Normalizing the North (2)
The position of Grand Duke's Heir was, in essence, the same as that of a crown prince.
In dramas and films, ministers were always clamoring for the investiture of a crown prince, and that urgency was tied directly to the stability of the realm.
If the king dies suddenly, the one already designated to take the throne without delay is the crown prince.
In a system ruled by a monarch, the meaning of the sovereign's existence simply cannot be compared to the modern world. In the twenty-first century, even if a president vanished overnight, the machinery of state would somehow keep turning. In a medieval world, the absence of a king meant government paralysis, full stop.
That said, a crown prince did not wield tremendous power in his own right. The office existed as a contingency for the day the throne fell vacant by accident; it did not, by itself, carry vast real authority.
But this place was fusion medieval—and of all such places, the North, where every single day was a survival epic. Here, the rank of Grand Duke's Heir meant more than the heir apparent of an entire nation.
"A lockdown… you want me to issue one? Little brother, I know you only just got up from your sickbed, but the southern merchant caravans are due any day now."
"Yes, I'm aware. That's exactly why I need it issued now—so they can't set foot in the North."
The North's structure was nothing if not dynamic. The Grand Duke's House was the absolute ruler, and yet their presence was not absolute in every sense—because there were things even the Grand Duke's House could not solve.
Food. A classic example of something even they can't fix.
The Grand Duchy was the most livable part of the North, but even there the yield of cultivated crops had a hard ceiling. They farmed whatever they could and distributed the surplus to neighboring fiefs on the brink of starvation—and still villages starved to death every year. The old saying that even a king cannot save the poor from poverty had not been coined for nothing.
Which was precisely why the merchant companies were so special.
Ordinarily, the caravans coming up from the south are like hemoglobin, carrying oxygen through the veins of the giant that is the North.
They traversed that vast, barren frozen waste, buying hides from every village and selling grain in return. They arranged their own escorts and came of their own free will. For a ducal house whose food shortages bled straight into population shortages, few people were more useful. Perhaps that was why some ancestor, knowing full well the merchants' abuses, had still been powerless to stop them.
But—
As long as I'm here, that kind of game is over.
If they had kept it within reason, I wouldn't have gone this far. In the military you saw procurement graft constantly. Petty "livelihood" kickbacks were beyond counting, and even our three-star Octopus General had looked the other way to a degree. You can't knead rice cakes without getting flour on your hands, he'd said.
But they should have kept it moderate.
This wasn't coming to sell rice cakes and leaving with a little flour on their fingers. This was rubbing the North with the flour and taking the cakes back home.
"With the head of the house absent, a lockdown is an authority only you can exercise, Brother. And it has to go out right now. If we wait for Father to return, it will be too late."
"Haah."
Darius let out a dry laugh. Judging by his face, he had expected me to ask him to kill some powerful monster or other, and this completely different request had thrown him.
But this truly could not wait. I was about to lay out the grounds when—
"Allow me to explain my reasons. First—"
"No. Enough."
Darius waved a hand.
"Brother, I know this is hard to grasp. But this is truly—"
"That isn't it. I'll issue the lockdown at once."
…What? Come again?
Darius laughed with open-hearted force.
"Hahaha. Little brother, what is that face for? Did I not say I would bring you a white dragon if you wanted one?"
"Even so, you should at least hear the reasons—"
"Enough. I know myself. I'm sure you have some intricate scheme. But if I listen, will I understand it?"
Well… that was true enough…
"I said I trust you. Then acting on that trust is the right thing to do. Is that the only favor?"
Darius nodded easily and asked, if anything, whether there was more.
This man.
I felt it again—he was a heavy man. Not merely in build or appearance, but in every single action.
A man who keeps his word no matter what.
I had known someone like that before.
I never thought I'd meet another one besides our three-star Octopus General…
Feeling the weight he carried, I answered with matching gravity.
"…There are a few more things, but those can wait. Right now the urgent matter is to issue the lockdown and broadcast it across the entire North."
"So be it."
For all the weight inside him, Darius answered cleanly and moved at once. Using the artifact granted to the Grand Duke's Heir, he transmitted the order to the ducal castle, then relayed the same to the retainers who had come with him and to the village chief.
Naturally, the chief came flying in a panic.
"Aigoo!!! Young Master!!!"
The chief who had fluttered in like a butterfly flopped down on his face like a caterpillar.
"This old man has committed a capital offense!!!"
"Pardon?"
"The t-taxes! You've done this because we underpaid the taxes, haven't you?! I'm sorry! There was so little to eat that this old fool dared to—"
Ah.
I understood. From the chief's point of view, I had made a fuss about looking at the ledgers and then, out of nowhere, slapped a lockdown on the place. It must have looked like a step that said, You little bastard, you've been skimming the taxes, haven't you?
Old man, it is absolutely not that.
"It isn't that, Chief. I told you from the start—I don't care about such things."
"Then why on earth…"
I felt awkward watching an old man who had lived far longer than my previous life and this one combined cling to my pant leg. I was truly sorry—but this was something the North genuinely needed.
"I'm sorry. I can't explain the details just yet. But it is something truly necessary for the North. Please trust me."
I bowed my head to him in turn.
Honestly, I had not expected to be understood. The idea I had formed was one only a modern person who had lived through the twenty-first century could conceive—more precisely, only someone educated by millennia of commercial history in which choices led to which abuses. Explaining it would neither make them understand nor allow me to share the method.
So I had braced myself for curses. I had even thought he might lose control and come at me.
And yet—
"Oh, so that's what it was?"
The hard grip on my pant leg loosened. When I looked up, the chief—who moments before had been showing the strength of a man in his prime despite his aged frame—was dusting off his knees with a grunt and getting to his feet as if nothing had happened.
"…You're trusting me?"
"Pardon?"
"I mean, do you trust what I said?"
The chief's reaction was much like Darius's. An expression that said, why are you asking something so obvious? Then he suddenly burst into a dry, chuckling laugh.
"Didn't you ask us to trust you, Young Master?"
"Well, yes, but whether this will actually work…"
"Of course it will. You said it yourself—it's necessary for the North."
The old man's face shifted from that of a subordinate clinging to an absolute superior to that of an adult offering instruction to a child.
"We lesser folk have lived until now by the Grand Duke's grace. Even this time, without the Young Master and all of you, we would already have been wiped out. And this year alone, such things have happened more than once."
He praised the grace of the Grand Duke's House—grace I myself barely knew.
"So is it not only natural that I, and we, should believe the Young Master's words and follow them?"
"…"
I did not understand. What the North was. And what this Grand Duke's House meant to them.
Looking at the old man, a host of emotions I could never have known from transmitted memories alone—different again from what I had felt with Darius—surged up inside me.
So then—
"I'll tell you one thing."
I would do only what I could. And what I could do, I would see through no matter what.
"Within a month at the latest, the North will be a place completely different from before."
The North.
A land so perilous that not only living there but even visiting was a gamble—high risk, high return. The survival conditions were wretched, the monsters vicious, the flying beasts rampant; yet if you made it back alive, you could make a killing.
And so today, as on every day, the major merchant companies were pushing northward.
But a certain rumor had begun to spread among those caravans.
"What? A lockdown? What the hell does that mean?"
"W-well, even I don't fully understand it. A notice went out that the Grand Duke's House has issued a lockdown and forbidden merchant companies from visiting any of the villages…"
The news reached even the Zeros Merchant Group, a respectable mid-tier company. And Zeros, its master, who had been on the verge of personally leading a large-scale caravan into the North, roared at the report his subordinate brought him.
"Does that make any sense? Have those northern bastards decided to starve to death as a group, or what?!"
The North was a land of bitter cold where even a single blade of grass struggled to grow. Farming there was nearly impossible, and even when they managed it, self-sufficiency was utterly out of the question. In the distant past, before there had been a Grand Duke, northerners had launched massive invasions into the continent just to eat. That was how bad it was.
Now that the Empire exists, that sort of thing doesn't happen… but still.
Zeros ground his teeth. He had no idea what had actually occurred. What he did know was that they were about to take a colossal loss.
Why?
Then what about our grain?! What the hell do we do with our grain?!
Trade with the North basically meant selling off the food hauled up from the south and buying local specialties—hides and various game. In particular, the inner cores of spirit beasts found only in the North sold for a fortune.
And now they couldn't do any of that?
Damn it all!! Why now of all times!!!
The first step in such trade was always dumping the grain. You had to sell off that bulky cargo before you could fill the space with anything else—and more importantly, selling the grain itself was the point. It all came down to shelf life.
If this were trade headed somewhere else, it wouldn't matter. But when you go north, people generally don't bother much with preservation!!
Grain had a limited storage life. Ordinarily, merchants used magical tools and took special care. Northern trade used fewer of them. The North's bone-deep cold worked as its own preservation magic.
And now a lockdown had dropped out of nowhere?
If it were any other goods, I could reroute in a pinch. Profits would shrink, but I could avoid a loss. Grain? No. By the time it reaches somewhere else, it'll all have rotted.
He had come to make a killing and was about to lose a killing instead.
Then another sudden update arrived.
"Master Zeros!!!"
"What?! What is it?! Has the lockdown been lifted?!"
"No, sir! Not that!!"
"Then what?"
"One exit has been opened! It says that if any large-scale party has business in the North, the person in charge is to come to the ducal territory!"
A large-scale party? The person in charge?
That's me.
Zeros realized at once who that notice was targeting. And in the next beat, he realized this sudden lockdown was targeting them—the merchant companies.
These bastards… don't tell me.
They wanted a staring contest?
What kind of cheap trick is this.
Did they think this would make them come crawling? Clearly the North was unhappy with the trade margins—but if they wanted to protest, this was the wrong way to do it.
A merchant was a creature who must never take a loss—and that included not only short-term losses but long-term ones as well.
I cannot yield once here and let them dictate the margins. That would be far too costly over the long run.
Zeros's eyes flashed. Naturally, he had no intention of folding so easily. People who would struggle just to get through this year without them had some nerve.
"By now the other companies should have come up nearby as well. Circulate a letter. Tell them I want a word."
This was the moment for unity. If the northerners were going to pull a stunt this petty, then even rivals among the merchants needed to join hands and respond. Now was the time to show the merchant alliance's ironclad solidarity—
"Um… Master Zeros?"
A subordinate who would normally have scrambled off at once was still calling his name. Zeros was about to glare at him for not having left yet when—
"There was one small optional clause in that notice."
"What?"
"Well… the North has been so busy lately that they can only receive a maximum of five people in charge, and even those only in sequence…"
What the fuck did you just say?
Five people. In sequence?
Which meant—
"…First come, first served?"
In that instant, a phantom voice rang through Zeros's head. Namely—
"…Run."
"Sir?"
"I said run!! Run and grab a number!!!"
And that was the sound of a crack opening in the merchant alliance's ironclad collusion.