Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 10

“The meal is growing cold, my lady.”

Ludmila reached out absently for her spoon. The congealed porridge came out in a sticky clump over her spoon, and she left the utensil in her mouth as she continued to work through one document after another at the dining room table.

The Adventurer Guild exercise had taken up hours of her day, starting late in the morning. The participants went their separate ways in the mid-afternoon, after they were dismissed to review on the events of the session. After a thorough scrubbing and a fresh change of clothes the odor of charred grass still clung to her, and the sensation of the vines that had constricted themselves around her body still remained. At least someone had been nice enough to heal her after she had been painfully kicked in her helpless state.

Placing the spoon back in its porcelain bowl, Ludmila sighed at the fresh memory of her misadventure with the Adventurer Guild. She had been strung up and smoked like a piece of meat, essentially useless for whatever had happened. It certainly wasn’t a good first impression to make, and she dreaded the reception that awaited her the next time she participated in their activities.

During her time away since the morning, Nonna’s Imp had scribed a small pile of documents: reports, requests and questions passed from the Elder Lich in Warden’s Vale to the city manor through her familiar. Communications from her attaché did not come at a set time or pace, instead arriving whenever there was new information to convey and added to the long scrawl of notes on the continuous stream of pages. Day or night, rain or shine, the Imp would scribe the information from its perch – she had found what she thought was supposed to be a wooden stand for pet birds in the plaza markets – in the letter room as long as it had the means to do so.

It was a pile of tasks better taken care of sooner rather than later, and it was beyond the idea that she needed to have it done before the various workshops and other businesses around the city would close for the day.

With their late start to the season, nearly every fief in the duchy was pressing the city with their demands for spring goods. Shortfalls in the Human workforce that had fled from the territories had been promptly shored up with requests for Undead labour and the demand for tools and various other pieces of equipment remained roughly the same as the previous year. It appeared that many nobles were indeed struggling with balancing Undead labourers with tenants, however, as nowhere near the number of them that could potentially have been fielded were – as far as she had heard, anyways.

With the six-odd week gap where the citizens of the Sorcerous Kingdom awaited, uncertain of their future, came a massive backlog of orders from the various industries throughout the duchy, which was in turn suffering from shortages of skilled labour and raw materials that were usually imported from other regions. Compounding this problem even further was the fact that an entire city quarter was now slated for reconstruction, creating competition for resources that were already scarce. The heavier work in the quarter was accomplished by large stone golems sourced by the Sorcerous Kingdom, but the project still drew away hundreds of artisans, architects, carpenters, masons and engineers.

It was finding these professional craftsmen that was Ludmila’s most pressing concern for her demesne. The trickle of migration to her demesne would fill all of the available housing by the end of the season, and any new arrivals would start having to live in tents. It was not the welcome she wanted to give to the precious few people that she managed to attract to her far-flung territory. She needed skilled labour who could build warm and sturdy homes for her people, as well as new warehouses, silos and watch stations for the new settlements. She needed to start work on the smithy and the mill. She needed to refurbish the old roads and bridges. She had no idea where to even look for a shipwright in the land-locked duchy.

As all these needs for the fief piled upon her, the inexorable march of time continued. At one point she had sent a message to Lady Shalltear, hoping that her liege knew of some way to secure any, or knew anyone who did. She had simply replied that the resources that she knew of, used by Lady Aura in the past to construct some basic structures, had been snatched away for the work in the new Demihuman quarter by the Guardian Overseer. Lady Albedo was now styled the Prime Minister of the Sorcerous Kingdom in order for her position to be more easily understood by the local Human populations of the region.

The information passed on to the Nobles a few days earlier gave Ludmila hope that she could perhaps bring in expertise from other lands, but that would need to wait until the new relationship between the Sorcerous Kingdom and the Empire was made public and traffic between the two nations resumed in full. The nobility had entered into a frenzy at the news and the preparations ordered for the duchy. The near term policies for improving the overall state of the realm – matters of presentation and prestige – were, at long last, something they could comfortably wrap their heads around; something they could apply themselves towards with zeal in the vast sea of change.

Admittedly, it was not something that Ludmila could grasp as well as the others. Fortunately, her own demesne was far from anywhere that visitors to the city would travel through. For her part, it made finding the people that she needed for development even harder. At least she had little to worry about when it came to revenues: so far it seemed that the projections for her crops were roughly on track, which would leave her with an unprecedented amount of capital to work with after she delivered the summer harvest.

Related to this was the matter of taxes. She had not broached the subject with Lady Shalltear yet, but it was a regular clause in the contract between liege and vassal. As basic and essential as it was, however, she felt hollow with the idea that it was the only thing she could offer. The history of their short relationship so far could be summed up as Ludmila knowing too little and needing too much, a one-sided dependency on Lady Shalltear and the resources of the Sorcerous Kingdom rather than the proper relationship between noble and liege.

Her duty and purpose as a Frontier Noble had been rendered utterly obsolete by the realities of the Sorcerous Kingdom: leaving behind an empty void at the core of her identity. Even with her daily life pressing her with tasks she only had just enough time to attend to, it seemed to gnaw away at her very soul: a hunger insatiable by the endless march of day to day administrative tasks.

Ludmila shoved the selfish worries that came uninvited back into their hiding place. She finished one document, added it to the pile and picked up a new one, continuing to sort through the information scrawled on the sequence of parchments and writing out the appropriate instructions and orders to be delivered to the city’s merchants. She was two-thirds of the way through, but she just knew that there would be one or two more awaiting her in the letter room when she finished these off.

“Luzi,” she said without looking up from her work, “check the letter room for anything new.”

“Right away, my lady,” her maid replied.

Re-Estize had always been a nation where information only travelled as fast as it could be physically delivered. Warden’s Vale would normally need to wait nearly two weeks for information to travel to E-Rantel and back. Communication between the city and her demesne now, however, was as fast as Nonna’s familiar – whose mind was linked to its far away master – could scribe it. The smooth flow of information that resulted changed many things for the better, but it came with its own pitfalls as well.

Ludmila suspected she would need to hire assistants at some point to help organize and regulate the flow of information, as she seemed to be developing terrible habits surrounding it. The Undead did not require rest, so Nonna would work at all hours of the day: meaning that information could come in at all hours of the day. While Ludmila was in the city, she would constantly check the letter room for anything new. She even found herself laying awake at night wondering what news the Imp had added to be read in the morning, resisting the temptation to head down and take a look.

Considering Nonna’s generally excellent performance, she could probably do with another Elder Lich for the city manor once it was busy enough to justify. It would certainly free up a significant amount of time: only important decisions would need Ludmila’s input once the new assistant got used to things. Hopefully Nonna wouldn’t get jealous. Perhaps she would be glad for a colleague?

“There were two more, my lady,” Aemilia said as she returned to the dining room table.

Ludmila glanced over the new arrivals. Like the others, each was filled with an assortment of information that Nonna had deemed worth reporting. In addition to an Elder Lich for city business, converting the hall of the manor into a proper office would also be necessary. She imagined that a year’s worth of this paperwork would fill several large shelves and require dozens of binders to organize the information into. As her demesne grew, it would probably turn into a small archive.

After several more minutes, she was finally caught up with her work. Taking a deep breath and releasing it, she reviewed the outgoing documents one last time before addressing Aemilia.

“Have Rodney take these three to the Merchant Guild,” Ludmila indicated one set of orders for goods and replacement parts.

With the chaotic atmosphere that accompanied the frenzied activity of the Duchy, the Merchant Guild had taken it upon itself to organize its members’ activity to meet the ever-growing demands that the city faced. Orders need only be delivered to the Guild, and the appropriate businesses that were available would bid on the work. It was a godsend, as Ludmila had not found merchants to hire for her own demesne yet: she would be constantly trying to second-guess every transaction if not for this.

“Send Terrence to deliver this to the Wagner manor,” she indicated a freshly sealed letter, then an application form, “and this one to the civil office. The rest are for Nonna.”

Two Human footmen had been hired on by her Housekeeper though, at a certain point before that, Ludmila was uncertain that she even needed them. Once the maids had become accustomed to working with the two Death Knights that had originally come alongside them, the results convinced her that there would be few problems employing them in the full capacity of footmen for her household.

Various places around the city begged to differ, however. When she used them to perform official duties around the city, they worked extraordinarily well – too well, in fact. Ludmila had sent one to deliver various orders to the Merchant Guild weeks before, and it experienced little wait time since it scattered the queue with its presence. She received a barrage of complaints from various interests around the city after that and the two footmen were hired as a result: Human servants that were required since many were still unable to interact with the Undead. As her own people became accustomed to them over time she imagined that the citizens would eventually as well, but foreigners that she might need to deal with in the future were another matter entirely.

As Aemilia left to send the Human footmen off, one of the Death Knights appeared at the entrance to the dining room. Her maid took a message into her hands and, after dismissing it with a word of thanks, she turned back around to deliver it to Ludmila.

“It’s from the Adventurer Guild, my lady,” Aemilia said, placing the piece of paper to the side of Ludmila’s work.

Ludmila reached over to pick up the folded note, flipping it open to read over the contents.

“They’re requesting my presence at the guildhall in thirty minutes,” she set down the note. “It seems that they aren’t done with exercises for the day.”

“Will you be attending, my lady?” Aemilia asked.

Her Lady’s Maid was ecstatic when she first learned that her mistress would be joining the Adventurer Guild: headed off to fulfil whatever wildly gallant vision she had of her. Despite their time together, Aemilia had apparently not given up on building up some fantastical image of her mistress.

“Yes, of course,” Ludmila replied. “We’ll need to prepare immediately. Bring my equipment to the solar, I’ll be right along.”

Aemilia left the room and Ludmila rose from her seat, quickly collecting the scattered documents from around the table and sorting them out into their associated folders. Work in hand, she headed up to her bedchambers, leaving her cold meal behind.