Ulric slept late into the next morning following his late night with the cantankerous but not obnoxious Elder Beastkin. He knew it was late thanks to the angle of light entering his avenue-facing window. Clear glass, so rare in Celestin and not to be found at all amongst the Iriel'en and Legranel, revealed the bustle of Bartala. Already Valin of the humble classes were about their business. Goods were brought in, charted for customs, and stored. Other times shipments destined for distant ports were packaged carefully, tallied again for customs logs, and transported to outgoing ships. Say that for a bunch that used trade like a thug might wield a club, the Merchant Lords kept a tight leash on what shit was going where. Which made sense, they were both merchants and lords, and that meant being good at knowing what went where and how to own it.
"Uuugh!" Groaned the slightly hungover man, recalling the protracted conversation with Varrock.
He'd promised to go with the old wolf as his plus one. Ulric hated weddings. Loathed them. All that pomp and ceremony because two people had decided they would bonk often and, if not exclusively, then in tandem. Worse still, marriage was a legal proceeding, in addition to a social one. The combination of ye household and all that bilk. A tradition long dead before the collapse of his world, thankfully.
In this case, however, there was no getting out of it. Ulric had given his word and amongst the changes to his perceptions in the past Earth year, though it was only half of one by Vardan reckoning, lying was not among those changes. Damn it.
"Aaah weeellll," Moaned Ulric to the unsympathetic walls of his room, "Maybe there'll be pretty girls, not that I can now do anything about that, it'll just be a nice break from the endless wilderness and rough folk. Or maybe a fight will break out, I bet that geezer of a wolf could get a tree to take a swing at him if he had a mind to."
Ulric recalled the sharp look the Lupid had directed momentarily last night, scanning the room with predatorial intensity. That was not the look of a tame merchant or a humble farmer. That was a fighter, assessing the lay of things before he relaxed his guard. He had to wonder why the old man had found favor for him. Ulric wasn't not only not a Lupid, he wasn't even a Beastkin.
"I'll ask him sometime." He announced aloud, "Maybe he has a soft spot for Twice Born migrants from Earth."
Quickly, Ulric brought his hands up to slap his cheeks a couple of times, to help throw off the remnant wool in his brain. It didn't really work, but the half hour of exercises and meditation did, carried out in the buff so he didn't further swamp ass his clothes. He hated not having access to regular baths. The Iriel'en had spoiled him. How he missed the great stone and timber room with its steaming, perfectly relaxing water. Not in the mood to wait around for a tub, Ulric wetted a towel and wiped himself down applying a small, acrid bar of soap to help remove the worst of the grime, as was his habit before bed as he'd traveled.
The wedding was slated for that evening. Varrock's clan liked to hold them at dusk, some tradition regarding the end of two lives to celebrate the birth of a singular one or some shit.
Alright there, grumpy pants, Ulric scolded himself, it ain't shit, it's their custom and you'll not be an ass just because you don't like weddings. Sometimes you gotta know when you're being pissy. Hangovers were a good time to assume that to be the case and remain extra vigilant.
While he fixed his attitude, Ulric threw on a fresh set of underthings and the spare shirt, pants, and travel robe from his pack, the ones Taipan had ordered made for him in Seinajok. They smelled like they'd sat inside his pack but at least they weren't caked in ten-plus days of hard travel. The odor would fade as he strolled the streets, the inland sea air carried the oh-so-memorable briney fragrance of salt. It pervaded the city and Ulric wouldn't smell like a leather sack for long. Hoisting his pack and affixing the vorpal blade to his back, Ulric locked the room behind him and descended the stairs.
A glance towards the half-full common room revealed more people than had been there when he'd checked in yesterday, the steady influx of travelers accumulating primarily in these lower districts as opposed to the swankier ones. Ulric had mapped out a significant portion of this lower district, although nowhere near all of it. Even so, he wanted to spread out his exploration. It wouldn't do to look too much like he was canvassing the joint. Perhaps he might even find someone who would wish to make a purchase of some [Azure Cedar] and [Azure Cedar] accessories, since that was what Taipan had filled his wagon with before she departed for her homeland. Too bad he was fresh out, although he still had some odds and ends left over, and he suddenly realized he was strategizing to please his wife, when they eventually reunited. Damn, he'd been trained. Hateful daylight bounced off his retinas immediately on leaving the Inn, while he absorbed his defeat at Taipan's hands. This south-facing door was taking the full brunt of the Twins and Ulric was not a fan.
He ducked into the relative shade of the alley that connected the main thoroughfare to a smaller avenue. Stone did not click as loudly as once it did beneath his boots, Ulric had learned some degree of control over his steps. He was no Aes'r, but he'd say he wasn't far off it. Just give him another couple of decades to really get it down.
There were few mysteries left to this part of town, the Twice Born man had already mapped the immediate vicinity of the inn. Instead of wasting his morning seeing more of the same, Ulric sought out the port. From his ridgetop view he'd seen the docks arranged along the seaside quay in the second tier of the Mot and Bailey organized city. Several long stairs and even a few switch-backed ramps for wagons and other wheeled conveyance descended down to the floating docks. Ulric wanted to get a closer look at the setup of the piers and the ships moored therein. That meant crossing through the interior wall and its miniature gate into the next echelon of Bartalan society. He was greeted by a couple of skeptical guards. They demanded an Argentum Knight for entry. It was brigandry under the honest light of the suns is what it was and Ulric named it thusly as he handed over the coin. The guards smiled under their helmets as they weighed their purse, knowing it was sanctioned theft and that there was nothing he could do about it.
Harlan's words were proving true. Ulric didn't receive much in the way of overt hostility, he was picking up some subtle hints that the barbarians of the Outer Reaches were not lightly trifled with. That didn't stop anybody from finding more pernicious ways to fuck with him though. He could argue with the guards, call all kinds of attention to himself, probably get stonewalled, and be turned away from the gate all the same. Next time he tried going through he had little doubt in that scenario the cost would have gone up. It was the way of petty corruption. It was also a flaw in the operation of the city. When the guards took bribes and extorted from the populace freely it told a story that they were not compensated adequately with their normal wages. That represented a failure of leadership and a potential for him to find or create holes in security. Wunderbar.
Glad was Ulric to lose some money to find soft places in the enemy. Still, it rankled to be treated like a second-class citizen. Even minor injustices had always stuck hard in his craw, the rules were rules for a reason. Disregarding them freely undermined society at large, regressed civilization. Some people said he was just uptight and finicky. He said they were cattle, led by a bell for promise of straw. Those conversations did not typically end productively.
What was that? Was someone judging him for being an asshole? Never mind, must be the wind.
For his money, Ulric was treated to a significant upscale of Bartalan society. The distribution of peoples, their features, hues, and health were mostly the same but where the armbands, rings, and chains had been copper below they were undoubtedly Argentum up here. The silver alloy glistened bright in the morning suns, with never a bit of tarnish to impugn its honor. Definitely, Ulric was seeing the money literally concentrate upwards within the city and within the higher tier of Bartala. It struck Ulric that the whole thing was a bit flagrantly on the nose. He supposed power liked to be noticed and that wealth stratification did often lead to physical stratification. Gentrification. Was that the term for it? Ulric questioned himself. Maybe. Moving on.
For all that the people of the tier of the city next to the bottom showed a rather large jump in wealth, the structures and architecture did little to reflect that. The same heavy stone and unadorned timbers comprised the buildings, the steepled towers showed perhaps a bit more in the way of decoration, the odd gargoyle here maybe a little extra flair in the stonework there, but nothing outrageous. The biggest shift was that there were not so many warehouses here in this part of the city. They still existed, Ulric watched a wagon haul a load of some kind of fragrant fish into one, briny salt wafting from behind those walls more intensely than the ambient air, which probably meant that the catch was fresh and being dried and preserved, but where the lower tier was almost exclusively warehousing along the wide avenues, they were more intermittent up here.
Were the goods stratified, in addition to the peoples? Perhaps he was seeing higher value goods, of which there was naturally a lower supply, being also located distinctly from the more peasant-oriented foodstuffs and raw materials.
Ulric was fascinated by that prospect. If true, then he should keep his eyeballs peeled for what the folk of Bartala considered valuable.
As he walked through the second tier, his suspicions were, if not confirmed, given support by the contents of the storage and exchange pavilions. There was a shift away from simple food stuffs to more perishable items. The cavernous warehouses of raw grains, potato-looking tubers, and sacks of flour below weren't quite as prevalent. In their place were smaller caches of fresh produce, cabbages or something similar, tomatoes, beets, these were items that Ulric would not have expected to be in such supply, given that harvests could no way have been in yet. He might be looking at the result of the shipping network, bringing goods from across the southern and northern hemispheres of Varda. Very interesting.
In addition to the produce was a prevalence of meats, some wrapped, some dried, and some hanging freshly butchered, the pavers in those squares running red with the remains of drained beasts. Now that was a smell that overpowered the salty air. Bitter iron assaulted his nostrils every time he passed those mass butcheries, leaving no doubt as to what was going on behind the road frontage. It was interesting that there was so little openness to the design of the city. In a wild divergence from the open courtyards and wide squares of Trachn'ir, Batala had almost a closed-in arrangement wherein the roads were isolated from the goings on inside of these pavilions. A sturdy wood front, where it wasn't the stone of the buildings, rose starkly at the sidewalk, which effectively turned the ground level of the city into a maze of streets.
Of course, meats weren't the only thing different. Fruits were commonly on display and eateries abounded. In fact, now that he was paying attention to it, it appeared that there was a heavy emphasis on actual cooking at this level. Food smells were permeating the air, and many of the wide doors opened into squares of tables, outdoor hearths, griddles, big dome-shaped ovens, and a wide assortment of folk taking breakfast while the cooks hustled their asses off. He hadn't eaten yet, this was a good time to pause his inventory of the city to investigate the doings of the wealthier folk.
Ulric received a few looks askance as he strode through the sliding gate of a random eatery, attracted by the spices being employed here, which roused his appetite thoroughly. It didn't take long to figure out why. There weren't any travelers from below here. Ulric seemed to have wandered into the more affluent part of town as he'd been too entranced by examination of the various holdings and musing on the implications of the first signs of a more global trade apparatus. In addition to that, Ulric was also the only guy openly carrying a weapon. Now that he really stopped to pay attention, many of these people didn't even have a belt knife sheathed at their hips. Holy fuck how had he missed that? Every single Elf had an individualized, if not ornate, long knife on their person. All of them. From the most humble to the most affluent. Here? Maybe a quarter, perhaps even less.
There was something incredibly important about that simple observation but he was damned if he could figure out what it might be. In any case, he was now doing the opposite of what he wanted to be doing: standing out. A watchful eye had seen the process for obtaining grub, approach a purser who would collect a few Bronze Squires and then he would have a plate offered with his choice of the cooked items being produced, like some kind of outdoor Hibachi grill. There was a queue at most of the kiosks.
The simple act of standing in a line was comforting, for some reason. Lines meant order, order meant rules, and rules meant some degree of civilization similar to his own. Never a great fan of people, Ulric was a fan of civilization. Moreso now than when he'd died, he now knew what the absence of civilization resulted in. But only when those rules were applied evenly to all. Which was the root of the imposition that was now before him.
Ulric presented himself to the man standing behind the desk who collected the three Eld, or Bronze, Squires from each and every person who approached. Thirty base units of currency, a high but not unreasonable sum for a quality meal. That was not what awaited. When Ulric came to the desk, the purser smiled in a way that did not suggest there was anything funny at all and said "One Sil Drake." with a sneering tone.
Hand frozen in the act of delivering the three metal coins he'd readied to hand over as he'd waited in line, as any not raised by animals would do, Ulric's eyes narrowed.
"What did you just say?"
The purser smiled wider than before, in that same smug, nasal tone, repeating the impossible phrase "One Sil Drake."
Ulric was an alien on this planet. He was also not familiar with the habits and cultures of this world or its peoples to a highly refined degree. Still less was he absolutely certain about the coinage and weights and worths of goods and plenty, other than their numerical representations. But. By the Twinned Suns circling above his head, there was no godsdamned way he was going to be paying a million units for a thirty-unit meal, which was the difference between a single Sil Drake and three Eld Squires. And, for the love of all that is sacred, he could afford to, a thousand times over. But that was not the point.
Heads had turned and Ulric was aware that he was now being watched with similarly smug eyes scattered across the square. Some of them, at least, had the decency to look ashamed. Was this all that the humans of this world amounted to? Disappointing.
There was a little mark-up for an outsider's room at the peak of a busy season, and then there was this. The markup was a bit of tongue-in-cheek harassment, a visitor's tax of sorts. Happened all the time, even in his own world in a modern society. But this here, this was an insult. Ulric was not in the mood to be insulted. Ulric was not in the mood to be insulted before a crowd of jumped-up savages in Gucci armbands, who thought themselves superior for being born in a place that may or may not be subsidizing genocide. If these people would like to be entertained, then they should get what they want. And choke on it.
Calmly, Ulric's hand returned to his purse and he withdrew the silver coin blazoned with a dragon's skull, its crown of horns catching the light of the morning suns.
The purser's eyes widened as Ulric laid the coin on the kiosk surface, his finger pressing down hard enough that he was probably imprinting the coin's markings into the wood. He held the eyes of the purser and, with deceptive speed, snatched the front of the man's shirt with his other hand and drug the startled face to within a few centimeters of his own.
"You will take this coin that you asked for, you unloved fucking bastard, and you will make change to return to me for all but three Eld Squires, or I will break you in half over this desk." Ulric told him with careful pronunciation and a tone that calmly announced great violence in the near future.
Panic visibly took hold of the man. Ulric watched the adrenaline cause the purser to break out in sweat, his face paled, and he looked like he might become sick. He'd tried to pull away and gone nowhere, and his hands scrabbled futilely for a few moments as they attempted to free himself from Ulric's grip. It felt like a child was trying to break loose. Ulric was sort of waiting for somebody to come over and raise issue, to intervene.
Nothing. Nobody moved, not one in a pavilion where at least two dozen were present, seated or otherwise. A thought came to him that seemed like it had its origin in a different age. Cowards, one and all. And this one. Why would a man so frail try to insult his betters? Which brought him to his next point. Why was Ulric better than this man? Strength? Maybe. But not just of arms. No one with any decency would attempt this sort of dishonest, intentional slight, for no better cause than to enjoy the suffering. It was cruel and petty. Cruel and petty people shouldn't be allowed to continue being so. However you had to go about fixing them.
"Weakling." Observed Ulric without particular anger, he was well past that now.
"I will now count to five. You have until then to save your own worthless life by giving me my change." Ulric casually declared.
"One."
"I'm sorry, it's a joke…a…I…I didn't mean it. P, Please let me go." Blabbered the idiot, wasting a fifth of his life.
"Two."
"Oh gods please, no, oh gods…" chanted the fool, before he finally realized he needed to start making change and that he'd wasted forty percent of his life.
"Three."
"Hallowed be the gods in their halls and the stars in the sky, your mercy on my soul be, your…" prayed the dying man as his fingers worked, counting out coin.
"Four."
"…and I won't ever do it again, I swear it." the prayer had turned into beseeching of a different sort, and he seemed to be struggling at carrying a ten.
"Five."
"Done! Gods! Please don't kill me!" The purser cried, figuring out that all he'd needed to do was count nine Sil Knights, nine Sil Squires, nine Eld Drakes, nine Eld Knights, and seven Eld Squires in his final moments.
And a good thing that the folk in this place were so wealthy that he'd had the coins to do it. Not bad mental maths, considering the conversion factor of a thousand Eld Servants to one Sil Servant. Ulric wasn't sad that the purser got to live. He just wanted to be treated fairly and, if that meant folding the purser in half, well, then it meant folding the purser in half.
While this minor drama unfolded the peanut gallery grew increasingly alarmed. When the last coin hit the kiosk surface a collective held breath released audibly. There. They got their entertainment for the morning, some schmuck learns an important lesson about personal responsibility, and Ulric got breakfast. Everybody wins, right?
"Thank you for your service, young man. Good day." Ulric said, sweeping the change from the kiosk surface into his coin pouch.
He was handed a shaking plate and took it without rancor. The lesson had been learned and that was all that mattered. For the both of them.
Gods, violence really was the answer. No amount of arguing, appealing to common courtesy, or imploring that justice be upheld would have resolved that situation favorably. The only way to prevent the abuse was to destroy your antagonist. Or be willing to, with their full awareness of that fact. Sad. But also true. Ulric didn't get to write the rules around here, he just needed to know what they were. That was a big one.
Now that rightness was returned to the world, Ulric could be about finding out what smelled so good from the street. It was a combination of grilled meat kebab and sushi roll. It was also excellent and Ulric ate six of them, washing them down with some orange-red juice that tasted like pineapple mixed with mango, sweet and rich. None of the other patrons would meet his eye, which was for the best. As low as Ulric's expectations had been, these Bartalan had failed to reach the bar. Now he understood why the missing knives were relevant.
The knives were a statement about personal accountability and the acknowledgment that a man's life was his own, to be defended by his own hand and his words were weighed against the knives of the other men around him. At least, that was the way amongst the Iriel'en and, to a lesser extent, the Aes'r he'd met throughout Orlethrem. Even that fool Sam'sav Morion, spoiled Lordling of the Zelussin who had attempted to usurp Ulric's claim to the Ancient Glade, had understood and accepted his agency in events. Even when the choices made arrived at the point of his own death.
The lack was the manifestation of an absence of cultural appreciation for the worth of one's own life, the responsibility for choices and consequences for poor ones. In many ways, it was a similar failing of his old world's society. People did not internalize the value of their own lives, they assumed that they would be protected, that it was the responsibility of the rules and civil infrastructure at large for their safety and prosperity. They had lost the need for self-preservation. The people of Ulric's world had, finally, evolved a civilization that was almost entirely beyond the brutal savagery that might require one man to murder another for a spoken word or deed and the need to be ready to repel such aggressions.
That was not the case on Varda. At all. But these people seemed to believe it was. Fools, the lot of them. And now he knew why Harlan and his kin looked down on the folk inside the walls. Fenced in, placidly bored, needless, and harmless. Except where they were utterly destitute and without hope. They were tamed, or, maybe, dominated. No wonder the prospect of a war with the distant Elves did not trouble them. None of these Bartalan would see a whisper of it, nor would they raise a hand in anger until, maybe even decades from now, the Elves carved a path to the city to have their vengeance for Prosper's butchery.
That put another pin in Ulric's intentions to wipe out the Merchant Lords. They were neutering their own populace, for the sake of maintaining control.
Fuck he missed his hand-carved hut in the glade, Prespang already grated on his nerves. Nerves. Ulric's were shot, he realized. Between the huge numbers of strange people, the stress of the situation, being in enemy territory, and the prolonged aggravation of the drive from the Moot, Ulric was trending hard toward the hostile.
The hints were there. Suddenly the Innkeeper and Varrock's sideways comments clicked into place "staring like a hungry wolf towards sheep", "greetings young hunter", "nose to the wind and hackles quick to rise", these were all unsubtle references to the edge with which Ulric was carrying himself. Not anger, really, but a distinctly adversarial bearing. Some part of him had labeled these people Enemy and he was subconsciously behaving accordingly. Except that the jerk off manning the eatery register really did need somebody to fix his attitude. Perhaps threatening to break him in half was a bit much.
Emotional intelligence wasn't his strong suit but Ulric was pretty sure that having Taipan around had been a kind of security blanket. He didn't feel as exposed, knowing his lethal partner was holding his back. With her by his side he had always felt some sense of invincibility. Without her he was a little raw and his response was to lean harder towards a predatory mindset. Prey and rivals abounded and he was in another monster's lair where he had to remain vigilant against all threats. Huh. How about that? He wasn't sure what to do with this information, but who knew when self-actualization might come in handy?
When Ulric stood to leave, he could almost feel the relief from the Bartalans within the square. Fuck'em. Bunch of pets, rolling around for their master's treats. This had to be a recent thing, there was no way any civilization like this stand for long unless they were overwhelmingly powerful. That old Wolfkin could likely kill half the pavilion before they could stop him. Christ wouldn't even slow down on his way through the whole lot. All the promising ones must get drafted into the army, an intentional selection to control the bravest and most likely to resist being swamped by all this passivity. Take the aggressive ones and separate them out, direct them towards a manufactured enemy.
Not bad, Evil Dick, Ulric praised the imagined progenitor of this war. Not bad at all. He wasn't above recognizing when an opponent played well and smartly. It merely meant that he had a better idea of what he was up against. And how he might destroy them.
So thoroughly had these people been conquered they didn't even view themselves as such. Ulric could use that. Just look at how they'd responded to his overt threat against the bastard trying to extort him for giggles. They'd frozen, the whole lot of them. Like rabbits. There was a cold logic to it. If the population was toothless and suppressed they would pose less chance of resisting domestically so that attention could be directed to exerting influence abroad. The populace had to be complicit so that resources and attention could be focused on the war in Orlethrem. Anything else would give the Elves time to get their feet underneath them. So long as he stayed away from the professional soldiers under Prosper's direct control, Ulric had a feeling he was unmatched in combat potential.
Truly, he was behind the enemy lines. From here, he might be able to do terrible, terrible damage to the infrastructure that powered Prosper's engines, the ports.
The seed of a plan formed, but he wasn't ready to look at it yet. Let it marinate for a little while.
With that in mind, Ulric strolled through the streets, moving along with the crowds unhurried. He mapped the positions of various businesses, the storehouses for valuable foodstuffs, and whatever looked like it might be destroyed most easily for maximum impact. Inevitably this took him to the dockside. There were a dozen access points, arrayed over a couple of kilometers. The scale of the Bartalan port dwarfed Trachn'ir. The docks themselves were stone, not wood, which precluded a fast-spreading fire as a way to shut them down. The piers were wooden though, which might prove vulnerable. He'd gone the entire length of the mighty shipping behemoth before an idea occurred to him.
What about an explosive?
He'd never had any reason to do it himself, but he'd had enough time working with and around organic chemists to have a solid set of synthesis procedures for some rather potent detonation speed compounds. Those mad men held competitions within their departments for who could make the most sensitive, highest-yield substances possible, and a rather hefty betting pool guaranteed everybody gave it their best effort, in addition to professional pride and exclusive departmental prick-waving rights.
The synthesis wasn't the problem. The real issue always arose that, once you had these incredibly powerful explosive substances produced at scale, how do you avoid leveling your lab while you store them? The lab, and the city block along with it. A litany of accidents involving a once common fertilizer reagent came to mind. The nitrated ammonium compounds were notorious for sitting around forgotten until somebody did something everybody nearby would regret.
It was doable. More than doable. With some glassware, the right reagents, and the appropriate amount of caution he could whip together some nasty plastique-shaped charges. He even had the proper core to remotely detonate them. [Ceraunoperception] was a simple oscillation of his electromagnetic mana. A tweak could cause a metal rod in the charge blocks to spark and set off a primary explosive, like a blasting cap. He'd need to wrap them in metal foil to prevent accidental activation by static sparks or some such stupidity. It was somewhat incredible that your average materials science undergrad had at hand the training to manufacture ludicrously dangerous weapons and only barely enough wisdom not to actually go and do it.
Ulric never claimed to be a wise man.
Oh, hell yes. Yes indeed. The plan was coming together nicely. He wondered whether or not the Watcher was ever going to regret bringing him back to life.
Between his jaunt around the dock district, lunch, and a somewhat meticulous survey of the shipyards and port, where he spent over three hours simply loitering around to observe the flow of people and boats and to gather something of an idea about the protocols for onboarding vessels and their cargo. The use of handwritten logs was similar to Trachn'ir, so was the healthy number of patrolling guards.
What was a little out of the ordinary were the lighthouses.
Being on a river, Trachn'ir did not have lighthouses. Here though, rocky coasts made the things a necessity, and two of them flanked Bartala. One shown from the northwest crescent a kilometer from the exterior city wall, as best Ulric could estimate. The second was located at the southeastern portion of the port itself, essentially guaranteeing that there could be no mistaking the entryway to the harbor from the open ocean. Speaking of which, not visible from afar but crucial to the layout of the port was an artificial reef that grew in a great arc from the coast to the open ocean. Watching, he saw vessels being flagged from the port. Ulric wasn't sure why the whole port and reef situation bothered him until he realized that Bartala wasn't a natural harbor, the deep water harbor had to have been created through extensive dredging or mana-based Terramancy. Quite the undertaking. All the curves were too clean, too symmetrical to be the action of wind and wave on the irregular coastline. Also interesting was that the crest of the sea barrier could only just barely be seen below the surface of the water. Differently colored flags marked the artificial reef, which bore a regular series of stone-worked spikes, almost akin to sharpened crenellations that were peaked to take the bottoms out of vessels that attempted to come in unguided.
That explained the number of ships sitting offshore awaiting a guide boat to show them the safe entry points into the "bay"of Bartala. Ulric had excellent eyesight, and he could make out huge metal gates at a dozen different locations, operated by a single man or woman who responded to the flags and that lowered or raised to permit the keels of even the great galleons through them. They could also be raised completely to block the access points. Now that was a stroke of absolute genius. The fortification of the port meant that its navigation was, more or less, randomized, and completely controlled by the portside officials and the guide boats sent to make sure only the sanctioned entryways were utilized.
Ulric was again impressed at the farsight of such an elegant system of control. There was virtually no cheating this system, it could be adjusted on the fly by what looked like a system of pulleys and cranks and could change with very little notice, hence the colored flags to indicate which routes were currently open.
Slick. Somebody had an eye for the fine details.
Ulric watched all manner of items brought into the city from his perch on a stack of crates. His study went undisturbed. Probably because he was clearly armed and, for once since entering this gilded shitheap, his apparent barbarian heritage was doing him the favor of inducing troublemakers to find somebody the fuck else to bother. These city dwellers might look down on the tribes who scratched their livings from the harsh reaches of Prespang, but they were too toothless to directly confront the hard sons and daughters that those wastes produced. At least when those bandit pricks had ambushed him, they'd had the balls to do it with steel in their hands and a declaration of clear intent. No shifty-eyed sideways games or manufactured slights. Just good old-fashioned banditry. Honest scum would always rate higher than whatever the fuck that purser was trying to achieve.
Satisfied that he'd learned all he needed to know for the immediate future, Ulric hopped down easily from his crates and made a casual amble back towards his Inn, meticulously taking the side streets from the main causeway he'd used to navigate in. Thusly he had a somewhat comprehensive atlas of the first two tiers of Bartala when he arrived back at the familiar timbers and the half horse half fish sign that marked his Inn. He'd have to do something about those damned oxen. And the wagon full of goods. Perhaps he could buy passage on an outgoing ship, for a percentage of the coin of its sale. Hmm…later, Chief, later. You got a promise to keep and a wedding to attend.
Which means you gotta get your stank ass into a bathtub, he told himself, with a snort. It wasn't egregious but all that walking under the clear skies and ever warming days was a recipe for sweating.
Ulric found the Innkeep easily, her auburn hair standing out, as well as her slight figure and utter dominance of the stones beneath her feet. She was cleaning a series of mugs, the efficient motions of a damp rag returning them to readiness so that the bartender could dry and stow them for the evening rush.
"Highness, this one does require a bathtub." Ulric petitioned, being carefully respectful.
He'd watched this woman strike men three times her weight with a wooden baton hard enough to send them to the floor like they'd been hit by a pneumatic bolt gun of the sort used to dispatch cattle. One rise of her arm, deceptively corded with muscle beneath the dainty, milky skin revealing dress, and one fall. Bang! One more ne'erdowell to drag into the gutter out back of the joint. The bouncers were mostly for show, it had turned out. The majority of the rabble didn't have the good luck to have one of the strong arms come over and toss them from the establishment. Most were destined to face the mercy of the mistress of the inn and found that there was precious little.
The Innkeep smiled at that address, glad that she would receive no trouble from the clansman with an evil eye and the smell of trouble about him.
"It pleases the house to deliver one. I will see to it now, Honor." Said the woman with perfunctory obeisance.
A snap of fingers towards one of the girls absently sweeping the floor, more to blend into the background than to accomplish anything, brought them from their open hiding place to bend ear. Orders were conveyed with efficiency and the girl hustled off with purpose. This Innkeep was wasted here. She should be exercising her talents somewhere, like leading an army.
If he wasn't a married man currently sort of at war with these people he'd immediately court and marry this woman, content that he would live the life of a well-kept house husband. A pity. Failing that goal, Ulric would have to be sure to stay out from under her feet. As he made his way up the stair, he realized that the Innkeeper was everything his own mother had threatened him with throughout his life. It was only with the wisdom of years that he understood that a mother does not want a daughter-in-law who makes her husband happy, she wants one that keeps him out of trouble. It was with a grateful sigh that Ulric entered his room, content that he had died before his mother's curse could take hold.
Once again, grey eyes swept the room, noting the positions of everything inside and comparing it to the mental notes from just before he'd exited. Everything matched. He didn't relax until he'd relieved himself in the bathroom. There are no words for how relaxing it was to take a shit sitting down, with no chance a ravening animal would spring from the bushes to chew on one's withers. The cultural norm here was to employ a bucket of soaped water for the purpose of *ehem* hygiene following the act. Ulric was well beyond being weirded out by minor details. When you lived a life in the bush wiping yourself with leaves you prayed did not contain a contact poison that induced paralysis and debilitating rash you stopped sweating the small stuff.
Upon washing his hands, Ulric realized that his hangover was dissipated. Probably just as well too, the headache and vague nausea had put him in a vicious humor, on top of the stress he was already under. It'd be a shame if he threatened murder on some extended family or guest at Varrock's granddaughter's special day. There was a non-zero chance that was why he'd been invited by the canny old wolf in the first place.
Ulric slept late into the next morning following his late night with the cantankerous but not obnoxious Elder Beastkin. He knew it was late thanks to the angle of light entering his avenue-facing window. Clear glass, so rare in Celestin and not to be found at all amongst the Iriel'en and Legranel, revealed the bustle of Bartala. Already Valin of the humble classes were about their business. Goods were brought in, charted for customs, and stored. Other times shipments destined for distant ports were packaged carefully, tallied again for customs logs, and transported to outgoing ships. Say that for a bunch that used trade like a thug might wield a club, the Merchant Lords kept a tight leash on what shit was going where. Which made sense, they were both merchants and lords, and that meant being good at knowing what went where and how to own it.
"Uuugh!" Groaned the slightly hungover man, recalling the protracted conversation with Varrock.
He'd promised to go with the old wolf as his plus one. Ulric hated weddings. Loathed them. All that pomp and ceremony because two people had decided they would bonk often and, if not exclusively, then in tandem. Worse still, marriage was a legal proceeding, in addition to a social one. The combination of ye household and all that bilk. A tradition long dead before the collapse of his world, thankfully.
In this case, however, there was no getting out of it. Ulric had given his word and amongst the changes to his perceptions in the past Earth year, though it was only half of one by Vardan reckoning, lying was not among those changes. Damn it.
"Aaah weeellll," Moaned Ulric to the unsympathetic walls of his room, "Maybe there'll be pretty girls, not that I can now do anything about that, it'll just be a nice break from the endless wilderness and rough folk. Or maybe a fight will break out, I bet that geezer of a wolf could get a tree to take a swing at him if he had a mind to."
Ulric recalled the sharp look the Lupid had directed momentarily last night, scanning the room with predatorial intensity. That was not the look of a tame merchant or a humble farmer. That was a fighter, assessing the lay of things before he relaxed his guard. He had to wonder why the old man had found favor for him. Ulric wasn't not only not a Lupid, he wasn't even a Beastkin.
"I'll ask him sometime." He announced aloud, "Maybe he has a soft spot for Twice Born migrants from Earth."
Quickly, Ulric brought his hands up to slap his cheeks a couple of times, to help throw off the remnant wool in his brain. It didn't really work, but the half hour of exercises and meditation did, carried out in the buff so he didn't further swamp ass his clothes. He hated not having access to regular baths. The Iriel'en had spoiled him. How he missed the great stone and timber room with its steaming, perfectly relaxing water. Not in the mood to wait around for a tub, Ulric wetted a towel and wiped himself down applying a small, acrid bar of soap to help remove the worst of the grime, as was his habit before bed as he'd traveled.
The wedding was slated for that evening. Varrock's clan liked to hold them at dusk, some tradition regarding the end of two lives to celebrate the birth of a singular one or some shit.
Alright there, grumpy pants, Ulric scolded himself, it ain't shit, it's their custom and you'll not be an ass just because you don't like weddings. Sometimes you gotta know when you're being pissy. Hangovers were a good time to assume that to be the case and remain extra vigilant.
While he fixed his attitude, Ulric threw on a fresh set of underthings and the spare shirt, pants, and travel robe from his pack, the ones Taipan had ordered made for him in Seinajok. They smelled like they'd sat inside his pack but at least they weren't caked in ten-plus days of hard travel. The odor would fade as he strolled the streets, the inland sea air carried the oh-so-memorable briney fragrance of salt. It pervaded the city and Ulric wouldn't smell like a leather sack for long. Hoisting his pack and affixing the vorpal blade to his back, Ulric locked the room behind him and descended the stairs.
A glance towards the half-full common room revealed more people than had been there when he'd checked in yesterday, the steady influx of travelers accumulating primarily in these lower districts as opposed to the swankier ones. Ulric had mapped out a significant portion of this lower district, although nowhere near all of it. Even so, he wanted to spread out his exploration. It wouldn't do to look too much like he was canvassing the joint. Perhaps he might even find someone who would wish to make a purchase of some [Azure Cedar] and [Azure Cedar] accessories, since that was what Taipan had filled his wagon with before she departed for her homeland. Too bad he was fresh out, although he still had some odds and ends left over, and he suddenly realized he was strategizing to please his wife, when they eventually reunited. Damn, he'd been trained. Hateful daylight bounced off his retinas immediately on leaving the Inn, while he absorbed his defeat at Taipan's hands. This south-facing door was taking the full brunt of the Twins and Ulric was not a fan.
He ducked into the relative shade of the alley that connected the main thoroughfare to a smaller avenue. Stone did not click as loudly as once it did beneath his boots, Ulric had learned some degree of control over his steps. He was no Aes'r, but he'd say he wasn't far off it. Just give him another couple of decades to really get it down.
There were few mysteries left to this part of town, the Twice Born man had already mapped the immediate vicinity of the inn. Instead of wasting his morning seeing more of the same, Ulric sought out the port. From his ridgetop view he'd seen the docks arranged along the seaside quay in the second tier of the Mot and Bailey organized city. Several long stairs and even a few switch-backed ramps for wagons and other wheeled conveyance descended down to the floating docks. Ulric wanted to get a closer look at the setup of the piers and the ships moored therein. That meant crossing through the interior wall and its miniature gate into the next echelon of Bartalan society. He was greeted by a couple of skeptical guards. They demanded an Argentum Knight for entry. It was brigandry under the honest light of the suns is what it was and Ulric named it thusly as he handed over the coin. The guards smiled under their helmets as they weighed their purse, knowing it was sanctioned theft and that there was nothing he could do about it.
Harlan's words were proving true. Ulric didn't receive much in the way of overt hostility, he was picking up some subtle hints that the barbarians of the Outer Reaches were not lightly trifled with. That didn't stop anybody from finding more pernicious ways to fuck with him though. He could argue with the guards, call all kinds of attention to himself, probably get stonewalled, and be turned away from the gate all the same. Next time he tried going through he had little doubt in that scenario the cost would have gone up. It was the way of petty corruption. It was also a flaw in the operation of the city. When the guards took bribes and extorted from the populace freely it told a story that they were not compensated adequately with their normal wages. That represented a failure of leadership and a potential for him to find or create holes in security. Wunderbar.
Glad was Ulric to lose some money to find soft places in the enemy. Still, it rankled to be treated like a second-class citizen. Even minor injustices had always stuck hard in his craw, the rules were rules for a reason. Disregarding them freely undermined society at large, regressed civilization. Some people said he was just uptight and finicky. He said they were cattle, led by a bell for promise of straw. Those conversations did not typically end productively.
What was that? Was someone judging him for being an asshole? Never mind, must be the wind.
For his money, Ulric was treated to a significant upscale of Bartalan society. The distribution of peoples, their features, hues, and health were mostly the same but where the armbands, rings, and chains had been copper below they were undoubtedly Argentum up here. The silver alloy glistened bright in the morning suns, with never a bit of tarnish to impugn its honor. Definitely, Ulric was seeing the money literally concentrate upwards within the city and within the higher tier of Bartala. It struck Ulric that the whole thing was a bit flagrantly on the nose. He supposed power liked to be noticed and that wealth stratification did often lead to physical stratification. Gentrification. Was that the term for it? Ulric questioned himself. Maybe. Moving on.
For all that the people of the tier of the city next to the bottom showed a rather large jump in wealth, the structures and architecture did little to reflect that. The same heavy stone and unadorned timbers comprised the buildings, the steepled towers showed perhaps a bit more in the way of decoration, the odd gargoyle here maybe a little extra flair in the stonework there, but nothing outrageous. The biggest shift was that there were not so many warehouses here in this part of the city. They still existed, Ulric watched a wagon haul a load of some kind of fragrant fish into one, briny salt wafting from behind those walls more intensely than the ambient air, which probably meant that the catch was fresh and being dried and preserved, but where the lower tier was almost exclusively warehousing along the wide avenues, they were more intermittent up here.
Were the goods stratified, in addition to the peoples? Perhaps he was seeing higher value goods, of which there was naturally a lower supply, being also located distinctly from the more peasant-oriented foodstuffs and raw materials.
Ulric was fascinated by that prospect. If true, then he should keep his eyeballs peeled for what the folk of Bartala considered valuable.
As he walked through the second tier, his suspicions were, if not confirmed, given support by the contents of the storage and exchange pavilions. There was a shift away from simple food stuffs to more perishable items. The cavernous warehouses of raw grains, potato-looking tubers, and sacks of flour below weren't quite as prevalent. In their place were smaller caches of fresh produce, cabbages or something similar, tomatoes, beets, these were items that Ulric would not have expected to be in such supply, given that harvests could no way have been in yet. He might be looking at the result of the shipping network, bringing goods from across the southern and northern hemispheres of Varda. Very interesting.
In addition to the produce was a prevalence of meats, some wrapped, some dried, and some hanging freshly butchered, the pavers in those squares running red with the remains of drained beasts. Now that was a smell that overpowered the salty air. Bitter iron assaulted his nostrils every time he passed those mass butcheries, leaving no doubt as to what was going on behind the road frontage. It was interesting that there was so little openness to the design of the city. In a wild divergence from the open courtyards and wide squares of Trachn'ir, Batala had almost a closed-in arrangement wherein the roads were isolated from the goings on inside of these pavilions. A sturdy wood front, where it wasn't the stone of the buildings, rose starkly at the sidewalk, which effectively turned the ground level of the city into a maze of streets.
Of course, meats weren't the only thing different. Fruits were commonly on display and eateries abounded. In fact, now that he was paying attention to it, it appeared that there was a heavy emphasis on actual cooking at this level. Food smells were permeating the air, and many of the wide doors opened into squares of tables, outdoor hearths, griddles, big dome-shaped ovens, and a wide assortment of folk taking breakfast while the cooks hustled their asses off. He hadn't eaten yet, this was a good time to pause his inventory of the city to investigate the doings of the wealthier folk.
Ulric received a few looks askance as he strode through the sliding gate of a random eatery, attracted by the spices being employed here, which roused his appetite thoroughly. It didn't take long to figure out why. There weren't any travelers from below here. Ulric seemed to have wandered into the more affluent part of town as he'd been too entranced by examination of the various holdings and musing on the implications of the first signs of a more global trade apparatus. In addition to that, Ulric was also the only guy openly carrying a weapon. Now that he really stopped to pay attention, many of these people didn't even have a belt knife sheathed at their hips. Holy fuck how had he missed that? Every single Elf had an individualized, if not ornate, long knife on their person. All of them. From the most humble to the most affluent. Here? Maybe a quarter, perhaps even less.
There was something incredibly important about that simple observation but he was damned if he could figure out what it might be. In any case, he was now doing the opposite of what he wanted to be doing: standing out. A watchful eye had seen the process for obtaining grub, approach a purser who would collect a few Bronze Squires and then he would have a plate offered with his choice of the cooked items being produced, like some kind of outdoor Hibachi grill. There was a queue at most of the kiosks.
The simple act of standing in a line was comforting, for some reason. Lines meant order, order meant rules, and rules meant some degree of civilization similar to his own. Never a great fan of people, Ulric was a fan of civilization. Moreso now than when he'd died, he now knew what the absence of civilization resulted in. But only when those rules were applied evenly to all. Which was the root of the imposition that was now before him.
Ulric presented himself to the man standing behind the desk who collected the three Eld, or Bronze, Squires from each and every person who approached. Thirty base units of currency, a high but not unreasonable sum for a quality meal. That was not what awaited. When Ulric came to the desk, the purser smiled in a way that did not suggest there was anything funny at all and said "One Sil Drake." with a sneering tone.
Hand frozen in the act of delivering the three metal coins he'd readied to hand over as he'd waited in line, as any not raised by animals would do, Ulric's eyes narrowed.
"What did you just say?"
The purser smiled wider than before, in that same smug, nasal tone, repeating the impossible phrase "One Sil Drake."
Ulric was an alien on this planet. He was also not familiar with the habits and cultures of this world or its peoples to a highly refined degree. Still less was he absolutely certain about the coinage and weights and worths of goods and plenty, other than their numerical representations. But. By the Twinned Suns circling above his head, there was no godsdamned way he was going to be paying a million units for a thirty-unit meal, which was the difference between a single Sil Drake and three Eld Squires. And, for the love of all that is sacred, he could afford to, a thousand times over. But that was not the point.
Heads had turned and Ulric was aware that he was now being watched with similarly smug eyes scattered across the square. Some of them, at least, had the decency to look ashamed. Was this all that the humans of this world amounted to? Disappointing.
There was a little mark-up for an outsider's room at the peak of a busy season, and then there was this. The markup was a bit of tongue-in-cheek harassment, a visitor's tax of sorts. Happened all the time, even in his own world in a modern society. But this here, this was an insult. Ulric was not in the mood to be insulted. Ulric was not in the mood to be insulted before a crowd of jumped-up savages in Gucci armbands, who thought themselves superior for being born in a place that may or may not be subsidizing genocide. If these people would like to be entertained, then they should get what they want. And choke on it.
Calmly, Ulric's hand returned to his purse and he withdrew the silver coin blazoned with a dragon's skull, its crown of horns catching the light of the morning suns.
The purser's eyes widened as Ulric laid the coin on the kiosk surface, his finger pressing down hard enough that he was probably imprinting the coin's markings into the wood. He held the eyes of the purser and, with deceptive speed, snatched the front of the man's shirt with his other hand and drug the startled face to within a few centimeters of his own.
"You will take this coin that you asked for, you unloved fucking bastard, and you will make change to return to me for all but three Eld Squires, or I will break you in half over this desk." Ulric told him with careful pronunciation and a tone that calmly announced great violence in the near future.
Panic visibly took hold of the man. Ulric watched the adrenaline cause the purser to break out in sweat, his face paled, and he looked like he might become sick. He'd tried to pull away and gone nowhere, and his hands scrabbled futilely for a few moments as they attempted to free himself from Ulric's grip. It felt like a child was trying to break loose. Ulric was sort of waiting for somebody to come over and raise issue, to intervene.
Nothing. Nobody moved, not one in a pavilion where at least two dozen were present, seated or otherwise. A thought came to him that seemed like it had its origin in a different age. Cowards, one and all. And this one. Why would a man so frail try to insult his betters? Which brought him to his next point. Why was Ulric better than this man? Strength? Maybe. But not just of arms. No one with any decency would attempt this sort of dishonest, intentional slight, for no better cause than to enjoy the suffering. It was cruel and petty. Cruel and petty people shouldn't be allowed to continue being so. However you had to go about fixing them.
"Weakling." Observed Ulric without particular anger, he was well past that now.
"I will now count to five. You have until then to save your own worthless life by giving me my change." Ulric casually declared.
"One."
"I'm sorry, it's a joke…a…I…I didn't mean it. P, Please let me go." Blabbered the idiot, wasting a fifth of his life.
"Two."
"Oh gods please, no, oh gods…" chanted the fool, before he finally realized he needed to start making change and that he'd wasted forty percent of his life.
"Three."
"Hallowed be the gods in their halls and the stars in the sky, your mercy on my soul be, your…" prayed the dying man as his fingers worked, counting out coin.
"Four."
"…and I won't ever do it again, I swear it." the prayer had turned into beseeching of a different sort, and he seemed to be struggling at carrying a ten.
"Five."
"Done! Gods! Please don't kill me!" The purser cried, figuring out that all he'd needed to do was count nine Sil Knights, nine Sil Squires, nine Eld Drakes, nine Eld Knights, and seven Eld Squires in his final moments.
And a good thing that the folk in this place were so wealthy that he'd had the coins to do it. Not bad mental maths, considering the conversion factor of a thousand Eld Servants to one Sil Servant. Ulric wasn't sad that the purser got to live. He just wanted to be treated fairly and, if that meant folding the purser in half, well, then it meant folding the purser in half.
While this minor drama unfolded the peanut gallery grew increasingly alarmed. When the last coin hit the kiosk surface a collective held breath released audibly. There. They got their entertainment for the morning, some schmuck learns an important lesson about personal responsibility, and Ulric got breakfast. Everybody wins, right?
"Thank you for your service, young man. Good day." Ulric said, sweeping the change from the kiosk surface into his coin pouch.
He was handed a shaking plate and took it without rancor. The lesson had been learned and that was all that mattered. For the both of them.
Gods, violence really was the answer. No amount of arguing, appealing to common courtesy, or imploring that justice be upheld would have resolved that situation favorably. The only way to prevent the abuse was to destroy your antagonist. Or be willing to, with their full awareness of that fact. Sad. But also true. Ulric didn't get to write the rules around here, he just needed to know what they were. That was a big one.
Now that rightness was returned to the world, Ulric could be about finding out what smelled so good from the street. It was a combination of grilled meat kebab and sushi roll. It was also excellent and Ulric ate six of them, washing them down with some orange-red juice that tasted like pineapple mixed with mango, sweet and rich. None of the other patrons would meet his eye, which was for the best. As low as Ulric's expectations had been, these Bartalan had failed to reach the bar. Now he understood why the missing knives were relevant.
The knives were a statement about personal accountability and the acknowledgment that a man's life was his own, to be defended by his own hand and his words were weighed against the knives of the other men around him. At least, that was the way amongst the Iriel'en and, to a lesser extent, the Aes'r he'd met throughout Orlethrem. Even that fool Sam'sav Morion, spoiled Lordling of the Zelussin who had attempted to usurp Ulric's claim to the Ancient Glade, had understood and accepted his agency in events. Even when the choices made arrived at the point of his own death.
The lack was the manifestation of an absence of cultural appreciation for the worth of one's own life, the responsibility for choices and consequences for poor ones. In many ways, it was a similar failing of his old world's society. People did not internalize the value of their own lives, they assumed that they would be protected, that it was the responsibility of the rules and civil infrastructure at large for their safety and prosperity. They had lost the need for self-preservation. The people of Ulric's world had, finally, evolved a civilization that was almost entirely beyond the brutal savagery that might require one man to murder another for a spoken word or deed and the need to be ready to repel such aggressions.
That was not the case on Varda. At all. But these people seemed to believe it was. Fools, the lot of them. And now he knew why Harlan and his kin looked down on the folk inside the walls. Fenced in, placidly bored, needless, and harmless. Except where they were utterly destitute and without hope. They were tamed, or, maybe, dominated. No wonder the prospect of a war with the distant Elves did not trouble them. None of these Bartalan would see a whisper of it, nor would they raise a hand in anger until, maybe even decades from now, the Elves carved a path to the city to have their vengeance for Prosper's butchery.
That put another pin in Ulric's intentions to wipe out the Merchant Lords. They were neutering their own populace, for the sake of maintaining control.
Fuck he missed his hand-carved hut in the glade, Prespang already grated on his nerves. Nerves. Ulric's were shot, he realized. Between the huge numbers of strange people, the stress of the situation, being in enemy territory, and the prolonged aggravation of the drive from the Moot, Ulric was trending hard toward the hostile.
The hints were there. Suddenly the Innkeeper and Varrock's sideways comments clicked into place "staring like a hungry wolf towards sheep", "greetings young hunter", "nose to the wind and hackles quick to rise", these were all unsubtle references to the edge with which Ulric was carrying himself. Not anger, really, but a distinctly adversarial bearing. Some part of him had labeled these people Enemy and he was subconsciously behaving accordingly. Except that the jerk off manning the eatery register really did need somebody to fix his attitude. Perhaps threatening to break him in half was a bit much.
Emotional intelligence wasn't his strong suit but Ulric was pretty sure that having Taipan around had been a kind of security blanket. He didn't feel as exposed, knowing his lethal partner was holding his back. With her by his side he had always felt some sense of invincibility. Without her he was a little raw and his response was to lean harder towards a predatory mindset. Prey and rivals abounded and he was in another monster's lair where he had to remain vigilant against all threats. Huh. How about that? He wasn't sure what to do with this information, but who knew when self-actualization might come in handy?
When Ulric stood to leave, he could almost feel the relief from the Bartalans within the square. Fuck'em. Bunch of pets, rolling around for their master's treats. This had to be a recent thing, there was no way any civilization like this stand for long unless they were overwhelmingly powerful. That old Wolfkin could likely kill half the pavilion before they could stop him. Christ wouldn't even slow down on his way through the whole lot. All the promising ones must get drafted into the army, an intentional selection to control the bravest and most likely to resist being swamped by all this passivity. Take the aggressive ones and separate them out, direct them towards a manufactured enemy.
Not bad, Evil Dick, Ulric praised the imagined progenitor of this war. Not bad at all. He wasn't above recognizing when an opponent played well and smartly. It merely meant that he had a better idea of what he was up against. And how he might destroy them.
So thoroughly had these people been conquered they didn't even view themselves as such. Ulric could use that. Just look at how they'd responded to his overt threat against the bastard trying to extort him for giggles. They'd frozen, the whole lot of them. Like rabbits. There was a cold logic to it. If the population was toothless and suppressed they would pose less chance of resisting domestically so that attention could be directed to exerting influence abroad. The populace had to be complicit so that resources and attention could be focused on the war in Orlethrem. Anything else would give the Elves time to get their feet underneath them. So long as he stayed away from the professional soldiers under Prosper's direct control, Ulric had a feeling he was unmatched in combat potential.
Truly, he was behind the enemy lines. From here, he might be able to do terrible, terrible damage to the infrastructure that powered Prosper's engines, the ports.
The seed of a plan formed, but he wasn't ready to look at it yet. Let it marinate for a little while.
With that in mind, Ulric strolled through the streets, moving along with the crowds unhurried. He mapped the positions of various businesses, the storehouses for valuable foodstuffs, and whatever looked like it might be destroyed most easily for maximum impact. Inevitably this took him to the dockside. There were a dozen access points, arrayed over a couple of kilometers. The scale of the Bartalan port dwarfed Trachn'ir. The docks themselves were stone, not wood, which precluded a fast-spreading fire as a way to shut them down. The piers were wooden though, which might prove vulnerable. He'd gone the entire length of the mighty shipping behemoth before an idea occurred to him.
What about an explosive?
He'd never had any reason to do it himself, but he'd had enough time working with and around organic chemists to have a solid set of synthesis procedures for some rather potent detonation speed compounds. Those mad men held competitions within their departments for who could make the most sensitive, highest-yield substances possible, and a rather hefty betting pool guaranteed everybody gave it their best effort, in addition to professional pride and exclusive departmental prick-waving rights.
The synthesis wasn't the problem. The real issue always arose that, once you had these incredibly powerful explosive substances produced at scale, how do you avoid leveling your lab while you store them? The lab, and the city block along with it. A litany of accidents involving a once common fertilizer reagent came to mind. The nitrated ammonium compounds were notorious for sitting around forgotten until somebody did something everybody nearby would regret.
It was doable. More than doable. With some glassware, the right reagents, and the appropriate amount of caution he could whip together some nasty plastique-shaped charges. He even had the proper core to remotely detonate them. [Ceraunoperception] was a simple oscillation of his electromagnetic mana. A tweak could cause a metal rod in the charge blocks to spark and set off a primary explosive, like a blasting cap. He'd need to wrap them in metal foil to prevent accidental activation by static sparks or some such stupidity. It was somewhat incredible that your average materials science undergrad had at hand the training to manufacture ludicrously dangerous weapons and only barely enough wisdom not to actually go and do it.
Ulric never claimed to be a wise man.
Oh, hell yes. Yes indeed. The plan was coming together nicely. He wondered whether or not the Watcher was ever going to regret bringing him back to life.
Between his jaunt around the dock district, lunch, and a somewhat meticulous survey of the shipyards and port, where he spent over three hours simply loitering around to observe the flow of people and boats and to gather something of an idea about the protocols for onboarding vessels and their cargo. The use of handwritten logs was similar to Trachn'ir, so was the healthy number of patrolling guards.
What was a little out of the ordinary were the lighthouses.
Being on a river, Trachn'ir did not have lighthouses. Here though, rocky coasts made the things a necessity, and two of them flanked Bartala. One shown from the northwest crescent a kilometer from the exterior city wall, as best Ulric could estimate. The second was located at the southeastern portion of the port itself, essentially guaranteeing that there could be no mistaking the entryway to the harbor from the open ocean. Speaking of which, not visible from afar but crucial to the layout of the port was an artificial reef that grew in a great arc from the coast to the open ocean. Watching, he saw vessels being flagged from the port. Ulric wasn't sure why the whole port and reef situation bothered him until he realized that Bartala wasn't a natural harbor, the deep water harbor had to have been created through extensive dredging or mana-based Terramancy. Quite the undertaking. All the curves were too clean, too symmetrical to be the action of wind and wave on the irregular coastline. Also interesting was that the crest of the sea barrier could only just barely be seen below the surface of the water. Differently colored flags marked the artificial reef, which bore a regular series of stone-worked spikes, almost akin to sharpened crenellations that were peaked to take the bottoms out of vessels that attempted to come in unguided.
That explained the number of ships sitting offshore awaiting a guide boat to show them the safe entry points into the "bay"of Bartala. Ulric had excellent eyesight, and he could make out huge metal gates at a dozen different locations, operated by a single man or woman who responded to the flags and that lowered or raised to permit the keels of even the great galleons through them. They could also be raised completely to block the access points. Now that was a stroke of absolute genius. The fortification of the port meant that its navigation was, more or less, randomized, and completely controlled by the portside officials and the guide boats sent to make sure only the sanctioned entryways were utilized.
Ulric was again impressed at the farsight of such an elegant system of control. There was virtually no cheating this system, it could be adjusted on the fly by what looked like a system of pulleys and cranks and could change with very little notice, hence the colored flags to indicate which routes were currently open.
Slick. Somebody had an eye for the fine details.
Ulric watched all manner of items brought into the city from his perch on a stack of crates. His study went undisturbed. Probably because he was clearly armed and, for once since entering this gilded shitheap, his apparent barbarian heritage was doing him the favor of inducing troublemakers to find somebody the fuck else to bother. These city dwellers might look down on the tribes who scratched their livings from the harsh reaches of Prespang, but they were too toothless to directly confront the hard sons and daughters that those wastes produced. At least when those bandit pricks had ambushed him, they'd had the balls to do it with steel in their hands and a declaration of clear intent. No shifty-eyed sideways games or manufactured slights. Just good old-fashioned banditry. Honest scum would always rate higher than whatever the fuck that purser was trying to achieve.
Satisfied that he'd learned all he needed to know for the immediate future, Ulric hopped down easily from his crates and made a casual amble back towards his Inn, meticulously taking the side streets from the main causeway he'd used to navigate in. Thusly he had a somewhat comprehensive atlas of the first two tiers of Bartala when he arrived back at the familiar timbers and the half horse half fish sign that marked his Inn. He'd have to do something about those damned oxen. And the wagon full of goods. Perhaps he could buy passage on an outgoing ship, for a percentage of the coin of its sale. Hmm…later, Chief, later. You got a promise to keep and a wedding to attend.
Which means you gotta get your stank ass into a bathtub, he told himself, with a snort. It wasn't egregious but all that walking under the clear skies and ever warming days was a recipe for sweating.
Ulric found the Innkeep easily, her auburn hair standing out, as well as her slight figure and utter dominance of the stones beneath her feet. She was cleaning a series of mugs, the efficient motions of a damp rag returning them to readiness so that the bartender could dry and stow them for the evening rush.
"Highness, this one does require a bathtub." Ulric petitioned, being carefully respectful.
He'd watched this woman strike men three times her weight with a wooden baton hard enough to send them to the floor like they'd been hit by a pneumatic bolt gun of the sort used to dispatch cattle. One rise of her arm, deceptively corded with muscle beneath the dainty, milky skin revealing dress, and one fall. Bang! One more ne'erdowell to drag into the gutter out back of the joint. The bouncers were mostly for show, it had turned out. The majority of the rabble didn't have the good luck to have one of the strong arms come over and toss them from the establishment. Most were destined to face the mercy of the mistress of the inn and found that there was precious little.
The Innkeep smiled at that address, glad that she would receive no trouble from the clansman with an evil eye and the smell of trouble about him.
"It pleases the house to deliver one. I will see to it now, Honor." Said the woman with perfunctory obeisance.
A snap of fingers towards one of the girls absently sweeping the floor, more to blend into the background than to accomplish anything, brought them from their open hiding place to bend ear. Orders were conveyed with efficiency and the girl hustled off with purpose. This Innkeep was wasted here. She should be exercising her talents somewhere, like leading an army.
If he wasn't a married man currently sort of at war with these people he'd immediately court and marry this woman, content that he would live the life of a well-kept house husband. A pity. Failing that goal, Ulric would have to be sure to stay out from under her feet. As he made his way up the stair, he realized that the Innkeeper was everything his own mother had threatened him with throughout his life. It was only with the wisdom of years that he understood that a mother does not want a daughter-in-law who makes her husband happy, she wants one that keeps him out of trouble. It was with a grateful sigh that Ulric entered his room, content that he had died before his mother's curse could take hold.
Once again, grey eyes swept the room, noting the positions of everything inside and comparing it to the mental notes from just before he'd exited. Everything matched. He didn't relax until he'd relieved himself in the bathroom. There are no words for how relaxing it was to take a shit sitting down, with no chance a ravening animal would spring from the bushes to chew on one's withers. The cultural norm here was to employ a bucket of soaped water for the purpose of *ehem* hygiene following the act. Ulric was well beyond being weirded out by minor details. When you lived a life in the bush wiping yourself with leaves you prayed did not contain a contact poison that induced paralysis and debilitating rash you stopped sweating the small stuff.
Upon washing his hands, Ulric realized that his hangover was dissipated. Probably just as well too, the headache and vague nausea had put him in a vicious humor, on top of the stress he was already under. It'd be a shame if he threatened murder on some extended family or guest at Varrock's granddaughter's special day. There was a non-zero chance that was why he'd been invited by the canny old wolf in the first place.
