Demesne 360 - Siblings (Patreon)

Since we were having a late start, we grabbed a few chlyp skewers for a hasty breakfast from a street stall, and two buns each from a bakery so we'd have energy for all the walking we'd be doing today. Fortunately, the walking helped me shed my sleepiness, but I still felt tired. That would pass later in the morning, I knew, but for the moment I was simply going to be miserable.

We checked up on Master Yhosed's recommendation first, since he was nearby. I'd told him, as I had told all our prospective recruits, that I would come back in a couple of days so they'd have time to consider our offer. Wizard Lidzuga and his sister lived in a small room in a boarding house, one of those depressing places that seemed more a place to sleep than it was a place to live, though perhaps that was just my bias after living in Lorian. There were no families, for one thing, and I'd been told during the small talk stage of our discussion that the one married couple had been told to move out when the women had gotten pregnant.

Thankfully, my worry that Lidzuga wasn't going to be in was groundless. I found him sitting on a bench outside of the boarding house, working on what looked like a wobbly-looking chair, a wooden mallet in hand. He was gently tapping at pegs and tenons to firm it up, then seemed to be using Deadspeaking to fuse the pieces together to secure it. At least, it seemed to wobble less and less as Lidzuga worked. Clad in pale, tan-colored cloudbloom trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with the expected sweat stains, his pale red hair was wet with sweat and tied back with a cloth to keep it out of his eyes as he worked, but he looked up as I approached, and his face broke into a wide, happy smile.

"Tah, Rian!" he greeted, swinging the wooden mallet in little arcs in lieu of a wave as he kept one hand on the chair, no doubt to maintain whatever meaning was in progress. "I've been waiting for you."

"I hope that means good news, then?" I said. "Ah, Lidzuga, these are Multaw and Liggs. I brought them along in case any heavy lifting was needed."

"Tah," he greeted, waving the wooden mallet again. "Well, it depends on what you mean by good news. My sister said she wouldn't decide to go until after she'd met you." One shoulder went up and down in a shrug, as if to encapsulate the eternal unscrutable mystery that was sisters.

I nodded in understanding. As a man with a sister—even if I hadn't seen her in six, no, seven years—I knew well what he meant. "I see. Is she in at the moment?"

"She should be coming back from the bakery," he said, looking down the street, the opposite way we’d come. “Actually, there she is now.”

I followed his gaze, trying to figure out who it was by process of elimination. I didn’t have to think to hard about it, as the Deadspeaker’s sister was obvious by how she was looking directly at him. She had a displeased expression on her face that made me want to make myself scarce out of reflex, though that was hopefully from being out in this heat. Her hair was a vibrant red that was tinging towards orange where her brother’s was pale, and she cradled a carry cloth wrapped around a lumpy shape that was probably whatever she’d bought from the bakery.

“Lidz,” she said as soon as she was close, and I relaxed slightly at her easygoing tone, “we’re in luck, the bakery had just finished some meat rolls, so I got us some of those instead.”

“Thanks Kuw!” Lidzuga said. “Rian, this is my sister, Kutago. Kuw, this is Rian.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, going with an inoffensive, easygoing smile that would hopefully put her at ease.

My efforts slammed face-first into a wall, no doubt squashing its nose and perhaps losing some front teeth as Kutago narrowed her eyes suspiciously at me. “So you’re the one who’s trying to lure my brother to some other demesne,” she said.

“That’s me,” I said, giving her a small wave. “He said you wanted to meet me?”

She nodded curtly even as she handed the carry cloth to her brother, who began to unwrap it. “I had some questions about your offer.”

“I’d be happy to answer them, if I can,” I said as Lidzuga drew out a what was probably a meat roll. “What are they?”

Inwardly, I braced myself for a rejection. He didn't looklike he was looking for a reason to refuse, like abruptly saying 'ah, you don't have a library? Sorry, I have to refuse, I couldn't possibly live in a demesne without a proper library' or something like that. The sister though… well, she was actually doing the smart thing, getting more details about important matters, but that was close enough to make little practical difference.

“My brother tells me that you claim to have survived three dragons so far,” Kutago said. “I’d like to hear the details about how you did so.”

…

Well, this was awkward. On the one hand, it would be a simple matter to outline our preparations. It… might sound a little unbelievable—I honestly don’t know how well it compares to the speed in which infrastructure got built in the demesnes outside of Covehold—but I could probably explain it as Lori being… well, Lori. 'Our Dungeon Binder puts a lot of importance on infrastructure' is a reasonable explanation.

The problem there was a good chance that Lidzuga and his sister were going to end up living in River's Fork, which… well, didn't have Lorian's extensive infrastructure. It had a dragon shelter now, but…

Wait, perhaps this wasn't an issue. A Deadspeaker surely counted as important personnel. Surely they'd be moved to Lorian to keep them safe in the event of a dragon… right?

I was mildly terrifying that while I was mostly certain Lori would do the right thing—or at least the thing that would preserve lives—I wasn't absolutely sure.

My thoughts were interrupted as Lidzuga patted the bench next to him. “Well, if we’re going to be talking, the two of you better sit,” He said. The meat roll in his other hand already had a bite in it. “You need to eat to, Kuw. You want some, Rian?”

I shook my head, even as I accepted his invitation and sat down. “We already ate before coming here, but thank you for the offer.”

Kutago rolled her eyes but sat down on her brother’s other side, reaching into the carry cloth to get a meat bun herself.

I took a deep breath as I sat down, looking like I was organizing my thoughts, and helped by the fact that was exactly what I was doing. "Well, to start with, our Dungeon Binder was particular about where they formed the dungeon's core for the demesne," I said. "They were very particular about how the core needed to be inside a cave of a moderately large hill…"

The two of them listened as I listed all the particular features of that Lori had made over the past seasons, slowly eating through the baked meat buns. I admitted to the hurried excavation she'd done when she'd felt the original dragon arriving, of the water reservoir she'd dug out and filled, of how she'd stayed up all night to maintain the, in hindsight, very rudimentary defenses she'd made. Of how the Dungeon had become a dining hall, which it basically still was to this day. The cramped and slightly inadequate in-dungeon bath. The second level she'd excavated, which was still bigger than they really needed, so the unused rooms were used for grain storage, the carpenters, the weavers, the ropers and the gristmill. The still-unfinished but still-expanding dungeon farm, all the water systems, the cold rooms, the ventilation…

I also delved into the defenses Lori had set up for when there were dragons. The hot moat, the binding of lightningwisps, the vents that let use draw in fresh air, the darkwisps…

It was actually quite impressive when I listed it all out like that, and Lidzuga seemed to think so too as he listened with rapt attention, occasionally asking how effective the defenses had been. The chair in his hands continued to move as he tapped the pegs and tenons back into holes and mortices before he fused them whole with Deadspeaking. While that probably wasn’t very complicated and taxing work, it spoke well of both his capabilities and experience that he managed it while listening to me speak. Hopefully his work when something had his full attention was commensurately more capable.

"That sounds like a fair-sized dungeon," he said as he finally set the chair aside. The chair now stood solidly, no longer loose and wobbling. "A lot of the surviving demesnes have dug out dungeons themselves, or hired Whisperers and Mentalists to dig it for them, but I've always heard they get fairly cramped. Yours doesn't seem to have that problem."

I shrugged. "Our Dungeon Binder has good motivation to keep expanding the dungeon. The excavated stone is our primary building material because it's so plentiful and relatively easy to shape."

"Hmm… yes, I can see that…" the Deadspeaker nodded. "And you said any stone that hasn't been used for building is used to reinforce the front of the dungeon. It all sounds better than the colored dragon shelters around here."

“That wouldn’t be hard to do,” Kutago grumbled. Her suspicion and curtness had softened as I’d explained about our dungeon’s defenses, and she’d asked her own questions as well, about practical logistical matter like ‘how was the waste in the dungeon dealt with’. Fortunately, that was something I could answer, since it was part of my duties to make sure it was being done. Lori might have a private bathroom, but she didn’t have a private latrine, so I had the dungeon’s kept clean, emptied, and as fresh-smelling as we could manage.

"It can't be too bad, if you're still alive to complain about them," I said.

The two siblings exchanged looks.

"Well, I suppose it's enough to keep people alive, but every dragon it seems like the shelters get more and more cramped and uncomfortable," Lidzuga said. "The Horotracts taking shelter with us have to keep taking shifts to give us all enough space to breathe. I think we've petitioned for the shelter near us to be expanded twice already, but from what I've heard the soonest any expansion work is likely to begin is next red month."

"Oh."

Kutago sighed. "It's not so bad all over. I've heard that the population in the area simply grew larger than was planned for, but… well, unfortunately we don’t really have time to go looking for a new boarding house we can afford in a part of the demesne with a nicer shelter."

I resisted the urge to tell them how our demesne doesn't have that problem and just nodded. No need to come on too strongly.

For a moment, the three of us sat in silence.

“So…” I said awkwardly, “while I don’t want to rush you… we plan to leave some time tomorrow. If you’re going to decide to turn down our offer… well, either way I need to know sooner rather than later so I know what to prepare the ship for.”

The siblings looked at each other, and Lidzuga gave his sister an expectant look.

She sighed. “Fine, fine. You can go have your adventure, exploring strange new lands and seek out new beasts and bugs to draw and study.”

“What do you mean ‘my’ adventure? You’re the one who decided to come to the new continent with me!”

“Well, someone has to make sure you don’t just go rushing into trouble. You wouldn’t have even asked about their shelter’s conditions if I hadn’t reminded you.”

“I assumed they must have one if they’d survived this long.”

I felt like an intruder as the sibling bickering to place. Really, hadn’t they ever learned they needed to keep disagreements like that private? It was the sort of thing an unscrupulous manipulator could use to drive a wedge between them to separate them and leave one or the other more vulnerable.

I missed it so much…

Hoping that my own sister was doing well, I waited for the two of them to remember I was still here.