Stone and Blood: Act 4, Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Hunched over her table, Florine worked frantically on a piece of intricate needlework. There was no time. There was never enough time.

They wanted done in hours what should have taken days. Why were they so unreasonable? She mentioned as much and all they did was cut another hour off of her deadline.

Florine glanced up at the sound of approaching boots, then cursed herself for not focusing on her task. They were coming. She was nowhere near done. Her hands moved faster as if what little progress she could make in a few minutes somehow mattered.

“Time’s up!” Falagrim said.

Falagrim snatched her work from her hands. A sob wracked Florine’s shoulders. It was impossible, yet they kept forcing her to try.

“Terrible,” Falagrim shook his head sternly. “Absolutely terrible! Is there nothing that Humans are good for?”

“No one can tailor a ballroom gown in four hours!” Florine protested, “It’s absolutely impossible!”

“Fah, excuses!” Falagrim pointed to her right, “He’s doing just fine.”

At the workstation next to hers, Liolio was working on his third dress. She didn’t know how he did it. They had all started at the same time.

Falagrim tossed her incomplete work into a rubbish bin nearby.

“Start again,” he shook the handle of his whip at her. “You have three hours.”

“Three? But–”

“And if you fail this time, you’re going into the pot.”

The pot…

Boobeebee had failed the previous day. She suspected that the Zern hero had ended up as the disgusting bowl of green soup they had eaten that evening, and it seemed that it was true.

“No…” Tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks, “No! I don’t want to be soup!”

Florine ran for the door in the corner of the room. She didn’t know where to go, but she couldn’t stay where she was. There was no way she could finish a dress in three hours.

She burst out of the door and fled down the corridor. After three steps, she fell face-first to the stone floor. She tried to get up again, but something was pulling on her leg. Looking back, she saw a whip coiled around her ankle. Holding the other end of the whip was Velgath, who rapidly stomped forward with an iron club in her hand and a grin on her face.

Florine sat up with a shriek. Sitting on her stomach, Liolio glanced around the room before regarding her with a beady black eye.

“Liolio does not detect any danger,” the avian Demihuman said.

The Vampire poked her head into Florine’s room. She waved the Undead handmaiden away before bending forward to cradle her head in her hands.

Now I’m even dreaming about it…

“Sorry, Liolio,” she said. “It was just a nightmare.”

Liolio settled back down. She wasn’t sure if Miq had nightmares or even dreamed since they were always at least half awake.

After visiting The Refinery, Florine was too disturbed to continue her tour. Even after returning to Felhammer Citadel, the scenes that she had witnessed still haunted her. Unwilling to let that paralyse her, she resolved to make sense of everything that she had seen that day. Unfortunately, her emotions and thoughts were still a mess and she couldn’t get much done. She went to take a nap hoping that she would wake refreshed, but her distraught state of mind ended up concocting horrible dreams.

Everything seemed so benign right up to the end.

Perhaps that was the most unsettling part about it. If she had visited Khazanar as a Merchant and didn’t know that the Dark Dwarves kept slaves, she would have never suspected that there were any slaves at all. If anything, she would have admired how high the quality of life was for everyone.

Liolio fluttered over to a nearby chair when Florine pulled back her blanket and rose from her uncomfortably hard bed. She went over to peek out of an arrow slit – Grimmantle was still burning – before returning to her desk. She stared down quietly at the blank sheet of paper that she had left lying there.

How does it all work?

She released an angry sigh. It was a question that she already knew the answer to, but her heart refused to accept it.

While the intricacies of an individual’s situation could be considered complex, populations were relatively simple to understand and manage. In the same way that the impoverished masses eking out a meagre living in the cities of the northern Human nations could be subtly directed to endlessly toil for next to no personal gain, so too could populations of slaves be managed. Khazanar’s system was so blatant in its methods that she couldn’t imagine that anyone wasn’t aware of what was going on, including the slaves themselves. Yet, blatant schemes were rarely a deterrent for those participating in them.

In any society, there was ‘up’ and ‘down’. This was generally measured through the relative degree of wealth, privilege, and freedom that individuals enjoyed and people seemed to naturally gain a sense of it as they grew accustomed to their environment. Shrewd countries, such as the Baharuth Empire, manipulated their citizens’ sense of those things through a robust propaganda program.

Pride and individuality were exploited by dangling the notion of ‘meritocracy’ before the masses. People believed that they were where they were in society through personal achievement or personal fault. Thus, everyone worked to improve their situation, completely distracted from or uncaring of the fact that they lived in an authoritarian regime that had introduced that premise in the first place.

While Khazanar was far less subtle about keeping people in their places than the Empire, the concepts that they employed were similar. The Refinery filtered out anyone that couldn’t adapt to life in Khazanar. One wouldn’t be wrong in saying that, past that point, the quality of life for a slave in Khazanar was far better than that of most imperial citizens. They were ‘educated’, kept well-fed, had decent accommodations and sanitation, and had access to free medical care.

And that was just the baseline that Khazanar’s slaves worked off of. They had their own little game to play between themselves, competing over the rights and privileges that slaves could obtain. One could earn better food, accommodations, ‘breeding rights’, and probably a fair number of other things. All of this, of course, came at next to no cost to the Dark Dwarves.

Slavery in Khazanar was not simply the extractive institution that she first imagined it to be. It was a cleverly designed society within a society that successfully regulated the behaviour of the millions who participated in its workings. She wasn’t sure whether the slaves even considered themselves slaves once they got used to things. Most of them had come from the Realms Below and Khazanar was an island of order and security within that insanely dangerous environment.

She wondered if the systems of slavery in other places were similar. In a world where everyone seemed to be able to eat everyone else and powerful dangers abounded, a country was essentially a sanctuary where people could at least harbour expectations of safety and stability.

Florine shook her head and picked up her pen. The practical realities of the wider world aside, there were undoubtedly useful takeaways for the Sorcerous Kingdom after examining how things worked in Khazanar. As her line of thought had led her before things took a horrible turn, the institution of slavery in Khazanar was essentially an organisation that collectivised the resources that went into its slave economy, turning it into an industry in and of itself.

The Dark Dwarves also controlled every industry that supported the slave economy, meaning that every input and output was known and probably documented, allowing them to run their slave empire as a country-sized business. The massive, standardised scale at which it operated had the effect of making things spectacularly cheap and efficient, much like how industrial workshops were compared to cottage industry, a restaurant kitchen was to cooking at home, or trade caravans compared to pedestrian peddlers.

When analysed and organised into economic terms, Florine found that it was less like the Baharuth Empire – which simply allowed its people to prosper or perish each according to their own means – and more like Warden’s Vale. The situation of Frontier Nobles was an odd juxtaposition of fierce independence and essential interdependence.

Resources were strictly controlled and every member of society was expected to contribute. The vast majority of a frontier territory’s surplus was reinvested into growth and development. Individuals who insisted on engaging in selfish pursuits to the detriment of the community could literally lead to its complete destruction.

In that sense, Ludmila treated her demesne less like a territory and more like a ship that sailed long-distance trade routes. It was something about the Frontier Noble that Florine hadn’t known until she got to know her as a friend. Even after the advent of the Sorcerous Kingdom, this mode of thought persisted. Ludmila Zahradnik did not think like the civilian population of the interior. Her measure of success was founded on her sense of communal survival on the frontier. It wasn’t about winning or losing relative to other people or territories: it was about an entire society living or dying.

That desperate – which outsiders who didn’t know what was going on would consider extraordinarily greedy – mindset catapulted Warden’s Vale to its current success. Though it had a tiny population compared to that of the established heartlands, it was already well ahead of everywhere else in the Sorcerous Kingdom and only looked like it would build on that lead in leaps and bounds.

Ultimately, Florine’s examination of Khazanar’s economic mechanisms represented yet another confirmation of something that she had only recently learned about over the past year. That was the existence of the ‘Class System’ that dictated the capabilities and growth of everyone in the world. By extension, it also dictated how civilisations developed and what avenues were the most efficient at obtaining progress in all fields.

While the world at large appeared to be ignorant of the minutiae of the Class System, most civilisations had grasped it to various degrees. People did not view things in terms of ‘Levels’, but whatever their society’s institutions had devised.

Adventurer ranks. Difficulty Levels. Certifications such as ‘apprentice’, ‘journeyman’, ‘master’, and ‘grandmaster’. They all consistently correlated with different Levels in specific Job Classes according to the investigations being conducted by certain knowledgeable parties throughout the Sorcerous Kingdom. What they considered a ‘genius’ did not so much have to do with stand-alone intellect than it was about whether someone had a high aptitude in their chosen vocation or had figured out how to gain Job Class Levels at a rapid rate.

It didn’t end there, either. Many organisations facilitated growth specific in their respective fields. The Human society in which she had been raised had institutions for nearly every facet of society. Guilds guided and standardised professional development in various trades. The aristocratic establishment produced civilian administrators and military officers. By extension, rural tenancy provided the framework in which rural industry – which historically involved roughly ninety-five per cent of the population – and its associated Job Classes developed.

Indeed, they weren’t actually ignorant of how the world worked in a practical sense. What they were ignorant of was the absurdly arbitrary and deterministic nature of the Job Class system and what it was truly capable of.

Because earning a decent livelihood for oneself in their civilisation only demanded a few levels in one’s chosen Job Class, the apparent difference between individuals was negligible. Also, though it was uncommon, one could even gain three or four levels in multiple Job Classes and become a master in multiple trades. This reinforced the notion that people had the freedom to be whatever they wished to be so long as they applied themselves. The most ‘well-known’ example of this – though it wasn’t considered as such by most – was Blacksmiths, who could go on to become Silversmiths, Weaponsmiths, and so on. In all, it created the illusion of the ‘mundane world’ that nearly everyone believed in.

The difference between countries like Khazanar, Baharuth, and Re-Estize did not so much stem from the economic systems that they used, but from the degree of investment in institutional and personal development.

Re-Estize was clearly the furthest behind in this regard. Its founding institutions had long stagnated and no investment was made to foster new national institutions. In the private sector, the guilds merely maintained their existing state as the various fiefs failed to make any progress in any field. The only ‘guild’ that made any headway was the country’s ‘thieves’ guild’, which was an expansive criminal syndicate parasitising the nation.

As for the reason why this had happened, Florine could think of several reasons that collectively contributed to Re-Estize’s current state. First and foremost was the fact that institutions were colossal things that were inherently expensive to innovate. Once established, institutions struggled to remain progressive as they by nature sought to maintain a set of standards and proven practices. There were no exceptions to this, even in institutions that were dedicated to research and development.

Creating a new institution required a combination of leadership, political will, economic means, and practical needs. All that and more was almost always in the hands of existing institutions. While Re-Estize had a favourable economic climate and thus plentiful resources to invest in national institutions, it either lacked some or all of the rest through nearly all of its history. There were no dramatic events that served as a catalyst for development as Re-Estize had been protected by the Slane Theocracy from non-Human threats for its entire existence.

The most notable cases of institutional investment by the government came in the form of two of Re-Estize’s leading Nobles: Marquis Raeven and Marquis Boullope. With the threat of an expansionary Human empire to their east, Marquis Boullope had created a standing army that was said to be nearly on par with an imperial army group. This could be said to be the achievement of a genius, as it had taken the Empire nearly six centuries to develop the Imperial Army to its current state while Marquis Boullope had taken less than a decade.

Similarly, Marquis Raeven had a powerful army, but he also invested extensively in progressive territorial development. Before the advent of the Sorcerous Kingdom, Raeven’s demesne was the one which every other Noble looked to with awe and envy. One might ask why they didn’t follow in his footsteps if they envied his achievements, but the answer was simply because they probably couldn’t. Most probably couldn’t even enforce the law in their own territories, never mind attempting any form of progress.

A Marquis was a stupendously powerful and wealthy individual. They were nearly kings in their own right, and, as Nobles, they effectively ruled as kings over their own territories. Because of this, both Raeven and Boullope could ‘brute force’ institutional development. Counts and Barons neither had the economic strength nor the population to do the same thing.

This brought Florine’s thoughts to the Baharuth Empire, which could be said to be an extension of this idea. As a breakaway state founded by a martial house, the nascent imperial dynasty rallied the martial houses of the then-eastern half of Re-Estize, forming the Imperial Army to protect itself from any attempts by Re-Estize to reclaim its lost territories. The creation of that army not only provided protection from external threats, but also served as a policing force that answered to the imperial throne alone.

Over the generations, each Emperor used the Imperial Army as a powerful tool in their quest to turn the Empire into a centralised state, creating more institutions which in turn only answered to the imperial throne and thus further strengthened the Emperor’s position. This culminated in the rise of the current Emperor, Jircniv Rune Farlord El-Nix, who used the power cultivated over generations to purge the majority of his political opponents and rule as a mostly-popular autocrat.

One might question how the Empire could be so lucky as to have six long-reigning sovereigns in a row who all happened to successfully work toward the same overarching objective, but one couldn’t question that it had happened. Among the aristocratic elite of the northern Human nations, the imperial dynasty was held up as a paragon – a house that exemplified everything that a Noble could be and achieve. The common citizenry of the Empire treated them as icons of their country’s present and future greatness.

All that aside, it could be said that those with enough wealth and power were the only ones with the means to pioneer new institutions and keep old ones on a progressive track. This could be achieved either through collective or individual will, though pooling everything into an individual undoubtedly made it easier to get things that were more radical or were not even present in the collective imagination of the people in place.

The Emperors of old founded the Imperial Army and all of its branches, then the Imperial Ministry of Magic, and then the Imperial Magic Academy that indoctrinated the future elites of the Empire. As time went on, the different imperial universities appeared and even the Grand Arena, which served as both a distraction for the masses and a tool for propaganda. Probably the most impressive thing about it all was that the Empire’s institutions continued to innovate and retain their progressive edge.

Counterintuitively, it was probably the traditional view of being an underdog that needed to continually strive for advantage that facilitated this. Now that she thought about it, it was the same thinking that drove Ludmila’s efforts in her demesne.

Florine reached into her Infinite Haversack for another stack of paper. Her pen hovered over the corner of a fresh page as she considered how she might tie everything together to explain what was going on in Khazanar.

A degree of centralisation sufficient to facilitate the development of major institutions…external threats that spur development…

Rather than external threats, she could probably categorise it as one of the most fundamental forms of competition.

Considering the utilitarian modes of thinking employed by Emperor Jircniv and the institutions of the Empire, it wasn’t a stretch to think that the Empire might have also been able to achieve similar results with its own system of slavery given enough time. Since the Faith of the Four held slavery to be a morally reprehensible practice, however, they went in a different direction and worked to gradually remove its existence.

The Dark Dwarves, however, had no such moral compunctions. Additionally, they were a coldly practical and hard-working people – all they ever seemed to do was work. By all appearances, it was this cold work ethic that came first and then was applied to the slaves that the Dark Dwarves came into possession of, resulting in the facility known as The Refinery and the system of slavery practised in Khazanar.

Since they didn’t seem to place much value in personal freedom – Velgath even went so far as to call individuality a curse – the high degree of control that the Dark Dwarves held over everything combined with their work-oriented culture served as the perfect laboratory for figuring out how the Class System worked.

Slaves that had no desire to work in the tasks assigned to them were bound for the bottom rung. Those who were too rebellious and deemed unfit for the society that had been designed for Khazanar’s slaves were liquidated. They knew that those slaves wouldn’t be able to get anywhere, so the Dwarves switched from training them to recouping as much of their costs as possible, forcing those ‘failed’ slaves to toil until they died. Once they died, it freed up the resources to try again with the next slave.

‘Trainees’ that passed the initial filter were trained in vocations that they showed demonstrable aptitude in. Using Blacksmiths as a point of study, Florine found that nearly all of those slaves reached what Human countries would consider a master level of work quality, while perhaps one in a hundred would end up as grand masters that were capable of working with mithril. Slaves capable of working with orichalcum were one in ten thousand, and slaves that could work with adamantite were one in one hundred thousand.

This ratio of skilled artisans was only in line with the other countries that she knew of at the master level. Beyond that, Khazanar was a clear outlier in terms of its industrial and economic capacity. Never mind the Dark Dwarves, the productive potential of their slaves alone dwarfed the rest of the region combined.

In summary, the Dark Dwarves of Khazanar understood that will, aptitude, and challenge factored heavily into Job Class growth. This, in turn, allowed them to create a facility that forcefully applied practices that leveraged that knowledge to their slaves. Once the slaves ‘graduated’ from The Refinery, the society that they found themselves in was one that incentivised a mindset that continued to encourage Job Class growth.

As evil as she believed their society to be, Florine understood that it offered a missing piece of the puzzle that they were trying to solve in the Sorcerous Kingdom. For the general population to rise above a certain level and thus rise above the mundane reality they had been stuck in for generations, the leadership of the Sorcerous Kingdom had to spearhead an institutional effort that invested in vocational growth and created a culture where individuals desired that growth.

The latter part of that statement was by far the more problematic of the two challenges. Unlike Khazanar, the Sorcerous Kingdom couldn’t roll carts filled with dead children out of classrooms on a daily basis. Something had to encourage people to strive for ever greater standards of excellence of their own volition.

To Florine, the apparent answer was to create a market that was only accessible through excellence. One only needed a certain income to get by comfortably in the Sorcerous Kingdom. The average income of a master artisan or the equivalent vocation in other fields was enough to get married and raise a family with. Those who owned the title to a rural tenancy fell in the same category, especially now that crop failures and other difficulties were a thing of the past.

In order to get people to do more through market forces, they could either raise the cost of living or convince people that they would be happier with more. The former required a government to fight its own market, which was ultimately a losing proposition. The latter was something that was already considered natural in Human society.

Better food. Larger accommodations. A more luxurious lifestyle. More land and possessions.

Or a nice new outfit.

The thought sent her mind back to the spat between Liane and Ludmila. Before that, she would have readily favoured the method, but, now that she understood at least a bit of Ludmila’s perspective and was exposed to how other races perceived the world, she was plagued by a pile of doubts over that path. Not only did she have doubts about its effectiveness on other races, but it would also transform the Sorcerous Kingdom into an exploitative nation whose population was compelled to devour the world’s resources.

Could they simply espouse the virtues of a good work ethic? Or perhaps a system that valued prestige above all else. That was what tended to come to the fore in subcultures where material wealth became mostly decoupled from one’s sense of personal achievement. This was demonstrated in academic, artistic, and high-end vocational circles, as well as in the ranks of the aristocracy.

Wait a minute…

Florine let out a short, quiet laugh and scratched her head. If applied to society as a whole, her line of thought basically imitated the Faith of the Six. Just how much had they figured out, and how many civilisations around the world operated on a similar level?

As a Noble seated at the head of a Merchant house, her worldview was inundated with the material aspects of the world. The daily operations of her house were filled with reports from her companies, the practical needs of her subjects, and her work for the Sorcerous Kingdom’s royal court. It wasn’t a career that had much exposure to the diverse landscape of religious and ideological approaches to life that surely must exist. As a result, outside of the Faith of the Four, everything just felt weird to her and she often simply handwaved those things away as quirks that were a private matter in a secular state.

Except they weren’t. Far from that, they heavily influenced the behaviour of individuals, often more strongly than the practical aspects of life. Those aspects also appeared to hold keys to understanding the world that would never gain traction in a highly materialistic worldview. Ignoring their existence in favour of trying to paint everyone with the same brush in the same colour was simply asking for trouble.

“Pip!”

Florine looked up at Liolio’s warning. A few seconds later, there was a knock on the door.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Prince Felhammer has requested your presence in the great hall,” Isoroku’s dry voice came through from the corridor.

She glanced down at her pile of notes. It felt like she had made a great deal of progress in organising her thoughts. More importantly, she had stopped thinking about what she had seen in The Refinery.

“Did he mention what it was about?”

“The delivery of additional security forces is due,” the Elder Lich said. “Additionally, Prime Minister Albedo has summoned you for a review.”