Chapter 26
A game of intense chess was underway in King Verwil’s court. The Duke of Vurtem sparred in his usual strategy with the king by playing well but making a few subtle mistakes here and there in order to allow the king to save face and the duke to save his life.
“What news do we have on our project?” the king inquired calmly while adjusting his rook’s position.
“Mostly excellent. Indeed, almost all excellent.”
The king frowned.
“I’ll go with the good news first this time. Bad news has a deleterious effect on my chess performance. But first tell me if you have any reports on Irkels.”
“None, Your Highness. It is as if he has disappeared.”
“He failed to find the pholungs and refuses to return here and accept his execution honorably. Make it known to the new chief of the Varco that a death sentence hangs over Irkels’ head. No need to bring him here—he is to be killed on sight whenever and wherever he is found. It will suffice to see his severed head displayed here in my court.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Now, tell me the good news about our project.”
“Money is pouring into our coffers in the tens of millions each month. If the whim were to strike Your Majesty, I believe you could raise or purchase an army that would flatten Sogolia!”
“Well, with news like that, I suppose it should be quite feasible for me to stomach whatever bad news exists.”
“Your Majesty, while our agents have been mostly successful in staying in control of the distribution of Smokeless Green, things are in a downward spiral in Sivingdel.”
“Go on.”
“Well, our agent there had retained nearly complete control of the Smokeless Green trade until several months ago; but after the death of Heavy Sam, control of the trade has been slipping from his control little by little to the point that now . . . .” The duke gulped nervously.
“Don’t make me drag this out of you word by word, Duke Galdfrey. I’ll be immeasurably perturbed. I’m very pleased with your overall progress, and not even I demand perfection. Now, be a man and tell me everything fluidly and with valor.”
“Our agent there, according to the latest report, is down to about ten percent market share.”
“What’s causing this? And where’s the other percentage going? Are we talking about a nascent monopoly, oligopoly, or, the worst case—small, independent distributors?”
“A nascent monopoly, I believe, would be the best descriptor.”
“Good. That means we only have one man to either bring into line or destroy. For a moment, you had me worried. Why is he successful? What is his source? Our agent should be able to undersell any distributor easily.”
“Yes, Your Highness. He should. Inexplicably, however, he cannot. This individual is outdoing him on both price and quality.”
King Verwil suddenly stood upright while releasing a loud “WHAT?!!!” his eyes full of fire.
Then, as suddenly as the anger had come he immediately sat back down to the chessboard. Such an outburst from a normal king might come from the most trivial annoyance, but to the Metinvurs, who valued icy calculation, precision, and cunning, such an outburst, even for a king, was nearly unthinkable.
“Your trepidation was well-founded in sharing these most gloomy tidings,” the king said with a furrowed brow, “and your head remains attached thanks only to the exquisite news you first shared with me. I pray you did not exaggerate it out of an instinct for self-preservation,” the king added, while moving a pawn and taking the duke’s bishop.
The king then looked up with icy eyes towards the duke and said, “You may recall that it was your idea, and your idea alone, to release Valder—now referred to most profanely as Smokeless Green—upon the people. It would bring us extraordinary riches, wreck the societies of our morally weak rivals, and forever remain within our complete control, thus allowing us to turn the ocean of Valder into a desert whenever it fancied us. Do you recall these predictions?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Good. Now explain to me what is going on. Is one of our own agents betraying us? How can an outsider undersell one of our agents? We have kept Valder to ourselves exclusively for millennia. No other country has it.”
“The only possibility, Your Highness, I believe is the seeds.”
King Verwil’s brow frowned severely, and Duke Galdfrey gulped nervously.
“Ah, the seeds. Yes, I do recall that those were my idea,” the king said, looking carefully at the duke, “yet I also recall that you assured me that these seeds would yield only seedless plants. You do recall that, do you not?”
“Of course, Your Highness.”
“And do you still retain confidence that our botanists competently inserted only such seeds in said barrels?”
Galdfrey paused only a brief moment before giving the only answer that would allow his head to stay attached: “Of course, Your Highness.”
“Well, then, I suppose there’s no point in getting too worked up, is there?” King Verwil said with a chuckle not even Duke Galdfrey could ascertain to be false or sincere, diligent student of the king though he was.
“Perhaps you thought it was a bit reckless of me to distribute those seeds, did you not?”
“His Majesty’s stratagems often exceed my own humble understanding,” Duke Galdfrey said carefully, with affected sincerity.
“Well, there’s no shame in admitting that. But I have faith in you, Duke Galdfrey. Tell me why I suggested it.”
There were many times in the king’s presence that the duke had to make great mental exertions to affect sincerity in his hypocritical answers, but the truly nightmarish situations came when faced with questions to which the desired answer was not immediately clear. He had assumed the king had suggested sending out the seeds due to the king’s eagerness to execute the project with the greatest celerity, and the seeds provided a way by which the product would be disseminated on its own, thus obviating the need for the already overstretched Varco agents to assume the full task of distribution throughout the targeted countries.
But it was clear now that the king was hinting at a shrewder strategy, and he had not even the faintest supposition as to what it might be.
“No need to torment yourself, Duke Galdfrey. Let me explain to you the difference between the way a king thinks and the way a duke thinks. It will be in our interest for the targeted nations not to know we are behind the proliferation of Valder, yes?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Could the threat of prison force a distributor to reveal his source?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“And if that source is a Varco agent, that means trouble for us, even if neither the traitorous distributor nor the arresting police officers knows the source is a Varco agent, yes?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“What kind of trouble, Duke Galdfrey?”
“It could require an allocation of Varco agents to free the arrestee. It could require the Varco agent to kill numerous police officers to escape. In brief, it could cause many problems and put Your Majesty’s desires in peril.”
“Very good. Now do you still fail to see the advantage of the seeds?”
It hit the duke like a bolt of lightning, and he found himself thinking that, perhaps all this time he had believed himself to be allowing the king to win at chess, in reality the king not only did not need his artificial mistakes but was also fully aware of them and laughing inwardly at the duke’s misplaced deference.
“If the distributor is planting his own Smokeless Green, there is no one higher up the chain for him to betray to authorities in exchange for leniency. Such a man is entirely and utterly expendable!” the duke nearly shouted, sincerely amazed at what he perceived to be the king’s brilliance. “He can be made a scapegoat . . . he can become the main target of police and military action while distributors under our agents are m
ostly left alone.”
“Close,” the king said calmly. “Now tell me why I was so furious.”
The duke’s good cheer quickly left him, as he felt as much at a loss as he did moments before, and with his newfound respect for the king’s intellect, he now felt quite doltish by comparison.
“Don’t flog yourself, Duke Galdfrey. Even kings miscalculate. My hope had been that a handful of independent distributors would arise from the seeds. Their ambition would be kept in check by the finite nature of their resources and by their rivalry amongst one another. With the seeds distributed amongst several individuals, no single individual would become powerful enough to pose much of a threat to our plans. But if most of the market share of Sivingdel is now in the hands of a single distributor—and we are of course assuming that no Varco agent is betraying us and selling independently for personal gain, a most unlikely possibility, given our excellent returns—it seems quite likely that most of those seeds did somehow end up with one individual.
“That means somewhere near Sivingdel there has to be one very large farm, yes?”
“A likely proposition, Your Highness.”
“The other fact that vexes me is you say the quality is reportedly higher. I confess that was a most unforeseen factor to myself, which is why I say even kings miscalculate. I would not have expected the quality of Seleganian soil to be so superior as to make a significant difference in the Valder planted there. But even from this good may yet come, as we may wish to eventually make it our preferred location for harvesting.”
There was an awkward pause, as the duke waited for the king to continue, since his pensive face left little doubt that he had more to say.
He then looked directly at the duke and said, “Let us not become overly worried about this lone individual. Let us first find out everything we can about him. Everything,” the king repeated with ice in his voice and eyes. “We will then decide whether this is a man who can be ignored for the time being. We may find him useful to our own ends. Or”—and as the king said this his hand calmly pushed his rook into the duke’s queen, in a move the duke had genuinely not seen coming, which sent a chill down his spine, as he now felt more certain than ever that the king was well aware of his fake chess mistakes of the past and was fully able to choose between exploiting his fake mistakes or his real ones, “we may find it necessary to destroy this man.”
The duke gulped nervously, feeling a bit of peculiar sympathy for the individual.
“Let us hope it is not Irkels. That could create a very nasty reallocation of our already strained resources,” the king said.
The duke felt a chill go down his spine. He had not even considered that possibility.
“Tell me everything you know so far.”