“So what’s your plan?” Duvas asked.
Kivamus began, “We’ll send Levalas disguised as a merchant to Kirnos, along with two of our new recruits to act as his guards. Their overt task will be to sell two wagonloads of coal and repay the smoked fish merchant in Feroy’s name, and buy some more of it. We do have the gold for it right now. But their secret mission will be to liberate Joric’s family. We will send the group immediately—that is, tomorrow—so he gets around two weeks to help her sell the house and shop. If the timing matches well, he can even return with the rest of the guards after the counter raid.”
Duvas nodded slowly. “Trevalo’s wagons are going to help us a lot in this as well. It wouldn’t have been possible to spare two wagons for this long without those six wagons he loaned us. But why does that mission even need to be a secret? Can’t Joric’s wife just sell her house and return up with Levalas openly? I know right now she doesn’t even know Joric is here in Tiranat, but once Levalas tells her about that, it should be easy enough.”
Kivamus shook his head. “Selling the shop is the easy part, obviously. But there is no good reason why a woman like that—with her husband a slave and a small child in tow—would ever want to sell the stable income she gets from that shop, as well as the safety of living in a wooden house within Kirnos’ walls. Anyone who notices her sitting on Levalas’ wagons to leave the village will ask questions, and eventually it may bring us into highlight. We just can’t risk any scrutiny of that kind. So we’ll do it another way.”
“The plan is that after she has received the gold from selling the shop,” he explained, “Levalas will hide her and her kid on the wagon. I had thought of making a secret compartment for it, but when I was talking about it to Levalas, he suggested a better idea. The smoked fish we buy from that merchant comes in barrels, so we’ll just rent two empty barrels from him, and put Joric’s wife and daughter in them.”
Duvas’ face had a look of disgust on it. “That’s… inhuman!” He sighed. “But… I agree. Nobody will ever think that Levalas may be smuggling humans inside those fish barrels.”
Kivamus exhaled. “I know… And that’s the point, as difficult as it may be for those two. Anyway, it’ll only need to be done until they cross the walls and get some distance away from Kirnos. After that they can come out into the open. This way, the locals will only know that she sold her shop and disappeared… somewhere. Maybe she was forced to sell the shop by Torhan before he took her away in the night as another slave, or maybe she boarded one of the merchant ships which regularly visit Kirnos and ran away for a better life elsewhere. Who knows where she went? The fact that a merchant from Tiranat was present during the time of her disappearance will be nothing more than a coincidence. This way she can come here without anyone suspecting us of harboring slaves.”
“All that will have to come out in the open at one point or another,” Duvas muttered, “but yeah, that’s a good plan. Still… I don’t fully understand why you are taking all that risk of attacking Torhan. We’ve already decided that we have no choice but to pay the mercenaries this time, which means we aren’t going to get in battle with them—at least this year. So attacking such a powerful bandit chief, who is very likely in cahoots with the Baron of Kirnos, doesn’t seem like such a great idea to me. Even if the battle goes well, we will probably lose a few men—and for what? Just to get more slaves? I agree that that would be helpful, but it still sounds too risky. We are already getting enough slaves and refugees here anyway even without that kind of risk…”
Kivamus just smiled. “We have no choice but to take risks at this point, or the village is never going to get any better than a destitute coal-mining village located in the middle of nowhere.”
“I agree with you on that,” Duvas snorted, “not that you are going to stop changing this village anyway. But Torhan isn’t just a bandit chief like Nokozal—he is a land owner. That’s a big thing in the kingdom—even I don’t own any land working as a majordomo and being a son of a baron. That gives him legal rights—as little as they are enforced in this region of the kingdom. And even if he’s officially not a noble, and even if you don’t plan to capture his land, attacking him like that will be counted as illegal in any court, including the Count’s, who will have jurisdiction over a dispute like this, between people of two baronies. If it was Baron Farodas attacking Torhan, or even confiscating that land for whatever reason, that would be fine because those clay mines come within the barony of Kirnos. But you don’t have any official right to do that… What if—”
Kivamus grinned, interrupting the majordomo. “You already gave the answer to your question yourself. Whatever legal rights Torhan may have as a landowner, the kingdom’s laws are barely enforced in this frontier region. That gives us a lot of leeway. Even if Torhan remains alive after our counter raid, what’s he gonna do? Complain to his daddy Farodas?”
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Hudan exploded into laughter. “I can’t imagine an egotistical bastard like Torhan doing anything like that. He even tried to attack Tiranat just to take revenge for our guards killing some of his men that time. He has no less than a high noble’s ego! And doing that would give credit to the rumors that he’s really a bastard. He won’t do that.”
The majordomo’s lips also curled upwards, although he remained quiet.
Kivamus nodded. “Exactly. So what other options does he have? Will he complain to the Count? Saying that big bad Kivamus stole his little slaves? Hah! I don’t think so. Even if he somehow got his ego under control to make that complaint, would the Count even care about petty matters like this, right when Binpaaz is getting bold in the east?”
He shook his head. “No. Just like the Count would have ignored us if we complained that Torhan stole so much from the village before last winter, Ebirtas will also ignore any pleas from Torhan about that—if the bandit chief even complained about it, and I don’t believe he will. Even if there was a full on battle between two barons of the Count, Ebirtas would likely have ignored it—since such disputes between minor nobles are quite common all over the kingdom—even if the Count didn’t have to worry about Binpaaz. And Torhan may be the bastard son of a baron, but he’s not the baron himself, or even a noble. He is nothing more than a bandit chief in my eyes. That means protecting our rights and defending our village from any threats within the kingdom is up to us—including dishing out the rightful punishment on a bandit group like Torhan—who stole so much from us.”
Duvas frowned. “I agree with nearly everything you said, but doing all this just for revenge…? I never saw you as someone who held grudges like that.”
Kivamus laughed. “No, no. I’m not doing it to satisfy my ego. I’m far more practical than that. And—” he glanced around and made sure the door was closed, “—you are forgetting something. Something which is the main reason I even considered doing something this risky. Why did Torhan attack us before the winter?”
Duvas raised his eyebrows slightly. “Because our village was very weak at the time? Because the previous baron and his guards were murdered on the road, leaving Tiranat basically unprotected?”
“Keep going.”
“Uh… To steal food? And even slaves? Or to steal…” His eyes widened. “Oh…!”
Kivamus grinned. “Yes. To steal gold. And it wouldn’t have been the first time Torhan stole gold from someone who couldn’t protect it. Most likely he has been doing it all over the barony of Kirnos, stealing gold from any farm owner who is too weak to resist. Torhan wouldn’t have become the biggest bandit group in this region otherwise. As long as it never got out of control and he kept giving a cut to Farodas, the baron would only send a nominal guard force to satisfy the farmhouses later on, likely saying it’s out of his hands to protect every single farm—there’s so many farms to protect and so few guards. That means—”
“—Torhan likely has a lot of stolen gold stacked up by now,” Duvas breathed. “Gold which he has likely hidden in his compound.”
Hudan gave a dangerous smile. “Yes. The same gold which he stole from the villagers—the same gold we are going to steal back from him! Just like he did it from us! The bastard didn’t leave a single copper in the hands of any villager. But now he’s going to regret it!”
Kivamus nodded. “And that is the primary reason I thought of this counter raid. Getting around 50 slaves would give a huge boost to the village by itself, but if we can recover some gold from Torhan, it will allow us to easily pay the mercenaries’ tribute, as well as the taxes in the autumn. Depending on how much we get, we might even have some gold left over. And this gold is over and above anything we earn as our normal revenue.”
“Oh…” Duvas muttered. “So that’s why you had openly announced that you will start paying every villager directly in coins within three weeks.”
“Indeed,” Kivamus grinned. “Now that coal sales are improving, and with the additional tax-free gold we get from selling acelos tablets and paper to Pydaso, we were already getting in a position to start paying the villagers soon. The new trading route to Ulriga will take time to start generating the full revenue it can give us, because we can’t produce that much coal yet, but that’s another source of revenue which is going to start giving gold in the near future. But the gold we are going to recover from Torhan will give us a good boost right when we need it. We might even get hundreds of gold coins from this counter raid.”
“Hearing about so many sources of gold makes it seem like we will need to purchase a bigger strongbox in the near future,” Duvas snorted. “But… you are only planning to hit a single compound, right? What if Torhan has kept nothing there? What if the gold is in another camp? All this would be for nothing then.”