Fire and Water (3)
Grand Duke Aratus had said so. Naturally, it could not be actual flame. Magicians were often called by their origins in place of their names, because the origin was their true self — much the same as the Red Tower calling its King not "the woman who bears the Sun," but simply "the Sun."
So that's the fire. Aroshu. That 4th-tier magician whose origin was the campfire had to be the fire Grand Duke Aratus had spoken of. The man was a magician of the Outlands — of the Red Tower, no less. Which meant the Grand Duke had known about the Red Tower even in Harad's past life.
Harad gave a dry, hollow laugh at the conclusion this led him to. He himself hadn't so much as noticed the Red Tower existed until after he regressed.
Why did he never tell me? In his past life, Harad and Grand Duke Aratus had kept each other at a polite, cool distance. There was never a good reason for it. It would have been worth a word to Elaine. Because the tower was a fallen one? By the war of the past life, the Red Tower no longer existed. Perhaps the Grand Duke simply hadn't judged it worth mentioning. To think he had an acquaintance in the Outlands. Aratus had known Aroshu would be coming down — which meant he kept an informant there. A magician, surely. The Outlands was a land where only magicians lived. Their ages were probably close; they must have become acquainted back when the Grand Duke was in his prime, wearing a path through the Boundary.
"So the Elder's words were true!" Aroshu cried out in wonder. "Where does this Elder of yours live?"
"In paradise, of course."
The magician the Grand Duke knew had to be that fellow called the Elder. They'd be of an age. No doubt acquainted from the days when Aratus had prowled the Boundary at the height of his powers.
"Was it not the Elder who spoke to you of me?"
"The Elder I know and the Elder you know appear to be different people."
"Is that so?"
"The Elder I know doesn't live in paradise."
"A different person, then."
Aroshu accepted it at once. Whether out of guilelessness, or as an act of guilelessness.
"The Elder I know told me to meet fire."
"The Elder I know said the same to me."
Grand Duke Aratus and the Outlands' Elder had arranged this meeting between Harad and Aroshu. Not killing each other — keeping in contact. Harad found it staggering. To forge such a relationship with the Outlands. And that Grand Duke, of all people.
"Why did he tell you to meet?"
"He said nothing beyond that."
"Same here."
Harad studied Aroshu's face. The man kept smiling, again and again, as if delighted to meet the Sun — no, the Star.
"And this Elder of yours — who might he be?"
"The Elder is the Elder."
"I see."
"Indeed."
Just as Harad was doing, Aroshu stared steadily back at him. And Harad kept offering up his own smile, as if glad beyond words to meet fire.
"By the way — who might the lady beside you be...?"
Aroshu had belatedly asked about Ellen.
"Who do you take her for?"
Harad bought time first. Grand Duke Aratus and the fellow called the Elder had done no more than arrange a meeting. Meaning theirs was no relationship of baring everything. Here, the judgment was Harad's to make. Could he be trusted? No. Aratus might have made the introduction, but Aroshu was still an Outland magician. To that man, Harad could not afford to be a magician of Serzila.
"That pit is a burrow I dug to hide in. I ran into a giant a while back."
"Ah. I've heard the tale."
Even in the Outlands, a 6th-tier magical beast appeared to be a rare marvel. No wonder the story had spread.
"And this woman is my woman."
Harad drew Ellen's shoulder firmly against his own.
"She followed me all the way out here. As you know well enough, the continent is a hard land for a magician to live in."
Why would a woman who was no magician stand at the Boundary beside a man who was? In Harad's estimation, there was only one reason.
"Ah — your wife!"
"That's right."
Aroshu hardly seemed surprised. No — he was less surprised than Harad had expected. He seemed to find the situation anything but unfamiliar.
"Just so! Families hoping to defect together do exist — rarely, but they do!"
It was Harad who was startled instead. Ellen, standing as though cradled against him, trembled several times over as well — which presumably meant she was every bit as shocked. It was news to both of them.
There's already precedent? Harad thought of the knight Pelatz — that father who had sold Iagar County for the sake of his son's merit in the Liberation Tower. Apparently the Outlands held men even more hopelessly devoted than Pelatz.
"As expected of a Star. Your wife is fervent indeed! It must have been an agonizing decision."
Aroshu marveled, eyes shining.
"Her name is Ellen."
"Lady Ellen, then. As I mentioned — Aroshu, at your service!"
With easy charm, Aroshu bowed his head once more.
To any eye, Aroshu was unmistakably a magician. Not that it showed under ordinary circumstances — it was the warmth that had taken shape around him. That, clearly, was magic.
"Truly a Star!"
And so Aroshu marveled at the warmth he could feel at Harad's side. He had noticed it was working without a drop of mana.
So bearing fire as one's origin doesn't make one free of the Boundary. It was a fact he had anticipated. The Boundary was, at bottom, a land where natural fire did not occur. Even so — fire was still fire. Aroshu shook off the Boundary's chill with only a sliver of mana.
Even Psina couldn't have managed that. A distinction only the Red Tower possessed, most likely.
"I was born on the continent."
"Yes!"
"So there's a great deal I don't know. What, exactly, is a Star?"
"Oh dear. How selfish I've been."
Aroshu swept a hand down his face in self-reproach. Unlike Hervis, his reverence had a sly, slick edge to it.
"A Star is the word for the noble one who serves the King."
"The mightiest origin after the King himself, then."
"Precisely! And you, Lord Harad, are the one who will become our King's right hand!"
Harad gave a loose, noncommittal nod.
Second-in-command of the Red Tower. A position that had never existed in his past life. Yet Aroshu was convinced Harad was that right hand — a preconception born of the Prophecy of the Moon. The Sun belonged to a woman, after all.
No one found it easy to imagine it simply hadn't been born yet. Which was why, even having burned the Watchtower to the ground, Harad went unsuspected of being the Sun.
"So every tower keeps a Star of its own, I see."
"...I beg your pardon?"
Aroshu's face twisted in an instant — as though he had just heard something beyond preposterous.
"Am I wrong? I hear even the Tower of the Deep Sea has a Star. One River Aquins."
"The only tower where a Star exists is our Red Tower."
The air around Aroshu began to shudder. His origin, resonating with his emotion, had kindled flame.
"The Stars of other towers are fakes! Impostors, daring to counterfeit our Red Tower's Star!"
Aroshu roared, face still contorted.
"Ah — aaah. Aaaah! Forgive me. You've had to witness an ugly sight!"
It was over in moments. Aroshu snuffed the flame out, and even the warmth vanished. The trick was to cool one's head on the Boundary's chill — Harad saw through it at once. It was a method he himself had often used in his past life.
"I understand. We are fire, you and I."
"Thank you for understanding."
Shivering hard in the Boundary's cold, Aroshu bowed his head.
"Noble Star. The other towers impersonate him out of nothing but inferiority and arrogance."
"I see. Because the Red Tower lost its King."
Aroshu's slitted eyes went wide. That his pupils were black — Harad was learning it only now.
"They kept that inferiority pressed down tight for the longest time, and of late it must have burst — whispers that the Red Tower had grown weak enough to trifle with."
"Exactly right!"
Aroshu responded with fervor.
"Insolent wretches, the lot of them."
"Tr-truly, you are a Star in every sense!"
With Harad chiming in, Aroshu's fervor climbed higher still.
"What breathtaking insight."
"I'd hardly be a Star otherwise."
Harad shrugged. Ellen was watching him through eyes gone cold.
"What is it, dear?"
"Pardon? ...No, nothing, dear. It's only the first time since Hervis that I've met anyone so... agreeable."
Ellen seemed to find their masquerade as a couple awkward. Through the arm cinched around her waist, he could feel her body trembling. So Harad pulled her in tighter — and contrary to his intention, the trembling only grew worse. Aroshu, mercifully, appeared to find nothing strange in it. It was the Boundary, after all.
"Hervis! Ah, what a fine junior he was. When word of his death reached me, I could not stop my tears."
"I felt the same."
"Might you have witnessed that junior's death?"
Aroshu's eyes thinned to a sharp edge. Was he imagining it? Harad trusted his gut. A slip. Ellen should never have said Hervis had been kind.
"He was killed by a wretch named Jeshult of the Ivory Tower. A magician whose origin was Muscle."
"Just as one would expect. The Star himself avenged his junior."
"It may not have been revenge. The man was mid-conversation with us when he suddenly loosed his Projection. Hervis was simply caught in it."
Aroshu's fist clenched hard. Sly as he looked, at bottom the man was all fire. So I'm not the only one. It seemed to be the shared fate of magicians whose origin was flame.
"I'd hoped to wring information out of him, but it was not to be. I'm far too fiery myself."
"There was nothing else you could have done. The composure you have attained leaves me nothing but awe. To think a Star could remain this calm."
Just as he had suspected — the stronger the fire, the harder it grew to leash one's temper.
The Torch. That was the question Harad was biting back. To raise it now, he feared, would make his feelings impossible to contain — one could hardly ask after an ally's whereabouts while spitting rage.
"I'd hardly be a Star otherwise."
Harad shrugged. This time, he meant it.
"So. Why has Aquins come down? To take me?"
Aroshu, who had been grinning all this while, shut his mouth. Apparently very few knew of Aquins's southward descent.
"Why keep it from me?"
Silence. The slits of his eyes grew thinner still.
"It isn't that I distrust you. Quite the opposite — after my wife, no one. We are the same fire. I only assumed you had your reasons."
At Harad's addition, an embarrassed smile crossed Aroshu's face before long.
"Because I dared to judge that, were you to learn of Aquins's existence, you would be unable to hold yourself back."
Aroshu apparently thought of fire as a man afflicted with an anger disorder. Perhaps that was because he himself was fire.
"So you were trying to keep Aquins and me apart."
Harad and Ellen were pressed together for all the world like a wedded pair — yet Aroshu spoke with his eyes fixed on Harad alone.
"Yes. My only wish was to bring you safely to the Red Tower."
There was no trace of a lie in it. Aroshu genuinely revered the Star called Harad.
"Is Aquins truly so formidable?"
"How could he possibly be!"
Aroshu all but jumped out of his skin.
"He is a fake. Only for the moment, at that — you, Star, are the one who will soon rise high and tall."
The expectation had been wrong. The Aquins said to have descended was not someone merely bearing the family name — it was River Aquins in the flesh.
"A fake Star — and a newly-risen one like Aquins, at that — would never even dare meet your eyes."
"Newly-risen?"
Harad's eyes gleamed. In his past life, Aquins had been an arrogant Star.
"Yes. Aquins only ascended to his false Star last year. A fake among fakes."
Everyone had a past. Just as the original Harad of this era had been nothing more than a bug-eater, Aquins, too, had once been a newcomer.
"The Tower of the Deep Sea has no foundation of its own, so it demands mighty deeds of its counterfeit Stars. They simply do not know what a Star is."
A Star, properly speaking, was a Star merely by existing... Aroshu droned on in murmurs for quite some time. Harad found himself thinking of Hervis. Every magician of the Red Tower seemed to be mad in his own particular way.
"And yet that upstart dares to make a Star into his great deed."
That was why River Aquins had come south in person. His circumstances differed vastly from the past life — he needed a deed to his name.
"My killing of Psina of the Ivory Tower must have been the thread he pulled. Am I right?"
"Pardon? Yes. Yes! Exactly. To think you had already broken through to the very truth of the Hierarchy — truly, you are...!"
"Just the essentials, if you would."
Harad cut him off. Without a hint of wounded feeling, Aroshu explained at once. Save for the matter of Aquins, it was all exactly as Harad had foreseen.
"The Ivory Tower shared its information, and the Deep Sea Tower came asking. Aquins had his justification ready-made — his own blood had died."
Tyrell Aquins's death had handed them the perfect opportunity.
"As expected..."
"As expected of a Star."
Harad cut him off again. Even praise wore thin in the end. The man would likely stand there marveling if Harad took a dump right in front of him — ah, what a Star, even his shit comes out thick.
"The Deep Sea hates us with a particular venom. What of the other towers?"
"The Tower of the Deep Sea has always been drowning in its own inferiority. The others are not like that."
"So the others hate us for standing against the Long-Cherished Wish of seizing paradise."
"Yes, yes. Exactly so. You may consider every one of them an enemy."
The Deep Sea, out of envy. The rest, for opposing the conquest of the continent. Whatever their reasons, it meant every tower looked upon the Red Tower as an enemy.
"As I understand it, we oppose the Long-Cherished Wish only because the King is absent. If the King returns, will the towers cease to be enemies?"
"Yes. They will not even dare speak the word enemy. Every last one of them will gaze up at our Red Tower in reverence — as in the history of old."
Aroshu spoke with utter conviction.
Wrong. Aroshu's words needed to be taken with a generous grain of salt. Perhaps it had been so in the old days, but it would not be now. He could not believe the Red Tower would return to its former glory simply because some magician wandered in and became King. Unlike back then, the other towers had grown fat with power.
For Harad, that was good news. The Outlands needed to stay at one another's throats, gnawing each other down.
Aquins, freshly minted as a Star. Of course, 5th tier was still 5th tier. But he would fall short of his past-life self.
Harad glanced at Ellen. They stood close — close enough that his left arm, wrapped around her waist, could feel both her softness and her firmness at once. Ellen did not look away. Her eyes were asking: so what now?
You won't die. You have me with you, after all. He had said as much before the burrow — that even meeting River Aquins face to face, neither of them would die. The past life had been his yardstick, and on that measure he had been half-convinced of their survival.
Oh, dear. All the more so with Aquins only just made a Star.
"Just as you feared, it seems I'm an uncontrollable fire after all."
"Pardon?"