Now that's a motley crew! Should I invite the Fallen One to join, too? Or Macaria, talking about the devil? Had she already realized she was now sitting on a time bomb? How did she expect her priests to level if she'd pulled them out of the food chain between her worshippers and herself, stripping them of the necessary referral XP? Never mind Eric: I was sure the Vets wouldn't let him down by seeking another priest for their own initiation. Actually, hadn't they invited me to some official 'do or other this coming Saturday? That was in their own interests: the priest's raid tricks and special abilities could add their two cents to the clan's power making it stronger and more competitive. But what was I supposed to do with the other Temple priests? Did I have to pay them for every initiation? Suicidal little cow. First she'd made a real botch of things, then she disappeared and left me to clean up her mess!
I stirred and glanced at the zoned-out zombie who must have been digesting his new status, saying goodbye to his eight hundred years of solitude.
I mentally reached for the Castle-controlling artifact. "Lurch!"
"Yes, Master!"
"What do we have in the way of a treasury? Know any?"
"Three!" AI reported with a note of pride in its voice. "One is official, used as bait for burglars and as decoy for an attacking enemy. Lots of traps and very few real treasures, mainly costume jewelry. The second one is the owner's personal treasury, an artifact strongroom with floating coordinates. It's currently on standby buried deep in the foundations and can be moved closer to your suite at your first request. Finally, the secret vault used to store real treasures. Status: yellow, borderline functional. Unfortunately, the regenerating wave that occurred sixteen hours ago has caused forty-one tons of the vault's contents to mysteriously disappear."
Bam! My virtual greedy pig collapsed, unconscious. I gave him a mental slap on his fat cheeks, wiped his large tears and sighed, "Oh, well. No use crying over spilt milk. Now listen: on my orders, Durin the Dwarf has been appointed castle treasurer. He is granted access to the last treasury you mentioned. His initial task will be to store the mithril ore and other valuables. Notify me of all instances of him carrying out more than 1% of the vault's contents."
With a smile, I turned to the dwarf and slapped his wood-hard shoulder, shrinking as I imagined him crumbling to the floor with my hearty endearment. But by now he was too dry and wizened to fall apart. Good.
"Welcome to our ranks! We are few but we do have potential—a Super Nova castle, the First Temple complete with a priest, and the promise of support from two gods. Potentially we might be looking at a major war but you can't scare a dwarf with a good fight, can you?"
He grinned in agreement, exposing a row of perfect white teeth marred by a couple of impact gaps. His jaw must have suffered a few quality punches in its time: to the best of my knowledge it took a good horse's kick to make a dent in Dwarven teeth. And not just any kick but a fractal one involving some twists and turns. Dwarves could gnaw on rocks without as much as a toothache.
I was about to send him back to the cellars for a new dose of mithril when I remembered the point at which we were interrupted. "How many grenades did you say you had stashed?"
He tried to play dumb but now it wasn't so difficult to put the squeeze on him. If he were a clan member in an honorary post, he had to get used to discipline and hierarchy. He seemed to have realized it as he mumbled,
"Seven with rings. And two crates without, that's another forty."
Logical. They had to store the grenades without fuses. Finding them was another thing. I told them to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and deliver the steel invaders' treasure to me personally. And gently, on tiptoe! I couldn't really say that the discovery of the grenades shifted the balance of power, reversing the course of history. How much explosive would they contain in total, a hundred grams? That wouldn't exceed the destructive effect of a level-90 Shooting Star spell. And that's in an ideal world, considering the weird markings. It could be a gas grenade, a signal flare or a thunderflash for all I knew. You tried to use it as a last argument in a critical situation only to discover you'd just lobbed a smoke bomb at the charging enemy. That wouldn't help you bring the world to its knees. Now if I had a whole factory of those, I could in theory give them to any number of zero-level characters, essentially arming them with the equivalent of a near-100 magic. But now all I had was a new tool, a trump card up my sleeve and I needed to make sure I used it promptly.
I turned to the two other clan members. "Lena, do leave the pup alone, will you? His mom can't wait for you to go, you've been treading all over her paws, I'm surprised she hasn't bitten you yet. Let's go outside and check on those ruins. I want to see what those mad goblins have done."
I lay my hands on their shoulders and led them toward the exit to demonstrate the whole grandeur of the Super Nova ruins. We stepped out, blinded by the piercing sun after the Temple's majestic gloom. Then we cried out: I in surprise, Lena in awe. The inner court looked as if it had been worked over by a talented landscape designer. Colored mosaic paths ran amid rich flowerbeds that climbed some of the walls forming hanging gardens. I didn't know any of those billions of flowers and plants that swayed in their pots, each humming its own note that weaved into beautiful melodies. Fruit trees offered their shade, all in different season: cherries budding and in blossom, and those bearing fruit from pale yellow to deep burgundy, all clinging to the same lace pavilion. Jesus, it was beautiful.
"Lurch?" I whispered into the artifact, unwilling to break the spell of the moment. "Got something to tell me?"
AI was smart enough not to ask me what I meant. "You did allow me to use 1% of all the units generated for my own needs, didn't you? So I thought I'd make myself pretty, the façades at least. Lying in heaps of debris for eight hundred years was intolerable. I used to be a painter once, you know..."
"I don't want to know! What 1% are you talking about? Have you done anything inside at all? I can see at least five gardeners here! Where do you think you got the money from?"
"Sir," Lurch's voice filled with injured dignity.
"Don't sir me! Okay, you can call me Master if you really have to..."
"Master, didn't you authorize me to hire extra staff with the automatic payment option? Indeed, the final version of the design you see now cost a hundred times more than I could afford. But I only paid for the project itself, plus the seeds and the enhanced-growth seedlings. The rest was all done by the staff hired as of your orders."
"Was it?" I didn't like the way he said it. "Who did you hire, then?"
"Ahem," Lurch paused. "Just some gardeners and diggers, a few stonemasons, carpenters and interior decorators, plus a couple handymen here and there..."
"How many?" I groaned.
"A hundred and seventy nine sentient beings," Lurch answered in a sunken voice. "But it's only for twenty four hours! And then I did send you a full expense report!"
"Where is it? Where the f-" I stopped noticing my friends' scared faces. "It's all right. Just the Castle's AI exceeding his authority. I've got to show him who's the boss..."
I finally trawled the message from the depths of my overflowing inbox. I opened it and groaned. "You butthead! You only sent it to me two minutes ago, didn't you? Jesus... An Elf designer, fifteen hundred a day. Total, forty one grand? Lurch?"
"He's the King's personal designer, Master. An award-winner. He used to decorate the palace of-"
"Fire everyone! Once their twenty-four hour contract is expired!"
"We can't!" Lurch protested. "All this will die!"
I looked at the glorious beauty around us. At Lena who was sitting amid the flowers that seemed to cuddle up to her, stroking a huge violet blossom that curled up in her lap ringing like a silver bell.