A Village I Want Made Useless

She had watched two thousand points go up in smoke right in front of her, but all the stress of the past while seemed to have gone with them, and she felt wonderfully refreshed.

“While I’m in a good mood, shall I go and do a bit of shopping?”

In excellent spirits, Dong-hui emptied out her Inventory and stepped in through the front door.

A short while later, four hundred great gold toads glittered on Dong-hui’s bed, rubies studded thick in their eyes.

“Dear, are you truly going to sit still and do nothing about this?”

Viscount Patrasche had been listening to his wife nag since morning, and his ears were fit to bleed.

Eileen had come back from Morta unable to master her fury, and had taken to her bed. With her one and only daughter laid up and groaning, Viscountess Vanessa harried her husband almost daily. When she first heard from Eileen what had happened at Morta, she had raged up and down the house and made a great scene about setting off for Grace that very instant.

“And how does Eileen fare?”

Without opening his eyes, the Viscount put the question, pressing hard at his temple against the throbbing in his head.

“She had another good cry this morning. Made a fool of by that half-witted creature, of all people — think how humiliating it must be for her.”

Just imagining it brought the fury up in Vanessa until her throat closed on her. Her precious daughter had gone all the way out to shabby Grace only to suffer for it and come home again; the thought of it set her insides ablaze.

“She wept?”
“She did. Those great eyes of hers, with the tears dropping out of them one after another — it was enough to break my heart clean in two. Oh, honestly!”

Vanessa thumped at her breast and heaved a deep sigh.

“Are you going to sit and watch that impudent little thing carry on? And what about the village of Morta! You told me you were buying it this time. Buy Morta and Enol comes along of itself, you said, crowing about it at the top of your voice — and now look at this!”

His wife’s shrilling drove the headache deeper still.

“I am devising a measure. You will attend Eileen, madam, and see that she gets her strength back.”
“What measure.”

Vanessa’s voice was thick with doubt.

The Viscount looked at this wife of his with open irritation. She could not bring herself to trust him entirely; she nagged and meddled over every last thing. Then their eyes met, and his face smoothed itself out at once into a mild smile.

“We shall simply have to leave her no choice but to sell the village of Morta.”
“You have a way?”

Vanessa’s eyes sparkled with expectation. With that look on her she resembled Eileen altogether too closely. To hold on to her youth she ate or smeared on anything at all said to be good for the body or good for the skin, and it left her a good ten years younger to look at than the other ladies of her age. A firm figure that would not have shamed a woman in her twenties played its part as well.

The Viscount answered his wife’s question with a smile instead of words.

That afternoon Vanessa declared that Eileen wanted cheering up, and took her daughter out shopping. Far better she go out and spend money than stand at his elbow nagging, so the Viscount told mother and daughter to shop until their spirits were quite restored. Only once the carriage carrying the pair of them had rolled away from the mansion did his headache ease at all.

“My lord, the man has just arrived.”

Patrasche was reaching for a cigar when the butler hurried in with the news.

“Now?”

The Viscount put the cigar back into its box, his face stiff as he asked it. The afternoon had come on, but the sun was still well up and the whole place stood in broad light. He had sent for the man because the word on him was that his work was uncanny; if this was how he made his entrance, it would not do.

The butler saw the displeasure on the Viscount’s face, grasped what it was he feared, and hurried to add.

“Not one soul saw him on his way here. I cannot tell you how startled I was myself when he appeared in front of me out of nowhere.”
“Do you mean to say he gave every one of the guards the slip?”
“Yes, my lord! Not a single one of the guards saw the man come inside.”
“Is that so?”

A curious look came over the Viscount’s face. The man had come in daylight rather than under cover of dark, into a place ringed about on every side with guards, and not one person had caught sight of him: chilling and dependable at once. That aside, every last guard who had failed to notice an intruder would be called to account for it.

“Bring him in.”

At the Viscount’s leave the butler bowed hastily from the waist and went scurrying out of the study. The Viscount’s brow crumpled with distaste at that undignified little trot.

A moment later a man came into the study, and the Viscount’s eyes filled with surprise and something close to horror in the same instant.

Told the man had got inside without a soul catching him, he had pictured someone small of build and quick on his feet. The one who came in with the butler stood a good two meters at a rough guess, and his forearms were thicker by far than the thighs of most grown men.

Scars great and small ran over his body and his face alike, and they made a man already enormous look more menacing still. Set against a butler as pale and scrawny as a reed, that bulk stood out all the more.

“My lord, this man here is Batyr.”

The butler stepped a little to one side as if presenting him, and Batyr bowed from the waist in greeting, as though he had been waiting for the cue.

“Batyr, they call me.”
“They tell me you will do anything you are told?”
“Yes. Name a fitting price and it will be done exactly as you wish it, perfectly, with nothing left wanting.”

Batyr’s answer was scarcely out before a large leather pouch dropped in front of him with a thud.

“Two hundred gold.”

The Viscount had expected the man’s eyes to go round at so great a sum. Instead Batyr only stared blankly at the pouch lying at his feet, and no quick grab for it came. Patrasche’s brows drew together, very slightly.

“I will hear the work you are commissioning first, and decide then whether the price is a fitting one.”

Batyr straightened from his bow, looked at the Viscount and answered in a level voice. He stood tall enough that his gaze fell naturally downward, and there was no feeling of any kind in it.

Patrasche liked it. Here was a man who could look at that much money unmoved and still want the commission first.

“Leave us.”

The order was aimed at the butler, who had been standing about vacantly in the study, watching for a cue.

“Yes, my lord.”

The butler had found the whole business a strain in any case, and bent low the instant the order was out, all but fleeing the study.

That left only the two of them in the broad study, the Viscount and Batyr. Neither spoke first, and the looks that passed back and forth between them, each taking the other’s measure, carried something close to tension.

Even with the butler gone, Batyr did not ask what the work was to be. He waited quietly for the Viscount to speak, and in the end it was Patrasche who broke the silence.

“There is a village I want made useless.”
“The price will differ according to which village it is.”
“Morta.”
“You will have to give me five hundred gold.”

Batyr gave his answer in a dry voice, looking down at the leather pouch on the floor.

The work on the vault room had grown a good deal larger in scale than first planned.

At the start Smith had been on it alone; now Builder had joined him. The village works had settled into a rhythm, so Builder’s slipping away for short spells did them no great harm.

A staircase was to join the room next door to the lord’s own with the room directly beneath it, turning both levels into the vault room.

The whole plan had of course come out of Dong-hui’s head, and the scale of it left Smith the blacksmith, the butler and Scrooge the treasurer alike unable to keep the shock off their faces. Every one of them was plainly dying to know what on earth she meant to put in a space that size.

Nor was that all.

“I want it to look like an ordinary room when you see it from outside.”

The lord’s requirements were peculiar in the extreme. She even showed Smith a rough drawing she had prepared beforehand.

“I mean, divide the first-floor room and the second-floor room in half. So the part that looks like an ordinary room from outside would be the outer face of the vault room. And the rest, the part that lies toward the corridor—”
“—becomes the vault.”

Smith nodded as though impressed and carried the sentence on for her. He had a great deal of work behind him, but a commission as singular as this was a first.

“That’s right. But if you go into the room from the corridor, it has to lead through to the room you can see from outside, not to the vault room. I want the doors into the vault room to be in my room and the treasurer’s room on the first floor, and nowhere else.”

Scrooge heard her out with a puzzled face, then asked.

“But my room is on the third floor.”
“Which is why it will be moved. Down to the first floor.”

Ever since her last visit to Scrooge’s room, the uncommonly worn furniture, the faded wallpaper and the patches gnawed through here and there by mice had stayed on her mind. She meant to use the vault room as her excuse and have his room done up handsomely.

With the short council on the vault room finished, Dong-hui went back to her own room, lost her fight against the tiredness crowding in on her, and flopped flat onto the bed.

Anna, following at her back like a shadow, was startled at the way her lord behaved, as though she had become someone else entirely. But she was not frightened by it, or worried, the way she once had been. To Anna’s eyes, at least, her ladyship as she was now looked far better than before.

“Shall I bring you up some hot tea, at least?”

Anna asked carefully. But Dong-hui was too tired, and wanted nothing but to lie exactly where she was.

“No, I’ll just sleep a little.”
“Then call for me if you need anything. I shall come running at once.”
“Mm. You get some rest too, Anna. You work hard, following me about all day long.”

At that drowsy answer from her lord, a bright smile spread over Anna’s mouth.

Dong-hui lay with her eyes shut for a good while after Anna had gone, then opened them wide as a thought came to her out of nowhere.

“What information have I got left that I haven’t used yet?”

She had paid for that knowledge in points dear as blood, and endured a head-splitting agony to get it. Resolved to shake out every last scrap of it and spend it thriftily, Dong-hui called the purchased information to mind.

And the one that caught her eye was the advice in the field of agriculture.