Chapter 54: A guild

Chapter 54: Chapter 54: A guild

Allan left the mansion at dusk, against the Duke’s order.

The bandage at his neck was already damp, and every step pulled at the damage in his left side. He told himself he only wanted a drink strong enough to dull the Scoundrel Title’s cold throb behind his eyes. The real reason was less comfortable. He wanted to know whether he could still move through a city without this unhealing wound.

He had checked it for the tenth time and bandaged it for the tenth time, and it was still not healing.

"That bastard hero must have used some stolen skill." He grunted, still feeling the crunching agony as he walked.

By the end of the first street he had counted three ways out without meaning to. At the corner he picked the longer route because it had fewer stairs. That bothered him more than the pain did. A week ago he would have taken the fast way and never thought about it.

A carriage with no crest rolled past, unhurried, and turned at the next corner. He did not think about that either.

Two streets later, Viscount Arclight fell into step beside him with an Earl at his shoulder, as if they had arranged to meet. Allan had not arranged anything. He knew the Viscount well enough by now, so much so it was easy to walk beside him and greet him. The Earl he knew mostly by reputation: his house had made its money on the old trade routes, and lately he had been turning up wherever the Viscount was, which meant he wanted something. Obviously.

Good luck getting something from the Viscount. Here I am, his daughter’s neighbor, and still I have nothing, Allan thought.

The Viscount leaned in close enough that the Earl could not hear.

"The letter to Amelia. Was it sent?"

Allan understood the real question. Had he made his move? He could not answer with the Earl a pace away, so he gave one short nod. The Viscount’s shoulders eased a fraction.

"Walk with us," the Viscount finally said. Though polite, it was not a request. Eventually they turned toward the market.

The stalls were closing for the day. Keepers stacked crates while the lamps came on one at a time. Near the first stall a broad-shouldered man stood in front of a shopkeeper with his hands open at his sides. A B-rank badge was still pinned to his coat, though nobody in the capital seemed to recognize it anymore. His sword arm had a slight tremor, the kind that comes from months without real work.

"Any job," the man was saying. "Carry, guard, I do not care."

The shopkeeper backed away due to his size. His fearful eyes were clear, like backing away from a dog that might still bite.

Allan looked him over for the signs he had been watching for all week, the ones that would mean the cult had gotten to him. He took out his analysis crystal and went close enough, but he found nothing.

Three steps later he stopped and turned around.

A man was asking for work and had named what he could do. This was supposed to be the capital where abundance flowed, but here was another large man in the same situation.

"What are you looking at?" the Earl asked.

"Oh, I am sorry, my lords. It is nothing."

The Earl looked at where his eyes were, seeing the man and not just him but a few others right by their side.

"Poor ones," he said, his tone soft and regrettable, like he actually cared. "Once they were proud warriors, showing their might, but now look at them. Life is strange, is not it, Lord Arclight?"

"Indeed," the Viscount muttered. "Let us walk away from this sadness, and we can all have a drink."

They kept walking, and once he had seen one, Allan kept seeing them. Four people on a stable step passing a single bowl of stew between them, one still wearing a vanguard’s leather bracers. A woman selling a mended sword and two padded jackets off a blanket, the hilt wrapped in old Guild-issue cord. He checked each of them for signs of the cult. Nothing again.

Near the end of the row, a man in a gray coat was studying a stall of cooking pots with great interest. His eyes slid off Allan half a second too fast. Allan noted it and felt his knife behind his coat, staying careful.

At the mouth of the lane ahead, a carriage with no crest stood waiting. Probably a different one.

The bar was in a lane where nobody asked prices. Dark wood, crystal, calming music from a corner nobody was listening to. Before Allan had opened his mouth, the bartender set an amber glass in front of him.

"You look like you need this one, lord."

Allan had not said a word. He took the glass anyway. Bartenders learned faces, and his was not hard to read tonight. Then he noticed a faded Guild healer’s pin, turned inward under the man’s cuff. The man’s eyes had gone to the bandage on Allan’s neck and judged it badly done.

"Do not worry about it," Allan muttered, drinking the glass whole.

Then it started again, the flattery. The Earl talked fondly about the old boom years, when slavery had kept the economy fat and obedient. Viscount Arclight said morality had to stand above profit. Allan thought of the Seventh Princess and her campaign to abolish the practice, and kept her out of it. Her reasons were moral. His were not, and he did not mean to blur the two in front of these men.

"Every slave needs a guard," Allan said. "Then a second guard to watch the first. You pay for the ones who run, the ones who break tools on purpose, the ones who stop trying. When one dies, you buy another and start over."

"They are cheap to replace," the Earl said.

"They are cheap to buy. That is different." Allan turned the glass. "A man who chooses to stay learns the work. He trains whoever comes after him. He wants a promotion, so he does the job properly. You do not need chains if leaving costs him more than staying."

The Earl studied him. "You speak as though freedom is merely another business model."

"It is. The difference is that this one makes people defend the slavers themselves."

"And when they demand more pay?"

"Pay them."

"Then we failed to make staying worthwhile."

Hahahaha! The Earl laughed. "And when they leave?"

"Then we failed to make staying worthwhile."

The laughter stopped. The Earl’s face turned colder and more interested. "Hmm, Lord Oakwood, I did not see you as an idealist."

"No." Allan looked toward the street. "I am an investor."

The Viscount murmured, mostly to his glass, that this exact mind was why Amelia had fallen for a man like him. He had planted a seed that could reshape territories. What it would cost, he did not know yet.

A glass shattered across the room.

A young waitress with scarred knuckles and the posture of a former adventurer stood over the pieces of her third glass of the night. The nobles at the nearest table berated her, loud enough for the whole room to hear. She apologized without looking up. Allan recognized her from old Guild records: mid-tier, reliable, gone quiet after the collapse. He checked her wrists for the signs out of habit. Clean.

Six for six.

He thought of the B-rank man, the four on the stable step, the woman at her blanket, the bartender with his pin turned inward. They were not scattered failures. They were the same event seen from different sides. The old Guild had not disappeared. Its people had. The skills, the contacts, and the knowledge of every road and dungeon in the region were still in the city, still working for nothing, just without the institution that used to connect them.

He had not been looking at unemployed adventurers. He had been looking at a destroyed industry. An industry he had helped to destroy.

The notification came while he was still working it out.

[Investment Opportunity Detected.]

Target: Displaced Adventurer Population

Estimated Available Assets: 317 to 642 individuals

Potential Return: Very High

Risk: [Withheld]

Condition: Institutional Collapse

Allan read the fourth line twice.

"Why?" he said under his breath.

Nothing. He looked again, and the field stayed blank. That had never happened. The System could hide information. It could obscure conditions and hand him deliberately incomplete returns. It had never refused to define a risk.

Allan’s fingers tightened around the glass. The only thing that could mean was that the System did not know what would happen either.

He made himself work the numbers anyway. Three hundred people was a labor force, an information network, an exploration network, and a political constituency. It was also a disaster if someone else reached them first. He then realized his suspicion of cult infiltration needed to stop.

[Title: Scoundrel of Yggdrasil. Active.]

What he needed to do was not let paranoia settle in. He needed to get back into his business mindset. These adventurers, powerful adventurers, were now desperate people and ready to work cheap. It would only get easier the longer the old Guild stayed dead.

If he made a new Guild, adding his modern system, food, contracts, pay, protection, status—he would eventually have a militia of his own and the cult could not match it at all.

And that tragedy would not happen again.

He ran the options through. If he accomplished it and filled this vacuum, Oakwood alone would be called a private army by every house in the capital.

But he knew he could not do it alone.

Unless... He thought, looking at both of them, both powerful houses in their own right.

Three houses, then. Three sets of interests, each losing money if the others tore the arrangement down. The easiest way to prevent betrayal was to make betrayal expensive.

He set the glass down.

"My lords, I have a special proposition before you," he said.

He instantly got their attention. Why would he not? They knew who Allan was, the man who brought a falling house to its peak, the one who destroyed House Emberwind.

"Yes?"

"House Oakwood, the Arclight house, and yours." He nodded at the Earl. "We have an opportunity at hand, a gap we can fill. Making a joint guild."

The Viscount’s eyes turned wide for a second. The Earl too, pulling his chair closer with keen interest.

"But before we continue, no one house owns it. If one of you moves against me, the other two lose money. If one tries to seize it, the others resist. Making it nearly impossible to take away from the man who built it."

Silence.

Nobody spoke. The music went on from its corner. The Earl turned his glass a quarter turn on the table. He had seen the problem before Allan finished the sentence: it was not just an opportunity; it was a warning. Yes, the opportunity was ripe, but whoever held this Guild held hundreds of armed professionals who knew how to fight and how to disappear. The Viscount had seen the value of that too. Neither was asking whether to build it anymore. They were ready to ask who would hold the biggest share.

The Viscount looked at Allan a moment longer. "You know this would require an insurmountable amount of gold."

"Indeed, maybe even a hundred thousand, but the return, oh, the returns would be far greater."

Allan let him think so. They had the gold. It cost them nothing, and he knew how this business worked. He knew that in the end it would all belong to him.