Chapter 70: DD3 Chapter 016 – Trade

“The Sasyari Empire was one of the first great powers to emerge from the fall of Old Epheria. Rich in land, lumber, and classers, they were an expansionist power that swept west in a bid to consolidate and absorb every fractured noble house and dynasty they came across. Many thought this grand campaign was nothing but a prelude to claiming the ivory throne and reimagining Epheria as a new Empire led by its southernmost former province.

“So great were the first Sasyari Emperor-Kings, that once their burgeoning nation had swollen to encompass what is now Nymhegia and the southern edge of Lintumia they thought that they could renege on their debts to the bank.

“Needless to say my predecessors were not best pleased.

“So they did what any good banker in their position would do. They funded every rebellious individual with even a half a brain, so long as they understood the notion of debts and dues. Within a decade—once word had spread—the great Sasyari Empire was fighting no less than sixteen distinct uprisings that brought its once unstoppable advance to a halt. Bogged down with unwinnable wars, Lintumia counterattacked and the Empire collapsed as all empires inevitably do. The briefly great Sasyari Empire, which could have potentially gone on to rule over all of Astresia, descended into turmoil and emerged a century later as a simpering republic. To this day, its leaders remain too busy squabbling amongst themselves to ever do anything remotely consequential.

“But do you want to know the very first thing the High Chancellor of Sasyari did after taking his office? Just like the Grand Duke of Nymheghia, and the Mage Kings of Lintumia, he made the first in a very, very long line of debt repayments to the Bank of Tolis.”

His monologue finished, the banker brought his hands together and leaned forwards over the table conspiratorially, practically beckoning Typh to do the same. Instead, she reclined further in her cushioned seat. 

She understood the threat, it wasn’t particularly imaginative because it didn’t need to be. Regardless of what really happened to the Sasyari Empire—she made a habit of not trusting humans when it came to recalling their own history—she was certain that it wouldn’t take them a decade to ruin her plans if the Bank of Tolis became her enemy. And yet, for a very simple reason she couldn’t take the thin banker’s threats seriously.

The human didn’t have a class.

She understood that the vast majority of humanity lacked them and that this particular man had far more power at his disposal than most classers she encountered, but the cognitive dissonance between what she knew, and the lack of words proclaiming his power above his head, was hard to get past.

“Are you even listening to me?” the banker asked, clearly frustrated that she’d scorned his implicit invitation to lean over the table.

“I’m trying to, but it’s hard. Especially when you’re being so unremittingly dull,” Typh replied honestly. She stretched in her chair and suppressed a yawn as she tried to work some sensation back into her legs. They had fallen asleep during the Tolisian’s long pontificating story about his precious bank, and it was her deepest regret that she couldn’t join them. “I’m sorry. Where were we?”

Anger flashed across the banker’s face, but it was quickly suppressed—replaced with a stern expression that she again struggled to take seriously. 

“This is not a laughing matter, Lord Sovereign. This conversation will determine the future of Terythia and your role in it,” the banker chastised.

“No, it won't. I will admit that this is important, but Terythia will survive without you,” the dragon stated.

“Lord Sovereign, if I may be frank. You’re a half-step away from financial ruin. Fighting a war is costly at the best of times, but the quantity of classers you’re employing would beggar most nations in considerably better positions than your… coalition of species. When we factor in the land grants and the construction work you’ve been approving—not to mention the absurd amount you’re spending running forges and workshops in both Helion and Rhelea—your expenditures are far beyond sustainable.”

“I understand that you are new to ruling over humans,” he said, his nose wrinkling like he’d smelt something foul. “And Helion’s expansion is admirable, especially given the rate at which new citizens are flocking to the city, but you can’t afford it. And may I remind you, you’re doing all of this when you don’t even control the entirety of the city and the majority of Terythia is hostile to your rule.” 

“And I take it you have a solution to all my ills?” the dragon asked.

“All of them? No. But I feel that it would be irresponsible for the Bank of Tolis to approve this treaty with Helion in its current state. Even if you can consistently provide these reagents and goods in such quantities—which I doubt—the coin you’ll receive from us won’t come close to righting this ship, not until you drastically cut back on your expenditure,” the banker intoned.

“You could always pay us a fair price for our goods. That would go quite a long way to ‘righting this ship,’ as you’ve put it,” Typh suggested.

The banker's face set into an even harsher frown.

“Lord Sovereign, the terms stated in these documents have been agreed by your own minister for trade. I assure you it's all quite fair.”

“We both know that it’s not. But as you correctly summarised, we’re desperate for coin and are willing to accept below-market rates for what we can provide. Don’t insult my intelligence by implying that Tolis is doing anything other than extorting us. At a time, I might add, when your country is flooding my city with refugees who are coming to you for aid.”

“I cannot possibly comment on the situation to the east, or on whatever my King may or may not have chosen to do, to help the Padians in their time of need,” the banker said.

“Of course, you can’t. I take it if I want to get someone who can comment on such things it will be at least another few months to talk to someone in Almitante?” the dragon asked.

“Again, I can’t possibly comment on—” 

“I get it. Now can we get to the part where you try to force me to agree to do something heinous?”

“Lord Sovereign, the Bank of Tolis would never ‘force’ a leader of an independent people or a nation into accepting anything. We deal in coin, not policy. However, if you insist on being difficult, perhaps we should revisit this matter in two weeks when you’ve had time to properly assess your fiscal situation.”

Typh grit her teeth and had to resist the urge not to eat the man sitting opposite her. 

“I’d rather not wait. Can I hear your proposal?” Typh asked instead, struggling to keep her tone pleasant.

“Of course,” the banker smiled.

The Tolisian smoothly produced a sealed scroll from the confines of his jacket which he handed to her over the table. When she read it, she had to strongly revisit the idea of simply eating the man sitting opposite.

“You want me to agree to move the border west by… two hundred miles, giving you dominion over three Terythian cities,” the dragon said, placing the parchment face-up on the table between them.

“Four. The proposal calls for Knicea’s administration to be passed to Tolis as well,” he corrected.

“And why would I ever agree to this?”

“Why wouldn’t you? It’s not like the governors of those cities acknowledge your authority. We have it on good authority that Knicea and Kiossa have even sent their standing armies south to fight you. This at least would give them a reason to turn back and whilst providing you with all the necessary funds to limp on until you can get your spending in order.”

“This deal is offensively one-sided.”

“You said it yourself, you’re desperate. As things stand you cannot possibly afford to maintain the siege on the palace for another month, and you’ll have at least one hostile army outside your gates long before that. If you don’t take the deal, you’re going to lose this little rebellion of yours, and the Bank of Tolis presently has no interest in offering more generous terms to a failed monarch.”

Typh thought on that for a time while the words on the parchment stared up at her accusingly. It was a bad deal, but the Tolisian did have a point. She was going to have to make a compromise. 

“If you were convinced that I was going to win you’d be able to offer better terms, correct?”

“Yes, but I don’t believe you’ll—”

“Good. I need to show you something.”

***

The journey out of Helion was bittersweet. It reminded Typh of quite how much she had missed being outside of the city. So many of her days seemed to involve being trapped inside stuffy meeting rooms with officials who exhibited varying degrees of open hostility towards her. She’d replaced as much of Helion’s infrastructure with people who were either loyal to her, or sufficiently disloyal to the crown that they could be bought, but all too often she was forced to extract a compromise from someone who wanted nothing more than to dance over her rotting corpse.

It was exhausting and worse, no one truly understood her frustration with humanity’s unending obsession with bureaucracy. She still had no idea why every little problem required going through a series of increasingly obstinate intermediaries before she was finally faced with either a guild master or an equally obscure sanctioned official. Naturally, every one of these people wanted to be paid their dues. The number of bribes she’d handed out over the past month, just to grease the bureaucratic wheels, contained more than enough gold to provide an impressive hoard for a dragon twice her age. 

Typh had never been both so rich and so poor at the same time—her inability to spend or stockpile any of the wealth that flowed through her city never ceased to infuriate her. Every scrap of wealth was earmarked for any one of a dozen vital projects that she backed—projects that no one besides her even thought were necessary. 

Arilla was always willing to lend a sympathetic ear, and Halith was predictably quick to descend into her favoured rant about how much easier things would be if the human population was reduced down to a tenth, but neither of them really got it.

Typh was a dragon. She was a solitary creature by nature and no matter how much of a deviant she was, sometimes she longed for solitude and quiet. Two things which were perpetually denied to her. The nonhumans she’d collected into her ‘coalition of species’ were all social animals. Whether they formed packs, tribes, or broods, didn’t really matter—they all worked together to achieve their aims, whereas she competed with her kin to be the best.

Obviously, she was not the best sovereign dragon—not in her clutch, and certainly not in the Dragonspines. Although, she supposed that would technically change once the dragons who made the mountain range their home fled west to escape the coming monstrous tide. Typh was the very lowest of the low—a literal outcast—but she still had needs, and the allure of a quiet cave somewhere grew more enticing with every passing day. 

She closed her eyes and perhaps foolishly, starved [Sovereign’s Perception] of the mana it needed to function. Creation rapidly retreated. All of the noise and activity that surrounded her fell away as she was suddenly limited to two human ears that, even empowered by her skill’s passive effects, gave her a much-needed reprieve. She inhaled the fresh country air, savouring the distant scents of prey on the wind over the more refined stench of the people crowding around her. 

Blissful dark descended and for a brief, beautiful second she could think again. The urge to stretch her wings and fly away from the responsibilities she had taken on asserted itself. It was so much pressure—at times it was too much. Worse, the very people that she wanted to save seemed to delight in making it harder than it needed to be. She would never have thought that ruling over Helion would have involved quite so much time on her metaphorical knees. 

Every day, some urgent crisis or another demanded that she scrape or kneel before someone who wasn't even worthy of standing in her presence. She was so sick of it.

Someone annoying cleared their throat and the illusion of serenity shattered. Reluctantly, Typh opened her eyes. 

“I’m failing to see why we had to trek so far out of the city for this,” the banker complained.

“Be patient. You’re about to witness something significant,” Typh intoned. She turned her head and her gaze swept over the collection of classers gathered on the small hill. Nearby on the plains below, the device was being set up to face away from them and at another—thankfully, vacant—hill. “How much longer?”

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“Not long, Lord Sovereign. We’re just waiting on the mages to finish their wards,” a polite soldier dutifully responded. 

“Wards?” the banker asked, showing the first genuine signs of curiosity.

“Anti-scrying. We don’t want this to be observed by any… third parties,” Typh explained.

“I assume that I’m supposed to feel honoured by my exception to that rule, but I don’t. My time is precious and I would appreciate it if we could skip the theatrics.”

“We are. This is not for you, although I will admit that I brought this test forwards by a day so that you could observe. Now if you would like refreshments, ask a servant, but for now please be quiet.”

Suitably chastened, the banker turned away from Typh and snapped at some poor boy for an expensive bottle of Padian red, a formerly cheap wine that grew more extortionately priced by the hour. The dragon did her best to ignore him and watched the proceedings below with bated breath.

A large cylindrical metal tube, rounded on one end and open on the other was suspended between two wooden wheels, rimmed in iron. Every inch of the machine was etched in runes, a swirling pattern of power meant to channel the arcane energies and reinforce the barrel. Freshly classed youths assisted diligent alchemists in measuring out the black powder, while smiths and rangers made their last-minute checks and manoeuvred the cannon into position respectively.

When they were finally ready and the mages reported that their wards were holding, Typh gestured for them to begin.

“Watch carefully, Tolisian.” 

Dutifully, the banker sat forwards in his seat and made a passing attempt at feigning attention, although it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that he was far more interested in his glass of expensive wine.

“3!”

“2!”

“1!”

“Fire!” 

No sooner than the soldier had said the words, a loud boom roared out of the neck of the cannon. A second distant crash quickly followed while the wheels of the engine rocked back along the grass. A cloud of dark grey smoke momentarily obscured the machine from Typh’s mundane sight. The acrid stench of sulphur filled her nose and in the distance, the small hill that had once sat facing them was now mostly a crater. 

For the first time since the start of their meeting, the banker looked interested.

“What exactly was that?!” he said.

“It’s a weapon. Obviously. But more importantly, it's why I’m going to win my ‘little rebellion’ no matter how many soldiers they throw at me. Now be quiet, they’re not done.”

“That wasn’t the test?”

“Hardly.”

The classers scrambled around the cannon, presumably checking it for cracks or other signs of damage, when they found nothing untoward, Typh breathed a discrete sigh of relief. It would have been a very anticlimactic test otherwise. Once the cannon was cleaned, the team pulled back, leaving a lone ranger to reload and re-aim the weapon by herself. She was considerably slower than the team who had set up the first shot, but speed was not the point. When she was done, she rested her hand on the barrel of the canon which began to glow a brilliant white.

“What’s going on? Why is it glowing?” the banker asked.

“She’s using an active skill,” Typh began, before turning her head to a clerk making notes nearby. “Do we have a description of what exactly she’s using?”

“Uhh, yes, Lord Sovereign. One moment, it’s right here…” the clerk said, retrieving a thin slip of paper that looked suspiciously like a full status. “She’s using [Marksman’s Final Shot], a level 51 active skill. It looks fairly standard for a low-bronze ranger at first glance. ‘You may make an attack with a ranged weapon that splits into a number of missiles equal to the skills rank’—so that’s three—‘each missile’s velocity is improved by a number of feet per second equal to this skill’s level’, so 51, there’s an additional aiming effect that stops the duplicate shots from spreading and it says the missile then detonates on impact with the blast scaling depending on the missile’s final velocity.”

“Satisfied?” Typh asked the Tolisian.

“Did he say it splits into three? And how big of an explosion are we talking about?” the banker spluttered.

“That’s a very good point.” The dragon quickly conjured a series of arcane barriers around everyone present, including a partial—albeit incredibly thick shield—around the ranger.

The classer must have overheard the banker’s wish to skip the theatrics, for she decided to forgo the count. The ranger touched the lit brand she’d been given to the canon’s fuse she had set in place. 

The sound that emerged from the neck of the cannon made the previous roar sound like a muffled whimper. It was quickly followed by three simultaneous impacts that immediately detonated with enough light and force to test all of Typh’s raised shields. When the flare finally faded from her eyes, she saw that the hill the ranger had been aiming at was simply gone, as was the majority of the one behind it. 

Regrettably, the cannon had also been destroyed. Fragments of sharp metal littered the grassy plain with the majority of them focused around a shallow crater where the weapon had been set up. The ranger who’d fired the shot was also on the ground. Large shards of blackened iron had ripped through her left leg from where Typh’s partial shield had left her vulnerable. 

While healers flocked to the injured woman beneath a rain of flaming soil which had just started to descend, Typh instead glanced over at the banker who’d fallen from his chair and spilt his wine.

“How is that… possible?” the man asked, clearly in shock. “I’ve seen the King’s personal classers duel, mage tournaments sponsored by the Bank. I’ve even watched iron rankers go against wild beasts and that was nothing—nothing like this…”

Typh didn’t bother to suppress her smile, instead she shrugged and, feigning nonchalance, waved over a dazed servant to help the banker to his feet and refill his still trembling glass.

“A mundane cannon will launch an iron ball at sufficient speeds that it will mow its way through about forty men in a line before coming to a very gory stop. With the right runes on the ball and the barrel, we can very easily improve the force of impact tenfold. A high-pewter smith can then increase the density and durability of a cannon by another factor of ten, which allows a high-pewter alchemist to improve the powder without blowing the whole thing up… and then you add in a combat classer with an active skill and we’re deep into the silly numbers.”

“We’re still having trouble standardising that last part. Given the varying levels and skills of the craftsmen involved in every shot, it took us a while to make cannons consistently reusable. The black powder's explosive yield per ounce fluctuated wildly at the start which certainly didn’t help. We were producing anything from as low as 5 to as high as 20 times base!” she laughed, before taking a sip of her own drink for the first time. 

“Now, we build cannons to handle a tenfold increase across the board and benchmark everything at that, which is where we’ll stay until we can get more iron rank craftsmen,” Typh finished.

“You make it sound like building these artefacts is… routine,” the banker said.

“I won’t go into the details—this is a secret weapon after all—but yes. Making a cannon is ‘routine.’ While it remains quite technical, the entire manufacturing process is significantly cheaper than making a full suit of runic plate out of ‘monster hide’ or mixing mana-infused alloys of adamantine and viridium into a sword.” 

“We haven’t even started experimenting with anything more durable than iron,” she added as an afterthought.

“So you have more of these ‘cannons,’” the banker asked.

“More than I know what to do with,” Typh said, catching the Tolisian’s eye. Slowly, and with the help of wine, the man’s shock gave way to the familiar stench of greed. Typh knew then that she had him. “Ask the question.”

His eyes shifted to the sides before eventually refocusing on hers. While she strongly disliked the unclassed man, he was no fool. He understood the significance of what he had just seen. The banker took a steadying breath and very nearly licked his lips before he spoke again.

“Are they for sale?”

“That depends on how willing you are to revisit some of these less-than-generous trading terms,” the dragon smiled.

The banker’s lips stretched wide, and the man took another deep glug of his wine. 

“In light of this… development, I think we can certainly come to a more amicable arrangement, but first, seeing as how you’re about to become a very, very wealthy woman, may I first extoll to you the many virtues of Tolisian mercenaries?”

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