Wish upon the Stars chapter 909

With the two traitors taken care of, we turned Horace over to Devlan. Sofia, meanwhile, led us deep into the belly of the winery in preparation for her delivery. Which brought up a question that had been nagging at me. “So…how does this work?” I asked as we walked. She was in front, and we were all prepared to end her if she stepped out of line, so she was naturally being incredibly obedient as a captive.

“What? The accumulation?” She asked cheerfully. “They send it up from the bottom of the chasm and we add it to the wine.”

“Not that part,” I said with a shake of my head. “From the other side. There’s no logical reason to spread the wine like that unless there’s some way to gather the resulting misery. Wine from one winery isn’t nearly pervasive enough to be a viable infiltration strategy, so you’re not weakening the city for an attack, at least not ONLY that. Which means you must be gaining something. So there’s got to be some reciprocity. How are you harvesting the resulting negative emotions the wine causes.”

As we talked, she led us deep into the building, and finally, we turned into a large dark warehouse, and she gestured smugly into the room as we stepped through the door. “See for yourself.”

I looked around…and my jaw dropped. “This is…a bottling facility?”

“A RECYCLING plant,” she corrected. “We offer cash incentives and bulk discounts if purchasers recycle their bottles with us. We even pay on an individual basis. People all over the city scour their trash for our bottles, flocking to the winery to return them to us. Normally it would be a terrible business model, but the Void taint is habit forming, so people keep buying from us, and it offsets some of the cost.”

I stared at her in horrified awe. “You…you enchanted the bottles? They’re some kind of gathering artifact that siphons off the generated negativity from the surroundings? And by using the recycling as an excuse you essentially force the locals to collect the accumulated despair FOR you. That’s…that’s so evil. And really brilliant. But mostly evil.”

“What is evil?” she shrugged. “To the Void, we’re evil. We muck up their peaceful universe with our noise pollution. Anyway, you guessed it. Each of these bottles accumulates despair, which can be processed into Void taint. The taint is much more refined, but is actually LESS dense than the despair, so you can make about five bottles worth of Void taint for every full bottle of despair.”

“And then you transport these down to the chasm, where whoever is down there processes them and sends up full bottles of Void taint, which you then spike into the wine,” I said sourly, finishing her thought. “I’m guessing there’s a lot of extra too. That’s probably how they made that shallowing.”

Callie frowned. “That’s…that’s not good.” I raised an eyebrow at her, and she explained. “Creating Void taint is a natural mechanism most of the time. You essentially just increase the density of misery in a given area, then add in some reactive materials like the bone coins for it to infuse. But given the size of this city and the sophistication of the operation, they aren’t passively gathering the stuff. They have someone who can HARVEST and REFINE it. There’s a Filthsmith down there.”

“Ok, so, I don’t know what that is, but I feel almost certain it’s a bad thing,” I said glibly as I took in her tone. “Care to educate me?”

“Filthsmiths are special Ascendants who can process Void taint,” she explained. “They’re like…the opposite of purification specialists. Their whole powerset revolves around corruption. Kind of like Belial, but more Void specific. Utility wise, this is extremely annoying, but their combat power is pretty scary too. They can infuse Void taint into creatures to empower them.”

Grimacing, I turned to Sofia. “When exactly is the next shipment due for delivery?” I’d told her we were going tonight, but if the next dropoff was soon, it would be easier to bullshit our way close enough to investigate without being discovered.

“Tonight,” she admitted. “We have pretty fast turnover, given how much Void taint needs to be processed.”

“What I want to know,” said Abel solemnly. “Is who OWNS this place? Because there’s no way this whole thing is going on without the owner being part of it. Slipping it by the employees is one thing, but whoever this building belongs to had to have been involved in setting this up in the first place.”

Sofia shrugged. “Cameron Thistle. It used to belong to his uncle Carlisle, but the old boss had a mysterious accident before I started. You might be right, honestly, but I’ve never seen him myself.”

“Because he’s a member of the City Lord’s family,” Devlan said in a grim tone. “He married in ages ago. Last I heard, he was in charge of the mining depot.”

“So the Void have been planning this for a while,” I said grimly. Which meant they either knew the vanished gods were coming, or more likely, had always been looking for ways to deal with the six and had just launched their plans early to take advantage of the war. Swell.

Shaking, my head, I focused on the present issue. “Well, how do we get this stuff to the chasm. I assume there’s some kind of tunnel or something?”

This whole city was built on a cave system, so the chances of the Void having a direct route to the pickup point were high. It was the only way I could think of for them to make consistent exchanges like that without it being WAY too obvious.

Strolling over to the back of the bottling warehouse, Sofia stopped in front of a shelf, reaching up, she yanked on a couple of seemingly loose fittings and hinges, getting a series of clicks as the snapped into place, then kicked the shelf. There was a low whoosh, and the metal shelving slid in and then down, flattening as it went, the shelves clicking into place as a flight of corrugated metal stairs.

“There’s a couple of carts on tracks down there,” she informed us helpfully. “I load them up with bottles and then ride along to the meeting place. They unload them, reload the full bottles of Void taint, and then I bring them back for Horace to infuse into the tanks.”

I nodded. “Ok, then we can head down there to meet up with them.”

“You COULD…” she said slyly. “But if you did, they might notice the carts are empty. So the safest way to do it would be to go about our business as usual, then follow them back down when they returned with the bottles. Right? Like you’re planning to raid the place, so you need to do recon before your people arrive.”

I sighed. “Are you trying to get us to do MANUAL LABOR for you? You’re our PRISONER!”

“I prefer to think of myself as an aggressive guest,” she chirped. “But until you actually attack them, I’ll be in danger if I don’t maintain the impression that I’m still serving the cause, so I obviously need to maintain my cover if you don’t want to give away the game.”

Squinting at her darkly, I ground out. “Do you, by any chance, get PAID for these deliveries?”

“Of course,” she said with a serious tone. “Otherwise why would I work for them? You can’t function in Yettin without money, and I’m very handsomely compensated. Of course, I could refuse that payment or avoid it somehow, but that would definitely tip them off that something was wrong. I would never miss a payday.”

Devlan whistled in awe. “Damn, that’s not bad. Blackmailing your captors into doing your work for you. Talk to me if you survive this, I might have a job for someone with your flexibility and cleverness.” We all turned to glare at him, and he shrugged. “Game recognizes game. Being able to turn the tables on us in this citation is impressive. Plus she’s right. Our forces won’t be gathered for hours yet, and the more information we can get on their base the better we can do with our initial raid.”

More than that, if we could take them out fast enough, we could identify and capitalize on whatever weakness they were planning to exploit in the depot. Hopefully less violently, considering they were the Void and were probably planning to kill a bunch of people, but still, it would make our job MUCH easier.

So, with a sight, we got to work. Abel and I started the process of lifting and transporting the crates. They weren’t exactly heavy in the traditional sense, but they were still D-rank crates, so the weight of the Impact was still there. And there were a LOT of them. The carts were actually more like train cars, and we had to fill every single one. The crates were stacked to the ceiling and there were easily thousands of them across the several cars. Even with our whole group helping it took like an hour.

When we finally finished, we climbed onto one of the cars that hadn’t been completely filled, and I triggered Murmur, covering us all and completely erasing all traces of our existence. I left Sofia visible, obviously, and once we were all set, she forced us to wait another two hours to justify her own bottle loading speed, something that enraged Abel and made Devlan laugh.

Finally, she tapped a button on the panel in the car we were in, and the cars all took off down the track at a decent clip. We spend maybe a half hour on the route, making multiple turns and doubling back several times, before we finally pulled to a stop in a big open cavern. Off the cavern was a web bridge, and to my surprise, an entire dock structure had been secured into the wall of the cliff, with a similar platform to the one in the fortress (albeit much higher quality and much more modern) hanging out over the abyss below.

As we dismounted, Sofia strode confidently up to the man in the bowler hat waiting for us. He had a round pale face (though it had a perpetual blush around the cheeks), a bushy mustache, and crafty look in his blue eyes. “Terrance,” she said with a sigh. “Nice to see you, as always. You have my money?”

The man pouted, which was not a good look on him. “Sofia, must you be so cold? We’re co-workers. I think you’d like me if you got to know me. I can advance you next shipment’s pay if you’d like to use it to share a meal.” He gave her a slimy smile that I suspected was meant to be ingratiating.

“Sadly, you’d have to pay me at least triple that to convince me to spend more than a few minutes in your presence, so there wouldn’t be any left over for the food.” Her tone was icy and poisonously sweet, like a cyanide popsicle.

His eyes flashed in anger, but he didn’t let it show on his face, maintaining an indulgent smile. “Very well, perhaps next time. Boys!” He snapped, and about a dozen hunched, furry creatures with black, matted fur and flowing blue eyes loped off the platform towards the cars. They began unloading them, stacking the crates on the empty rock floor of the chamber before returning to pick up yet more crates from the platform and carry them back to replace the ones in the cars.

As they did so, I escorted my people over to the lift platform, this one the size of a large room, and we took up a position in the corner of the lift. When they finished loading the new bottles and stashed the old one in the platform with us, the round faced man smiled snidely at Sofia, and then returned to the lift, throwing a lever. The last thing I saw as we descended into the abyss was the woman counting her money. Maybe it didn’t suck to be her after all.