Lich for Hire

Chapter 455: The Kouto's Mortal Enemy

To learn about a deity's preferences, the most straightforward approach was to start with their alignment and divine domain.

Blobdilpulp was neutral evil, though during one of her episodes, she tipped squarely into chaotic evil.

Her followers were much the same. The kouto might appear foolish, but they were not the least bit benign. They delighted in killing and destruction beyond mere survival. They killed other creatures for sport, dismembering the bodies to use as decorations for their homes and the construction of idols.

The kouto had virtually no moral framework of any kind. Their social order was thoroughly savage.

Accordingly, Blobdilpulp was unlikely to do anything that could be called good. She was, in essence, a neurotic chaos-monger.

But none of this was particularly useful for figuring out how to lure Blobdilpulp out of her divine realm. One could hardly sit around hoping she would have an episode and come rampaging out of her own accord, and Ambrose's Loom of Fate had no reach over deities.

Besides, what Ambrose objected to most was sitting idle while waiting for the Goddess of Fortune to deliver results to his doorstep. His habit was to select a target, apply his utmost effort toward reaching it, and leave just a little opening for Fate to lend a hand.

Waiting for good luck had a habit of turning into waiting to die.

So Ambrose could not give up. If there was no obvious weakness to exploit in the kouto goddess herself, the only remaining option was to look for one through her enemies.

After all, one's enemies invariably knew one best.

"I'm fairly certain I read something about this in a book once."

Ninety percent of the literature on deities was roadside gossip, either near-fanatic hagiography or vitriolic slander, with truth and fiction so thoroughly intertwined that separating them was nearly impossible. Ambrose had long since taken to reading books about gods the way one read serialized fiction: useful for entertainment, but not worth keeping close at hand.

In other words, all these books were back in his old castle.

Ambrose stepped through a teleportation array and headed there for a rare visit.

There had been a time when he was so poor that this castle was all he owned, its furnishings so sparse that receiving a guest meant offering them plain hot water and nothing else.

It had a little more life to it now.

A handful of maids moved through the halls attending to the cleaning. They started slightly at the sight of Ambrose, then bowed with practiced courtesy and addressed him as "milord."

Ambrose gave a casual nod. Isabel must have drilled them properly so there would be no repeat of last time, when the castle's own master went unrecognized.

He wasn't here for Isabel, though. Ambrose made straight for the bookshelves, which were distributed throughout the castle in no particular order, and began his search.

Ambrose had always been somewhat cavalier in terms of personal habits. Any detail that didn't affect the outcome of an experiment simply didn't register for him, which was why the castle's dominant feature was bookshelves.

His approach to reading had always been to pick up a book wherever he happened to be standing and put it back wherever was convenient, provided it didn't end up on the floor. He was a lich; he had eternity to sort it out properly.

The result, predictably, was that finding anything now was a significant undertaking, requiring him to reconstruct the location purely from memory.

"Let me think... it should be somewhere around here." He rummaged through a shelf and pulled out a thick, vaguely familiar-looking tome. "Goblin Guards of the Lyon Harem... Hmph. Not that one."

Over the following minutes, Ambrose unearthed a considerable heap of lurid popular fiction: The Troubles of a Young Drow, My Eight-Hundred-Year-Old Loli Elf Wife, Vol. 6, and more of the same. After working through half a shelf, he confirmed that this was the wrong section entirely—it was all trashy fiction he had collected before his transformation into a lich.

He was about to move to a different part of the room when Isabel appeared before him.

"Master, it's been so long! I'm glad you've finally found a moment to come back. I mentioned in my last report that I'd made some modifications to the laboratory. Now that you're here, why don't you have a look and see whether they suit you?"

She had matured considerably since he'd last seen her. The nervous tension of her apprentice days had entirely left her behind.

That said, Isabel still looked genuinely delighted to see Ambrose.

Ambrose shook his head. He had no use for the castle's laboratory anymore.

"Do as you please. Isabel, have you come across any of the books I keep around here?"

The question made Isabel pause. She glanced down at the books scattered across the floor nearby and went slightly red.

"N-No... I haven't..."

The way she fumbled told Ambrose all he needed to know. She was not going to be of much help.

"Never mind. You don't need to worry about it. I'm just here to find a few books."

"I haven't got anything pressing today," Isabel said, decisively. "I'll help you look."

An extra pair of hands was always welcome. "I'm looking for Chronicles of the Gods, Memoirs of the Deep Diver, Conflicts Among the Gods of the Sea, and Field Guide to Deep-Sea Creatures. Those four."

"Oh?" Isabel blinked. That wasn't what she'd expected.

She exhaled quietly and fell into step behind Ambrose as they methodically worked through the dusty shelves.

Many of the books had been sitting untouched for years.

Isabel had never dared to move any of Ambrose's collection, so everything remained exactly where it had been left. She went carefully, brushing the dust from each spine and reading the titles one by one. The two of them combed through an entire floor together without finding what they needed.

As they headed up the stairs, Isabel could no longer hold back her curiosity. "Master, has something happened?"

Ambrose nodded and said offhandedly, "I'm planning to deal with a shrimp-headed goddess and came back to look up some materials. I should have organized these properly back in the day—this is a real headache."

Isabel showed no particular surprise. In her eyes, Ambrose might as well be an omnipotent deity. His name had spread across the continent in recent months, and he had become the stuff of epic legend.

Given his reputation, Isabel wouldn't even be surprised if he ascended to godhood one of these days.

It was a pity she couldn't stay by his side.

Ambrose caught her faint sigh. "What's wrong? Something troubling you lately?"

Isabel was putting substantial sums into his coffers every month. The Fountain of Youth potion had become his best-selling product, and was more profitable than trading in undead armaments by a considerable margin. She was very much a golden goose, and Ambrose had every reason to keep an eye on her welfare.

Isabel hesitated, then finally spoke up.

"Everything is fine with me. It's my brother. He and I have had a few arguments recently. He wants to get into the slave trade in the dwarven kingdoms, and he's been asking me to back him."

"The slave trade?" Ambrose said, puzzled. "Can't say it doesn't pay, but it takes real skill to do well. What put that idea in his head?"

The slave trade was one of the most brutal industries in existence, but handled properly, it generated not just wealth but connections across every tier of society.

It was also not a business most people could enter. To begin with, you needed official sanction: a recognized license to operate as a lawful slaver.

Free citizens were always precious. No kingdom that wanted stability could afford to allow mass enslavement of its own population, which meant the conversion of free citizens into slaves was tightly restricted. Common slaves could change hands for a few dozen copper pieces, but a free citizen selling themselves into bondage commanded a very high price and required extensive paperwork. Anyone attempting to capture free citizens by force generally faced severe punishment, up to and including the enslavement of their entire family.

Beyond that, you needed enough armed force to capture, transport, and contain your stock.

And then there were the sales networks, knowing which types of slaves to sell to which buyers, how to move them quickly before food costs mounted, and so on, that required considerable expertise. It was no business for amateurs.

Raul had no background in it whatsoever. His sudden interest was, at the very least, peculiar.

"He's always wanted power," Isabel explained. "In his mind, being a slave master would give him a sense of authority and control. I tried to arrange other work for him, but he kept refusing, so we quarreled."

There was real sadness in her voice. Since she had become Ambrose's apprentice, the distance between the two of them had only grown. There had been a time when Raul had walked into a lich's domain for her sake. Now they were fighting over the slave trade.

Isabel could not begin to understand her brother's thinking. She had come within a hair's breadth of being sold into slavery herself, and the very thought of the industry repelled her from the inside out. Who could have imagined that one day her own brother would set his heart on becoming a slave master?

"People find their own paths," Ambrose said. "You're both adults now, and your futures are yours to decide. If this is what your brother wants, let him pursue it. If you won't support him, simply keep out of it. If he gives up because you don't back him, then he wasn't that committed to it in the first place."

Ambrose was by nature easygoing about things that didn't affect him. He had no particular moral sensitivities on the subject either.

The slave trade was a time-honored tradition in this world, and Raul was a local. There was nothing remotely unusual about his ambitions.

"The thing is," Isabel said, "I think someone has been influencing him. There's a woman who's been spending a lot of time with him lately. And my instincts tell me she has ulterior motives."

"That's even less surprising. You've risen to prominence, with money, standing, and a formidable reputation. It would be strange if Raul weren't affected. Those with money and power will always find themselves surrounded by others with agendas."

Ambrose's indifference was beginning to try Isabel's patience. "Master," she said, with some urgency, "I can't just stand by and watch my brother be taken advantage of."

"Then handle it yourself. Isabel, you are now the most accomplished young alchemist of your generation. Gustavo Flynn has dropped hints more than once about wanting to take you on as a disciple, and for all that old man's cutthroat nature, his eye for alchemy is sharper than mine. Stop thinking of yourself as a helpless girl. A problem this small shouldn't be enough to stop you."

Isabel was still turning that over in her mind when Ambrose suddenly strode over to a particular shelf and pulled out a thick, aged volume.

"Field Guide to Deep-Sea Creatures. Finally."

He opened it with evident satisfaction and quickly located the section on kouto. He read through it rapidly, skimming past the material he already knew, until he found the passage he was looking for.

"During the height of the mindflayer empire, vast numbers of kouto were enslaved, serving as both labor and food. Based on the author's research, no records pertaining to the kouto goddess exist from the period of the mindflayer empire's existence. It is suspected that this deity's emergence is connected to the history of the kouto's enslavement."

Ambrose laughed with genuine satisfaction. At last, he had found the kouto goddess's greatest enemy.