Chapter 50: Trader’s Smile
Krug had never been a trader. He’d been a priest, then a handler, then a diplomat by necessity. But trade was something else — it required a different kind of face. Not the authority of a voice speaking for a god. The openness of a man offering something you might want.
He practiced the expression on the walk south. Harvin, who’d agreed to serve as guide and cultural translator, watched the Lizardman’s face cycle through various attempts at approachability.
"Stop trying to smile," Harvin said. "Lizardmen don’t smile. It looks like you’re about to bite someone."
"Then what expression do I use?"
"Your normal one. Calm. Steady. You look trustworthy when you’re not trying to look trustworthy."
The delegation was small by design. Krug, Harvin, two porters carrying trade goods — stonesteel tools, surplus grain, dried medicinal herbs from Ashenveil’s growing agricultural output — and a single Shadowfang scout trailing a kilometer behind as overwatch. Not enough to threaten. Enough to trade.
They walked for two days through terrain that shifted beneath their feet — swamp giving way to scrub, scrub giving way to dry hillside. The divine bond thinned as they moved south, never fully disappearing but growing quieter, like a voice heard through walls. Harvin set the pace and the route, choosing paths that avoided the Beastmen runner trails he knew Thyrak’s informants used.
"The runners won’t be a problem," Harvin said on the second morning, navigating a dry creek bed. "They report once a week. Worst case, Thyrak hears that a trading party came through. He won’t care. Traders cross the border constantly."
"And if he does care?"
"Then he sends a squad. A squad takes three days to mobilize from The Stamp. By then, we’re gone." Harvin shrugged — the practical fatalism of a man who’d spent twenty years running calculations on exactly how much trouble he could afford.
Fangscar appeared on the third day. A cluster of wooden longhouses on a hillside, surrounded by livestock pens and a low timber wall that wouldn’t stop a determined child. The wolf-beastmen settlement held roughly fifty residents — Runt’s scouting report was accurate. Smoke from cooking fires. The smell of livestock and tanned leather. A Stampist shrine in the village center, with the Iron Hoof carved into a standing stone.
The gate guard — a young wolf-beastman with patchy fur and a spear that was mostly rust — watched them approach with the nervous energy of someone who rarely saw visitors and assumed they meant trouble.
"Traders," Harvin called out. "From the northwest. We brought tools."
The guard looked at the stonesteel knife on Krug’s belt. Then at the grain sacks the porters carried. Then at Krug — a Lizardman in priest’s vestments, which was not a thing you saw in Thyrak’s territory. Ever.
"Wait here," the guard said, and disappeared into the village.
***
The elder came out personally.
Grimjaw* was old for a wolf-beastman — greying muzzle, scars across his forearms that told a story of decades of small violence, one ear torn half off in a fight that had happened long enough ago that nobody remembered what it was about. He moved with the careful economy of someone whose joints had started charging interest on old debts.
He looked at the trade goods. He looked at Krug. He didn’t speak for thirty seconds.
"You’re from the settlement in the swamp," Grimjaw said. Not a guess.
Krug didn’t deny it. "We are."
"Thyrak’s scouts went to look at your settlement four months ago. They said you were nothing." Grimjaw’s eyes were sharp, reading Krug with the practiced assessment of someone who’d survived by knowing when strangers were dangerous. "You don’t look like nothing."
"We’re traders," Krug said. "We have stonesteel tools, grain, and medicine. We’re looking for trade partners on this border."
"Trade partners." Grimjaw repeated it the way you repeat a word you’ve heard before but never experienced. "What do you want in return?"
"Information. Goodwill. Whatever you think is fair."
Grimjaw stared at him for another long moment. Then he gestured toward the village center. "Come in. Don’t touch the shrine."
The trading happened in the village square, in front of the Stampist shrine that nobody touched. Krug laid out the goods on a hide blanket — six stonesteel knives, three stonesteel axe heads, two sacks of grain, a pouch of dried fever-root.
The villagers gathered. Slowly, the way prey animals approach something unfamiliar — curious but ready to bolt. They picked up the knives. Tested the edges. The stonesteel was immediately, obviously superior to anything they owned. Their tools were iron — cheap, dull, prone to rust. Thyrak’s territory produced iron because minotaurs understood iron. Nobody had invented anything better because nobody had been asked to.
"What’s this metal?" a young wolf-beastman asked, turning a knife in the light.
"Stonesteel," Krug said. "We forge it in Ashenveil."
"It’s worth more than anything we have to trade back."
Krug shrugged. "Then trade what you have. We’re not here to take your best. We’re here to start a relationship."
The word landed differently than "deal" or "exchange" would have. A *relationship*. The promise of continuity. We’ll come back. This isn’t a one-time extraction.
Grimjaw watched all of this from beside the shrine, arms folded. He didn’t participate. He watched Krug the way a wolf watches a campfire — aware that it could be useful, aware that it could burn.
After the trading was done and the delegation had received a modest exchange of smoked venison, leather hides, and local herbs, Krug did the thing that would matter.
A child — maybe six years old, wolf-beastman, female — was sitting at the edge of the crowd with her left arm wrapped in dirty cloth. The wrap was soaked through. Infection. The kind that killed children in villages without healers, which was every village in Thyrak’s territory because Thyrak hadn’t sent a healer to his border villages in living memory.
Krug walked to the child. He knelt. "May I?"
The child’s mother — thin, exhausted, eyes that had already started grieving — nodded.
Krug placed his hand on the child’s arm. The gold light was subtle — not a performance, not a display of divine power. A warm glow through his palm, the priestly healing that cost nothing but intent, that any Handler could channel from a god who cared enough to allow it.
The infection drained. The wound closed. The dirty cloth fell away from clean, healed skin.
The child flexed her arm. She looked at it like she’d never seen it work properly. Then she looked at Krug.
"Thank you," her mother whispered.
Krug stood. He didn’t say "praise the Ordinator." He didn’t mention his god. He didn’t preach. He just nodded and walked back toward the delegation’s packs.
The entire village had watched.
Grimjaw’s arms were no longer folded. His hands hung at his sides. Open.
He walked to Krug before the delegation left. Not close enough for conversation to be private — the whole village was watching — but close enough that his voice didn’t carry.
"That child is my granddaughter," Grimjaw said.
Krug said nothing.
"Thyrak’s priests came through last season. Tithe collection. I asked them to heal her. They said blessings were for tithing villages, and our tithe was short." His voice was level. The kind of level that took effort. "Our tithe was short because Thyrak’s minotaurs had taken our breeding stock the season before to feed the garrison. We had nothing left to give because they’d already taken it."
"I understand," Krug said.
"You healed her and asked for nothing."
"I asked for nothing because nothing was owed."
Grimjaw held his gaze for five seconds. Then he turned and walked back to the village without another word. Not a conversion. Not a rejection. A door left open.
***
Thornwatch was easier.
The mixed Human-Beastmen village of eighty residents had been waiting for any alternative to Thyrak since before Harvin could remember. When Krug’s delegation arrived with stonesteel tools and grain and the rumor — already traveling from Fangscar — that the Lizardman priest could heal, the village elder met them at the gate and invited them to dinner.
The conversion happened over the course of an evening meal. Not through theology. Through roasted boar and the quiet revelation that a god existed who didn’t take thirty percent of everything and give nothing back. The elder — a human woman named **Maren**, grey-haired and practical — asked exactly one question about the Ordinator.
"Does he demand tithe?"
"He asks for faith," Krug said. "Not grain. Not livestock. Not your children’s food. Faith. What you give beyond that, you give because you choose to."
Maren looked at her village — the thin children, the half-empty storehouses, the Stampist shrine that nobody prayed to willingly anymore — and made her decision before the boar was finished.
Twenty-three adults converted before the delegation left the next morning. Casual tier — not deep faith, but genuine willingness. Their children would follow. The system registered the conversions with the neutral efficiency it applied to everything:
[NEW BELIEVERS: +23 (Thornwatch)]
[TOTAL BELIEVER COUNT: 312]
[FP Generation: +143/day]
Zephyr watched the numbers tick. Three hundred and twelve believers. The FP economy was accelerating — every new believer fed the engine that funded blessings, that attracted more believers, that generated more FP. A flywheel. The same compound growth curve that had carried him from top 100 to Rank 1 in Theos Online.
The difference was that these weren’t data points. They were people who’d chosen to believe in something because that something had healed a child’s arm without asking for payment.
Through the bond: Grimjaw?
Krug, walking north toward Ashenveil with the delegation, replied through the connection: Not yet. He watched. He saw. He’s deciding. Give him time.
How much time?
He’ll come to us. Men like Grimjaw don’t convert because they’re convinced. They convert because they’ve convinced themselves. That takes exactly as long as it takes.
Zephyr accepted this. The Handler understood mortals better than he did — better than any player ever had. In the game, you clicked "convert" and the NPC changed allegiance. In reality, people needed to arrive at decisions through their own process, on their own timeline, through their own logic.
Grimjaw would come. The healed child was worth more than a thousand sermons.
Three hundred and twelve believers. The border was softening. The Constrictor was tightening.
Five weeks to go.