Dead Tired - Volume Four - Chapter Five

Hmm... gonna do a few more character things, but for now, back to the main story?

Chapter Five

An entire week passed, somehow, and Fenfang wasn’t sure if it had been real or not.

She’d wake up in the morning with a start, often finding Alex by her bed with a kind smile and some toasted bread and warm tea. She’d scarf it all down, get dressed in a hurry, then rush out of her rooms and get back to work.

Every day, without pause, had been a new disaster. 

Suppliers were complaining, merchants were asking for more, the security was lacking in places, too tough in others. She had to deal with stupid and corrupt officials at least twice a day. By the start of the fourth day, she was hanging them by their feet off the palace walls in nothing but their underthings with painted signs explaining their sins.

Mostly it had been the sin of wasting her time by trying to line their pockets. The hangings actually helped, which was a distressing fact she’d ponder more later. 

She didn’t want to be evil, but she did want to be efficient, and all too often it felt like one led right to the other.

Most of all, there were questions that landed before her that she had to answer. Often, people wanted those answers quickly and they wanted them to be intelligent. At first she put them off, looking for more time to research things, to find the right answer. 

That had proven to be the wrong way of doing things. Perfection was nice and all, but ‘good enough’ was plenty fine.

Sometimes, the queries sounded relatively simple, things like how many carts did she want lining the streets and how many permits for vendors did they need? Well, wouldn’t that depend on the layout of the stalls and streets? She’d send some undead out to measure things, only to be stumped when it turned out that stalls and vendors didn’t have anything approaching a standardized system for their stalls.

One question like that could stump her for a day, and it was never something that important.

So now she made it up.

It was... weird. It felt wrong. But dammit, it kind of worked most of the time. How many stalls? Fifty. Oh, there were two hundred merchants that wanted stalls? Well, the first fifty were discounts, the next hundred would be twice as expensive.

Some merchants had stalls that were too large? Write new rules, and tell them that if it wasn’t fixed by the morning, they’d get fined. 

It was rude, and abrasive, and she found herself handling some of her stress by quietly and firmly warning people that she could end their careers and hang them by the ankles from the walls for a day.

People listened, things got done.

The advertisements were made, news was circulated, and she even had her master ‘ship out’ ads to different areas where people could stumble across them.

The city for the tournament was coming along at the kind of pace that surprised even her, and she had an inkling of what her master could do. 

Overnight, a large stretch of not much went from desolate and empty to a grid of roads, and then a few days later, there were hundreds of homes, then a wall, then past that, the skeleton of the great arena where the tournament would take place.

As she woke up, had a quick bite, then padded over barefoot to the porch attached to her room to take in the city below and the city being constructed, she couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to be someone from Yu Xiang. Maybe someone from the lower districts, living here their entire lives, only to climb up somewhere tall, or step up onto the walls, and see a whole new city, just a walk away that hadn’t been there a week ago.

Magic, she reminded herself, was truly amazing.

Now, if only it were so easy to use. She could barely string together a single free hour to practice with these days. At this rate, she was going to fall behind.

“Are you feeling better?” Alex asked.

“Hmm?” she asked before turning to the maid. “Oh? Yes, I suppose. Than you for the tea, it’s lovely.”

Alex smiled. “No problem. Rem made it.”

“Really?” Fenfang asked. She hesitated with the cup in hand. Had it been poisoned? She was pretty sure that none of her spells could help with poison and she wasn’t ready for her Master to bring her back as a skeleton just yet.

Alex nodded, unknowing or unconcerned about Fenfang’s worry. “Rem is becoming quite the butler. She hasn’t quite mastered Mage Hand yet, but she can make something close to it, and I think she secretly enjoys making tea.”

“Huh, is she complaining less?” Fenfanh asked. She sniffed at the mug, then realized that she was being silly. It was perfectly drinkable just moments before, wasn’t it? She took a sip. Maybe it was a little weak? She wasn’t sure.

“She’s... not complaining any less, no,” Alex admitted, a little sheepish. “But she has seen Mem’s ability with the spell as a great source of motivation.”

Right, no one expected Meme of all mantises to master... anything, actually. To see her become so good with Mage Hand was a little disconcerting. Had she learned it even faster than Fenfang? No, certainly not. That wasn’t possible.

“Besides, I told her that teamaking is just a skip away from poisoning, and that encouraged her a lot too.”

Fenfang set the mug down. “That’s nice,” she said. She took a small cloth--provided by Alex to wipe her mouth with--and discreetly spat into it. “A-anyway, what’s on the list for today?”

“There’s a visit to the new city in the afternoon, and Seventeen wishes to talk about the security for incoming competitors. A few have started to make their way over and have been detected by our longer-ranged scouts. Ah, but the first thing this morning is a meeting.”

Fenfang frowned. A meeting? She’d had two or three a day, so it was hard to remember with whom and about what she was supposed to meet. “What meeting?”

“With the merchants Bao and Mao,” Alex said.

Fenfang groaned. “Can I stay in bed and sleep in? I’d much rather do that then suffer through a meeting with those two. Why are they even together?”

“You suggested it,” Alex said. The maid had their maidly hands clasped together over their stomach and looked particularly prim and proper and not at all amused, and yet Fenfang could taste the emotion in the air. “I believe you wanted to avoid spending time with them as much as possible, so you scheduled their meeting at the same time and place.”

“Curse my past self for being clever,” she muttered.

It might be a god idea, maybe.

Bao was the owner of the Gain Consortium, a family business that had grown quite large in Yu Xiang and in just about every other city in her little empire. He wasn’t even in the top one-thousand richest people in the wider Jade Empire, but in hers? Yeah, he was up there. 

He consortium had a lot of shops and smaller businesses. Mostly his family had been money lenders and were quick to buy small enterprises, reaping tiny fractions of profit off of a dozen companies all at once. 

On the flip side of the coin was Mao. The man owned the stone and maybe all of the sand around here. And since this was a desert, there was a lot of sand and stone to go around.

His company had nine quarries, and over time he had purchased literally every stone mason and glass-making company in her empire. It didn’t sound too impressive on the surface, but it put him in a very nice position over a longer period.

He had a monopoly on the single most common building material in the region, and so anyone building anything had to go through him.

“Do we have any ideas what they’re after?” she asked.

“In the short term, or in the long?” Alex asked. “And do you want me to help you dress?”

She sighed. “I should bathe first.”

“Water is drawn already,” Alex said.

And so it was. The small washroom adjoining her room had a full tub of warm and faintly perfumed water. Fenfang tossed off her nightshift and dipped into the bath. She would have enjoyed taking her time, but time was in short supply, so it was a quick bath. 

“Alright!” she said, loud enough for Alex to hear. “What did you mean, earlier, about short and long term?”

She could see Alex’ shadow, just on the other side of the door. It opened, then Alex’s arm came around and hooked a nice dress onto a stand by the entrance. “I meant that they are complex men with complex goals. They’ll want something from you that you can give them now, and something from you for later. If you know what both are, then you can anticipate them, and plan accordingly.”

Fenfang hummed. That... sounded plausible, she supposed. Maybe she could look into it more, then?

***