Chapter 5 (Part IV): Black and White and Dead All Over

With all of his loose ends sewn up, Vinny returned to the ruined journalism building with a small cart that contained part of the materials he’d secured. He’d kept in contact with Azraea by way of their enchanted objects, but he’d not seen her for days. Every time one of them traveled to or from the ruins it increased their risk of discovery, so he had mostly stayed away while she camped underground in the partially collapsed basement without complaint. Vinny had been incredibly impressed. It was the sort of thing he would have expected a trained operative to do, but not an academic. Although Meingen had surprised him too, so maybe he’d been underestimating scholars.

Vinny had come as soon as Azraea had said they were ready to print; when he crawled out of the coal chute into the basement, he understood why she’d spoken in the plural.

The room was largely cleaned out – the walls were still scorched and rain-damaged, of course, but the floors had been cleaned, buckets put down to catch dripping water, and lamps were lit to brighten the room. Against one wall, there was a rack set over a fire where something was being prepared. Except for the lack of smoke coming from the fire, this all seemed more or less ordinary to Vinny. What seemed strange was Azraea busily chatting with two burned corpses and an apparition of a woman who looked like she’d been a faculty member. One of the corpses, faintly illuminated by the distinctive green glow of Azraea’s magic, fiddled with the fully cleaned and restored printer, He (Vinny assumed it had been a man) made final adjustments, while the other corpse walked over to Vinny, put on a pair of heavy leather gloves like it was getting ready for just another day’s work, and hefted the bundled stack of paper he’d brought. The corpses had some sort of silent conversation about the dimensions of the paper being a poor fit for their small press and took the sheets to a cutting board.

Azraea nodded to Vinny briefly, to acknowledge his arrival, but did not interrupt her conversation with the apparition. After a moment, she turned to the rack over the fire and waved her hand; the smokeless flame returned to her palm and disappeared as she closed her fingers around it. At the direction of the apparition, she took a board and pressed it down on the rack that had been heated over the fire. When she withdrew it, the ghost seemed to applaud excitedly, squeeze her shoulder affectionately, and point out a few more details before evaporating.

“I see you’ve been busy,” Vinny said.

“Thank you for getting the paper here quickly,” Azraea said, “We’re about ready to go.” She held up the rack that had been heated over the fire and showed him the finished plate, made of hundreds of ceramic tiles glued to an iron-backing.

“Charles?” she said, her eyes flashed green as she communicated with the corpses, “This is a bit awkward for me.”

One of the dead men stopped what he was doing to help her lift the plate over another plate filled with soft clay, and then press the two together. Azraea, teeth clenched for fear the thing might come apart, pulled the plates apart from one another, and revealed a mostly clean impression on the soft clay. One of the ceramic tiles had come off the first plate and stuck to the soft clay, but ‘Charles’ delicately removed the piece, and touched up the area with a stylus, before lifting the plate onto the press. He stepped back, and Azraea lit another fireball and hung it out over the soft clay. She looked at it for a moment, adjusted it slightly, and then with a whirl of her finger set it to slowly circling over the clay plate.

“When that’s done baking, we’ll be ready to go,” she said, “Michael and Charles here have been a lot of help. They were down here in the basement printing pamphlets about the protest when the dragon burned the building above them,” she explained, “Their spirits had just been hanging around since then, frustrated they hadn’t gotten to finish their work. Since I reanimated them, they’ve been working around the clock to get this thing together and running again. We have agreed however,” Azraea turned towards them, “That when they have finished this project, they will be moving on to the other side.” Charles flashed a charred thumbs-up, and the burned men went back to work cutting the paper.

“Have you been down here alone with them for three days, straight?” Vinny asked.

“That’s ridiculous,” Azraea said, “How can you be alone with someone?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” Azraea said, “And you should have more respect than that, Vinny. These men aren’t zombies or ghouls. They’re honest souls trying to use their last hours in this world to make a difference. Have you any idea how difficult it is to work in a body in that state? To watch what’s left of your own body crumble and deteriorate with each motion, each action? It’s one thing for a spirit to rise for a few minutes or even hours to take revenge on someone that wronged it, but it takes amazing resolve to selflessly work the way these two have been for days straight.”

The corpses stopped to applaud her speech, but one afterward made motions like he was saying something.

Azraea sighed, “Yes, Charles, I know I used a split infinitive there but I did correct them all in the final draft of the pamphlet. I promise.”

The corpse held up his blackened, flaking hands in surrender and went back to his work.

“Okay,” Vinny said, using a similar gesture, “I apologize. Honestly, the truth is, of the two of us I’ve still spent more time in smaller spaces with more dead bodies, and it just wasn’t a positive experience for me.”

“Well, if you could have talked to those people you might have had a different experience,” Azraea pointed out.

“I could talk to them just fine before I killed them,” Vinny said, “Didn’t seem to help.”

That must have unbalanced Azraea slightly, as she didn’t quip back at him. So that’s what it takes to ruffle her feathers at this point, Vinny thought, maybe she really is ready to play with the big kids now.

“Have you given any thought to dissemination?” Vinny asked, “I can get them spread around, but where do you want them to go?”

“Anywhere people congregate,” Azraea said, “A person who finds one alone may read it and forget it, but if two people start talking about it, it’ll stick. Charles said we should distribute in the marketplace, definitely, especially the coffee shops. Michael suggested the taverns as well, provided people aren’t too drunk to read when we pass them out. And it’d be good to get some out to the area outside the walls, maybe even across the lake in Mudville. And we shouldn’t put them all out at once. Start small, and then increase distribution steadily.”

“Got it, but bear in mind: we don’t start distributing until we’re done here. I set up some things to draw attention off in a particular direction, but there’s no guaranteeing someone won’t come here to track down the source of the papers. And if we get caught with ink on our hands, we’ll be in trouble.”

“Got it,” Azraea said, “We should be out of here by tomorrow night.”

Chapter 5 (Part III): Papers, Please

One fall when daddy was serving overseas, I told mama about a kid at school picking on me. The kid ended up in jail for embezzling. At the age of nine. Mama always said daddy did it, that he heard what had happened, came home while I was asleep, and took care of it. Obviously, I know better now – daddy was good but he wasn’t that good. Mama had to have been the one to set the kid up. I think.

-          Antiope Vexarius recalling her childhood in Tulusa.

Making arrangements for the printer paper hadn’t been as easy as Vinny expected. He still had some connections in the city, of course, and plenty of gold to work with, but none of his connections were the sort that dealt in blank paper. The best they could do was to offer to help him steal some from one of the other printers in town.

Unfortunately, due to regulations related to government taxes on printed materials, several hundred sheets of paper disappearing would be noticed, not only by the print shop’s owner but by the city guard as well. Vinny spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how to cover up the theft, particularly considering arson, but he didn’t really want to contribute further to the chaos in the city.

When Vinny finally decided that covering up the theft was impossible, he’d decided to make the best of it and singled out the single most unpleasant print shop owner affiliated with Broad Beard Press, a man named Elberte Cesster. Cesster had been quick to capitalize off the shutdown of The Kingstown Herald and its associated contractors. 
In Caelia at that time, privately contracted lawyers and barristers only participated in civil cases; in all of Caelia's criminal justice proceedings legal counsel for the prosecution and the defense was provided by the state. Unfortunately, although accused individuals would be represented by a state-chosen counsel, they still had to pay a variety of court fees to fund their defense. If they didn't have the cash to cover it, the state would liquidate however much of the accused's property was necessary to cover the fees. The writers of Caelia's constitution likely thought themselves quite clever when they came up with the process; it hypothetically ensured a fair proceeding regardless of a defendant's economic status, and avoided imposing a tax burden that many Caelians were opposed to. 
Unfortunately, there eventually came to be a significant disparity between how the system was intended to function, and how it actually did. Affluent defendants could pay bribes or call in favors to influence the state's choice of legal counsel, while lower class individuals were stuck with the most inexperienced, overworked, or incompetent representation - poor individuals who couldn't cover the fees languished in debtors' prison until someone else paid for their defense. Up to that time, however, the system was maintained despite its problems because it could be quite profitable for the individuals managing the liquidation of a defendant's property. In this case, when the The Kingstown Herald's  printers were shut down, the new Chief Counselor to the King - Syliva herself - had sold all of their materials at a “limited attendance auction” to pay for their defense. Cesster and other printers who contracted with the dragon's heralds had obtained large amounts of fine printing materials at these exclusive auctions for very little money. This arrangement had left a lot of Cesster's competitors facing an inevitable loss of livelihood, but it had also left a whole lot of fresh printing paper sitting in the storeroom of his shop. Still bundled up, it was practically gift-wrapped for Vinny. 

Cesster had also been one of the printers that Azraea had approached when they were looking for an accomplice to pass on their news. Given his association with the Dragon’s herald, Vinny wouldn’t even have considered it, except the man was a notorious sellout. His services could apparently be bought by anyone if he thought he could get away with accepting the bribe. Apparently that had changed since Vinny had been away, though. The man suddenly had 'principles', and for Cesster, that not only included having nothing to do with ‘non-people’, it meant regarding everyone who wasn't a fair-skinned human as a 'non-person'. Apparently there’d been an altercation in which Azraea nearly burned down his shop.

Azraea had stayed her hand because otherwise she would have been tempted to move onto the other print shops and do the same; that apparently crossed a line for her own principles. Scorched earth tactics and asset denial didn't conflict with Vinny's principles, but that approach would have crossed his line for subtlety. And Azraea's restraint had turned out to be fortunate, if not deliberately prudent; everything their little underground press needed was now sitting packed up in the storeroom of a man Vinny would truly enjoy dealing with.

Vinny never shared the story of what happened with anyone except his wife. In truth, it was rather unprofessional of him. He could have simply set the man up and let him hang. He could have dealt with him with the same quiet efficiency he dealt with Meingen. But Meingen had been a chore – something that needed to be done, and Vinny, well – Verax – had taken care of that quickly, professionally, and as emotionlessly as possible. Verax was good at infiltration and assassination, but he didn’t enjoy it. The game the Gnoman agent staged now was one he did enjoy.

When Cesster walked into his shop one morning and discovered that over 500 unused broadsheets had disappeared, he hadn’t hesitated to contact the city guard to report the theft. He’d spent the entire morning answering their questions before they finally took his books and left to start their investigation in earnest. Cesster had been on his way out the door when a lone Gnoman merchant walked in sipping a Facian coffee.

“We’re closed,” Cesster had curtly informed Verax, “And I don’t want anything to do with your kind.”

“Elberte!” Verax said, “What a terrible way to talk to a faithful business associate!”

“What are you talking about?! I’ve never had anything to do with you.” 

“Oh come now, there’s no guards to hear us talking now. I’m surprised you called them, by the way. Seems like a risky move to me.”

“What are you… did you take my printing materials?!”

“Well, you sold me the materials off the books so that we could avoid paying the rather atrocious tax on them, so… yes. I suppose in a sense I did ‘take’ them.”

“What?” Cesster flustered, “I’ve never sold you anything. WHO ARE YOU?!”

“Believe it or not, I’m a friend,” Verax said, “The best friend you’ve had in a long time, probably. I’m surprised you don’t remember – I’m sure the guards will also be surprised when they start asking questions.”

“What are you talking about?!”

Verax sighed as if he were dealing with a fool, “Allow me to jog your memory. This morning, I graciously concluded our business by taking possession of the papers – per our arrangement, I did so while you were gone because – after all – we agreed you’d be better off not knowing where they were going.”

“We never made any such agreement!”

“Oh Elberte… Is this some sort of seller’s remorse? Or do I really need to remind you? You didn’t want to take cash directly for the materials, so instead I just did a few favors for you.” Verax flashed a predatory smile.

“You haven’t done anything for me!”

“Who do you think the guards will talk to first when they start investigating those books they took, Elberte? My guess is they’ll go to your bookie first. They always go to the bookie first.”

“How would they…?”

“Any guard worth his salt knows every bookie in their city. But just in case our local law enforcement is running a bit slow this week, I did make sure to leave a receipt in the back of one of your books – I'm sure they’ll find that within the hour.”

“What?!”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be so concerned. I don’t know why everyone treats bookies like they’re the slime of the earth – they’re in one of the few lines of work that being successful hinges on maintaining a trustworthy reputation. And Joey’s an especially nice guy. He was very happy to have a large portion of your gambling debt paid off last night. So happy, in fact, that he didn’t mind me paying him in foreign gold. He was curious why a Gnoman was paying your debt, of course, but you needn’t worry; I didn’t go into details about our arrangement – I just said I was doing you a favor.”

Cesster went pale, imagining what the guards would think if they talked to the man, “It’ll be my word against yours, though,” he said, “I’ll explain to them that you set me up. And Joe will back me up when he knows what happened – there’s no proof you and I are connected.”

“Well… technically, that is proof. But you’re partly right; one piece of circumstantial evidence wouldn't carry much weight.”

“One?”

“Well, I can’t really guess how thorough the investigators will be, but if they question Joey much at all, they might learn about your time at the Forking Tongue.”

“The what?”

“Elberte – I’d think you’d know what I’m talking about having just spent the night there.”

“What?! I did no such thing!”

“Of course you did! I paid for a full night there! Of course, the proprietor wouldn’t take Gnoman gold, so I had to pay some of her debts to Joey when I paid yours - lucky for us you two go to the same bookie. None of this rings a bell?”

“This is ridiculous!”

“That’s not what Madame Fleur will say when the guards talk to her. In fact, I imagine she will refer them to one of her workers – a lovely young woman by the name of Samantha – who is prepared to give a very detailed accounting of your activities last night. Right down to that birth mark on your left ass cheek.”

“How do you…?”

“Really, Elberte, you shouldn’t walk around your house naked like that. It’s disgraceful.”

“My wife will vouch for me – she knows I was home!”

“Adria would, of course. And that would carry a lot of weight with the guards, since only a very devoted or very well kept wife would lie to cover her husband’s infidelities.” Verax smiled again.

“No… no… no… what did you do?”

“Just what you asked me to do this morning when you realized what a mistake you’d made last night – I went back to Joey, asked for a good jeweler in town, and purchased a very nice necklace for Adria. It’s being delivered to her as we speak, actually. The card has a note from you, of course, but don’t worry – it’s my name on the store’s receipt.”

“W-why?”

“Well, for one thing, Adria deserves it. You really don’t appreciate her enough, and, honestly, I think your toxic marriage is killing her day by day. Frankly, I was surprised you weren’t a regular at the Forking Tongue – she might be glad to get you out of the house.”

“But what…”

“What will they think when they question your wife and find out you had me buy her a very, very nice present before they turned up at your door? If I were them, it might undermine my confidence in her accounting of things. Like I said, pretty bold move actually contacting the guard like that; if it were me, I would have just kept quiet about the stolen papers, but I imagine it’ll make sense to the guards. Maybe they’ll think you reported the papers as stolen to make sure there weren’t any irregularities in your books? That would make sense.”

“Why? Why would you do this to us?”

Verax stared at him coldly for a moment, but he did consider the question in his mind. He knew that when he eventually got home, this would be one of the first stories he told his wife when they were alone. It was an informal tradition, between them – she never wanted to talk about the people he’d killed, but she was always eager for details about the people he’d screwed – literally or figuratively – and he was always eager to tell her. He was always eager to brag about it.

Which is essentially what Verax was doing now; he was bragging to his victim, rubbing it in his face. He’d known that was why he was doing it, even before he walked in. He’d even thought about what Azraea had said about Syliva and Jake, and realized that in going out of his way to gloat, he was not so different from either of those monsters. Yet, even knowing that he’d still been unable to resist the temptation.  

Although Verax couldn’t resist the urge to play god with the man’s life and lord it over him, he regretted the inconvenience to Mrs. Cesster, who was, by all indications, a lovely person. Worried over her fate, he’d come with one last card to play. He opened his cloak, pulled out a small scroll and handed it to his victim.

“What - What is this?”

“Like I told you Elberte, I’m your friend. And I thought you might do something foolish, like talk to the police, so I brought this as a sort of backup plan.”

Cesster unrolled the document and studied it, “This is a check? This is… a very large check.”

“The Gnoman Empire takes care of its friends, Elberte, it takes care of them very well,” he handed him another piece of paper, with notes on it, “There’s a boat waiting for you and Adria on the other side of the King’s Lake reservoir; it's ready to take you down river to the northern territories of the Gnoman Empire. You can deposit this check at any imperial bank you choose and start your life over down there. I know you’re not fond of foreigners,” Verax acknowledged, “but, well, between the coastlines and the islands of the Facian Sea, the Gnoman Empire hosts about 25,000 miles of beach front property. I’m sure you and Adria can find some place agreeable to settle with that much money.”

Cesster seemed ready to have a heart attack. He probably suspected it might be a con, but with the promise of the guards coming down on him by the end of the day, he apparently didn’t see any good in challenging it. He grabbed some of his things from the shop and left, leaving the front door swinging behind him.

Verax made his way over to Cesster’s home later that evening to check on his collateral victim, Adria Cesster. He hung about one of the windows as the guards explained the situation to her. They told her that her husband had gotten involved with a foreign agent, apparently to cover his gambling debts, and when they’d started asking questions about his personal activities, he’d left the city in a hurry, last seen headed south of the border.    

Apparently, Elberte had been so overwhelmed by the number of zeroes on the check that he forgot to bring his wife to the boat. If Verax felt any guilt at all for manipulating the man, that absolved him of it. Elberte would find a Gnoman bank about a week down river, at the soonest, and there he would learn something important about Gnoman law – a check made out to two people cannot be cashed without both parties present. Elberte was about to find himself jobless and penniless, adrift in a culture he had never tried to understand.

But Adria was blameless, and though she was frightened and unsure of what life had in store for her now, she wouldn’t stay that way. Verax paid a few more debts and the guards’ investigation closed. With a little leverage provided by an anonymous benefactor, Adria was able to sue for an annulment and win her husband’s assets, rather than have them sold at auction. Just to be thorough, Verax re-procured the necklace the guards had confiscated as evidence, and left it in Cesster’s shop with a personal thank you note apologizing for the inconvenience.
Verax had little doubt he was still a terrible person for feeling schadenfreude in response to a situation he himself engineered, but fate had rewarded his sadistic streak with a career he enjoyed and a wife he loved. Verax wasn't an overly spiritual individual, but if one of the many Gnoman gods had been looking out for him over the years, Verax knew he or she must have been a real piece of work.

Chapter 5 (Part II): The Liberal Art of War

Days passed and things didn’t calm down in Kingstown. Azraea became certain they wouldn’t. For a time they seemed to plateau, and Azraea decided that if they didn’t get to work then, they might never do so. Vinny had hesitated, but eventually admitted that sooner was better than never. On the upside, he reasoned, if they could get their story about Defiance into the news right now, it would probably spread like wildfire, and having met Syliva face to face, Azraea imagined that the dragon's new position would make her all the more prone to charge headlong into their trap.

Azraea and Vinny set about trying to make inroads with the remaining heralds in the city, ready to drop substantial gold in the hands of anyone who could put the story of Defiance into the week’s news. Vinny’s attempts to approach people didn’t go over well, of course, because few people wanted to be seen doing business with anyone who even looked Gnoman while the dragon was 'investigating' her conspiracy. Azraea’s attempts didn’t fare any better; as usual, her skin color invited a lot of snide comments and rhetorical questions about her citizenship, and on top of that many of the people she talked to connected her to the confrontation in the market (despite the shoddy wanted posters), and talking to her seemed to be considered an even bigger risk than talking to Vinny.  

On the upside, Vinny pointed out that at least one of the people they’d approached would either be such a sycophant or such a coward that they would probably go running to the dragon with their story. If that was the case then their main objective, to taunt the dragon into flying into their trap, might yet be satisfied. Azraea agreed that might be true, but she'd never been the sort of person who could simply take a seat and see how things played out.

When she’d witnessed the dragon’s extreme reaction to their encounter, Azraea had at first felt badly for setting off a horrific chain of violent events. However, now over the subsequent days her mindset had shifted. She’d taunted the dragon with her lack of formal power and, bam; suddenly the colossal piece of luggage was perched next to the king receiving her new title. Azraea might not be able to hurt the dragon physically, but it sure looked like her words had struck a nerve. It felt empowering. If Syliva had insecurities like that, she wasn’t the unstoppable force of nature they’d always been led to believe – the dragon had anxieties, or at least concerns, serious enough to act upon.

So, Azraea had started questioning the dragon’s other actions, trying to discern what else the dragon feared. The Kingstown Herald had been enough of a threat to Syliva she’d taken rather severe action to shut it down, so it was clear that as superior as she acted, she was vain enough to keep tabs on what was said about her in the media. That got Azraea curious about what else might have penetrated the lizard’s metaphorically thin skin, and after some arguing with Vinny, convinced him that they should make a discrete trip to the public library.

While dodging guards and unrest through the town had been something of a challenge, It had been no real trouble to get into the library itself – Azraea wasn’t just on a first name basis with every librarian in the building, she could also name their favorite books, and tell you how many children they had. Although Vinny had been impressed by her use of an existing information network, he didn’t appreciate the point of the exercise until she led him to the periodicals section in the basement. The library had copies of nearly every periodical printed in Kingstown since the movable type press was introduced eighty five years earlier, and it had extensive notes about the heralds dating back much further than that. The oldest documents, of course, had to be handled with extreme care, under supervision by one of the librarians, but Azraea was more interested in publications from the past month.

Reading through copies of the papers provided a good review of how the whole alchemy conspiracy had played out (much to her surprise, none of it seemed remotely related to Meingen’s activities), but Azraea’s ‘ah ha’ moment came when she found the papers printed by the University.

She hadn’t given it much thought, but the university’s journalism department had recently acquired its own printing press and the students had, of course, used it to begin publishing a school newspaper. The content wasn’t especially interesting – messages from the schools presiding officials, administrators, department heads, and some things about graduation and such, but then she ran across something odd. Just after they had left, there was mention of an alternate paper in an editorial. When she asked one of the librarians about it, she learned that earlier in the spring the journalism students had begun printing an unofficial paper off the books, using it to say things the school wouldn’t ordinarily allow. Apparently she’d been too preoccupied with her final semester to notice the minor scandal. The librarian dug up some copies for her and… its aggression was impressive. The writers hadn’t held back.

Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly professional, objective journalism. It had a definite slant to it, and relied heavily on satire to make its point. It was bold, though, treading into territory even The Kingstown Herald, at its most defiant, had not dared to enter. The underground paper had not only vocalized opposition to Broad Beard’s rhetoric, but provided a platform to organize the ill-fated protests that Kaira’s friend Schroeder had been unfortunate enough to witness. And then, there it was: in the last issue there was a front page piece that called the whole conspiracy a fraud, and laid it at the feet of Broad Beard Press’s owner, Syliva. It not only drew the connection compellingly, it took no quarter in shaming and humiliating the old reptile. The street date made it the last of the underground papers printed before the dragon burned the university to the ground.  

Azraea had been vexed by the dragon’s decision to burn the university. She’d run the numbers several times over the years, every time she paid tuition and bought books, and she believed Shroeder was right; the university had provided a sizable income for the students’ primary lender, the dragon. After discussing the issue with Ochsner long distance she had become even more certain that there could have been no profit in burning the kingdom's largest school to the ground.

Vinny had suggested that the economic situation had become so bad that Syliva didn’t expect to see any more loans paid back, but even if students were defaulting on their loans there were better ways to make money off the college than to sell its charred remains. Ochsner had then suggested that the dragon had simply lost her temper and incinerated the whole thing without thinking of the consequences. Ochsner had said that the general state of the kingdom suggested that the dragon was, on occasion, fairly short-sighted for a centuries old creature. Syliva had made some shrewd business deals, of course, but in her greed, she’d also run the whole economy into the ground.

Azraea had doubted the suggestion at the time; she had seen the dragon’s temper up close and lived to tell of it. Given the contents of the school paper, though, it looked like Ochsner might have been right. The journalism students had slighted Syliva and she had rained fiery retribution down on the whole school as a result.

That made Azraea very interested in whatever might be left of the journalism school.

Despite the turmoil in the city, guards had been allocated to the task of patrolling the perimeter of the burnt out campus. Trespassing was something Azraea would not have considered a few months ago, but now, attired in black, close-fitted clothing that Vinny insisted was essential for this sort of work, she didn’t hesitate to slip past the men. Azraea and Vinny quickly made their way to the center of campus, out of sight.

 As they picked their way through the dark ruins by starlight, Vinny finally asked, “So, I get why a paper that the dragon didn’t own would be a problem for her – even a tiny little one - but doesn’t burning down the whole university seem excessive?”

“Everything she does seems excessive,” Azraea said, “I think excess might be her most defining trait.”

“But why even let it get that far? Why didn’t she buy off the university same as the other heralds?”

“What was there to buy? She already owned a large chunk of the university.”

“Yeah, exactly, so why not just throw her weight around and put a stop to it right away?”

“Oh, if you think it’s that easy to control anything that happens in your school, you haven’t spent enough time in academia. You can bully, you can bribe, and you can persuade, but dealing with a small town’s worth of administrators, faculty and students is like herding cats. Hundreds of cats. Cats with oppositional defiance disorder.”

 “So a few weeks back, the dragon used her influence with the Beard and the Vulpine to pick a fight with the university’s students. Why? She just needed a scapegoat for the kingdom’s problems?”

“Maybe,” Azraea said, “Or maybe she just thought it would be fun. Having talked to her face to face, I think she… well, for lack of a better way to put it, I think she gets off on that sort of thing.”

“What do you mean? Like... sexually?”

“You remember when we first met? You remember rescuing me from that pawner?”

“Seems like a lifetime ago, but yeah. Rapey Jake is hard to forget.”

“I got the same vibe from Syliva that I got from him. When she was threatening us, looming over us, it was the exact same gleam in her eye… the exact same… just vibe. I don’t know how else to put it. There was some grandstanding, she was showing off for the crowd like Tharkrada did for his troops when he fought Kaira, but there was something else too. Something personal… if there were an evil version of the word ‘intimate’, that’s what I’d use.”

“And you think that she was picking on the university students to scratch the itch under her scales.”

Azraea grimaced at the gross mental image that conjured, but she nodded, “Most people, they've got metaphorical safe spaces they can run to when threatened; they have money or connections that can bail them out of a fleeting spot of trouble. Bullies don't pick on them because they know it'd come back to bite them in the ass. Instead, the bullies pick on people like my parents, the farmers in Rosebud, the people in Defiance..." 
Azraea's teeth ground in the back of her mouth as she listened to the silenced screams echoing through the ruins, "College students in Caelia live paycheck to paycheck, semester to semester. They succeed or fail at the whim of others. But people talk about how 'entitled' and 'spoiled' they are. People never like college students – even alumni. Once they have that diploma in hand and find a job, they treat college students like dirt. A college is like a kick-me sign turned into a community.”

It wasn't an experience Vinny could relate to directly, given the militant nature of Gnoman society, but he understood bullies and predators well enough. “So the dragon saw an easy victim to metaphorically screw; what went wrong?”

“Well, the way I figure it, getting people to hate students is easy, but in a war where words and information are your weapons, I would think it generally unwise to go up against a small army of liberal arts majors.”

Vinny laughed quietly, “What’s so dangerous about liberal arts majors?”

“They go into their degree path knowing they’ll never make any money, throwing away years of their lives and incurring massive debt without any hope of seeing it pay off” she said, “They’re academic martyrs. Give them a printing press and you have a serious threat on your hands.”

Azraea led them towards the school of journalism. The burned out remains were a tad disorienting but given the years she’d spent here, so long as she could see the castle to the southwest, she couldn’t get lost. Vinny followed closely behind, wary of any pursuit.

Azraea found the scorched frame she thought was the building – the entrance was marked by a granite statue of the Elven god of knowledge that was identifiable even when broken off at the knees.

“Look at the doors,” Vinny said, “people tried to evacuate the other buildings, but this one was smoked before anyone could react. This looks like the first place she hit. Too bad nothing’s left.”

“They moved the press to the basement because the sound of the boards clacking was annoying one of the magisters,” Azraea said, “And it doesn’t look like the first floor collapsed completely.” She followed the edge of the building. Despite the fact that the first floor hadn’t fully caved in, it was an impassable ruin of charred wood and fallen brick. Fortunately she found what she was looking for; the coal chute to the basement was still largely clear.

“You lead a charmed life, kid,” Vinny commented on their luck as he helped her haul the few charred beams and bricks off of it and open the chute.

“If you say so,” Azraea said, “then I’ll go first.” She sat down and slowly slid down the short chute into the pitch-black basement. She ignited a fireball in her hand and found that, indeed, half of it was caved in. Timber jutted through the ceiling, spilling bricks onto everything that had been beneath it. Fortunately, the half of the basement with the printing press was still mostly intact, though it was a mess. Rains had washed dirt and ash down into the basement. The floor and the machine were covered in gunk and the stored paper was ruined.

Vinny slid in behind her, and looked around, “Compared to ‘totally incinerated’ this is pretty good.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was expecting to find.”

“No, I wasn’t being sarcastic,” Vinny said as he walked around the thing, “It’s really pretty good. I can get the papers and ink,” he said, “if you can get it cleaned up and working. We can start our own underground press. Literally”

“You want to start printing our own paper?” Azraea asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Vinny said, “Maybe we can’t go the whole way with it, but we can manage some flyers, right? The way I see it, anything that’ll rattle the scaly old bat’s cage is worth doing at this point, and apparently a free press concerns her a great deal. Of course, while I have acquired a rather impressive repertoire of skills over the years, I’ll admit that I haven’t a clue how you would run this thing.”

Azraea found a charred skeleton in the mess of collapsed timbers. Some poor soul had been down there using the machine when the building caught fire and had run for the stairs only to be crushed by the building caving in. She looked around and found two more charred bodies.
Azraea’s eyes glowed green, “I’m sure I can find someone here eager to teach me.” 

Chapter 5 (Part I): The Dynamic Status Quo

The Kingstown Herald is failing; we all know that, everyone knows that. The lies they print, the outright lies, are a last desperate attempt to discredit real sources of new information, credible sources people trust, like The Vulpine Post – where I get all my news. The Kingstown Herald is an enemy, it’s not my enemy, it doesn’t threaten me, though they’ve had some very nasty things to say about me, it’s an enemy of the people; the people’s enemy. And maybe somebody should do something about that.

-          Captain Medes commenting to The Vulpine Post

It took Azraea some time to shake off Samantha, but when she finally played up the cloak and dagger angle that Lily had pushed, Samantha apologized for being ‘obtuse’ and they parted ways. Eventually, Azraea made enough twists and turns to actually lose the curious woman, and feel safe returning to Vidi’s safehouse. Samantha was a sweet girl, and Azraea didn’t want to judge her for her chosen profession, but after their conversation about hustling snake-oil, Azraea thought it wise not to invite the girl into what Ochsner had dubbed “History’s Most Half-Assed Conspiracy”.

To her surprise, Vinny was waiting for her at the shack when she returned. He was both foul smelling and foul tempered. His irritation over her absence softened somewhat when she offered him some of the food Lily had given her, and his anger seemed to completely abate when she started going through the newspaper, and relating what Samantha had told him on their walk back. Intelligence (both literal and figurative), seemed the most reliable way to placate Vinny.    

It turned out one of Syliva’s first moves after being appointed Chief Counsel to the Throne was to shut down the Kingstown Herald, accusing them of “fomenting dissent that threatened the security of the kingdom and its people” based on “false information.” She censured the publishers, editors, and distributors for being complicit in a “reign of terror”, and she outright arrested the writers, whom she held to be the main perpetrators of what she now called “informational terror.” This morning’s main news was covering the beginning of the protests which that had triggered, including a heard-it-here-first story from a Broad Beard contributor who’d somehow managed to get a story about last night’s riot to the presses about the same time they happened. Vinny explained what he’d seen when he came into town, but at this point Azraea couldn’t honestly say she was surprised. 

Reinvigorated and up-to-date, Azraea was well past ready to get to work. Vinny, however, compared conducting operations in the current environment to trying to build a house during an earthquake; counterproductive and dangerous. So instead they stayed put, only sojourning out to gather information as discretely as possible. In the mean time, Vinny took the opportunity to give Azraea a crash-course in political strategy and media manipulation, with Syliva's actions being the focus of their lessons.
The Vulpine Post and the Broad Beard Press had done Syliva's bidding, and they had done it well. While The Kingstown Herald hadn’t fallen in line, Vinny explained that itself had become a boon for the dragon. Gaining power in a kingdom the size of Caelia would require Syliva winning the favor of at least a portion of the population, and they would have to follow her out of some measure of loyalty beyond what fear or money could ensure - at least for a while. Syliva needed to cast herself as a hero, and that dramatic narrative required an opponent her own papers could paint as a villain. The Herald had unwittingly walked into that role and doing so dragged its supporters with it.

To some degree, Vinny's way of looking at things fascinated Azraea. He never told her anything about her own country she didn't already know, but being better traveled, Vinny saw patterns where she had only seen chaos, and being more ruthless, he saw strategy where she had seen only senseless hatred.  
Azraea knew that The Kingstown Herald had always been a fairly neutral business; it was politically moderate if not necessarily apolitical. She also knew that over the past decade a large portion of  Caelia had responded to the kingdom's economic hardships by idealizing a bygone era of Caelian history. The world they 'recalled' fondly was white-washed and rose-colored, of course, but many Caelians now desired a restoration of that fantasy world more than anything else. These self-declared 'Nationalists' saw themselves as 'true' Caelians and everyone else as wastrels, parasites, or even traitors. They supported any policies or ideas that were consistent with the 'restoration' of Caelia to the nation they imagined it once was. They vehemently opposed anything else, including any suggestions that the time they 'remembered' was not so great as they imagined. 
This was all basic current-events to Azraea, but what she had never consciously realized was that, quite unlike some of the other heralds, The Kingstown Herald had never really supported the Nationalist's nostalgia-fueled revision of history. Not only had it lost many readers to The Vulpine Post as a result, that was the over-arching reason it had been labeled as a 'liberal rag' filled with 'leftist propaganda'. 
Vinny suspected that Syliva herself was not especially given to nostalgia - maybe being thousands of years old tempered one's view of history, or maybe she just gave little thought to the past in general - but he imagined that conservative Caelians' antipathy towards the Herald and its supporters had proven to be something she could dig her claws into. The Kingstown Herald had become a tangible opponent that she could spar with, and do so without looking obviously like a power-mad tyrant - at least, not to the dedicated readers of The Vulpine Post or the Broad Beard Press. That conflict - garnished with some speeches and editorials - transformed Syliva into a celebrity among Caelian traditionalists. 
Azraea had found the relationship between Syliva and her emerging supporters to be strange; it seemed to her that Syliva embodied everything the conservatives claimed they were opposed to - or more accurately, she embodied everything everyone was opposed to - but Vinny argued there was a wide gulf between what a person said they opposed and what they actually hated. Vinny claimed that Caelian traditionalists had trustingly jumped on the stories and rhetoric that claimed to discredit The Kingstown Herald simply because it was consistent with the narrative they had already embraced. Now that they saw Syliva as an unfortunate victim of the Herald's 'slanderous' headlines, they would reject any aspersions to her character or factual observations of her actions that would compromise that perception. 


Ironically, as Azraea and Vinny discussed this, on the opposite end of Kingstown, Syliva was contemplating  many of the same things. The dragon knew that, ultimately, nothing could have guaranteed she would have support better than the emergence of opposition. If someone hated her, then anyone who hated them must also love her. Humans were strange like that – somehow unable to hate everyone equally.

Syliva's new devotees had given the dragon a measure of ‘legitimacy’ that no heralds ever could, and the devotion they had begun to express was sweet indeed. Syliva had thought that to be loved would be a weak draught, but knowing that they loved her despite the fact that she had exploited them at every possible opportunity made it sweet. In fact, Syliva became less and less subtle about what she was and what she did. It seemed as if these pitiful people had committed to supporting her as the cruel, greedy, vain creature that she was, and because they had committed to that, the worse she behaved, the more they loved her. Even Syliva thought it was demented – in a beautiful sort of way.

Syliva had supporters in the media, she had supporters in the streets, and now after a little pressure on Hylas she’d gained an official title: “Chief Counsel to the King.”

It was insulting. 
Now that Syliva finally had an official title, it was offensive to be officially number two in the kingdom. She reminded herself, though, that it was part of a process. She hadn’t stolen all of the kingdom’s gold in one day let alone indentured its people so quickly. Likewise, this game could not be played any faster than it was; the wheel was turning, and she needed to give it time to build up momentum. While a measure of popular support had helped Syliva obtain her position, gaining her official title had galvanized her supporters. Her perceived legitimacy gave her supporters a stronger identity, and they were rapidly overtaking the larger group of Nationalists. Every day that went by, the Nationalists became more and more her people. Nevertheless, Baryd had already discovered that he'd lost control over the movement. He could nudge them with deals and bribes targeted at individuals, but the collective group was far too big for him to control with money, and it was becoming too fanatical for him to steer. It would be up to Syliva to tame the growing beast herself. 
It was an exciting challenge for Syliva, but it also meant the dragon was almost as surprised as everyone else when the group’s anti-intellectual, anti-minority, xenophobic rhetoric suddenly broadened to include the upper middle and lower-upper classes. Baryd had published an anonymously letter-to-the-editor of the Broad Beard Press that pointed out that material investments like land, tools, livestock, retained their inherent value even as Caelia’s currency became worthless. It argued that the businesses built on those physical assets could raise prices far more easily than workers could negotiate higher wages for themselves, and those near the top could afford to lose a far greater portion of their wealth without seeing any important impact on their life styles. As a result, the upper middle classes seemed to retain their creature comforts while their employees starved and their consumers went bankrupt.  

Baryd had published the letter along with many more just to sustain reader engagement, but the arguments it made spread like wildfire through Syliva's Nationalists. Before long, stories began to circulate about how business owners had orchestrated all of this, somehow caused inflation by hording or withholding goods to drive up scarcity. The theories didn’t make much sense, but they spread quickly amongst the angry Nationalists, even without the Broad Beard’s support. Shopkeepers and small business owners were threatened, stores were broken into. That was initially fine with Syliva. All the money spent to repair and reopen those businesses would flow back into her coffers and no one could even faintly point to her or to her heralds as the source of this new violence; their hands were clean for once.

However, eventually the rabble rousers began trying to push the public against the high profile business owners, the moneyed individuals whose investments in the city represented only a portion of their power. Threatened by this, the upper class pushed back against the Nationalists, but rather than tackle them head on, as Syliva expected, they used their resources to organize rallies and direct anger away from themselves and upward at the economic class above them. 

That class included only one individual: Syliva.

The Nationalists, of course, only became more devoted to Syliva, whose character was, as Baryd’s writers put it, “under attack from the corrupt, greedy fat-cats running the kingdom.” The Nationalists’ opponents, of course, argued that she had more money than any of the ‘fat-cats’ the Nationalists wanted to get rid of, but that just prompted her supporters to praise her brilliance and cunning in the business world, as well as her strength, power, and assertiveness as a dragon. 
For Syliva, it was simply amazing to watch; she’d crafted a complex strategy to place her in power, but most of it had become unnecessary – her base was unwavering, sustained not by personal interest or welfare, but simply by the spite they felt for the segments of the population that reviled her. All she had to do to keep them happy was to act like a monster.