Excellent. I slapped my knees and jumped to my feet, scaring a butterfly and earning a disapproving glance from the Hound pup busy hunting it.
Enough digressing. I reminded myself of a steam engine pulling an enormous freight train packed with goods and people clinging to car roofs as I dragged it directly into the financial abyss. I had to force myself out of it. Actually, that was exactly what I'd been doing those last few days. The cigarette business wasn't bringing in any profits yet: all the proceeds were immediately invested into its development, building premises, buying supplies and hiring more staff. Judging by what my analysts had gleaned from my business plan, in just one year we were looking at five hundred grand gold a month to each alliance member. Nice as it was, I needed money now—preferably fifty times that.
I started by creating a new High Spell scroll, put it up at a private auction, then sent an invitation to the Minediggers impatiently waiting for it. In less than ten minutes, they bought the precious parchment. True to their word, they transferred the million into my account adding a polite letter where their ill-concealed impatience and hopes for quick revenge shone through their words of gratitude. I had a funny feeling they weren't going to stop at that. They would keep going, destroying the greedy offenders' castles one after another. They were yet to learn that sooner or later—sooner rather than later—their happy bubble would burst. Everybody in the square had witnessed the scroll in action. All the interested parties had gleaned everything they needed from that demonstration and were probably busy working on countermeasures. Which were quite simple and obvious. It was enough to break the dome down into a few smaller segments or levels. Then the scroll would only be able to remove the first layer, presenting the attackers with an unpleasant surprise: a second protective sphere.
I was afraid that very soon, when discussing a castle's defense levels, everyone would allude to the number of layers in a dome. The scrolls would still be used but their price would fall tenfold, if not hundredfold.
Too bad. I had to squeeze as much out of it as I could while I still could. I had to churn out a scroll a day: the Vets' arsenal could wait no matter how many hints Dan and the General would drop.
Another money-making idea had been burning a hole in my brain for the last twenty-four hours, ever since I'd received Thror's message. That honorable Dwarf, the patriarch of Thror's Gem House, informed me that the work on both altars had been completed. Which made me remember our last meeting and the way he complained of the greedy priests of Light who didn't want to add a new god to their pantheon—one that would answer the needs of both Dwarfs and miscellaneous crafters. Actually, he'd chosen the right shoulder to cry on. Was I the First Priest or just a pretty face? Granted, I only knew the location of one Dark temple out of the remaining four: the one in the Drow capital. But that was plenty to summon a new patron god. Ruata, the Drow Princess doubling as the deserted temple's Priestess, was unlikely to mind. And even if she did, so what?
In other words, I had enough to offer the midgets from Under the Mountain to make them untie their purse strings and dig up their grandfathers' pots of gold. The unique service of custom-summoning a patron god was going to cost them.
A couple of hours later, having rummaged through the available gods lists and having discovered, to my joy, an additional box saying include deities from literature, fantasy and gaming, I was knocking at the massive gate of Thror's Gem House with my most enticing smile.
The clan's patriarch knew better than to make me wait. Almost straight away, the receptionist invited me in. He wasn't particularly pleased with the speed with which I accepted my finished order—apparently, he'd been looking forward to explaining every flourish of the intricate design and painting a picture of the task's inconceivable difficulty. Now he sniffed into his beard, apparently betrayed in his best expectations.
Unwilling to alienate him, I hurried to rectify my mistake. "You'll have to excuse my haste, Sir. I didn't want to hurt your feelings by inspecting your perfect work for non-existent faults. The stamp of your House is all I need to justify its quality."
My sugar-coated flattery had the desired effect. The dwarf relaxed, accepting a stance of haughty arrogance. Oh well, end of fine tuning, time to engage the primary caliber.
"Besides, I wanted to save our time and energy for a much more important private conversation," I rolled my eyes meaningfully at the guards behind their firing slits.
The Patriarch gave a kingly nod and began making a complex sign combination with his fingers. Steel trapdoors clanged. The Dwarf's time-ridden face expressed a patiently polite attention with just a tad of skepticism.
"Absolutely private," I repeated.
He stared at me with suspicion, chewing his lower lip. Finally, he made up his mind. He made another sign, dramatically more complex than the first one, and froze, listening. Then he made another sign and finally shook his fist at somebody unseen. Another doortrap clanged—hopefully, the last one.
The Patriarch looked up at me from under his bushy eyebrows. "Speak."
"Does the name of Aulë say something to you?"
Crack! A steel pencil in the dwarf's hand snapped in half. With a thump, one of the guards collapsed behind the wall. So he should. The blacksmith god, the lord of earth and metals and the Maker of the Dwarven race who'd passed onto them his love of creations in metal and stone.
"Speak," the Patriarch repeated. He leaned forward, virtually lying with his chest on the table, his hopeful eyes looking into mine.
Four hours later I walked out of his house, not quite stable on my feet due to the amounts of Dwarven Extra Dry consumed, and breathed a sigh of relief. It probably would have been easier to come to a business agreement with an electric kettle than with those skinflints from Under the Mountain. They hadn't given me twenty million. Nor ten. I'd only managed to squeeze seven out of them. Plus five hundred Dwarves deployed for the restoration of the castle's defensive capacity including four external bastions.
And if someone says it's not enough, then I hope they have to deal with a dwarf vendor in every scruffy shop they ever visit on their crooked life's path. And if six months of such pain in the butt doesn't turn him into a gibbering walking skeleton gray before his time—then I'll eat humble pie and admit I was taken for a ride. But at the moment, I was entirely proud of the deal I'd just struck.
According to the Dwarves, they could have seven million in a week in exchange for my keeping my end of the bargain: summoning their much-anticipated deity. Actually, without even mentioning anything else, such summoning would bring thousands of Dwarves under the Fallen One's banners. True that whenever the question was raised, Honorable Thror had turned rather pale and sad—so it looked as if the event could lead to a rift in the Dwarven ranks. Not everyone was prepared to denounce their new gods returning to their original element that technically had found itself on the side of the Dark.
But for me personally, such a Dwarven exodus from the army of Light and their allegiance to the Fallen One was in some respect even more important than the money itself. This was a very hefty weight added to the balance of future confrontation.
Having received a boost from the admittedly decent brew, my mind was already painting countless steely ranks of Dwarf squads lining up at the foot of the Temple, waiting for my command. Then the world shuddered.
Booom, the gong reverberated all over AlterWorld with a system alert. I peered at the opened message and froze in the middle the road.
Pantheon alert! A new force has entered the world! Llos, the Dark Mother of the Drow, Weaver of Chaos and the Lady of Spiders, has joined the Pantheon of the Fallen One!