I had called Amelie, Jeremiah and Emmerich into my office for a meeting. Amelie was clearly not happy with the situation, being dumped here by her brother to ‘keep an eye on us,’ whatever that meant. I wanted to ask her a few questions about the situation in Lunarmar, but first I needed to tell Emmerich what happened.

“They came for tax money?” he pondered, stroking his beard.

“Not exactly. It was more a show of force to let us know that they’re aware of this place. He only came with a small squad of troops, and they didn’t look well trained.”

“That’s because they weren’t,” Amelie confirmed, “They were a bunch of drunk cretins that my brother had to collect along the way. The premium he paid is beggars’ belief. The Kingdom simply cannot spare any soldiers to do work like this. Which is why many of the other towns in the Kingdom have broken away and stopped paying their tithe.”

I knew all of this already thanks to my magic book. Lunarmar was struggling with a serious bout of internal strife, and with each passing day a new issue arose to make the problems even worse. Their army was occupied fighting inside and outside the borders. Without an army, they couldn’t collect tax money using force. Without tax money, they don’t have much of an army. The easiest solution would be to cut your losses and call the men back to the Kingdom. But when noble pride is on the line such an option is deeply unpalatable. The King’s position could be in trouble if he did so.

I explained my reasoning, “Essentially, I think we’re safe for a good while yet. At least until the situation in the Kingdom changes. The problem is that we don’t have the people for an army of our own, so we’re at the mercy of what they decide to do with us.”

Jerimiah grunted, “It’ll end the same way then. With us out on the streets with nothing to our names.”

“That’s why it’s important for us to develop leverage over the Kingdom somehow, if not military, economic.”

“Economic?”

“Simply put, cash is king. If we turn this town into a centre of trade that’d make the world envious, we could be safe. Get a port running with traders coming and going, industries and people producing goods to sell. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea to mess with us. We’re producing a bunch of tax money – and upsetting that finely tuned balance could end in disaster.”

Jerimiah still seemed sceptical, “And how do you suppose we do that?”

I tapped the side of my head where the eye had been inserted into my skull, “We have something those other towns don’t. You have me.”

“Pah, isn’t that just egotistical prattle?” Amelie huffed.

“Jerimiah’s seen me work first hand. And something I didn’t tell you is that I’m… well educated.”

She quirked her brow, “Truly?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to the wall, “But the writing on these papers is complete nonsense.”

“I never said I was educated in your language.”

“Ah, so that’s where that curious accent is from,” Emmerich concluded.

“It makes perfect sense to me, and that’s all that matters. I know a lot of stuff, stuff that’ll help us get a leg up on the competition. The first step of the plan is simple, we turn this town into an amazing place to live.”

“Huh? That’s not a plan!” Amelie sighed, “It’s a concept really.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” I explained, “What’s the average town like in Lunarmar?”

She counted using her fingers, “Cramped, uncomfortable, disease-ridden, sewerage running down each side of the road.”

“Suppose we build a town. Not just a modern town, but a forward thinking, futuristic town. How many people do you think will move here?”

Her face lit up for a moment, “…A lot.”

“We have a huge blank canvas here to play with,” I reached under my rickety desk and unfurled one of the maps that I had used to plan the town square. I had used a quill to copy down the markings that my eye showed me, resulting in a map that anyone could read. “As you can see here, giving the buildings space between each other will improve the quality of the plots, as well as mitigate the risk of fire.”

I had plumbed the depths of my mind for all my historical knowledge and realized it wouldn’t be much good if we built a huge, dense city and burned it down within the year. The Fire of London was evidence enough that tightly packing people together was a bad idea – additionally it made keeping waste and filth away easier.

“One of the key issues with dense townships is the waste. It causes disease and invades the senses.”

“It causes disease?” Amelie says, stopping me in my tracks, they didn’t even know that?

“It can.”

“And how does that work exactly?”

I knew that a long-winded lecture on the mechanics of germ theory would merely be a waste of time, so I decided that a more rhetorical approach would suit best. “Lady Amelie, would you ingest the waste of another person if asked?”

“Of course not, how utterly foul.”

“And what if you had no choice in the matter, or were unaware?”

“…If I didn’t know, that’s not the same thing.”

“But my point is the same. Disease spreads between people, and one of the primary reasons is faeces. If by some chance it gets into the water supply that everyone is drinking from – the entire town could be disease-ridden overnight. Those towns you spoke of, do they not throw their waste into the streets with little regard for the consequences?”

She grimaced and nodded.

“We need people. People give us power, and money, and produce goods that we can use to make everyone’s life easier. If we build a town where people can live like nobles, without having to be a noble, then they’ll come in droves. All we need to do is work hard enough to make it happen. The first step is planning properly for the future. We’re going to want a working sewer system to keep the waste away from the streets.”

Amelie cut in once more, “Let me.”

I was shocked to find that Amelie of all people had volunteered for the task. “You’d like to help build the sewers?”

“I’m familiar with the mechanism behind them,” she explained, “Much more than you, anyway.”

I didn’t know at the time, but Amelie, like all of the children of her house, were taught a variety of trades and skills from a young age. To live a life of a noble was to wait to be parachuted into a newly established township as a Lord or Lady. To fulfil that purpose, they were taught everything there was to know about governance and had some freedom to select other subjects that would help them in specific circumstances. For Amelie, that thing was ships.

“Can you really trust her?” Jerimiah asked.

I couldn’t really explain it, but I felt like she was being genuine enough. I shrugged, “I think her noble pride demands that she does a good job. You’ll notice that the streets on my map are rather large. Plenty of space for us to do the work, and the houses aren’t built yet. There’s never going to be a better time to do it.”

“I’m not going to sit in here and do nothing,” she replied, “Give me some labourers and a source of stone, and I’ll see to it that it’s done.”

I moved over to my wall and located my employment rota. A large portion of the people in the town worked as farmers, hunters and miners. Only a few had secondary roles in turning those products into something useful, as the homemaker usually took care of that kind of business. People would make their own clothes from raw materials and process all of their own food. There were ten people who were currently unemployed.

“I can give you ten, maybe we can draft in some of the miners to give you a hand.”

“That might not be good enough,” she explained, “This is a big project we’re discussing.”

“Emmerich?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he nodded, “Living like a noble sounds good to me, and it’ll sound good to a lot of the other young lads too.”

“Oh, and get Lady Amelie something to wear. I don’t imagine she wants to get that nice dress dirty working in the mud.”

“I would not.”

Emmerich nodded and headed out, “I’ll see what I can gather up.”

With the situation explained to the community leaders and my next big plan assigned to Amelie, it was time to get back to work. Those houses weren’t going to build themselves.

Amelie and the rest of the workers were fast.

Just a day after I handed over the town plans to them, they’d already started digging the deep channels we needed to build our primitive sewer system. I would have preferred to create something more modern, out of sight and out of mind, but I didn’t know enough about sewers to be confident in it. While I knew a lot of things that the others didn’t, that did not mean I was an expert on everything.

I needed some other smart people to come help. My grand scheme to enforce rapid economic development in the area relied on one key thing, education. Education was the great equalizer. By forming a strong academic community in the town, I could fill in my gaps of knowledge by recruiting the best and brightest from around the world. I could point them in the right direction and let them figure things out.

Not to mention the benefits it would bring to the children. A full decade long curriculum was probably just a pipe dream, but teaching them some basic things like mathematics, reading and writing would pay dividends very quickly. A well educated society is a productive society. It was the competitive edge that would make the difference between success and failure.

While it was all too easy to make these types of plans in my mind, the real problem would be convincing other people to go along with it. I had no doubt that the traditional farming families would question the value of having their children educated when they were destined to inherit the family business. What good would reading and writing do for them? All they needed to know was how to plant and harvest.

This would be a persistent problem.

I need political capital, I needed trust. If every townsperson didn’t want anything to do with my fancy modern ideas, I wouldn’t get very far trying to implement them. “This is just how things should be,” isn’t a convincing argument; especially not when it flies in the face of every norm that they know.

I decided to drop by the worksite, which just so happened to be a very short walk from my office in the barracks. They’d already marked out the areas that needed to be unearthed, and palettes of stone brick had already started arriving from the miners. Amelie was busy directing the workers.

I called out to the leader of the team, “How are things going boss-man?”

The foreman, Andrew, turned back to me with a mixed expression, “They’re going well. I wasn’t so sure about her at first, but she knows what she’s doing. Where did she even come from anyway?”

“That noble who stopped by a few days ago ditched her here, she’s his sister.”

He scoffed, “Why would he do that?”

“Probably to try and keep an eye on us. Not that there’s much need considering there are spies running around in the woods.”

“You gonna’ do something about it?”

“As long as they don’t cause any trouble, it’s fine. They don’t have the men to spare to come here and shake us down for what little coin we have.”

“If they do?”

“Bad. We need to open trade with other towns soon so we can get money flowing inwards, but it’ll be a while before people have things to sell.”

We had a surplus of food on the way. The farms we had already were enough to support the population of the town, which was odd. Older farm technology essentially required that a huge portion of the population worked as farmers to support themselves. I suspected that their techniques were more advanced than I first thought.

My hope was that those farmers would sell the excess to nearby settlements to earn some cash, bring it back to our town, and spend it here. This would distribute the money into our economy and cushion us from any potential deflation when the taxman came calling. Transporting those goods would be the problem. The nearest settlement (by land) was a long way to the north. Some of the farmers hadn’t been able to save their animals when they fled, meaning they’d have to potentially pull a very heavy cart by hand.

Jerimiah had been adamant that getting a horse or two to every family would make the farms even better, for both production and output sold. But where would we get them from? Somebody would have to find the money and make the long walk to a farm selling them. Jerimiah told me to not worry about it and focus on town planning. He was the farmer’s collective head, so I listened to his advice and left solving that problem to him. It was probable that he’d take the mules from the travelling wagons and use them to get things going.

Amelie clambered out of the ditch and approached me, “Jeeze. I’ve never such an ambitious plan for such a small town in my life.”

“The idea is that it won’t be just a town soon enough. When more people move in, we’ll be glad that we took these steps to prepare for them.”

She planted a hand on her hip and frowned, “You did include a toilet for these new houses, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

The people living on the farms would have to make do with an outhouse for now. Ideally we’d evolve our sewerage system over time and spread it out to every home in the area. The people on the farms were used to handling their own waste, and had the space to dump it without causing too many issues.

One of the other major developments in the town was the construction of a well. Again, that was outside of my wheelhouse, but some of the other settlers knew how to do it. I pointed out a good spot using my magic eye and left them to it. Some of the stone bricks had been used to build the surround structure, and the wooden bucket I used to collect election candidates was tied to a clever pulley system.

Another small building had been erected using logs and stone. Unlike the houses, this warehouse didn’t need sewerage, so we were able to build it before everything else. It was a convenient place to keep our perishable goods safe from the elements. We had enough food to last us until the first harvest came in.

Amelie broke my reverie, “This location is good. You could easily hold a shipping lane from here to the Black Cove. Were you the one who decided this was the place to start building?”

“Yeah.”

“Once we’re done with the sewer channels, we should prioritize building a small dock for ships to use. A place for small trading ships to moor and load goods would be a great boon.”

“And you know how to build one?”

“In principle.”

It was better than what I knew at least. The waters were also good for fishing, but none of the people in the caravan had worked as fishermen before. I wanted to make that a reality soon enough – it would help with our food security.

“How long is this going to take?”

“We started here so that the homes can be built, I’d say a week for this section; the masons are going to come this evening and begin working on the tunnels. The hardest part is the output into the sea. It’s a long distance away and the largest channel we have to dig. For a fully working system? A month, assuming we get some more help.”

“I think some of the others will join in when they’re done with their own work. Hopefully we can get ahead of schedule and get these homes built.”

The houses weren’t going to be anything special. I’d spoken with the builders, and they told me that they could easily set up something quickly and easily. I wanted to get everyone into a home of their own as quickly as possible, as camping out in the barrack or outside in the cold was a major driver of low morale. Additionally, these wood and brick homes could be dismantled in the future when new building techniques became available to us.

“Where did you learn how to do all this?” she asked again, “You have a strange talent for identifying points of weakness.”

“I told you already, I’m educated.”

“Where?”

I reached up and tightened the leather band around my replacement eye, “That’s a secret.”

“Pah. I should have known, you’re just leading me on.”

“We all have secrets, don’t we? I’m sure there’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t like to tell me.”

“And if we exchange a secret between ourselves, an equivalent trade will do, will it not?”

“I guess. But what could you tell me? I don’t really much care for details about your personal life.”

Amelie thought on it for a moment, “I can tell you what my brother intends for you and this town. In exchange, I want to know how you know all these things.”

“…Very well.”

Amelie’s expression told me that she still felt sour about being left behind, “My idiot brother was tasked by the King to secure the loyalty of these people. As you can probably guess, he did not see the profound irony in earning ‘loyalty’ from people abused and persecuted by his men. Much to his frustration, neither my father, nor the King believed he was in a position to take over as the Count.”

“So who is?”

She pointed to herself, “Me. He believed that my guiding hand would create a prosperous new source of tax money for his hungry war machine. Officially though, daughters of noblemen are second in priority to the male heirs. Instead – they proposed that I come here and use my ‘womanly charms’ to seduce you, the witless idiot, and assume a position as the lady of the county and real powerbroker. I nearly vomited on the spot.”

“I’m not that bad, am I?”

“This was before I knew what you looked like,” she assured me, “A cynical and foolish plan, as I have come to expect from my father.”

“You’d be the one pulling the strings.”

“Yes, that would be the case. Though my initial assessment of you was of a man too savvy to fall for such a scheme. You have a firm hold on the mechanisms of power here. That is beside my own objections to the plan, of course. Call me a romantic if you must but marrying a man merely to assume control over a half-built hamlet is a bridge too far.”

We agreed on that, at least. “Nobles are something else…”

She smiled and held out her palm like a child demanding candy, “Now, a secret of your own.” I sighed and reached up for the leather strap I had tightened nervously just a moment before. Her confusion soon gave way to shock as she saw the distinct glow of the eye inserted into my socket. “I… oh my. Is that?”

All of my town plans appeared in glowing yellow lines behind Amelie, “Yes, yes, it is.”

“I never thought I would get to see one of these for myself. A Holy Relic… so confidently utilized by a mortal man.”

I redressed myself and shook my head, “It’s called the King’s Eye. That’s how I’ve been planning out this little town of ours. If I want a piece of information, or want to see through the ground, that’s how I do it. These ditches you’re digging? I used it to calculate the flow of the water running through them.”

“Incredible. Ah, to have one of those for myself.”

“I have reason to believe they’re very rare, Lady Amelie.”

“Yes, of course. Don’t take that the wrong way. I have no intent of outing this to others, or scooping the thing out of your skull and swapping it with one of mine. I’m a firm believer in the principle that those who are worthy are granted these gifts. There’s clearly more to this tale that you’re not speaking of.”

“Like I said, we all have things we feel the need to keep secret.”