The World Dragon's Heir

Chapter 777: Let The King Arrange It

Once Alexis finally made it down for dinner, the entire team of tax assessors began to relax. While the Princess had a reputation for being somewhat unreasonable, her version of unreasonable was not known to be quite as hazardous to the health as Dominic’s was.

While they were getting along quite well, they were also certain that if things were not going smoothly, it would very rapidly cease to be a positive situation for them.

"There is no need to be so scared of him, you only encourage him to keep acting up for the entertainment value." Alexis informed the group as they ate.

"Easy for you to say. However, I had the particular misfortune to be on the team that discovered the bodies of Margrave Malton’s son. It’s not a sight that I will quickly forget."

"Who?"

"See, His Grace doesn’t even remember. He would be the traitor who tracked you to the border near the start of the war. The one that you buried in the hills near a ruined village with his father’s personal army?"

"Oh, that guy. I totally forgot his name. But honestly, that wasn’t all that bad. We shot most of them."

That was not true at all.

They had blown most of them up with mortars, doing the initial testing for their new weapon system. The battlefield had been quite a mess.

"Should we ask that the King arrange the shipment of the tax goods?

I believe that the Merchant’s Guild has been stressed lately, with too many routes and not enough willing merchant caravans. So, they may not be able to make the delivery in a timely manner," the assistant suggested, changing the topic.

"Yes, that would be perfect. Just keeping up with our shipments to Dagos has been a difficult time for them, but they’re doing their best not to have us build our own tractors and wagons to make the deliveries.

Their transport fee might not be particularly large for that shipment, but it moves a lot of convoys around the region and helps with placement if they can return them to Wistover when we are sending others to Albroles.

If we cut them out, it would only make the situation with the caravans worse, so I haven’t made any efforts in that direction.

After all, we need those caravans here."

The tax agents nodded. If anyone needed as many caravans as they could get, it was Wistover. Not because they were a particularly large city, but because their goods moved over such distances.

If they made reasonable items, they would only have to move them around to the Baronies nearby, and that could be done by local merchants.

But no. They had to make rare magitech everything, and then it was demanded all over the region, and in every allied nation.

As soon as the meal was done, the agents departed by portal, courtesy of Amie.

That would save them a long trip back to the capital, as well as getting the Royal transport corps to the Duchy faster, so they could collect all the produce before it started to go bad.

There would be a portal open in a few days, their regular rotation to Cygnia City, and the delivery could be made through those means. They would just need to send the trucks out to all the baronies with overflowing silos and storage barns, so they could collect it all to take back.

That wasn’t a hard task for the Kingdom. They did it every single year when they collected taxes and supplied the army.

With that settled, Dominic could finally get back to trying to sort out the distribution of their new projects. The biplanes could be picked up once the Barons and Knights were trained to fly them.

Or, they sent someone to be trained to fly them if they weren’t so inclined.

But the gull wing fighter for the Cygnian army was a more sensitive project. It was nearly ready for testing, but they couldn’t just fly it openly for everyone to see. They would have to fly low away from the hangars, and then test it in a remote area, so that the full details didn’t leak to every other nation before they even had it delivered.

There were too many visitors from too many nations to count themselves as truly safe from espionage.

If you could even call it that.

Seeing an experimental airplane flying wasn’t exactly the stuff of deeply embedded spies. But it was still incredibly valuable information to every other nation. Information that would definitely damage his proposal to the military advisors if someone else came out with a similar design.

They would want something that could deal with the foreign development as well, and that meant starting all over.

The best option that he could come up with was to fly it out at night, just before first light, and then return the plane in the evening. It would take some work to make it happen, but that would also be valuable research for the army.

They certainly weren’t going to want to use them only during the day, and that meant finding a way to make the landing areas distinctly visible from the sky, without making them too obvious from the ground.

The radios would help with that. They could mount lights and only turn them on when someone was coming in to land.

But that would still alert anyone who happened to be nearby.

It might be inevitable that the landing zones were common knowledge, though. Large flat areas would immediately become suspect the moment that anyone found out about the airplanes, the same way that randomly placed deep spots along a riverbank were often dug as hidden docks.

Once you knew what to look for, there was no missing them.

That could be someone else’s problem, though. The biplanes for the Wistover Duchy and its Barons would be able to land in a short pasture or down one of the many public roads.

In fact, the roads were a wonderful choice, as they were relatively smooth, and didn’t have soft spots or badger holes in them.

You just had to pick a spot that didn’t have trees alongside the road.