The Shadow (2)
"See? Told you."
Ellen's voice rang with certainty — the voice of someone declaring that Harad had been wrong, and that she had won their wager.
"I was right, wasn't I?"
"There's no way you were right."
Harad didn't waver. His gaze had gone calm somewhere along the way.
"Tell me the details, Horn. How did you catch him?"
"At a ruined inn near the plaza."
Listening closely, Harad recognized it — a familiar inn. The one perched above the tunnel linked to the 2nd Boundary, the one Arika had tracked down and Kubel had cleaned out. The tunnel was classified; the knights knew nothing of it yet.
"That place was never supposed to be a search site."
Harad remembered every document he had dealt out to the 2nd Knight Order. What Horn had been given was a derelict house on the western district's outskirts.
"The mage came out of that derelict house. Our eyes met, and he ran."
The flight had been remarkably fast, Horn said — and utterly silent. Not one passerby had so much as noticed the mage existed.
"If it hadn't been me, he'd be gone."
Horn reported, visibly wrestling his excitement down.
"It was magic, no question."
The Origin was surely a covert one — kin to the mages who had hunted Elaine all this while.
"A mage, all right."
Not a face from Harad's memories, but Horn was hardly the sort to mistake aura for magic.
The mage Horn had hauled in was iron-bound at both wrists and stripped to his underclothes. That was Horn's doing, and the right call — who knew what might be hidden in clothing. The bare skin on display was mottled with bruises. With underclothes the sum total of his possessions, it was still the mage's face that struck Harad as remarkable. Precisely speaking — those eyes.
The instant their eyes met, the mage's pupils wavered. A face arranged into fear.
"He only does it when someone's watching."
Harad murmured it under his breath. The darting glances, the tremors, the working of the throat, the fingers — none of it was real. It was a performance. Harad, who in his previous life had lived under everyone's cold stares, saw through it at once.
"What kind of magic?"
"His body turned black. At first the whole figure vanished; later, only his presence."
"I imagine he could manage it right now."
No sooner said than done. The mage's figure stained black and came pouring off him like water. The melting silhouette met Horn's fist and snapped back into the shape of a man.
Horn, having pinned the mage down, looked at Harad with unmistakable pride.
"And how do you make him the mastermind?"
"He confessed it himself. With his own mouth."
Horn held up a fist — the very size of the bruises showing on the mage's skin. Meaning that caught and beaten, the man had spilled everything.
A confession, then. A confession was, at times, a surrender wrung out by pain. If so, the man ought to be pouring out grievances right now. But the mage kept still. Breaths shallow, no sweat on him — he shuddered only when their eyes happened to meet.
"Any resistance?"
"That was it."
The Sun Projection Harad had unveiled was the exception, not the rule — Horn was no weakling. A Horn who never dropped his guard was a knight fully capable of crossing blades with a 4th-Tier mage, and the mages who had ambushed Elaine had been 3rd Tier at their very best.
"Well caught."
"There was no magic there as strong as yours."
Just as knights of real strength were rare, the 4th Tier was a rare height to reach.
"Oh — that wasn't my meaning."
Harad said it while meeting the mage's eyes. The pupils trembled once more.
"The moment their ambush failed, they used to end themselves. To keep what they knew out of our hands, I'd say."
Again, no sooner said than done. The mage's mouth began to work; Horn's hand shot into the jaws before they could part. The mage's teeth closed on Horn's fingers instead of his tongue.
When eyes met it, it played at fear. Speak of flight and it flew; speak of self-destruction and it destroyed itself.
It's feeding back.
His words were not coming true — the mage was mining them for instructions. Self-destruction included. No ordinary human could do such a thing.
Less a person than a machine.
Harad could feel no emotion in the mage at all. Only calculated responses clung to the thing, thick as scale.
"Ah. So that's what you are."
Harad murmured, as though something had just become clear.
"You're a bug."
Arika, Ellen, and Horn all cracked smiles. The intent to provoke was obvious — and yet a word that wasn't even an insult landed strangely, eerily.
"That's too far, even for you. What's a bug supposed to— …huh?"
Ellen, mid-rebuke, suddenly swallowed her breath. Her gaze had nailed itself to the mage.
The mage who had shown nothing but fear until now was glaring at Harad as if it meant to kill him.
"How fascinating. Even the bug knows how to be angry."
Harad grinned.
Stuff a jar full of venomous insects and shut the lid, and in the end a single one remains. The strongest of them — the last one alive, grown fat on the venom of all the rest. That one is the Gu. The cruelest poison favored in Norbu, the desert nation of the continent's south.
"In the Outlands, they make them out of mages instead of insects."
Arika's eyes narrowed; Ellen's went round. Information that did not exist in Serzilla. Arika doubted it was true; Ellen believed it with her whole heart, and was astonished.
"A Gu, they call it — yet there is no poison in it. Mana grows in its place. It is a mage, after all."
A difference of faith — and yet in the end the two of them pulled exactly the same grimace.
"They don't throw in just anyone. Only mages of meager talent — of shabby Origins, in other words. Perfectly economical."
Harad was speaking from the Outlands' side of the table.
"The long and short of it is that a useless mage becomes a useful one. And since even emotion dies somewhere in the making, that usefulness carries all the more value."
"That is not a thing people should do."
"It is precisely what humans do."
Harad corrected her.
"You are still naive."
Ellen bristled. Arika did not take her side. Unlike Ellen, she knew a great deal about the continent.
"What exactly are you trying to say?"
Horn and the 2nd Knight Order had been sent back to their quarters. That, too, was Ellen's doing — and even Arika had caught on that the reason for it was disquieting. The situation was turning uncanny.
"That one let itself be caught."
The mage had sprung from the very derelict house Horn was combing. Their eyes met, it fled — the figure gone first, the presence after. The mage had been considerate of Horn. Lest the man fail to give chase.
The place of capture must carry meaning, too.
The mage had been taken not at the derelict house but at the inn that housed the 2nd Boundary tunnel.
Harad met the mage's eyes.
"No name, I'd wager. What do they call you?"
Elaine had suffered five ambushes.
"Number Six? Or are you the highest of the line — Number One?"
"…"
"Do speak, bug."
The light in the mage's eyes was murderous. It did not look the sort to open its mouth no matter how it was beaten. And yet Horn had wrung a confession from this very bug.
"Can it only say what it was permitted in advance?"
Not a confession, then — an order. If captured, say these things. Harad had no reason to refuse. It spared him the labor of interrogation, and he was confident he could winnow truth from whatever the mage's mouth produced.
"Go ahead, then."
"I am a Shadow."
The mage spoke as though it had been waiting for exactly that. A voice clogged thick with phlegm.
A Shadow.
Its Origin would be of that strain, too. Every spell the mages had used against Elaine had been built for stealth.
"Which Tower?"
"The Red Tower."
"Oh — I'm of the Red Tower myself. What a coincidence."
Arika's eyes narrowed. Ellen laughed out of sheer disbelief. She knew better than anyone how readily Harad pinned things on the Red Tower at the first pretext.
"And yet you are not fire."
"A shadow cannot exist without fire."
The Origins of the Sixth Tier shake the laws of the world; every Origin beneath them must bend to those same laws. That was why mages weighed affinity at all. So there was a certain logic to the Red Tower's ranks including a mage of a shadow-kin Origin.
"The Red Tower wants you."
Fire was a precious Origin. It was nothing strange for the Red Tower to want Harad.
"So they mean to wrap this whole affair around my neck."
The attempt on the Grand Duke's heir was the demonstration of a Red Tower that wanted Harad — the message that so long as Serzilla refused to give him up, the attacks would go on.
Which was why it had let itself be caught at that inn.
The tunnel beneath the inn, running down into the 2nd Boundary, led to the vicinity of the Sacred Ground of Fire. Ideal ground for tying the affair to the Red Tower.
"Ellen. What do you think?"
"…It hangs together."
Ellen's face was half-convinced, half-not. She seemed to be recalling Hervis of the fire watchtower. If the Red Tower was blind in its devotion to Origins of its own strain, it could be so.
"And you?"
Ellen asked in a carefully measured tone — as though, if anything, she hoped the culprit really was the Red Tower.
"I happen to know a great deal. About the Outlands, I mean."
"So?"
"The Shadow belongs to the Moon Tower. Not to our Red Tower."
At that, the mage's face warped. A Gu emptied of emotion — and yet Harad read emotion plain in its eyes.
"You're peeping, you know."
The pupils were dark — far too dark. Someone was looking out of them.
Harad spoke to the one peering.
"You are a deeply ambiguous creature."
Ellen flinched at the words. Ambiguous. That was the very word Harad had once used on Cassion.
"That you keep magical knowledge out of Serzilla, I can understand."
In this moment, through the mage's eyes, Harad was taking the watcher behind them for Cassion.
"But why did you kill so many Outland mages? Your fellow Outland mages, at that."
"Come to the Red Tower."
The mage spoke. Where the old voice had been thick with phlegm, this one scraped like sheet iron.
"The Eye. Compaso of the Ivory Tower, the same. Why did you kill him?"
"Come to the Red Tower."
"Why send your mages at the Grand Duke's heir alone? Killing me would have done."
"Come to the Red Tower."
"Why do you hate me?"
"Come to the Red Tower."
The answer never changed. But the peering gaze was climbing toward frenzy; black light bristled up out of the pupils like thorns.
"Then let me guess."
That emotion — Harad recognized it.
"Jealousy. Am I right?"
A thorn burst from the pupil and lunged to stab him. It never landed — the fire blooming up before Harad saw to that. The shadow checked itself just short of the flame, recoiling as though touch itself were loathsome.
"Then I've struck the mark."
Harad smirked.
"It's late today. Tomorrow, then."
"…"
"When the sun rises, I will call at the Grand Duke's residence. And I will say — that you were, in truth, a mage."
The shadow spilling out beyond the pupils swelled huge. It read as rage.
"His Grace will believe me long before he believes you."
The bloated shadow churned without pattern. It read as denial.
"Regrettably, it is the truth."
Grand Duke Aratus cherished Harad more than anyone would guess. The Harad of the previous life had reached that conclusion through firsthand experience.
"Your head will be dangling from His Grace's hand."
Harad swung his left hand like a hanging pendulum and smiled wide.
"So think it over carefully. Tonight is the last of the time you have left."
The mage's head struck the floor — at that very moment.
Ellen's sword, fresh from the neck, stopped before Harad's eyes.
"…Who were you just speaking with?"
"Cassion, commander of the 2nd Knight Order. You know him as well as I do."
Cassion was a mage — yet Harad could put no proof of it on the table. Because that proof was his regression.
Even if I said I had regressed, I doubt they'd believe me.
Which meant that, left as it was, the matter would run parallel forever, the two of them never meeting. If Cassion insisted he was no mage, Elaine would simply take his word for it.
Not Aratus, though.
That Grand Duke would take Cassion's head without a heartbeat's hesitation.
As he had in the previous life.
Borrowing the Grand Duke's hand would settle it easily enough. But that was exactly what he must not do.
It has to be different from the last time.
It was already different. It had to become more so. That was why Harad had put off his report.
The grace period running to dawn would corner Cassion. Force a choice on him — and what that choice would be, Harad could guess without half trying. He had to be ready for it.
Ready. And only one thing comes to mind.
It was hardship bought willingly — but the hardship had meaning, and what has meaning must be done. Every act of a regressor had to carry meaning.
If Cassion was to be executed, then the blade had to belong to Elaine — not to Grand Duke Aratus.
Or to me.
The former was the best of outcomes. The latter was close to the worst. If Harad's hand did the killing, Elaine would never be brought to accept it.
"…You're not going?"
Harad looked at Ellen, frankly baffled. She was sitting on the floor — the floor of the small annex that served as Harad's bedchamber.
"I'm sleeping here."
"At least spread a blanket, then."
Ellen looked, to any eye, as though she hadn't thought it through at all.
"No. You said yourself you'd report to His Grace at sunrise. I'm watching until then."
Her voice was needling sharp.
"If Sir Cassion really is a mage, he'll come for you before dawn. If he doesn't come, he isn't one."
"With you standing there, he may not come at all."
"Why not?"
"Because you are Serzilla too."
Harad was no longer speaking in riddles. He had grasped what manner of man Cassion was.
"Cassion is a greedy coward."
Ellen could not make sense of it.
"Either way, in your eyes Sir Cassion is a mage. That's what you're saying."
"It is."
"Well, I don't think so. If Sir Cassion hasn't come by sunrise, I am going to crush your report."
An unforeseen turn. Harad let out a groan. With Ellen there, the whole design came apart.
"I told you before — conviction and stubbornness are different things."
"And you have no evidence either. Nothing but your own eyes."
Harad opened his mouth, nothing left to lose.
"The truth is, I regre—"
-ressed.
No voice came out.
His lungs crumpled. It was as if a hand had closed around his heart.
…The Regression Stone?
He could not defy it. It was a law — he knew that much by instinct. Regression was not to be spoken of.
I won't tell.
Only after he had repeated it to himself several times over did his heart begin to move again. Air returned to his lungs.
"Regre-what?"
"I, in the futu—"
-re.
Breath vanished once more. Lungs and heart crumpled harder than before.
…I truly won't tell.
This time the repetition had to go on far longer. Only after a long while did heart and lungs right themselves. One more attempt, he felt, and he might genuinely die.
And yet it had worked with Gulen.
That he knew a magic for seeing the future — Harad had told Gulen as much, once. All so that the man would take up an axe.
So Elaine alone is the one I must never tell.
The Regression Stone did not merely cast him back through time. It seemed to keep constraints of its own.
What about routing it through another person?
He had only thought it — and his heart lurched to a dead stop. Apparently the Stone tolerated no loopholes, either. There was no sharing the regression except through dreams.
Wait.
He was not the only one the Stone had touched.
At the thought, surfacing unbidden, Harad turned his gaze on Ellen. Ellen, whose eyes had been wide open moments before, was lying down. The posture looked distinctly wrong — like someone struck unconscious against her will.
"I say."
"…"
No answer came.
"Ellen."
Harad slapped her cheek. Not a flicker. Only his own palm stung.
"Ellen."
He clenched his fist and struck again. A knight-grade blow — and her cheek did not so much as redden. Her Heavenly Might was monstrous.
"Hey."
He struck with flame in his fist. Only then did her cheek flush faintly.
"As expected."
Strike her as he might, Ellen did not wake. Just as there were strictures on him, there were strictures on her.
"So this is how the dreaming is done."
Given the needed stimulus, Ellen dreamed. And the dream came with compulsion fastened to it — Ellen sank into sleep regardless of her own will.
Only at night?
Or the instant the conditions were met? The former sat better than the latter. Then — at what hour? For how long? The things he wanted to verify piled up past counting. But the circumstances allowed none of it.
Harad drew a sheet of paper and a pen from the desk. The hand gripping the pen stopped.
"Better not to."
He must not force judgment on her. A puppet was not what Harad wanted. In his memory, the Elaine of the past had stood closer to a tyrant.
Harad gathered up Ellen's sword, scabbard and all. The hilt settling into his grip felt strange — and welcome all the same.
"Oh — Kubel."
Outside, Kubel was waiting. What he held was steaming into the night air: the late-night meal Ellen had ordered for herself.
"Half — no, half of a half will do. Ellen's fallen asleep."
The meat had been grilled for easy eating and threaded onto skewers; Harad took two.
"It will be some time before she wakes."
"Was… was it your doing, Harad?"
"Mm. Half of it is my responsibility."
The other half belonged to the Elaine of the past.
The meat was excellent. As Harad ate, Kubel's eyes traveled over him from head to toe. This was not the getup of a man out for air — Ellen's sword hung at his hip.
"Ah — it isn't stolen. I'm only borrowing it a while."
"Where… where are you going?"
"A walk."
At that,
Kubel's face set hard — the look of a man who had steeled himself for something.
"The only thing left for you today is putting Shura to bed."
"B-but… but…"
"And once Ellen wakes up, just put this in her mouth for her."
Harad smiled, pointing at the remaining skewers of meat.