Chapter 2 (Part III): The Cost of Tragedy

"The exact number of people killed by the dragon during the first riot of that summer has never been certain. Medes initially insisted it was 'a big crowd, the biggest crowd anyone in [his] position had ever had to deal with,' but later, when public opinion on the matter proved sour, he claimed that there were probably no more than a few dozen protesters involved. That claim is sharply at odds with official records pertaining to the guard presence - if Medes were to be believed, his supposedly 'overwhelmed' guardsmen would have outnumbered the protesters three-to-one."
- Alfonsa Camernus, in her book, First of the Worst: When Brutish Men Lead Brutally.  

Azraea and Kaira left the outdoor cafe and headed up the street towards the burned out remains of the college.

 “How many of our friends do you think survived the fires?” Kaira asked bluntly.

“Well, by my estimate,” Azraea said, “Probably three - if we each include ourselves in the headcount.”

“I don’t mean just our little trio,” Kaira said, “Classmates and such. I mean, you had some other friends, besides us, right?”

 'Acquaintances' would have been more accurate than 'friends' in Azraea's mind. Being nice and good as she had been seemed to doom one to a locked degree of social distance - everybody considered you a friend, but no one really considered you their friend. You were just close enough to be asked for favors, but not close enough to be invited to along for a night out. But Azraea also realized that was perhaps unfair. Despite the upbeat and chipper facade she had fostered throughout her time in Kingstown, social interaction was as emotionally draining as it was rewarding. There had been times in her life when it had felt almost painful to drag herself out to interact with people. Azraea wondered how many friendships she had herself avoided or starved because of that, but didn't share the mental tangent with Kaira. 
She returned her focus to the elf woman's worries, “More than us three, I’m sure,” Azraea’s eyes glowed with a familiar faint green aura as she looked into the grey area between the living world and the other side, “I’ve seen the spirits of some familiar faces, and a few instructors I was really fond of, but of course, most of our friends had graduated, and those that hadn’t were on summer internships.”

“Well, that’s some good news, I guess…” Kaira said.

“No, it’s just news,” Azraea said. She wondered how many of these people could have been her friends, if she'd been less shut off from the surrounding world. And how many had themselves been closed off, just like her? Each of the spirits she saw in her mind's eye had been a person, complicated and full of their own dreams and fears, connected to their own friends, their own families and lovers. When Azraea thought about the value of just a single life - the work that had been invested in shaping it, the people who'd become connected to it, the potential that had laid ahead of it - the cost of this tragedy was stomach churning. Azraea gritted her teeth, “That most of the people who died happened to be strangers to us doesn’t mitigate what’s been done.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Kaira said, “I was just saying it’s a relief no one…”

“No one what?” Azraea stopped and wheeled around as the emotional turmoil inside boiled over, “No one important died? No one who mattered? Every one of those people mattered to someone.”

“I-I’m not meaning to be insensitive here,” Kaira said with unusual trepidation, “It’s not that I don’t think their lives matter, but…”

Azraea sighed and shook her head, willing away the tears that had started to well in her eyes. She took Kaira’s hand and squeezed it, “I’m sorry. I know what you meant and there’s nothing wrong about being worried about those closest to us. The problem isn’t that we callously devalue the lives of the rest, it’s that we’ve accepted that the slaughter of a hundred people in the street is just something that can happen, and we believe that if it had to happen, then we should be thankful that it didn’t happen to someone close to us.”

“Yeah,” Kaira looked down sadly, “I guess that’s about it.”

“But it didn’t have to happen,” Azraea said, hardening again, “We shouldn’t have to be grateful our friends and family haven’t been burned alive because no one should have been. That thing up there in the castle, she’s not a force of nature. She’s not a goddess. She’s just a bully. A murderer.”

“So, we kill her,” Kaira put away her grief.

“Yes,” Azraea said, “But... I think you may need to go back to Defiance.”

“What?” Kaira asked.

“Give it a day or so, of course, to help me get things in order around here. Then, head back. I won’t be alone once Vinny gets here, but I’m worried about leaving Ochsner to handle the ballpipe on her own.”

“I can’t help her fix it,” Kaira said.

“But you can help her use it,” Azraea explained, “Ochsner can defend herself from a drunken frat-boy, but she’s not exactly martially inclined. She’s good with a bow, but is that the same as firing that thing? The Gnomans might know what to do with it, but this is just too important to leave to relative strangers.”

“And you’re too important to leave to Vinny,” Kaira said.

“Honestly,” Azraea said, “I can take care of myself here. Maybe I was more than a little lost in the countryside and nearly helpless in the wilderness, but this is a city - the same city I spent most of my adult life in. This is my world.”

Kaira was visibly perturbed, “There are streets filled with people who’d kill you as soon as look at you. I’m afraid of what could happen to you once the sun goes down.”

“In Kingstown, I’ve always been afraid of what could happen to me once the sun goes down. For a woman who looks like me, current events haven’t changed much,” Azraea reminded her, “But this is not me being brave. I don’t want to be alone here. It scares me not having you around right now, but I really think this plan needs you back there with Ochsner. And I know you can make the ride faster if you’re alone. And you can take both of our horses; that will help.”

“Alright,” Kaira said, “Let me get a night’s sleep in a bed, and I’ll head back out tomorrow morning.”

After checking in with everyone else via their wondrous new long-range communication system, Azraea and Kaira spent the remainder of their afternoon on a relatively mundane task – learning about the heraldry system in Kingstown. All the town-criers and printing presses in the city were owned by a few businesses that made their profits by drawing people’s interest with stories and news, and then bombarding them with paid advertising.

Our heroes’ plan had been to relate a (partly invented) story about how the mayor of the town of Defiance had threatened secession from the kingdom unless criminal charges were levied against the dragon, and had even gone so far as to halt any payments being made to the dragon. They’d expected they’d have to put a slightly villainous spin on it to satisfy the heralds, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem; the public was not unfamiliar with criminal folk heroes, and the real agenda was to get the dragon angry, in case the two orcs Thrakaduhl had dealt with didn’t bring his message.

This sort of media manipulation wasn’t a simple proposition, however. Timing was an issue, of course, as they didn’t want to set the dragon off too soon. Vinny had dealt with Meingen, so there was no rush to get the dragon out of the city, but at the same time, it would only be a matter of time before the creature took an interest in the defeat of Defiance’s late master. When that happened, Azraea wanted to make sure the dragon was enraged enough to fly out and deal with it personally rather than send a cadre of mercenaries to burn Defiance to the ground.

Knowing where to start was also a problem. It was surprisingly hard to find out who needed to be bribed for their story to make it to the streets. They tried chatting up people at the heraldry businesses, but there was simply no way to casually bring something like that up. In the end, they’d put out some feelers through the few people they did know that might be connected to the heralds but they were afraid to say too much too soon.

And finally, there was the issue of currency for making bribes. Azraea and Kaira had only traveled with a small portion of the Gnoman gold they’d been awarded for resolving the scolopendra problem, which meant that they needed to talk to Vinny’s cousin, Vidi.

Just as before, Vidi was alone in his agency’s office, hard at work on some sort of book-keeping. He was clearly surprised to see Azraea when she walked in.

“Are you here to collect on the scolopendra contract?” Vidi asked, “I thought that payment had been arranged independently…?”

“It was,” Azraea said, flashing one of the Gnoman coins they’d brought from their payment, “But Vinny sent us with other business.” She handed the Gnoman a scroll bound with a wax seal imprinted with Vinny’s signet ring.

Vidi popped the seal and began reading, “Oh, my. This is, unexpected.”

“Obviously, Vinny thought it wise to leave out some details, at least when it came to putting anything on paper,” Kaira said.

“Oh, yes, I can understand that,” he passed the scroll over the candle on his desk, igniting it, and tossed it into the cold ashes in the shop’s presently unused hearth, “So, money then.”

“Yes,” Azraea said, “We need to purchase the services of certain individuals in town, but all we have are the few Gnoman coins we could carry with us on what was a very fast ride back from Defiance.”

“Well, the king has ordered a crackdown on people trading money minted outside our borders, so that could be a hindrance. Are these services being purchased legitimately?” Vidi asked.

“This would be an off-the-books payment for advertising space,” Kaira tried to put it delicately.

“Oh, so we’re paying for news then,” Vidi nodded, “I haven’t done that yet in this country but I keep abreast of certain things. Obviously, most of the money going into the heralds comes through big advertising contracts with major businesses. For the biggest of the heralds, those contracts really just represent one hand feeding the other, since the herald and the businesses it promotes are all owned by the same entity.”

“The dragon?” Kaira guessed.

“Yep.  Either way, all of the advertising contracts for the big heralds are all handled on paper. No liquid cash involved. Smaller heralds contract ad space on a weekly basis using our lovely new lead coins, but needless to say, the cost is going up as the value of the coin plummets. But, really, it’s not advertisements you need. You need to get an actual news story printed, and that’s even more complicated,” Vidi said.

“How so?” Kaira asked.

“Well, as you said yourself,” Vidi explained, “It needs to be off-the-books, and anonymity is expensive. Second, you’re talking about more than just paying some guy to write a story. You’ve got to get a herald to carry his story, and you have to make sure that that herald’s distributor actually takes it to the streets.”

“Distributor?” Azraea asked.

“Yeah, well, the heralds organize the work of their writers, right? They organize scripts for the town criers, and print papers for sale on the streets. They don’t actually employ the town criers, though, or the people who sell their papers – that’s all contracted through distribution unions.”

“Why?” Kaira asked, “That seems ridiculously complicated.”

“Well, as I understand it, it was a law the King Hylas's father pushed for back when you two were probably kids. It prevented a monopoly that would have allowed one herald to starve or drive out the other heralds.”

“I guess that makes sense…” Kaira couldn’t think of a reason she would have been opposed to it at the time.

“Making sure the heralds all play fair? Definitely makes sense. It’s just too bad they didn’t impose any actual regulations on the distributors to ensure they played fair too. They don’t.”

“So we have to buy a writer, a herald, and a distributor…” Azraea was imagining wheel barrows full of lead coins at this point.

“Not buy; outbid. The sort of people who are willing to take a bribe are either in the dragon’s pocket or afraid of winding up in her gullet. If you want to circulate something that will piss her off, you’ll have to offer enough money to override that influence.”

“Is that even possible?” Azraea asked.

“Ordinarily, I’d say no. But right now, as Caelia's official currency is plummeting in value, and the price of gold is skyrocketing, I’d say maybe. Most of the kingdom’s gold is in the dragon’s claws, so she’s effectively become even richer than she was before, but no one wants to accept credit for anything right now, and our minted money is quickly becoming worthless…”

“So if she wants to use the wealth she has, she will actually have to pull it out from under her scaly ass and start spending it,” Kaira followed.

“Oh, she’ll hate that,” Azraea said. Her economics professor had speculated that the physically valuable treasure horde that sat under the dragon had become the equivalent of a privately held gold reserve. It had likely been decades since the dragon had parted with any of the actual gold she physically sat on. Still, there was that pesky law about foreign currency…

 “Do you have anything other than Gnoman coins?” Azraea asked, “If not that’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

“Well, like I said, the king’s condemned the use of foreign currency, so that does give us an additional challenge, but it’s not necessarily a problem,” Vidi assured her, “Gold is so valuable now that a lot of people are defying the order, and a lot of people are taking their business out of the country. Even the fairly modest traders are making a hard effort to make connections to the south, rather than buy and sell domestically. For them, accepting Gnoman coins here means they don’t have to worry about what the exchange rate is going to be in the Gnoman Empire in a month. Plus, I’ve been making a few investments in town to stay connected, and that means I’ve already put a fair number of Gnoman coins in circulation. People aren’t going to think it’s too strange if the Empress’s face is on your cash. What’ll draw more attention is if they see you with a lot of it, so I think it is best that I only partial out a bit at a time…”

Vidi pulled out an oil-skin tube just like the one they’d carried Vinny’s letter in. He popped the end off of the tube and shook some of the contents into his hand – more Gnoman gold. Vinny's group was certainly well-funded.

“Be discrete,” he said, “Don’t use this to pay for drinks, right? But one of these coins will get you room and board at the High Stag Inn for a week, and a lot of information. Rege, the owner, is pretty connected if you need to make any discrete purchases. I’ll look into our herald problem.”

Azraea thanked him and they headed back out the door.