“So, here’s the situation, based on what I’ve learned.”

Ten days later we were back around the conference table in North Watch. With the same number of people as my original council, even, the empty seat having been filled. Not just the same physical chair; Nazralind occupied more or less the same niche as Sakin had, though her skills were a poor substitute for his. Probably—it occurred to me now I didn’t actually know what real-world experience he had, and Naz was here as the only one of us who’d actually conducted guerrilla warfare. Her insights into that and the deeper politics of Dount and Dlemathlys were invaluable, but I wasn’t ready to assign her an official rank or command. Useful as she was in organizing her gwynnek riders, she was also shockingly naive in some ways.

“The short version is it’s bad, but not as bad as I feared it was going to be,” I continued. “To begin with, the food situation. It turns out the harvest was well more than half brought in on the night of the Inferno, and furthermore most of the agriculture on Dount is done on the eastern half of the island, where the actual burning was minimal to nonexistent. So some of the harvest was lost, but a small amount overall. It looks like it’ll be a lean year, but there won’t be a famine.”

“There may or may not be relief supplies from the capital, depending on how organized and motivated the King happens to be on a particular day,” said Minifrit, “but I rather expect Dount will receive gifts of food from Lancor. Especially with all the talk of signs and portents in the air, the Empire will seek to aggressively position itself as the leader of the Sanorite world.”

“Food prices are still gonna rise this winter, and relief shipments probably won’t help,” Kasser added, scowling. “The problem’s not how much food there is, but how it’s distributed. The Clans will start hoarding. That’s what they do whenever there’s a shortage of anything. People will be hungry while piles of grain sit around rotting.”

I nodded. “It’s a different situation with the khora. They don’t provide any food staples—it’s my understanding the edible khora products are all luxury goods, used for trade rather than feeding Dount. The ones that burned… Apparently it takes multiple years to grow and harvest a lot of those, and all of those cycles have been interrupted. There’ll be no harvests of what was being grown, but the khora affected by an Immolate spell are suddenly more vibrantly healthy than they have ever been. The last word I heard as we were moving back out of inhabited territory is that the next khora harvests are going to be absolute record-breakers, but that won’t even start to be seen until next year. Not for as long as a decade, some of them. So the cultivators are going to miss a harvest they were counting on for the benefit of much better ones down the line.”

“Which will exacerbate the problem Kasser referred to,” Minifrit drawled, exhaling spicy smoke. “Clans and merchant houses will get in on this. The situation now is that the plantations and those who depend on them are urgently in need of relief. They will be given loans on punishing terms, against future profits. The moneylenders will grow richer in the years to come, but those who actually cultivate the khora will barely survive their upcoming success.”

I closed my eyes. My elbows were resting on the table, hands folded in front of me, and for a moment I leaned my forehead against them.

“What can I do?” I wondered—aloud, but talking mostly to myself. “I can put a knife to the throat of any Clan on this island if I really wanna work at it… But not without starting a war we won’t win.”

“Best not to try that approach anyway,” Nazralind murmured. “Take it from someone who has. If you squeeze the highborn, it’s the lowborn who’ll feel the most pain.”

“You should talk to Rhydion,” Aster suggested.

I raised my head to look at her with a questioning frown.

“You’re right about the basic problem, Lord Seiji,” she explained. “The shortage will be manageable, except for the greed and paranoia of the Clans. Someone has to get them under control, and neither Clan Aelthwyn nor the King have the power to do it. Well, Archlord Caludon probably could, but this isn’t something he’d care about. What’s needed is a blade to their throats to make them fall in line. This time, you’re not the best person for the job.”

“She’s right,” Nazralind said, her eyes widening with dawning realization. “The Clans are scared of Rhydion in a way they never will be of you, Lord Seiji. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. He’s at least as physically dangerous as you are, and… Well, it’s like the night you ousted Lady Gray from the Gutters. They drew together to confront a perceived attack on the power structure itself, and that’s exactly what they’d do if an outsider like you started bludgeoning them into line. But Rhydion is part of the system—a powerful part. He could walk into any Clan’s fortress and behead the Highlord, and the reaction from the throne and the Convocation would be to start viciously ‘investigating’ the survivors, because he must’ve had a good reason.”

“Rhydion,” Minifrit mused, leaning back in her chair and raising an eyebrow. “This is the so-called paladin who rather notoriously refuses to see injustices under his nose, yes?”

“It’s true, he’s on Dount to deal with zombies or some shit and got tunnel vision about it,” I said. “Hm. He did finally stir himself to protect the Gutter Rats, after Gray and I between us made a big ugly spectacle of it close enough to him that he risked getting splattered by the blood spray.”

“Course, it’s hard to say whether that was him changing his ways,” Aster muttered, “or a one-off exception that’ll make him even less inclined to in the future.”

I heaved a sigh. “I think you’re right. Rhydion is the solution to this problem… And I have something he wants. I bet I can get him to play ball.”

“Hang on, Lord Seiji,” Kasser protested, “doesn’t the thing he wants involve you going adventuring with his party? As their healer? Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like eleven kinds of disasters just waiting for an excuse?”

“No, Kasser, we all possess basic sense, thanks for your concern,” I snapped. “It’s not as if I like this idea. But… I have to do something. If this is the only thing I can do, it’s what I’ll have to do. Never mind it being the right thing to help people, all of this is my fault.”

He lowered his eyes, frowning pensively. Nazralind gave me a warm smile across the table.

“Speaking of that, though,” I said, “this is also exactly the kind of thing a Hero would stick his sword into, and… With all respect to Yoshi and his crew, they will definitely fuck it up and cause exactly the kind of blowback Naz was talking about.”

“Are they even still on Dount?” Aster asked pointedly. “We haven’t heard a peep out of them in months.”

“They are on Dount to cause trouble for the goblins, which means the goblins are paying very close attention to them, and I paid Maugro to inform me if they either do anything interesting or give up and leave. He hasn’t informed me, so I presume they’ve been spinning their wheels, basically just like Rhydion has been with his zombie problem. Oh! That reminds me, was there any word from the goblins while we were away from the fortress?”

“Not on their own initiative,” Minifrit replied. “I did check in on them while you were away, Lord Seiji. Apparently Maugro was unavailable when I called down the tunnel, but that junior agent of his appeared, Maizo. He seemed quite…harried. I gather events in the tunnels are tense at the moment, but when I asked after the goblins’ welfare he rather curtly told me that goblin business was none of ours, and to refrain from summoning them unless we wished to conduct commerce.”

“Could be worse, I guess,” I grimaced. “Okay, then, the next matter of concern is our strategic position. Nobody I met as the Healer in the last week seemed to connect the Inferno with my, ah, signature spell. It seems like all the miracles in other countries provided suspiciously good camouflage for that, too. But somebody will definitely put it together. And we still don’t know who or what caused all those…ugh, signs and portents. Biribo claims that only the Goddesses or the Devil King even could have done it, and that all three of them weren’t likely to.”

“And I stand by that,” Biribo chimed in.

“Well, I mean, whoever it was had to have been friendly to us, right?” Kasser offered. “Cos let’s face it, none of that helped anybody except us.”

“Just off the top of my head,” said Nazralind, “that was as much a life-saver for the Fflyr government as us. If it became known there was a Dark Lord on Dount, Dlemathlys would be an annexed province of Lancor by the end of the month.”

“The Fflyr government, as you just pointed out, isn’t even capable of securing its own borders,” said Minifrit. “They definitely don’t have the capability to cause miraculous events in multiple countries simultaneously. You would be hard-pressed to convince me the King even learned of the Inferno in time to order a response, even were he capable of executing one.”

“It was just an example,” Nazralind said impatiently. “My point is, politics are complicated, and they get more so the bigger the scale on which you consider them. Countless potential factions benefit from muddying the waters. Anyone who knows where the Dark Crusade is beginning has an advantage over those who don’t yet; many would stir up much bigger trouble than this to preserve that advantage for just a little longer. What it comes down to is that someone out there did this, and almost certainly for their own benefit. Any help to us is purely incidental. We shouldn’t forget that someone is going to be coming at us.”

“And that’s what it comes down to,” I agreed. “The material and economic effects on Dount, the strategic implications for us… We’re looking at mitigation, not salvation. People won’t starve over the winter, but it’s going to be tight for everyone—starting immediately, and for a good while to come. We don’t have the attention of the entire world rushing toward us, but Dount is now one of the sites every power on the archipelago is going to be investigating, which means the clock is ticking. We’re going to be found sooner than later. There is now an indeterminate grace period until the Dark Crusade has to get kicked off in earnest, which means we need to be ready for it.”

“Okay,” Kasser said, wincing. “But…like…how? I hate to be the party pooper, Lord Seiji, but I don’t see us being in a position to even conquer Gwyllthean in the next…what? Year? Let alone deal with Lancor and whoever else.”

“First of all, I’m not Yomiko,” I said. “I’m not in her situation and I have a very different set of aptitudes and resources. Thinking in terms of conquest was always going to be a losing proposition for me; I’ve succeeded by working surreptitiously. Whatever strategy we pursue next should leverage that rather than brute force. As for how to go about getting ready for the big fight… I have several potential plans I’m working on, but I don’t want to commit to one prematurely. A lot depends on the outcome of my next battle.”

“Ah, yes,” Minifrit said, blowing a streamer of smoke at the ceiling. “Your planned confrontation with Caldimer Olumnach.”

“Exactly. We know where his agents are positioned and distributed in the Gutters. The next step is to arrange a meeting. And depending on how that works out, I’ll decide what to do next.”

“Well, closer to home,” Minifrit continued, “Biribo’s prediction was accurate.”

“Hell, of course it was!” my familiar blustered. “What’re we talking about?”

She blew smoke at him, smiling in muted amusement. “The dark elf. Lord Seiji’s supplies disappeared from the pantry, replaced by a pile of coins. Viryan coinage. In fact, they rather significantly overpaid.”

“Sounds right,” said Biribo. “They’d wanna show largesse, since they’re in an inferior position.”

“That,” Aster countered with a grin, “or, like we decided earlier, they’re a displaced aristocrat who probably doesn’t know the value of basic supplies.”

“I’d believe that,” Nazralind muttered. “No need to make fun of them, for it. That could happen to anyone.”

I rested my forehead in one hand. “You know, I wasn’t just bullshitting at the cats. I am just about out of patience with this creep and their nonsense. It’s nice that they’re trying to help and all, but their fucking up has already gotten people killed. Is there any way to make them just show up and talk to us like a normal person?”

“Boss, a Viryan noble would probably rather die than end up as anyone’s servant, even a Dark Lord’s. They’ll want to be on footing to present themselves as a valued ally. Keep in mind this person has been starving in the forest for…months, probably, and prefers that to the risk of becoming a pawn. With Viryans—especially Viryans who’re accustomed to power—trying to force them into subordinate positions tends to trigger the kind of fight other people put up when their lives are in danger. If you wanna force the issue, the best approach is to engineer a situation where they have the opportunity to prove their value.”

I massaged my temples. “What a fucking headache. All right, fine, I’ll…try to come up with something. More immediately… Aster, Naz, I know we just got back, but now that we’ve checked in and settled this place…”

“We need to head out again,” Aster finished, nodding. “I understand, Lord Seiji, there’s no time for screwing around. Better deal with Olumnach as soon as possible.”

“That’s the plan.”

Back on Earth I, like everyone with an iota of sense, had never gone anywhere near organized criminals or any of the shit they were known to peddle. It was a sound policy which I’d recommend to anyone, but it left me unprepared for the amount of diplomacy involved in setting up a meeting between two underworld powers, or the weird nature of that diplomacy.

It wasn’t hard to find Olumnach’s people once we reached the Gutters; thanks to the goblins, I had a solid handle on their deployment and schedule. It varied a bit; it had been a couple of weeks and the Inferno had happened in the interim, but there was only so much they could vary and still stay in business. On the first day back in Gwyllthean, I cornered a well-dressed man in the process of delivering orders or collecting a report or something from a gang. After tossing the lot of them around a street with strategic Windbursts, I instructed him to carry a message to his boss.

What ensued was a protracted exercise in frustration.

For three days I made a point of visiting the Gutters every night, intercepting and interrogating (politely…well, relatively politely) the Olumnach agents who were running the new gangs in town. After the second day, they started trying to avoid me, which thanks to Biribo was futile. All of them had the same answer: Highlord Caldimer had heard my request and would respond at his leisure.

I didn’t kill any of them, or even scuff them up more than was necessary to get them to sit still for a chat. It was tempting, but I was, after all, trying to open a dialogue here.

“What is this guy’s problem?” I complained aloud on the third dawn, as we were settling in for our daily rest at Nazralind’s old camp in the poison khora grove, which had been untouched by the Inferno. “I’m the guy who killed the enemy he wanted dead, and the competitor who wiped out her organization and took a massive bite out of his. That’s two reasons he needs to talk to me. Is he just an idiot?”

“’Idiot’ is a strong word, Lord Seiji,” Nazralind answered, fighting a smile, “but, well…it’s not uncommon for the decisions of highborn to be weighted more heavily toward pride than reason.”

“That’s a way to put it, all right,” Aster said dryly.

“Consider it good practice for when you start dealing with Viryans on the regular, boss,” Biribo suggested. “Him and our dark elf buddy back at the fortress. To some extent, the behavior of people interested in power is universal, it’s just that Viryans have formal methodologies for it. He’s asserting dominance by making you wait. Yeah, he undoubtedly does want to have an actual meeting, but he feels the need to put you in your place first, so he can go into said meeting on favorable footing.”

“Yes, that,” said Nazralind, nodding emphatically. “Exactly.”

“Oh, really,” I growled. “Asserting dominance, is it?”

“Oh, here we go,” Aster groaned.

“Here we go!” Nazralind cheered.

Starting the next day, I began seeking out and spending time with the gangsters, the ones imported from the countryside territories I had taken over. To begin with, they were afraid of me. Obviously; they were gangsters, so in order to approach them un-robbed I always had to open with a demonstration of why fucking with me was a fantastically bad idea. But after pushing them around with some flashy spells, I gave out healing, and then I listened to their problems, like some kind of therapist.

Immediately I ran into a roadblock of suspicion, as these boys had heard enough by now to suspect I had murdered a bunch of their friends. It was one I could resolve easily enough by sending Naz on a messenger run back to North Watch, to collect reports from Minifrit on how the new folks we were recruiting were doing. It took her a couple more days to gather that, since a lot of them were still spread through the forest camps, but once she was back, I quickly made myself the favorite person of the new Gutters gangs, simply by being able to update them on the well-being of their friends. That, and the free healing; these guys managed to get themselves roughed up a lot more than they were used to. Apparently the population of the Gutters was getting uppity and had less patience with criminals than they had in Gray’s day.

Part of me wanted to start giving orders concerning the treatment of locals; my bandits strictly chose targets who could afford to be robbed and employed the minimum possible force in every situation. I told them about this, but didn’t yet insist on it. The gangs were under Olumnach’s thumb and had quotas to bring in, or it was their asses.

The upside of that was their seething hatred of their Clan masters, and how neatly I could weaponize that by making a big show of smacking them around.

For the first entire week, I made a game of tormenting the agents of Clan Olumnach: the rules were that I could only use Windburst and Heal and move at a walk, and the objective was to see how long I could bat them around like a sadistic housecat with a mouse before they managed to escape my clutches. My record, reached on night four, was an hour and a half. I left them shaken and bruised, but never seriously harmed, I made sure of that. I quickly earned the hatred of the Clan, but made myself the beloved dangerous mascot of the gangs.

I gave it fifty-fifty odds whether Highlord Olumnach would care about or even notice the state of morale among his lowborn pawns, but he’d definitely see the shift in the more well-bred lackeys he used to control them.

There was a positive result of Olumnach keeping me waiting, at least: I had time to check on the various other irons I had in the fire in and around Gwyllthean.

Captain Norovena had some details about the island’s recovery efforts which I mentally filed away to direct some later relief of my own where it would do the most good. He was also in a position to have a more complete picture of the damage, which continued to reassure me. Most of the Fflyr didn’t actually live in or even too close to the khora, so the Inferno had for many just been a terrifying spectacle that posed no immediate threat to people, animals, or structures. A lot of grass fires had been started, and those had resulted in more harm than the actual khora burning. Displaced animals had been the biggest problem for a while, gradually replaced as they crept back to their old habitats by increasing encounters on the edges of the forest with desperate beastfolk who seemed to have lost their homes. I managed not to cringe, hearing about that; clearly I would need to reach out to the local tribes and offer some help.

Not the cats, though. Those fuckers could come to me if they wanted to play nicely.

Norovena casually mentioned that the Healer had been seen giving aid all up and down the island. The air in his office all but thundered with the pointed questions he did not ask.

Master Auldmaer confirmed Minifrit and Kasser’s speculation about economic developments following the Inferno. The wheels had already begun turning; Clans and merchant houses alike were moving to corner every market they could, extending predatory loans to the khora cultivators who had been affected, and beginning to stockpile food from the fresh harvest. In fact, apparently they’d been prompted by this to start hoarding whatever else they could get their hands on; Auldmaer told me that kind of contagious panic was pretty typical when a run on any commodity occurred. He perked up immediately when I said plans were in the works to put a stop to all this behavior. As I’d thought, a man in his position with advance knowledge of something about to happen could surely find a way to profit from it, and since it was specifically not going to be bandit activity that broke the hoarders’ grip, he could even do so openly. This might be the next big thing for the Auldmaer Company, the major play he’d been on the lookout for since the shimmersatin job. I promised to give him as much advance notice as I could of whatever was about to unfold.

All the downtime, frustrating as it was, gave me the opportunity to check up on what I’d set in motion in the Gutters, as well. The canals were already noticeably cleaner, all over. It seemed the slimes had spread far enough that the outermost canals ran clear and almost clean enough to drink out of. I say “almost” because nobody I met was stupid enough to test that; if you get your water from a canal, you boil the shit out of it, full stop. Even so, the difference was night and day. The spread of disease was already noticeably down, and for the first time probably ever, the Gutters didn’t stink.

I was here in my persona as Lord Seiji and the relatively few who had connected the two didn’t hang around with the lowborn down here, so I had freedom to move without being constantly mobbed. The Healer, it seemed, had leaped right past “local folk hero” and nearly to the role of saint. Between cleaning the canals, healing the villagers after the Inferno, and donating the healing slime, the Healer’s stock had never been higher.

Actually, that was the one thing that had not gone as I’d intended: the healing slime was still in the possession of the Convocation. It turned out King’s Guild adventurers had been brought in to do round the clock guard duty on it. The good adventurers, the ones nobody wanted to fuck with and even I would hesitate to tackle more than one at a time.

“Plus there are three healing slimes now,” Aster reported after a rumor-gathering session, once we were safely private on a rooftop. “They immediately figured out they reproduce just like normal slimes. So it’s exponential; as long as they’ve got trash to feed them, their numbers will keep growing faster until the whole population explodes.”

“Well, blow me down, they’re actually being smart about this,” Nazralind marveled, shaking her head. “I thought for sure the Convocation would want to hoard a resource like that, same as anyone else, but… Yeah, eventually something like that would escape into the environment and become widely available; this way, they get to take credit for doing it on purpose. Hell’s revels, they could even get a political leg up on the Radiant Temple by unleashing free healing slimes on Ephemera. And of course, once they’re not scarce, nobody’s going to bother trying to steal them, so they’ll only need the guards at first.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Y’know…considering my strategy was just foiled, I’m strangely unable to be upset by this. Free healing for the poor? Yeah, that seems like a good day’s work.”

“Relax, the Healer still gets credit for kicking it all off,” Aster said, smiling and gently elbowing me. “There were way too many witnesses for the Convocation to bury it.”

“That’s true. Also, though, damn. I had better be really careful to douse any fire slimes I summon. There’ll be hell to pay if those get loose.”

All this was well and good, but Caldimer Olumnach was still wasting my precious time. I could practically feel the eyes on the back of my head as seconds counted down. All manner of agents from every major power on Ephemera were closing in; undoubtedly some were already poking around Dount, as they were every other site which had seen a miracle. Thanks to the plethora of those signs and portents, nobody seemed to have connected the spell Immolate with the Inferno, but I knew the trail existed. Sooner or later, somebody good enough to follow it would stumble across its end. And still, the overbred fool wasted my time.

So I did what I do best: escalated.