Chapter 299: The Voice Of...
As news of Kir’s slaughtering of the slavers worked its way up Amrita’s branches, a sort of chaos began to unfold.
Word from Norneau that Ghostheart had departed finally began to circulate, as did the truth that he was now stalking the very heart of the Amrita Kingdom.
Anxious slaveowners approached the King’s ministers, hoping to offload the people they considered assets and property until mere days ago. At the same time, Syndicate warehouses began to suffer from theft and abandonment by their guards, as Kir took care of the more difficult locations in the crown of the world tree by slaughtering the guards and liberating the Syndicate’s captives.
True to her word, Imogen managed to quietly distribute copies of Kordia’s work detailing Ghostheart’s fight, which was limited to what Kir had accomplished in Norneau but still gave people an idea of what to expect and what his side of the story was.
The "more erudite" circles received copies of "Letters from Norneau," which laid out Kir’s arguments on increasing education and the practice of magic to levels that would make slavery completely unnecessary in any society with access to mana. Kir also had her watching for responses from Heaven’s embassy, but their silence left him with only concerns. He had to assume they didn’t need to say anything, given the vociferousness with which King Anmes denounced the "Demon Ghostheart," even going so far as to send out soldiers to protect the slaver families.
But behind the scenes, Imogen discovered a darker truth. Under the guise of protection, the crown was also assuming control of the Syndicate operations, handing them off to the two remaining family heads - Reginald Goldman and Amherst Fleecer - to continue business as usual. The girl Kir had let live, and even the heir of the Ertem family, were rapidly bought out and set aside, while house Nebima’s assets and slaves were downright seized.
A large amount of power and wealth was shifting hands, but thanks to this, Imogen was able to single out the location of most of the Syndicate’s gold.
Though they had offices on every branch, the roots of Amrita, every city in the Kingdom, and even one distant trade bank in Montmorency, the Consigliere Trust had only one vault.
Things would have been much simpler if the shifting wealth had actually, well, shifted. As things were, the shifts had more to do with changing the names of who owned what amount of gold in the vault, at least as far as the bookkeeping was concerned.
A quick inspection of the building showed that it was enchanted with more enchantments than all of Norneau’s walls combined... which made sense, given how old Amrita was compared to its younger sister city. Kir’s physical options were to nuke the place with magic or to cut off the branch it was attached to... which happened to include a large number of businesses and residences, being the merchant branch of the world tree’s crown.
Kir wasn’t about to involve that many innocents in his mission.