Norbelgard (3)

Norbelgard. A land of opportunity, and a land of unreason.

Pormel got us there safely, and the place had a wall and guards like anywhere else, which read like a flat betrayal of whatever Lilian had been quietly hoping for.

“There’s no lord, but there are soldiers.”
“There’s an army, yes, but it’ll belong to one of the big houses. Less a defense army than a militia.”
“That wall too?”
“Yes. Somebody built it at their own expense.”

The wall and the guards we had just come past were most likely some house’s way of turning a profit. In a free city, everything flows through money.

“They put up a wall and keep your life safe, and in return they take a set amount in protection tax.”
“What’s that supposed to be? Isn’t that just banditry?”
“They really do protect you, though, so you could call it a better bargain than banditry.”

Some free cities have a wall like this and some do not. In Norbelgard’s case there seemed to be a house collecting a tax in exchange for guaranteeing a minimum of safety.

“For what it’s worth, Bestraum in the west, where I went, had neither wall nor army.”

That was why free cities varied so wildly in scale and in standard. As a rule, the more a city fills with large, wealthy houses, the cleaner and the more livable it is. Norbelgard, at any rate, looked to be a free city of the middling sort.

Lilian thought my words over for a while, then asked.

“Is that even possible? Some ordinary resident who just happens to have money really builds a wall and raises soldiers?”
“You seem to have got something confused. Anyone with money is usually a noble.”

Having no lord does not mean having no nobles. If anything, a free city offered landless nobles ideal ground to flock to. For second and third sons pushed out of the succession fight, and for nobles whose houses had come down in the world too, a free city was a field of opportunity all the same. It was fair to say that more than half of what a free city earns comes down to the nobles.

“It was common enough for the eldest son to inherit the domain and the title while the second son inherited the money, so a noble with no title can start out far better placed than anyone else.”

Lilian nodded. Having never actually met a noble, she still seemed to hear it as a story out of another world.

“What are we doing now? I want to go see an inn.”
“Before long the lot who are meant to take us there will come out to meet us.”
“People are coming?”

The force that had received the house of Balzenov’s message.

No sooner had I said it than the street began to stir. People grew noisy, and every eye was pulled toward one place. Out of the crowd came soldiers in quilted armor, spears in hand. Given that no armed force in a free city can be anything but a band of militiamen, that was a fairly respectable standard of gear.

“Are you Sir Roan Belgard of the Talios faith, and Lady Lilian?”
“That’s right.”

That is a great deal of fighting strength for a party of guides.

“What has become of the supplies that were due to come with you from Siltrein.”
“Before I tell you that, I will need to know who you are.”

The soldier standing at the front looked back at the others and, seeing them nod, spoke.

“We belong to Sir Kyle Rowellin’s guard corps. We were told that two wagons and the pair of you would be coming from a city in Erbern called Siltrein.”

The figure Balzenov had said he would contact seemed to be Kyle Rowellin of the guard corps. A wagon entering the city naturally has to pass the wall, so in this one matter the guard corps was bound to carry strong sway.

“There was an unfortunate accident. A beast attacked, and both wagons were left half wrecked. The two of us are the only survivors, so we were hardly in a position to bring the supplies along either. The guard corps came at us already knowing something of it. Otherwise you would not be doing this, would you?”

My words made the soldiers falter for a moment. At a signal from the one at their head, they had been closing a ring around us without appearing to.

“That is so. Sir Kyle Rowellin did order us to bring you in. It is not that I say your words are false, but neither can I take you at them out of hand, so I would ask your understanding.”
“Did we not hear from Leonid Balzenov in the first place that we were your side’s guests? Is it the way of the house of Rowellin to send private soldiers and haul off a guest from far away without a word?”

“…Speaking ill of a noble on a noble’s land is not a very good idea, sir paladin.”

The soldier let displeasure show openly, but could not go so far as to shout or threaten outright, because this far up, in Norbelgard, the Talios church’s ill fame was beginning to tell. To Lilian, Talios’s paladins were nothing more than strange people; to most northerners, anyone of the Talios faith passed for a madman who tore bears apart barehanded and took pleasure in slaughter.

“Whatever the case elsewhere, this place is Sir Kyle Rowellin’s land. I would have you show him respect. I ask you, come with us. We too would rather avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”

In a free city, talk of whose land a place is amounts to nothing but an idle joke, but coming from a man who owns an entire guard corps it was not something to laugh off either.

“Lead on.”
“As you say.”

The soldiers ringed around Lilian and me took us to a barracks near the wall. Other cities use the inside of the fortress as barracks, but this one was a separate, purpose-built structure, and perhaps for that reason its scale looked all the more enormous. Deeper in, past the soldiers’ living quarters, the number of people about fell off noticeably. That was because they had not set the administrative section apart but built it into the structure itself.

The clerks’ office. The soldier who had brought us this far opened the door.

“I have brought Sir Roan Belgard.”
“Good. See to your work.”

The soldiers went out, and I sat down in the seat the man offered. Kyle Rowellin was far younger than I had expected. Thirty at the outside.

“Is that person a noble?”

Lilian’s whisper came out of nowhere, and the man’s eyebrow twitched. He had evidently expected at least a formal introduction from us. I caught his expression turning sour and answered her.

“Let me see… If I remember right, he’s probably not from the north. I’ve never heard the surname Rowellin.”
“That is strange.”

He cut in on what I was saying, leaning back and propping his chin on his fist.

“If you really are a paladin of Talios, there is no way you would not know me.”

For some reason he had gone past displeasure into open hostility. Come to think of it, Norbelgard was the very fringe of what counted as the north. That its guards knew Talios’s ill fame at all was faintly unnatural. The church had never come down as far as these parts.

No, had it really never?

“I went to the trouble of opening the gate for the rare outing of gentlemen so very slow to stir, and now here you are heading back up. And what business is it in the north that has you going back this time.”

The branch of Talios seated in Pirberk. They had passed through Norbelgard and got as far as Darbar. Their real intent was to extend their reach into the west, but the stated pretext, at any rate, was to help with Darbar’s territorial war.

“A noble of Slonhar.”

It is a simple guess. The only people in these parts with cause to hate the Talios church were Slonhar, who had been at odds with Darbar. And that means the man before me is of the blood of the Slonhar lord I met in Brus. There looks to be a fair gap in age, so father and son, perhaps.

Things have got tangled.

Leonid Balzenov knows nothing of affairs outside Erbern, so the guest he sent Kyle Rowellin was the vanguard of the enemy that had once invaded his own courtyard. Strictly speaking, I was not the Talios church that had taken Darbar’s side, but that did not seem to matter to the man in front of me. And clearing up the misunderstanding would only make a bigger mess of it. Would I not become the bitterest enemy of all, the very man who murdered his father?

The vanguard of the enemy was a hundred, a thousand times better than the killer of a parent.

“So you have already forgotten who I was?”
“I don’t keep every gatekeeper’s home town in my head.”

The one small mercy was that he seemed not to know yet that the lord of Slonhar was dead. If the lord had died suddenly just as the church’s support for Darbar began, naming the church as the culprit would be no hard thing. And if he thought the church had killed his father, he would never have had us brought this far.

“The lord’s second child, was it.”

“…Kyle Rowellin, second son of the Rowellin viscount’s house.”
“Roan Belgard, of the Talios faith.”

The lord’s letter I found in Brus. If this was a Slonhar noble come up into the north, he was most likely the lord’s child who had been due to receive it. Luckily, I had not forgotten he was a second son.

“Enough beating around the bush. I would like you to start answering my question. What is your reason for going back up into the north?”
“So free cities ask that sort of thing these days? I distinctly remember there being no checkpoint at the wall.”

“…Ha. Never changes, does it. Not one of you church people is to my liking.”

The man clicked his tongue. A long while later he came out of the lean and sat forward.

“Then let us talk of something else. Two wagons loaded with grain and meat, and one paladin, were due to arrive from Siltrein in Erbern to Norbelgard’s guard corps. Correct? You are not going to quibble about this too, I take it?”
“Yes. That is so.”
“And yet the supplies have vanished somewhere, and all that has arrived before me is one paladin. It seems to me there is some correlation between the wagons going missing and you alone coming through unharmed. Is there not?”
“There is nothing much to hide. A beast attacked and both wagons were smashed to pieces. The only survivors are Lilian here beside me and myself.”
“Fine, let us say that is so. Either way, from the guard corps’ side, supplies that ought to have come were lost, so we have taken a loss.”
“And your point?”
“Roan Belgard. You are going to make that loss good for us.”

I shook my head at that, feigning a loss of interest.

“That’s a ridiculous demand.”
“You are a paladin of the Talios faith. Strong enough to survive a beast’s attack easily, and in fact you came all this way unharmed, with the woman beside you into the bargain. Does that not mean you were in a position to hold the wagons and did not?”

“…That is too much of a leap.”

What he said was not entirely wrong. Pormel had been the one to put the owlbear down, and with strength like that I would have had a good chance of bringing the wagons through as well.

“No. What I am doing, as head of the guard corps, is demanding proper compensation from the house of Balzenov for the failure of this deal.”

The deal ran like this. In return for receiving two wagons of food, the guard corps would take in two honored guests of the house of Balzenov as honored guests of its own. So, since the wagons never arrived as they should have, he is arguing that we are Balzenov’s people too and must answer for it. The man’s way of taking a great gain out of a small loss. He gives up supplies he could take or leave, and in exchange he gets one game piece that is strong, durable, and his to push about as he pleases.

Kyle Rowellin was wearing the smile of a man whose plan had come off.

It does not stray from what I expected.

Put the other way round, this had handed me an opening to put him in my debt and at the same time to get my hands on the strongest game piece for driving the Ecclesia church out of Norbelgard: the guard corps. I had been turning over how to set them against the Ecclesia faith, and had that not just become unnecessary?

“Well. Let’s do that.”

He could not see it behind the helm, but I smiled back at the smiling man.