BECMI Chapter 365 – The Difference Between gold and Gold
-Yeah,- Sama /agreed quietly, thoughts going right down the same path. -Beat the thing unconscious, bind it in stone, including the eyestalks, and then harvest its eyes regularly. Regrows a stalk a day and the main in a week, right?-
-As I recall from the texts.- Because naturally wizards wanted to learn little details like that. Beholders were extremely intelligent, if batshit cuckoo by human standards, but that wasn’t going to stop many wizards from doing those kinds of things For Magic!
Where did most of the beholder eyes on the spell component market come from, anyways? Yeah, from beholders in captivity who had their eyestalks severed regularly and sold off. As power comps, they ranged in value from one to six thousand gold, and their big central eye was worth a cool 10k as a power comp towards Dispelling, Abjuration, and Anti-Magic effects, which basically included any kind of large-area Wards, so infinite demand.
Tubes were affixed over the eyestalk sources and/or the thing was surrounded in a Permanent Anti-Magic Shell, forcing growth of the eyes down the tubes with no viable targets to discharge upon and neutralizing its main offensive weapon of magic. The stalks could be harvested easily once fully grown, and all you had to do was keep feeding the beholder a diet of offal and meat scraps to harvest more of them indefinitely.
It was ongoing torture of a sapient being, however monstrous, for considerable financial profit. Because it could regrow anything lost, most people considered it no different than milking a troll for blood, a Power Component for Healing Potions in particular.
I could make the cage for it in under a minute out of a thousand tons of stone. I could write Runes on the thing that would detonate if it ever escaped or got out, nullifying any risk, powered by its own innate magic. One Widened Grayfield would drop it out of the sky, a net to hold it down and inside the Field, and it would be helpless.
The creature itself would think such a chain of events to merely be a logical and reasonable course of action pursuing the course of greatest wealth.
Those giant eye-stalks would be worth anywhere from ten to fifty thousand gold for the amount of magic they could channel. That main eye had to be worth a cool 200k.
All combined, 500k or so a week in power components.
Anti-Magic spotlights that could turn magical fights on their head without a problem, Artifact-class in their range and utility.
I closed my eyes and just /sighed.
-I heard that,- Sama /murmured. -I take it this is not a decision that takes much thought at all in Delpha or Zanzyr?-
-There’s only one beholder farming operation I know of in Zanzyr. It’s in Fuireze, under the auspices of the Alchemist Society, exact location secret. Sales of the eyes fund most of its operations, swapped for other resources. Other places have tried, and their beholders mysteriously get free and wreak a lot of havoc before they are destroyed, surprise, surprise.- I.e., someone didn’t want competition for their great idea and source of wealth.
-Ever been to a Delphan Alchemy shop? A real one?- I went on, and she /indicated not. -They have jars full of these things, they are almost a staple medium of trade. Broadly useful, never go out of style, and beholders can live for centuries. There’s probably one to three such farming operations in every major city.-
-Fueling the wealth and power of a robust and powerful magocracy and empire,- Sama /observed drolly. -I know they have troll blood harvest farms, corpse collecting corporations and collectives, buying people’s bodies while they are still alive, and similar things.- Delpha had definitely been among the places she and Briggs had wandered through in their travels.
-The churches try to crack down on it, but yes, they all exist underground in one form or another. It’s not open and blatant, but the law mostly turns a blind eye to it if it doesn’t actually involve killing people, and don’t go hunting for the operations. I confess to not knowing if Siricil does the same.-
-Well, they did. Then a lot of the people involved in the stuff died in gruesomely violent ways, including like twenty trolls rampaging through the artisan district slaughtering everyone buying alchemical Healing Potions and the like, and a beholder that tore apart the harbor area and a few warehouses there before it was shot dead by about a hundred archers. The profit-hungry have been trying to replace the lost revenue by starting up outside of town, but the enterprising minds keep falling down stairs, out of windows, and on their own daggers a few times. It’s tragic, really.-
-You do that so well!- I /congratulated her with sincere admiration.
-Our cut of those operations could have been easily twenty goldweight a week,- she /related, and we both made the same sort of sigh. That was a LOT of easy, soulless, and very useful revenue to have foregone. -If we ran them ourselves, two to five times that. This fat sucker? It’s like printing goldweight for next to nothing.-
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The number of people who could call a Gargantua Beholder a ‘fat sucker’ wasn’t high, but we were definitely two of them!
-Have a Sim make the Grayfield Arrow, you round up the Butcher Team with the nets and arrows. As long as the eyes survive, we’ll call it a win.- I /tilted my head, staring at the waters below. -Also, we’ll use it to kill Temptation’s Mirror.-
That drew her interest. -Hmm? Reflecting all gaze weapons. Reflecting a Grayfield Cone to allow magic against it, while no magic is permitted around it, making it vulnerable and sidestepping its Artifact level?
-That sounds wonderful! I’ll let Briggs know and he’ll have the Hammers ready for it!- she /chirped, always willing to cost Entropic Immortals time, money, and Immortal Power. -Ah, for further gossip, Grimbol confirmed the boy is definitely involved with what was going on. That freak of a Sage was much too unduly interested in him, and not once have any of the river-mad creatures attacked the kid.
-Also, there were far too many of the creatures around the Sage’s lair, and none of them were attacking the Sage… but they seemed unduly interested in what Grimbol’s party was doing.
-In addition, it seems the Curse originates from that Delphan colonization attempt five hundred years ago, their first attempt at claiming Eislas. There was a wall mural in the Sage’s lair detailing the history of it. Seems the Delphan general proclaimed a great Curse on the barbarians after they protested the wise and inviting Delphan colonization protocols with some vigor, and there was no aid forthcoming from Delpha. ‘Let this land be unclaimed for seven times seven centuries!’ or somesuch grandiose thing. Then a lightning bolt came down, split his sword in two, and the Delphans were slaughtered.-
Not what happened according to the Siricilan histories, although that was a bit too dramatic an event to not have occurred. There were definitely Siricilan mercenaries, weapons, and military advisors on the side of the barbarians!
-Aaaaand then they were off to find the sword and hilt and reforge the Blade that was Broken and gather the armies of Man to fight off the incursions of Mordor?- I /followed along with the trope.
-If that kid is Aragorn, I’ma eat my hat!- Sama /laughed in agreement. -Anyways, we dropped them back off a few miles up the trail from the big eye tyrant, and Grimbol messaged me not ten minutes later that the kid stumbled right across them.-
-Wise Alice says?- I /murmured.
-Curiouser and curiouser!- she promptly /replied.
-I guess I’m expecting a lot of Axes and Hammers to be bringing down a lot of meat. Go make us our beholder goldweight allotment for the month, hag.-
-As the Mighty Mystic Magos commands!- she /replied in good humor.
I /nodded as Sama Rantha went quiet in the Markspace, off to other things. Like, destruction of a monster capable of taking out a city, and destroying a perverted Artifact of Entropy.
I wasn’t going to immerse myself in the Cursed waters, but then, I didn’t have to. Some intrepid soul using ancient Delphan architecture had made a temple or monastery or, ahem, a Dungeon right on top of the heart of the river here.
Out here, in the middle of nowhere, where no people visited and there was no way to get any materials up here, and no sign of anyone living in the area.
Just dropped down out of nowhere, right on top of the source of the river.
No, no, no Immortals were involved in the making of this quest, they were not.
So, I could go all the way through the obvious Dungeon, down to wherever the source of the water was, or I could just go up the cursed outflow down there using Airy Water from Primus to push the water aside and skip all the fun stuff in between.
“Let’s go, Duum.”
With a chortling warble, Duum shrank down to about horse-sized, the better to fit in the fairly narrow gushing outflow. Primus brought up the hydromantic magic, and without a care, Duum plunged right into the riverflow.
Water exploded into a strong breeze around us, the magic of the Curse breaking off from it and visible as little black threads around the bubble of magic as Duum flew unerringly forward. His sonar worked perfectly fine underwater, and if anything was even more effective with a longer range down there. We’d spent a great deal of time traveling through seas and oceans so he could get used to ‘flying’ down there. We often attracted a great deal of attention from pods of whales, orca, and dolphins down below, all very intrigued at the sight of a bat and elfin soaring through the depths of the seas.
I was well-warned about when it opened up, and we blew out of the middle of the drain-point into a sizable underground lake. Wavesight and Devilsight combined to give me unerring vision in all directions, the water clearer than an open sky.
Primus indicated that the water was Elementally-pure, except for the Curse magic. Duum’s sonar chirped out in ultrasonics, measuring the area, while I stood up in his saddle and looked in all directions.
Three things demanded immediate attention.
First, two screaming wings of saberclaws came plunging down through a conduit from a water source above us, spreading out like fingers of two minds, clearly heading right for us at flank speed.
On the far side of this underground lake, a great circular form the size of a galleon slowly turned around to gaze our way. Its eyes were reddened, blackness bubbled on its skin and shell, and it obviously knew right where we were, as well.
Down at the bottom of this entire artificial chamber, a gaping hole in the floor existed, extending right out past the Prime Material Plane. The purest of waters ran out of the Wormhole to Elemental Water, but growing on the edges of the wormhole was a great pulsing black tumor, beating like a living heart, and disgorging black effluvia into the sparkling purity of the outgoing waters as it did so.
Well, well, well. Heart of the River, indeed!
The Spear of Dread snapped out, and I pointed with the crystalline Golden tip of it. Duum heeled over on a dime and plunged for the bottom as if there was no water resistance at all.
Dread informed me that there was a lot of Immortal Power tied up in this Curse, someone had spent a good deal to put it into effect, and then let go some permanent amount to make it enduring.
I did not have to deal with the limitations of a mortal, having to jump through all the right hoops, but at the same time I didn’t want to draw pointing fingers at this moment...