Phantasm

Hector was going to be a problem. Part of the problem, the smallest part, but the part that was often uncomfortably at the forefront of my mind, was that I was calling him Hector. Not Captain Rodakis. He had become familiar to me, both in our working relationship as Talnier officials, and as a consequence of his pursuit of my hand in marriage.

He hadn’t been subtle about it, but neither had he been too pushy. With Tom having done a disappearing act, Hector no longer had competition. That might explain why he was content to play a slow game, just making sure that I knew he was there, and that he was interested. I honestly thought he might give up if I ever gave him a clear indication that the answer was no.

The reason I couldn’t do that was the bigger part of the problem. Hector was listed as one of the “Threats” to Talnier, or to my leadership of it. The interface wasn’t exactly clear, but it wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. The nobility wanted Talnier back, and Hector was the point man for at least one noble faction.

Having to question the loyalty of the head of your military was either a leader’s worst nightmare or something they did as a matter of course. I was still new to this leadership gig, so I wasn’t sure. I was sure it was something that I needed to worry about. My hope was that as long as he thought he had a chance, he wouldn’t do anything rash, like open the gates for another noble’s forces.

That said, I couldn’t let him get too confident. I didn’t want him to get the idea that I was just playing hard to get and that a coup was what I “really wanted”. I was walking a fine line, and the days that it was visible were the good ones.

In the meantime, though, I had to contend with Hector spreading his influence any wider. According to our Charter, the King was responsible for garrisoning the city and maintaining a guard on the wall. In theory, that put the King in direct control of the local forces, without having to go through the treacherous hierarchy of Dukes, Counts and Barons. In practice… well, at least I wasn’t the only one who had to worry about Hector’s loyalty.

The town guard, who had previously worked for the Baron, was now only responsible for keeping order in the town itself. The reduced responsibilities had allowed us to shrink the force, but only a bit. I had aspirations of turning them into an actual police force, and they were a tight-knit group that would have responded badly to any drastic cuts.

Still, it had allowed us to cull a few of the more corrupt and incompetent members from the ranks. They were a pretty good guard, if I did say so myself. It wasn’t a surprise that Hector wanted to take control of it. He’d made a proposal twice now, to the Council, and had been rejected both times.

The arguments about both forces working in unison during emergencies and such weren’t actually bad, but they weren’t persuasive to me and the rest of the Council was even more firmly against it. We were all quite friendly with the current head of the town guard, Captain Guertin, and he wasn’t happy with the idea of getting demoted to lieutenant.

However, it seemed that, instead of taking no for an answer, Hector had been out on the streets, administering… something.

“Is there something you want to tell me about this expense list?” I asked Marlon, my information broker. He scowled and screwed up his mouth like he was going to spit.

“Cost of doing business, sometimes,” he said. “It’s a reasonable expense.”

“I don’t doubt it, but if you’re in some kind of trouble, I can do more than just pay for the healing potions.”

He thought about it for a bit, long enough to make me wonder if I was going to have to use a [Skill]. I tried to avoid that, especially among those that I thought of as my people. Pushing someone with [Intimidation] or [Persuasion] might not be as painful as slapping someone around, but no one liked a bully.

“Might as well say,” he admitted. “Captain Rodakis has been sniffing around for dirt… he’s more fond of fists than gold for getting answers.”

“Do you want to make a complaint to the magistrate?” I asked, my voice carefully neutral.

This time he did spit, aiming it behind the table we were sitting at. I winced. This was one of the nicer taverns, I didn’t envy the server who had to clean it up. “I know how it works, with his type. A complaint won’t get me anywhere.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It might go the other way. You’re a local, he’s an interloper. I can put in a good word for you. But he is the King’s man, so the odds aren’t good.”

“Like I said, it’s the cost of doing business. Long as you pay for fixing it, we’re good,” he assured me. “Besides, now that he’s shown me the error of my ways, there shouldn’t be too much of that from now on.”

“You talked,” I stated.

“Course I talked. Not like I know anything damaging to you. Not that he asked much about that. Mostly he wanted to know… about the same stuff you did, at the start.”

“Who’s doing what, how this town works,” I said. “He wants to get his feet under him.”

“I suppose,” Marlon agreed. “I told him where the remaining gangs hang out, but I haven’t heard of his men doing any raids.”

“They don’t have the authority to do so,” I explained. “Any more than they had the authority to beat you up.”

“A noble’s sword is its own authority,” he muttered.

“True. It might be that he’s just waiting for the right… exigent circumstances to use that information.”

Knowing where the criminals lived was one thing. Without evidence of a crime— something the Guard was only just starting to grasp the need for— all you could do by raiding the place was to bust some heads. For now, the guard was focused on catching the criminals in the act.

Marlon shrugged again. “Is there anything you want me to keep from him… or anything you want me to tell him?”

I shook my head. “Use your own discretion for now, if something comes up I’ll let you know. If you find something damaging to me, I presume you’ll contact me to charge me more.”

He looked away. “Maybe not,” he said after a pause. I raised an eyebrow.

“You were right, before,” he said, “about the business.”

I didn’t say anything, curious as to where he was going with this.

“The town’s booming, and townsfolk want to know about everyone else,” he said. “Businesses want to know about their competitors. Not criminal stuff, but how well they’re doing, what their contracts are, that sort of thing.”

“Information is the lifeblood of commerce,” I said, quoting a line from my first orientation session at the Company. “That’s what I pay you for.”

“Yeah, and it turns out there's a whole lot of people that will pay for it as well. So it looks like you were a good bet after all.”

“Good to hear,” I said.

“So all that I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense to bite the hand that's feeding you, you know? You’re gonna keep growing the town, keeping my bottom line in the black. If something comes up that's gonna put an end to that, I’ll make sure you know. No charge.”

“Thanks,” I said, touched by his sincerity. “Now, about the rest of those reports…”

“Yeah, sure boss. Your other guy was right on the money. Brennan and Betard are definitely getting extra money from somewhere.” He scowled. “Wish I knew who he was.”

I just smiled. Marlon had already asked, and I’d refused to answer, saying that two informants kept each other honest. The truth was a little difficult to admit to.

My other source of information was the [Town Status] interface. Additional sections had become available over time. The [Treasury] section had been added when the Council had gotten some funds, the [Defenses] section had arrived when Hector and his troops showed up, and the [Infrastructure] section had appeared after we built our first building.

It might have been nice, if a little difficult to explain, if the [Infrastructure] section had allowed me to spend Town Points on buying new buildings. I wouldn’t have put such a thing past the System. What it did do was provide information about all the existing infrastructure.

Maybe infrastructure was the wrong word. It wouldn’t be the first time that I thought the interface was badly designed. What the section showed was a long list of every constructed feature of the town, and every business operating in the town.

Now, all the businesses were listed, but not all of them were named. To be named, you had to be registered in some way by the city. Merchants, for example, signed in whenever they brought goods in or out of the town. That was mainly for tax purposes, but it also made their name appear on my list.

Local businesses, on the other hand, might not be named. I was finding ways to encourage businesses to register, but Marlon’s enterprise was probably going to be forever known as “Unnamed Information Broker 13” I could tell it was him because his income went up every time I paid him money.

That was the really useful part of the list. Each business had four numbers next to it. Foreign Income, Foreign Expenses, Domestic Income and Domestic Expenses. Domestic didn’t refer to Latora, it was limited to my territory.

The other part of the list was the various features and infrastructure of the town. These listings showed what the town paid to maintain them, and what they generated for the town.

For example, the docks and the town gates generated tax income from goods passing through. The numbers matched what was reported manually. I wasn’t yet sure if that meant that no one was skimming or if skimming wasn’t reported.

For something like the town walls, what was generated was lives. How the System calculated that, I did not know, but there had been a few wandering monsters that had been stopped at the walls. Each time, lives saved had ticked up by a few people.

Those numbers weren’t everything I would have liked for an economic analysis of the town, but they were updated in real-time, and Marlon could fill in some of the blanks. I’d been working on a model in my spare time. [Calculate] and [Scribe] weren’t an entirely adequate substitute for a spreadsheet, but I was getting there.

I went over Marlon's reports, comparing his data with what I already had. The few meetings we’d had so far were almost a refuge from this crazy world. As I crunched the numbers, I could almost believe I was back in my finance industry job. Almost.

There were still a few areas where Marlon had declined to help me. Reminders that he was still beholden to criminal interests. Because the criminals were listed too. “Unnamed Criminal Gang”, “Unnamed Fence”, “Unnamed Alchemical Provider”. Crime in Talnier had taken a beating once the Baron was no longer there to protect it. I liked to think that my promotion of actual policing was also taking a bite out of it. But my interface was a reminder that it was still there, and would be a part of my town until I rooted it out.

Before then, Marlon would have to take a side. Today gave me some hope that it would be the right one.