The Cog Declares (7)
Thud.
"Ugh. Filthy."
Pat. Pat.
King Edmund dropped straight to the floor, and the sight of him was pitiful beyond words.
Squish...
His trousers had grown considerably heavier.
There was nothing strange about it.
So he learned how to work a sphincter.
Ihan had arranged things so that it would happen, and the result was only natural. It felt, all at once, like a thoroughly productive day's experiment. He had no guilt over it. Only this.
"I've finished what I came to do. Handle the rest yourselves."
He had caught a single tick, and the feeling was refreshing, nothing more.
"Hah. You finished it far too filthily. Unclean."
"You ought to be grateful it stopped at unclean. I nearly turned him into a proper piece of gore, and I only just managed to hold back."
"...Huu."
Ihan said it bluntly. The woman let out a sigh.
The king had been reduced to that, and still the crown princess who had worn a blank face through every moment of it—Isis—finally rose.
Whoom.
The air changed the instant she stood. Edmund lay collapsed at her side, ugly past the point of filth, while she kept every inch of her noble bearing, and the contrast only made the difference starker. The moment every gaze in the hall gathered on Isis, she spoke.
"You will all have heard already. Of the crimes committed by my royal father, Edmund Julian de Pendragon, the present sovereign of Pendragon."
The voice was neither high nor low, only clear, and by some mystery it rang through the whole of the banquet hall.
"It is cruel, and it is wretched, but... yes. It is true. Every word of it is the truth."
Crash!
A glass already cracked by Ihan's Lion's Roar chose that instant to shatter, as neatly as a flourish underscoring the climax of a play. The difference between King Edmund and the woman before them was this: Edmund had staged every last detail with his own hands, while she had brought the moment into being without ever meaning to. Naturally.
"Decades ago, the Military God himself put down the temple's heretics, the faction known as the Blood Cross Army. The king gave that faction his direct patronage and laid the kindling that brought them back to life. By that patronage the subversive power grew, until at last it became a force great enough to burn the kingdom—no, the whole of the South."
She had acknowledged Edmund's crimes, and the shock that struck the nobles was of an entirely different order. It was not some other witness. It was Isis, the king's own heir, testifying with her own mouth. There was no taking it back now. This was a catastrophe large enough to shake the whole of the royal house.
"Nor can it be denied that the king may have maintained his ties with them down to this very day. Which is to say that it also cannot be denied he may have had a hand in every incident of the past year, and in everything that has happened since."
Here and there, people clutched their heads and staggered. The blow had gone past shock; some of them looked ready to faint where they stood.
Please. Please, stop!
You can't!
Deny it, Your Highness! Why in the world are you admitting it?!
The nobles were screaming inside their own skulls. Yes, a crime once committed could not be denied. But to affirm it so flatly, so absolutely, was the worst thing she could have done. This was a declaration that could collapse the crown's credit, collapse the royal house itself. The cracks in that house were already racing wider, and the words she had just spoken were the signal flare of a disaster large enough to rock the kingdom. A dread settled over the nobles. A situation that had already been hideous looked ready to plunge into something still more extreme.
Isis paid none of their terror any mind. She only delivered the notice, as if it were nothing at all.
Crrrack...!
A splitting sound reached their ears. The royal palace—no. It was the sound of the kingdom itself beginning to crack.
"Are we really allowed to do it like this?"
"It will do."
"...Well, I'm fine with it. But if it goes this way, Sister, you won't get to play king either."
"I do not care. So long as my royal father—so long as Edmund—stands in my path, this kingdom can never be mine. No. Even if Edmund were to vanish, I have no need of Pendragon as it stands."
"?"
"Do you know? If a thing can never be wholly mine, and if it has already rotted through..."
Crunch!
"Then one simply smashes it all, and that is the end of it."
"......"
"It is always easier to make something new than to repair what is already broken."
"...Sister, I don't know if I should say this, but honestly..."
"You may."
"You've really lost it, haven't you?"
"...Impudent boy."
Thwack!
"...Hm."
Ihan found himself rubbing a forehead that did not even hurt.
Didn't that sting her wrist?
The thought was an idle one, and with it he remembered what it had been like to walk into this farce of a banquet in the first place. There was an old saying about burning the whole thatched house down to catch a single tick. This was that, exactly. But what else was there to do?
There are too many ticks.
So many, and already spread so far, that the house was past any hope of saving.
"Well. I've done my part. That's the end of it."
He rolled a shoulder. He had played his role, and he had finished the work cleanly. So—
He held his arms out.
"Take me in."
"......"
"The charge is what it is. Assault on the king. Cuffs, rope, whatever you've got. Bind me and haul me off."
"...Do you imagine cuffs or rope would even work on you?"
"Then go fetch a chain forged of ten-thousand-year cold iron."
"And what is that supposed to be?"
"Right. You haven't got one. Hurry up and do your jobs. You're soldiers, aren't you? Then carry out the mission."
"...You are a soldier yourself."
"...And you think a man can go on living as a soldier after he's left the highest power in the nation looking like that?"
"......Haaah!"
He offered his arms to be taken without a fight, and the knights clutching the backs of their necks could not swallow their groans. The sighs were tangled with despair, and so they did what they had come to do.
Click.
"Ihan Turtle. You are under arrest for assaulting the king and for insulting the royal house."
"As you should."
Ihan let them bind both his wrists and offered no resistance at all. Not one person who watched it looked satisfied. And yet—
"Let's go."
The man being arrested—no, the man who had let himself be arrested—set off with his head high and walked himself toward the prison.
The nobles watched him go with faces knotted in confusion. What was this? What gave him the right to look so unashamed? He had left the king in that state, he had opened this crack through the kingdom, and still he walked as if he had nothing in the world to answer for. They could not understand it, and they did not want to. What he had done was something no noble's sense of the world could accept. Even if the king was a criminal, even if the crime was great, one did not behave with such outrageous disregard. There were forms. There was procedure. One was meant to follow—
"—Why."
"......"
Thud.
Before their confusion could even finish unfolding, someone stepped into the knight's path. A man with black hair and black eyes, the very image of Lionel.
"Y-Young Lord Roen."
Roen Dritri de Lionel stood before the knight.
"Why what?"
"I have come to ask a question. So answer me, if you would."
"...In this situation?"
"I am asking because it is this situation. And you are still my instructor. You will answer a student's question, will you not?"
"Your logic's a little off..."
"I learned it from my instructor."
"...You only ever learn the strange parts."
The exchange was perfectly calm. It could not have been less suited to the moment, and more than a few people wondered what on earth he thought he was doing. Even so, no one moved to stop Roen, and the Silver Lions turned their eyes on the knight as well.
"Instructor. Do you want power?"
"Not particularly. Don't need it."
"Then were you promised a vast fortune?"
"Money's enough if there's enough to eat and live."
"Then is it honor you want? Justice?"
"If I'd wanted that, would I have pulled something this stupid?"
"...Then why did you do it?"
Roen's face said he could not understand. A man who needed neither power, nor money, nor honor—why commit an act this extreme? Faced with that question—
"Geomdung. You need an answer to that right now?"
"Yes. I want to hear it."
"All right. Mm. You might be disappointed."
"I will try not to be."
"...You're laying it on thick, too."
"I apologize."
"No, there's nothing to apologize for. The real reason isn't anything much..."
He clicked his tongue. The look on his face was awkward, almost sheepish, and yet the smile he wore was strangely clean.
"......"
"Nobody. Not a single person was going to hold that man to account, so I did. That's the whole of it."
"...And do you have the standing to hold him to account, Instructor?"
"I do. I'm one of the people he hurt."
"......"
"Think about it simply. Because of what that man did, I lived ten years in hell, and I lived them in pain. Then I learned the truth, and I made him pay for it."
"......"
"You and the rest of them keep calling him a king, so you keep picking at faults and tripping over the law. So I'll ask you one thing. Can the law judge that man?"
"......"
"Right. It can't. Judging him by the law is impossible. They talk as if the law is sacred, and the measuring stick is always gentle with power. Always generous. Funny, isn't it."
"That is..."
"Ah, I'm not putting it on you. I'm not asking you to understand how I've been wronged, either. But hear this one thing. The world is full of cogs. Tiny cogs that keep the whole thing turning. And power throws those cogs away whenever it likes. Discards them. Without a scrap of mercy."
Somewhere in the midst of it, people had begun to listen. The knight who, only moments ago, had seemed nothing but violent and reckless now looked unshakably upright. There was a resonance in the words. They seemed to drive straight into the chest.
"If a person has no strength, they get crushed. That's a truth that never changes. Fortunately, I have strength. Strength enough to make it known that a cog like me exists. Lucky, that. Because of it, I could raise a proper hell on behalf of all those countless cogs."
He was smiling.
"This will throw the kingdom into chaos. Plenty of people will hate me for it. But I don't regret it. If I just endure, is someone going to come settle the wrong done to me? No. Nobody shouts in your place. So I have to be the one who shouts. I have to be the one who moves. If I don't, nothing anywhere changes."
Someone swallowed.
The knight was not flaring his presence. He had not raised his voice, and he was not releasing his power. Even so, the words he spoke had weight, and there was not the slightest waver in them. He did not dodge the crime he had committed, and he had no regret for what he had done. That was why he could stand so straight.
"I'll say it again. I'm not claiming what I did was right. There might have been a better way. So don't go hanging some meaning on it. Nobody else was going to do it, so I put it into practice. ...That's all."
With that, he walked on.
His stride was proud to the point of arrogance, the stride of a general returning in triumph. As if there were nothing in the world that could make him flinch. Before anyone quite noticed, the knight had passed Roen and gone ahead, and Roen—
"...Do you know? When I look at your back, I find myself wanting to live the way you do."
Boldly. Without hesitation. And with a heart so full it ached.
Without regret.