Chương 20: Chapter 19: Benefits

Matthew sat behind his desk and counted his money. The coins sat on the desktop in neat rows, silver and copper, separated by denomination. The silver pieces were larger and heavier, each stamped with a crown-wearing skull Matthew did not recognize and a motto in a language he could not read. The coppers were smaller, worn smooth by circulation, their faces so faded they could have been anyone. Thirty-two silver and two copper, three hundred and two 'Obols.' OBOLS The currency of the land.

Obols are metal coins accepted globally as a currency amongst the civilized races. The warren's share of the first iron sale: Matthew counted it. Each coin represented a decision that could be made correctly or not. He picked up a silver piece and held it to the forge light shining through the open door.

The weight was real, and so was the purchasing power, and the purchasing power mattered, because the warren had needs it could not meet through internal production, and those needs would sharpen as the season turned. The cold had arrived, not fully. But a smidgen. The first chill of autumn had crept in through the ventilation shafts and settled in the stone and made the goblins huddle closer at night than they had before.

The warren was underground, and underground ran warmer than above, but warmer was not warm, and while his employees were gaining weight fast, they weren't ready for winter. He could still see more ribs than bellies. The iron trade had produced revenue, and the revenue could buy supplies, and supplies could buy quality of life, and quality of life could buy a healthier, more productive workforce. The question was how to spend it. He picked up charcoal and wrote on a thin, small piece of hide. REQUISITION LIST 1.

Salt. 2. Medicine, bandages, and antiseptic. 3. Soap, unscented. 4. Blankets. 5. Mugs, with handles. Dear Valued Supplier, Please provide us as many of the above as you can source in quantities you find reasonable for our extended gathering. Please assume you are shopping for roughly one-hundred members of our extended business family. Be sure to include all receipts with delivery. Your payment will be delivered by the messenger of this letter. Kind regards, G. C.

Incorporated Industries His only issue was that he didn't know what things cost in this world. They had some money, but how much was it really? He had to have a lot of faith that Sarais wasn't pulling him over the table on these matters. — He did. But it still felt worthwhile to consider the strategic vulnerability. He liked Sarais' but she was the lynchpin in his operation. If anything happened to her, his entire system would enter a failure cascade.

As for the goods, the warren had operated without salt since its founding, and the absence was more than a culinary gap. Salt preserved meat, letting the smokehouse be supplemented with salted stores that lasted longer. Salt replaced electrolytes, which mattered for a workforce doing physical labor in a humid underground environment. He had been craving it since before the first sale, a physiological demand from a body running a sodium deficit for months. Medicine would cover what the fungal paste could not.

A basic frontier kit would fill the gaps. Soap. The warren smelled, and the mycelial saturation had helped, but the goblins still sweated and bled and did not bathe as often as they should. It wasn't really a part of their corporate culture. They refused to enter the stream. But maybe he could make them an office shower room at least? Matthew made a note to work on that immediately, stopping only for a moment to sniff beneath his own arm. He recoiled and shook his head. Blankets.

The rabbit-fur pads were functional but thin, and the cold was worsening. Real woven blankets would keep the goblins warmer, and warmer goblins were healthier goblins, and healthier goblins were more productive goblins. They needed better clothes too than their primitive rags. But one thing at a time. He could only get them to adapt to so much, so quickly. Mugs. This was the item that made Matthew pause, because it was the least essential and the most personal, frankly.

The goblins drank from hollowed gourds and scraped stone bowls. They were also crude and unpleasant. Real mugs, ceramic or wooden, with handles a goblin hand could grip, had no actual operational justification. Matthew put them on the list anyway. Everyone loved a good mug. They would be critical morale boosters. Plus, it would help improve consumption hygiene. He needed to civilize them more. He reviewed the list and called Rick. The spidery hobgoblin appeared in the doorway in under a minute.

The mycelium rippled faintly under his feet, responding to the presence of a dungeon unit.

"Rick. Take this to Sarais." Matthew rolled the hide letter together and put it into the bag of coins. Rick took both. He was gone, footsteps fading. Matthew sat back. Then, he picked up his rock phone and held it to his ear. Sarais found the letter and the purse on her porch at dawn, left in the dark, when she opened the door. The goblins never knocked. The pattern had become so routine she no longer startled at new things on her porch. Sometimes it was supplies and merchandise.

And sometimes one of them just left her a whole dead rabbit or a squirrel it caught in the forest. Her day led to her hitching the cart and riding into Dunkelhollow. The goblins gathered in the core chamber when the cart arrived, pulled by Rick. A team carried the goods through the tunnels in relay; each item passed hand to hand until the floor was covered in the warren's first imports.

Modest by any human standard, the kind of supplies a frontier family would buy without thinking, but in the warren the haul was the kind of event that happened once in… well, ever. Matthew started with the salt. He poured a small pile of white crystals onto a flat stone. The goblins stared at it just like they had stared at the first iron nail, with the suspicion that was the default response of creatures, feeling innately that new things were usually dangerous. Matthew took a pinch and put it on his tongue.

The taste hit him like a physical force. His body responded to the salt with a surge that sat between pleasure and relief. His mouth watered. His muscles unclenched. The low-grade headache living behind his right eye since the siege, the one he'd blamed on stress and ventilation instead of malnutrition, faded by a noticeable fraction. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is salt. You put it on food. Small amounts. Not too much." The reaction was immediate. Felix, game for anything that went in his mouth, grabbed a fistful of crystals and shoved them onto his tongue. He let out a surprised cry, recoiling and flailing. Nicole stopped him with the flat of her hand against the back of his head.

"Small amounts," Matthew repeated, because the message needed to be clear: this was a resource to be managed and conserved, not consumed in a frenzy.

"Cooking team. You're in charge of managing it." He pointed to a trio, who nodded. The soap would also require explanation. Freddy the tracker picked up the brown-wrapped bar and sniffed it. The lye smell was sharp and vaguely chemical, and Freddy's expression suggested the smell could go either way. He made the wrong choice. He bit into it. The sound he made was one of deep personal betrayal.

His face twisted, his mouth opened, and foam erupted from his lips, the lye reacting with his saliva, white and foul, and Freddy was spitting and wiping his tongue and making sounds that were extremely communicative.

"People please," said Matthew, folding his hands together.

"Stop putting everything in your mouths." Exasperated, he took the soap from Freddy.

"It's not food. You wash with it. Water and soap together on your skin. Removes dirt." He gestured, rubbing it on himself. The goblins looked at Freddy, still foaming, and then at the soap, and made a collective unspoken decision that it was not to be trusted. He sighed. They would figure it out. The blankets, however, were fawned over. Matthew divided the gray woolen stacks into shares, one per goblin, and the distribution stayed orderly until the blankets were in hand, then ended.

The warren wrapped itself in wool with the fierce possessive grip of creatures that had never owned anything softer than furs before. They went insane for the blankets, wrapping them around themselves and huddling, or running around and scaring each other. The barracks became a nest of bundled goblins, and the sound of it changed, the hard, echoing clatter of stone-cave sleeping replaced by the muffled quiet of fabric and warmth. The mugs were last. Simple things, wooden, roughly turned.

He set them on the warehouse table. The claiming of the mugs differed from the blankets. That had been frantic and possessive. This was careful and deliberate, each goblin selecting one, testing the handle, filling it with water from the supply, drinking, and setting it down somewhere of their own. A shelf, a niche, a corner of a bunk. A place where the mug would live and the goblin would know where to find it. He hadn't expected them to catch on, but somehow, they had.

Goblins had an innate knack he didn't quite understand yet. They would sometimes just… know things and he had no idea where it came from. Mugs were an important part of an employee's identity. A mug showed the office who you were, as your only socially accepted avenue of self-expression that was allowed within the soul-devouring corporate machine.

"Payday," Matthew said, the word new.

"Payday," Nicole repeated, tasting it.

"Every month, the warren earns, the warren spends, and the tribe benefits. That's the deal. You work, the warren produces, and the production pays for the things that make your lives better." That was the promise Matthew made to them. They started chanting, cheering his name.

"Tandaradei!" shouted a goblin, the others following in suit. The school had been running for weeks, a cleared section of the main corridor where new goblins sat in rows and learned the basics. Janet's stick tapped for attention, and the goblins watched her with the focused, slightly terrified expressions of students who had learned that noise brought the stick and silence brought the lesson. Common was different from the symbol lessons.

Common was language, and language was what could connect the warren to the world outside. Matthew made it a point of note that this was to be one of the highest priority educational goals. Janet pointed at herself.

"Janet." The class repeated it in a ragged, uncoordinated chorus. She pointed at the fire.

"Fire." At the water.

"Water." The repetition was the method, and it worked, the new goblins' mouths shaping unfamiliar syllables, sounds landing close enough to the target that meaning came through even when the pronunciation did not. Nicole stood in the back, arms crossed, ears tilted forward, watching. Janet seemed to struggle, figuring out where to go from here with the lesson. She looked around herself for inspiration.

"The fire is hot," said a voice. The classroom went silent. Nicole had produced a full, correct sentence. Matthew, watching from the corridor, stared at her. Her Common had been accumulating for weeks, each word filed and organized and connected to the others, and the accumulation had finally crossed the threshold where words could combine into something greater than their sum. The classroom repeated after her.

"The fire is hot," said a dozen goblins at once. Nicole grunted. Janet looked at Nicole, then at Matthew, then at the class. The stick tapped once.

"Lesson. Continue." Nicole came to his office that evening and started reorganizing like she had been doing all day in the rest of the warren. Matthew watched from his chair, feet on the desk, rock-phone in hand. He did not need to. Nicole was doing what Nicole did, everything he had not gotten to yet, faintly aggressive, because Nicole's default mode was a low, steady hum of productive hostility.

"Planning on a late night today, Nicole?" he asked, holding his phone down as if someone was actually on the other end. She moved the contents of his shelf to be facing the same direction and spaced them uniformly.

"Nicole plans to bite work." He supposed that meant she was being bitterly productive. Matthew watched her arrange them and felt something between amusement and affection, the familiar feeling of watching a competent person do a job well and knowing you did not have to manage it because it was in good hands. Nicole finished her busywork and then left. He watched her go, thinking she was done with whatever she had felt compelled to do. But then she came back again, setting a mug down on his desk. Water.

She pinched some of the salt into it.

"Thank you, Nicole," said Matthew.

"Go get some rest. We have a long day tomorrow." Her ears lifted slightly.

"Tandaradei not sleep?" she asked, nodding her head back out of the door. The rest of the tribe had already begun gathering under the dryad tree or heading to their bunks. A sea of blankets was moving, waddling. They were prized possessions, apparently. Matthew took a sip of his salty water as if it were coffee.

"No rest for the wicked," he replied, looking back at the map.

"There's still so much to do for the warren, so many plans I have to get ready." He set the mug down, thinking in concern.

"Where do you think they are?" he asked, rubbing his chin as he scanned the map.

"The other core." A firm growl.

"No. Tandaradei sleeps. Or Nicole bites. She will!" He looked at her.

"You can't solve every problem in life that way, Nicole." Nicole hissed at him between her clenched teeth. His eyes caught the paper on his desk. The note from Sarais was there, the one that had come with the supplies. P. S. The guild has started asking pointed questions about missing adventurers. It will attract outside attention. Be careful. The words were simple and the meaning was clear. They were flying too close to the sun.

"We still don't know anything about the thing that attacked us," he explained.

"Demons? The hell are demons doing here? And why are they after us but not the humans or Sarais?" He gestured with his hands in confusion.

"Does that even make sense? Aren't demons supposed to go after people? Is this just a territory thing?" he asked, knowing he would get no answers. Matthew folded his hands, staring at the map. If there was a rival core, that meant it had to be nearby enough to consider them a problem. At least now, since his arrival and their expansion. Maybe that's what triggered it? The goblins before weren't big enough to be a problem. And what if it meant that his warren had to already be inside of its territory?

Maybe that was the reason for the aggression? They were a monopoly-disrupting competitor inside of a presumed captured market. Since there hadn't been any contact since the initial attack, he could only hope to assume that their rival hadn't expected the defeat. They were likely spent on personnel and had to recover first. That was good news. It meant that their opponent wasn't an overwhelming force, right? … Either that, or the goblins weren't considered a big enough threat to really go after with full force.

But that would change now, right? His door shut. Matthew thought he was alone again for a second before he heard the footsteps approaching.

"Nicole warned Tandaradei," said the goblin, walking past his desk, her teeth bared. The warren settled into its new comforts as evening deepened. The hearth burned steadily, and the mycelium glowed faintly on every surface, soft even light filling the corners. The goblins in the barracks lay wrapped in the first real blankets any of them had owned. Matthew, covered in slowly healing, red, circular marks, sat in the core chamber with his back against the dryad tree and watched his tribe resting.

It was interesting to him just how individual they were. Even in things like sleep, they had their own preferences. Some liked to be by the tree, others in the barracks. Some went downstairs toward the new huts that were being made, and others just slept in any old nooks and crannies within the main warren. Asleep, muttering and twitching, Nicole was lying on the ground with her head on his lap and a blanket over her. His hand was on top of her head.

Above his head the tree's ornaments rattled in the draft: strips of cloth and cracked beads and the copper ring. The sound was a wind chime in a breeze. Matthew closed his eyes and listened. He could hear them: the tree, the dungeon. They spoke to him in a wordless language. A weak gust came through the vents, the first real chill of the season. The mycelium rippled, and the warmth of the hearth and tree pushed back against it. Tonight, the warren was warm and the tribe was safe. The night was quiet.

But summer was ending. Autumn was on the doorstep, and beyond that, winter. Every business had to operate in a competitive market. But their list of challenges to overcome and even if they had been doing well, it all felt so fragile. His people were counting on him to get them through all of it. He leaned back and closed his eyes.