Nobody had elected him, of course; he had seized control of the Town Core, and the only way to remove him was to kill him or convince him to pass on the power to another Arcane Official. Ruling Orom wasn’t a popularity contest, but he wanted people to be happy. Before he did anything, he would run his ideas past Saturnyx, Nadia, Tava and of course Kinto, who had plenty of common sense. Maybe Patros, too; the Priest knew the townspeople well, when he wasn’t drinking himself into a stupor, at least.
Taking over the Core had been a last-ditch measure to stop the zombie apocalypse, and most townspeople were grateful for that, but from what he had heard from Dorrham, Alba, and Marko, they were still worried. Worried about conflict with the Necromancer; some were blaming Hawke for it, despite the fact that the vampire attacks had been a thing before he even showed up. Others were concerned about having their taxes raised, which was a valid concern; he hated taxes with a passion, but they needed more than twenty guards to protect the town, and neither they nor all the public officials he needed to hire would work for free.
His first meeting of the day was meant to bring money to the town without squeezing its citizens. Hawke stopped by a two-story shop that had been vacant since its owners disappeared during the vampire attacks. The town had claimed ownership and then gifted it to the Stern Company of Miners and Adventurers, as a reward for its help.
The door was open. The main floor was dominated by a large table, covered with maps on the region, as well as scrap paper filled with scribbles and mathematical equations. Standing over the table were Korgan and Taggan, engaged in some discussion in their language. They looked up and grinned broadly at him when he entered.
“Welcome, your holy eminence!” Korgan Stern said. The leader of the Company was the only red-haired Dwarf Hawke had seen so far, and happily displayed his ginger status by growing a long beard that made him look like his lower face was on fire.
“It is good to see you again, Paladin,” Taggan told him.
The Stone Mystic was skinny for a Dwarf, with narrow shoulders and stooped-over posture than made him look older than he was. His gray-speckled black hair and sparse beard added to the illusion. He wore a brown robe embroidered with magical formulae. Thanks to his Class, he had access to a lot of spells with mining applications. He and Egg, Priest of the Earth God Gaon, were the Company’s chief surveyors.
“Same here,” Hawke told them. “Didn’t see you guys at Dorrham’s last night.”
“Ah, yes. We had a meeting, me and all the lads, and it went long into the night. Which is the reason I sent word for us to meet.”
“I’m listening,” Hawke said, leaning over the table. Dwarves didn’t use chairs in their offices; they liked to conduct meetings standing up, believing that people who became too comfortable risked dozing off, or worse, wasting valuable time.
“Egg and Taggard have examined the foothills to the south. There is some iron and gold there. But we will need workers to set up a camp. We will start hiring tomorrow.”
“Hey, that’s great news!” Hawke said.
He didn’t know how mining worked on Earth but in the Realms, it looked as if the Arbiters just placed mineral deposits anywhere they wanted, and even replenished them over time. More weirdness, but he didn’t care, as long as Orom prospered.
“However, we will also need more experienced miners, which unfortunately your town does not have. It has been too long since the people here worked the earth; the handful who remember those days were children when the mines closed and are old men now. I need to bring in more Dwarves.”
“I see. Do they have to come from Akila?”
During Hawke’s visit there, he had run into trouble with a Guild of Earthlings. The Nerf Herders were hellbent into conquering as much of the Common Realm as they could, and their leader saw Hawke as an obstacle who needed removing. Hawke had also made a fool out of the top Nerf Herder, Kaiser Wrecker, nearly taking him down before escaping. There was bound to be a confrontation with the Nerf Herders, but he wanted to postpone it for as long as he could.
Korgam looked unhappy as he answered: “Akila has the closest settlement of my people. The next one is the Dun-Takah Kingdom. A month’s travel if the roads were good, which they are not. More like six, seven weeks each way, with Trogg tribesmen threatening the passes and Murk Arachnoids striking at night.”
“What do you propose, then?”
“A caravan to Akila. A few traders want to pool their resources and send their wagons there to buy goods that are needed in Orom. The sister of your Mistress of Coin is one of them. I can send one of the lads off with them, and he will return with plenty of help.”
“When are they planning to leave?”
“Two weeks. Maybe three.”
Hawke nodded. “Then we need to deal with the Necromancer before that happens. When that is done, I might even go to Akila myself.”
Because once I’ve taken care of Domort and freed all the Eternals he has, it’ll be time to deal with Kaiser Wrecker.
“I believe your Guild will depart in a few days to deal with a Lair, correct?” Korgam asked. When Hawke confirmed it, he went on: “We will watch over Orom until you return, and follow you to the Sunset Range to deal with Domort.”
“Very well. Thank you again, Korgam.”
“We all thank you, Hawke. Normally one does not advance on the Path to Power but once every few months if one is lucky, or every few years if one is not. We have all attained the seventh level, eighth in my case, in the span of a few weeks. It is clear to me that you will leave a blazing trail of glory across the Common Realm, until you ascend and leave us behind.”
I only hope it’s not a trail of bodies.
Eleven
Back at the Town Interface, Hawke tried to take one pass at things before his meeting with Orom’s new Magistrate and Clerk.
Town of Orom (Level Two Township)
Current Population/Maximum Pop.: 1,912/5,000
Warning: If its population decreases below 1,000, the Township’s Level will be reduced to One.
Available Mana/Mana Pool:1,145/1,912
Mana Recharge/Day: 200 (100 for Keep, 100 for Temple of Shining Father)
Current Mana Expenditures: 150/day (Undead, Demonic and Fae Wards)
Enchantments Available: Arcane Appointment, Call to Arms, Demonic Ward, Empower Champions, Fae Ward, Undead Ward.
Current Morale: -10 (Discontent)
Ongoing Projects: 0
Finished Projects: 3 (Keep, Temple, Town Walls Level II)
Resources: 174 gold, 20,000 Daily Rations (Private Stores), 12000 Daily Rations (Town Stores).
Income: 28-33 gold a month (Last month’s taxes: 13 gold)
Taxes: 18 gold/month, 900 Daily Rations/month (collected Seasonally; Next Harvest Season in 2 months)
Fees and Duties: 10-15 gold/month.
Expenses: 106 gold a month
Town Guard: Guardsmen (40): 36 gold/month, 1200 Daily Rations/month. Sergeants (4): 8 gold/month, 240 Daily Rations/month, First Sergeant (3 gold/month, 30 DR/month) Captain (1): 5 gold/month, 30 DR/month. Stables (8 mounts, 4 servants): 12 gold a month. Total: 38 gold a month
Upkeep: 30 gold a month
Civilian Salaries (12): 24 gold a month
Town Buildings and Projects:
Buildings: 5 Apartment Buildings, 12 Homes, 3 Inns, 1 Keep (1,853/2,500), 4 Manors, 218 Shoddy Homes, 8 Shops, 1 Smithy, 1 Temple (1,250/1,250), 3 Workshops.
Appointed Positions Vacant: None.
Arcane Professional Slots Available: 12
Hawke had repaired the Temple and as much of the Keep as he could afford. Several interior sections of the central building were still damaged as a result of having a bunch of Undead monsters tearing through walls and doors. At the current rates, he should have the place fully restored in two weeks, unless he paid to have it done manually, but Orom was short of gold, which was sort of ironic since the town’
s name was literally ‘the golden village.’
What he really wanted to do was build a new Temple to the Triune Goddesses and get the Keep upgraded. But there wasn’t enough Mana to go around, not yet. He would probably have to spring for the cash to do some upgrades the non-magical, old-fashioned way. Which he didn’t mind; he really didn’t have much use for the gold he had earned from his adventures, and he hadn’t even touched the ingots of precious or high-level metals he had ‘mined’ from the battleground where he had found Saturnyx. He might as well invest some of it in the place. Orom felt like home, much more so than the rented apartment where he’d moved in after leaving his parents’ place, back when keeping up with car payments and other bills had been his only worry, and not a big one at that.
Sighing, Hawke kept allocating fifty Mana to repair the Keep, and went off to the new offices he had built for the town officials. They were on the first floor; the old ones had been on the third level, which was considered a hardship when you needed to go up two flights of stairs to get there. Instead, he had taken a former storage room that had been briefly converted into a prison for the old Prefect’s sacrificial victims, and paid to have wooden partitions added in. The low-wooden walls divided the room into three sections; Hawke realized he had introduced work cubicles to the Realms and hoped the gods would forgive him for it. Two of the sections were the offices of Orom’s Magistrate and Clerk, with the third used by their common secretary-slash-gopher.
“Oras, Markello, you guys busy?”
“We are at your service, your eminence,” said Markello Dometes, Town Clerk; he liked to conduct business just as formally as Mistress of Coin Antana. He was a short and portly guy with a beard but no mustache, which Hawke found a bit unsettling.
“I’ll be there in a moment,” Magistrate Oras Pertinos said from the other cubicle. “Unless you’d like me to keep an innocent man in a cell any longer.”
The Magistrate had the close-cropped side-and-back haircut of someone used to wearing a helmet to work, day in and day out. A Legionnaire’s cut, it was called in town; Hawke’s brother would have called it a ‘high-and-tight.’ And Oras made Kinto’s general disposition look almost sunny by comparison. But he had served in Alpinia’s constabulary for several years after a stint in the Legions, before retiring to Orom when a relative left him a house in town. He had experience in legal matters, which made him the closest thing to a judge in town. The previous Magistrate had suffered an ‘unfortunate accident’ during Felix’s tenure a few months back, and his staff had decided the weather in Akila was much better and headed off there, never to be heard of again.
Markello looked a bit scandalized at Oras’ bluntness, but Hawke nodded. “Do what you gotta do. I’ll get started with Markello here.”
He and the Town Clerk went to the meeting room. Markello had a thick sheaf of papers for Hawke to sign. They included his new Guild’s charter, so he was actually looking forward to it. He sat down across the table from the Clerk, reached into his inventory mentally, and made an honest-to-goodness fountain pen appear in his hand. Turned out that metal pens with ink reservoirs were a thing in the Realms, even though Nadia had told him she was sure they hadn’t been invented on Earth until close to the Industrial Revolution.
According to Saturnyx, the most knowledgeable person in town about those things, metal pens had been in common use since before the rise of the Onyx Empire, well over a thousand years ago. The pens couldn’t have been introduced to the Realms by somebody from Earth; a thousand years ago people were still using gull feathers or whatever. Had someone invented them independently on the Realms? It was a mystery that probably didn’t matter. Hawke was just happy to be able to use something even remotely resembling modern tech to sign his name. The damn things were expensive – he had paid nine silver for his at Antana’s general store – but they beat the sharpened quills, wax tablets with metal scratchers, and pieces of charcoal that were the alternatives.
“What do you have for me, Clerk Dometes?” he asked in a mostly-serious tone.
“A sale receipt for the warehouse on the corner of Via Sinestra and Cattle Path Road,” Markello said, passing him a scroll; rolled-up papers were still used for legal documents. Hawke opened it and – quite literally – scrolled down to the line where his signature went, and put down his John Hancock, followed by the Prefect’s Seal, stamped in with wax. Markello had helpfully provided him a lit candle for that purpose.
“Petros has already paid the stipulated sixteen gold; the receipt is attached to the left roller.”
“Yeah, I noticed the addition to the Town’s treasury.”
He had mostly noted a lot of subtractions, mostly spent paying the wages of the forty-man town guard and assorted civilian employees. Keeping budgets balanced was a pain, although his parents – his mother specially – had been very thorough about teaching him to manage his money. There was a reason why he’d never owed money on a credit card for more than a month. Debt-free was the way to go. It was a lot harder to do with an entire town where a lot of taxpayers had fled, died, or lost everything, though.
After a couple more legal papers – he took the time to read each one carefully – Markello handed him a larger scroll with two ornate rolls with golden cappers on each end; he had paid for that out of his own pocket. On the first page was the title ‘Charter of the Earth and Realms Defenders.’ He smiled as he went over it.
The name had been a pain in the butt, but the Knights of Not-So-Good, the name of his old Guild, just didn’t translate well in Vulgate, and he wanted a title that would let any stranded players in the Realms know that the Nerf Herders weren’t the only game in town. The Defenders had been the best that Desmond, Nadia and he had been able to come up with, even after they brought in Tava and Gosto into the brainstorming session. The charter itself was based on the Tenets of the Triune Goddess, as told to him by Vitara herself:
Protect the innocent, punish the guilty, and learn the wisdom to tell them apart.
Be merciful to those who do no harm and enact retribution on those who do.
Seek and value peace while preparing for war, for war is inevitable and peace only possible through victory.
To that, he had added some basic anti-murder hobo language, including not robbing, assaulting, murdering, or cheating anybody other than outright enemies of the Guild or its members. To that, Saturnyx had added a long list of qualifiers about what constituted an enemy (enemies couldn’t consist of entire groups or classes of people, so no ‘I hate Goblins so I can murder any Goblin I meet,’ for example). Hawke didn’t like telling people what to do except in tactical situations, but he didn’t want any members of his organization to besmirch his good name or that of his friends. Oras, as the local judge, had gone over it and declared it ‘good enough,’ was high praise coming from him.
The Magistrate entered the meeting room just as Hawke finished signing the document. “I see the Earth and Realm Defenders are Orom’s official Guild,” he said. “Hopefully, you will keep lawlessness at bay. Adventurers can be an unruly lot.”
“Yeah, I can see that. What was it you were saying about an innocent man?”
There was a prison in the Keep’s basement, not quite big enough to be called a dungeon – and not to be confused with the Proving Grounds of the same name – with a dozen cells and room for as many as thirty people if you didn’t mind them sharing the accommodations. The town wasn’t big enough to have an official jailer, with the job falling to one of the guards. When Hawke took over, the prison had been empty – all the people who had been there had become the first batch of human sacrifices at the hands of Felix. In the last week, there had been a few arrests: drunk and disorderly, mostly, but one was an aggravated assault that hadn’t become a murder only because Priest Patros had been at hand to heal the victim. The alleged perpetrator must be the innocent man he was talking about.
“Yes, your eminence,” Oras said, tacking in the honorific almost as an afterthought. “The victim regained
consciousness yesterday, but was afraid of the real attacker and didn’t dare come forward until Patros talked him into it. The man in question has been taken into custody, and I have signed and executed the release of the innocent party.”
“That’s good to hear.”
And it was. Not having to worry about what everyone was doing under his name was a huge weight off his shoulders. Orom seemed to mostly run itself, perhaps not perfectly or even as well as you’d expect from an Earth town, but well enough. Hawke didn’t want to be looking over everyone’s shoulder. He wanted to become a powerful Eternal, not Big Brother.
“Okay, then. Let’s go over anything else you may need, because the day after tomorrow, or a day after that at the latest, I’m going to be unavailable for at least two, maybe three days.”
It was time to clear a Lair, level up his Party, and get ready for the main event: the Lord of the Dead and his Stronghold.
Twelve
“Just sign your name on the dotted line, and you’re all set,” Hawke told Kinto, the eighth and last signatory to the Guild Charter of the Earth and Realms Defenders.
“First Adventurer’s Guild I have been a part of,” the old Hunter said. “Never was much of a joiner when I was young, and had too much sense to become part of such foolishness when I wasn’t.”
“We’ll make sure you won’t regret joining us.”
“I could never regret being part of something my daughter and son helped build.”
“All right, it is official! The Defenders have become a Guild!”
Congratulations! You have become a Guild Master!
Earth and Realms Defenders is a Level One Guild.
New Guild Power Available: Guild Evolution, Guild Party
Lord of the Dead: A LitRPG Saga (The Eternal Journey Book 2) Page 7
