The orange light of the torch licked at the walls, sending shadows dancing away into the nether gloom. Straight-hewn stone walls stretched out of our little bubble of light.
Will and Heskel - Heskel was the elder of the two - followed close behind me, the latter holding his own torch.
"Why are we down here?" he asked, his voice holding the same whining tone of every teenager ever. I should know.
"If you're going to work with me, I think it's only fair that you know as much as possible," I answered, not looking back. "Besides, you'd find out soon enough, and I've no desire to lose my little minions quite that quickly."
Why yes, I was channelling Kakashi a little there. Why do you ask?
The two former urchins were quiet, but I could feel their apprehension. It was understandable. I'd only 'employed' them less than an hour before.
I summoned up the map of the underground city in my head and took two right turns and a left before we arrived at the stone doors behind which I could feel the outermost mechanisms of the factory-base.
"The first thing you need to know is that nothing here will hurt you. I can promise that."
They tensed. Understandable. Still, best to get the thing over with. A thought, and the door slid to the side, revealing the room beyond.
Two more of the long pits had been added to the big hall while the computer system and the fabricators had been moved further into the depths, both for safety and because the hall was just so damn convenient for the sugar-making. Arrays of molecular fabricators hung like stalactites from the ceiling over the great troughs, the faint ripples on the surface of the syrupy liquid the only sign of their operation.
Overseeing the operation was my newest creation, the so-called 'Cyclops'. A variant of the Weaver, the Cyclops was intended as more of an overseer and a maintainer than a builder. An issue I had recently discovered was the fact that cores tended to slowly degrade, with the speed of the degradation increasing proportionally to the amount they were used and the amount of power that flowed through them. When the first of the fabricators failed, I was anxious that my own core might fail in a similar way. Thankfully, it seemed that my body was designed to last, as I couldn't find even a trace of such degradation in my main systems, and only minor issues in the auxiliary cores.
In any case, I made the Cyclops to act as a monitor and repair system for the cores and so far it had performed admirably, its stripped-down construction and limited abilities relative to the Weaver making it both cheaper to produce and allowed it to circumvent some of the restrictions on fabricator construction, allowing me to mass-produce it.
I turned to the two former urchins, who both looked a little on the verge of flight. Both of them had drawn their weapons.
"Don't worry," I said, "I created them myself and they're under my control. In short, that," I gestured towards the sugar-troughs "Is where I produce the sweets I'm selling in the market."
"Are they… spirits?" asked Heskel, his face noticeably pale.
"No," I replied. "They're like… um," I wracked my brains for something I could use as an example. "They're machines, like pulley systems on ships, only much, much more complicated. They won't do anything unless I tell them to. I am not a sorcerer. I am an arcanoengineer and yes, before you ask, I am the first as far as I know. That's why you won't have heard of them."
The knives lowered slightly. "So… why did you show us?"
"Because the help I'm after with running my little business - primarily with resupplying the stall - would have meant you meeting the automata anyway, and there was no particular reason not to show you. Provided, of course, that you can be trusted to not go blabbing to all and sundry about it, of course." I levelled what I hoped was a severe glare at the pair.
I immediately regretted that, as it worked a little too well. A chorus of assurances erupted from the pair, until I eventually just put a hand up to interrupt them.
"Look, all I want from you is to pick up the sugar from the house on the surface when the automata deliver it, and to bring it to the stall. If this arrangement goes well, with any luck we'll be heading up in the world and I might even teach you something about how they work. For now, though, shall we just concentrate on the business at hand, eh?"
They nodded, still warily. Good enough, I decided.
XxXxXxXxX
With my new employees, the sugar business expanded quickly. Within a few days I had received several offers to provide snacks for a number of different enterprises, primarily the fighting pits and a few of the more… licentious establishments. I was by no means happy about supporting either business, but in the end practicality won out to an extent.
I negotiated a contract with the owners of two of the larger fighting pits as well as the manager of a large and well-reputed tavern/hostel on the eastern side of town, selling bulk quantities of sugar and mint cakes in return for advertising and a pretty penny. I did not establish a direct contract with any of the brothels - no matter that I could understand why that particular industry had endured for so very long and that some of the prostitutes and courtesans were there by choice, many were undoubtedly not and, frankly, the concept of the thing still rubbed me up the wrong way.
No pun intended.
Regardless, with my spreading fame - and the mystery of my source was likely a factor in that as well - my coffers expanded quickly and within a week of initially setting up the stall I moved my business to a former opium house whose owner had been apparently run off after a batch turned out to be contaminated - more than usual, anyway. I took the large rooms of the interior and turned them into something akin to a lounge, a place where people could come and discuss matters in comfort. I reached out to a few of the wine sellers and managed to form a contract with a merchant, one Awiram Arandas, to supply my new establishment with wine of a reasonable quality.
I also made my next few hires. The third employee of my growing company was a (now former) prostitute by the name of Reene whom Heskel had introduced me to, having apparently met in circumstances they would not tell me and I did not push for.
In any case, Reene quickly demonstrated a sharp mind and a talent for both numbers and charm, both of which qualified her for manning the stall in the market alongside a pair of 'free' mercenaries for protection - free, in this case, meaning that they weren't attached to any preexisting mercenary company. Both men - Tsega and Haile - were large and had a flair for looking intimidating without being scary enough to reduce customers.
I struck up something of a friendship with Reene seeing as she took up residence in one of the rooms on the second storey of the townhouse. I think that at first she thought I was just being nice to her to get into her pants - understandable, given her previous occupation - but as the days wore on, we began to settle into something resembling a comfortable rhythm. She was scarily clever at times and shared an interest with me in the form of the workings of magic, even if she wasn't a magician herself. She never came out and told me directly, but from various clues and references I eventually gathered that she had been taken in as a 'toy child' - a sort of living doll, of sorts - by an Imperial noblewoman who did use magic and had both taught her her letters and made quite an impression on her young mind. There was a painfully bitter not in her voice when she talked about the noblewoman, but given the fact that she had ended up as a prostitute in what is to all intents the ass-end of nowhere I doubted that that particular arrangement had ended well.
Eventually - about two and a half weeks after hiring her - I introduced Reene to the automata. I debated the decision for quite a while and made certain that I was paying her a very handsome wage beforehand, alongside keeping an eye on her with one of the dozens of Muninn I had constructed, but eventually decided that she was more than clever enough to know that something was up anyway. Better to just show her, rather than have her discover them on her own and draw conclusions that i didn't want.
It says something, I think, that after her initial minor freak-out, Reene's first reaction was to inquire about how on earth I managed to provide the energy to animate them. Following my simplified explanation of how I didn't use a living source at all but rather a generator - and after explaining the concept of a generator, for that matter - she brought up a point that I had not considered, and which had immense implications.
Namely, could a magician use the energy in my cores.
Now, she hadn't known about the possibility of storing energy in gems until I referenced it from the books somewhat absentmindedly, and as such she knew no more than I about how exactly that worked. Regardless, if magicians could, the possibilities were both endless and terrifying, and were of enormous importance to my plans to get eventually involved in the political scene of Alagaesia.
Human, and to a lesser extend dwarven, magicians were primarily limited in their capabilities by two things: their knowledge of the Ancient Language and the amount of energy they had at their disposal. If magicians could tap my cores, only the knowledge of the Language would remain an actual limitation, at least to magicians with access to the cores. The possibility of magicians with the capability to perform magic on a level unprecedented except perhaps by the elves was a Big Thing, and would also be a surefire way to draw the attention of a certain megalomaniacal emperor.
I would need to be very careful indeed as to what I did with that particular possibility, if it even was one. I had no desire to be crushed beneath the weight of a thousand-odd Eldunari's worth of magic if I could help it, especially not before I got myself properly set up and dug in.
I made a mental note to looking into finding some way of quietly employing or otherwise obtaining a magician in order to test that hypothesis. Better to know one way or another than to flounder around with no idea. I would need to be careful, though. Very careful.
In any case, the first three weeks of my business were very profitable indeed. Perhaps too much so, as I arrived back at the townhouse one evening to discover a scroll had been sealed to my door.
It was a very nice scroll, high-quality, almost white parchment with two splotches of red wax holding it to the door by a ribbon. It was far from a welcome message, though, given that pressed into one of the seals was the downward-pointing sword of of the Lawgiver, along with the wreath-and-star of the Council of Seven, the closest thing the mercenaries and merchants of the city had to a ruling body. With trepidation, I pulled the scroll from its place and slipped it out of its ribbon, unfurling it.
By the generous request of the Lawgiver and the Council of Seven, you are cordially invited to partake of an evening meal with the aforementioned parties two days hence in the Hall of the Lawgiver.
You are permitted to bring one member of your Company with you, and are also requested to provide a selection of your Company's products for the meal. Present this letter to the guards at the gate and they will allow you passage.
Penned this day by the Scribe Eil on behalf of the aforementioned Lawgiver and Council
Well…
That's certainly something.