Luka decided to keep certain aspects of what had transpired in the forest as confidential as possible, leaving it to the two royals to determine which trusted subjects they ought to reveal this information to. For some reason, that strange poem seemed like something that was directly relevant to them, and she was not even sure that it had anything to do with the present mission.
To Tammy, Luka wrote a letter describing everything. In spite of Tammy not even technically being legal, much less having a royal title, she was the most powerful person in the world and also Luka's sister. Having knowledge of what is transpiring in her hands might actually lead to the right people being almost magically in the right places at the right times, almost before Luka knew that she would need them. On the other hand, it could take weeks for Tammy to get something like this processed and get everything set into motion, so while Tammy did make miracles happen and had virtually magical foresight, she could seldom grant instant gratification for the comeuppance.
However, Luka took time to brief the Crew and the Entourage on the most important elements pertaining to them. "There is still a lot of work to be done in Valarius," Luka said, strutting in front of them with her hands behind her in a bastardization of the "parade rest" position. "We might have been fools to leave things unfinished in Valarius, really. We just got things done there, and we sort of abandoned them."
Vaestro looked affronted. "I had thought that we were very thorough! We purged the entire ranks of the king's court!"
"But what about the odd innkeeper, the schoolmarm, or anyone left that is in a position that has tentacles of influence?" Luka said. "Somehow, people are still turning up missing in one place, and mangled corpses are turning up in other places with the meat mostly carved off of them. Community leaders that had spearheaded initiatives to improve transparency of the use of financial resources are being found begging in alleys, with their eyes having been cut out and their brains having been partially destroyed by some perverted form of trepanation."
Avelia looked sick. "Trepanation?" she said bleakly. "They've gotten worse since what happened to me."
Luka nodded. "It's worse than quasi-medical forms of it. It results in its victims behaving shamefully, and this undermines their previously held beliefs worse than if they had never tried to do any good at all. In some other cases, there have been people that were previously close friends of an important reformer start to publicly disavow that person, resulting in a scandal, and while our intelligence officers have sometimes managed to prove who was actually making threats against these people, that's been in the minority. In some cases, the people we have tracked the threats to have turned out to be perfectly innocent of wrongdoing, and the trail of information had been set up in order to mislead while the real scum got away."
"A tangled web," Oliver muttered, tapping his fingers together. He exchanged a glance with Ethel.
"May I speak?" Vrackie said tentatively, following an old habit.
Avelia patted the dragon on the shoulder. "Remember, Vrackie, part of our alliance with the Lush Kingdom involves letting dragons speak their minds as they please," she said.
Vrackie nodded. "While I was lurking in an inn, while having taken the form of a moth, I was listening to an exchange between an innkeeper and a traveler. Apparently, the cultists follow a fairly predictable pattern in how they go about corrupting people in key positions. Truly, the most powerful people are ones that have no titles at all or even very much money, yet they come into contact with thousands of people a day and have an ability to cause an incredible amount of harm or good at one time. Many of them are people that may never feel appreciated by society, and the cult gives them a way that they can feel important and vital to something. The cult honors them and decorates them with medals and awards."
"So we're talking about seemingly unimportant people, then," Vaestro said, "like housemaids, bar-tenders, and so on. People that are universally important and yet never noticed. They are those invisible people that, while we could never survive without them, they are rebuffed from social inner-circles and expected to be invisible."
"Yes," Vrackie said, "and while nobody intentionally tells them anything, they do happen to be present while important men are speaking in what they assume to be secrecy. Nobody thinks about a person that serves men their mead, during a private conference, as having ears, intelligence, or perception."
Avelia added, "and nobody thinks of a seamstress as being able to notice things like, when an important lady has a semen stain on a dress that she wore while her husband was out-of-town."
Oakmoss chimed in, "and come to think of it, I can't even recall what the little man that repairs the stitching on my tack actually looks like. Perhaps I ought to take more notice of him. I always talk to the master craftsman and don't even look at the apprentices that actually do the work." Oakmoss had become almost incredibly vain. Her tack was elegant and lacy, and it was replete with lots of semi-decorative and semi-functional stitching, with subtle hints of pale pink getting sneaked in where the eye didn't expect it. Olivia's family had been very indulgent with her.
Astrid hissed, "intelligence does tend to be found the most readily at the bottom of the barrel. However, if the cultists are truly one-trick ponies, then we can arguably start to predict their patterns fairly quickly."
"So it's like those chain-knots that sailors put certain kinds of rope in," Vaestro said. "If you can learn the way to undo it in a certain place, it all comes unraveled."
Avelia nodded. "Except that failed attempts to untangle it have resulted in the tangle getting worse than it would have been if it had remain untouched," she said. "I imagine that, as the cultists have been hunted by our own intelligence officers and occasionally found out, they have started making at least some adjustments on their pattern to try to throw us off the scent. It might have slowed them down to have to work harder to get the same results, but they're ultimately going to be harder to stop."
Ethel cleared his throat. "Excuse me," he said.
Everyone looked at the jolly, red kilin.
As he tapped his clawed fingers together, Ethel explained, "I do tend to engage in more conversation than most at...drinking venues," Ethel said.
Hilda giggled, and she chimed in, "Especially ones frequented by the Riders of very sexy drakes!" Hilda and Astrid almost invariably got themselves involved in orgies whenever they visited a new place, but it was Hilda that would sleep with a drake at the drop of a hat. Astrid would be a virgin if not for the trouble that Hilda had gotten her into, although Hilda would be almost impossibly destitute if not for the trouble that Astrid had kept her out of.
Ethel blushed at this, and he continued, "so the members of a variety of occupations often tend to form informal unions. Not all of them are members of these unions, but the ones that do tend to be involved in them find that drinking venues are places where they can organize their activities. If there is a textile mill that won't fulfill a demand that the shelving of materials be made safer, at the expense of storage space they don't want to invest in, the union bosses can almost invariably guarantee production can move a lot faster upon the changes being made."
"So they deliberately slow things down to punish their own employers," Luka said bitterly.
Ethel shook his head. "I know some of their secrets, actually. Often, the poor storage decisions result in workers having to take more time and use more energy performing a task than they would have to if things had been done properly, to begin with. If you store rolls of material in a place where they might crush someone if they fell down while someone was passing underneath, then everyone eventually starts taking trips all the way around the machinery and through narrow alleys in order to avoid the danger zone where things are falling all the time. Time is wasted picking up things that fall down from sagging shelving units. When the changes are made, the union bosses quickly explain the benefits of the changes to the workers, and throughput can often redouble. Also, whenever small injuries to fingers are more frequent at textile mills, the textile workers can hardly be expected to move very quickly, the fear of getting injured slowing their movements. The union bosses know that it takes about three months for workers to fully get the idea that a usual risk of injury is no longer there, so they can tell the owners of the mills that productivity can be increased significantly within three months. There is no actual forcing involved. The union bosses are just telling the owners of the mills basic common sense that one would think they could have figured out if they had entered the mills a few times while they were in operation."
Luka muttered disagreeably, but she was unable to come up with a comeback. "So how does this end up being relevant?" she asked.
Ethel rolled his eyes. "We are talking about the invisible people of society," he said. "The ones you have been focusing on have been ones that you glimpse occasionally through your peripheral vision. They are not really fully invisible to you. Do you ever see the tanner, though, that produces the hides your tack is cut from? And do you ever meet the person that mixes the chemicals that he uses in order to treat them in order to make sure that they last and remain soft instead of becoming rigid and brittle? Or the mine-worker that excavates the mineral components of those chemicals?"
"Wheels within wheels," Karyu said wondrously. "So many hands necessary to do one small thing. I never thought about it. Our entire society is a house-of-cards. If one at the bottom is knocked-out, the entire structure comes tumbling down."
"I see, then," Luka said. "So we therefore ought to start by getting rid of these union bosses."
Ethel pounded his fist. "WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THEY ARE THE PROBLEM!?" he roared. "Start targeting them, and you can count me out!"
"And I would join him in making myself absent," Oliver added.
Anija broke her silence, and she put her paw on Luka's arm. "Luka, you need to get over your authoritarian mindset about things," she said gently. "We need to think about using diplomacy and peace first, force second."
"There is a place for force," Oliver said firmly. "It just needs to be applied in the right place."
Anija scowled at Oliver and made a face, but she abstained from making a further scene.
Celestia, who had been silent up until this point, pointed out, her young voice hesitating and stammering as she spoke,"I would like to note that my friend, a fellow scholar, has done a few key studies."
"Go on," Luka said.
"H-h-he, well, he, um, he, ah, he, you see, um, so he did..." Celestia began, doing a lot of repeating and vocal pauses as she tried to speak.
Oakmoss broke in. "Celestia, dear, remember what we talked about in our public speaking club: pause, and breathe." Oakmoss had become quite the socialite, and she had dragged the shy, young scholar off to many different clubs in town that were focused on self-enhancement. The public speaking club was just one of them. Vision-board parties, yoga clubs, and spa-crawling groups had kept Celestia quite busy. Ravenna had completely corrupted Oakmoss, and Oakmoss had become addicted to embracing her femininity at every opportunity that presented itself. She had gotten so deeply immersed in the intuitive thought-processes of female culture that she had forgotten what a solid application of logic even felt like, anymore. Everything had become about "feelings" and "intentions" and "acceptance" for her.
Celestia took a breath, and she started over again. "My friend is an economist," she said, and she paused to breathe. "He studies the services we use every day and the origins of the materials in everything that we own." Pause. "He has an entire library of literature on the topic." Pause. "We could start there if we wanted to."
Oakmoss nodded approvingly. "That would be a good idea for a place to start," she said. "However, I would also like to note, to everyone, that females rarely care very much about the social status of each others' husbands. Our friends come from every walk of life, and while ones from wealthy families are overrepresented, we have many different classes mingling together."
"So we have a handful of ideas," Luka said: