Chapter 452 |
He sat in a high-backed leather chair, absently running his fingers through azure fur as Talbot sprawled across Nick’s lap the moment he sat down, demanding attention with the imperious entitlement only a feline could truly muster.
Nick scratched the spot just behind his tufted ears, earning an appreciative sound.
Across the desk, Elena folded her hands over a stack of parchment he knew was the trial’s records from the day before. Though its conclusion had been foregone, they couldn’t skip the bureaucracy; only now that she was done could they finally move on to planning the next phase.
I don’t anticipate any objections, but it’s good to air things out.
"The execution seems to have achieved exactly what we needed it to," Elena began. “I have received multiple reports that the public spectacle unified the town behind us. The displaced northerners now view House Crowley as their protectors, and their belief in a better life here has been strengthened, while the foreign spies hiding in our land have been reminded of our power.”
"The show of force went as well as it could have," Devon agreed from his place by the window, arms crossed over his chest. He wore simple training clothes rather than his armor today, but his brow was furrowed, and he’d clearly been thinking about this for a while. "However, our most pressing problems remain the same. The refugee camps are overflowing, and we cannot allow those tents to become a permanent fixture.”
Ah, yes. That is something we need to address, especially since the numbers coming in still haven’t dropped significantly.
"If we leave them in squalor, disease will follow, and desperation will breed more groups like the Ashen Choir," Nick said with a nod. "We need to process them faster. Floria has the resources to expand, but we need the labor to harvest them.”
"I have already drafted the preliminary edicts,” Elena agreed. “We will offer every able-bodied refugee a position in the logging expansion or the quarry crews. In exchange for two years of contracted labor, they will be granted citizenship, a plot of land in the newly zoned eastern district, and the timber needed to build a proper home.”
"It is a sound investment," Nick nodded. Until now, they’d just been going over uncontroversial matters, but good intentions, while all well and good, couldn’t turn dreams into reality on their own. "But it will require a significant upfront outlay of coin to feed and equip them until the new timber harvests begin yielding a profit. Which brings us to the Valerius Consortium.”
The atmosphere in the room shifted, growing noticeably warier, enough that Talbot opened an inquisitive eye, only for Nick to pat him back to sleep.
All three of them were aware of the opportunity that having the Valerius Consortium on the back foot would bring. Now it was just a matter of calibrating their response to make the most of it without provoking an excessive response.
"They are the fourth-largest merchant union in the kingdom," Elena muttered, picking up a scroll from her desk and reading the intelligence assessment one of the clerks had compiled. "They control a significant share of the grain imports and steel shipments traveling through the western arteries, and have links to just about every Guild and organization of note. If we push it too far, retaliation is not merely a possibility but a certainty. They will not take the execution of their expedition leader and the capture of their agents lightly, and demanding even more might set them off.”
"Let them retaliate," Devon said, his jaw tightening. “They clearly broke the King’s laws, not just by harming our interests. No one would see us as overreaching.”
Ah, if only I could have the same faith in the Kingdom.
"I agree with the sentiment, Devon, but we must be pragmatic," Elena countered smoothly. "They will likely try to impose an economic blockade and pressure the smaller guilds into boycotting Floria, hoping to starve us out before winter. Given the sheer influx of people, they might actually succeed, even though we are net exporters.”
That was true. If House Crowley had been more ruthless, such a threat wouldn’t have carried any weight, but they’d already taken steps to portray themselves as compassionate toward the weak.
If they allowed the poor to starve, everything they’d built so far would come crashing down.
Still, that didn’t mean they had no cards. "They certainly can make things difficult for us, but I wonder if it won’t blow up in their faces,” Nick pointed out, shifting his legs slightly under Talbot's weight. "The Green Ocean is the most lucrative frontier in Berea right now. The demand for monster cores, rare alchemical reagents, and ancient wood is far too high in Alluria alone. If the Valerius Consortium tries to lock us out, their rivals will simply step into the vacuum to claim the profits, with some incentive, of course.”
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Both his mother and his brother understood what he was implying. They would need to make a secret agreement with another major consortium, likely one of the top ones, and accept a slight loss in profit, but their position wasn’t as weak as it might have looked from the outside.
Hopefully, the Valerius Consortium wasn’t made up of idiots and would realize there wasn’t much to gain from butting heads with them, but he wouldn’t put too much hope in that. People had a bad habit of disappointing him.
"We will send the demand today,” Elena decided, pulling a fresh sheet of parchment toward her. "One thousand gold pieces is a sum they can easily afford, but paying it will serve as an official acknowledgment of our authority. If they refuse, we’ll put their men in the labor camps and start sounding out the other major consortia.”
Once she finished writing, she paused and looked at the two of them. “We must remain vigilant. They may decide that hiring a mercenary army to burn Floria to the ground is cheaper than letting their enemies expand their business in this direction.”
“I’d like to see them try. Mercenaries haven’t impressed me much,” Devon snorted, and Nick had to suppress a smirk.
Certainly, the kind of people they’d faced in Floria so far was nowhere near the level needed to intimidate them, let alone take the town.
Still, their pockets are deep, and it might be enough to entice someone beyond us. Of course, in that case, Ogden, Arthur, and Marthas might have to intervene, and even Xander if he’s still here by then. I doubt any mercenary army would stand up to such monsters for very long, even one led by someone with a modicum of power, but there would be a price to pay for their protection.
“I do not believe it will come to that, no,” Elena said with an exasperated sigh. “But it’d be better to avoid that conclusion, wouldn’t it?”
Talbot suddenly stopped purring and lifted his head, his ears swiveling forward. He hopped down from Nick’s lap with grace, landing silently on the wooden floor. He looked back over his shoulder, his iridescent eyes fixed on Nick, and let out a low, insistent trill.
"What is it?" Nick asked, frowning.
“I sense something,” the cat said, padding toward the door, pawing at the wood, and looking back again.
"I think our meeting is adjourned," Nick said, standing and smoothing his shirt. “It’s not like there’s much we can do until we hear back from the Valerius people.”
Elena waved him off, already busy with something else, and Devon didn’t need to be told twice before scampering off to find Sonya.
Leaving the study behind, Nick followed the Guardian Beast through the manor, growing more curious. Talbot moved with singular purpose, navigating the winding halls and descending the stone staircase into the reinforced subterranean levels.
Soon, they arrived at the underground training room. Nick pushed the door open and stepped into the wide, unadorned space.
The air down here was cool, and Nick could feel the resonant hum of the defensive wards he had carved into the foundation months earlier, fueled by the blood and souls of the two careless spies he had sacrificed.
Talbot trotted to the exact center of the stone floor and sat, wrapping his thick, fluffy tail neatly around his paws.
"Alright, we are here," Nick said, crossing his arms and studying the cat. "What did you find?”
Since he’d found out they could understand each other, the two of them had spent a lot of time chatting about the nature of the ether and spiritual magic, but it seemed Talbot himself was having trouble pinning down whatever he’d sensed.
As one of the very few beings with keener senses than Nick, he allowed the cat the time he needed to put his thoughts in order.
Suddenly, Talbot’s jaws gaped, and he lunged into the empty air, his teeth sinking into something invisible to the naked eye. The air rippled, distorting like the surface of a pond disturbed by a stone, and Talbot planted his paws and pulled back, his muscles straining against an unseen resistance.
With a tearing sound, the Guardian Beast dragged a writhing, living shadow from the deepest recesses of the ether into the physical realm.
Nick stepped back, his eyes widening in surprise, not having sensed its presence at all.
The wards didn’t notice any intruder!
The entity pinned beneath Talbot’s paws was not a natural monster, but a construct of aspected spiritual energy, twisting and thrashing like a tethered eel. It had no fixed shape, appearing as a shifting blot of darkness, yet its internal energy was incredibly complex, suggesting it was a cousin to elementals.
When Nick analyzed its fluctuating mana, he noticed that it possessed a rudimentary yet surprisingly sharp emotional range and, from what he could tell, was capable of observing, listening, and recording.
In essence, it was a familiar. A very strange one, apparently built for the specific purpose of evading wards, but a familiar nonetheless.
Someone has been spying on us.
The realization hit Nick like a plunge into freezing water. Spiritual magic was an exceedingly rare discipline in this world, reserved mostly for priestly classes, who never delved deeply into its potential, and for a few more esoteric casters like himself.
Every mage at the Prestige level was capable of interacting with the ether, as far as he knew, but Tholm had confirmed that most didn’t see the need, having more than enough power on their own. Exposing themselves to a capricious dimension like the ether simply wasn’t worth it.
However, it seemed he wasn’t the only one who had managed to grasp its usefulness, for the shadow was clearly cloaked in specialized spells.
Another mage, one with a high degree of spiritual capability, had crafted it and sent it into the heart of Crowley Manor. Was it an agent of the Crown? A spy for the Valerius Consortium? Or perhaps a watcher sent by the northern nobles who had backed the Ashen Choir?
Whoever it was, they likely had learned far more about House Crowley than they had any right to know.
Nick approached, extending his hand as he projected the authority of his soul. The shadow shrieked, then went entirely still, pinned to the stone floor by his willpower.
"Good catch, Talbot," he murmured, his voice deadly quiet. "An exceptionally good catch.”
He stared at the captive familiar, his mind's gears turning rapidly. He needed to process the Crimson Basilisk core Marthas had given him to permanently integrate the fire affinity into his soul before they departed for the North.
Such a process, involving a Prestige-tier core containing a foreign, highly aggressive element, would likely be agonizing and extremely dangerous.
To safely absorb such an overwhelming concentration of fire without incinerating his own mana channels, he needed a buffer. A pure, highly malleable source of energy to coat his coils and shield his internal structure during the transition, and possibly to use as a sympathetic connection to locate the source of the spying, a source he would gladly dump all the pain onto as a sacrifice.
Whoever they were, they had deliberately sought House Crowley’s secrets. It’d be rude not to include them.