Demesne 165 - Salt, Fees, Anchorage, Heat (Patreon)

After breakfast, Lori set about heating her Dungeon. Clearly she didn't need it, but it was the principle of the thing. A Dungeon was at the heart of the demesne, fortress and seat of a Dungeon Binder's power, first and last bastion against dragons. It was rare but not unknown for a demesne to be ravaged by a dragon so thoroughly that those who had taken shelter in the Dungeon needed to repopulate the entire demesne... and the only reason they managed to do so was that the dragon had managed to kill the demesnes around them, so they hadn't needed to worry about being invaded.

Hopefully she didn't need to worry about that. Dying by finding the entire demesne suddenly had a mountain on top of it, or finding it suddenly at the bottom of a frozen sea was… not survivable.

Even if she didn't need the warmth, her Dungeon needed to be warm and comfortable, not just because she lived there, but because the second level was an industrial area, and as someone who had worked in industries, it had always irritated her when the people she had worked for had been too cheap to pay for any sort of heating. 'You'll be sweating in no time, you'll be warm then', 'just warm yourself'… ugh. Horrid people. And they always paid the lowest rates, too.

Tempting as it would have been to not provide heating to save on expenses… she wouldn't actually be spending anything, whether beads or materials, so why not?

At Rian's suggestion, she had also placed bindings of firewisps in the old dining hall and the hospital to warm those locations, as well as indoor lightwisps in the latter's case, which… well, she had actually forgotten about. Still, he'd had a point. While both building had received shutters at some point, eating would be torturous in this new cold—or so Rian said—and should there be any injuries, the doctors and medics would need light to operate, and due to the new shutters, the building couldn't rely on natural light for it anymore. It was an oversight Lori was annoyed to have made.

She had to start with feeling the cold. That had been… unpleasant, but needful. After all, she couldn't properly heat her Dungeon if she couldn't tell how cold it was before, and how hot it was when she was finished. It had been surprisingly simple, deactivating all the firewisps around her. The cold had been like a bucket of water thrown over her, the change in temperature not exactly abrupt, but the end result had been sharp. Her firewisps had half-accidentally, half-instinctively come out of her grasp, like her lungs after she'd held her breath for too long, and she had immediately warmed to a comfortable temperature, the occasional breeze from her Dungeon's air circulation a cool breeze rather than a freezing bite.

Bracing herself, she did it again, and with her braced for it, the cold wasn't so surprising. It was, she was willing to admit, annoyingly chill, the kind of cold that made one want to curl up in bed with a good book and wait for a reasonable hour like noon, when the world had finally sufficiently warmed enough.

Lori grit her teeth and set about banishing that feeling from the confines of her dungeon.

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"Ah, so warm…" Rian sighed at dinner. Lori had spent the whole day trying to balance the temperature of her Dungeon, starting with putting heat-generating firewisps among the airwisps that circulated air in her demesne—heat needed a medium, after all—and then adjusting the output of the firewisps, making sure it would only generate up to a point and not grow hotter than that. Heat built up, after all. "Well, warmer, in any case."

"Additional heating isn't necessary right now," Lori said as she set up the chatrang board. "It will grow warmer as the heat builds up."

"And you can just make it hotter if it gets colder, right?"

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "If needed," she said. "I'll need to implement a more extensive system to take advantage of the heat we're excluding from the cold rooms, but for now this solution works." It worked but it wasn't… elegant, and a bit wasteful, even if it was the simplest solution to implement right now. "What is the progress on the farm?"

"It's… happening," Rian said unhelpfully. "We have a lot more open area to plant in now, which is both good and bad. That means more ground needs to be prepared, and since you can't assist with that, it has to be done the hard way. At least being out in the sun keeps us from getting cold, though I could do without the smell from the latrine soil. But the farmers say that once they have it all planted, when we harvest it we'll be able to regularly have bread."

"Something to look forward to," Lori nodded.

"Well, before then we have to make sure the chokers don't eat any of the grain we cast," Rian said. "Or at least too much of the grain we cast, since everyone seems a bit resigned to losing some. Even with our most optimistic estimates, it will be a while before we can get started on the Dungeon's farm, and it will eat heavily into the amount of grain we can eat. We might have to trade salt for grain at River's Fork, at least if we want to eat bread andmake the Dungeon's farm."

"Make sure our needs our fulfilled first before we trade away any of the salt," Lori said.

"They might ask us to pay a toll fee," Rian said. "At least, we'll have to be prepared if or when Shana—"

"Binder Shanalorre."

"Binder Shanalorre starts charging us for the privilege of passing through their length of the river," Rian said, voice suddenly sounding tired for some reason. "Hopefully it won't come to that, but at the very least do I have your permission to preemptively start giving them salt?"

Lori stared at him. "Why would we want to do that?"

"So we can essentially set the price," Rian said. "If we wait for them to start charging a toll fee, they can set the price, and it might be a percentage of our cargo, or it can be a weight that becomes a new minimum we have to gather. If we voluntarily start giving them salt, we essentially set the price, and it can be a much smaller fraction. It will also cause fewer delays, since if they demand a set percentage, we might be delayed while they inspect our cargo and count it all up."

Lori stared at him. "That makes absolutely no sense!" That… wasn't how economics worked! "That's not how economics works! We can't just give them things! Why… why…"

"Ah," Rian said, smiling smugly. "But it's not economics. It's interpersonal relations. Or rather, inter-demesne relations. People are far less inclined to be horrible to people who have been nothing but nice, helpful, generous and friendly to them. By giving them the salt when they don't ask for it, they'll seem greedy and churlish by imposing a higher toll fee or customs duty or both. And if they do so anyway… well, we tried, and you were right."

That… that… that…

"Ugh, fine, do it if you think it will work," Lori groaned.

"If it helps, it also performs the practical function of showing them the quality and desirability of our salt, likely making them more inclined to trade with us for it," Rian said.

"Well, why didn't you just say that in the first place!"

"Because it's only the secondary purpose of doing so. Conditioning River's Fork to allow us to pass without some sort of onerous fee is the main reason to do it. I'm having the Coldhold set off downriver tomorrow towards the ocean. With plenty of water to wash with, they should be able to last until they fill the holds salt…" Rian hesitated, then sighed. "Ugh, maybe not tomorrow. I'll have to set up something so they can stay warm. Maybe some kind of brazier… well, they'll be going within the week, anyway. Will you be able to maintain the Coldhold for that long?"

Lori thought of her list of bindings to imbue. "That shouldn't be a problem."

"If it helps, you won't need to make any more ice blocks to keep food cold," Rian said. "We have salt now, we can make salted meat. It'll preserve well, having it get iridiated will basically just tenderize it, and since we can cook it in water, that won't be a problem."

"I'll take your word for it." Preserving food with salt wasn't something she was knowledgeable about.

Rian nodded. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go get our food before they beat me to it." He stood, just as Riz, Mikon, and Umu arrived and started putting down bowls of food and cups of water.

"Too late, it seems," Lori said blandly, grabbing one of the bowls and cups.

"Hello Rian," Mikon said cheerfully. "Sit, sit, we brought dinner. And I finished the filter cloth you asked for, and made a few spares as well."

"The carpenters said they'll have the shutters ready soon," Riz said as she sat down to one side of Rian, Umu settling down on Rian's opposite side. The northerner woman blinked when she saw Mikon decide to sit down next to the other weaver. "M-maybe as soon as tomorrow, they said."

Rian stood there, looking up at the ceiling for a moment before sighing and sitting back down. "Thank you for bringing the food," he said, sounding sincere but tired. "Though if you're all going to be doing this from now on, I insist I get a turn getting food too…"

Lori tuned out what was likely to be 'relationship things'. Her mothers had also had a lot to say on the subject, as if her getting into some kind of intimate relationship was a given. Really, they got ahead of themselves on a lot of subjects like that, ugh. She focused on enjoying her food and playing chatrang with Mikon, who finally seemed to be developing some sort of proper caution. She no longer sent her pieces into attack range so recklessly, at any rate.

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Lori had checked the temperature of her Dungeon again the next morning, disabling the firewisps around her. While it had been a little cool, it was certainly far warmer than it had been the day before. Lori resisted the temptation to increase the output of the firewisps she'd set. She had to let it run for a few days to let the heat grow, otherwise she might overheat her Dungeon…

With the temperature of her Dungeon resolved, she set about going over the next thing she had to personally see to, which was proper storage for their boats in the event of a dragon. Lori's Boat could easily be picked up and carried into her Dungeon, so it wasn't a problem, but due to the size of Lori's Ice Boat and the Coldhold, that wasn't an option for them. The boats would need some kind of secured structure she could seal in the event of a dragon, and it would need to be along the river so it would be relatively simple to move the two vehicles there.

She toyed with the notion of just building an enclosure around the dock to which the boats were secured, but the dock had been built close to the water hub, and building a proper protective enclosure that would encompass the Coldhold alone would mean intruding into the water hub's structure. That would mean either rebuilding the water hub or making a too-tight enclosure, which the Coldhold would have difficulty maneuvering into and out of. The alternative was moving the dock a little farther, but that would put it too close to the clay pits, which was vital industry with established infrastructure she didn't want to have to move or rebuild.

With the docks as they were currently positioned not an option, and building the docks farther upriver would put it too close to the seels, disrupting their food supply, the only option was putting the enclosure downriver, past the laundry area and the aqueduct that carried up drinking water to the demesne's basins. Well past, as she didn't want to potentially affect their drinking water's quality.

She… should probably alter that system so that the drinking water reaching the basins also came from the water hub, which had been heated to kill dustlife in the water without actually resulting in distillation. It would certainly be far safer than water from the river itself, no matter how well she had planned their waste water disposal so that it wouldn't contaminate their drinking water…

Ugh, she'd have to do that next!

One thing at a time, one thing at a time…

She walked past the laundry area, ignoring the people there doing laundry and avoiding the clothes drying on the long lines strung up on poles stuck into the ground. Some of those poles were visibly wobbling a little, piles of rocks at their base to try and stabilize them. Absently, Lori reached out through her core to bind the earthwisps on those rocks, fusing them together and wrapping them around the poles they were around, before forming a wide base to properly stabilize the structure.

Once she was past all that, Lori reached a part of the riverbank were all the ropeweed had already been harvested, the stalks cut can long trampled, the dirt hard-packed. A few of the ropeweed at the edge of the river was already starting to regrow though, small shoots rising out of the ground. It was the site where they had constructed the Coldhold.

Sighing, Lori began to mark out a space for the shelter where the boats would be kept, drawing it out with lines of darkwisps she pulled out of her clothes so that the marks would be visible in the daylight. After all, if it was big enough to build the Coldholdat, it should be big enough to store it, right?