Book 4 Chapter 18: Familiar, Twitchy Faces

++Of the numerous patients I have treated, none have been in any way as advanced in their mental degeneration or violent tendencies as this man. He was first submitted to my asylum following the offensive into Estalia, wherein he was, apparently under the command of Baron Agrian Vornholt, caught in some ambush from which he was the only survivor. Apparently he presented normally prior to this; a man of twenty or so years, average height, wiry build, brown hair and eyes. Afterwards, however, his brain appears to have undergone some sort of permanent psychiatric shift. He claims to hear voices that are not there, and has a tendency to respond violently to any attempts at reasoning with him on the matter. Four times now, he has escaped, injuring several orderlies on two of these occasions. I am entirely unsure how exactly he keeps finding the materials to mount these attempts at flight, but each one has been more creative and destructive than the last. The most recent incident involved use of large amounts of improvised explosive material, resulting in the destruction of an entire concrete wall. Efforts to find the underlying cause of this delusional insanity have so far proven fruitless; the subject is simply unwilling to permit any official, myself included, to get close enough to truly examine him. After I reasonably suggested that the problem may lie with the misaligned plates of his cranium, he began shrieking. I still recall the words. “That’s how it starts”, followed by, “first the skulls and then the meat. You’ll want to cut it next, cut me right out of me.” To this day, I do not know what he was talking about, but the look in his eyes…the madness.

David Blakely is beyond help. I understand that this will be seen as an admission of failure on my part, on a surrender of the medical sciences over human madness. I happen to agree with this. Nonetheless, I must still say that the only solution I can recommend with any sort of ethical confidence is to quietly and humanely euthanize the man, before his dementia progresses further. He is a threat to himself and everyone around him.++

- Doctor’s report from Borkil Asylum, Laugrey. 1,862 A.E

It took a day before Victoria was mostly recovered from the kidnapping attempt. Her period of returning to normal seemed to have just been a fluke, because soon after that she retreated back into the depths of some stultified melancholy. The girl was despondent, speaking only when spoken to and flinching whenever I made a sudden move in the periphery of her vision.

It hurt me to see her like that, and hurt more to know that there was nothing I could do to abate her pain. I offered to take her out with me to shop, but she refused even that, practically begging that we remain in the hotel room together and that she not be exposed to the outside.

What was worse than all of this, though, was the infrequency. The periodic shifts in her mood and how unpredictable they became. I got the strong impression that Victoria—the real Victoria—was somehow trapped in a cocoon of trauma, able to poke her head out only briefly where it broke through the sides before inevitably being snatched back inward.

I was not surprised when she finally worked up the will to request that I take her back to the Vornholt estate, nor was I especially bothered. It seemed entirely naturally to me that the girl would want the safety that came from a whole household constantly under guard.

Granted, I knew that the Vornholt estate’s protection was now far inferior to that which I could provide by myself.

“I will take you to Poloira for a brief stop,” I told my sister. “We need to pick someone up to protect you.”

It was not pleasant, making myself part with such a valuable asset as Blakely, but I decided that my sister was more valuable than any one of my refineries. Victoria for her part was utterly aghast at the notion of flying across the ocean, though I noticed she did not actually complain.

For her sake, I made the trip quick. It was another benefit of my heightened power that I was able to do so, and we touched down in my primary refinery together less than two hours after departure from Laugrey.

Even Victoria’s grim mood seemed to crack a shade at the sights awaiting her there. The refinery had, naturally, grown larger since I first set it up.

By now there were several large blocks of machinery where the actual extraction and refinement was done, great veins of brass piping that pumped the hot iron up through the earth to filter and process it. Men and women flitted around all doing one job or another, regulating outputs, ensuring pressure remained stable, the works. Uniformed magicians patrolled with mercenaries for security purposes, though I doubted we would suffer a serious attack for quite some time. It was, after all, an open secret now that the Vorets themselves had failed to break my refinery, and few were stupid enough to think themselves worthy for a task the Vorets were not.

“This is amazing!” Victoria chirped, seeming to briefly forget her trauma from the day before.

“I know,” I told her. “It is my largest refinery, though not the only one. The others are still undergoing a few modernizations.”

“How much oil does this place process?” Victoria asked me.

“Just shy of seven thousand barrels a day.”

She looked at me blankly, and I was reminded how naturally insufficient the human brain was at visualizing such numbers. As an ancient lich, I could not only picture seven thousand barrels of oil in my head, but have each one be a slightly different colour and rotating at a slightly different speed while reciting poetry to myself.

“Roughly one million crowns’ worth each year,” I told her. “That is in profits.”

“And how many others do you have?”

“Thirteen now.”

“You’re planning on all of them becoming this big?”

“Bigger,” I told her. “And I am looking to purchase more.” My temporary limit on expansion was just that the other oil barons of Poloira had started to form a block, not wanting me to corner the market.

I could undo that problem quite easily with nothing more than additional funds. I doubted their cooperation would survive being offered half again, let alone double, the actual worth of their lands. That was the one eternal benefit to dealing with oil barons, they were not a lot less eager to step on one another than they were the common man if it meant more money.

For now, I had to settle for merely being a decamillionaire.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Victoria’s awe lasted while I made my way through the refinery, and she seemed only to get more impressed as I was suddenly swamped by people inquiring about one project or another. It seemed that everything was always my problem. This was, on some level, fair enough, given that I was claiming no small portion of the wealth generated by this place.

On the other hand, it was annoying, and I did not see much point in having the money of a small Iruccian nation if it meant I still had to do annoying peon things like manage my business all the time. I directed them all to Alira, confident that she could handle whatever these trivialities were.

***

Alira had managed to scrounge up the time for a bath, when people started reporting Isabel’s appearance on the horizon. She’d eagerly seized her chance to take a break and relished the hot water rolling over her, thrown her head back and just sighed as it seeped into every pore and warmed the ache right out of her sleep-deprived body. For ten minutes, there was only bliss.

Then she came out to find the new stack of paperwork upon her desk. Alira Bella Paula had never actually wanted to kill Isabel, but in that moment…In that moment she came very fucking close.

***

Unfortunately, I was not just here to show Victoria how amazing her older sister’s work was.

“Do you remember Dave Blakely?” I asked her as we approached his perch.

“I think so,” Victoria told me. “He’s that weirdo who was always sniffing people right?”

“He is a very skilled sentry, scout, trapper and soldier with over a decade of military experience and two decades of paramilitary experience. Perhaps the most naturally skilled soldier I have ever met, and easily the most intuitive person I have ever seen evidence of existing,” I told her. I was, I admit, somewhat surprised by the strength of my reaction, but I had always hated to see talent go unappreciated, and Blakely had been extraordinarily useful to me. It irked me to see him dismissed.

“Okay,” Victoria nodded. “He does sniff people though right?”

“...Yes,” I told her. “He does. But generally no more than once, after that he has a person’s scent and does not forget it. Ever.”

My sister shivered at that.

Blakely’s ‘perch’ was a large, heavily constructed building of dense steels and thick stone work, built to withstand cannon fire. Literally. Built, at his very explicit instruction, to withstand cannon fire. Even I was not sure I could have blown through the yards-thick stone-and-steel walls with a single blast, and suspected that Blakely had set up some means of escaping before I managed should I ever make that attempt.

I could feel his eyes on us as we approached. Another feature of the perch; Blakely had clear sight lines to practically the whole compound at once while within it. Just as he preferred.

Victoria seemed to feel it too, she clung closer to me as we approached.

“Blakely,” I called out. “I have a task for you.”

No answer.

“Blakely!” I repeated, and again there came no answer. I did not take long to get irritated, and soon started drifting upwards. Victoria grabbed my hand.

“Wait,” she pleaded.

I eyed her, sighing as I came back down, instead raising my voice once more to shout up again.

“Dave Blakely, you are staying in a building constructed with my funds, on my lands, with my permission. Do you really think that it is in your best interests to continue ignoring me?!”

A few seconds passed, in which I thought Blakely may actually continue to ignore me. That would have been very interesting, as even I did not know how I would react to such blatant disrespect.

Fortunately for all parties involved, he ended up descending down the retractable ladder poking out through the bottom of his tower and walking over to me with a grim face.

Blakely had never been the most well-adjusted man, but living in his tower had seemed to bring some semblance of peace to him. I imagined that being surrounded on all sides by such thick fortification, and having sight lines to everything for miles around him, was the closest he got to ever feeling truly safe.

Having that torn away so suddenly clearly did not sit right with the man. His face spasmed more than usual, and this time the image was punctuated by a few actual bites aimed at the air around him, like a dog snapping its jaws. Victoria shied back behind me.

“What do you want?” he growled.

Blakely had earned quite a lot of good will from me with his performance in saving my life, my refinery, my secrets and, generally, by proving himself to be one of the more useful creatures that I currently had at my disposal.

There were, however, limits.

“Step back,” I told him mildly. He seemed to pick up the severity in my thoughts and backed off by half a step, not quite shying away but suddenly becoming a good deal less aggressive in his contempt. It was how a wild dog might behave after catching the scent of a wolf.

He did not apologize, but he did not push it further.

“I need you to return to the Vornholt Estate,” I told Blakely.

He scowled instantly. “Why?” His eyes flickered to Victoria. “To protect her. There was another kidnapping attempt?”

I hated how he did that, sometimes. There was no way to predict or plan around such leaps because, as far as I could tell, there was something more than simple logic behind them. I knew, intellectually, that there must be some rational mechanism to Blakely’s thoughts, or else they would not be so consistently correct, but whatever that logic was, it was as alien to me as music to a deaf woman. All I could do was try to account for wherever his random fits of insight might strike.

And tread carefully.

“You are correct,” I admitted evenly. “And I want you to keep her safe.”

“Why me?” Blakely asked.

Another rare opportunity where the truth was actually my best chance at persuading the person I was speaking to.

“Because you are the most suited to the job. I do not have any other subordinates who are as skilled at safeguarding against attacks, as decisive in a crisis and as good at…preparing defences.”

That this remained true despite my working heavily with a millennia-old ancient lich who was feuding with the Gods was, I thought, ridiculously absurd. But still undeniable.

Blakely did not seem mollified by my response, either.

“I’m safe in that tower,” he told me, with what almost sounded like a note of pleading in his voice.

“You may return to it after this,” I promised him. “But that tower does not come freely.”

He looked like he was thinking of something, perhaps weighing a retort in his mind. After a few moments, he instead just nodded and headed back to his tower to prepare.

“I don’t want to stay with him,” Victoria told me as soon as he was out of earshot.

“You do not have to,” I promised her. “You will be staying with mother and father.”

Victoria looked down at her feet and nodded.

“Is there something you would like to say?” I prompted her.

“No,” she replied quietly. I considered pushing the girl, but decided against it. She had experienced enough lately.