Chapter 1924: Passive Income

On a rest day between dives, Kaelira walked the joint halls under the dwarven mountain, where three races now worked one forge floor at her direction.

Half the benches were turning out enchanted plows and seed drills for the spring planting, the emperor’s farming project made steel. The other half fitted dwarven plate to human and elven frames for the joint army.

A human journeyman and a dwarven smith were about to come to blows over a quenching trough on the plow row, and neither of them noticed the elf until she was already between them.

"You pulled the blade at the wrong color," Kaelira said to the human, taking the tongs out of his hand without asking. She turned to the dwarf. "And you let him, to prove a point. The steel paid for your pride."

The dwarf’s beard bristled. "Girl, I’ve worked this floor six hundred years."

"Then you know I’m right."

"..."

Silence sat between them for a moment.

Then the dwarf grunted, and it came out closer to a laugh than he would have admitted, and the human ducked his head at her in apology.

The Runeweaver Titan was already gone down the aisle, sleeves rolled, calling corrections at a rack of half-finished plow blades.

At a forge, nobody ever remembered she was shy.

...

The report reached the war-lodge fire at dusk, and Gorruk read it through twice before passing it into the circle, which had become his habit lately. The page said the same impossible things both times.

"They put armor our forges can’t make on cargo guards," Rajah said from his bench, and there was no drawl left in it at all. "Three races riding one column, and they came in early, as though the winter roads meant nothing."

"The escort was twelve riders," Gorruk rumbled. "Twelve. For wealth that could ransom a county."

Skarn had not sat down since the horn. "Because nothing on those roads dares touch it. Double the watch on every pass. I want eyes on that column every hour it breathes our air."

"You doubled the watch after the first delivery," Rajah observed.

"Then I’ll double it again!"

Across the fire, Vargis Ironfang said nothing at all, merely shook his head.

The circle had stopped asking his opinion. His silence had begun to sound like one.

...

The family surfaced in the last light of afternoon three days later, and winter had moved without them.

Outside Aldoria’s labyrinth gate the drifts reached the knee where they had been ankle-deep at the dive’s start, and the gate knights’ braziers burned twice as tall. The city had pulled its shoulders in under the snow, chimney smoke standing straight up in the windless cold.

Quinlan gated his women home, and the evening ran the way home evenings ran: a dinner loud enough to rattle the windows, and a long stretch afterward that was considerably less clothed.

Then, the pile.

He slept buried in the middle of his family, sensual breathing all around him, soft bodies clinging to his skin from every side. Kitsara’s tails had claimed his arm, Seraphiel’s lips rested warm against his shoulder, and the whole tangle of them rose and fell in one slow, contented rhythm.

*Ding!*

His eyes opened at dawn to a soft chime and a line of blue script hanging in the dark.

[Level: 59 ➣ 60]

His last swing had been hours ago, deep in the labyrinth.

Every night, while his family slept, his thousand-plus Elite Souls filed down into the labyrinths of Iskaris and hunted until morning, and every point their kills earned flowed to the Necromancer who held their souls.

The wives ground by day, the dead ground by night, and their emperor leveled around the clock.

"Good morning to me," he murmured into Aurora’s hair, and dismissed the window.

At breakfast, Lucille eyed him suspiciously over her tea. "What are you smirking at, baby?"

"An oiled machine," Quinlan grinned.

...

In the burned lands of the old war, on Confederation soil, the first rebuilt village raised its walls before the deepest snows could stop it.

The crews were dwarven, sent north under the labor half of the reparations bill.

They worked the timber and stone to dwarven standard, which meant the granary went up square, sealed, and warmer than anything the village had owned before it burned.

Around the site, in a wide and watchful ring, stood the finest killers the Confederation owned, breath steaming through their guard rotations.

The carpenters they guarded waved at them at shift change. None of the killers had yet decided what to do about that.

...

The Elysiar Youth Program, in the capital of Vraven, had discovered ice.

The courtyard fountain had frozen solid, and the children had learned that the ballroom’s sock-sliding records translated poorly to the real thing.

Serika Vael turned in the middle of it with a child riding her shoulders, one hanging off each arm, and a fourth locked around her waist, all four shrieking as she spun.

"Faster, Miss Serika!!"

"Faster? You’ll fall off-"

"FASTER!!"

She went faster. The Solar Fist’s laughter carried over the wall and down the street, chased by four smaller ones.

...

The third installment from the human-elf-dwarf budding nation without a proper name crossed the pass before the moon turned, weeks ahead of any schedule the ledgers implied, and the watchers on the ridge saw why before they saw the wagons.

The empire’s half of the pass road had changed since their last rotation. Living root ran beside the roadbed the whole way down the valley, thick as a rampart, and the wagons rolled along its back at a pace no mule train had any right to hold.

"The road," the senior watcher said slowly. "The road is alive."

"The road is helping them," his partner whispered. "Since when do roads take sides?"

The root was Rosie Elysiar’s doing. The Princess of the Eternal Tree had ridden the empire’s half of the pass with her palm flat to the roadbed, and the Tree had come down the valley after her. It had not stopped growing since.

High above the cargo, elven rangers rode the bare winter canopy, watching the land.

"Her Highness Rosie Elysiar is watching us. Make no mistakes," their leader ordered.

On Confederation ground the deliveries stopped pretending to be deliveries. The column split at the burned crossroads into a crew for every dead village of the old war at once, and within days the ruins wore scaffolds, well-cranes, and granary frames.

And the crews had brought children.

Human and dwarf kids in half-sized work coats came down off the wagons, the first apprentice cohort of the Elysiar Youth Program, sent out by the governor’s own decree: a few children of the realm, old enough and set on learning architecture, picked to ride along and learn from the masters on the job.

So the escorts of the war-lodge, hand-picked killers every one, held their posts around a rebuild site and listened to a gray-bearded dwarven master walk a fourteen-year-old down a roof beam, broad hands over the boy’s on the hammer.

"Feel that? The beam talks when the nail sits wrong."

"It’s not talking, Master Dolgrin, it’s creaking-"

"That’s talking. Learn its language."

*Tok. Tok. Tok.*

"It went quiet!" The boy’s whole face lit up under his oversized cap.