He's in Love with the Devil.

Chapter 30: Hell at Your Service

"The black star is already in the house of the Lord, joined to the power and majesty of the dim star, and the scythe of death is coming down in a horizontal figure, and if they are united, the fishes of death will overwhelm the continent on which they shine."[1] The devil pronounced these cryptic and strange words.

It reminded the king of the young man he had met during the negotiations at the Moon River Fortress.

According to the Oath Knight Leader, that was an astrologer.

"Yes, Your Majesty." The devil speculated on the king's thoughts, "This is indeed the prophecy of that group of astrologers. It foretells an impending disaster ...... You know what it is."

"It comes in four months, I believe."

The king pondered for a moment and spoke his judgment in a declarative tone.

The devil wanted heartily to applaud the king; see how keen his sense of all intrigues was.

But it wasn't really hard for the king to judge.

For in the original fate line, Poulain was hanged before the Tower of Mourne in the fourth month after the assassination, whereas the original sentence was only exile. While it's true that Pourland was a tyrant, Archduke Grice's penchant for image management would suggest that he would have preferred to show his magnanimity by keeping the former king in close confinement.

The sentence of exile at the outset confirms this.

A former tyrant with no power alive can still make quite a bit of political sense to a new ruler. He can elevate his position in people's minds by constantly comparing himself to the former tyrant. When the purpose is served, the former tyrant can retire without a word.

One month was not enough time for Archduke Grice to build up his image.

But what if there's a terrible plague that people can't do anything about?

What better target for this crime than a violent ex-king?

"Did the astrologers, besides you, predict the Black Death?" The king caught on, "Who do the astrologers work for?"

"Yes, Your Majesty." The devil duly took credit for himself, "Do you remember that lame Mr. Astrologer? He once tried to spy on your destiny and then also intended to inform his mentor, as your loyal knight I have helped you with this little problem - otherwise by this time dozens of adjudicatory monks would have arrived like flies smelling blood."

"They serve the Holy Court."

The king made his judgment.

He pondered for a moment.

Generally, astrologers should belong to the heretics and be at odds with the Holy Court. And as far as he could remember, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Holy Court had once embarked on a vigorous campaign of persecution against astrologers - on a scale that almost rivaled the witch hunts. But in the middle of the fourteenth century, the campaign subsided.

From the devil's words, it seems that it was the majority of astrologers who ultimately chose to serve the Holy Court in order to survive.

That's not really good news.

If that new pope across the Abyssal Strait wasn't brainless, he would have seized this opportunity to raise the status of the divine right. In a large-scale plague like the Black Death, which people were almost powerless to fight against at this point in time, the easiest thing to breed was nothing more than religious beliefs as well as relocation of sins claims of all shapes and sizes.

The most recent outbreak of the Black Death in Rogaland was in the fourth century.

Prior to that time the Rosicrucians ruled even more strongly than they do now, and the Western Continent became the region with the dimmest divine light. But that Black Death changed the political landscape, nearly one in nine people died in the plague, and the Crown was powerless to stop it powerless to change it. The Holy Court was taking advantage of this moment to make a big deal out of it, and it was because the Rose family did not fear the Holy Lord that the Holy Lord descended on them.

"God is a righteous judge and a God who is angry with the wicked every day. If anyone does not turn back, his sword will be sharpened and his bow will be strung and made ready. God also hath prepared instruments to kill; and what God shooteth is a rocket." [2]

The king slowly recited these words that the Rosebud family must have remembered.

The Black Death is the judgment of God, and all sin stems from the contempt of the Rosicrucians for the Holy Lord.

As the deaths spread, the accusation became a riot known as the "Return of the Holy Spirit Movement". At the instigation of the Holy Office, people began to build churches of their own accord. Eventually, the Kingdom of God on the other side of the Abyssal Channel expanded to Rogaland.

From then on, the king of the Rosebud family had to be crowned by the Holy Court.

Nearly a thousand years of enmity resulted from this.

The king sneered.

No wonder the Pope had changed his attitude this time and suddenly sent someone to intervene in the battle for the throne of Rogaland. It turns out that they had already budgeted for this disaster.

They seem to be planning to use this opportunity to play the clichés of the fourth century one more time on the great land of Rogaland. Archduke Grice was just a puppet of theirs.

But damn, this Black Death is very deadly.

With less than four months left before the outbreak of the Black Death, the king didn't think that those four months of preparation would be able to defuse a disaster that was considered insurmountable in times like these.

"Hell be glad to take care of that for you, Your Majesty."

The devil bowed demurely toward the king.

"However, that depends on whether or not Your Majesty dares to dance with Hell."

The king scrutinized the devil who seemed to have a permanent smile on his face.

"And the terms?"

"There are no conditions. Do you need any conditions to serve your sovereign?"

"I don't intend to follow you to hell right now." The king rebuffed.

"You misunderstand me." The devil said, but his tone was clearly a bit of regret, "Then ...... well, a small condition, which is not difficult for you to do."

The king waited for the devil's words.

"Mind a number of knights from hell? My dear sire."

..................

The Devil has an explicit one, he becomes one of the King's sworn knights.

However, the devil seemed to have other things to do as well, and after he received this promise from the king, he left in a hurry once again.

After the Devil left, the former Knight Commander of the Templars quietly walked in.

"Your Majesty, this devil of yours is very dangerous. I don't know why he is so humble to you, but his aura brings me back to the past. At that time, I was still on an eastward expedition with the Temple. The group on that eastern expedition came across a monument, and I felt a similar aura in the monument."

The former Knight Commander of the Templars had a rare serious face.

"What was the situation like at that time?"

"Disaster. Your Majesty."

The former Knight Commander of the Templars replied, his tone tinged with pain that was hard to hide.

"A mortal disaster."

..................

The devil excused himself.

The king, not intending to pin all his hopes on a dangerous devil of unknown origin and purpose, proceeded to make his own preparations.

In the past two days, the king's finance minister had compiled the royal financial files that the king had asked for. It was so thick and cumbersome that not even the Treasury's full-time staff would have been happy to go through them.

The king frowned and endured the poor record-keeping and the troublesome monetary units to read through the parts he was most concerned about, and then realized one thing deeply- the

The royal family could be called poor.

The King himself had an annual income of roughly twenty-seven thousand pounds, which, on the face of it, was an absolute fortune. For in today's Rogaland, a man is considered wealthy if he earns enough for twenty pounds a year, and even earls rarely earn more than five thousand pounds a year. [3]

But these revenues of the king were to be used to maintain the expenses of the entire royal family as well as the running of the entire king.

This is the norm for the royal family in most countries today.

They are always in a situation where they can't make ends meet.

The building of castles for military purposes is also part of the king's financial outlay. Construction of the royal castles in Newcastle in the north and Nordover in the west began at the end of last year; castles take a long time to build, but a conservative estimate is that the entirety of a single castle in Newcastle alone has cost twenty-seven thousand pounds to build. [4]

The Duke of Buckingham is now justifiably claiming to be family-less.

Anyone who maintained such an enormous expenditure would have ended up in poverty.

The king finished reading the file just as the nobles of the new king's party were carefully submitting the first ransom - the value they placed on their own heads had led them to write the amount that they were doing their best to come up with, and thus had to submit it in installments.

At this juncture, the king looked at the sum of money that had been put together and pondered whether it would be better to just get rid of everyone.

The money and property of the collar are all confiscated at once, saving effort.

The nobles who paid the money don't know why they always feel their necks are cold.

The amount of ransom is mostly a few thousand pounds, and a single sum adds up to a sizable total. Waiting for the nobles to pay the first ransom, plus the inheritance tax levied before, the king almost enough money to redeem the Duke of Buckingham's son, General John.

And by this time there was news of the missing negotiating mission.

"Shall we talk as we walk? You have been in your room long enough, Your Grace." The Duke of Buckingham had his outer robe on his arm as he took in how many files the King had read in the meantime, "Perhaps you would like to take a walk with me?"

"Of course, I would be delighted."

The King looked at the Duke of Buckingham with some surprise and put down his quill.

It was now October, and snow was beginning to cover the ground thickly. The King and the Duke of Buckingham walked down a long corridor and saw the castle's woods beginning to drape themselves in crystalline ice, magnificent and dreamy in the sunlight.

"Stuck in Tru Castle."

The king listened to the Duke of Buckingham's story and pondered.

"Baron Sheen? He does have some guts, and he's not too stupid."

While speaking, the two had already crossed half of the palace, the Duke of Buckingham stopped and looked out from the cloister, he looked at the stone pavilion to the left of the tower not far in front of him and lamented, "There used to be no pavilion over there, that was built by your father later."

The king also looked toward the stone pavilion coiled with rose vines.

One could imagine what a beautiful landscape it would be decorated with countless intense red roses when it was in bloom.

"Go over and take a look?"

The king agreed.

They walked through the cold wind and into the snow. The black tower stood not far away, and the snow fell on it and quickly slid off again.

The black tower was silent.

It was as if it was watching all of this as well.

Author's Notes:

[1] Originally created as "If Anyone Knows" by the Prague court poet Heinrich von Mugn circa 1349-1355, with slight modifications to the original poem to fit the world context.

This is one of the many "literary antidotes" produced during the "second pandemic" of the Black Death.

[2] Quoted in Psalm 7:11-13.

[3] The data refer to the current state of Edward I's monetary economy.

[4] actually spent on the construction of Carnarvon Castle