1????????Soul Bound
1.3??????Making a Splash
1.3.1????An Obligated Noble
1.3.1.22 Anti-assassination market
Lord Landi gave Kafana a sly look.
Claudio: “You won’t broadcast this or let anyone else know?”
Kafana: “It won’t go beyond you, me, the five other wombles in my party, and our vessels. You have my word of honour upon it.”
Claudio: “Purity of blood doesn’t matter to me, but there are plenty of nobles who do care about having a purely Covadan ancestry. And while old Azephus looked Covadan, he was a half-breed and proud of it. He didn’t just follow Cov - he honoured all the deities, and set up a shrine to them in the gardens. There have been periods in the past when that alone would have been enough to see House Landi disgraced, had it become known, so we’ve a tradition of restricting access to just the Count and the Count’s Heir. But, in return for the respect we offer, the deities sometimes send us dreams, and we pay attention to them.”
Kafana: “And Mor sent you a dream about me?”
Claudio: “Two days before Fra Mattheus performed the summoning ritual at Villa Landi, that united you with your Vessel, I received a dream from Mor about a woman with sea-like hair, and my gifting her with one of our family’s oldest heirlooms, the ring given by Mor to Francis the Navigator. It is why I visited on that day, and ordered a feast to be prepared on such short notice.”
Kafana: {Guys? Thoughts?}
To cover the wait while the others listened to the recording slice she’d embargoed as womble-only, she carried on speaking to Claudio.
Kafana: “That’s a lot to take in. Please give me a moment to adjust. Does Herberto know about this?”
Claudio nodded.
Claudio: “He’s still young, and needs to gain confidence as a leader, but he’s my heir. He was astute enough to spot that two volumes are missing from the collection in the Library and was curious enough to ask me about them. They are the volumes which talk about the Cor Focis and how the Landis select an Heir.”
Kafana: “I think I’m suffering from a lack of confidence myself. I’m new to leadership, and keep feeling like a fraud - like I haven’t earned my position and am not worthy of holding it. How do you cope?”
Claudio: “No matter how well they succeed, every ruler starts off feeling like that if they take their responsibilities seriously. You learn through making mistakes, and though that’s inevitable, they burn you worse than hot coals. You look around you at established leaders, and at great leaders from the past, and you see their successes or the front they present, not their failures and the path they took.”
Wellington: {It’s possible. We registered our characters in advance, when we signed up to Soul Bound as a group. The expert systems will have had access to your avatar appearance and the personality traits and aptitudes their client software detected when Tomsk took you through the calibration process used by ExperiSense to decide your character’s attunements and which quests or encounters to nudge towards you.}
Bungo: {They do that sort of thing. Starting cities in other regions probably also have quest series the devs hand crafted in preparation for the game’s launch, and the deities will have searched the profiles of players due to arrive on the first day, for individuals that best matched each quest series. You lucked out in being a good fit for a quest line that wanted attunement to both Cov and Mor. Blame it on your weird hair.}
Alderney: {Her hair isn’t weird. I like it. It may have been distinctive, and different from the natural colours of the native NPCs and players who wanted to blend in, but it is way cool.}
Bulgaria: {And apparently deities of the sea enjoy sea-like hair. You can’t argue with results. Maybe if I’d picked ashen hair filled with mysterious sable shadows, I’d have received special attention too.}
Kafana: “Making mistakes sounds a horrible way to improve your ability to lead well, especially when mistakes can kill.”
Calaudio: “You try to avoid foolish risks, but if you don’t take any, you’ll also fail because you’ll miss the opportunities too. There will always be doubters and naysayers, but you just have to develop a thick enough skin to survive their barbs and do what needs doing even when you know it won’t be popular with all your subordinates.”
Kafana: “How do I do that? I don’t want to lose my empathy and turn into a jerk.”
Claudio: “You don’t need to. Don’t be the one who is trying to make everyone else in the room recognise how smart they are. Be the quietest. Spend most of your time listening or asking questions that give others a chance to shine. Once you are the one with the authority, you can afford to grant time to others, and they’ll appreciate it because they know how valuable your time is. Rather than giving an immediate ‘no’, you ask them to persuade you or give more detail about the thought process they went through when considering other options.”
Kafana: “And that works?”
Claudio: “It does if you’ve picked the right people. Just knowing that you might ask will keep them honest and ensure that they think things through. They’ll accept the times you say no, because they trust that you respect them, and they work twice as hard to ensure success the times you do say yes, because they want to justify that respect. You should read Domatore’s thoughts on the subject. He compared training a staff to how a tamer turns a group of wild animals into a pack that works together to aid their leader. The aim is to have a staff that will get the right information into the right hands at the right time, so that most of the time you get handed not just a problem, but also a list of evaluated options to respond, and you need do little more than approve or acknowledge the top recommended option.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Kafana: “Sounds lovely. No thinking required.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow, to Claudio’s amusement.
Claudio: “Oh, there’s still plenty to do. People will come to you asking for a decision when that’s not really what they need. Either the solution is obvious, but it uses resources or contradicts a previous policy they don’t have the authority to change, or they’re in a dispute with another subordinate and the areas of responsibility are clashing. Sometimes what they’re really doing is keeping you in the loop, or making you aware of a cost or risk down the line (or just covering their asses), because while they have the authority and could just do it and then report, they don’t want the responsibility. Fixing that by defining areas of responsibility, setting procedures and fine tuning the amount of authority you delegate is where the work comes in. How you do it is a matter of style.”
She was about to ask him for more tips, but the chime of a bell reminded him that time was passing. She saw the look on his face, and decided to slip in one more issue.
Kafana: “Thank you for all the advice. I’ll make sure I read the diary entry you recommended, and perhaps we can discuss it another time. But before we go, I ought to spend a few moments alerting you to another situation relating to the assassins.”
She ended the embargo, guessing Alderney would want to broadcast this next bit.
Claudio: “Go on.”
Kafana: “We discovered the building used by the Lily as their main base of operations. It’s in the Arsenal, and we’ve been talking to crews from the ships whose captains were permanently killed by the Assassins. They want revenge, and we intend to help them.”
Just as adventurers could respawn after death at a sanctum run by the priests of Cov, so too could NPCs, if they were wearing the pendant that Cov blessed his people with. But success was not certain if the NPC was old, or had died many times before. Torello’s assassins had developed a number of techniques which acted the same as extreme old age in preventing respawning, and would use them on anyone for anyone, if paid enough. Most of the nobility considered it politics as usual, though being unsubtle about it was bad manners.
Claudio frowned.
Claudio: “You’ll make an enemy of them, and I can’t imagine a more dangerous one to have. Is it worth it?”
Kafana: “There’s already a price on my head, and I’d like to express my displeasure about that. Pointedly. But, more than that, the assassins are now working not just on behalf of local lords who pay them gold, but also on their own behalf and on behalf of forces aligned with Bel. As a priestess of Cov it is my duty to oppose that, no matter what the personal risk. I doubt a raid will get them all, but if we seize their records or magically interrogate their leaders, it should be a significant setback to their plans.”
Claudio: “Are you asking for help from House Landi?”
Kafana: “No. I don’t want any of the consequences to fall upon you. But I will give you notice in advance if you like, so you can put the guards you have patrolling the Mercato district in appropriate positions to take advantage of it. What’s your opinion of Lord Ruffo? You thought he was unlikely to be a dedicated worshipper of Bel. How do you think he’ll respond to such a large raid taking place in his territory?”
Claudio: “He’s an interesting man. Complex. Smart, charismatic and well spoken when that serves his purpose. When he talks, he talks of individual freedom of choice - the rights of traders to choose their own risks and make their own deals. The captains support him, as do the mages who chafe under the restrictions set by the Mages Guild. I wouldn’t call him a patriot, but his actions have consistently demonstrated a concern about defending the Arsenal district as a good place to do business, and if only for pragmatic reasons I’d expect him to oppose Torello being turned into a Pirate haven. Other cities would stop trading with us.”
Kafana: “So he wouldn’t mind, as long as he saw the raid as being in the best interests of the ship’s captains and the trade they bring? I think I could make a case that most captains didn’t like the idea of being told to sell their ships under threat of death if they declined.”
Claudio: “It isn’t that simple. House Ruffo and House Trinci has been at loggerheads for generations, over whether Torello is a confederation of independent districts who work together on matters of mutual self-interest, or whether the council is a ruling body that should have the authority to impose tariffs on all arriving cargo, and restrictions on what may be traded. If the Lily are based in the Arsenal and avoid targeting people under Ruffo’s protection in order to avoid it being worth his while kicking them out, that’s a source of power for him.”
Kafana: “Would he know they’re there?”
Claudio: “Oh yes. He may not admit it in order to retain deniability, but he knows practically everything that happens inside his district or nearby. It is what makes the situation with the leaking of the information about the convoy schedules so tricky. The question isn’t whether he has the information, or whether he’d leak it if he wanted to. The question is what he’d think he might gain from doing so. Fabrizio might well be willing to allow some harm in the short term, intending to use the danger to gain leverage over Trinci via high-stakes brinkmanship, while fully intending to later close things down before his district and Torello’s long term prosperity get damaged. Probably take all the credit too, for ‘taking decisive and timely actions against the Pirate menace’.”
Kafana: “So if he learns of the raid in advance, he might ‘accidently’ sabotage it. But if it succeeds he’ll publicly accept that, or even claim credit, while privately resenting it unless he manages to loot so much blackmail material from the burning ruins, that his power is increased rather than decreased?”
Claudio: “ More or less. I’d recommend staying out of the clutches of his enforcers for a while, though. They’re likely to resent your raid as being an intrusion upon their turf, no matter how Fabrizio feels about it. And of course, since you’re wealthy, you may find yourself being sued by anyone who can claim your raid harmed them, and as Count of the district where it happened, it would be up to Fabrizio to pick the judge who’d set the fines. Have you considered taking out insurance against that, down at the Sostanza?”
Kafana moaned.
Kafana: “This is going to be a headache, isn’t it?
Claudio nodded, not particularly sympathetically.
Claudio: “Yes. Yes it is. Welcome to the burdens of leadership.”