All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 267: Fruits of our Labors

Chapter 267: Fruits of our Labors

Harold rapped three times on the closed door. He waited a second and then knocked twice more in a particular cadence. The door creaked open, and he slipped inside, checking over her shoulder to make sure he still wasn't being followed.

He was greeted with the sight of an elderly woman standing over a bedridden figure. A fireplace crackled merrily near the back of the room, silhouetting the pair.

"How's he doing?" He whispered to the healer.

"Same as last time," she croaked at him, her voice rusty from disuse. "It's still going to be a couple of weeks before he can move."

Harold winced. He'd hoped for some sort of miracle, but apparently not. The Warden was not in good condition. By the time he had finally managed to work him out of the cells, the man was already on death's door. Worse, the guards had never really given up looking for him. Even now, they still hunt him across the city due to some unfortunate events that happened during their escape. To top it all off, Harold's identity had been revealed, and his face was now available to many of the kingdom's amazingly hostile spies.

How had the king managed to assemble such a pervasive network in such a short amount of time? Especially one that neither he nor the Warden had any idea about. It was ominous. People who had no preexisting connections to the kingdom or hidden motives that he could uncover were firmly in the king's pockets. They were constantly on the lookout for him, constantly observing wherever Harold went. And it had taken all of his skills to maintain undetected for this time. He'd even had to pay the healer a significant bribe to keep things quiet.

However, he would have to figure out a way to move soon. He was starting to run low on certain spell ingredients, and restocking in the city had been almost impossible. Harold had hoped that the Warden would be in good shape by this point, or at least well enough to pull him out. Then, they could reactivate their network. Not so much to resist the king, as that was still a secondary concern. The real problem was how to contain the damage of the Lieutenants getting free.

Harold had done what he could on his own, but his hands were all but tied. They hadn't even been able to leave the city for almost a month after he'd gotten the Warden out. A few of their contacts were activated, and hopefully, some of their messages to the outside organization were getting through, at least. Security on the other Lieutenant protections needed to be double-checked and reinforced with whatever spares they might have. But the organization wasn't made for that.

What was worse was that information wasn't flowing back, so he could only hope they could get out and flee to a nearby major city or some other place. Somewhere, they had some of their command stations, but they were outside of the purview of the king. Perhaps they could learn more and regroup to be more effective. But until the Warden finally healed and was coherent again, it would be rough going.

"Can I talk to him?" Harold asked.

The old lady shook her head. "No. He's sleeping. This is good. He's recovering. He was able to eat a full bowl of soup on his own earlier today. But at his age and what he went through, he's lucky to still be alive. Man must be stubborn as a mule."

Harold nodded. “That's for sure.”

The Warden hadn't been in one of the guest noble cells in the upper levels of the prison. That was where Harold had thought he'd find him, but no. The man had been stuck in the very bottom of a cell too small to lie down in, with a trickle of water running through it. He'd been emaciated and clearly had other injuries. But Harold had managed to carry him out, and that was what had given him away. Stealth was much harder with a burden like that.

Well, at least they made it out. And safely, too. There was only one variable that he hadn't yet accounted for in his plan. And that was the strange cult infiltrating the city. It was slowly but surely taking over, and they seemed to have some sort of central organization. Perhaps he could broker a deal with the cult and get them out early. Or maybe the Warden could do it when he woke up. It seemed that the strange figures might have enough control over the city that they might be able to make some changes.

Harold sat in one of the free chairs at the table and pulled out half an apple from a pocket. He leaned back and took a slow bite, running some figures in his head. He eventually nodded. He'd try to talk to them tomorrow. Perhaps they'd be able to help.

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It was early morning when I got back to the house to find that Beatrice had already left. But I could still tell there was something different. There was a bit of an uproar in the kitchens. By which I meant there was an extra dirty plate. Did we have a visitor?

We'd only been here for a few nights, and we were already having guests over. Well, a good thing. I had worked on preparing the place for the company.

I was a little disappointed that it hadn't gotten more done last night between the meeting with the demon and cleaning the streets, but I had stayed out a little bit later than normal to make up for the time I had wasted talking to the ghost demon. I did a quick once-over of the house to make sure it was presentable and found no one besides Mrs. Chadwick there.

She told me that Talia had gone off to do some grocery shopping, and I found the kids playing gully ball. Today, it took the form of something akin to volleyball, but with sticks. Two of each four-member team held sticks and were using them to whack the ball instead of throwing it. The game made even less sense to me now as I spent a few minutes watching, but they all seemed to be having fun, and no one was seriously hurt, so I moved on.

I didn't find the men anywhere nearby after venturing out for a bit, but I did find Talia at an impromptu market, haggling with a fruit vendor. I slipped into the crowd to observe.

After the first couple minutes of observation, I couldn't help but be surprised by the chaos. This market was simply a mess. At first, I had been a little bit hopeful about the lines of vendor stalls boasting tables full of wares under shaded awnings. I thought there would be some order here based on how neatly they were laid out. But no, it was chaos.

People milled around as merchants shouted. Tables got bumped, rattling their contents and causing a few spills. Kids ran around and hid under the tables as vendors chased them off with raised voices and shaken fists.

I had no idea how Talia managed to navigate her way through the sea of people and constant change. But she did. Even more, she did it with a calm, collected grace that told me she wasn't out of her depth and everything around her was far from unusual. Simple steps avoided the large eddies of traffic that trapped people in them, and she moved from one place to another, speaking quickly to distract the shopkeepers and occasionally exchanging some coin for whatever they were offering.

How did she know what to do? Could she interpret the chaos? Or was there some hidden pattern here? Something, some governing rule that I just hadn't yet decoded?

I did my best to whiz through the people's legs to stay around her level as she moved, but it required a lot of attention. Perhaps it was that they couldn't see me. Or perhaps my models just were not calibrated or capable enough of pulling me through. Whatever it was, I had to rely on last-minute corrections rather than planned pathing.

After a few minutes of dodging about and doing my best to observe, I found a different approach. I found a larger building in the center of the plaza and rested atop its steepled roof, gazing down and tracking as many variables as I could in an attempt to find a pattern in the market. While I dedicated a few subroutines to that, I watched as Talia gave away more and more of the coins to receive bits of various foods.

Eventually, I began to focus more on what she was actually doing. How was Talia picking up the food? What made food worth buying? I looked at the stuff she was selecting, and I started to notice some similarities across her selections. Now, this was a problem I could solve.

Whenever she grabbed fruit, it wasn't just any fruit. She was picking up the most ordered specimens, the ones with the least disruptions to the natural patterns within them. At least, she tried to. Most of the time, she ended up picking something that wasn't the best on the table, but it was never among the worst options. It was always something with the least amount of bruises, the brightest color, the cut of meat with the fewest bacteria.

Interesting. All this time, I had planted orchards and watched the humans gather food. However, I never really thought about the quality of growth. Talia wasn't accepting anything. She was picking out only the best.

That raised a question. If there was variation in what fruits a plant produced, then could I grow better fruit than what was naturally produced? Hmm. If I made the order inside the fruit higher, I could possibly give them more structure. Would that be better? It seemed like it. But was that true in every case?

I suddenly regretted not picking the Create Fruit skill. Evidently, it might have opened up more options than I'd expected, even if the protective coatings had been useful so far. Besides, maybe I didn't need the skill. Maybe it was time to experiment a bit on my own.

Lost in thought, I left the bazaar to go check on the fruit trees that I had planted in the back of the manor. Perhaps there was something I could learn from here. I did make a mental note to keep crunching the data I collected from the market's eddies and flow in the traffic to see if I could find some sort of governing dynamic. But right now, the fruit problem was more interesting. I wondered what would happen if I could use my domain to manipulate their organization a bit. What sort of properties could I give them?