Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 3

“Stop saying um. Did you become a Buddhist?”

“Don’t they say ‘Om’?”

Saye sent an unamused look across the table at her.

“I-I couldn’t help it!” Neia flopped listlessly onto one of the incalculably expensive-looking couches in her state room, “There were so many people watching me!”

“Aren’t you already used to speaking in front of crowds?”

“I am, but this is different. Plus, they were all Nobles! It felt as if a coven of Vampires was trying to suck something out of me.”

Every minute from the moment she entered the palace was exhausting. Usually, she could muster seemingly unlimited energy to speak with people, but interacting with Duke Debonei and his cohort was downright oppressive.

“Maybe they were using Skills,” Saye said.

As far as Neia knew, Nobles didn’t have Skills. Only powerful warriors like her father and the elite Paladins did.

“Yeah,” Saye said. “A Skill. One that makes you go um. An Um Skill.”

“Th-that’s ridiculous. How can there be such a Skill?”

“Why not? It seems useful. It made you sound like an inferior orator and it was throwing you off.”

That’s true, but…

Only Demihumans and Heteromorphs had weird Skills. Humans were normal.

Neia rolled over to face the backrest of her couch. She was so tired she could barely think.

“At least our strategy worked,” she said.

“Kind of,” Saye replied. “We knew that they would probably use the trade agreement to hook us. How things play out hinges on us proving how useful we’ll be to them.”

Their strategy – if one could call it that – had been to take advantage of the idea that she was an unsophisticated commoner. This in itself wasn’t exactly wrong when she compared herself to the Nobles, but it felt odd nonetheless. Neia restricted herself to a few talking points and feigned ignorance or disinterest in everything else. This, in turn, would cause the Nobles to frame her as a certain type of ‘asset’ and focus on discerning her usefulness as one. In all, it wasn’t hard to accomplish since Saye’s coaching similarly focused on topics related to what they were going for and Neia had no confidence talking to the Nobles about anything else anyway.

Additionally, Saye used Spellsongs to increase Neia’s competency for the duration of the discourse, which the Bard disguised as the ‘tuning’ at the beginning of dinner and between songs. Since Nobles were used to treating servants and performers as ‘invisible’ or part of the background, they hadn’t noticed at all – they only praised the quality and breadth of the musical selection that they were supposed to hear.

Wait, doesn't that mean I'm the only one that looked bad back there?

“Miss Baraja,” Mrs Diaz entered the drawing room, “would you like to have a bath drawn?”

“I’m fine, thank you. Saye used that towel thing on me before we got off the carriage. I just want to sleep.”

“I’ll prepare everything right away,” Mrs Diaz said.

The sound of Saye’s lute filled the chamber with a soft melody. Neia flipped over to eye the Bard.

“You performed throughout dinner without breaks,” Neia said. “Aren’t you tired of playing that thing?”

“No.”

“What do you think will happen tomorrow?”

“Not much. The Nobles need time to put together a satisfactory force for their test, so we have the Merchants’ negotiations and that’s about it…I think.”

“In that case,” Mister Moro said from where he was attending to them, “would you like to speak to the people, Miss Baraja?”

Hmm…

Now that she had some sense of how her words affected people in various situations, she was actually hesitant to speak in Rimun. Everyone seemed content as they were and it would feel devastating to have her message fall on deaf ears when so many of her followers were around. Furthermore, she was still reworking key points in her message so that they were more applicable in times of peace.

“Instead of public speaking,” Neia said, “could we visit members of the Sorcerer King Rescue Corps? I’d like to see how they’ve applied His Majesty’s wisdom to their everyday lives.”

“Of course, Miss Baraja.”

That would probably help. Hopefully, she would be able to understand what was going on.

The following morning, Neia found herself lying abed in a solar that immediately induced anxiety in her. It was so big and fancy that it may as well have been a manor in itself. She couldn’t recall how she had gotten there.

After a long stretch and a yawn, she rolled out of bed and went to peek through the curtains. It was already mid-morning. Outside, a small army of gardeners and their assistants worked to restore the palace grounds to their former glory. Pretty much everything had been churned up by the Demihumans’ activity, putting the gardens, parks, and venues into a dire state of disrepair.

Neia left the window and went looking for her clothes, finding most of them draped over a chair nearby. Mrs Diaz appeared with her freshly ironed shirt.

“Good Morning, Miss Baraja,” the buxom woman smiled.

“Good Morning, Mrs Diaz. Oh, you’re growing out your hair – I didn’t notice yesterday since you had it up.”

“Keeping it short would remind me of my days imprisoned by Jaldabaoth’s armies, so I figured I’d let it grow until it starts to annoy me.”

For some reason, the longer hair made her seem gloomier than usual, but her choice was more than understandable.

“Did I miss anything?”

“The Merchants left to conduct their negotiations in the warehouse district at dawn.”

“Ugh, I should have gone with them…”

“Mister Moro went along,” Mrs Diaz carefully placed Neia’s shirt over a chair before going to make her bed. “None of the Nobles were present so it’s probably for the best that you didn’t go.”

“I see. What about Saye?”

“She’s in the solar office. That girl refuses to stray very far from you, so you two must be very close. She’s astonishingly strong, as well. Mister Moro has a bad back so she carried you from the couch in the drawing room to your bed.”

“Saye slept in the office? Honestly, this bed is so stupidly huge that she could have–hmm…have you seen my mask?”

Mrs Diaz’s gloomy look faded as she smiled slightly.

“Why, it’s on your face, Miss Baraja.”

Neia’s hand went to her face. She hadn’t even noticed that the mask was there. Her face really was going to disappear, at this rate.

Does that mean Saye left it on my face on purpose?

She left the bedroom to find the Bard behind the office desk. A tome that might have passed for trebuchet ammunition lay open before her.

“What are you reading?”

“History,” Saye replied. “I know I should have expected as much, but it’s very Roble-ish.”

“What does that mean?”

“Extremely biased, I guess? Instead of The History of the World, it should be called History According to Roble. Well, more like History According to Roble’s Nobles. There’s barely anything in here older than what happened on the peninsula after the Demon Gods.”

The desire to root out bits of lore from wherever they could find it seemed to be common to all Bards. Neia’s education revolved around combat and judicial duties and didn’t include any unrelated history, so Saye probably already knew more about the Holy Kingdom’s history than she did.

“Have you ever wondered about our history?” Saye asked.

“Our history?”

“You know, the stuff that everyone knows. Like the Demon Gods. If you sift through the records and filter out all of the embellishment and attempts at patrons to aggrandise themselves, there’s pretty much nothing.”

“Nothing? There must be something…”

Saye shook her head, sweeping her hand palm-upwards over the book.

“It’s all ‘common knowledge’. That the Demon Gods existed and destroyed everything. A few stories about the Thirteen Heroes. We know that they won, but not where and how, and we know that a ‘Dragon God’ ended their adventures after that.”

“I-Is that so? I always thought that was just what we know and people elsewhere had their own stories about them.”

“I think most would think that,” Saye said. “But if you travel from place to place – especially as a Bard – it’s pretty noticeable. It’s all the same story and there are no details that give you a sense of who, what, when, where, why, and how for almost everything. It’s almost as if the story was purposely made that way so it could be accepted everywhere.”

“But we know for a fact that the Demon Gods existed. We also know that everything was destroyed and we built on top of what came before.”

“I’m not saying that they didn’t exist,” Saye said. “I’m just saying that the stories around them are oddly uniform wherever you go in the Human world.”

“Shouldn’t that be because of the Theocracy?” Neia said, “We have their version of the story because humanity spread out from there after the Demon Gods were defeated.”

“That could account for much of it,” the Bard sighed and closed the book. “I suppose I was just hoping for something more substantial out of a tome from a royal library.”

“Um…sorry we disappointed you.”

“Stop saying um!”

Neia’s mouth snapped shut and she left the office. A breakfast of fluffy buttered bread, sausage, eggs, and fish stew awaited her in the suite’s dining room. She settled down for her meal, sorting out her clouded memories of the previous day.

We’re supposed to be visiting people today...I think?

As important as her talks with the conservatives were, she wanted nothing more than to get back to spreading the Sorcerer King’s wisdom and increasing the number of people who understood His Majesty’s greatness. Now that she could focus her time and energy on those efforts, she could refine her message and help restore justice to the lands being strangled to death by the royalists.

Mister Moro returned an hour before noon and together they took their carriage to the common areas of Rimun. Neia eyed the flowers piled at the palace gates as they passed through them.

“I should offer some flowers,” she said. “It’s terrible how life under the royalists is so wretched that people lose their sense of everything but themselves. Queen Calca would have been horrified to see the Holy Kingdom today.”

“What was the Holy Queen like?” Saye asked, “It looks like the people loved her a lot.”

“She caused a lot of controversy by simply existing,” Neia answered, “but I’m pretty sure most of the citizens loved her.”

“Controversy?”

Neia’s gaze rested on a ruined theatre as their carriage rolled by. She remembered watching several plays there when she had visited Rimun as a child with her parents.

“The Holy Kingdom has always had a Holy King. Calca ascended the throne due to her appearance and power. They even had to make a new title for her because she couldn’t be the ‘Holy King’.”

“That sounds a bit like imperial culture,” Saye said.

“It does?”

She couldn’t recall any notable Empresses, though her knowledge of world history was even more dismal than her Roble history.

“More specifically, imperial military culture,” the Bard told her. “Baharuth society is dominated by men, just like the Holy Kingdom, but it developed differently. In Roble, you have universal mandatory military service. In Baharuth, the martial aristocracy remained at the forefront of military affairs and their culture evolved into the traditions and organisational structure of the Imperial Army. Women from the martial aristocracy are treated very differently from ‘civilian’ women. They’re not wives and mothers to be provided for and protected: they’re war leaders who defend their fiefs against monsters and raiders while their husbands and brothers are away from home serving in the Imperial Army.

“Once in a while, a woman from that group is so strong that they decide it’s worth it to serve in the army. So now you have this noblewoman of good breeding who is already beautiful who also happens to be strong and personal strength is also always seen as desirable. Then you attach that image of the stalwart leader who can always be relied upon to defend hearth and home and it all comes together to create a living idol. An icon of a proud military establishment that everyone respects and adores.”

Neia wondered how her mother would have done in the Imperial Army. She had been recognised as one of the Holy Kingdom’s elite Paladins, but little of what Saye described happened here. Strong, capable women were usually viewed as disruptions to social order at best, or perhaps ill-fitting tools.

“I think women like that would be seen as an object here,” Neia said. “In the sexual sense.”

“That’s not bad in itself, is it?” Saye asked, “Though I guess it might be annoying if that was the only thing that people cared about.”

“Queen Calca had the endorsement of the Temples since she was such a powerful Priest, as well,” Neia said. “You’re probably right about the idol thing, though. She was an existence that could only be admired from afar by most and no one would dare try anything on the Holy Queen, so her looks and strength worked in her favour.”

“What was her reign known for?”

“Social reform, maybe? I think that her policies were a good thing, but I might be biased because I’m from the city like she was.”

“So she promoted policies that favoured the cities?”

Neia shook her head.

“No, she tried to…I’m not sure how to say it. I guess she tried to bridge the gap between rural and urban society. She wanted a more cosmopolitan country that accepted ideas from abroad – even from non-Humans. The Summer Palace, for instance, was turned into a public space with all sorts of attractions and she encouraged everyone to visit on holy days. She was probably more successful with the commoners than the aristocracy.”

“Because the Nobles saw it as a cultural attack.”

She nodded at the Bard’s characteristically astute conjecture.

“The conservatives were very loud about how the Holy Queen was trying to encourage the people to adopt corrupt, immoral urban values in an underhanded effort to erode society and undermine the power of the aristocratic establishment. To the progressives of the time, however, she was the wrong sort of progressive who focused on what they considered frivolous policies. Both sides considered her soft and being a woman only served as proof of that in their eyes.”

“That’s interesting,” Saye said.

“No, it’s terrible!”

“I meant the divide between rural and urban society and how the late Holy Queen tried to address it. It’s almost the exact opposite of what happened in the Baharuth Empire.”

“I don’t actually know much about the Empire…”

Their carriage shuddered as it crossed the threshold of the Summer Palace’s southeastern gate. The scenery was replaced by the gardens and manors of Rimun’s Prime Estates. Its residents – the southern conservatives that had come to help administer the north – had been quick about fixing the place up after they moved in.

“Baharuth’s Emperors were what you’d consider progressive, but in the way that your progressives would have wanted. They prioritised military power and territorial expansion, industries that were considered ‘practical’, and the integration of arcane magic into society.”

“Hehh…everyone always seems to only have good things to say about the Empire. Wait, but doesn’t that mean the royalists are right?”

“It depends on what you think is desirable,” Saye replied. “Due to the aggressive pursuit of its imbalanced policies, the Baharuth Empire is a country of haves and have-nots and the vast majority of its people are a part of the latter. Its people believe in their version of meritocracy, and that also means they believe that those have-nots deserve to be in the situation that they’re in. Even the have-nots believe that they just have to work harder to cross over to the other side of the economic fence. In reality, their economy isn’t much stronger than Re-Estize’s and the Empire just came up with a way to justify one person being rich at the expense of a thousand others.”

“But how can that be? No one ever portrays Re-Estize in the same light as Baharuth.”

“Because they would be insane to do so. The difference between the Kingdom and the Empire is that the Empire was much better at organising their resources and they put those resources to good use. Also, the Empire conveniently doesn’t have a powerful criminal syndicate feeding off of them like Re-Estize does. After six generations or so, the gulf between them has become so vast that most wouldn’t imagine that they’re roughly equal in economic terms.

“Also, what Merchants and the like – who serve as the primary source of information from foreign lands – see is what the Empire wants them to see. Someone visiting Arwintar stays in the First or Second-class Districts, depending on what their business is. They don’t go to the Third and Fourth-class districts where all the poor people are, nor would they ever want to. Those parts of the city rarely see any security patrols, if ever.”

That almost sounds like how things are here these days…

Due to the Holy Kingdom’s limited resources, public services went to the most ‘valuable’ places. It was almost as if people didn’t deserve a decent quality of life if they were poor.

“Mister Moro,” Neia said, “is it like that around Rimun, too?”

“To an extent,” the middle-aged man replied. “Miss Saye paints a dire picture, but the truth is that no country in existence can afford to provide high-quality public services to every single one of their citizens. That is, unfortunately, reality.”

“But that sort of inequality feels unjust,” Neia frowned. “There must be a better way.”

“I suppose it is a matter of expectations, Miss Baraja,” Mister Moro said. “As you’ve noted, you harbour the biases of urban society. People in the city expect regular patrols and sentries at every corner, well-stocked markets, a temple on every fourth block and all sorts of other amenities. Nine out of ten people in the Holy Kingdom do not live in the cities, however. A patrol coming by once every other week to check in on their village is fine. So long as there’s a temple within a day’s walking distance, they feel that their spiritual and medical needs are met. If they need specialised goods and services, then they go to the local town which is a day away, at most. In their minds, they have everything that they need.”

“That seems like an excuse,” Neia said. “They’re fine with it because they don’t know better and others take advantage of that to put their resources to use elsewhere.”

“I believe that was the rationale of our late Holy Queen, Miss Baraja. Some may even assert that it was a condescending viewpoint, so it may be advisable to reserve those notions for another time – especially considering that we’re dealing with the conservative camp.”

Why does everything have to be so complicated? No, that’s wrong. It only seems complicated because we currently lack the strength to uphold our justice.

Weakness was a sin that facilitated iniquity and the suffering that it wrought. Strength was required to enact true change and maintain it.

Their carriage slowed as they crossed into the common area inside Rimun’s walls. Neia still quite couldn’t believe what she saw. By almost every measure, the port city – which was perhaps a fifth the size of Hoburns before the war – had eclipsed the capital. The streets and markets were as busy as ever and the masts of ships filled with cargo could be seen peeking up over the southern wall. Rimun had already left the war behind while Hoburns only continued to deteriorate in its aftermath.

“Who are we visiting first?” Neia asked.

Mister Moro produced a folded parchment from his coat pocket.

“I’ve taken the liberty of spreading you out,” he said. “We’ll be seeing people in different parts of the city so that you can, in turn, be seen. Our first stop is the workshop of one Jan Soto in the southeastern quarter.”

“The industrial quarter, huh…what does he do?”

“Mister Soto runs a lumber yard with three hundred employees.”

Wood and wood products were some of the only exports that the south purchased from the north, so Mister Soto sounded like an extremely wealthy man. She wondered if all of his employees also followed His Majesty’s wisdom.

Would that be genuine? Or would it essentially be coercion?

Their carriage came in front of a workshop – or, rather, several workshops – attached to a yard the size of a city block. Just before they stopped, a well-dressed man with a mop of brown hair came running out the nearest door. He fidgeted nervously as Neia and her party disembarked, bobbing his head several times as she approached.

“Miss Baraja, I’m sorry that you had to come all the way here for us.”

“Ah, no,” Neia bobbed her head several times, “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this, Mister Soto.”

“I-It’s no imposition at all,” Mister Soto bobbed his head back. “We’re honoured that you’ve taken an interest in our work!”

Neia jumped mid-head-bob as Saye poked her in the ribs. Mister Soto was too preoccupied with bobbing his head to notice. A small crowd started to gather at the spectacle. Mister Moro cleared his throat.

“Mister Soto…”

“Ah, of course. Please, this way.”

They were led into an office that had all of its doors and windows opened, yet remained miserably hot. Mister Soto crossed the building to enter the yard behind it, which was filled with people hard at work.

“I don’t remember this facility being here before,” Neia said.

“It wasn’t, Miss Baraja,” Mister Soto said. “But demand for our goods was seemingly unlimited during reconstruction. In accordance with the wisdom of the Sorcerer King, my sons and I worked as hard and as long as we could every day, challenging ourselves to grow stronger. All of the training that the Sorcerer King Rescue Corps conducted during the war undoubtedly helped.”

“In what ways would you say that it helped?” Neia asked.

“Well, we became physically stronger as a result of that training. That, in turn, gave us an undeniable edge over our competitors. Can you imagine eating and sleeping the same as everyone else yet being able to accomplish twice as much? Er, I guess you could, Miss Baraja, but it was a complete mystery to anyone who didn’t understand His Majesty’s wisdom.”

It made sense for physically intensive vocations. One could use the strength that they gained from the war in their profession. The Sorcerer King Rescue Corps was the only group amongst Roble’s defenders that spent most of their free time out of battle training to become stronger, so the performance of its members probably couldn’t be replicated by anyone else.

“Anyway,” Mister Soto continued, “between our profits and the Crown’s recognition of our performance, we slowly started buying up the empty shops and yards in the area. After that, we moved on to our competitors. Eventually, we consolidated all of the lumber workshops in the city under us and we were even granted some of the woodlands around the city by the Crown.”

He’s sort of like Mister Lousa, except for lumber.

“That’s amazing,” Neia said.

“It’s all thanks to the Sorcerer King,” Mister Soto said. “His Majesty is truly great.”

“What about your employees?” Neia asked, “Have they come to realise the Sorcerer King’s greatness, as well?”

“Not at first, but they eventually came around to it. It was hard to ignore the fact that normal people just like them were doing so much more than they could. We did more work at a higher quality and got paid accordingly. People who heeded His Majesty’s wisdom went from barely getting by to being able to buy abandoned properties in the good parts of town, fix them up, and furnish them. They can afford what their families deserve and go to bed without worrying about the next day.”

Hearing his account was truly edifying. The Sorcerer King’s wisdom was unlike the ways they had before the war where one could only tighten their belts and suffer what they must whenever hardship came along. For the first time ever, they could take control of their lives and forge their own destinies.

Mister Soto stopped occasionally to speak with people and show off their work as they laboured in the shaded areas set up around the yard. For some reason, unassuming things like frames for housing and even planks had a sense of being masterfully made.

“Your workshops produce really high-quality items,” Saye said.

“Don’t they?” Mister Soto grinned, “I don’t mean to brag, but our business has the distinction of having two certified grandmasters. At the rate that things are progressing, we’ll have over a dozen by next year.”

“Won’t that make your products common enough to affect the price?”

“Only if we stick to local markets. There’s a whole world out there that’ll purchase goods of grandmaster quality. We haven’t been dropping our prices at all: instead, we’ve been stockpiling inventory for the fleet. Our ship is literally coming in.”

Neia couldn’t help but be impressed by Mister Soto’s good business sense. While the trade fleets were run by the Holy Kingdom’s people, one could rightly say that Rimun and Debonei were merely tiny ports of call along the fleet’s massive trade route. The majority of their business was conducted in the distant southeast and exporting any goods from the Holy Kingdom would help bring in more wealth from there.

After two hours or so, their tour brought them back out of the yard and across the street. There, Neia was surprised to find a second, smaller yard where dozens of men were drilling and sparring with practice spears.

“What’s this?” She asked.

“It’s not exactly the same as our time in the army,” Mister Soto said, “but we’re continuing to strengthen ourselves using a training regimen similar to what we followed during the war. It works just as good now as it did then; even the new employees show improvement within weeks so long as they don’t slack off.”

“Mister Bertrand,” Neia turned to the former steward, “is every member of the Sorcerer King Rescue Corps following similar routines?”

“The specifics vary according to vocation, but yes, everyone that I’ve personally spoken to.”

Neia sent her gaze over the rows of men training in the yard. All of them were at least as strong as the average career soldier in the Royal Army. Perhaps the Nobles’ reaction to her statement about noncombatants wasn’t concern over her unwillingness to commit, but disappointment over the fact that she wouldn’t mobilise a two-hundred-thousand-strong army of battle-hardened veterans to sweep aside all opposition.

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