Book 4 Chapter 25: The Help
Book 4 Chapter 25: The Help
++Stories of dashing explorers filling in the map have always been popular in penny novels or magazines, but there is only a small nugget of truth to them. For the most part, the men responsible for expanding what Garamon knows of the world and its history are not daring heroes, but scholarly academics.++
- From ‘The History of History’.
Farah became rather more enthusiastic in helping me once I started offering him more than the bare minimum aid, and I was soon bequeathed with a rough address for the man he was directing me to. Idjatanya Johns, his name was, a Professor of Archeology, the discoverer of several ancient ruins, the sole speaker of at least two otherwise-forgotten languages and, for some reason, an accomplished competition marksman and warrior.
He was in Poloira rather than Garamon, too, which made him more conveniently located. Then again, with my current flying speed this only actually made the difference of an hour or so.
Blakely was not thrilled by the prospect of him being brought along with me, but then Blakely was rather suspicious of having neighbours within a mile of his home without spending at least a few days studying them through the scope of a sniper rifle first. I decided to note his worries down for later, still aware of how his instincts had often saved me in the past.
With that set out, I simply did a sweep of my refinery to see how business was going. Alira was, for once, happy to update me on it.
“Pretty much everything you said would happen has happened,” she told me. “Minus a few details.”
“Such as?”
“The demand’s been steadily increasing across the board,” she grinned. “The market’s just growing, basically. Constantly.”
I weighed that. There would be no more chance for aggressive expansions for a while, and yet…
“Sink up to ten million crowns into acquiring new lands and refineries,” I told her. “I want to meet this demand.”
It was, obviously, a ridiculously big risk. It was in fact half of my whole fortune, more even, considering my other expenses this year. But I was confident in it. I had a way of looking at vast stretches of numbers and anticipating where they would finally balance, of seeing patterns and trends too subtle and fine for an unaugmented human to fathom. It was a lich’s trick.
At my current rate of growth, I would multiply my income and wealth by a factor of roughly one point five per year, for perhaps three more years. After that, all bets would be off. This was good. It was excellent. It would, however, still leave me just shy of Garamon’s top ten wealthiest people by the end of those three years.
This way, I hoped to raise the scaling factor by enough that I would be counting hundreds of millions of crowns instead of tens of millions. If I was very lucky I may even have surpassed the wealth of Earl Elqarth by that time.
Alira did not know that there was a superhuman mind guiding these decisions though, all she could tell was that I was confident and good with business. She spent ten minutes attempting to guide me onto a more cautious lane before finally surrendering and doing as she was told.
With that seen to, I departed for Professor Johns.
Blakely became rather more agitated by this flight, perhaps a feature of us soaring over land instead of sea.
It was not exactly an irrational difference, at least. With several times an ordinary human’s durability, Blakely might survive falling onto water from even hundreds of yards up, providing drag force bled away his horizontal velocity and he positioned himself just right. Over dry land, though, bones would break and organs would rupture.
Of course that was always doubly true of me than it was for him, and one did not hear me whining about it, so I ignored him.
My destination was the city of Worsican, the staging ground for Poloira’s pathetic little revolution against Garamon a century or so back, and now one of the world’s larger trade hubs. The reek of it struck my nostrils like a hammer blow as I decelerated from supersonic speeds to merely fast enough that I would be smeared into paste on impact with something solid.
“What a revolting settlement,” I frowned.
Blakely cackled beside me. “Not pretty enough for her ladyship?”
“No,” I snapped. “It is indeed not. If we are defining ‘pretty’ as an absence of open sewage.”
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“The place has grown fast,” Blakely shrugged. “You always get this in expanding cities.”
He was right of course, and I knew the fact more than he did. I had seen many thousands of cities grow and swell in my time, though never quite like this. The bloated populations of the modern age were still a sight to behold.
We cut through the worst of the reek and closed in on a large and proud-looking building which I had already verified was the university Professor Johns worked in.
“Fancy place,” Blakely noted as we drifted down.
“What is your judgement on the odds of people attempting to kill us here?” I asked him.
He looked at me sidelong. “We’re in the middle of an esteemed university in broad daylight, there’s no need to be paranoid.”
I almost strangled the grinning bastard. Fortunately he gave a more helpful answer.
“Nill, the place is basically made of natural cover and anyone who might try to slot us will know that wherever we stand in it leaves about one second of separation between us and a marble wall.”
I looked at the walls in question. Thickly built, and of course dense stone like marble was somewhat stronger than concrete.
We headed through and came to an office space crammed into one corner of the building, passing several students and professors as we went. I knocked and was irritated to receive no answer. I knocked again, and still nothing came. I knocked a third time, this time mustering as much strength as this new body could apply to the door without the risk of leaving knuckle-shaped indentations in the wood. This finally got me an answer.
The door swung open to reveal a tall, haggard looking man on the other side of it. He was tanned. Very tanned, with skin that looked sun-beaten and scarred, cool brown eyes and the sort of stubble one would normally expect to find in a homeless camp. He wore a suit, though without the jacket and terribly untucked. His gaze swept from me to Blakely, then back to me.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Good afternoon. I am Isabel Vornholt, may I come in?” I was keeping myself wary of this man, but I saw no reason not to be polite. At least for now.
He blinked, seeming to be in some sort of daze for a moment, before nodding and ushering me past him. “Oh, yes, yes, please do.”
I headed in after Blakely had made sure that nobody was hiding and waiting to kill me, then took my seat before a small desk cramped into the corner of the room. Johns sat down opposite me.
“So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked me, drawing out a large, heavily chipped combat knife and sprinkling a line of white powder over the blade. Stimulant powder, I recognised. He snorted it and shivered for a moment, then, as if as an afterthought, held the knife up and offered me some.
“No thank you,” I told him, though it was bloody tempting.
“Alright,” he shrugged. “Why are you here?” he was snorting more of the stimulant before even awaiting an answer.
“I require your services on an expedition I am intending to launch into Asyran,” I told him frankly, seeing nothing to gain from beating around the bush. “I have been informed that you are the best and most qualified set of hands I could hire for this affair, and so I want your aid with it.”
Johns took it all in easily enough.
“What’s the expedition for?” he asked me.
“I need to procure something from there. An artifact.”
“Whereabouts?”
I told him the specific details I had received from Elqarth, which was not much. “Part of your job will be tracking it down,” I added. “And, of course, total secrecy is expected.”
Johns bristled at that, which surprised me. “This is for some private collection then?” he asked.
“It…may be,” I said evenly. “Will that be a problem?”
“It’ll be a non-starter,” Johns said shortly. “I don’t do this job so that nobility or tycoons can snatch up historic relics and hide them away from the world. Everything I track down goes exactly where it belongs; in a museum, displayed for all the world to see.”
All the world, I noted, who lived within easy reach of the museum, could afford its visitation fees and, of course, were of the relatively few races who might be granted entry into the country at all. It was an endless source of amusement to me how I was treated in Garamon now, compared to how I would have been treated were its people aware of my actual birth in Irucci.
Then again, it was not like I especially cared where the artifact ended up for its own sake. The true purpose of any ancient relic was to be of use to me, and if one had no use for me then there was no point in worrying about where it ought to be placed.
“Once I am done with the artifact, I will send it to a museum of your choosing,” I offered.
That seemed to surprise and confuse him, but he certainly warmed up once he heard it. “That’s a serious offer?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “Then give me your word. I know how you magicians tend to get about that.”
The little rat-man. I had to fight the growl from bubbling up in my throat. “...Fine, I give you my word,” I managed.
Johns required little more attention after that, just a brief bit of bartering on specific pricing, none of which I actually cared about except to deprive him of as much money as possible in retaliation for him entrapping me with my word. After that, I had only one last thing to see to.
I began to fly back to Garamon with Blakely.