Workshop Guild (1)

“We are not taking orders at present.”

The door opened on Lilian going back and forth with a blacksmith who stood with folded arms.

“You really have nothing at all? Does that even make sense? We have the money, I’m only asking you to show us the goods.”
“Well, I’d show you if I wanted to, but there’s nothing here to show.”

Lilian whipped around to look at me, her face screwed up into a scowl.

“Is there really nothing, Roan?”

“…I don’t know why you’re asking me that.”

I left her stinging glare behind me and swept my eyes over the place. No equipment hung anywhere, inside the smithy or out. The embers in the forge were still alive, though, and the air inside the building was hot as well.

“Whether you have anything or not, I couldn’t say. But you clearly have no intention of taking customers.”

Equipment the owner could shove into a corner easily enough, but the forge could not have been in that state unless it had been melting iron until a few minutes ago.

“You two haven’t been in Norbelgard long, have you?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What equipment I had, I sold off long ago, and even now I only take orders from there. And it isn’t just me — go anywhere in this place and you’ll find it much the same.”
“Sold it? To whom?”
“The workshop guild. They swept up every last piece of equipment there was, and the volume they keep demanding on top of that is enough that a body can’t hold up under it.”

The workshop guild, is it? From Kyle Rowellin’s account I had taken it for a federation the blacksmiths had banded together to build themselves.

“But that’s a place where the blacksmiths gather, isn’t it? So why is it the one buying weapons?”
“More precisely, it’s a place that gathered the blacksmiths. Some grand noble who claims to be in business turns up, hands out iron cheap and buys the equipment dear, so iron-pounders like us have no choice but to gather. And doing that, we naturally came to know one another.”

Take iron from the baron, make equipment, send it back to the baron. In practice the workshop guild was Baron Lestein’s private trading account.

No wonder Kyle Rowellin is wary.

What Baron Lestein was thinking in all this I still did not know, but past any doubt, the whole thing stank. This was not ordinary. By this point, Kyle Rowellin’s commission or no, the baron was worth looking into.

If the baron stood in the way of driving the Ecclesia church out.

Then I would have to do something about it in advance.

Lilian and I slipped out of the place and spent a while going round the area, checking other smithies.

“Which number was this one?”
“Fifth.”

And sure enough, just as at the first, we met blacksmiths who were not taking customers. We had deliberately picked places set far apart from one another, and yet all five gave the same answer. Perhaps Baron Lestein really was raking together every cold weapon across the whole of Norbelgard¹.

This goes far beyond what I expected.

Before I knew it the city had taken on the color of sunset, and it was about the hour when the children clustered in threes and fours along the street headed home. The stalls were folding up one by one, and still the street was full of the blacksmiths’ vigorous hammering and the sound of quenching, of water coming to a boil. It meant days brimming over with work had been going on a long while.

“Roan, what are you going to do now? Look around some more?”
“It seems I had better. It looks as though it will take some time; would you rather head in now?”
“Mm. So I don’t get to buy you armor after all.”

Lilian yawned hugely. Getting up early was unlike her, and it must have tired her out badly.

By the time I had walked her back to the lodging and come out again, it had grown noticeably dark. I walked slowly.

Lestein… not a name that stayed with me.

Baron Lestein buys arms off the workshop guild’s blacksmiths, indiscriminately. And every blacksmith in Norbelgard belongs to the workshop guild. The weapons the baron is buying up must come to a quantity enough to arm not merely a battalion but an entire domain, with plenty to spare. Setting the reason aside for the moment, the money to make that possible is not a sum that can be handled at a baron’s level.

Suppose the baron is moving at the instigation of some other group. No noble in the north holds an army that would need weapons in that quantity. So the only such group would be the Talios church, which is forever at war, and they have no reason to send people all the way down to Norbelgard to supply weapons. They could get them close to home.

My steps stopped at yet another smithy. The reason I had come to this one and to no other was simple. Here alone, no sound of hammering could be heard.

“A customer?”

When I opened the door, an old man with a bent back welcomed me. For all his many years, he was of a great and powerful frame.

“You are not telling me to go home.”

“…I was about to. As you can see, it has been a long while since I set the hammer down.”

“Then these things laid out here must be for decoration. Rings, necklaces… are you not a jeweler, one who makes ornaments?”
“You don’t look like someone who’d be after ornaments.”

I set the ring I had been fiddling with back down.

“…True enough, but I haven’t come looking for a sword either, so don’t worry. Do you belong to the workshop guild?”

“No.”

It seemed I had come to the right place.

“Did you refuse to join? Or does the guild not take jewelers?”
“I turned them down. At the time the workshop guild sent someone round, I was still beating out swords and spears myself.”
“Why did you refuse?”
“Sir knight, it does an old man in poor health no good to be kept up. The hour is late.”

Plainly the old man was tangled up in some story of his own, but I had no warrant to force my way into it. I considered a moment, and in the end I spoke.

“I am a paladin of Talios. I cannot tell you my exact post or mission, but I am investigating Baron Lestein under orders from the main church. And I am also able to judge what manner of person the baron is and to carry out an execution on the spot.”

I drew out the paladin’s token and showed it to him. The old man’s eyes wavered violently. As I had expected, there had been a whole run of friction between him and the workshop guild.

“Which means that, depending on how you answer, the fate of Baron Lestein narrowly, and of Norbelgard broadly, is decided.”
“Hmm…”

The old man hummed low in his throat.

Friction means he dislikes the workshop guild. And a paladin of Talios, turning up out of nowhere at just the right moment, was telling him he would go and squeeze that workshop guild on his behalf. It would be strange not to be tempted.

“Come inside.”

He led me deep into the smithy, where a plain table and chairs stood.

“…It’s twenty years gone already. There was a great fuss about it at the time, so I remember it yet. Baron Lestein came to Norbelgard saying a vein of iron ore had been found on the baron’s own domain, and asking for blacksmiths to join in it. And then, by some change of heart, Lestein simply settled in here for good. After that, as you know, the workshop guild was built and weapons were being stamped out like a madness.”

The present three-power structure of the guard corps, the workshop guild and the Ecclesia church was barely twenty years old.

“That’s how I put it, but the weapon-making itself only began a short while back. It took a fair time for the workshop guild to harden into shape and become what it is now. There was a body of blacksmiths who held Baron Lestein in suspicion, you see.”

By any common sense, Baron Lestein’s course is genuinely hard to understand. And what cannot be understood is bound to be shunned.

“My son was one of them. He was certain the baron was offering those weapons up on a demon’s altar.”

“…A demon?”

The story had leaked out so abruptly that I repeated the word without thinking.

“Because none of it was ever sold on. It’s the same now. The weapons just go on piling up in the manor, and not one has ever been sent outside the city.”

If all that equipment was simply being stored away, then short of offering it up as a sacrifice, I could think of no particular use for it.

That is, if a thing like a demon actually exists.

“My son said he’d prove to people that the baron worshipped a demon. Back then it wasn’t the baron’s manor but another house that was used as the warehouse. The back of that boy’s head as he went out in the middle of the night saying he’d search that warehouse — that was the last I saw of my son. Whether he sank into the ground or shot up into the sky, we couldn’t even find a body.”
“Is that house near the manor now?”
“No, it’s far off. From what I know, I heard the residential blocks around there were pulled down and other buildings put up in their place.”

After losing his child, the old man had given up making weapons and refused the workshop guild’s overtures. It must have been the one sign of resistance a powerless man could manage in his own way.

“Did you never think to look for your child?”

“…My son was a dull boy. If the baron truly worships a demon, that is not something you go calling on alone in the dead of night. And if not, then the baron is still a rich and lofty noble all the same, is it not?”

Inwardly, the old man must have blamed his child. Out of a paltry sense of justice the boy had committed the unfilial act of departing before his father.

And at the same time, he must have been flogging himself. A paladin had come from outside to investigate the baron, and that alone was measure enough that his son’s sense of justice had not, in the end, been wrong. He would have realized as much.

“But the one who was far more foolish than he was me.”

In the end the old man’s guilt came out of a single remark of mine, that I spoke for Talios. That fact stirred no fresh misgivings in me. I finished my talk with him and rose from my seat.

The baron’s old warehouse, the one the old man had named, was across from the square where the cathedral stands. I had come from the lodging by way of the square, which put it geographically at the exact opposite end from the guard corps’ barracks.

White breath scattered out through the gaps in my helm. The sun had gone down and a cold night had come, and yet this place was still noisy with the voices of people laughing and talking. Bright lights and the stale reek of drink.

It took no great guesswork to place the street as an entertainment district where the blacksmiths gathered once their day’s work was done. My destination was still a good way off.

So they tore down a housing block and moved an entertainment district in…

Had this not been a free city, it would not have been a particularly unusual thing. Since there would be a plain owner of the land, a lord.

But in a free city, individuals own the land. That was what the redevelopment of a street meant. That an individual owned that street.

Perhaps the whole of this district was meant to be put to use.

So long as I did not know the baron’s aim, guessing at the plan was meaningless.

I walked on, and the address the old man had given me stood in front of me. In the spot where an ordinary house would once have stood, an inn had gone up in place of a home. A two-storey building of the sort you find anywhere.

“Hey.”

The innkeeper, too, was an entirely ordinary sort with nothing remarkable about them. Perhaps because there were no guests staying, the first floor was completely empty.

“Are you open for business?”

“…We are.”

I sat down at a nearby table. The place was clean, and well enough kept to catch the eye. With not a soul in it at the hour it ought to be at its busiest, business had to be poor on ordinary days too.

And yet, is the polish on everything not a little unnatural? As though to underline the fact that it is doing business normally.

“Will you be eating?”
“The cheapest thing you have.”
“Two copper coins.”

The barkeep went inside. Dishes clattered a few times, and then a voice followed.

“Not a face I’ve seen. Come from outside?”
“That’s right.”

“…Quite the proper set of gear, for a mercenary.”

I did not like the feel of it. A sticky unpleasantness crawling in from somewhere out of sight. There was something in this land, something impious and vicious. I could tell by instinct.