Chương 113: Chapter 110 - Ninety Barrels

Alric had, at some point in the last two days, lost the common room. A strategic loss in Alric's current war against barrels. It had not been a dramatic loss. There had been no moment where someone had stood in the doorway, looked at the barrels, and declared the land formally surrendered or that the barrels had won. Instead, it had gone the way most practical things went when faced with sufficient volume: it had become geography.

He stood just inside what had once been the main sitting area, a folded sheet of charcoal-marked parchment in one hand and looked out over what now resembled a storage solution that had abandoned the idea of elegance halfway through and committed fully to inevitability. Barrels filled the room. Not arranged, that implied intention. These had been placed where they would fit, then where they would almost fit, and finally where they could be persuaded to fit when pushed into necessity.

They were stacked two high in places, braced against beams, wedged into corners, and in one case occupying the full length of a table that had not been seen in its natural state since yesterday morning. A more apt description for the room would have been stuffed. A chair near the hearth existed purely to support a barrel that had nowhere else to go. The chair, Alric noted absently, was performing admirably. He glanced down at the paper again. It was currently covered in small formulas.

"Where did this one come from?" he asked, not looking up, gesturing vaguely toward a barrel that seemed to have appeared between two others without warning.

"Brewery's full, so is the fermentation building, oh cask building too," someone answered from somewhere behind the stacks.

"We're ahead again though." Alric closed one eye, as though that might improve the accuracy of the count. Ninety. They had passed ninety. He had done the numbers himself, had accounted for pressing rates, fermentation lag, transfer time, all of it neat and contained within projections that had felt, at the time, aggressively ambitious. He'd recalculated. The number that came back was unreasonable. He rejected it and recalculated again. The number remained.

"That's not right," he muttered, though the barrels, in their quiet and substantial way, suggested otherwise. Movement behind him resolved into Seren, who stepped into the room with the ease of someone who had already learned the routes required to navigate the building. She did not look at the barrels immediately, which was, Alric had come to understand, a deliberate choice.

"You're blocking the walking space," she said lacking words for what space was left. He shifted slightly to the right. Something creaked in response. Seren's gaze moved over the room then, taking in the stacks, the braces, the subtle lean of one particularly ambitious column near the far wall.

"We've exceeded the original plan," she said stating the obvious.

"We've exceeded several plans," Alric replied.

"Most of them mine. We just passed ninety barrels" Seren nodded once, as though confirming a figure in a ledger.

"That places us," she paused trying to find the words, "Well past what the city would normally deal with." Alric frowned slightly, not at the statement, but at the direction of it.

"I figured that. We're beyond space," he said.

"That's the problem." Seren regarded him for a moment, then inclined her head. A shout came from the corridor, followed by the sound of something heavy being shifted, then the sort of silence that followed a collective decision not to examine a situation too closely. Alric folded the drawing once more and tucked it under his arm.

"We need to move some of these," he said.

"Where?" Seren asked. He opened his mouth to say something unhelpful before he closed it again. The inn cellar was already full. The upper rooms were full. The hallway to the rear entrance had become a negotiated passage requiring both planning and a willingness to turn sideways at inconvenient moments.

"Somewhere," he said. They stood in silence for a moment, considering the concept. Stromni arrived without announcement, which was impressive given the current density of obstacles. He paused just inside the room, taking in the barrels, the braces, the subtle adjustments that had been made to accommodate reality's continued insistence. He grunted once.

"This is noble output," he said. There was no humour in it which was unusual for the dwarf. Alric felt the words land, not as exaggeration, but as classification. Noble output meant scale, expectation and attention. Alric specifically did not want the latter. It also meant this did not belong hidden in an inn that had lost track of its furniture.

"We're not nobles," Alric said, though it sounded thin even as he said it. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Stromni shrugged, he shifted a nearby barrel to feel the weight.

"The barrels disagree and ya sure act like it sometimes." he said admiring the barrels. From outside, faintly, came the murmur of voices. The smell had been building for hours now, rich and sharp and unmistakably alive, fermenting grapes announcing themselves to anyone within range of a nose and a moment's curiosity.

"Is it supposed to smell like that?" someone asked.

"It smells expensive," another voice replied. Alric rubbed at his temple.

"We can't keep this," he said.

"No," Seren agreed.

"It needs time," he went on.

"Weeks. Months. We don't have the space for that."

"Please tell me we are nearly done with the grapes." Alric asked.

"We are nearly done with the grapes." Seren said with a smile.

"What really?" Alric asked doing a double take, she nodded. He looked around the room again, the calculation shifted. Wine needed time. Time required space. The space they had, had already been spent. The conclusion arrived with a clarity that felt less like a decision and more like the removal of an alternative.

"It can't stay wine," he said. Stromni's eyes flicked to the drawing under Alric's arm.

"No," the dwarf said. Alric nodded once.

"We need the still." Alric and Stromni said in unison. The king's office had been designed to prevent problems from becoming theatrical. It accomplished this primarily through the careful management of space and expectation. His desk was wide, but not indulgent, its surface occupied by neatly aligned stacks of documents, each one placed with an attention that suggested not merely habit, but policy.

Ink wells were stoppered, quills trimmed to uniform length, and nothing existed within reach that did not justify its presence. Behind and to the right, a tall window overlooked the city. It was not decorative. It existed to provide light as well as information. Streets, gates, movement, smoke, everything that might, if left unobserved, become inconvenient. Clerks worked within the room in a steady, unremarkable rhythm.

Papers were sorted, copied, annotated, and recorded with the quiet confidence of men who believed that, given sufficient care, all problems could become columns, where they would behave. Into this environment, a letter arrived. It was presented correctly. Sealed, stamped, and delivered through the proper channels. It was not marked urgent, which suggested either that it was not, or that the person writing it had not yet understood that it was. The king broke the seal and read. Once, at the pace of habit.

Then again, slower. Nothing in the room changed. A clerk turned a page. Another sanded fresh ink. A ledger was closed somewhere with the soft finality of something resolved. The king set the letter down, adjusted it so that it sat square with the edge of his desk, and read the first line again.

"Twelve wagons?" He let the words rest there, as one might allow a number to correct itself.

"Twelve wagons," he repeated quietly. His mind moved to refine it. He picked up the letter and handed the letter to his advisor with his eyes closed. Reports exaggerated. Distance distorted. Twelve could be six. Six could be three. Three could be…

"Your Majesty," his advisor said, without looking up from the letter, "it says in grain? It seems… very specific." The king's fingers tapped once against the desk.

"Simultaneous?" he asked just to check, his advisor nodded. The king stood with a scrape of his chair and moved to the window. Below, a wagon approached the palace gate, slowed, stopped, and submitted itself to inspection. Papers would be checked, goods examined and duties assessed. It was visible, measurable, interruptible.

"They stop. They wait. They are opened. Counted. Taxed." The king said observing and gesturing to the wagon, no one dared interrupt, "And if they are not?"

"If they are not," the advisor said, "they are not part of..." The king turned.

"He brought twelve wagons' worth of goods into this city," the King interrupted, "without stopping, without inspection, without record, and without payment. If those wagons had carried weapons—" The king's hand struck the desk. The sound cut cleanly through the room. Pens halted. Ink paused mid-line.

"—then we would have an army inside the walls," the king said, his voice sharp now, the control breaking just enough to let the truth through. Silence followed.

"He could supply them," the advisor said, steady.

"Feed them. Arm them. Move material without detection. There would be no warning." The king's gaze fixed on him.

"Inside my city," he said, quieter.

"For as long as he chose." The king drew in a slow breath, the anger contained again, shaped into something colder. He moved to sit down again.

"He did not bypass the city gate," he said adjusting his chair.

"He walked straight through it, it was simply irrelevant." No one spoke.

"We have built a nation on counting things, every place works this way," the king went on.

"And he has made his goods uncountable."

"Uh.. He registered," the advisor said.

"Walked past the city gate with an entire merchant train in his pocket," the king continued, the edge returning in thinner form, "and then presented himself at a desk a year later?" The king exhaled once, sharply.

"He complied, partly and a year late." he said.

"Which makes his compliance meaningless. News of a twelve wagon item box would have reached us, we would have known."

"Yes." A nearby clerk hesitated.

"Your Majesty… how should this be recorded?" The king looked at him.

"Not yet," he said. The clerk bowed his head and withdrew a step.

"If he can carry that much," the king said, "then he can carry more. Armor, food, bloody siege equipment and we would not see it." The king closed his eyes feeling a stress headache coming.

"We would not stop it. We would not know until it was already inside." The king leaned back slightly. All the clerks and advisors were watching the king.

"That is not a loophole," he said quietly.

"This is the biggest administrative failure I've ever heard of." The word settled.

"Who is he?" the king asked.

"A recent registrant, he registered as a merchant last year, he registered as a mage yesterday." the advisor replied.

"Of course. So we have had this… what class of mage is he?"

"Uh.. The highest your majesty, he's considered elder." The advisor said closing his eyes for a heartbeat. The king let out a deep breath.

"So, an unregistered elder mage, has been marching around the city for over a year, with a merchant train in his pocket… and enough mana to flatten a city district?" A clerk ventured, cautiously, "Uh… Should we adjust gate procedures?" The king looked at him.

"For what?"

"Uh... So it doesn't happen again?" The king was silent for a long time.

"If there are more mages like this walking around the countryside, the gate is the least of our problems. How didn't we know?" The problem, he did not say, was that the world was no longer obliged to behave accordingly.

"We cannot act immediately," he said. The advisor nodded.

"We don't know who he is or what he's doing here. Potential threat, maybe?" the king said.

"But potential asset. Being an unregistered mage is still a crime, we make him sweat a bit." The king inclined his head.

"We issue a summons," he said.

"For spring."

"Spring your majesty?"

"Yes, investigate him, go find everything we can. These reports come to me and the queen only. Am I clear?"

"Yes your majesty and uh… if he refuses?" The king's expression did not change.

"Then we will have learned something useful. Be polite. Damned polite. Call it an inquiry." Around them, the clerks resumed their work, pens moving, records forming. The letter was copied, logged, and filed, its contents preserved with careful accuracy. Outside, another wagon approached the gate, slowed, stopped, and submitted to inspection, the system continuing with quiet confidence, unaware that, for the first time in years, it had been cleanly, completely, and rather politely ignored.

The king lowered his head, using both hands he began rubbing his eyes while frowning.