Chapter 105

For several days after that, Eugène could not see Ebroin V.

Not once did the Emperor accept Eugène’s repeated requests for an audience. The emergency summonses that used to arrive at odd hours had ceased entirely, and the piles of administrative work that were so often dumped on Eugène at the Emperor’s whim no longer came his way at all.

He was so thoroughly ignored that even invitations to dinner or post-meal performances failed to arrive. For any other concubine, such treatment would have signaled a complete fall from favor.

One day passed. Then two. Then three. As time went on, the number of eyes watching him began to increase, eyes gauging his reaction. The winds of courtly favor were fickle things. None had made a move just yet, but in their glances, Eugène could already read a gloomy anticipation of his downfall.

However, he paid no heed to the looks cast his way by those with nothing better to do. More precisely, he had no energy to spare for such useless matters. Ever since he learned that he could not leave the palace and that the Emperor had cut off every possible path of persuasion, Eugène had shut himself away in the Imperial Library, refusing to set foot outside.

Stubborn though the Emperor may be, Eugène was no less tenacious. That the Emperor had issued an order of confinement simply from the assumption that Eugène would ignore his advice meant he had not misjudged Eugène’s character at all.

Within the bounds of what was possible, Eugène continued his investigation. If a lack of evidence was the issue, then he would simply have to find it. He had known little to begin with, so his progress was frustratingly slow, but he possessed exceptional patience. Like a tailor searching for a lost needle in a haystack, he pursued the scattered fragments of information

The Night of the Fallen Chandelier…

Of all the leads, the one Eugène was focusing on most was the events of that night. It had started as a simple attempt to make sense of some troubling details, but the deeper he dug, the more intriguing facts began to emerge.

Wary that someone else might share the Emperor’s sharp eye, Eugène deliberately pulled down not only the books he needed, but also completely useless ones, piling them around himself in great towers while he sat brooding over the newly discovered facts.

The Night of the Fallen Chandelier refers to the day when the Eastern nobles decided to retreat en masse after learning of the massive invasion of Shaak’s army during the Second Landrienne Campaign. It earned that romantic nickname because they had been attending a party when the news arrived. But in reality, it was nothing more than a disgraceful incident in which those who had been the owners of their lands for hundreds of years abandoned their duties as nobles and fled in order to save their own lives.

However, when one examines the history more closely, it becomes difficult to wholly condemn the historians who were moved by the dramatic poignancy of the event. The collapse of the East bore a tragic grandeur, like a camellia blossom falling whole from its stem just as it reaches full bloom.

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But misfortune does not strike all equally. As the drought dragged on, grain prices in the empire skyrocketed tenfold or more, and not everyone suffered because of it. Those who gained the most were the noble houses of the East. Already dominant in the marketplace, they seized the opportunity to disregard the unwritten rule that nobles must not engage in commerce, using proxy merchants to hoard and manipulate grain stocks on a massive scale.

The Eastern nobles had lost the goodwill of the people and their honor, but in exchange, they amassed immense wealth. The eastern territories, known as fertile breadlands even in ordinary times, had long been synonymous with abundance, but from this point on, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they had no peer.

According to some records, their splendor at the time was said to rival, even surpass, the opulence of the Imbert Palace itself. The most representative example of this was the birthday banquet of the Duke of D’Estuaire, an event that still lingers in legend.

Yes, the very same banquet that became the stage for the ‘Night of the Fallen Chandelier.’ That infamous evening had been the Duke of D’Estuaire’s birthday celebration. The feast reportedly lasted for an entire month and was so grand and lavish that it defied belief for a mere nobleman’s private affair.

To celebrate the occasion, they hosted not only horse races and falconry competitions but even a full-blown jousting tournament, one that cost a staggering amount of money. In the gardens, fountains flowed ceaselessly with wine and chocolate, freely offered to all.

In the open-air theatre set up outside the estate, comedic operettas and ballet performances alternated each night, illuminated by thousands of candles made from musk-infused sperm whale oil. Not a single candle was spared for extravagance.

A certain noblewoman left the following description of the scene.

‘The thousands of candles that lit up the garden like stars in the night sky gave off a fragrance too lovely for words. So pure and delicate was the scent that even after returning home, I found it had clung to every fold of my sleeves. I wish I could send you this enchanting aroma, too. I have never seen a whale, but to think that such a fragrant oil resides in their heads, surely they must be divine creatures.’

Eugène, however, upon reading that passage, could not help but idly calculate how many sperm whales had been sacrificed just to make the candles for that month-long feast. He was no professional whaler, so he could not arrive at an exact figure, but even a rough estimate made it clear it was no small number. At the very least, it had to be in the double digits.

The extravagance of the banquet did not end there. Every meal was served as part of a grand thematic performance, and at the end of each banquet, guests were gifted the exquisite silverware used during the feast. There are even records stating that the estate distributed silver coins, not copper, to the common folk as charity. It is no exaggeration to say that not even the Emperor’s birthday celebrations could rival it.

The fact that the Duke of D’Estuaire’s household had been able to host such extravagant banquets year after year spoke volumes about the sheer extent of their power and resources at the time.

However, the manner in which they had accumulated their wealth inevitably bred enemies. The people of the empire were deeply outraged by those who had reaped obscene profits at the expense of others’ lives, but no one expressed greater hostility and animosity toward them than Emperor Armand III, the monarch at the time.

He loathed them so thoroughly that, on official occasions, he openly denounced them as “rats feasting on the corpses of the dead.” Because of that, he introduced a number of direct regulatory measures aimed squarely at the Eastern nobility, most notably, a luxury tax implemented by imperial decree, derisively nicknamed the ‘Bern River Levy.’

This is where it gets interesting.

Eugène mulled over the special tax initiated by the Imperial House to raise relief funds for the famine-stricken southern provinces. In truth, the motivation behind the tax was not particularly unusual. It was one of those emergency levies typically imposed during times of war or famine, enacted as an imperial ordinance under supplementary provisions. Its official name, in fact, was the rather unremarkable ‘Special Luxury Tax.’

What made the law notable was the manner in which it was enforced: it functioned as a toll for ships traveling along the empire’s rivers. But rather than calculating the tax based on the deck’s length, as was customary, the levy was assessed according to the type of goods being transported, with a progressive tax rate that implicitly narrowed the burden to a specific class.

The law stipulated that staple goods like wheat, herring, and vegetables were exempt from taxation. In contrast, luxury items such as silk, gemstones, porcelain, tea, and coffee were subject to rigorous tariffs, and progressive tax rates were mercilessly imposed if a shipment exceeded a certain value.

Due to the very nature of the law, the tax primarily targeted the wealthy, namely, affluent merchants and the nobility. However, nobles from other regions found ways to exploit loopholes and evade the tax. Since one could avoid the levy simply by crossing via bridges rather than by boat, circumventing the river tolls was, in most cases, a simple matter of logistics.

However, the Bern River was a different case entirely. Its breadth and depth made it geographically impossible to build bridges across it, unlike the other rivers in the empire. In practical terms, the eastern banks of the Bern River were the only imperial territories not connected to the rest of the empire by land routes. And none knew this better than Emperor Armand III himself.

Since the unification of the empire, the Emperor has held dominion over not only the Neutel and Salpine Rivers but also all river basins represented by them. The right to levy tolls on river traffic is traditionally the prerogative of the Emperor. The nobles likely could not voice their opposition outright due to the optics, but it was only natural that relations would sour.

Nowhere in the world do people welcome taxes. This was especially true for the privileged classes, such as the nobility. It did not take much for Eugène to reason that tensions between the Emperor and the Eastern nobility must have escalated sharply as a result. The logic was simple enough. From the Emperor’s point of view, a rapidly growing faction of powerful provincial lords would have seemed threatening. Meanwhile, the Eastern nobility would have found the central authority’s overt interference increasingly intolerable.

It was precisely here that Eugène’s real suspicions began to take shape. By this stage in his investigation, he had started to dig deeper, hoping to understand the concrete political dynamics behind the friction between Armand III and the Eastern nobility. However, no matter how thoroughly he searched, he could find nothing. It was odd. A conspicuous gap existed, one so glaring that it could not be dismissed once noticed.

There was a mountain of material documenting how wealthy the Eastern nobles had been and the envy and resentment their extravagance provoked across the empire. Countless records detailed the fashions and lavish lifestyles of the time. In some cases, even the guest lists of famous banquets were still preserved in astonishing detail.

But that was all. No matter how deeply he dug, there was not a single surviving document that described the Eastern nobles’ political standing at the time.

A few texts did note that Armand III had despised them intensely, but not a single one explained what actions he had taken in response, or what political ramifications followed.

Had he not noticed, it might have passed without incident. But once he had seen it, the absence was impossible to ignore. It was too deliberate. There is a saying: silencing the public is harder than stopping the flow of a river. This means that no power can entirely erase the traces of what has been done. And yet… here it was. As if the Emperor had passed on his habit, Eugène, lost in thought, drummed his fingers against the table. His gaze settled on a few book titles arranged before him.

There were a few notable commonalities among those books. First, they each contained at least some meaningful information related to the part of the matter Eugène had been investigating. Second, they all belonged to the list of forbidden books recently unbanned by Emperor Ebroin V.

“Forbidden books…”

Eugène unconsciously murmured the words aloud, then bit his lip in frustration. In the end, it was this that had tripped him up. Within the confines of the palace, there was simply no way to obtain a proscribed text unless it had already been cleared for circulation. This was the very heart of legitimate power, Imbert Palace, where even the walls had ears. The idea of smuggling in a forbidden book was laughable.

Mere possession could lead to denunciation, and in tense times like these, one might be summoned before the High Court and subjected to the humiliation of watching an executioner burn the book in front of them.