Death After Death-Chapter 327 - Doing Business

When the time came, he invited a delegate from every clan that might have a claim, but only half of them came. He supposed he didn’t blame them. Though he’d gotten clan Aldor to back his play, his vague wording about proposals of mutual interest largely fell on deaf ears; that might have happened even if he hadn’t been an outlander, though.

It was fine. Simon wasn’t looking to make a fortune here. He was looking for people he could work with, and to do that, he needed to find people who could make smart decisions when it came to money.

“As some of you know, I recently got back from dealing with a little ogre problem for clan Aldor,” Simon said when he addressed the six clan delegates. “It was supposed to take a week, but it turned into more like a month because—”

“Because outlanders shouldn’t be trusted with such tasks?” one man called out.

“Hells, I’m surprised he survived at all,” another man with a bushy beard exclaimed.

Simon let them get it out of their system. He was used to it and above such taunts. He let the mountain men have their fun for a minute, then when the conversation died down, he said, “The delay was due to prospecting. There’s a lot of wilderness between here and Baleger Pass and a lot of wealth that’s going to waste.”

Everyone disputed this, but once he put the gold nugget he’d found on the table, most of them relented and listened while he laid out the rest. “I’d found both copper and tin, several iron deposits, and, of course, a gold-rich river, but the real treasure, I think, are the coal seams.”

“Bah, coal!” the bearded man countered. “I’d rather burn cow dung. Smells cleaner, too!”

There was some agreement with that, but not as much as before. Instead, there was interest. Everyone wanted to know where these veins were and which ones were on their land.

“All in good time,” Simon assured them. “We haven’t gotten to my cut.”

Everyone bellyached about a finder’s fee, then, but Simon made it very clear he wasn’t in this to get rich. “My terms are simple,” he told them. “I get five percent of the profit, and you get eighty.”

“What about the other fifteen percent?” the oldest man in their gathering asked. “Where’s that go? The high Karl?”count

“While the high Karl will certainly get his cut, I don’t count that as profit,” Simon answered. “That’s the cost of doing business. No, I have bigger plans for that money.”

“Bigger plans,” another man laughed. “Here we go.”

“The rest of that money isn’t for me,” Simon calmly insisted. “It’s for you, in a roundabout way.”

The skepticism only increased then, but he ignored it and went on a long and winding description about the dangers he’d braved on the road. It wasn’t just monsters that were nearby or goblin dens that should have been dealt with long ago. It was the roads themselves.

“A few bridges could cut travel time in half,” he explained. “And a tunnel or two could shave days off such a trip.”

“Yeah, well, those things cost money,” the delegate from clan Aldor piped up. “Why should we pay for a road or a bridge that anyone can use if they aren’t going to contribute.” His name was Aldor Maller, Simon was pretty sure, but that didn’t matter. What did, though, was that he’d missed the point entirely.

Because if you do, they’ll eventually do the same, was what Simon wanted to say, but that would go exactly nowhere with this crowd. Instead, he offered a more direct reason.

“I know,” he nodded. “That’s what I’m spending the other fifteen percent on. Five percent for monster bounties and ten percent for road improvements. Those are all costs you’d have to pay for anyway, so it's not really costing you a thing.”

“So instead of us offering twenty percent for this information, you’re offering us five, as long as we clean up the roads? Why?” Only one man asked the question, but Simon could see that everyone shared it.

He wanted to explain. He wanted to talk about how this was to force them to work together, but he knew that would make them more suspicious of him. They obviously suspected him of having ulterior motives already. So, instead, he offered them a little white lie that might one day become true.

“Right now, tough as I am, I can’t journey more than half a day from a clanhold before I have to turn around and return before dark,” Simon said. “It’s a disgrace. Think of all the sights unseen and treasures waiting to be found. I’m asking you to spend that money for very selfish reasons: because once things are a little safer, I can find even more rich deposits and charge double.”

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That, at least, they bought, and though everyone promised to take the offers back to their Karls, as the weeks passed, he only ever heard from three, including clan Aldor. That was fine. It was a start. They would grow rich, and then, hopefully, he could get other factions on board with his policy of spending money to make even more money.

After that, he gave a few other locations to Eddek to use as bargaining chips. “None of these are on your land, so your father can’t mine them,” Lucas explained. “But the information is still valuable, and if you need to negotiate concessions from anyone or just want to build wealth for your family, these will help.”

Eddek thanked him, but only after he finished peppering him with questions. Are you sure these are there, or merely guessing? How big are they? How much work would it take to exploit them? Why aren’t you selling them directly?

Simon was pleased that the questions were good ones more than anything. That alone told him that the boy would grow into a fine young man. Neither he nor Kayla seemed unhappy, which told his time on this floor had been well spent.

“You said so yourself,” Simon quipped. “I’m not like any other sellsword you’ve ever known. Besides, it’s not like I won’t find more. There’s endless wealth hidden in the world around us if you just know where to look.”

That wasn’t all he did that spring, of course. As the days slowly faded into summer, he took trips to several nearby villages. One was suffering from famine because of a hard winter. He arranged to buy a few bushels of wheat to see them through until harvest, for which they were grateful but not so grateful that they took his suggestions about terraced farming seriously.

The problem was not that Charia didn’t have enough land. They had more land than they knew what to do with, but very little of it was flat, which limited their farming and made them more vulnerable than they should be to attacks on their herds.

Simon also took up wood carving and cheese making for a time. Not because they were part of some grander scheme but just for something to do. In fact, he was visiting the clanhold of Stoneslopes, which belonged to one of the lesser branches of Clan Aldor, to learn how to make good, long-lasting goat cheese when he found a reason to focus on something that wasn’t self-indulgent.

He’d been there for a week and was trying to decide between two different journeys to embark on. He was either going back to fight the troll in the fall or taking a longer trip to the heart of clan Eddek’s territory and staying the winter in the hopes of helping them with their problems and surveying a better way through the mountains when something happened that derailed all his plans: witchcraft. Though he lacked the sight to see who was behind it, he knew magic was afoot almost instantly when one of the women of the clan became deathly ill without warning.

Aldor Elgah wasn’t particularly fond of Simon. She was a thick, no-nonsense woman who bristled against being made to help an outlander, but she still did it just the same.

One day, she’d been helping him milk the goats, and she was as healthy as a horse and complained loudly about every mistake Simon made. The next, she was deathly pale and running a high fever. Simon’s first instinct was that she was just sick, and he cured that easily enough with his holy symbol and a little faux-prayer.

Sickness wouldn’t have come back, though, at least not so strongly. So, when he searched her room after the second bout a few days later, he found a strange symbol on her back. It looked like a birthmark, but then, a real birthmark wouldn’t have been made to look like words of power.

Farzehl Vrazig Zyvon, the words of manipulation, ruination, and transfer. He knew them both, as well as the name of the victim, but some of the other words that apparently powered the symbol eluded him. He struck them out immediately after copying them down. What they were wasn’t as important a question as why they were, though, and for that, he didn’t necessarily have an answer. His amulet wouldn’t heal it away, so he was forced to whisper the words of lesser flesh manipulation, erasing it and setting his sight back who knew how long.

They seem to transfer someone else’s misfortune to Elgah, he thought as he examined the image in his mirror that night. But who did she piss off? Is my presence to blame for this?

In the morning, when she was feeling better, Simon questioned Elgah, but she had no answers as to who would want to harm her. When he explained the mark he found, she paled visibly but would not elaborate. In fact, after that she refused to speak with him again, and no one would either, but he saw the clanhold’s headman. He didn’t tell Simon much either, but what he said was enough.

“You have to understand magic here in the mountains… it’s women's work,” the old man explained. “Even if a man could use it, none would. There’s no honor in it, and even bad men crave honor.”

Simon disagreed with very nearly all of what the headman said. Still, he didn’t give up the point. “Even if it is witchcraft, I—” he started to say.

“Please do not use that word in my presence,” the headman interrupted. “It’s very sound is cursed.”

Simon cursed his superstitiousness but did not chastise him for it. Instead, he very calmly repeated himself. “All enemies can be found and fought. Aren’t you the least bit concerned that whoever did this had access to your very clanhold? They could still be inside for all you know.”

“The women… uhm, whoever it is that might have done this…” the headman said, repeated very slowly, as if Simon had a learning disability. “They are best left alone. They will receive their punishment in the next life, but they will only curse those who pursue them, and I have no wish to be on that list.”

After that, the man strongly implied that Simon had stayed long enough and should be on his way. He agreed and told the headman he’d leave tomorrow, but of course, Simon had no intention of letting this go; there was something larger at work here, and even if it wasn’t a chance to learn more magic, it was a chance to explore another aspect of this world that he hadn’t previously suspected the existence of.

Besides, he had no reason to let this go. He had the powers of divination; if he could find a werewolf, he could find a witch, no problem.