§118 Radegonde (Patreon)

Curator Meltissa Jane - Radegonde

Radegonde was a sawmill town. Logs from Rosewood in the north and mountains in the south met there to be cut into rough timber and finished lumber. Half the town was dry-houses, heated warehouses that dried wood until it was stable enough to ship.

The previous winter, Meltissa and Cadmius had uncovered a plot in Radegonde to grow, refine, and distribute divinia. Despite the drug's enticing name, there was nothing divine about it. A few minutes of bliss were paid for with addiction, weakened limbs, and blackened fingernails. Users couldn't get enough and wrecked their lives attempting to procure more. It was a craving that had no substitute, and some users killed themselves rather than go without.

Illegal money always showed up somewhere. The last time they were here, Cadmius had noticed a surplus of bejeweled women at the local theater. Where most criminals purchased big houses and fine carriages, the style in Radegonde was to get a mistress and dress her in jewels. From that observation alone, they were able to unravel the knot of corruption and vice, ending in the arrest and enslavement of the town's legate, curator, and several prominent citizens.

The end result was that Radegonde's new legate and curator owed their jobs to Meltissa. Out of equal parts gratitude and fear, they set aside an office for her and opened all the books. Legates sometimes hosted criminals in their towns unknowingly, and the best guard against that fate was to have a third party examine the books. But Meltissa's search wasn't going well. The chief problem was that Radegonde's books were almost perfectly clean. A few minor entries had incomplete details, but the contracts were all in order, and nobody was getting paid more than they should. It was even the perfect amount of imperfection. The books were real.

In the past year, Meltissa had acquired some skills in quick estimation. Her class called it Instant Census, but it was a skill she never had to spend points on. She learned to do it the hard way, through practice and constant refinement, and the skill ranked up accordingly. Knexenk evaluated her ability and put a number on it, reflecting what she could do rather than a system-granted ability. The first thing she had done upon arriving was walk the length and breadth of the town, tallying everything she could see at ground level. 

Wood came into the town, and lumber went out. Imported foodstuffs came in from the train station to the east or carriages from the west. People had children, the children went to school, and on holy days, most of the town went to one of the local temples. Some roads were in better repair than others, and the local cuisine suffered from the limited range of foodstuffs they could afford. The rich were rich, but not very rich. The poor struggled, but they got by. The park behind City Hall could use a new figurehead for their fountain. The library building was too small for all the books it contained. Everything was exactly as it should be in a town like Radegonde.

Frustrated, Meltissa met Cadmius for dinner at Kirsten's Kitchen, the only decent place to eat in town. She walked in to discover the buxom owner looming over a seated Cadmius, offering him more than gently coddled eggs. Her pretty face froze mid-simper.

"The plate of the day," Meltissa ordered as she sat herself, "and that black tea if you still have any."

The eponymous Kirsten found her more professional face and put it on, pretending she hadn't just been flirting for all she was worth. "Coming right up. And for you?"

"The same," smiled Cadmius. "Please."

"Why do you encourage them?" Meltissa asked when she was out of earshot.

"I don't."

"You do. Every time you don't send them off, they think they have a chance."

"If I sent them all away, they wouldn't tell me things. Like the fact that Warden Naja prefers women, and the special friend she lives with is really her lover."

"If you needed Kirsten to tell you that, then you're not as sharp as I thought. It was obvious to me when I met them."

"I've never seen the two of them together, so I had no way of knowing. Did you find anything?"

"No. Even the imperfections are perfect. You?"

Cadmius shook his head but remained silent while one of Kirsten's employees brought their tea: a strong black leaf grown in the warmth of Dimmik's thermal springs. He waited for her to leave before answering. "Nothing useful. There's a crew operating an unlicensed distillery in the hills. They make an exceptional jenever. But they're not the criminals we're looking for."

"They're not criminals at all: the legate knows all about them. They pretend to be unlicensed so they can make less and charge more, and nobody complains."

"Nefarious!"

"We're wasting our time here. This isn't the place."

"You get clay from a clay pit. It's not a waste to look in places where you've found criminals before. But I think you're right. This can't be the place."

"For one thing, it's too large," said Meltissa. "Someone is taking a huge risk by digging up corrupted ore, but they only ship a handful of cars in a month. That's not enough to matter in a town this size. It wouldn't balance the books if they were in financial trouble. And I don't see any unexplained wealth here."

Cadmius nodded. "And a functioning mine leaves traces. I've been all over these hills, and I've found a handful of abandoned shafts, but nothing in use recently. If someone is operating up there, then they're hiding their tracks with a lot of magic."

Their meals appeared, a hearty stew with potatoes, and they ate for a while in silence. The obvious next move was to head to the next town west and repeat the process they'd just been through, potentially with a less helpful legate looking over their shoulders. And if they still didn't find what they were looking for, they would continue on to the next town. There were several such townships they could work through.

Somehow, ore from the nearby range of hills was finding its way onto train cars headed for the capital.

"We know the train is showing up at the first Rossignol station, already loaded with iron," she thought out loud when their plates were clear, "but the cars aren't attached when the train leaves the last station in Dimmik. The only station between the two points is Radegonde."

"That's assuming we trust the station agents, but let's stick with that. Do you think people here would notice if there were a load of ore next to their loads of lumber?"

Meltissa had spent half a day with the station master, learning the man's routine. "The lumber cars sit on the spur line for days, waiting for the freight train to pick them up. The station master knows what's in every car. The lumbermen know, too. They even publish the shipments in the local paper." Meltissa had an odd idea, but it felt right, like it was worth following. "What if the iron cars are already hooked up to the train when the train gets here?"

"That implies the station master south of here is lying. Or, there is another station between here and Dimmik, maybe across the border. One that isn't on the maps."

"Dig the ore in Estfold, but load it at a phantom station in Dimmik or Rossignol."

Cadmius grinned. The idea felt right to him, too. "Freight trains move at night, with small crews. If it's the same train every month, you could keep the secret close. We just have to ride the tracks south and look for a junction where it doesn't belong."

Meltissa groaned. "This means camping, doesn't it?"

"It'll be fun," Cadmius assured her. "The weather should be good."

"Get the gear together," said Meltissa, "I'll get permission to cross the border."

Cadmius was right about the weather. The wind blustered, but it didn't rain. The nights were chilly and clear, good for watching stars while huddled under the same blanket. They followed the steel-and-mithril tracks along a route planned with a straightedge and complete disregard for local geography. The tracks cut through hill and wood, crossed streams, and passed over low terrain with imperial arrogance. The rail system refused to dip, bend, or climb for hundreds of miles at a time. 

Meltissa had never ridden the rail into Dimmik. The maps said it cut a straight line until it reached the caldera, where it veered slightly before cutting a tunnel through the Rim, the curtain of solid rock that surrounded Dimmok's central valley. A series of switchbacks took it down the Rim into Dimmik's lowlands. Between Radegonde and the Rim, the rails touched territory in Estfold, Rossignol, and Dimmik. Borders were messy, but the rail cut through them without a care.

One of the underappreciated facts about rail transportation was that the limited track space had to accommodate trains of different speeds. Passengers and mail moved at one speed, while heavy freight moved at another. Freight mostly moved at night to avoid blocking faster passenger traffic. During the day, slow freight trains sat on side spurs called "day stations." This gave the animals time to rest as the daily traffic sped by. These side-rails were well known to planners, pilots, and conductors, but they didn't appear on the maps Meltissa had brought with her.

On their second day, they found one of the day stations and got very excited. The junction was marked by a series of wooden poles painted in white and orange stripes, which led to a spur line running parallel to the tracks, long enough to park a train with thirty cars attached — far longer than a passenger train. They spent the remainder of the day looking for a way loads of iron could get to the spur: a road, another rail, a pack mule trail, anything. But they had found a day station, and nothing more. They made camp, wondering aloud whether they would find what they were looking for.

Their progress was slower than expected. When the trains crossed bridges or cut through hills, imperial engineers barely left enough room for a person to walk along one side of the tracks, nevermind horses. They often had to find older, less secure ways across minor obstacles. On their third day out from Radegonde, they found a promising junction. It was entirely unmarked, but the rails of the junction still moved back and forth when Cadmius tried the switch lever. But that discovery, too, led to nowhere. It used to be a day station until a landslide wiped out the spur line. Just to be sure, they spent a few hours circling the area, looking for signs of recent use.

Their break came on day five, in Rossignol near the Dimmik border. They found an unmarked junction, and this time the intersection itself was suspicious: the rails were made of plain steel instead of the usual alloy. The rails split off to a spur line covered with loose netting camouflaged with local grass woven into it. The netting extended down the line until the hidden tracks ducked into a forested area between two low hills. A passenger riding the rail at high speed during the day wouldn't notice anything amiss. A tired driver running a slower train at night was even less likely to notice anything unusual. Loaded cars could wait on that spur for days, hidden from nearly every direction, biding their time until they were picked up. The construction looked relatively new.

And, most promising of all, the spur line had another junction, to a line that crawled west into the hills. The new rails were wood rather than metal, as if they were meant to be temporary. Meltissa took a collapsing telescope from her bag and surveyed what she could see of the route. There was a chance the next shipment was already on its way down to them. What should they do? Follow the rail to the source? Or wait for the next batch of ore to find them?

"I'm concerned," said Cadmius to her unasked question. "I don't want to run headlong into a potential enemy. I'd rather hide here and get a look at them before they see us. On the other hand, we could be waiting for a few days. Your call, boss."

"Oh joy," grumbled Meltissa. "More camping. Try not to look too pleased."

"We need to find a good spot." He grinned as he scanned the hills. "Do you want in on the fun, or should I come back for you?"

Climbing up and down hills looking for the perfect campsite did not appeal to her. "I wouldn't want to intrude on your adventure. Besides, I have a report to write. Someone has been omitting crucial information from their logs."

The new certainty that train drivers were making unauthorized stops without logging them felt like a personal affront. Cadmius chuckled. "Which offends you more? That someone lied, or that their records are incomplete?"

"It's all branches of the same sinful tree."