed person right up to the point where she started ‘sharing’. All logic and reason flew out the window after that. It was to the extent that Saye wondered if Neia had just brainwashed herself with her own message and was stuck going in circles with it.

The main problem with Neia’s message was her arbitrary way of attributing bits of ‘wisdom’ to the Sorcerer King. Saye was pretty sure that His Majesty wasn’t like Neia’s image of him at all. When the Sorcerer King walked around E-Rantel, he never went on about strength or justice or sin being a weakness. Rather than any of that, he expressed his pleasure over the fact that his people were happy and his kingdom continued to develop in a positive direction. His citizens were encouraged to thrive doing the things that they were good at for the benefit of society and their collective prosperity, which – paraphrased – was one of the core tenets of the Faith of the Six.

Well, there’s no use griping about it. It’s my job to make her thingy marketable. I just have to make sure it doesn’t conflict with any tenets of the faith.

Saye had a sort of kind of time limit when it came to preparing Neia for her main role. The rapidly deteriorating state of the Holy Kingdom was purposely engineered by Lord Demiurge and his agents in the Holy Kingdom to rebuild the country’s industrial base at all costs, rip up the old cultural regime, and put its people in a mental state that was highly susceptible to Neia’s oratory abilities. Neia needed to start taking advantage of the situation because letting too much time pass would see the Holy Kingdom fall apart.

Thus, the equipment that the Sorcerer King had lent to Neia was recalled to mitigate the risk of her going on any vocational ‘detours’ – she was supposed to grow as an orator, not as an Archer or a Paladin. Neia’s modest following, the Sorcerer King Rescue Corps, was serving as a ‘control sample’ to see how old ‘converts’ would react to refinements to Neia’s message and changes in their environment.

As Saye lay in her bedroll, pondering Neia’s developmental trajectory for the foreseeable future, a Shadow Demon phased through the ceiling of her tent. It had been hanging around her for most of the day – probably because Neia kept relating tales of the Sorcerer King’s greatness – so it made for a convenient scout when Saye needed one. She reached up to activate the Silence item sitting by her pillow.

“What did you find out?” Saye asked.

“The rider and his squad returned to the previous town,” the Shadow Demon answered. “They conferred with another group of men at the inn.”

“What colours were they wearing?”

“Many men. Many colours. The most important person was wearing stripes of red and blue.”

“House Cohen,” Saye nodded.

“Cohen…”

The name seeped out of the Demon’s mouth like a poisonous mist. It seemed that the men stopped at the border by Neia’s company were the vanguard of the scions Saye had overheard discussing their plans in The Queen of Thorns.

“What did they say?”

Several moments went by before the Shadow Demon spoke again.

“Lord Eduardo, this outcome is absolutely unacceptable. That mad-eyed bitch needs to be put in her place for this brazen challenge!”

The Shadow Demon shifted over and faced the empty space where it was once floating.

“We were just testing the waters, Aquino. The remainder of our forces will be joining us overnight. We’ll leave in the afternoon after everyone receives their assignments.”

The Shadow Demon changed places again, crossing its arms.

“My man wants the girl who turned him away.”

“Doesn’t he know that being so persistent will only make women hate him?”

“…”

“It was a joke,” the Shadow Demon's chuckle didn't sound quite like a Human’s. “They had three hundred men, you said?”

“All mounted and armed.”

“We’ll send ten Knights to break them up.”

“Twenty. Also, I assume we have an answer for their crossbows…”

The Shadow Demon scoffed.

“As if a ragtag band of cowherds wouldn’t break as soon as something substantial comes their way. They’re not Demihumans, Aquino, nor do they have a leader to command them.”

“We still need to make sure they don’t escape to cause trouble elsewhere.”

“…fine. But remember that the remainder of our task only consists of exerting pressure on Iago Lousa. We’re not here to thoughtlessly butcher productive elements or cause undue damage to industrial infrastructure.”

“Of course, Lord Eduardo.”

Hmm…

Saye reached up and patted the Shadow Demon on the head.

“You have a good memory,” she smiled. “What do you think the Nobles’ chances are?”

The Shadow Demon shrugged. She supposed that it wouldn’t bother with that sort of assessment when it could probably wipe out both sides on its own.

Saye considered the conversation and the probable effects of the royalist’s actions. The scions were very aggressive as far as the Holy Kingdom went, but it still wasn’t enough.

“I have a job for you,” she told the Shadow Demon. “This is a perfect opportunity for us to give Neia a little nudge along the right path; it would be a shame if we let it go to waste.”

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