Siltrein (3)

“First I’ve heard of a free knight who has a lady.”
“There’s no reason there shouldn’t be. A free knight’s still a knight.”
“Hahaha! Well, that’s true enough.”

A wandering knight, and the lady that knight serves.

Put simply, that was what Lilian and I amounted to.

Tairen Beloa, the mercenary who had helped us out, talked smoothly and carried himself with a brazen ease. Sociable by nature, perhaps; it was hard to find anyone nearby who did not know him.

“Now, I can’t just let you go like that. I’ll pay, so sit down and give me a story or two. Ah, you said you don’t drink, didn’t you? The potato soup here is good. Have you eaten yet?”

He was a difficult sort to deal with, somehow. Men like Walter Schneider, who come at you swinging a sword without a word of preamble, seemed easy by comparison.

“That’s awkward. I’m tired just now.”
“Then it can’t be helped. If you’re ever at a loose end, come and find me any time. I’m a listener at the ready.”

Lilian and I crossed to the building opposite. The key the barkeep had handed over turned in the lock, and the door opened on a neatly kept room. A little cramped for two, perhaps, but we had shared a room ever since the day we met, so that was nothing new.

“Roan, what are you going to do now?”
“I’ll have to pass myself off as a mercenary.”

When does a criminal come into being? There are two cases: the city is too good a place to live, or the domain is so wide that the lord cannot police it in any detail. Siltrein was both at once, a good place to live and a very wide city. Erbern above all, where the bulk of the guard force has to face outward, had no way of holding down the incidents boiling up inside.

So in cases like this, it is generally the mercenaries who step in. Not merely living off the small commissions the residents hand out, as in other cities, but colluding outright with the vested interests and taking charge of the city’s public order. Handing a matter to mercenaries can never rise above private punishment. But when the party doing the commissioning is the city’s ruler, then Siltrein’s mercenaries amount, in the end, to a militia.

“We’ll try the association.”
“The association?”
“A place like this usually ends up with a mercenaries’ association.”

An association does a number of things, but its chief function is to serve as the brokerage between client and mercenary.

Build up Lilian’s power, and turn a profit while we were about it. Mercenary work was two birds with one stone, and everyone the better for it.

Once our baggage was in order we went back across to the drinking house. Tairen Beloa and the rest of the mercenaries were carrying on exactly as they had been when I left them.

“Friend! You’re back a good deal sooner than I expected.”
“There’s something I want to ask.”
“Ask away, you’re welcome to it.”
“I’d like to take on a few commissions. Which way is the mercenaries’ association?”
“The association? We’ve no such thing here. Do mercenaries outside Erbern really go and put up something as grand as an association?”

“…There’s no association? Then how do the commissions get brokered to you?”

For an instant everything around us went quiet. The mercenaries who had been laughing and shouting fell still, and then laughed harder than before.

“Hey. It’s right there in front of you.”
“What does that mean?”
“The one who brokers the commissions. Without Tairen we couldn’t do a thing.”

Only then did I understand how Siltrein’s mercenaries went about their commissions.

This city has no association.

A broker instead of a brokerage.

Work that an institution takes on was being shouldered by a single individual. Inefficiency aside, is such a thing even possible?

“You’re telling me you broker between every mercenary and every client?”
“Not all of it. There’s a few who go out and work their own legs for it.”
“Which is to say most of it comes through you after all. Isn’t that far too dangerous? If you were to vanish, the mercenaries of Siltrein would be finished, every last one of them, that same day.”

Tairen Beloa tapped at the scabbard hanging at his waist.

“I may not look it, but my skill is the one thing I’m sure of. So long as I don’t croak, that’s the end of it, isn’t it?”

“…That’s far too uncertain a gamble to be waved off with a line like that.”

“Friend, you’ve got your priorities the wrong way round. The broker’s part doesn’t wobble because I’m strong. It’s because there’s nobody else fit for it in the first place.”

If the brokerage that arranges the commissions is a single person, that person must never be allowed to die. And to say Tairen Beloa was the only man fit for the part was to say that he never dies.

“There’s nobody in this city who could kill me, friend.”

The other mercenaries each put in a word of their own, as though there were no arguing with him.

“It’s a piece of luck that Tairen there said he’d shoulder the part.”
“The fact that we get to sit about like this is thanks to Tairen, isn’t it.”
“If he hadn’t, we’d still be in a mess, sir knight.”

Something in what they were saying caught at me.

“Did something happen?”
“The truth is you’ve had good luck, friend. You turned up after the unsettled times had more or less been sorted out.”

Tairen Beloa picked up his beer mug and perched himself on the table. The way he talked while he drank had reached the level of an art.

“A while back. Not long, mind. A few months ago? Around then the mercenaries banded together and rose up in a big way.”

An obvious enough story.

The mercenaries of a fortress city have the city’s vested interests at their back. Which was another way of saying those vested interests held the mercenaries’ leash in their fist, and inside a monopoly market ruled by vested interest, the mercenaries watched, eyes wide open, as a cut amounting to plain robbery was taken off them.

“The administrator who came as the lord’s deputy took half the commission fee as a cut. F***ing bastards. How is a man supposed to keep the grievance from piling up? Of course we protested. Do you know what the administrator did to the one who stood up to speak for us then? Had them hanged, and called it treason.”

The mercenaries of a fortress city are a force large enough to raise an association, and at the same time dogs kept alive on the feed the lord throws them. If the food thrown to them is not to their liking, barking at the master is only natural.

“So we went ahead and gave them a real rebellion. As you’ll know yourself, friend, mercenaries aren’t a breed that bands together. In all my life as a mercenary I’d never seen mercenaries as united as that.”

A f***ing cur that barks at its master does not come to a good end. An association’s mercenaries either live on with the grievance held in and the tears swallowed, or, if they do resist, simply vanish without a sound or a rumor.

Siltrein’s mercenaries, though, seem to have been different. As f***ing curs they dared to raise the flag against their master, and they did in fact bite the master to death.

“There was never anything like an association in Siltrein. We used to take our commissions from the lord’s castle, where the administrator sits. We broke through the guard force, occupied the castle and claimed the right to govern ourselves. In the end, a few days later, the lord of Erbern sent a new administrator and came to terms with us on condition that we were left alone. The old administrator was sent back to the city where the lord is.”

Sent back across the Erbern plateau with no escort worth the name.

That would in practice be little different from an execution.

“So. You’re telling me you threatened the lord?”
“Put it that way and yes, I suppose that’s what it comes to. We were desperate ourselves back then. When your own children say they’re hungry and go and steal a bit of bread and come home beaten black and blue for it, what is there left to weigh up?”
“And it worked?”
“Luckily it went well enough. The administrator we have now won’t so much as meet our eyes.”

A deputy of the lord, no noble perhaps, and the castle that deputy resides in.

Occupying it by force was treason plain and simple, and yet the lord of Erbern, unusually, chose to come to terms with the rebel force rather than send an army and wipe it out.

What that meant was simple. An army of Erbern’s sort could never have driven the rebels out, so there had been no choice but to come to terms.

“There must have been a rallying point that pulled the mercenaries together. Who was it?”
“Sir knight, as we said, that would be Tairen. Tairen isn’t only strong. He’s the symbol of the mercenaries who opened a new age. That’s why nobody but Tairen can be the new broker.”

In practice, the reason their rebellion succeeded, and drew no reprisal, is that Tairen Beloa is here. A revolt by an association that actually succeeded was something even I had very seldom seen.

“Just how strong is he, that the lord backed down so readily?”
“Sir knight, let me give you one aside. On somebody’s commission, Tairen once went out beyond the wall alone and came back carrying a skeleton knight’s head.”

Enough to range the Erbern plateau tracking undead, face a skeleton knight alone, and return unharmed.

Perhaps because of the beer, Tairen Beloa’s color was slightly up as he waved a hand about.

“Now, now. You’ll embarrass me.”
“What of it, it’s the truth. Hunting a skeleton knight is one thing, but Tairen’s the only man in Siltrein who could meet one in single combat.”

Siltrein’s mercenaries are not a militia. They do not have the vested interest at their back; they have become the vested interest itself.

Which is why handing a matter to mercenaries can be nothing more than private punishment.

Siltrein is a city of mercenaries. And so Siltrein encourages private punishment.

It will not last long.

In a structure like that, crime calls forth crime. It looks well enough so far, but before long any number of problems will rise to the surface.

The administrator’s monopoly on brokerage ended, and Tairen Beloa’s monopoly on brokerage began.

Thinking it over, they might well be savouring a premature peace when nothing at all had changed. Not that I had any intention of pronouncing on the state of affairs they had built for themselves, nor any standing to.

“I’d like to take a commission. Is there any particular procedure?”
“There’s no procedure… but most of the commissions are work that means taking a man. Is that all right? In a city like this, the only work handed to a mercenary is that sort of thing.”
“As much as you like.”

Tairen Beloa was quiet for a moment, perhaps turning over which commission to put in my hands.

“Igor. A vicious piece of work, four murders and two arsons, and the bereaved family of one of the victims put the commission up. Dead or alive makes no difference, and the last sighting was said to be the brothels of the Fourth District.”
“The fee?”
“Fifty silver coins on completion. And the word is they’re willing to pay something extra the faster it’s dealt with.”
“I’ll take it.”

Criminal-hunting, or whatever name you put on it, is in the end the work of a butcher of men.

I had meant to enlist Lilian’s help and grow her holy power by it, but when it came to actually opening my mouth, I could not help hesitating.

“Are there no commissions for hunting creatures, by any chance?”
“Hm? The commission isn’t to your liking?”
“No. Not for me. For this one here.”

“…Your lady’s, friend?”

A creature hunt would use a great deal more holy power than chasing down a man. And since the only thing that can do Lilian injury is a human being, where a beast was concerned I could leave as much of it to her as I liked.

“It’s not that there aren’t any… but are you really in earnest?”
“There’s no need to worry. More to the point, I’d like to know what commissions there are.”

“…The creatures we have here, when it comes down to it, are all undead. Or else things that gnaw their way through the crops. The most common are the ghost-clearings.”

Ghost-clearing, is it?

Ordinarily it is as troublesome a commission as they come. But if Lilian steps in, the story is different, because a single word from her telling them to clear off settles the whole problem.

Simple, and well paid at the same time, a commission tailor-made for Lilian.

“I’d like it if you told me every commission that has to do with ghosts.”

“…Every one of them?”