Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 1

The serving girl shot him a glare.

It was the fifth such glare that afternoon – that he had noticed, anyways – but Itzal Verdi looked past her ire with disinterest as he nursed his drink in the furthest corner of the tavern. His lidded gaze scanned the common room, running over the sparsely occupied tables and then to the door of the building, which had been undisturbed for the past hour. For over a week he had been waiting to meet his associates, and the tavern itself had been the last in a long series of backups in case all of their other meeting spots had been compromised.

And compromised they were: leveled, in fact.

When he arrived in E-Rantel amongst the trickle of rural traffic coming in through the southern gate, he had taken a meandering route intended to confuse potential observers through the streets on the way to the slums of the city – only to find that all of the entrances to the district had been barred off. Under Reconstruction, the words were plainly scrawled in bold on a large sign laid across every gate; accompanied by the seal of the city’s new administration. He turned away from the Undead sentries standing watch over the ways in and asked around, soon discovering from the locals that the entire section of the city had been cleared and was now undergoing conversion into a district for use by Demihumans.

The thought made him recoil in disgust, yet the only visible mark of his displeasure was a slight turning-down of a corner of his mouth.

Preposterous. A city founded by Humans becoming a teeming den of inhuman filth? He supposed the apostates that had turned away from their rightful gods deserved no less. Even so, it infuriated him that they didn’t even seem to care that a huge swathe of their beloved city would simply be given away to a swarm of savage creatures.

Itzal sighed; understanding that his own frustrations over the entire situation did nothing to alleviate his current problems. The slums were an ideal backdrop to run the operation that he was a part of: a section of the city that was barely monitored by the authorities and full of people that would willingly perform various tasks for little pay with no questions asked. Within, it was easy to hide and even easier to escape notice; a community full of individuals with various useful skill sets and networks which complemented his line of work.

He might have expected one or two of the ‘establishments’ where he was to meet with his fellows going under due to perfectly normal circumstances, but the idea that the whole damn thing would go up all at once was something that they had only considered as an afterthought in their contingency planning. What sane person would suddenly decide to tear up a whole quarter of a city, anyways?

The serving girl shot another glare at him and Itzal decided that he had stayed for long enough. Unlike the seedy watering holes in the slums, the taverns that were in the main section in the city were too…reputable. They were too open and too well lit; made to provide hospitality to merchants and well-to-do travelers. The patrons would try to connect with others and the staff would keep pestering you without your asking. Even trying to avoid notice would get you noticed, so one couldn’t even act to obscure their identity as they waited at their tables. After days of waiting, it seemed pointless; he would have to figure out something else. Shoving open the door, Itzal didn’t even bother to give the fuming waitress a second glance as he left the building.

Taking a turn, he nearly bumped into a short, portly woman coming up the street. Their eyes met momentarily before he stepped back into the doorframe to stand aside, continuing on his way after she had passed. He turned into the alley behind the tavern and, a half hour later, the same woman appeared from the other end of the alley. She made her way up to him, leaning on the shadowed wall across from where he stood.

“About damn time,” Itzal spat.

“Can’t be helped,” the woman shrugged. “You know how it is.”

Itzal made a noncommittal noise. Road traffic between E-Rantel had effectively ceased from the neighboring nations since its fall, making it difficult to travel unnoticed from abroad. He himself had been on standby in Crosston, and it had taken more than two weeks before he felt it was safe to join the fresh trickle of local carts and wagons to enter the city.

“I’m surprised the Eight Fingers moved at all,” she continued. “Didn’t even think they’d want to try and sink their teeth into this place, but I guess I was wrong. The leaders pushed to get a caravan together all the sudden and sent it over with some pretty normal cargo. Probably trying to lay out their groundwork and set up shop…but I guess they got the same nasty surprise that we did.”

He made to reply, but shadows flickered across the ground as a pair of Undead casters zipped through the sky over the alley for a split second. Uncertain whether they had been noticed, Itzal silently motioned for them to split up and meet at a safer location.

They were together again an hour later, finding a freshly abandoned home deep in the back alleys. When he had first arrived in E-Rantel, this hidden area of the city had been crowded with the displaced denizens of the slums but they had disappeared somewhere since then. It had happened quite suddenly: he returned from a day of waiting at the tavern and every man, woman and child had disappeared. All of the work he had laid out in the short time he had been in E-Rantel fell apart as well.

The homes were emptied; all evidence of their former residents absent, leaving buildings scoured clean sitting in eerie and sterile silence. He couldn’t tell if they had been violently whisked away, or slaughtered on the spot – they certainly hadn’t walked away through the city streets, and the rest of the city was none the wiser.

“Any sign?” The woman asked.

“I haven’t seen any of the others for days,” Itzal answered. “You’re the second to arrive after me, as far as I know. I almost went to the Cathedral – that’s how stumped I was.”

“The Cathedral?” She frowned, “You know that’s a last resort.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he held up his hands placatingly. “Just saying.”

Agents working under the Scriptures almost never interacted with the Temples when working. The sacrosanct status of the Temples in nations with secular governments relied on their hands being clean of activities that might be considered interference in political matters, or those threatening the security of the state. It was only in the most dire of emergencies that they would appeal to the local Temples for assistance – or to send word in a desperate situation.

The sign that the woman asked after was the presence of a Scripture member that should have eventually appeared to coordinate the regular regional efforts in their operations. Each agent in that effort ran a cell consisting of mostly unassociated subordinates and associates who were unaware of their true nature and would, as a whole, create a web which collected information to be sent back to their superiors through others that passively drifted through the region.

They could be disguised as anything: Adventurers, traders, mercenaries, vagabonds. These agents and the information they held would be carried throughout the realms by the currents of trade and travel, like whispers on the wind. It was this vast network that kept the Slane Theocracy apprised about what went on in the world around them, and many of its knowing participants considered it a sacred duty.

His decision to uproot himself from Crosston to help set up a new group of cells in the city of E-Rantel came shortly after its annexation. Agents such as himself worked in a fluid and natural fashion: they would identify gaps in the greater lines of communication that needed to be filled, and those on standby in the region would move independently to do so until those gaps were bridged.

At first glance, it seemed like a haphazard way to organize work that generally required meticulous effort but, in reality, it was extraordinarily difficult to counter. Agents saturated the lands, passively collecting information. Removing a few would simply see the vacancy replaced by others in short order. More often than not, governments simply gave up trying as it was tantamount to suspecting every single inhabitant in their country of being a spy.

There were a few others around the city that he sensed to be similar to himself – intelligence agents from other organizations – which made the absence of their own coordinator all the more puzzling. He or she was supposed to arrive in advance of the others, possibly with additional objectives delivered directly from the upper echelons of the Theocracy. As someone with local expertise, Itzal was to collaborate with them to lay out the foundations of the intelligence network in the duchy, but this coordinator had vanished without a trace. More accurately, there wasn’t even any evidence that one had even arrived in the first place. A Scripture member was a part of the elite corps of the Slane Theocracy and would be much harder to stop than these other agents from lesser nations, so their coordinator should have easily slipped in as well.

“Looks like you’re in charge for now, then,” the woman spoke with expectation, yet there was a question on her face.

“No,” Itzal shook his head. “Everything set up from last year is gone. We’ll work on our own and try to lay as much new groundwork as possible – let anyone else you see know as well. Whoever finally does arrive will need things working as well as possible when they get here. They can sort everything out later.”

With that, they split up to start their work.

Special orders notwithstanding, the basic role of the information network utilized by the Scriptures was always the same. Filter out useful-sounding information and send it on its way. Assist local operations with information gathering, should they require it.

Setting up for that alone would take up enough time to see if their coordinator was simply late, but there was still the pressing matter of the resources and funding they should have provided to assist them. Minor agents like Itzal would be able to independently fend for themselves, but financing a broad network of eyes and ears under them was not something that was easily done without acting out of character for their supposed personas – especially now that the impoverished people in the slums had all but vanished. Even so, if they did not act, the information that the Theocracy would have to work with regarding the situation in E-Rantel would be unsubstantiated and possibly filled with harmful rumors and unfiltered hearsay.

Itzal’s cover was basically that of a layabout mercenary, while the woman looked to be posing as a caravan worker for the Eight Fingers – a criminal syndicate that ruled the increasingly pervasive underworld of Re-Estize – which in turn was probably posing as a regular merchant caravan. He had hopes that one of the other agents coming in would be a wealthy merchant or something along those lines to smoothen things out financially but, until then, there was no point in working as a group with essentially no collective resources that could potentially overlap. It would be much easier for each of them to forge small inroads in whatever niche they found to work with…and if one of them was discovered, the rest would be much safer with no traceable coordination to implicate the rest. There were just too many unknowns about the way this strange, inhuman nation functioned and missteps were bound to happen.

Lost in his thoughts over what could be accomplished with so little, he stepped out onto the street and nearly collided with a Death Knight patrolling the street. He stifled a curse and reached for his sidearm – a light mace – before regaining control of himself. The Undead horror stopped to stare down at him, as if in anticipation of the most cursory infraction that would give it an excuse to mete out some grisly punishment for challenging public order. Itzal lowered his trembling hands to his sides, and it ran its hateful crimson gaze over him one last time before turning away to resume its beat.

Even after nearly a week of being in the city, he still couldn’t get used to the damned things. Watching it recede into the distance, Itzal couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for the citizens of the city that rose through his disgust. Though somewhat muted in their liveliness, the people simply stood aside and continued on their way whenever they encountered the Undead patrols. They had an unbelievable reserve of fortitude when it came to the grim reality that faced them every day. A younger version of himself might have mocked him over the fact that he, a hardened veteran that worked under the Theocracy’s special forces, was outmatched in mental resilience by the comparatively weak citizens of E-Rantel.

Going by what he could put together, the city folk had been uncertain and fearful initially; with no refuge to flee to that would take them. Unlike the simple labourers of rural territories, which almost always welcomed new hands to help in the fields and forests, the amount of work available in urban areas like cities and towns were entirely dependent on servicing their respective lands and the activity that they attracted. A professional artisan or tradesman could not simply hop over into another community and rob those that had been there long before them of their work. They would have to endure a fresh start at the bottom of the hierarchies of the guilds that regulated them, which did not even guarantee that they would have a way to feed themselves.

For the month that followed the Kingdom’s defeat at Katze plains, he had watched as those that could uproot themselves passed through Crosston, following the Royal Highway to the west – it had been a veritable flood at first with the panic that accompanied word of the rout. The wave of refugees slowed to a trickle a few days after the annexation was formalized and the so-called Sorcerous Kingdom formally declared itself, but Itzal estimated that several hundred thousand had fled over the weeks between...whether they survived the exodus to find a place in Re-Estize seemed dubious considering the lawless state of its rural lands. It was a crippling blow to the towns that serviced the larger territories, and it would be even more pronounced in E-Rantel as the amount of work available would quickly dwindle below what was required to keep the industries of the city afloat.

He allowed himself a grim smile at the thought as he continued through the streets. The Evil Sorcerer King may have announced his ‘benevolent’ intentions to encourage the regular lives of the people, but the hard reality was that the economy of the region had been hamstrung by the mass depopulation of the land which he had violently wrested away for himself. Even the conditions of the quarter that they had pretentiously removed would simply reappear elsewhere in the city as trade and employment faltered and even more of the citizenry fell into poverty.

Itzal did not even need to lift a finger for the inevitable to come to pass. Monsters had no right to rule over men, and Ainz Ooal Gown would find this out the hard way as his ill-gotten gains crumbled from his bony grasp.