Before the Storm: Act 2, Chapter 7

Before the Storm: Act 2, Chapter 7

Chapter 7

“Woo, what a view!” Dimoiya exclaimed.

A gust of cool wind tossed Frianne’s golden locks as they stood atop the village's lichtower. While the view of the Vale was indeed breathtaking, she wasn’t focused on the lake or the distant peaks to the east.Visjt novelbin(.)com for new updates

“How far is it to that strip of forest up the road to the northwest?” Frianne asked.

“Four kilometres,” Ludmila answered. “If you’re wondering how much land each village manages, it’s twenty-five square kilometres.”

Frianne silently scanned the fields on the terraces around them.

That’s far too much...

At least by the Empire’s standards, it was. As far as she knew, Re-Estize was no different.

Each farming village in the Empire managed about ten square kilometres of fields and copses. The allocation was something like a hard rule, as it was determined by how far the villagers could walk and move equipment and still get a good day of work in.

“This is possible because of Undead labour?” Rangobart asked.

“That’s right,” Ludmila answered. “Speaking of which, I’ve spotted them. Let’s go and take a look, shall we?”

They descended the tower and boarded their carriage, riding a kilometre southeast along the main road connecting the farming villages. The vehicle stopped on the shoulder of the road, but there were no Undead to be seen.

“The team I spotted is two kilometres that way,” Ludmila pointed to a distant terrace further up the valley. “Can everyone fly? Walking out there would take a Wizard an hour.”

“Does it take non-Wizards less time?” Dimoiya frowned.

“It varies depending on vocation. For instance, a decent Ranger could cover the same distance in five minutes if they run straight there.”

“...through the mud?”

“Mud doesn’t matter to a Ranger.”

Dimoiya gave Ludmila a dubious look.

“Are you a bad woman like Wagner?”

“It’s true,” Rangobart said, then cleared his throat. “About the Rangers, I mean. I could scarcely believe it when I saw them in action during my first month running patrols with the army. My company’s best Rangers could traverse a muddy farmer’s field just as quickly as we could ride our horses on the road beside it. Actually...shouldn’t you have seen something similar with your escort on the Promotional Examination?”

“No, I didn’t pay attention to any of that. I was paranoid about a Goblin jumping out from behind a rock and slitting my throat!”

“It’s more likely that they’d put an arrow in you. Even a Wizard can kill the average Goblin with a good whack and the Goblins know it.”

Dimoiya gave Rangobart a good whack.

“Ow!”

“Why do you have to be like that?” Dimoiya fumed.

“Like what?”

“I was scared! Who cares about being rational when they’re scared?”

“...everyone can fly, right?” Ludmila asked again.

Frianne floated slowly into the air after casting her spell. Ludmila eyed her curiously.

“How does carrying a child interact with flight magic?” She asked.

“It factors in as additional encumbrance,” Frianne answered, “so I fly as if I’m carrying a good-sized book around.”

“What happens if you cast a Fly spell on the baby?”

“...please don’t propose unsettling ideas like that.”

They flew low over the freshly tilled ground, following Ludmila, who ran ahead of them. The uneven, muddy soil that should have probably sucked her boots off of her feet didn’t seem to affect her mobility at all.

“You’re a Ranger?” Frianne asked.

“House Zahradnik is a line of Rangers...haven’t I mentioned that before?”

“I think so. I suppose I’m used to martial Nobles being cavalrymen.”

She soon spotted a team of Death Knights ploughing a field on the terrace above theirs. Ludmila stopped at the windbreak beside the field, where a pair of Farmers were having lunch on the grass. They didn’t stand upon Ludmila’s arrival, instead offering friendly nods in greeting.

“Afternoon, m’lady,” one of them said.

“Good afternoon,” Ludmila replied. “What’s for lunch?”

“Crab salad with crab rolls and a crab sandwich. I suppose I should be thankful that they haven’t figured out a crab dish that goes with the fruit.”

“Maybe I should have the restaurants change things up a bit,” Ludmila said. “I know I instructed them to use crab with the meals, but I never thought they would go to such extremes.”

“Well, I heard someone say that crab’s a luxury, so I figure I shouldn’t complain. Especially not in the Chef’s face. Who’s that you got with ya?”

“Some acquaintances from the Empire. They wanted to see how things worked here.”

“Work, eh...now I’m feelin’ all guilty.”

Indeed, the farmers hardly looked like they were hard at work. While they ate, the team of Death Knights made their way up and down the field with their ploughs.

“What’s left for you to do with the Undead working out there?” Rangobart asked.

“When we’re ploughing? Not much. We have teams of Death Knights ploughing the fields. Teams of Skeletons and Bone Vultures pick through the fields for stones and other unwanted debris. We give everything a once-over before sowing the crops...well, we use some new and improved seed drills that the Death Knights also handle. After that, the real work begins.”

“How do the Undead compare to conventional methods?”

“Hmm...it’s hard to even compare. A village doing things the old-fashioned way shares teams of draft animals, taking turns with their tenancies. Here, our ‘draft animals’ are the local security, so we can whistle up as many teams of Death Knights as we have ploughs. They can handle ploughs with six blades, too. The smiths are working on a twelve-blade plough that we can use with Soul Eaters next spring.

“Anyway, the Undead go faster; they don’t have to rest every few hours like a team of horses does. They don’t need to eat and there’s no stables to muck out. They can work all day and night so things ploughing gets done quick. Compared to the old days...yeah, no one in their right mind would want that after doing things the way we are now. Growing season’s shorter up here than in the lowlands, too, so the speed’s appreciated.”

Improvements in efficiency all around, then...

Listening to the Farmer pointed out a few ‘small’ things that hadn’t registered before. Clara and Liane focused on the many applications of Undead labour, but what happened when they weren’t working was an important factor, too.

“I’m beginning to understand why Liane says that you’re a cheater,” Frianne said.

“It is what it is,” Ludmila smiled slightly. “I saw little reason to imitate lands developed under an obsolete paradigm and absolutely no reason to adopt the systems that create all of their problems.”

“But you must surely have some problems of your own...”

“Of course,” Ludmila replied. “But they’re good problems to have. We are investing our resources to answer questions posed by the future rather than spending them fixing the mistakes of the past. No other territory in the Duchy of E-Rantel is in my position, but many territories in the Empire are...and many more will be.”

It was a pointed remark that required no effort to interpret. Both she and Rangobart had just been granted fiefs in the wilderness. Thousands of Imperial Knights had similarly been granted land, as well. With even more imperial expansion slated in the decades to come, those thousands would become tens or even hundreds of thousands.

“So your objective is to influence the Empire’s new developments rather than the existing ones.”

“Simply put, yes,” Ludmila replied. “The Empire is set on a course for expansion and they will succeed so long as they pick their fights carefully. With General Ray now in command of the Sixth Army Group, the Empire will soon find itself in a golden age fuelled by its new territorial acquisitions. With this in mind, I would like to see that success take a more healthy form, from a cosmopolitan standpoint.”

“Considering that the Empire already considers itself the pinnacle of cosmopolitan society,” Frianne said, “you may have some trouble convincing them.”

“It’s still more effective than standing on a box in Arwintar and trying to convince the citizens to change their ways. I don’t expect anyone to copy what I’m doing here – it’s impossible to do so. What I’d like to see is the principles employed in my territory being adapted to fit the unique properties and situation of any given fief. I suspect that most of the resistance to this will come from the Imperial Administration rather than the frontier folk.”

“I think I can see why you would say that,” Frianne said, “but how would you define the problem?”

“Hmm...I do not know if there is any formal terminology for it,” Ludmila said, “but the two major factors are ‘distance’ and ‘control’. I think you understand the control issue well enough. What I mean by distance is not physical distance, but the degrees of separation that any individual has from any given process. If one has too many degrees of separation from a process, one loses touch with the realities of that process unless one makes an active effort to understand it. Not many people care enough to do so or have the time to even if they did.”

“Of course,” Frianne nodded. “That is why regulatory bodies such as the Guilds exist. They ensure that the general public has access to products and services that meet acceptable quality standards.”

“But what defines those standards? I can guarantee you that the Guilds in the Empire do not care how many Goblins are killed or displaced to procure their lumber shipments. The Imperial Administration is even worse because they consider security an investment and the lumber as a ‘return’ that the Empire is entitled to. Tenants who receive the right to harvest lumber treat it as such and their landlords see it as a source of revenue that they deserve because their taxes pay for infrastructure and fund the Imperial Army.

“In every single case, no consideration is made to what exists outside of the imperial economy. At best, a forest is simply a prize to be won from its inhabitants and exploited for the benefit of the Empire while it is being converted into farmland. The gods forbid that the inhabitants resist or retaliate: that only somehow proves that the Empire is on the side of justice and now all manner of assassins and armies can be dispatched to deal with the ‘problem’.”

“Assassins?”

“I believe you call them Adventurers and Workers. At any rate, the problem I foresee is that the Imperial Administration will impose ‘imperial standards’ on its newly-acquired territories much as it has in the past. Am I correct in assuming this?”

“That should be the case,” Rangobart said. “Once my land has been surveyed, the Imperial Administration will make an assessment and issue recommendations to my seneschal about how to make the land as productive as possible.”

“For the Empire.”

“Right.”

“What if Brennenthal is as inhospitable for Human habitation as it sounds?”

“Then I will have some choice words for the Court Council. In all seriousness, I assume that some effort will be made to tame the land.”

“And thus the Empire remains forever mundane,” Ludmila sighed.

“I lost you,” Rangobart said.

Their carriage stopped at the ‘outskirts’ of the village, which consisted of the common land around the walls. A few villagers could be seen here and there, tending to their livestock.

“What do you think the yield of the fields that we just visited is? Of the principal crop.”

“What do you grow here?” Frianne asked.

“The latest harvest was oats.”

“If it’s oats and you’re using Plant Growth to enchant the fields, it should be just under seventy-five bushels a hectare.”

It was a frightening amount, especially considering that each of Ludmila’s Farmers managed a hundred hectares of land. Oats were a popular crop in cool, wet regions and produced two harvests a year. That meant a single farming household in Warden’s Vale produced enough food to feed eleven hundred adult Humans for an entire year after seed stores were set aside.

And this single village is exporting enough food to feed twenty-two thousand people. These Farmers must be ludicrously rich.

“That was the same thing that our central administration’s almanac listed. The actual harvest was one hundred bushels per hectare.”

“Hah? But Plant Growth already guarantees one hundred and fifty per cent of the maximum yield of any plant under its influence.”

“You would make a good Elder Lich,” Ludmila smirked. “They said the same thing, then checked the numbers and remeasured the harvest ten times over. The result was the same, however. Since that was the case, they tried to destroy the ‘erroneous’ harvest since it was clearly in violation of the mandated amount. I had to get the Sorcerer King to stop them.”

“I thought Elder Liches are supposed to be smart,” Dimoiya said.

“That may be so, but they’re also very arbitrary in the way that Undead can be.”

“And here I thought that the ones working with the Second Army Group were just admirably austere,” Rangobart muttered.

Frianne eyed one of the chickens blithely pecking away in the field nearby. Did it lay bigger than average eggs?

“So you attribute this to the effect of primal energies proposed in the Unified Mana Theory that Miss LeNez brought up,” Frianne said. “The abundant positive energy present in Warden’s Vale results in higher yields.”

“Higher maximum yields. We assume that Plant Growth still applies because yields are still uniform. The difference created by the spell made it much easier to notice. Also, this phenomenon and many others like it in Warden’s Vale led to the creation of Unified Mana Theory and its effects are being researched all over my territory.”

“So you propose that we leave our territories relatively untouched to take advantage of these effects.”

“That is your decision to make, but justifying it to the Empire will be difficult in most scenarios.”

“Why is that?”

“Clara once told me that the only way to keep a tree from being harvested is to convince those who would harvest it that it is more valuable to them if it is left standing,” Ludmila said. “This is nearly impossible when there is always someone out there who prioritises personal material gains and the Imperial Administration champions that way of thinking. Leaving a regular forest standing in the Empire is not as valuable to the Empire as the agricultural development that it stands in the way of. Harvesting that forest for valuable materials is merely a bonus obtained along the way.”

Frianne’s gaze went out to the fields being prepared for sowing.

“Assuming your theories lead somewhere,” she said, “I would say that the results achieved by your agricultural efforts would be quite convincing.”

“The effects of elemental gradients are subtle,” Ludmila told her. “What you see here would be considered extreme – just as extreme as Undead manifesting in the Katze Plains. Life generates positive energy, just as death generates negative energy. Normally, the balance between the two swings back and forth, but only slightly. Warden’s Vale is a ‘crucible’ because the regular balance doesn’t exist here. Negative energy is being siphoned away, causing the positive energy that it usually cancels out to overflow.”

“That’s an interesting hypothesis,” Frianne said. “Could it be that the Katze Plains and Warden’s Vale form two poles of an elemental conflux?”

“You are welcome to contribute to our research if you wish,” Ludmila said. “Just don’t Fireball Master LeNez if you lose your temper. That aside, it wouldn’t help any case for conservation of elemental gradients in the Empire because there is no known way to replicate the effects of what is going on in Warden’s Vale...though I suppose that Humans are quite good at replicating the effects of the Katze Plains.”

“We are?”

“Consider graveyards through the lens of Unified Mana Theory. Collecting ‘death’ in one place has the effect of engineering an artificial negative energy gradient, just as leaving some Elemental Ice lying around creates a tangible ‘ice’ gradient in that alchemical workshop. Re-Estize and the Empire chose to fight every year in the Katze Plains, effectively ‘dumping’ the resulting negative energy in a convenient place. If I recall correctly, there were rumours that the Katze Plains has grown over the past few years...”

“...those rumours are true,” Frianne shuddered. “The northern fringes of the Katze Plains have advanced by a few metres over the past few years. Some of the researchers at the Imperial Ministry of Magic postulate that the growth will stop now that the annual skirmishes have stopped.”

“So it appears that the Ministry of Magic does have some sense of what we’ve been researching here.”

A sigh escaped Frianne’s lips. She was so sure that she had everything sorted out before coming to the Sorcerous Kingdom.