Lucas spent the next day doing what he could with the herbs he had while Adin went out and got him more inner rosewood bark and sagethorn root. While they did that, Kar’gandin and Hura’gh spent the day chatting up strangers at the inns along the main road looking for answers about their goblin dilemma. 

When the four of them were reunited at dinner time, Kar’gandin declared he’d found the source of their problem. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all he’d discovered. As soon as the dwarf sat down at the table in the barn that served as their dining room, he slapped a wanted poster down on the table. This one had one major difference over the last one, though: the only one on it was Lucas. 

Where as before there was a poster with all four of them on it, now it was just him, along with the promise of a sizable reward. It was a terrible likeness of course. Not only did it show him with the beard the mage had almost certainly seen, but he was described as far more menacing and muscular than he actually was. 

With all of those shortcomings, he wouldn’t have worried if it wasn’t for the money that was offered for his capture and questioning. 

“Fifty golden dragons shall be offered for the man if he be delivered alive to the castle. For further questioning,” Lucas read aloud before setting it back down. 

There was a lot more about his various misdeeds, including assaulting a mage and slaughtering dozens of innocent people along with guards over the course of his many escape attempts while he continued to poison the city, but he didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was the way the other three men at the table were looking at him. 

“So is that it,” he asked. “Are you losers going to turn me in for a lousy pile of dragons?”

“I wanted to,” the half-orc admitted, “but the dwarf talked me out of it.”

“Yer damn right, I did!” Kar’gandin said. “I might sell me own mother for such a sum, but the man that can make twenty or thirty dragons in a week with random ingredients he finds on the ground? He’s worth way more than that!”

“Thanks, I think,” Lucas answered with a grateful smile. He was pleased that at least one person knew there was more money to be made in feeding the golden goose instead of slaughtering it. “You let me know when it hits five hundred, and I’ll start to worry.”

“Boy, it would take a thousand for me to even consider such a thing,” the dwarf smiled. 

There was a little more joking, but after that, the four of them discussed the more serious matter of the missing goblins between bites of leak soup and loaves of freshly baked bread. Kar’gandin’s answer surprised him, even though it shouldn’t have. 

“You’re serious?” Lucas asked after the dwarf started laying out the big picture. “The Blind are hunting them?”

“Well, not directly,” Kar’gandin replied. “But through intermediaries, they’ve put out contracts, a king for a corpse, no questions asked. Apparently, adventurers from all over have been purging lairs. It’s practically a gold rush.”

“That’s fucking bullshit,” Lucas cursed. 

He’d already done the math in his head. Even if their jank-ass midnight potion or whatever it was they were calling it was selling for half what his blue was, they were still tripling their money because the fire salts they were using as a catalyst were far from expensive. 

“So, is there an alternate ingredient we can use?” Adin asked. The man was clearly fiending. It had been a few days since his last fix, and he was taking this news harder than anyone. “Maybe troll blood or orc…”

Adin trailed off when Hura’gh looked at him with fire in his red eyes. “Sorry,” the noble mumbled. 

“Well, the lad has a point,” the dwarf agreed, “If we could find an alternative, we might—”

“We can’t, not any time soon anyway,” Lucas said, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. “It’s complicated alright, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how simple the rest of this is all of a sudden.”

“Simple?” Hura’gh asked. “Simple, how? Do you know where to find goblins they don’t?”

“There’s always going to be more goblins, man, don't worry about that,” Lucas shot back. “But they don’t matter either. What matters is that the Blind bastards stole my recipe, and now we gotta fuck 'em up.”

“Fuck them up how?” Adin asked. “They’re way bigger than us. They got a claim on most of the best spots in the market district and dozens of men. Hundreds, maybe.”

“Yeah, but they also got someplace where people are turning in those corpses,” Lucas shot back, “and as vile as that work is, I doubt very much they’re bringing them into the city. So, it simplifies things. We find out where they’re carting off our goblins. We break in, steal whatever they got worth stealing, and then burn the place down as a warning to the rest of them.”

“That will start a gang war for certain, sure,” Kar’gandin said, though Lucas noted he didn’t seem particularly upset by it. “If we start killing people, then—”

“Whoah, who said anything about killing people?” Lucas asked. “I doubt they’re running a 24-hour operation. Who’s going to want to steal a bunch of dead goblins? Besides me, I mean.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to kill them?” Hura’gh asked. “Doesn’t that send a stronger message?”

Because I’ve never killed anyone before, for one, was what Lucas thought, but he didn’t say it. He couldn’t. That wasn’t a message he could share with these men. The city watch was making him out to be some kind of mastermind on a murder spree, and even if that wasn’t true, his growing gang certainly saw him that way. The Knights of Brass probably did, too. 

It wasn’t like he didn’t understand that people needed to die, he just wasn’t sure he had it in him. People had already died because of him. Guards, elves. Whether he swung the sword or not, dead was still dead. 

While he wrestled with these thoughts, he lied and said, “We attack while people are there, then we send a stronger message, but if someone escapes, then they know who did it. We strike in the dead of night then no one is there to see it, and we can make up whatever story we want and pit them against the gang of our choice.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Adin asked. “A nicely worded invitation. Dear Mister Blind, we stole your drugs, sincerely, the Butchers?”

“The Butchers are a great idea, actually,” Lucas said with a gleam in his eye. “Whose more likely to break up than an illegal drug ring based around butchering monsters than those meatheads?”

Lucas went over his plan after that: find out where the Blind were taking the corpses, ambush it in the middle of the night, find enough bile to keep cooking, and then sell any vials of midnight that the bastards might have already cooked up and find a way to sell it to their rivals cheap. 

It was a simple plan, and in his experience, those always worked best for him. That was doubly true when he was going to be working with mouth breathers like Hura’gh and Adin. There was just one problem. They didn’t have nearly enough people for something like this. 

They all knew it, even the noble. “What are the odds they don’t have even a small night shift or a few watchmen to keep the place safe until morning?” the noble asked. “If it’s as important to them as you say it is, then they’d be fools to leave it unguarded.”

“The man has a point,” Kar’gandin nodded. “Rare, true, but it has happened.”

Adin almost thanked the dwarf before he realized he was being insulted. “Hey!” the noble shouted, but everyone else just laughed at his expense. 

“Well, then we grow the gang,” Lucas said. “We could tap into our relationship with the Brass Knights, but it would be impossible to keep it a secret then.”

“What other choice do we have?” Adin asked. “I know Viscounts, Baronesses, and Earls, but not a single mercenary company looking for work, I’m afraid.”

“You know lots of people,” Lucas said. “Servants that might drive the wagon, those villagers you were going to hire to do construction on the cider house. Kar’gandin probably knows a couple of dwarves who are good with an axe, too. If he doesn’t, then I’m sure his cousin does. You guys are tight like that, right?”

“I know a few caravan guards, sure,” Kar’gandin said, cautiously, “But I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re getting at here.”

“What I’m saying is we gotta build our own muscle, our own network,” Lucas said. “Someday, we should handle everything up to and including distribution. That doesn’t happen until we have enough money to buy a few members of the watch, though.”

“But teamsters and brute labor… they aren’t killers, Lucas,” Adin said. “I could hire all of the strongest men in Meadowin. Most of them know how to use a sword or an axe, but they’re hunters and farmers, not murderers.”

Neither am I, Lucas thought, but that doesn’t mean we won’t all become one sooner or later. He didn’t say that, though. Instead, he just shrugged, and when that wasn’t a good enough answer, he said, “Have you seen the state of your village, man? Kids so skinny you can see their ribs through their shirts. If a man’s family is starving, and you’re offering to put food on their table, or they have a sick wife, and you can make the cure, you can own them pretty cheap.”

He paused as he listened to the words coming out of his mouth. It wasn’t something he planned in advance, but it was definitely on the right track, so he decided to double down. “Us four, we’re stuck together now, for better or worse, until we make enough money to go our separate ways, but we start inviting just anybody to come work for us, and sooner or later, one of the other big gangs is going to figure out who we are, where we cook, and how to put us out of business. We want to avoid that, well - we’ve got to be smart about it, you know?”

“Why worry about city dwellers at all?” Hura’gh asked. “We could simply pay tribute to a tribe from the great plains, and they—”

“And they would stick out like a sore thumb,” Lucas said, trying hard not to sigh. “We need people that can blend in. People with a particular set of skills if you will. If you got a buddy or two you trust to crush some skulls, then I’m all ears, but a tribe…maybe not right now.”

Hura’gh glowered at him, but since he didn’t actually growl, Lucas called it a win. 

“Ye know lad, I might have been wrong about ye,” the dwarf said, as he leaned back in his chair. 

“Oh yeah? How’s that?” Lucas asked.

“I thought ye were just a lunatic looking to make some quick coin, but yer really tryin’ to build something here, ain't ya?” The dwarf’s tone was approving, but even if it wasn’t Lucas would have grinned. 

“I’m just a guy trying to put together enough coins to open a bar and invent Mexican food,” Lucas said. “But we need to make a lot of money to get there, and I’m sure this is the way to do it.”

Even after dinner wound down, the four of them talked about his plan to find and take out whatever abattoir the Blind had set up. To him, it seemed more than doable. The bastards were most known for petty theft, pickpocketing, and begging rings. They were scammers, not fighters, so as soon as the four of them put out some feelers and found where they needed to hit, he was sure they would fold easily enough.