The ego-fueled psychosocioeconomic confrontation between Archmund Granavale and Xander Cooper (di Granavale, reflective of his hometown) was, of course, highly atypical for how festival preparations usually went.

  Here is how a typical preparation usually went:

  Archmund walked up to the baker’s stall. The bakers, a kindly couple who went only by Ma and Pa, smiled at him. Their son, a gangly fellow named Al (named, of course, for Alexander Omnio I), also smiled at him with a mouth missing two teeth, and smiled even bigger at Mary. The smell of warm bread wafted from their stall, as they were continually baking.

  Raehel had been politely asked to stay some distance away.

  Archmund asked typical questions of their inventory and capacity:

  “Do you have enough supplies?”: Yes.

  “Do you have enough hands to bake enough for the festival?”: They had been able to cajole Al into helping instead of practicing his swordsmanship with his friends, but other hands were unusually expensive this year.

  “Will you be able to provide everyone with a loaf for free?”: They were on track to have enough bread, with a 10% allowance for the unusually hungry. Funded, as usual, by the usual noble charity.

  “Will the agreed-upon payment cover the costs?”: Almost, but this year their labor costs had been higher than expected by about 15%.

  Mary had jotted down all of these figures. Archmund was concerned, to put it lightly, but he agreed that House Granavale would cover their extra labor costs in the name of keeping the Festival grand.

  Fundamentally, although he’d been entrenched in the study of the movement of money, he was not well-read in economics. He didn’t have a great frame of reference for how all this would go.

  But a 15% increase in labor costs in the course of a season was unheard of. The demand of bread was the same as it was last year — Imperial demographers had assessed that the level of population had remained roughly constant from year to year — so that meant there was a constraint on supply.

  And that constraint?

  The Dungeon.

  He knew the Church and the town leadership had arranged for a rotating guard of the Dungeon, partially appropriating the existing militia and levies, but they’d had a fair bit of new signups. Was that adequate to explain all 15%?

  Or was the Dungeon itself changing the hopes and dreams of the population?

  He would have to go there later to check.

  The story was the same among all the craftsmen.

  The basketweaver had paid twice as much for an extra pair of hands to thresh grasses for baskets.

  The glassblower had paid 20% more for someone willing to keep the fire stoked.

  The farmers, shockingly, hadn’t paid all that much, but they’d had to hire some extra migrant workers since some of their usual aides were drawn to the Dungeon. They’d had some minor harvest losses due to the disruptions from the Dungeon Storm, so their taxes paid would be about 10% less.

  All small things. But together, they compounded into a very concerning picture.

  “What do you think?” he asked Mary. They’d snuck back into their carriage for privacy, though they left a window open to stop it from being too stuffy in the afternoon sun. Raehel had graciously agreed to stand guard, though doubtless she was eavesdropping.

  “I think you’re ignoring how much in taxes you collect from the Dungeon.”

  It was true. They levied a hefty 20% tax on any Gems harvested by adventurers, which was actually very generous compared to the Great Dungeons. The spoils of the Omnio Dungeon belonged fully to House Omnio, those of the Arcane Dungeon were reserved for the Imperial University and their research, and the Holy Dungeon belonged to the Church, and its relics were sacred. Only the Wild Dungeon, far on the Frontier, was totally free to loot — but even reaching it was an ordeal in itself, and it was deadly.

  In practical terms, since adventurers had no need for most unshaped Gems, they gladly gave any Gems they had in exchange for keeping their Gemgear. One unshaped Gem could easily cover the 20% tax on ten pieces of Gear — but most adventurers rarely harvested any, so they racked up an unpayable debt. Those who got nothing skipped town, going to some other opening Dungeon (there always seemed to be one every summer, opening in a different far-flung part of the Empire), hoping to get lucky, and since the local authorities rarely could enforce their will into other lands, their taxes would go forever unpaid.

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  But those that did succeed more than covered those that didn’t.

  Frankly, this was why Archmund had insisted on doing the first delve himself.

  “So you’re saying,” Archmund said, forcing his thoughts back to Mary, “We’re still in the net positive. Even if we cover all the increases.”

  But that would mean giving everyone free money. Which was fine, if it was just for one year, or two. But across the ten or so years of a Dungeon’s typical lifespan, an annual 10% increase in the money given out would compound to a total of a 150% increase. And once the easy money of the Dungeon ran out, those expectations would remain, the wealth to fund them would not, and Granavale County would lose its luster and collapse back to what it had originally been.

  This must have been how Jerome Powell, the leader of the Federal Reserve, which managed the currency of the United States of America had felt, when he was raising interest rates to try and tame inflation. He had to stop money from becoming totally devalued nationwide for… reasons, which Archmund didn’t think were fully applicable. This was clearly just like that.

  He gave Mary a quick summary of the issue of compounding. She seemed skeptical of it — she argued that expecting a permanent, yearly 10% growth rate in expenses was unrealistic, that surely people’s requirements would peter out at around a flat 50% increase from the current amount, but he pointed out that was still pretty bad so she accepted his premises.

  “What do you think we should do?” Archmund said.

  “If it’s the cost of goods and labor,” Mary said, “House Granavale could provide them directly?”

  Archmund shook his head. Price fixing and price controls had issues. He didn’t understand them fully, but he knew there were reasons to be wary. It was easy to think of them as a preferable band-aid to raw, unfettered capitalism, but he didn’t want to unleash a tool that could so obviously come back to bite him later.

  Well, moreso than he already had. He still felt more than a twinge of guilt about the whole situation with Mary being permanently stuck with him.

  “What about the labor?” Mary asked.

  “What do you mean?” Archmund asked. Surely she wasn’t suggesting that they send the household staff out to work the fields. They had maybe three gardeners for the whole of Granavale Manor, and they were more concerned with lawncare and pruning and flowerbed arrangement, not the harvest.

  “Slaves,” Mary said.

  “Absolutely not,” Archmund replied instantly.

  “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

  Yes, this world had slavery. His old one had too, but in more subtle and insidious ways. But this world straight-up followed the imperial Roman model of slavery, complete with philosophers moralizing about how the master-slave bond was actually good for society and uplifting to the soul, educated slaves serving as tutors, expeditions into the Frontier to “civilize” unprepared villages, and a lot of expended human lives in dangerous heavy industry.

  The existence of slaves meant that those who traded their lives to the service of noble houses for Gemgear weren’t at the bottom of the social pecking order. And they had the social mobility to escape as well, something far less possible for slaves.

  Either way, he didn’t want to participate in it. It really seemed like the sort of thing that could actually damn your soul to the objectively real hell. Also, he knew from his world’s history that actually it could be quite a bit more expensive than hiring workers at sub-market rates while requiring them to handle their room and board themselves. Which was better morally, in theory at least, despite the obvious continuing exploitation.

  Mary smiled. “I don’t care what Xander says, you’re definitely not one of the wicked nobles.”

  “Surely you didn’t suggest something you already knew I’d never agree to.”

  Maybe she’d done it to see if he was turning into a bad person. Their class system was complex and, as far as he could tell, imposed and surmountable. That made all nobles a little wicked for reaping its rewards while never questioning it, surely.

  “I do have another suggestion.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’ve heard in other lands, the local lords have stricter controls on migrants,” Mary said delicately, her eyes flitting back and forth. Her aunt and uncle had been wandering merchants, after all. Did that make her a class traitor?

  “You could… hire them directly, and tell them who to help,” Mary said. “You get control over how much they get paid. You can take it out of your goods subsidy to the craftsmen.”

  Archmund frowned. The idea appealed to him.

  “But why would they agree to it? To take less money from me when they could negotiate with the craftsmen directly?”

  “Because you can force them,” Mary said. Which was true.

  “That won’t work in the long run.”

  “Then…” Mary said. She took a deep breath.

  And Mary explained how the lives of wandering merchants, and presumably other migrants, worked.

  It was possible to bring one’s home on one’s back — a tent and a camp — but it was far more preferable to find an inn or some other place to lodge. That took money — not much for a single night, but it added up. And either option was lacking in security. Inns relied on the trust of strangers (though some measure of the ancient Greek idea of Sacred Hospitality had filtered into this world, probably from Alexander Omnio I), while camping exposed you to all the normal dangers of the lawless lands outside of towns — the bandits and beasts and escaped Monsters that somehow managed to escape eradication.

  But none of that compared to a true sense of safety and security.

  And Archmund realized what she was saying.

  Sure, slavery was morally abhorrent. And yes, cheating people out of their wages was wrong.

  But people would gladly take a lesser wage if they got the sense of safety and security that came with a short-term rental.

  Besides, it wasn’t like it would be that much more evil for him to become a landlord. He was already a hereditary noble with a natural claim to all of the land within Granavale County, so he was already “evil” in the sense of taking advantage of his position as hereditary nobility. He would just be putting it to different use.

  But there was one glaring issue, a factor that had distorted the labor market, the very value of a hard day’s work:

  It was time to return to Granavale Dungeon.