Kelvun flipped through the briefs not quite sure why he should bring himself to care about their contents. His spymaster had brought them to him while he lounged half naked in the study of the little house he kept for these sorts of indiscretions. His wife was as frigid as her family was wealthy, and though she was important to him in the grand scheme of things, she would never understand his needs any more than Paulus seemed to understand what it was he was being paid for.

“Well, what is it I’m supposed to be seeing,” Kelvun demand, looking up at the fearful expression of his intelligence chief. “None of these even discusses the county of Greshen. Noden. Black Pine. Svendon. These are all villages in Lindvell. Coastal. Fishing. Villages. Do I need to get you a map to do your job properly?”

“No sire,” the old man said, not entirely able to keep his voice from trembling. “I just - you said that you wanted to know about any goblin attacks as soon as they happened, and word of a recent rash of conflicts just reached from us down river, so I thought—”

“So you thought that I would care about goblin attacks in the ass end of nowhere more than I would care about spending time admiring Lady Margaret’s ass?” he asked slamming the sheaf of papers hard enough against the desk he was sitting next to, to make the older man flinch slightly. “No one would think that would they. Certainly not my spymaster. Someone that I place such trust in would without doubt have more sense than that.”

“Well that’s not the only reason my lord…” Paulus said, fumbling, even though it obviously was all he had. The man wrote everything down, and he’d already given Kelvun every paper he’d walked in with. Anything past this point was the old fool just looking to curry favor with his lord, when he clearly didn’t understand that every extra minute he kept Kelvun from the arms of his mistress was compounding the damage he’d already inflicted on himself. “There’s also word in Blackwater that—”

“To the pits with Blackwater. Until and unless you can point to a credible threat on my person I’m not going back to that flea bitten hellhole until it’s time to tithe the river goddess herself. Anything that doesn’t rise to either of those thresholds can be handled by you, or you can send a bird to the local governor and have him handle it for you.”

“But—” the spymaster protested.

“No buts - not from you anyway. You’re as wrong about this as your predecessor was about an imminent attack from Dutton,” Kelvun said with a smile as he stood unsteadily. He’d tried to make that a joke, with all the charm that the two bottles of red he’d shared with Lady Margaret could make him, but it had come out as more of a threat, which worked almost as well. “When you have something more important than my lover’s butt you may return to me, until then though - spies work best when they are neither seen nor heard. Do you understand?”

Paulus opened his mouth one more time to speak, but thought better of it, and he closed it again before quickly bowing and taking his leave. It was the smartest thing he’d done in weeks, Kelvun thought, taking one more look at the papers before he turned and walked back toward the bedroom where he belonged. His wife would be expecting him home from his "hunt" in a few hours, and he would have to make sure he caught his prey another time or two before then.

He shook his head, ruing the day he’d had to get rid of his first chief spy Wurmnth. Despite the disloyalty that had eventually forced Kelvun to kill him, the man had been competent at least, but in the years since his passing, it seemed like every replacement had been worse than the one before. At the rate things were going now, he doubted that Paulus would last more than a year, but that was hardly Kelvun’s fault.

Despite the nest of traitorous vipers he ruled over he’d managed to make a fine show of things over the better part of his decade as Count Garvin, and that was no thanks to his incompetent help. The county had prospered under his rule like it never had under his father, Count Leo Garvin, and the old man had never had to deal with a plague half so bad as the Drowning. Despite everything, the county had come through everything almost unscathed when compared to their neighbors, all things considered.

Kelvun laughed to himself as he opened the door to his darkened bedroom. His previous spy had warned of an imminent invasion from the east, and instead their army had been decimated by fever.

“Is something funny my Lord?” Margaret asked. Her sonorous tones drifted in from the shadows.

“I’m just thinking about how hard it is to find good help,” he said smiling wider as she leaned forward, letting the crimson sheets fall seductively away from her as he spoke. “I’m afraid Paulus might not work out.”

“No? Isn’t he your wife’s cousin? I thought he was supposed to be quite perceptive. What a shame,” she answered, but she didn’t seem saddened by the news.

If anything she loved the vicious streak he had. That was good, because as his little secret she saw his ruthlessness more than anyone else, and it made him love her all the more.

He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over Paulus’ instincts just yet. After all, things were looking up: it had been years since the darkness had troubled his sleep which spoke to its powerlessness, and in a year or two when the swamp finished drying up it would be well and truly dead along with everything else that had ever threatened his rule.

Paulus hurried through the streets back to the room he kept on the waterfront. Not the main one where Count Garvin might think to look for him if his irritation hadn’t subsided in a few hours, though. He’d gotten rid of servants for less, including his predecessor, and Paulus was under no illusions that his family ties would save him from one of Kelvun’s fits of drunken pique.

A pithy slogan that a particularly clever bard had coined to describe the current state of the county of Greshen was “The best of rulers governs least, by that measure Count Garvin is the land’s highest priest.” The man’s words had outlived him, and even if Paulus didn’t dare say them out loud he thought about them often.

Just like his father, Kelvun had little interest in actually governing his kingdom, but unlike his father he lacked the ability to trust in other competent nobles to do it for him. It was a complete mess that was hidden entirely by the revenues of Garvin’s gift, if the notes he’d obtained from the master of coin’s private books were to be believed.

Everyone from the highest Baron to the lowest blacksmith knew that the kingdom was horribly mismanaged, but few besides the Count’s loyal spymaster could see the true shape of the problem, and that was likely one of the reasons that the good Count went through spymasters like other nobles went through mistresses. As long as he had a steady supply of gold and the love of the people from his youthful exploits though, no one was inclined to do anything about it.

Indeed, several of the Barons were getting quite rich as a result of their Lord’s folly, and as long as they bought him shiny gifts and made the proper obeisances before their lord, Count Garvin wasn’t overly concerned. Indeed, all the time that should have been spent running the county from day to day was spent chasing down secret enemies. The Count was sure these existed, even if he could not name them and could provide no evidence except for his feelings on the subject, but almost every real threat that his spymasters brought to him was shrugged off as unimportant.

Last year his predecessor had warned Kelvun that the county of Dutton was preparing an attack on the pretext of their resurgent river goddess worship, but when the plague brought everything in the region to a halt and the attack never materialized, poor Gelwin had paid for it with his life. That had made things very clear to Paulus from the very beginning: if he was going to tell the Count anything then he’d better be right, or else.

And he was, at least when it came to the goblins. After years of relative silence where they had done no more than attack supply convoys in the red hills, they were suddenly resurgent. Instead of attacking the farming villages again like they did a few years ago though, they were attacking the logging and fishing villages on the coast. His spies said that it was because there simply weren’t enough farms to the east anymore for them to bother attacking the same place for a second time, but he didn’t buy that explanation.

Paulus was a religious man, and he could smell a greater evil involved, even if no one else could. His master might see traitors everywhere without being able to point to anything specific, but Paulus was in just the opposite position. He could see dozens of individual instances of evil, but he could find no common thread to connect them. The goblin attacks, the barges that disappeared on the river, the stranger rumors concerning the cult of the drowned goddess, and of course the nightmares were all the most obvious examples, but there were so many more, and most people never seemed to notice.

Even the waters of the Oroza stank of evil to him now, which he would have thought impossible if he hadn't been so sure. The river water had made him sick often enough that Paulus only drank from deep city wells now, and he never ate fish anymore. It wasn’t worth the risk even if he didn't understand why.

The nightmares were the thing that troubled him the most. Paulus didn’t get them too often, but after he’d discovered that one of the men he was to make disappear was also suffering from them, he’d made a point of asking everyone who was going to die about them.

To a man, every person on the wrong end of his knives suffered from similar dark dreams. Some had them nearly every night, and some like him only had them once or twice a moon, but everyone had them, and they were all the same imagery. They all had dark grasping hands, and darker suffocating water. Paulus would have been inclined to blame the swamp and the ancient evil that was said to lurk there, but it was all but gone now, so there had to be something else.

That was the one great thing that the wastrel, Kelvun had accomplished. He’d drained the darkness from that blighted land once and for all and made it into tillable earth instead. In a few more years it would be nothing but a fertile valley, and in a generation or two Blackwater might be a larger city than Fallravea proper because of that bounty.

Paulus had drawn up all these details into detailed reports. Reports that made it all seem a little less crazy when all the facts were collected together in black and white like that. When the reports on the cults were combined with the river dragon sightings and the entrail readings he’d commissioned from the local temple, it was clear: there was a growing darkness in the heart of his beloved homeland. He considered giving that report to his lord many times. It was only his fear of what would happen next if he couldn’t substantiate them, and give his Count a target for his angst. Well, there was that fear along with another, deeper one.

What if instead of simply being the neglectful ruler that darkness blossomed under, Kelvun was somehow part of its machinations? To Paulus he seemed much too incompetent for such a thing, but perhaps that was his role to play. It was his strong suit after all.