-
“The
Ox” guest lecturing a class on the ethics of science and spellcraft.
Azraea
had expressed concern when Ochsner chose to stay behind at the dwarven citadel
with Vinny while the others went down to Defiance, but the dwarvish woman hadn’t been
especially worried. Ochsner did have
misgivings about Vinny being a foreign agent operating within their country –
the woman hated being lied to. Her mother had told her that if she had one
fault, it was her gullibility, and her father had told her (quite lovingly over
a game of liar’s dice) that if she had a second fault, it was her own total
ineptitude in deception; it was one of the few arts that she wasn’t proficient at. But
Ochsner always had a curious way of looking at people. She didn’t like to think
she objectified people, but in some sense it was easier for her to think of a
person as a complex system or a technical mechanism – a moving, reactive puzzle
that was hideously complicated, but not so inscrutable she couldn’t work with
it.
Vinny
was another puzzle, and finding out that he was a spy simply meant she’d
learned that she needed new ‘rules’ to govern her interactions with him. Always
look for secondary motives for his actions, consider carefully the consequences
of doing anything he asked, and – most importantly – never take his word alone
for anything crucial. Interacting with someone who had more ‘rules’ was
emotionally and mentally taxing, true, but she’d known simpler people she liked
far less, and more complicated people she’d give her left pinky for.
Understanding Azraea had turned in to a years-long ongoing project, but she
couldn’t imagine life without the mercurial woman’s friendship.
Though
she did not trust Vinny, Ochsner liked him well enough to feel comfortable
staying in the citadel, especially knowing that her friends were just down the
slopes of the small mountain. Although, truth-be-told, she would have had
trouble saying ‘no’ to his invitation under any circumstances, as he had
promised to allow her further access to the ancient tablet she had found when
they had first explored the subterranean fortress. The enchanted device was
mystically tied to a wealth of knowledge held deep within the mountain – it
promised access to secrets of such great value she could not have refused such an
offer. Fortunately, Vinny had been true to his word, allowing Ochsner to spend
the entire night studying the archives the device was connected to. Of course,
it was not as if Vinny did not have an alternative agenda; he had spent the
night hovering over her giving her the hard-sell on the Gnoman Empire.
“You
would be amazed at the things we have,” he said, halfway through a bottle of
wine, “The things we’ve achieved. Not just our art and culture, but things
anyone should appreciate. The spellcraft that allows that device to communicate
with what’s in this mountain? We’re on that, we’ve got magic that allows people
with no magical training to communicate instantaneously over vast distances, I
can show you; I brought the enchantments with me! But you know what? More than
that, we have people who are starting to understand why the spells work. Not just how, why. And besides magic, we’re making amazing advances in the
natural world, advances that aren’t just locked up in some hidden vault under a
mountain; they’re literally making it to our streets. We’re experimenting with
a system of self-igniting gas-lamps in our capital. By this time, next year,
every night at sunset, the city will be illuminated by lamps on every street.
And the plumbing in Kingstown? That sort of thing is commonplace throughout our
major cities, and we’re working on improving the infrastructure even in our
small towns. We’re working on improving everything
all the time. Healthcare, food production, sanitation, and we’re throwing
everything we’ve got at education, because that’s what’s making it happen.”
Ochsner
sighed and put down her tablet, “But those advances? They’re paid for by the
spoils of war. The Gnoman Empire thrives by devouring other countries. I don’t
want any part of that.”
“Who
told you that?” Vinny said, “Who teaches that crap? That’s not how it is.”
“Fine,
then, how is it? Hm, how do you justify the fact that your empire is an empire, how it went from a small coastal
country, to dominating an entire sea?”
“You’re
thinking of us as some big lion that’s out to devour everything in our path,
and just gets bigger and bigger with every meal, but we’re not. If anything,
we’re a rose bush.”
“A
rose bush?”
“You
never had wild roses? They’re amazing – domesticated roses are a pain in the
ass to grow, but wild roses, the more you cut them back, the stronger they get.
You know how many wars our empire has been in in the past two centuries?”
Ochsner
sighed and tried to remember her history classes, “Like a dozen or so?”
“Eight,”
Vinny said, “Although one of them has been going on for nearly fifty years, so
the confusion is understandable. Do you know how many we started?”
“No,”
Ochsner admitted.
“One,”
Vinny said, “In two hundred years, we’ve started one war. The fact is, the
bigger our rose bush has gotten, the more people have wanted to cut us down,
but when they tangle with us, oh man, they get the thorns. We come back bigger and stronger, and we firmly believe the
best defense is a good offense. Other people start wars but we finish them, and
if we keep something for our trouble, well, then maybe that’s a lesson for
everyone.”
“Keep
something? You mean the entire Facian peninsula? Didn’t you wipe out they’re
entire culture?”
“Not
exactly… See, Gnomania started out as a small colony of the old Facian Empire.
All Gnomans were essentially Facians. When we became self-sufficient and found
ourselves crippled by rising Facian taxes, though, we declared our independence
– as did most of our smaller sister colonies scattered across the Facian Sea.
Facia didn’t like that, but when they collapsed due to, we’ll call it terrible
mismanagement, they couldn’t do much about it. Facia divided into a bunch of
small warring city-states, and off and on, some of the coastal states would get
this idea that they’d show they were the rightful heirs to the Facian legacy by
trying to reclaim us. Which was stupid, of course; they could barely protect
themselves from their neighbors, and we’d been building up to defend ourselves
from the Sillsresh corsairs to our south and the orcs living across the
mountains to our west. Eventually, though, we got tired of our old motherland
coming and harassing us, and decided to put an end to the infighting in the
Facian peninsula. With the help of the same Sillsresh corsairs that had
previously been our enemies, we sailed over and conquered Facia. We
standardized the hell out of things and set up a thriving trade system.”
“So
the reason Facian culture was supplanted by Gnomanian culture was because
Gnomanian culture was Facian culture to begin with?”
“Basically,”
Vinny nodded, “If anything, we wiped out the frankly petty differences that had
emerged among the city-states, and brought back the ideas that had united them
all to begin with; with some more modern sensibilities of course.”
“Honestly,
are you here because Gnomania has designs on our kingdom?”
“If
it were your kingdom we wouldn’t need
to be here. But despite what it says on paper, this is the dragon’s kingdom, isn't it? And we
figure it’s only a matter of time before she picks a fight with us. She’s made
like she’s content to lie on her pile of gold and roll around in the suffering
of your people, but she does more than lean on you all economically. She’s
gotten increasingly enmeshed in the functioning of the country, like a weed
spreading roots through the plants around it, and she uses those connections to
strangle the kingdom’s agencies and departments, increasing people’s dependence
on the businesses she controls. It’s profitable for her of course, but it’s
also given her more control over the kingdom every day, and whatever she gains
control of she turns to one purpose – getting more…”
“Yeah,
okay, I get the picture. You’re afraid that she’ll gain so much control over
Caelia that she could force us to attack our neighbors.”
“It
may not be her plan now, but she’ll get there. And she won’t care who dies in
the process, on either side,” Vinny
said, “It’s just about money and power. She’s addicted to it, there’s never
enough. And she’s running out of room to grow here. If you’re worried about a
despot gobbling up other countries, you should be looking in Kingstown.”
“But
you’re not going to prevent that?” Ochsner said, “Your plan is just to be
prepared to respond when she finally makes her move?”
“Well…”
Vinny started, “Like I said, the best defense is a good offense, so when you
say ‘respond’, that’s sort of an understatement. Guys like me do their job, and
the war will be extremely short with very little of it happening on a battlefield.
Still, the best wars are the ones that don’t happen, and I firmly believe, you
never do anything for someone that they can do for themselves.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning
I have a few barrels aging in the basement, metaphorically speaking.”
“And
was Meingen one of those barrels? Metaphorically?”
“No,
an old eccentric like that?” Vinny answered, “He was a means to an end. He had
his crazy plan to poison the Dragon’s horde as part of some economic
revolution. I needed some connections in the university, so I gave him some
tips that led here. Easiest sell I’ve ever managed; dwarven history and culture
were like catnip for the guy.”
“I
got that impression,” Ochsner said, “I was kind of surprised he couldn’t read
old dwarven.”
“Say
what?” Vinny set his wine glass down on the table, “He reads dwarven fine. One
of the first things I needed him to do was take care of some translations for
me. That’s how I found this place to begin with. Cross-referencing old Facian
records with some journals and maps we recovered from an ancient dwarven
shipwreck.”
“He
didn’t tell me that,” Ochsner said, “He spent his whole time in an alchemy lab
trying to fill in the gaps in what we know because he couldn’t understand anything
more than the numbers and diagrams. I mean, given that it gave him everything
he needed to know about the composition of the deathmetal he wanted, that was
enough, but he couldn’t have read any of the scrolls. I mean, he said he
couldn’t.”
“Well,
he lied,” Vinny was looking decidedly uncomfortable. He had a loose cannon on
his ship, and he didn’t like that, “Did he get one of those?”
“The
tablet?” Ochsner asked, “The only ones I found were in an observation room he
didn’t go near.”
“So
you were separated?”
“For
most of the time we were down there. We didn’t come out together, either. We
had to run when Azraea tripped an alarm with her magic. He went back out the
way we came in, and we went up through the ammunition feed for the ballistic pipe.
I don’t get it, why would he lie?”
“That’s
the problem,” Vinny said, “I don’t get it, either. I expect people to lie to me
to play their angle, but I don’t know why he’d lie to you. He needed me to get him to this place, and gave me a nutty
motivation that I didn’t question because it was enough that I didn’t think he
could actually get into the place without the master-word, and because, even if
he did, he agreed it’d be in our best interests if we kept the place secret for
the time being.”
“Well,
he seemed intent on keeping it secret,” Ochsner said, “We agreed to that too.
He’s not working for the dragon, is he? He could be riding to Kingstown to tell
her all about this place.”
“No,
I’ve missed something here, but I know my profile is spot on. He hates that dragon.
It’s pathological for him – he hates her and everything she symbolizes in his
mind.”
“So
his agenda would still be to kill her, then?” Ochsner asked.
“And
deal the killing blow to the kingdom’s economic system,” Vinny said, “Hence his
scheme to poison all of the gold in her horde.”
“Which
you knew would never work,” Ochsner said.
“Well,
yeah, it’s not exactly practical to perform alchemy on tons of gold,” Vinny
said, “It’s the sort of idea you come up with as a child or… drunk.”
“But
he’s a tenured professor of alchemy,” Ochsner said.
“He
could be the tenured professor of rainbows and miracles,” Vinny said, “It
doesn’t mean he can make the impossible happen, no matter how much he believes
in it.”
“No,
but it means he can convince you he believes in something he knows wouldn’t
possibly work.”
Vinny
went wide eyed, “He played me; he played on my
expectation that the crotchety old professor was off his gourd. Well,” Vinny
paused, “this is… this is humbling and disturbing.”
“Okay,
so, he’s an alchemy expert, he probably still wanted something to do with the
deathmetal. He told us he wanted the deathmetal itself, a small amount of it.
So maybe he was planning to use it in something, or maybe he was planning to
use it to make more, like he said.”
“But
he can’t make that much more,” Vinny said, putting aside his humiliation, “Not
if he’s making it from gold. If he’s using lead, then he can make a lot. That
stuff is everywhere now.”
“So
he makes a few ounces, or he makes a ton, so what?” Ochsner asked rhetorically,
“Unless he can get the dragon to eat it or sleep on it a ton of deathmetal’s
not going to get things done any better than a few ounces. If anything it’d
just kill him before he can do
anything with it.”
“It’s
not just about the dragon,” Vinny said, “It’s about the money. He thinks it’s
all the same, all one big evil.”
“Yeah,
but like we said, the dragon’s horde isn’t a plausible target…”
“But
the dragon’s gold isn’t money anymore,” Vinny said, “Not if you think about it.
It’s been out of circulation for years. They’d been plating lead with gold,”
Vinny pulled a dark coin out and tossed it on the table, “And now they aren’t
bothering to plate it.”
“So,
you think he’s going to poison the money that’s in circulation?”
“It’d
make people sick, right?” Vinny said, “Eventually it would, and it’d be the
rich people first. Exactly the sort of thing he’d want.”
“No,
the rich people don’t see much coin. Their wealth is mostly in their ledgers.
The people who’d get sick would be the people who handle money every day. The
vendors and shopkeepers,” Ochsner said, “Bank tellers, but not bank owners.”
“Yeah,
okay,” Vinny agreed, “And that’s the opposite of what he’d want. He’s willing
to break some eggs, but he wouldn’t directly target the common man unless he
could really get some mileage out of it. Plus, I’ll admit, he didn’t impress me
as patient enough for a plan like that.”
“How
many eggs would he break?” Ochsner asked as she began flipping through pages on
her tablet.
“Depends,”
Vinny said, “If it meant tearing down ‘the system’ as he called it, he’d break
a lot to make it happen. He wants a revolution, and he never pretended he
expected it to be bloodless.”
“Meingen
knows his dwarven mythology well. He knows the legendary hypotheses,” Ochsner
said, “If Meingen knew that place wasn’t a mine... then he might have gone in looking for the means to make one of them happen.”
“Legendary
hypotheses?” Vinny asked, “You were talking about that the other day; they’re like
myths about things that haven’t happened yet, right?”
“Yes,
but over the centuries, some of them have come to pass, and Meingen might be
close to making another one work,” She tapped the tablet frantically, swiped a
few times, and, finding what she was looking for, turned it around so Vinny
could see it.
Vinny
studied the complicated diagram, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what I’m
looking at.”
“Meingen’s
reset button,” Ochsner said, “A device that could wipe out the dragon, the gold
she’s sitting on, and the government that works for her, in the blink of an
eye.”
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