~Risch~

God did he hate this job. He hated being hated. And being hated by children whose only crime was having a pissing match with the overgrown toddler they called a prince was something he hated most of all. It broke his heart that someone the same age as his daughter, or would've been the same age as the daughter he wished he had, would have to put up with such harassment. And for him to be the one tasked with doing the harassment, it rankled him something fierce. Since when was the inquisition a bunch of lackeys tasked with intimidation and other such brutish behavior? No, that was why he hated this job, the real question was when were they not?

The problem with hating being hated and being part of the inquisition was that there were so few people who didn't hate the inquisition. First, the nobles hated the inquisition. It was the inquisition's job to sniff out the crimes of the nobles and they were all doing crimes, so they all hated him. Well, they hated the inquisition, but they hated him too. Second, the commoners hated the inquisition. It would've been nice if they were appreciative of all the ways in which they weren't getting fucked over because he was stopping the nobles from doing some of their crimes, but it was definitely hard to appreciate while getting fucked by the nobles anyway. The inquisition was meant to check the nobles, so the inquisitors all came from commoner backgrounds, but that just made it sting more when his old friends called him a traitor. That is, nine, maybe ten years ago they said that, but he didn't really want to go back and see if they had changed their minds.

Actually, the crown and the royal family didn't hate the inquisition. Rather, he hated them for all the shit they made him do instead of stopping the nobles from doing their crimes. That was just as good as them hating him though, because either way he'd have rather chopped off his own cock than been in a room with one of the too good bastards for more than a heartbeat. It wasn't like the thing was much use since everyone hated him. No wonder he didn't have a daughter to spoil with all the money that he got for working this god awful job.

Risch went back to staring at his empty desk in his empty office with its empty walls and the empty chair bolted down in the middle of it all. Some days the lack of anything at all made it easier to think, but some days, like this one, it just made him think when he didn't want to think about anything at all. One of the few nobles who wasn't actively searching out some way to make the lives of the people just that little bit more miserable probably hated him now. The thing about hate is that there are levels to it. People didn't start ignoring him more, that was a binary. But hate? There was the default hate that came with existence, but there was also hate that came from telling a man's daughter that she didn't really love her fiancé because he wasn't the prince. There were tactics to be hated less, he was familiar with those, but no amount of playing the jester made such colossally stupid orders get you hated any less.

He had been this close to putting Count Beyer behind bars for embezzlement, but with Duke Wellsworth no longer a reliable ally, it would be difficult to get much more than a fine out of the council. It wasn't even the embezzlement that was the problem; it was the way that he was buying out foodstuffs and then reselling them to folks at jacked up prices that needed him in a cell. The racket was entirely legal and almost entirely starving at least ten percent of the capital's population. It had taken him nearly a month of digging through accounts and audits before he found the problem, but it would've been enough to put a stop to things if only he wasn't made to piss off the chief councilor.

"Sir, are we going forward with it?"

Junior Inquisitor Ihre was in the habit of asking stupid questions. He had already told her that without Wellsworth, it was more likely that Beyer just raised prices even higher to try and recoup the fine. He had blood on his hands, no doubt about that, but he'd rather it not be his friends even if they had called him a traitor.

"No, hold onto it. Don't let it come out that we have anything at all. Keep digging and have a little patience."

"But sir, every day that we sit on this is another––"

"Another day of waiting. Because that's all you're going to do. Wait."

Risch got up and pushed the door to his office open. He had places to go, people to see, and waiting just didn't much appeal to him.

***

In a perversion of all that the inquisition was established for, it was common practice that when an inquisitor didn't have an active assignment or case, they would patrol the streets and make arrests for bad conduct. Put on some dirty workman's clothes and they could blend in with the common populace or so the logic went. The idea that Risch could pull some custom tailored brown robes with stains added on over his paunch and be mistaken for anything other than an inquisitor was ridiculous on its face. He preferred the reds of his uniform to blatantly lying. He also wasn't walking through the stink of poverty because he wanted to transfer them from their open air prison to an underground one. He just wanted a little reminder of why he signed up for this job in the first place.

The glassy eyed beggars held out their hands without knowing if anyone even noticed them. The gangs of children watched his paunch like they would a sack of coin. The crowds of men stumbled back home from long shifts at the forges with not much more to show for it than the stoops and limps of their grandfathers. A noble war fought on the backs of less fortunate men. Truly an honor to corrode the work of some nameless smith with the blood of a conscripted farmer. When he joined, he had told himself that he would find some way to help his people, but he was no closer to that now than he was when he first joined. Really, he had just signed up to escape that same fate.

Even with his detour, Risch was too soon at his destination, a monstrous building of garish fancies and the home of Prime Minister Finer. For once though, he wasn't here to meet with the Prime Minister. It was his daughter, Jezbeth, who had requested his presence this time. She hadn't elaborated much on what about, but if it was him that she called on and not one of the other members of the tribunal, then there was only one topic that made sense. What didn't make sense was the very idea of one of the old bloods coming around to the reforms that he had been pushing for literally decades.

The guards let him in, but as they did he was able to catch the stilted leftovers of commoner vernacular, a sign that unlike many of the guards that nobles employed, these were actually hired from the masses and not raised as pseudo-nobles. Risch wondered if he could even speak like he had when he was young anymore. It wasn't just fat that he had gained over all the years he spent rubbing elbows with upper society. He idly wondered what it would've been like if he had been raised among them, never knowing what went on beneath while absorbed by petty problems that would've seemed the world to him. It was a well trodden path, this one, and every time he arrived at its end, he came to hate himself a little bit more.

The inside of the place was layered with enough history that if anywhere was haunted, it would be here. Not a speck of dust blemished the mismatched array of pieces. One of the couches in the sitting room must've been at least a century old and yet the table at its foot was in the latest style. Nothing forgotten, only added to what was there before, stacked on the shoulders of the previous to get an ever more precarious balance of mismatched form.

"Every time I come here, there's something new and yet I can't seem to find a single thing removed," he said to no one in particular. His hostess then rounded the corner, as much a stickler for time as her father and sat down in one of the older looking chairs.

"Waste is the greatest enemy of longevity, why would we ever do away with what we already have?" said Jezbeth.

"Some of your peers must feel very differently if the success of our city's craftsmen is to be believed. Still, I'm sure that you wouldn't have chosen to request for me of all people if your purpose was discussing the intricacies of furniture. I am also not so sure that a queen candidate in a position such as yours would want to jeopardize the privileges afforded by having frivolous meetings with less popular members of the tribunal," he said.

"Unpopular? However could the only member in the tribunal's history to be appointed to the post by unanimous vote every be called such a thing?" she said, clearly ignoring the fact that the honor was only possible because of his unpopularity. Who would be a better compromise candidate than the one whose only agenda was universally derided?

"Please, I haven't been invited to a ball in almost eight months now. What am I if not unpopular?" he joked. At first it had been an effort to attend every event that he was invited to, but eventually people started getting tired of his actually accepting invitations only meant to be formalities and stopped sending them. It had been fun while it lasted though. Even with his salary he couldn't afford the sorts of foods that those parties served. It was also probably the reason he ended up overweight, but it wasn't like he had needed to do any enforcement himself since his first promotion to behind a desk.

"Being that as it may, I wonder if you would do me the favor of reminding me why you say you are so unpopular?" Jezbeth asked.

"I'll start with the greatest problem that plagues our kingdom then, we are one major famine away what I like to call an uncivil war." Risch watched his hostess for her reaction as he started into his well-rehearsed speech. If there was one benefit to being consistent, then it was that he didn't have to pay much attention to the speaking part. "A certain subset of the nobility at current is worried by the possibility that the succession this time around, like every time around, carries with it the risk of civil war. Some houses backing the crown prince, others backing the young second prince, even others who may have more personal aspirations. These nobles may field soldiers and march against each other, then surrender when it becomes obvious who has outmaneuvered who. The losers will then lose their titles, be exiled, maybe a couple of the most highly placed will even lose their heads, but all will go back to as it was."

"My house has watched this happen more times than any other, I'm more interested in the uncivil version," Jezbeth prompted.

"The reasons why nobles go to war are various and almost invariably stupid, as your house seems to be well aware. The question then, is for what reasons do the commoners go to war, or as the nobles like to put it, revolt? History shows us that there are basically only two reasons. Injustice and desperation. When a lord raises taxes so high that his subjects have no chance of paying without starving themselves, they turn to what may be the only chance that their families have to survive the winter, they get together with their neighbors and try to kill their lord. If the taxes are truly so high that none can stand them, then eventually the lord ends up dead. The people then either try to govern themselves or they petition the king for a new lord, but eventually a new lord is raised and the people get on with their lives.

This is of course a well known dilemma faced by lords who want to raise taxes but also like living. Over time, they've gotten better and better at balancing on the knife's edge to squeeze the most they possibly can out of every last man, woman, and child. Uncivil war is my term for the resulting revolt which will come when every commoner in the kingdom is pushed past the brink all at the same time. They will see no recourse in the law, what with that being its design, so they will replace their lords by force. No surrender will be accepted because the nobility has fully demonstrated its trustworthiness through its abuses, and we'll all be dead."

"And you propose that the law be revised so that it protects the commoners and gives them some breathing room. That is what you've been saying to every poor soul that will listen, right?" Jezbeth said.

Risch gave himself a mental pat on the back. Even if they all dismissed him, at least his ideas were getting widespread. For even the next generation to have heard of his conclusions, perhaps he was closer than he had thought.

"What's to stop future nobility from changing the laws again and bringing us right back to where we started then? Wouldn't it be better to have a more permanent solution?" the girl in front of him asked. He had met with the Wellsworth girl earlier that day, but they couldn't have been more different. She had been leaning over what had to have been an attendant, no noble daughter would have the hard callouses of labor. Her eyes had been red with crying and as much as tried to hide them, her voice had betrayed the feeling underneath.

"Wouldn't it be better if they ruled themselves?"

There was something behind the veil of youth and beauty that had watched dynasties rise and fall. Ingrained somewhere deep in the mortal coil where it resided. It didn't care for any of the people it talked about helping, maybe it never had.

There were some half dozen families that were known as the old bloods. In general, they prided themselves on their history and held newly raised nobility in contempt. They tended to be arrogant and concerned only with their own wellbeing. Among them, House Finer was thought to be the oldest, but since their claims couldn't be checked against other sources, it was unknown how far back in time they reached. Well-liked because of their reputation for moderation and fairness, they often held positions of great power. In modern history, the rise of Mellok Wellsworth had been the first time in ninety years that the council was headed by someone not directly related to the house.

Historians had long debated the reasons why the house had been able to survive for so long. Risch had hated every moment of his studies of noble lineages, but now he would've been happy to sit down with those historians and contribute to their debate.

"Wouldn't that last longer?"

It would continue on because that was all that mattered to it. The unfeeling bleakness of utility stretched out to the end of time stared back at him. There was no pride there. He had fed it with a new idea and it didn't matter that it came from a jumped up commoner. It wanted to cleanse the system of its volatility, and it would damn them to a bloody revolution if that was what it would take.

"Isn't that what you want?"

***

Risch was shown the door by a very polite butler. It was all so utterly implausible. No one would step in to stop Jezbeth from inciting mass insurrection. No one would even consider the idea that one of the most powerful houses in the entire kingdom would want to see it all burn. The nobility wouldn't stand for it if he tried to use the inquisition to stop her. All that was left was to push his reforms through before it was too late. It was just that little bit easier to motivate himself now that it was his own skin on the line. And he fucking hated himself for it.

MrAntonym

Here's hoping that I did the villainess justice. Also, Risch will probably be the last POV character, so the number of new names should slow down by quite a bit.