Chapter 237: Chapter 237: Forty Days
Chapter 237: Forty Days
The northern plains had changed drastically.
Eight towers stood in the Northern plains bearing the weight of Humanity.
Halvers had three sites running at once and a fourth surveyed.
The master cradle was prepared on Troval’s benches. It took about eleven hours with four smiths working together on it. Lyra’s buffer collars came out of the alchemical corps in batches of six.
A tower went up every two to three days and did not stop going up.
The fields were present behind the Towers.
Lyra was in charge of the Conditioning teams that worked on the grounds before planting the seeds. That included laying down the mineral treatments out of the Deep Root method, testing the mana density and wait for the readings to cross the threshold. Then letting the drill teams in.
---
Inside the wall, the hunger was rising.
The flour was provided to the Stonehelm Bakery, but that was not the solution this dire time asked for.
Mr. Stonehelm sold bread all day at a price, but not everyone was able to afford it. Half the people were turned around.
"It cannot be done any cheaper," he said, for the ninth time that morning. "I have paid four times the original cost. I cannot sell it any cheaper."
"You are selling at cost that nobody can pay."
"It cannot be helped. We are all going through a hard time."
Mrs. Stonehelm did the accounts at the back table every night. And it was clear that they were only able to feed the people who could afford to be fed.
Out at the primary tower site, Sella ran the field kitchen and coordinated the cooks at the two forward camps by runner.
The problem she was facing was simple, but worse.
"They are hauling Star-Iron for eleven hours," she said, to nobody, ladling.
"Eleven hours. And the decree says a rigger eats the same as a man who counts forms in an office? This is unbeleivable!"
She looked at the line of exhausted workers shuffling past her ovens. They were hungry.
"So either the decree is wrong, or these men fall over."
She put an extra half ladle in every third bowl and did not write it down.
---
Sogaar, the broker, earned his two percent.
"The eastern road is dead for six days," he reported. "They moved a customs detail to the crossing. But there is a service track four kilometers north that the mining consortium cut forty years ago and nobody has updated a map since."
"Give it to Sirius."
"Already did." Sogaar hesitated. "There is something else."
"Speak."
"Somebody is buying."
Draven waited.
"Bulk," Sogaar said. "Whoever they are, they have been standing at the end of Sirius’s routes with cash. They take entire shipments off the wagons before they reach the distribution points. Then they keep it in the warehouse and sell it inside the city four times what we are charging."
"Four times our price?"
"Yes! Four times ours. Which is already four times the old market." Sogaar spread his hands. "I told you black market grain makes profiteers. Everyone told you. This is what it looks like."
Draven said nothing for a moment.
"The lower wards?"
"Are eating last," Sogaar confirmed. "The nobles and the guild families are buying the warehoused stock at whatever it costs, because they can. Everyone else is waiting for what falls off the back."
Draven did not order anyone killed. That was not the answer that could solve the bigger problem.
Killing the buyers would take a week, expose the network, and put every wagon on that route under Vanguard investigation. And there would simply be new buyers by the following month.
"How much would it cost to buy them out?" he asked.
Sirius, standing in the emerald light of the Server, raised an eyebrow.
"Buy them out?"
"Their entire warehoused stock, at their price. All of it. And then a standing offer that we will outbid anyone who tries this again."
"That is going to be expensive."
"Give me a number."
Sirius ran it in his head.
"Two million," he said.
Draven did not hesitate.
"Do it."
The black card had started at ten million and it had been buying Bastion Nine and Bastion Eleven grain at four hundred percent for a fortnight.
There were a little over three million credits left on it before Sirius made the offer, and considerably less after.
It was a mess of a solution.
Then Gunther’s crawlers were late.
They were not intercepted. Not attacked. There was no Cult ambush.
They were simply behind the schedule. But when they finally rolled through the northern gate, three of them were half empty.
The Bastion Six quartermaster’s manifest was attached to the lead vehicle. It was accurate to the kilogram and it was for slightly under half of what had been promised.
There was no explanation attached and no apology.
Draven read the manifest standing at the gate with the transport crews unloading behind him.
’He has not been ambushed,’ Draven thought.
’He has hit the bottom of his own reserve. He loaded what was there, and he sent it anyway rather than send nothing.’
Draven went back to the villa and ran the numbers again.
Forty days became forty-eight.
He sat with that for a long time.
He had said it himself in Helion’s war room with the door shut. There is no slack in it anywhere. Not one day. If we lose a single shipment the forty becomes fifty, and fifty is a different kind of winter.
He had been wrong about the cause. He had assumed the Capital would take something from him. Instead an ally had run out of things to give.
He opened his interface.
[1x Mythic Sign-In Token]
[Grants one immediate out-of-cycle claim at guaranteed Mythic tier. Reward is drawn at random from the Mythic pool.]
He had been carrying it since the night he crushed Tharzek Noctis into a singularity. Sixty-nine days, roughly, of a Mythic-tier draw sitting in his inventory doing nothing at all.
At random.
That was the whole problem and it always had been. The Heartwood Accelerant had solved a bottleneck. The Deep Root method had halved a crop cycle. Either of those would have been worth spending this on.
A siege array would not feed anybody. A weapon would not feed anybody. Another World Map would not feed anybody.
’I have one draw and eight days of margin,’ Draven thought.
’If I spend it now and it gives me a sword, I have spent it.’
He closed the interface without using it.
---
Helion signed the tiered ration order the next morning.
He did it in front of Lord Tokks and two clerks, with the same heavy iron pen he had used on the flat decree three weeks earlier, and he did not hesitate over it.
Tower crews and the border garrison moved to a heavy labor allowance. Every other adult in Bastion Seven went down by a fifth to pay for it.
His name was at the bottom of the page.
"You refused this," Draven said afterward, when the clerks had gone.
"I did."
"You said you would not put your name on a paper deciding which citizens eat less."
"I said that." Helion set the pen down. "And I meant it, and I still mean it. But I have just done it anyway. So you may as well hear why."
He turned the signed order around on the desk.
"It is already happening. Sirius has been feeding your tower crews off black market grain since the day I refused to sign it. I knew that."
Draven did not deny it.
"I let it run," Helion continued. "Because it kept the crews standing and it kept my name off it. I told myself that was a moral position. It was not. It was a comfortable one."
He tapped the paper.
"An unsigned policy has nobody to blame. When a woman in the outer ring works out that the riggers are eating better than her children, and she will, there is no name on the order for her to hate. So she hates the riggers. Or she hates the guild families. Or she hates whoever is nearest."
He looked up.
"With my name on it, she hates me. That is what the name is for. That is the entire function of a Lord Commander in a hungry city."
He stood and walked to the window.
"I was not being principled three weeks ago, Draven. I was being clean. There is a difference and it took me a fortnight to find it. My vision was lacking."
---
In Bastion Six, the quartermaster stood in the doorway of the primary military warehouse with a slate in his hand and nothing to write on it.
The building was four hundred feet long. It was empty except for eleven pallets at the far end, and those eleven pallets were the seed stock, which could not be eaten without ending next year.
Gunther Stillbane stood beside him and looked at all that empty floor.
"Say it," Gunther said.
"There is nothing left to load, sir."
"Then we do not load nothing." Gunther turned around. "Cut the garrison to two thirds ration. Officers first, and I mean officers first, I want to see it in the mess before I see it anywhere else. Anybody complains, send them to me personally and I will explain it."
"Sir, the garrison is already-"
"I know what the garrison already is."
The quartermaster closed his mouth.
They walked back through the half-rebuilt central plaza in silence. The scorch marks were still there. Nobody had the labor to grind them out.
A communication chime went off on Gunther’s belt.
He pulled the slate and saw the Bastion Seven seal, and something in his chest went tight, because he knew exactly what he had sent them four days ago and exactly what it had looked like.
He opened it braced for a question he did not want to answer.
It was not a question.
It was a construction schedule.
Eleven pages of it. Tower site surveys, cradle allocations, leaf delivery timings, crew rotations.
Bastion Six was on it, inserted between two Bastion Seven sites, with three towers assigned to the arable ground north of his own wall and a delivery date eighteen days out.
At the bottom, in Helion Goldmane’s own hand, four words.
Your soil is next.
There was no mention of the half empty crawlers anywhere in the document.
Gunther Stillbane stood in the middle of his own ruined plaza with the slate in both hands.
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