Imprisonment
"An Outlands magician has attacked the plaza."
A Fourth Circle, someone had said.
The face was a familiar one. The Second Knight Commander.
Magicians, infiltrating the very heart of Serzila's streets? Elaine jolted — and in the same instant realized that this dream was a lucid one.
Because she could see herself reflected in his eyes. The Second Knight Commander was delivering his report to that Elaine of the dream, and to the Grand Duke.
"Tracing it back, there was a passage linking to the Boundary. It runs beneath a tavern called Flowerbed's Flesh."
At those words, Elaine's eyes widened further.
The Second Knight Commander was speaking of the tunnel Ellen and Harad had discovered only yesterday. Which meant this was no idle nonsense of a dream. It was a dream built, in its own way, on reality.
"With your leave, may we investigate the tunnel? I intend to cross over myself and see where it leads."
"Leave it."
The Grand Duke dismissed the request out of hand. The imperial decree forbade it — Serzila was not to cross the Boundary freely.
She understood the reason. It left a sour taste all the same. The Elaine of the dream wore a disgruntled expression to match, and the Second Knight Commander seemed to share the sentiment; his footsteps leaving the Grand Duke's residence were nothing short of stormy.
Space flowed past like wind.
The Second Knight Commander led his knights out. They were underground now, standing before the tunnel — precisely as it had appeared the night before. And for some reason, Harad was with them.
"Is it truly all right to do this?"
A knight asked it of his commander. Harad, meanwhile, stood staring at the knights, rigid with fear.
"Does this one look like one of ours to you? Whatever we get out of him is profit; if he dies, it's only a waste. His Grace has permitted this too."
The Second Knight Commander was trading on the Grand Duke's name. The audacity of it. Elaine seethed — and there was nothing she could do. This was a dream.
"In. You crawl in, and you come out the other side."
The Second Knight Commander shoved Harad into the tunnel mouth.
"Move it, you hostage bastard."
A knight kicked Harad in the rear. Elaine knew that face too.
Harad slid in. Then his backside popped right back out, and another knight jabbed at it with a scabbard, again and again.
"Get in now, or I'll string you up on a cross."
Only then did Harad crawl.
"Fucking idiot."
A knight bellowed it straight into the mouth of the tunnel, and the jeer went echoing down into the dark.
The vantage shifted. Now she saw Harad — prone in the tunnel, weeping, one hand clamped hard over his mouth for fear the sound might carry.
That's Harad?
Truly, the sight was jarring. The Harad Elaine had known was not a man who did this.
He stayed like that a long while before he began to crawl. Who knew how much later, light and snow came tumbling down into the tunnel.
A bone-white wilderness. A blizzard that hid everything beyond arm's reach. Blade-winds howling in from the Outer Realm.
It was the very scene Ellen had been thrown into last night.
So it wasn't complete nonsense after all.
As expected, the dream stood on a foundation of reality. Proof of it: Harad did not feel the cold. The blade-winds shredded his clothes to rags, yet could not so much as scratch his skin.
So it was an act.
Watching Harad arrive at the Boundary, Elaine was certain of it. He had faked his frailty all the way here. Next he would make for the orange river and hunt the ragged magical beasts along its upper reaches.
Then, without warning, tears began streaming down Harad's face.
"Father. Mother."
Harad did not go to the orange river. He simply hunched where he was and wept, and whenever his throat grew parched, he scooped up snow and ate it.
The sun set fast and rose fast. A minute passed like a day. On the day the sun had come up for the fifteenth time, a dark figure appeared through the blizzard.
Astonishingly — the Grand Duke.
"A pity, to let such an Origin go to waste."
Come alone, the Grand Duke said only that, then dragged the sleeping Harad back to the Inner Castle the way one drags a corpse.
Then the carriage stopped.
"My lord. You've been through a lot, I trust."
Mores, who had been waiting on Elaine's return, pulled the door open as he spoke.
"What a crock of shit."
Elaine laughed, incredulous. From there she returned to the residence, washed, and set out at once for the Inner Castle.
"What? Who did?"
And then came the news that Harad had been thrown in a cell.
"How?"
He was not a man you could arrest just because you took a notion to.
The cell was narrow, and it was cold. There were no bugs to speak of, thanks to that; still, sitting on the earthen floor, a man's backside seemed bound for frostbite. For Harad, of course, this was nobody's problem. Wherever he was, he never felt the cold. If anything, he only ever felt hot — and the higher one's Circle, the worse the heat became.
"Fuck, it's cold as hell in here," said the prisoner locked in the cell across the way. He was a man taken in the act, red-handed, for caving in the skull of a drunkard who had been slandering his wife.
"Here. Wear this."
Harad shrugged off his coat and tossed it through the bars.
"You sure about that?"
"Cold never gets to me. Constitution thing."
"Much obliged."
The prisoner draped Harad's coat over his own.
"When do you get out?"
"Once the bastard who picked a fight with me wakes up, I expect."
"And if he dies?"
"I get out all the same."
The man chuckled.
"In this land, being weak is the crime."
To be weak was to die. That was the North's one truth. A weak Northerner was fair game for mockery — and rightly so, for the mockery was what taught them to nurse their venom and grow.
"Truth be told, they do weigh the fault. That's how I'm walking out. He threw the first word, see. Self-defense, that's what it is."
The man sounded sure of himself. Even by Harad's reckoning, it held up. The man was innocent — whatever the rights of the quarrel, the two of them had consented to the fight, and that was that.
"So what'd they pinch you for? You don't look the brawling type."
"Couldn't tell you. I got myself arrested because I wanted to know that very thing."
"You some kind of madman?"
The man chuckled again. He did seem awfully free with his laughter — perhaps the drink hadn't fully worn off.
"Well, fate's thrown us in together, so we may as well trade names. Carlson, mine."
"I'm—"
"Harad!"
Just then another voice cut in, unbidden. Harad stretched only his hand out through the bars and pointed toward where it had come from.
"That's the name."
"Huh. So you weren't a madman after all."
His cellmate Harad, it seemed, had friends in high places.
"Looks that way."
Footsteps drew near. Singularly rough ones. The figure that finally appeared before the bars was Elaine.
Startled her badly enough, it seems.
He had expected her to come as Ellen.
"My lord!"
Carlson, recognizing Elaine, bowed low at once. She acknowledged him with a nod and fixed her glare on Harad. She looked a little stunned herself.
"What are you doing here?"
"I was arrested."
"Why?"
"I was just now trying to find out."
"What the hell kind of— come out first, anyway. We'll talk outside."
Elaine fitted a key into the lock and swung the bars open.
Go out? Harad weighed it a moment. Had the one who came been Ellen, he would have walked out without a beat's hesitation.
I still need to identify the informant.
He had to go on playing the stranger with Elaine. The tunnel was not something they could discuss.
"Not coming out?"
"Coming."
Harad stepped out of the cell. Ellen he could spar with; before Elaine, Harad was unfailingly the deferential one.
"Um— er—"
"Keep the coat."
Harad waved off the flustered Carlson. At the sight of it, Elaine snorted.
"Made a friend in there already, have you?"
"A friend who beat a man unconscious for slandering his wife."
"A good friend, then. He didn't even kill him."
Harad followed Elaine up to the surface. The guard force's Squad Three captain who had hauled him in stood with his head bowed to his chest. Harad bent to bring himself level with the man's eyes, carved the captain's face into memory, and left the guardhouse.
"Dreams. Did you happen to have one last night?"
"…Is that how you say hello?"
"With people I don't know well, yes."
He had put the very same question to Ellen the first time they met.
Come to think of it, I never asked Ellen yesterday.
He doubted he'd need to going forward, either. Elaine looked mildly put off, but conceded the point.
"If it's dreams, then dreamed I did."
"Of what?"
"Strangely enough, it was you again. I suppose you left quite the impression on me."
The words carried a double edge.
"There was a strange tunnel underground. You were crawling through it. It connected to the Boundary."
Harad's eyes gleamed.
That was when he had been forced down the tunnel at the Second Knight Commander's hands. A future that would never come to pass in this life. And if they sealed that tunnel away for good, the future in which the Outer Realm struck at the plaza would vanish along with it.
So it isn't only the days we shared that she dreams of.
No doubt because it was Harad who had used the Regression Stone. Elaine, who had fed that stone her blood, had come to see even his memories as dreams.
That part, I could have done without.
Harad's face screwed up. There was nothing about him Elaine didn't know — and yet, still. Hearing a thing told and watching it happen were very different matters. His frail years were a past so mortifying that even Harad himself could barely stomach it.
"You were bawling your eyes out. That was you in there, I take it."
"It was a dream."
"I know. But what a performance it was."
And already she was having her laugh — without even holding the memories themselves. How much worse would it be when those memories came back to her? Harad made a point of not thinking about it.
"Did the hunt go well?"
Harad turned the subject.
"How would you know that?"
"The maids were talking as they passed. I caught some of it."
"A most meaningful time was had by all."
Elaine said it with a face that believed not a word of it. She looked full to bursting with discontent.
No fun to be had, then.
The knight order's patrol range was safe. They stirred up the same grounds every outing — an environment where so much as glimpsing a magical beast was a rarity.
Her palate has grown spoiled, after all.
Elaine was one of those people who tasted euphoria only in battle. She'd had exactly one proper taste of the Boundary, and one taste was never going to sate an appetite like that.
"But why were you in a cell at all? You carry the seal, don't you?"
The seal of Serzila was as good as omnipotent in the North. It opened any door, and short of outright crime, nothing else a man did signified.
Harad looked at Elaine, straight on. She simply stood there, gazing back.
Oblivious at times like this, of all times.
Harad clicked his tongue where she couldn't see. Were their places reversed, he would have pleaded busyness, taken his leave, and come back wearing Ellen's face. That was the only way a conversation could breathe.
"How much do you know?"
Harad asked because he had no other choice. It meant: here is your answer, spoon-fed — eat.
"…Ah. Ahh. Whatever you've been about, I've heard the broad strokes through the Information Bureau."
Elaine managed, barely, to swallow the hint.
So she isn't entirely without sense.
Though the fact that she let it slide so meekly was itself evidence of the opposite… but no matter. A suitably dense Elaine was the easier Elaine to deal with.
"You mean from Ellen?"
"That's right. You went to the Boundary with her — by way of the very tunnel from my dream."
Elaine laid it out without a grain of guile. Her reasoning would be identical to Ellen's: confidence, no doubt, that there was no chance in the world of being found out.
"You've nothing to say about it? Crossing into the Boundary is summary execution, I hear."
"The one who gave you that seal is the ruler of this land. While they hold their peace, what business have I touching you?"
That was why Ellen despised Harad yet never once suspected him. It had been Grand Duke Aratus who granted the seal with Harad himself held as surety.
"Don't tell me you meant to go again today."
Elaine asked it as casually as she could manage.
"That was the intention. It seems that's no longer possible."
"Why."
"The tunnel's been discovered. I was taken into custody right in front of it."
"What?"
Elaine's pupils shook violently.
"That tunnel is finished. No one goes through it now."
…
Elaine sagged. The look on her face was that of a woman who had just lost the North itself.
No telling how long it took.
"I'd best be going. There's business I haven't settled."
Recovered, Elaine hurried off — and before long, Ellen came.
"What's this I'm hearing? The tunnel's been discovered?"
The changeover had taken less than a minute. Harad found that hard to credit.
Not one shred of effort.
Was that any way for a person to look, if they were supposedly hiding something?
Where did she even change? Ah — there must be a bureau safe house nearby.
Ellen was the only agent stationed in the whole territory, so of course she used the safe house like her own front hall. Or else — given the special treatment — perhaps a safe house kept ready for her alone.
The latter, I'd bet.
Harad gave Ellen a slow once-over — Information Bureau uniform and all — then spoke.
"The report has it right. Someone informed on me, it seems. The guard force came on the tip and took me in."
"Why on earth would they arrest you? You carry the seal of Serzila, don't you?"
Ellen flung out the question that had gone unanswered before.
"I never showed it to them."
"You got yourself arrested on purpose?"
Harad nodded.
"The strand of your hair I'd left wedged in the door was gone. And yet there wasn't a trace of entry inside. Whoever it was opened the door, had one look, and left it at that."
"Who?"
"Someone who knows the true face of the Flowerbed's Flesh's keeper, I'd say. A colleague — or a competitor."
A colleague, it would not be. The keeper of the Flowerbed's Flesh was a small-time broker — a two-bit operation that would never have earned a place in Harad's memory at all, had an Outer Realm magician not once made use of that tunnel.
"Whoever it was must have been watching when I stepped into the Flowerbed's Flesh. That, I'd wager, is my informant."
"It could have been someone else entirely."
"Aren't you a Northerner like me?"
Ellen's brow creased, as if to ask what nonsense that was.
"Up North, who runs to file a report? You start planning how to beat the man dead with your own two hands."
"Oh. Right."
Ellen bought it on the spot.
"Your task is to find out who informed."
"Why me?"
"Are you not an agent of the Information Bureau?"
"…I am, yes."
"Then dig into the Squad Three captain's background while you're at it."
The captain who had taken the report was suspect in his own right. A sound man would have rounded on the informant — who in the hells reports a thing like that? — and barked him into the ground. That was the North.
"Understood."
"Can you manage it? If it proves too much, ask someone you trust for help."
"I can manage it."
Ellen answered looking caught out. It was the reaction he'd expected. As far as Harad knew, Elaine was hopeless at this kind of work. From the very beginning, the only thing she had ever excelled at was the blade.
Ah — and fists. She's good with fists too.
In any case… Ellen would be calling someone in. A genuine agent — one who actually knew her way around information work.
"And what will you be doing? Don't tell me you're planning to go to the tunnel?"
"That tunnel is beyond reach now. By this hour, the report will already sit on His Grace's desk."
The color drained from Ellen's face. She was daunted by the Grand Duke — in truth, "he was a weight upon her" would have been the more exact phrasing.
"I'll see to the report myself."
"You will?"
"I doubt anything will come of it."
So he said — but Harad was certain. He knew better than anyone what Serzila wanted.
"See? I told you from the start to file a report."
"…Did you, now?"
Says the one who enjoyed it most of all.