Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 9

Though Lloyds was one of the smallest cities in the Holy Kingdom – its current population was around ten thousand excluding the new labour camps – it was still a city and Neia struggled to figure out what was going on and who to speak with. Everyone had their own interpretation of what was happening and why, though the general themes that came with the divide between urban and rural society seemed to weigh heavily on anything anyone said.

Even now, as she and Saye settled down for a late lunch in the city’s main plaza, they listened to another bout of familiar complaints by a group of citizens.

“It’s wrong, I tell ya,” a man in a work apron motioned angrily with a hand. “They say we don’t need the army anymore, and now suddenly they’re yanking people for the wall!”

“Makes no sense at all,” another man shook his head.

Heads around the small gathering nodded in agreement.

“My son was getting ready to take over the workshop,” a third man said. “We thought the days of fighting were behind us! He’s got a kid on the way, too…”

“At least you have a workshop,” a labourer snorted. “I’ve been scratching up a living doing odd jobs for years, and they still call spares like us to fight. Then, we’re ‘reservists’ for the army. We’re spares for our families and spares for the army!”

Putting it that way, it did feel pretty mean. While Neia wasn’t exactly a spare, she had no titles or tenancies to inherit from her family. Unless one was a talented genius, the only options for people like her were joining the Royal Army, the Temples, or scraping up a meagre existence in the cities. Of course, there was also becoming a housewife, but men didn’t have that choice.

Neia glanced around as the gathering grew more noisome and passers-by stopped to lend an ear. The nearby armsmen were quick to take note of the knot in the crowd, however. They pushed their way through towards the group, their halberds gleaming in the afternoon sun.

“Clear out!” One of them shouted over the din, “You’re obstructing traffic.”

The men and women dispersed. Neia finished off her skewer of fish before rejoining the flow of the street with Saye.

“Maybe we should have waited for Mister Moro,” Neia said. “Trying to make sense of all this is…”

“That’s just how gathering information works,” Saye said. “Do you think neatly organised little bundles of information just conveniently appear to present themselves to you for no reason?”

“Obviously not, but…”

A blonde-haired young Priest dressed in high-ranking vestments came up the street, accompanied by two female attendants in the garb of temple staff.

Isn’t that…

Their eyes met, and they stared at one another as they drew closer. As the Priest walked by, Neia’s hand shot out to grab him by the arm.

“Don’t ignore me like that!” Neia cried, “I’m already questioning my existence as it is!”

“Wouldn’t people normally keep their distance when someone looks at them like that?” The Priest replied stuffily.

“You know who I am!” Neia gave the Priest’s arm a shake.

“Should we do something about him?” Saye asked.

Neia’s gaze slid over to the Bard.

“Do something…? Er, no – Priest Jan is a friend of mine. He joined the northern resistance forces not long after the invasion started and was part of the Sorcerer King Rescue Corps. Priest Jan, this is Saye. She’s a travelling Bard.”

“May the gods bless you this fine afternoon,” Priest Jan smiled. “Shall we take our discussion to a more suitable setting?”

Priest Jan sent a pointed look at the busy street around them. More than a few people had stopped to watch, perhaps wondering if another conscription-related scuffle had broken out. Neia nodded and they turned to join the Priest and his attendants as they casually strolled along.

“So, have you found yourself a husband yet?”

“Me? No…”

“That’s no good,” Priest Jan said. “We lost so many during the war…well, I suppose competition might be stiff for the exact same reason.”

Neia nodded. Although both men and women served in the Royal Army, the majority of the Holy Kingdom’s women didn’t pursue a career in the military. As a result, a good chunk of the men in the Holy Kingdom had been killed as part of the Royal Army at the outset of the war.

Additionally, men still stepped up to protect women and children as the conflict raged on. While this technically meant that the population could recover more quickly, finding a husband had become a daunting affair for post-war women.

“What about you?” Neia asked.

“Oh, I got married right after the war ended,” Priest Jan smiled.

“Ah, you did say something along those lines, now that I think about it.”

Neia was attending to His Majesty the Sorcerer King at the time while he was visiting the Corps during the siege of Lloyds, and the Sorcerer King questioned the wisdom of making such a declaration before a major battle. To this day, she still couldn’t figure out what the problem was. She thought it was nice and romantic.

“Was it that Acolyte who was always with you back then?” Neia asked.

“That’s right,” Priest Jan answered with a nod. “Paula’s already expecting. I also married Maria and Martha here.”

She coughed as her congratulations lodged in her throat.

“I thought they were your attendants.”

“They are, but you know how it is. Life in the ministry is always busy and it’s ten times worse nowadays. There’s little time to pursue a relationship and it’s hardly fair for a man to be monopolised by a single woman in our current circumstances. You could say that we’re all doing our part.”

Doing your part, huh…

Maria and Martha both smiled serenely as he spoke. Neia’s mind went somewhere stupid and she remained silent until they arrived at the cathedral in Lloyds’ main plaza.

As with most of the buildings in the city, the cathedral had seen better days. The debris left in the wake of the Demihuman occupation had been cleared away, but restoration efforts lagged behind. Wooden scaffolding covered the walls and tarps had been stretched over the holes in the structure.

The cathedral’s interior was in a similar state of disrepair. Hastily-crafted pews had replaced the old, broken ones, but they had to be arranged around the holes in the stone floor. Neia looked up at the once-majestic murals on the ceiling, which were no longer illuminated by the building’s broken stained glass windows.

“It took weeks to clear out the Pteropus nests,” Priest Jan said. “I swear the stench still lingers no matter how many Clean spells we use.”

Neia wrinkled her nose at the memory. Lloyds Cathedral was the tallest building in the city, so hundreds of Pteropus had nested there. The entire place had been covered in layers of guano and there were thousands of Slimes everywhere.

“How did you manage to clean up that disaster?” Neia asked.

“It took a little while,” the Priest answered, “but the solution was rather simple in the end. We just left the building alone and let the Slimes get rid of the mess. Sentries were stationed around the perimeter and they dispatched the Slimes that tried to wander off.”

“That’s pretty clever.”

After the battle for the city, which included the Sorcerer King’s duel with the Grand King of Destruction, Buser, the Holy Kingdom Liberation Army had camped in and around Lloyds. The tiny city could in no way handle the sanitary needs of the army and its camp followers, so an outbreak of Slimes and other monsters that fed on waste occurred. The Slimes literally erupted from the city’s sewer system one day and attacked everyone and everything in their hunger, so the first thing that people would think at the time was to kill them, not use them.

They walked around to the cloister behind the cathedral, where they found Paula toiling away in the gardens. The Acolyte rose to greet them with a smile.

“Welcome back Bishop.”

“Bishop…?” Neia frowned.

“A side-effect of nearly everyone else dying, I suppose,” the Bishop said.

“But that means you’re the Prefect…”

“Such that it is,” the Prefect shrugged. “The Crown assigned Nobles to the precariae with the blessing of the Temples and we’re bare on staff anyway, so I basically function as a senior Priest these days.”

“What’s ‘precariae’?” Saye asked.

“Temple land leased out tenants,” Bishop Jan said. “They were ruined like everything else, however. Even the monasteries were razed. I haven’t had a taste of good mead since before the war…”

The Bishop sighed as if that was the worst part of it, but it shouldn’t have been his primary concern. The main revenues of the Temples of the Four in the Holy Kingdom came from the precariae. Since they were so short-staffed and most of their institutional activities had been suspended in the wake of the war, however, they could probably sustain their core functions through temple services alone.

Bishop Jan led them into a sparsely furnished office that looked like it had been burnt out.

“So,” he said as he took a seat at his desk, “what brings you to Hoburns? Given you’re in a dress, I can’t imagine you’re here on Holy Order business. Could it be that you came husband hunting? If so, I’m afraid to say that Lloyds is in the same situation as everywhere else in the north, according to the reports.”

“Something was bothering me,” Neia replied. “Since the royalists took control of Lloyds a few weeks ago, I wanted to see how things had changed.”

“That’s a very broad line of inquiry.”

“Any information that you have will help. This is really important.”

The Bishop rested his elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers with an expressionless look. Maria appeared with a stack of wooden cups and placed them on a nearby table. Martha came in on her heels, filling them with hot water from a bronze kettle.

“I know that the new royalists are made up of the progressives from past days,” Bishop Jan said, “but the shift in methodology between them and the old royalists is so radical that I’m not sure what to think. Hoburns has ordered us to cooperate, however, so there’s little that I can do about it.”

“Does that mean you feel something’s wrong with how the royalists are running things?”

“That’s yet to be seen. They have an explanation for everything and claim that Hoburns is the same way, so we just have to wait and see.”

“Y-You can’t do that!”

The Bishop leaned back from Neia’s outburst, exchanging a look with his wives.

“Why is that?”

“Have you been to the capital?” Neia asked.

“No,” Bishop Jan scoffed. “We’ve been so busy in Lloyds that we couldn’t even attend the victory celebrations. But the reports indicate that Hoburns is doing remarkably well.”

“…may I please take a look at one of these reports?”

“Just a moment.”

Bishop Jan rose from his seat, but Paula beat him to the cabinets along one wall of the office. She opened one and ran a finger through the documents within.

“Which ones would you like, Your Excellency?” She asked.

“The monthly summaries for Lloyds Prefecture and Hoburns, please.”

Paula took a moment to locate the desired files. The Bishop gestured with an open hand after she set them on the table.

“There are only three full months’ worth of reports, so I’m not sure if you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.”

Neia placed the reports for Lloyds and Hoburns side by side, looking back and forth as she compared them. She wasn’t an expert in administrative matters, but the files were presented in such a way that most people could make sense of their content.

“This doesn’t make sense,” she frowned.

“I know that members of the Holy Order spend half the day bashing one another over the head,” Bishop Jan said, “but it’s not that complicated…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Neia kept comparing the lines of each report. “Why are the numbers for Hoburns so huge compared to Lloyds under the conservatives?”

“Hoburns is the capital,” the Bishop replied matter-of-factly. “It would be strange if it was the same as Lloyds. The new administrators promised that we would see the same results in a few months, relatively speaking.”

She struggled to reconcile the numbers in the reports with what she witnessed in Hoburns.

This is a lie. It has to be!

While the summary only referenced records that weren’t included in the report, it did break things down into several categories such as reconstruction costs, trade, tax revenues, government expenditures, population growth, and so on. All of it painted an exquisitely optimistic picture of the capital region’s recovery – one that she had seen no sign of while she lived there.

Government expenditures were slashed by three-quarters. Trade and tax revenues were thirty times that of Lloyds, despite Hoburns only having roughly six times the population. Neia pointed to the ridiculous figures, looking up at the Bishop.

“You have to have been suspicious of these claims,” she said. “They’re entirely unrealistic!”

“I did express my confusion over those numbers,” Bishop Jan replied, “but the Nobles had a plausible explanation for it.”

“And what was that?”

“According to them, a significant amount of our country’s productivity goes unreported. One of the first things that they did was take measures to ascertain the true economic situation of their assigned territories. Revenues went up accordingly once the Nobles enforced transparent reporting.”

“Transparent reporting? They make it sound as if the Holy Kingdom is swarming with smugglers and shady organisations.”

The Bishop chuckled lightly at her comment.

“I was a bit offended when I first heard it, as well, but they came up with proof within a week. According to their findings, roughly two-thirds of Lloyds’ economy was what they termed ‘informal’. One-quarter of that informal economy’s transactions could be considered criminal.”

“What would be an example of a transaction in this ‘informal economy’?”

“The majority of them were supply or service arrangements. For instance, a weaver agreeing to mend a Fisherman’s net for a certain number of fish in return. Labour for room and board is also a prevalent one.”

Neia had to admit those things did happen all the time before the war. No one thought badly of those activities, however.

“But that’s normal stuff,” Saye said. “Why is it suddenly wrong?”

“Because it obscures the true productive potential of the Holy Kingdom,” the Bishop said. “Missing revenues aside, they claim that having a clearer picture of the economy helps them plan better for the future, and I can see the sense in that.”

Did they do the same thing in Hoburns? Neia was away on patrol most of the time, so all she could do was note how things had changed whenever she returned from the countryside.

“What did they propose to fix the ‘problem’?” She asked.

“They’re pushing heavily for full monetisation,” the Bishop answered. “All goods, services, and labour are recognised as having monetary value and must be reported. That even includes what goes on between members of a workshop or family business, though I have no idea how they’d enforce that.”

“I don’t think they intend to,” Neia said. “That’s what those labour camps are for.”

“Is that so…?”

She frowned down at the most recent pair of reports. Based on the Bishop’s explanations, the report for Lloyds was what a ‘normal’ recovery would look like. Because the labour camps around the city were just starting to get established, it was very easy to see how they worked.

“The Nobles don’t trust the city folk,” Neia said. “Those labour camps contain almost every industry that you can find in a town or city, and they’re intercepting goods flowing in from the prefecture. No one needs to look inside houses or whatever for accurate reporting because, eventually, the workshops in the city will have nothing to report. By controlling the city’s economy, they’ll get the numbers that they’re looking for.”

“…but they said that Lloyds would be doing as well as Hoburns once everything–”

Neia shot to her feet and slammed her palms on the desk.

“The citizens of Hoburns can barely afford to eat!” She cried, “You don’t want to be doing ‘as well as Hoburns’.”

“But, the numbers…”

“Those numbers are an illusion. I’d almost call them a lie. The price of everything just keeps getting higher and higher in Hoburns and no one has any money anymore. Even the royalists know it. All those labour camps outside of the city walls don’t run on coin: they run on food-based scrip. Those things that the Nobles talked to you about aren’t some special product of their management – they’re things that have always existed no matter who was in charge and how they framed things.”

She wondered if Bishop Jan’s reaction was related to why the problem was getting worse and worse. The people who had the power to do anything about it either only saw nice numbers on a page or were taking advantage of that same blindness.

No, that’s not right. The conservatives refuse to do the same thing and they’re doing fine.

Did it mean that the proverbial lines were already drawn? That everyone in power east of Hoburns wilfully partook of the horrible new form of management spearheaded by the royalists? She didn’t want to believe it was the case.

“If you don’t believe me,” Neia told the Bishop, “visit Hoburns yourself. I hope you have plenty of money, though – they’ve ‘monetised’ everything there.”

“Perhaps I will. Is this the true reason why you came dressed as you are? To covertly deliver a warning?”

“I’d be happy if you could do something about it,” Neia said. “Hopefully before angry mobs start burning bakeries and people get assassinated for being on the ‘wrong side’ The last few months have been far more depressing than I’d like to admit.”

“Assassinated…”

“Didn’t you hear?” Neia said, “Iago Lousa, the new ‘Black’, is dead. The royalists didn’t like that he was importing supplies from Lloyds when it was under the conservatives. They hired an Assassin to kill him and almost all of his hacienda’s senior management as well as lighting the camps around it on fire.”

Neia left the cathedral on that note, letting out a tired sigh as she rejoined the traffic flowing through the square. Things were still lively – at least compared to Hoburns – but it only seemed like a matter of time before Lloyds had the life sucked out of it just like the capital.

“I didn’t know you could be so dramatic, big sis,” Saye said.

“I-It just came out,” Neia mentally curled up on herself. “Everyone’s just so nonchalant about the problem. That’s probably the worst part about it: you just arrive in a terrible place and you never realised that things were heading there the entire time.”

Worse yet, many people were gleefully accelerating the process by participating in the system of rewards and honours for exceptional ‘performance’. That in itself wasn’t the problem, however. Rimun had plenty of examples of those incentives working properly.

“We still have plenty of time until it gets late,” Saye said. “What do you want to do, now?”

“Hmm…”

She already understood that problems were taking root, but, even if she did, she had no clue how to stop them.

“Figuring out where the problems would start might give us some clues about how to counter them,” Neia said. “Have any ideas?”

“Someone once told me that following the money would usually lead somewhere interesting.”

“…I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.”

Neia wasn’t sure that she wanted to know at all, as it sounded like another ludicrous anecdote from a Bard who always saw the worst things in life.

“In this case,” Saye said, “the Nobles are being pretty blatant about it, aren’t they? They know that their scheme works, so all they have to do is enact it.”

Their scheme, huh…they’re in the process of setting up the labour camps and regulating the city’s resources through them, so…

“Let’s go back to the docks,” Neia said. “It’s the only place they can’t block with their labour camps.”

“Alright. By the way, you said that the Bishop was a member of the Corps? I thought the Temples hated the Undead.”

“It’s not as if the Corps was filled with Undead,” Neia frowned. “I know it’s true that the Temples’ official stance calls for the destruction of the Undead, but there were plenty of Priests and Paladins who could work with the Sorcerer King. Queen Calca herself would have probably gotten along with him: both she and His Majesty wished for their citizens to be harmonious and happy.”

It was a shame that the Holy Queen never got the chance to meet the Sorcerer King. The Holy Kingdom would’ve probably been a very different place than it was today if she had.

A front of angry grey clouds loomed on the horizon when they arrived at their destination.

“I’m not very superstitious, but I don’t like the looks of that.”

“Looks like a convenient excuse to me,” Saye replied.

“Huh?”

Neia’s gaze went from the clouds to the Bard, then back again. The corner of her eyelid twitched as a sheet of lightning illuminated the coming storm.

No…they couldn’t, could they? No, they will.

She stepped on a rail and twisted around to scan the waterfront. The entire wharf was a hubbub of activity as it prepared to receive the ships coming in ahead of the storm.

“Ugh, there are too many people.”

At first, she thought she would be able to spot groups of armsmen harassing the people working on the docks, but she couldn’t make anything out in the chaos. Merchants made last-minute sales before packing up their stalls and carting them away while wagons were rolled into place to rush whatever cargo came in to the nearby warehouses.

A gust of wind pushed Neia off of her perch. They moved away as a large wave crashed into the wharf, inundating the stones.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to catch them before it happens,” Neia sighed.

“They won’t be doing it right in plain view,” Saye said. “Let’s check the alleys.”

Neia rushed to catch up to Saye as she went for the closest alley. There were too many buildings to check, but they had to try.

Hoburns, Kalinsha, and Prart were all landlocked, allowing the royalists to gain economic control of them fairly easily. Lloyds, on the other hand, could import vast quantities of cargo by ship. The royalists’ tactic of using labour camps on their assigned fiefs outside of the city couldn’t work as they had no jurisdiction over the water.

To achieve their ends on crown land, an ‘accident’ had to be arranged. Before, it was an angry mob burning down a town mill and bakery. The royalists hadn’t driven the people of Lloyds to the state where they could manipulate public anger yet, so the coming storm was a golden opportunity to expedite their plans. Any warehouses or processing facilities unwilling to go along with their schemes would be mysteriously set on fire by ‘lighting’. The rain would make it easy to control the aftermath, as well.

A peal of thunder drove Neia forward as she searched for any would-be arsonists. The two blocks closest to the piers were occupied by warehouses and industries meant to support the fishing industry. That meant there was only one alley to go down – hopefully, they had chosen to go in the right direction.

She nearly ran into Saye as the Bard jerked to a stop. Neia looked to her left and right, then nearly shouted as she spotted a pair of men between a warehouse and a covered shipyard for small vessels. Both were garbed as common labourers. One of them knelt, his hands working on something out of view as the other man held up a lamp to provide him with light. They both froze and looked in her direction as she approached.

“H-Hi,” she smiled nervously.

Neia wasn’t sure what to say, so something stupid came out. The two men gave her incredulous looks.

“We’re not buying, woman.”

“Buying?”

“Get lost.”

Uwah, so rude. And what do they mean by ‘buying’?

Were they accustomed to performing shady dealings in dark alleys? Neia swallowed. It was rather Rogue-like. The men obviously weren’t commoners, either. They had the height and solid look of professional armsmen.

“You deaf?” The man with the lamp stepped toward her, “Leave.”

“Why should I? What are you two doing here, anyway?”

She glanced at the wall where the kneeling man was, but he had moved to block her line of sight on whatever he was doing. They didn’t miss her look.

“That’s none of your business,” the man with the lamp said. “Go home. Didn’t you see that storm coming in?”

“I did,” Neia replied. “But nothing says I can’t be here.”

Neia looked past the man’s shoulder to the street beyond. People were running back and forth as they rushed for shelter. None of them spared a glance at what was going on in the alley.

A flash of lightning scattered the darkness. The kneeling man jumped at the thunderclap that followed.

“What’s that you have there?” Neia pointed at some rags piled against the wall.

“Like I said, it’s none of your business.”

“Your friend looks like he’s scared of thunder. Maybe you should take him home before it gets worse.”

An exasperated sigh joined the sound of the rising wind.

“We’re staying right where we are,” the man with the lamp told her. “You’re the one who should leave.”

“I don’t want to,” Neia replied. “I like it here.”

Another clap of thunder shook the buildings around them.

“Your friend is going to cry,” Neia said.

“I’m not!” The kneeling scrubbed his cheeks.

Eh? Is he actually crying?

“Don’t you feel sorry for him? Take him home already.”

“I’m not crying!”

“Yeah? Then why are the rags all wet?”

“It’s not from me! It’s from the oil that–”

The man’s mouth snapped shut. Neia’s eyes went back and forth between the two ‘labourers’.

“…what did you say about oil?”

“It’s nothing,” the man with the lamp told her. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to stick your nose in other people’s business?”

“My mother always told me to help people who were troubled,” Neia replied. “Do you need money? I’ll give you some for that lamp.”

“Hah?”

What am I doing…

They were trying to set the building on fire, but they weren’t doing it yet so she had no right to stop them. She couldn’t just run in and attack the guy while shouting wild accusations.

Not that the royalists would believe anything I said. Wait, aren’t I screwed here?

A drizzle made its way between the rooftops. Neia moved under the eaves as it rapidly turned into a deluge. Then, she leaned over and snatched the oil-soaked rags.

“Hey!”

“What? I wanted to wipe myself off. They’re just rags, right?”

“They’re my rags!”

She held up the cloth in her hand. There were at least two moth-eaten socks in the bundle.

“You don’t want these,” Neia said. “Just get some new socks. I can buy you some socks if you’d like.”

It’d be nice if Saye did something to help…huh? Where did she go?

Neia couldn’t take her eyes off of the men, but she couldn’t feel the Bard’s presence nearby anymore. A lump formed in her throat. Was she alone in an alley with two Rogues?

The second man rose to his feet. Neia took a step back.

“Wh-what are you doing?” She asked, “Stay away! Help! Someone!”

“Dammit, shut this ugly woman up!”

A hand reached out to snatch her wrist. Neia shrieked and punched the Rogue with all of her might.

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