Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 31

“It’s mine!”

“No, it’s not!”

Eleniah and Kay quietly clashed, their forks dueling as they battled for the most decadent of prizes, the last bite of their dessert. The simple-looking cake was a moist, delicious treat sitting in a small pool of cream and topped with sweetpeel peels. It was very good, and there was only a little bit left.

“You took an extra bite of my main course after I already shared some!” Kay complained as he blocked the tines of her fork and knocked it upward.

“That means nothing now! Victory or death!” She angled her attack low, bringing her fork down so that she could stab into the last bite of cake and deflect Kay’s own attempt simultaneously. With a quick flick of her wrist, she freed her utensil of any obstructions and gleefully dropped the last bit of desert into her waiting maw.

“Dammit!” Kay clenched his fork and bowed his head, bitter in defeat. He slowly lifted his head, his eyes just barely showing as he glared at her, swearing vengeance in his heart.

Eleniah tipped back her head and laughed merrily at their shared dramatics.

Kay sat up normally and joined in. “This was fantastic.”

“One of the perks of wealth and power is being able to hire high-level chefs.” Eleniah leaned back in her chair, and it looked like the only reason she remembered not to rock it back onto its hind legs was the fancy nature of the establishment they were in. “You need to pick up a private chef for yourself; that way, we can have fantastic meals without having to walk all this way.”

“We’re tier-five; the walk here wasn’t hard at all.”

She lazily waved off his argument, “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, well, it’s on a list of things to get done when we have the time. There are more important things going on that we need to focus our efforts toward.”

A knock came from the entrance to the room, and they looked over to see Kolm Davidson standing there. “While the timing is a coincidence, that is a wonderful segue to why I’d like to speak to you. May I come in?”

Kay and Eleniah shared a glance. Kay slowly nodded. “Please. Although this is your restaurant.”

Kolm chuckled as he approached. “That may be, but I pride myself and my establishments on propriety.” He pulled a chair out of seemingly nowhere, which must have been a storage item, and sat perpendicular to the table, facing both of them. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small metal spike with a flat base. He set it on the table and tapped the pointy end once, causing it to light up with a soft blue glow. “I’d spend some time asking you about how the meal was and what you particularly enjoyed, but that isn’t what you’re here for, and there are others I can interrogate over how well my chef did this evening.”

“I’m guessing that’s some kind of privacy item?” Eleniah asked with a raised brow.

“Quite. I don’t particularly care whether or not any of this gets out into the world, but I don’t know if you’ll feel the same way.”

“Feel free to share it with us, and we’ll be able to decide for ourselves.”

Kolm smiled at Kay’s reply and softly shook his head. “Based on previous experience, it will be better if I give you a little context first. It’ll keep you from bombarding me with questions after I tell you what I’ve learned.”

Kay stared at him for a moment before nodding once. “I wouldn’t say that you have us right where you want us, but this is your show so far.”

“I appreciate that.” Kolm leaned back in his seat and ran his fingers through his bushy red beard. “I am an old, old man, and I’ve spent quite a lot of my time chasing after a single goal. Originally, I was content that I could do what needed to be done to achieve my goal by myself. On the surface of things, my goal isn’t very large or complex, so I thought I could do it all alone. Sadly, over the years, I’ve found through successive failures that I need connections, influence, and power to get what I need. As I’ve lived longer and grown my Classes, it’s become easier to gain influence and wield it to get what I want, but I’ve also found it’s even easier to get what I want if I temper my influence and power with mutually beneficial deals and the bonds of friendship, or at least acquaintanceship. I keep my ear out for rumors about potential new powerhouses that might make good connections in the future, and if the opportunity arises, I offer my assistance with whatever they need in exchange for future favors.”

“Basically, you want me to owe you one in exchange for this information.”

“Yes. The information I’ve gained is something I believe will be very important to you, and I’d be telling you it long before your lovely little spymaster could get a hold of it. She’s very good, and the bits of her original network that she managed to hold onto, plus what she’s built up since she came to work for you, is quite impressive, but I can literally move faster than her agents can.”

Kay stared at him, considering. Kolm’s large face was genial but also a solid wall that gave none of his thoughts away. “What’s your goal?” Kay eventually asked. “What are you after, and what kind of future favor would you be asking me for? It’s probably obvious, but I’m not going to be signing up for a complete train wreck of a deal when you’ve just told me that I’ll learn about this later.”

“A perfectly reasonable question.” Kolm leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “For the sake of my long-held goal, I’m after… ingredients.” He spread his arms, palms open, like he’d revealed some wondrous secret of the world. “Mostly ingredients. There are a few other materials that I’m generally interested in, but usually its ingredients.”

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“…What?”

“I love doing that.” Kolm chuckled as he sat back. “I’m not after anything nefarious or damaging; I just want ingredients that can be difficult to acquire. There are many items out in the world that are rare, hard to harvest or process, limited in quantity, or any combination of the above. That makes most of them very expensive, which isn’t really a problem in most cases. I’m quite wealthy at this point, and more annoyingly, people are prone to hoarding the things I want. Power, influence, and connections to others with power and influence make it easier to pry what I’m looking for out of the arms of others that also really want what I’m after.”

Kay and Eleniah both stared at him. “You’re going around trading favors with the powers that be in the world so you can get better ingredients for your restaurants?”

“Oh, no, not for my restaurants. I make sure they all have their own budgets, and we try very hard to make sure that we use mostly local products in each restaurant. The ingredients I’m after are all for my personal goal.”

Kay suppressed a sigh he felt rising up in his chest when he saw the gleaming in Kolm’s eyes, just begging him to ask the question. But he was curious, so he did. “And what’s that?”

“Booze.”

Kay sighed at the answer and pressed his hand to his eyes, “You’re getting a kick out of dragging this out, aren’t you?”

“I’m an old man; let me entertain myself the way I want!” Kolm protested.

“Just tell us the whole thing.”

“Fine. I’ve told you that I have a Bartender Class, and it isn’t that hard to figure out I’ve got a Chef Class and a Restaurateur Class as well. But my starting Class was Brewer, and that’s still what I love most. A long time ago, when I was still a tier-three Brewer, a tier-five came to my establishment to try my drinks. As I’m sure you know, alcohol is technically a poison, and as you get higher and higher in tier, you need stronger and stronger drinks to get drunk as your body improves from the mana flowing through it. This particular tier-five had a Class that gave extra strong poison resistance, and they hadn’t been able to get drunk in decades. I took their situation as a challenge and started to try and brew stronger and stronger alcohol to get them drunk. They hung around while the batches I devised were fermenting, and we ended up becoming friends.”

Kay watched out of the corner of his eye as Eleniah leaned forward, her hands pushing down on the table and an intense look on her face. She’d originally been sitting and listening with a look of exasperation that mirrored Kay’s, so the shift was noteworthy.

Kolm continued his story without seeming to notice, “My drinks eventually finished, and we tried them. They were all terrible. The strongest, most stomach-wrenching, teeth-wrecking barrels of rotgut you could ever drink. My friend took one sniff of the best one and told me I’d won, that that drink would absolutely get them drunk if they imbibed a few flagons of it.” His smile was wide and wistful. “And they refused to take a single sip.” He glanced over at his audience of two, “It was nasty shit, and my friend didn’t want any. They weren’t an alcoholic after the haze of getting black-out drunk; they just wanted a nice drink that would let them get buzzed while they relaxed. So we burned the whole lot, and my friend set off, back to adventuring or whatever they did when they weren’t spending time with me.” The out-of-focus and nostalgic look in his eyes sharpened into determination. “And I had the goal that’s driven me every waking moment of every day.”

“You’re the goddess’ brewer.” Eleniah breathed out. “The one in the stories about Olivia Snakebiter.”

“Ha! You’ve heard that one? I’d thought those versions of her stories had died out. They aren’t a perfect representation of what happened, but yes, that character in those stories is based on me.”

Eleniah caught Kay’s questioning look and explained, “Olivia Snakebiter is one of the legends said to have made it all the way to tier-ten. Some of the cultures that think you ascend to godhood when that happens to worship her as the goddess of antidotes, resisting poisons and venoms, that kind of stuff.” She turned back to look at Kolm. “You’re old as shit!

He shook his head and laughed, “I am, but that’s not usually the kind of reaction I get when I reveal that. All in all, though, that’s my goal. I’m trying to brew a tasty drink that can get my old friend pleasantly buzzed while we enjoy a nice meal together and catch up on our lives. It’s not some heroic quest or grand adventure, but it’s still an important goal to me.”

If you didn’t have the background information that Kay had access to, or if you weren’t paying attention to Kolm’s words enough, it would be easy to overlook the fragments of information that the large man dropped when he talked about his goal. Kay did have that information, though, and he was paying attention, which is what let him reach the conclusion that had him blurting out a question before he could think through whether it was a good idea or not.

“Administrators can come back to Torotia?”

Kolm’s gregarious smile and laughter vanished immediately, replaced by steely determination and incredible focus as he stared down Kay. It reminded him of facing down some of the stronger monsters he’d gone up against, and he was halfway out of his seat, with armor forming over his nice clothes and half of a sword in his hand, when Kolm leaned back, his hands in the air.

“Sorry, sorry! I really wasn’t expecting you to say that, and I overreacted. I don’t want to fight anyone.”

Kay slowly let his blood constructs dissolve into his veins and saw Eleniah sit back down, both of them keeping a close eye on the suddenly much more dangerous man.

Kolm waited until they were both fully seated again before continuing. “Now, in response to your question, all I can say is, ‘I can’t answer that question’.”

“That… kind of gives away the answer.”

He shrugged, “That isn’t my problem. I’m just keeping to the agreements I’ve made in the past. Let’s move on from that subject and get back to why I invited you here. I’m offering you information I’ve learned that will be important to you and is more valuable the earlier you learn it in exchange for a future favor that will involve you helping me get my hands on an ingredient or material I’m after that will be used for the creation of a new drink and which will only be acquired through means that won’t hurt anyone or put you in an unwinnable situation.”

Kay really wanted to keep asking about Administrators and the System since the obviously much higher-tier man had to know a lot more than Kay or any of his people, but the look in Kolm’s eyes told him that he wasn’t going to get any answers here. “I’m fine with those terms.”

“Fantastic. The information I’ve learned is this: The Shatterplate Order and the Itarian Crusade have begun speaking to various nobles and the military of the larger nations to the west regarding potentially sending a force to Avalon to deal with ‘the threat of a national leader corrupted and turned by vampyr’. The Itarian Crusade has also made overtures to the Coalition of Fang’s End. Nothing’s been finalized yet, but from the way the wind is blowing, it looks like you’re going to have a decent-sized army on your doorstep by the end of the year at the latest.”

“…Dammit.” Kay groaned into his hands, “I was really hoping it wasn’t going to be something like that.”