Book 3 Chapter 16: Fifty Percent

++Misogyny really is annoying sometimes.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

It took almost as long to coax Blakely onto my land-bound vessel as it did to travel with it. We were relatively close to Lachfel this time, travelling without an official vessel meant I could land at the coast nearest my family’s estate rather than needing to stop at one of the country’s docks. And it was infuriating to be delayed over such a trivial reason.

“I’m not going on that fucking thing,” he snapped.

“It will be slower than the last, and, as you have seen already, it is quite safe.”

In the end, I convinced him only by encasing the whole vehicle in an extra bubble of aether to ensure some level of protection should it crash. This raised its surface area, and thus made it slower, but at the very least abated the fears of my useless bodyguard. We were taking off shortly after.

One additional feature of the encased vehicle soon made itself known; we could talk. Earlier, at my vast oceanic speeds, I had only barely heard Blakely screaming at the top of his lungs. Now conversation was…not easy, the wind punching us from the outside still made it hard to hear, but certainly possible.

Which meant I was subjected to more of Blakely’s so-called ‘thoughts’.

“Why are you bothering with oil?” he asked me as I drove the vehicle forwards.

“What?” I snapped, still irritated by his delay.

“I mean, you can make something faster than anything short of a cloudscraper right? And I saw it only took you a minute or two to create it. Why not produce these to sell instead?”

His question left me rolling my eyes. “I make these sledges out of aether. I am very good at making aether, but nobody is perfect. The one I left by the shore will have finished dissolving within a few days, for instance. They do not last.”

“Right,” he replied irritably. “I know that, I remember the ones you used for transport in Poloira before learning to fly would dissolve too. But can’t you make one out of normal material?”

“What?”

“I mean,” he continued, “stone or…okay, not stone, but metal or even wood. There’s got to be something you could make this basic shape from, surely. It doesn’t have to be aether right?”

By the fluctuations in his voice, I could tell Blakely’s face was twitching even as he spoke. But he had me thinking.

“...Perhaps,” I admitted. “Yes, possibly.” Why had I not thought of that?

Magic-blindness. I had gone so long having the power of the arcane at my fingertips that I almost had a mental block regarding anything else, almost found it hard to even remember that there were mundane options for mundane solutions. I could not help but smile.

“Yes, you are right,” I said at last. “I will have to look into this.”

Of course, it was more difficult than he was implying. The hardest part for these constructs was the actual propulsion, something that most certainly did require magic. Steam engines were simply too heavy and cumbersome to move such tiny vehicles with any significant speed.

I tucked the idea away for later examination. It was the sort of thing that would be useful with far more funds than I had now, something for the future.

The rest of my journey was long, dull and uneventful. If nothing else, powering my sledge at top speed was some kind of training for my Vessel’s raw power, so I was not simply wasting the time outright. That did not make it any less tiresome. Compared to my vast speeds over the ocean I was currently crawling along on my belly, moving as fast as a train perhaps.

One hundred miles across Garamon’s countryside took me almost as long as three thousand had along the ocean.

Lachfel loomed ahead of me, and even then I almost missed it. The aether at my vessel’s front was translucent, but I had been forced to thicken it enough that it would survive the wind currents of high speed travel for hours, and light was barely able to pierce the barrier. Had I been unlucky, I may well have announced my return by crashing into a brick wall.

That would not have been very funny. Not at all.

Fortunately I noticed in time to slow the sledge and drop its walls, and Blakely and I continued to drift through the city streets at a more reasonable horse-drawn-carriage pace. Perhaps a shade faster, I was a busy woman after all.

Blakely was as pale as a ghost by the time we disembarked, and he looked like he would rather bolt than spend another second near me. I enjoyed the sight as I made my way into the mansion and headed promptly through it to see my father.

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The moment we were inside, of course, Blakely vanished. Here I was protected by my father’s guards, which meant I was not his problem.

Baron Vornholt answered my knock upon his study door and met me with perhaps the widest grin I had ever seen upon his face. I might have invented sunlight for the reception I was receiving, and he wasted no time in ushering me inside.

“There she is!” he laughed. “There’s my girl, my little tycoon! Bloody hell Isabel, I’ve been hearing one story after another about that refinery of ours, how did you do it?!”

I resisted the urge to bristle at hearing him refer to my refinery as ‘ours’. If nothing else, he was correctly observing who had started and was running the damned thing.

“Careful investments, good choice of territory and a few choice connections,” I replied.

In truth there was more to it than that. I was burning excess products from the refinery to fuel the machinery, and selling off its extractions for use in lubrication or making tar. The low prices had drummed up business quickly, and it is a simple fact that oil is so inherently profitable as to actually make it hard not to make money, provided you own your own field.

“You have your mother’s intuition, that much is clear,” my father grinned.

I did not remove any of his bodyparts, even though he seemed desperate to provoke me into doing so.

“I have brought the first of several repayments for the loan I took out from you,” I told him, holding out a roll of banknotes, one that had been very carefully sequestered on my person when I flung myself across the ocean.

My father took the money eagerly, like a starving dog being thrown a chunk of gristle. He flicked through the notes and looked more pleased with each one he counted.

“Marvelous. I knew this would work out, well done my girl!”

I decided not to remind him of how much convincing he had required, simply nodding and letting him have his enthusiasm.

“I…know I’ve never been terribly easy to get along with,” he said after a moment, his face falling. “But I want you to know, Isabel, that I’m proud of you. Really, I am.”

He meant it, I thought. My father’s face was so painfully earnest that it brought to mind images of an open wound exposed to the air.

But then I saw the smile slip as he sighed. “However, you don’t owe me a debt. What you owe me is shared ownership over our company.”

I kept my face carefully blank.

“I do not understand what you mean,” I told him, more to buy time than anything else.

“When you came to me for these funds, you made it clear that this was to help maintain the estate and benefit the Vornholt name. Were you lying?”

So this was it then. I had expected it, the thought had been looming at the back of my mind since I came here, but now my father had made it real.

“You want part of the business, then?” I asked him.

“Half,” he told me. “That’s only fair. If anything I’m being shorted by asking for that, on account of how little money you put into starting it.”

My father was volatile and needed careful management. At the moment, I was faced with the difficult choice of either keeping full control over the oil business or keeping his favour.

I started thinking it through carefully.

Less control for myself would inevitably worsen the running of it. Liches are logical and mentally focused in a way that normal humans, especially ones like my father, simply are not.

But there were other factors to consider. So far I had faced obstacles based on the idiotic views of people in both Garamon and Poloira regarding a woman running such a business, and those obstacles had been overcome. The next ones may not be, or may be more difficult and costly to do so.

As much as I would have liked this to be a contest of my competence against my father’s—one I would easily win—we would not at all be competing on an even playing field.

I had acknowledged this myself already, it was why I had strongly led the businessmen and land-owners of North Poloira to believe that I was only running my refinery on the behalf of Baron Agrian. And if his ownership of it became strictly true, then that would be so much the better. Then I could report it to lawyers and judges without fear of being brought up on fraud charges.

Eventually, reluctantly, I nodded. “Very well,” I conceded. “You will have joint ownership.”

I let my father’s smile linger a moment before I continued.

“Also, I would like us both to give the impression that you are the one actually running the business. Behind the scenes, I will be exerting as much influence as you with my dual-ownership, but it is more convenient if the wider world does not know that.”

My father was smiling again, at the eyes if not the mouth. He made a show of nodding gravely. “Yes, yes, you’re quite right. Very well then dear, we’ll do as you suggest.” He reached out to place a hand on my cheek, then scowled as I leaned back from it.

“Do not touch my face,” I told him simply.

His smile melted away, and he cleared his throat. “There’s more,” my father told me. “How long will you be in Garamon?”

“Why does it matter?” I asked.

“Because I just want to know how busy you’ll be for a while. Before you leave, in any case, you must see me again, that much is vital, understand?”

I did not like that wording.

“If I have time, and am given a reason to, then I will,” I told him firmly.

I met his eyes and stared, waited to see if a challenge would come. Some part of me hoped my father would try to strike me again. The results would not be hard to predict, but I was feeling frustrated from my long journey and was looking for an outlet.

My father denied me the opportunity, face like thunder as he turned away from me. “Right,” he said. “I…forgot.”

The bitterness in his voice was impossible to miss, but I had no time for his petulance, so I ignored it.

“I am going to be around for a few weeks,” I told him at last.

He nodded, and I took my leave. A few weeks was enough time to see to what I was here for, after all.

I still needed to clear out my old laboratory in Winzorth.