Graffiti (1)
"Go and find out."
That was what Grand Duke Aratus had said.
Generous of him. The Grand Duke did not lean on men without ability — so for him to say it at all meant he acknowledged Harad's worth. Win over the 1st Knight Order as well, and he means to actually put me to use.
Useful or not, a man could not simply be installed on the spot. The blood of the frozen North had to burn hotter than anything, and Serzila prized bonds that held fast above all else.
Harad had no reason to refuse. He had no intention of growing attached, but a measure of closeness was required — only then could he become a vassal of Serzila. Might as well close the distance while I'm at it.
What Northerners loved was strength and warmth. Harad possessed both — by magic, admittedly, but a wrinkle like that could be smoothed over soon enough.
A prank on the Great Wall. Having regressed, Harad knew exactly what that prank was. So it happened around this time.
It was nothing he had lived through. He had only heard of it secondhand, from Elaine — for it had occurred back when he was a bug-eater.
Does the Grand Duke know, and send me anyway? No — he sends me precisely because he doesn't. Suspicion was all the Grand Duke had, and that was why a magician was being dispatched. Nothing ventured, nothing gained — that would be his reasoning.
None of this had happened in his past life. The Grand Duke of those days had expected nothing of Harad at all. Then why did he save someone like me?
Harad recalled the time the 2nd Knight Order had forced him through the tunnel. He had been left adrift in the Boundary, and the Grand Duke had come for him personally — without summoning a single man to his side.
Was he waiting for the moment I'd act the part of a human? If so, then Grand Duke Aratus's choice had been the right one. And thanks to it, I even made it to regression.
Buildings stood at the garrison in place of tents — timber-built and shabby, yet respectable enough in their own way. Small, though. No one could enter the Boundary without aura, so the only souls dwelling here were knights.
Four more garrisons like it stood elsewhere. Serzila had split the Boundary into five sectors and posted a knight order to each. And beside the seas on either flank, vassal houses play the margrave. Six orders in all meant one always stood down, and this year it was the 2nd Knight Order's turn.
Knights were visible here and there, leather worn in place of armor — the hides of magic beasts. In the Boundary's killing cold, armor turned traitor; let your guard slip for a moment and it would seize your skin and tear the flesh away with it. The hide of beasts native to the Boundary, on the other hand, shrugged off both the chill and the blade-like wind.
A knight in blue hide came walking toward Harad.
"Long time no see. Been keeping well?"
"……"
Gulen's brow crumpled the moment he clapped eyes on Harad. "Gone mute in the meantime, have you?"
"……Damn it all. What are you doing here of all places?"
"The Grand Duke told me to come. So I came."
Gulen's eyes were the same as at their last parting. He did dislike Harad — though not, it seemed, with his whole heart.
"I'm asking why the Grand Duke sent you."
"Something must be gnawing at you. Why else come out to meet me?"
"……Let's go."
Gulen exhaled and led the way.
A single road ran beside the garrison — one the knights cleared of snow every single day. Snow walls rose on either side, each a good five meters tall.
"Massive."
At the road's end stood the Great Wall. Continentals called the castle walls of Serzila Territory "the Great Wall," but that was, in truth, a mistake — no continental had ever laid eyes on the real one. This was Serzila's true Wall: raised from the western sea to the eastern edge of the world, the masterwork of Serzila's founder, sealing off a Boundary that had once been Outer Realm itself.
Its height seemed to brush the clouds, and the clouds themselves wore every color at once. Sunlight fell, yet no sun could be seen. That Wall was where the Boundary began.
The gate is absurdly oversized, too. Huge, and thick beyond reason — nothing less could keep magic from punching through.
"By the way — aren't you the new recruit?"
"That's why I got stuck with you."
The 1st Knight Order had entrusted Harad wholly to Gulen, its youngest — contempt worn openly.
"If you want to go back, you're free to."
Gulen pointed back toward the garrison. The looks the knights turned their way were anything but kind.
"Kill him?"
"Not today. The Grand Duke's orders."
Had the command been anything but to escort Harad to the Wall, they would have drawn steel and rushed him long before. So some of them hoped he would lunge first. Devil bastard! one of the knights burst out.
"They're baiting you. Attack first, and they'll have their pretext to kill you."
"So it would seem."
"No knight in Serzila likes a magician."
With the men at his back, Gulen spoke as though delivering a warning. To Harad's ear, it was worry. Gulen had worried for him back when he entered the Grand Duke's residence, too — he owed Harad his life from that ruined village, after all.
"Well, this much is nothing. Serzila's practically genteel, as such places go."
Harad was a living witness to that.
"On the continent, a man dies for merely being suspected of magic."
"It's no different here. You're in one piece only thanks to the Grand Duke."
"The continent doesn't even offer that."
Not even the Emperor could stand guarantee for it — the Church of the Sun and Moon saw to that. Gulen, who couldn't have cared less, only shrugged. He backed away from the Wall and dropped into a sprinter's crouch.
"The gate's over there."
"It takes five knights to open that gate."
"So we'd need four more."
"Not one knight alive will open it for you."
Gulen broke into a dead sprint — a speed unbefitting his bulk — and rode that momentum straight up the Wall's face. He used no aura in the doing. Knights stood watch along the top at even intervals, and not one of them blinked at the sight of him. They all did it, after all.
Brute force, every time I see it. Harad gave a hollow laugh. However many times he watched, he never quite got used to it.
From above, Gulen dropped down a thick rope. "Grab hold and climb up!"
Harad didn't take it. He ran straight up the Wall's face, just as Gulen had. At the sight of him landing on the ramparts, Gulen's eyes went round.
"Could you always do that?"
"Do what? Ah — the body?"
"Yes."
"I built it up a bit. It looked terribly unimpressive."
Gulen cocked his head. Can a body really be remade just by willing it?
"I'd say I'm about a knight's match these days."
Thanks to the tempering he had undergone through the Sun.
"Does that even make sense?"
"It does for me."
"……"
"It'll make even more sense later, too."
Tempering could be done a second time.
Gulen's brow knotted — a face that understood none of it.
"It's magic."
"That explains it."
Only then did Gulen's expression ease. He was already channeling his aura. Atop the Wall, everyone had to be — the cold and the wind had the Boundary's nature threaded thinly through them.
"Careful from here on. This may be the foot of the Wall, but the Boundary is still the Boundary."
"Oh, I know. The Boundary's rather bracing, isn't it."
"……"
Gulen decided Harad was posturing. The knights standing watch along the top were glaring daggers at him.
Gulen gave him one long look, then leapt from the edge. Harad followed. The snow, banked to the height of a building, broke their fall with a soft crunch.
One stretch of ground lay bare. The earth there was filthy — the snow hadn't failed to fall; it had been cleared away.
"Here it is."
Gulen, first to land, stood waiting. He was pointing at the Wall — its face was a horror, scarred by long ages of blows from magic beasts and magicians alike. And across those scars ran a wound that did not belong.
"We found it four days ago. Judging by the traces, we put the graffiti at about a week old."
Someone had played a prank on the Great Wall — so Grand Duke Aratus had put it. Gulen called the prank graffiti, and fair enough: dozens of circles that meant nothing to any eye lay overlapped upon one another, each as tall as Harad himself.
My first time seeing it in the flesh. To Harad, it was a drawing. A drawing it would be in truth, as well — in his past life, back when he was a bug-eater, that drawing had thrown the 1st Knight Order into confusion. Nothing catastrophic, mind. Just as the Grand Duke said, a prank. Though one that would leave a seed behind in Serzila — a seed that could wait, for he knew the future. It could be dealt with in its turn.
Not an easy place to stumble upon. Snow blanketed everything in sight, and not merely drifted — banked to the height of a building. Yet the drawing had been carved at Harad's own eye level.
"You were lucky to find it at all."
"We were. A knight on watch above stumbled onto it while seizing a beast that had been scraping at the Wall."
Identical. He'd heard it was found the same way in his past life — which meant what came next would come the same way, too.
"Do beasts often batter the Wall?"
"That much happens every day. Something on the scale you'd call a siege... once a month, perhaps?"
That, too, was unchanged.
"And magicians?"
Gulen snorted at the question. "Outer Realm magicians come prying at the Wall so rarely it barely bears counting. Because the knight orders are here."
True — and only half true. The Outer Realm kept its hands off the Wall for more reasons than the knight orders. So there had been fewer who crossed the Wall than I'd imagined.
Before his regression, the Harad of this era had been a bug-eater. He hadn't known what went on at the Wall at all. What Elaine told him later had covered only the weightiest of events — like this graffiti.
"No one thought to erase it?"
"The knight order's duty is the defense of the Wall."
Erasing it would be defacement, not defense. Such was the unbending steadfastness of Serzila's knight orders.
"Astonishing."
To Harad it looked like sheer brutish simplicity. But simplicity was no flaw — it was a virtue.
"That graffiti is, in fact, magic."
"What?"
"Some Origins defy intuition. There are Origins that stir only when their magician wills them to. That graffiti belongs to the latter kind."
"What utter nonsense."
Gulen was bristling. "Then who, in your estimation, carved graffiti in a place like this?"
"One of your own knights, most likely. Idle away your time and be off."
And there was the problem. The knight orders were ignorant. They spent their bodies and spared their heads; squared against the Outer Realm, they knew less of magic than they didn't. And for all that, their rejection of it was vicious. Where the Wall was concerned, their stubbornness swelled to monstrous size.
"……Is Commander Toremoat of the 1st Knight Order still at the garrison?"
"He's gone to the Inner Castle to report the graffiti. He should return tomorrow."
Then the confusion would come tonight — for so long as Toremoat was among them, the 1st Knight Order was incapable of falling into disarray.
"And the Vice Commander?"
The Outer Realm, you see, minded Serzila more than it minded the Empire or the Church. It may well have feared Serzila — for the root of that wariness ran in Serzila's blood. That blood had been great in every generation; not one of its line had failed to become a Sword Master. Grand Duke Aratus stood atop that blood, and in the not-distant future Elaine would stand atop that very Aratus. Serzila boasted a history older than the Empire's — and yet its golden age would begin only now.
That, too, was why the North had fallen: so mighty for so long that it grew arrogant. The knight orders were that arrogant Serzila's core strength — even the Imperial House possessed no order mightier than Serzila's. Unlike Serzila itself, however, the orders were never arrogant. Not before the Wall, at any rate.
The orders fixed every ounce of their focus on the Wall alone. When Serzila festered, and when that abscess burst, they guarded the Wall all the same — guarded it until blades ran them through the back atop the ramparts. They died with their eyes on nothing but the Wall, because the Grand Duke had commanded the Wall be held.
"They're not dogs."
And so, if the knight orders bore any guilt, it was their loyalty itself.
"They were knights who served you, Your Highness."
"Is that a problem? It's my own knights I'm berating."
Once, Elaine had cursed the knight orders. Harad knew it was not a curse but tears.
"They were not men who deserved to die like that."
HAD they fallen on a battlefield, no one could have called it unjust. But the orders had died without ever truly fighting. The North's fall had been utterly one-sided.
"Not from complacency, nor from arrogance — from ignorance. That is why they died."
Their strength had overflowed. The orders simply hadn't known how to spend it. Looking back, that overflowing strength had done nothing but dance to the Outer Realm's magic; the Outer Realm never met the knight orders head-on. Even swung about like puppets, the orders never knew they were being swung — because the Wall before their eyes still stood. They had believed all they need do was hold the Wall.
"The fault is mine. I was arrogant. I should have governed better."
"I know."
Their devotion was a poison — and too potent a poison at that. The orders could not so much as conceive that Serzila might be wrong. No — they would not.
"You share the blame as well."
"……?"
"Admit it. Look — I admitted mine. Their devotion was indeed my failing."
The flaw Harad saw in the knight orders was that virulent devotion. Elaine saw one more: the orders did not know how to think.
"Their ignorance is your fault."
"They were born that way, Your Highness."
"All the more reason you should have mended it."
He had never shared the orders' mess. He met them often enough, and got along well enough — but he never thought to change them, for he felt no need. No — in truth, they weren't so likable as all that.
"Half jest. In truth, I know — they were not men mending could fix. They were men mending would break."
Men so middling could never have become Serzila's knights in the first place. They were loyal because they were ignorant, and strong because they were ignorant.
"Not reformed — shored up. You should have patched over what they lacked, you, the cleverest head in all Serzila. And that came far too late."
Harad had come to his senses far too late, and Elaine had pinched him for it.
"I'm hardly so clever as all that."
"Clever as you are, you're a genius by Northern reckoning."
The knight orders' strength overflowed, but they had no head to wield it. In Elaine's judgment, that head was Harad. He should have become one of Serzila's own far sooner.
This time, he could be.
Of course, this time too the orders would stand brutish before the Wall. In exchange they would be strong — and loyal to Serzila past all reason.
"It's not graffiti. It's magic."
"Get lost, magician. Before I kill you where you stand."
Just like that. Vice Commander Delic spurned him to his face — because this was the Wall.
What was it they said — that thinking makes you weak? The orders would hold fast to their ignorance. Harad had no confidence in curing it — and in truth, it must not be cured. You don't fix it. You reinforce it. Their bodies would do the work; his head would do the thinking.
"I bear the seal of Serzila. I came here at the Grand Duke's command."
"Before the Wall, there are no exceptions."
Which meant that stubbornness had to be broken first — and the regressed Harad knew exactly how.
Harad drew out the glove he had brought from the Inner Castle. "With your kind, this is the only tongue that carries."
Smack. The thrown glove cracked against Vice Commander Delic's cheek.
"Have at me."
"……You're serious?"
Delic's face writhed where the glove had struck. His whole body shook.
"Reluctant?"
"As if!"
It was excitement. The writhing face had broken into a grin before anyone saw it coming. "You're nothing like a magician!"
This was the North, where even a beggar might challenge the Grand Duke. In a land where strength was everything, the throw of a glove alone won half the argument.
"If I win, the graffiti is magic."
"Agreed!"
And the strong, as a rule, are right.