The Tunnel Digger (1)
Inside a field of vision gone pitch-black, Elaine instinctively knew she was about to dream.
Not now, of all times.
She still had to go confirm the two people Shura had flagged as possible tunnel diggers.
But Elaine felt a torrent she had no strength to resist. If a dream came, it had to be dreamed; if she wanted to wake, the dream would have to end on its own.
The torrent swallowed Elaine whole and swept her away.
Where it stopped was a tavern. Ellen sat at the bar, having ordered the house's tastiest food and its strongest liquor.
The tavern was familiar. So was the face of the owner taking her order with a smile.
It was Flowerbed's Flesh. A magician of the ripple Origin set out food and drink.
"Thank you. For everything, always."
That was what Ellen said to the tunnel broker, smiling.
Which meant it was Ellen in there. Not Elaine.
Even in her dreams, that woman had indulged in her little escapes. And she'd been a regular at Flowerbed's Flesh in exactly the same way.
Well. Tsk.
It wasn't all that strange, really.
It was her dream, after all. Of course it would be built out of reality.
She had just drained a bottle and was lighting a smoke when the owner set out fresh liquor.
"I didn't order that."
"It's a gift — five whole years since you became a regular!"
At that exchange, Elaine let out a hollow laugh.
Didn't that mean the Ellen of this dream had been taken in for five entire years?
The scene flowed swiftly past. Ellen accepted the drink with a happy little sound, smoked, devoured the magic-laced dishes declaring them delicious, then ordered more.
Stupid woman.
Elaine sneered at her.
She couldn't write it off as a meaningless nightmare, though.
If not for Harad, reality would have looked much the same.
Never mind the tunnel beneath the tavern — she wouldn't even have known the owner was a magician.
What was Harad doing back then?
In the dream, Elaine and Harad had been close.
It couldn't have been that way from the start.
At their first meeting, Elaine had mocked Harad as a cripple.
The Harad of reality had snapped back with some sneer about the kind of upbringing Serzilla provided.
The Harad of the dream just trembled like a leaf.
As if that were all. The Harad of the dream had been dragged across the tunnel by force, by the Second Knight Order, and at the Boundary he'd done nothing but dawdle through a fortnight.
The early Harad of the dream had been precisely the coward the North despised most.
So the difference was never in me. It was in Harad.
If Harad had been incompetent —
That, it seemed, was the hypothesis the dream was showing her.
Five years would make her twenty-four.
Elaine had been coming and going at Flowerbed's Flesh since she was nineteen.
Which meant that in the dream, at least four years had passed with no contact between her and Harad at all.
Harad had been brought here as a hostage at twenty.
So she knows nothing.
The twenty-four-year-old Ellen of the dream would likely be ignorant of the Boundary itself, let alone the tunnels.
At best, she'd have gone out on the occasional hunting day.
And I've already been to the Second Boundary.
Elaine was in the middle of comparing dream against reality when the tavern door swung open.
The man was a stranger to Elaine — and he seemed to be one to the Ellen of the dream as well.
Even to the owner of Flowerbed's Flesh.
"Haven't seen your face before."
The owner offered the man seated at the bar a smile.
"First time here."
The man ordered haltingly.
He looked distinctly awkward, and his social graces didn't seem much better. And yet here he was, alone in a tavern — that combination prodded Ellen's curiosity in earnest, and she spoke up.
"Where are you from? You don't look northern."
"……I am, actually. Northern."
He was a terribly thin man.
There was nothing to his face but bone — an impression hard to reconcile with the North.
"Really?"
"Yes. I lived in the southwest district."
Something about the man's voice sounded labored.
Phlegm caught in it, breath heavy between the words. Like an old man's.
"That's a long way from here. How did you come to know this place?"
"Someone who helped me recommended it. Said it was unique, and very good."
Just then the food arrived.
The man fell upon it ravenously.
He didn't look thin from not eating; he looked thin from having been unable to eat.
"Take your time. Nobody's going to steal it."
"……I'm sorry. It's been a long while since I've had a proper meal……"
"Was someone tormenting you?"
The man's spoon stopped dead.
His dazed eyes lifted to Ellen.
"Why so startled? Anyone can see it, looking at the state of you."
"……I suppose so."
"Do you need help? I can help you."
Ellen drew something from inside her coat.
A badge proving her an agent of the Serzilla Information Bureau. The man's whole body flinched at the sight of it.
"I-I'm all right. Someone has already helped me."
"The one who recommended this place?"
"Yes. Yes, that's right. I should be going now."
The man rose as though pressed by urgent business.
"Already?"
Ellen pointed at his food.
More than half of it was still there.
To Elaine's eye, the man was suspicious enough.
But the Ellen of the dream thought nothing of it.
"……I couldn't eat another bite anyway."
For all one's suspicion, the man was too thin, too wretched-looking.
His voice, drained of all strength, was like a dying old man's.
"Take this."
Ellen pressed the Information Bureau badge into the hand of the man who was trying to leave.
"If you ever need help, grab any soldier you can find and show them this, along with my name. Ah — I'm Ellen, by the way."
The man looked back and forth between Ellen and the badge.
The faster his head swung, the wetter his dazed eyes grew. What the emotion was, she couldn't tell.
"Rick…… My name is Rick."
And that was the last of it.
"……This dream is a strange one."
Elaine muttered as she woke.
It was quite unlike any dream she'd had before.
Harad hadn't appeared even once.
Instead, the Harad of reality was there.
He was staring straight down at her as she came to.
"Care to tell me about it? You were dreaming again."
"I'll tell you later."
"Why?"
"Come to think of it — where is this?"
Not Kubel's annex.
They were outdoors. Through the driving snow, the sun stood at high noon.
"In front of their house."
"I was asleep."
"I carried you here."
"Who did?"
"I did."
"Ah."
"You snore far worse than you look, by the way."
Me?
Elaine barely held herself in check.
Russell was a fur merchant from the northern great plains, famed above all for the clean way he stripped a hide.
The leather shop Russell ran was a name to be reckoned with in Serzilla's southwest district.
"Finest hands in the trade, like always. If you could get your paws on magic beast hides, they'd have carried you off to the Inner Castle long ago."
"Haha. You flatter me."
"You free today?"
A burly customer, hair sprouting from every inch of him, settled in as if to linger over a drink.
Most of the mercenaries who couldn't get their hands on magic beast hides were Russell's regulars.
"Ah, no, I can't today. Believe me, I'd like nothing more, but……"
Russell let the words trail off and shot a sidelong glance toward the back of the shop.
"Mother's got you tied down again, eh? You're a proper devoted son, you are."
Russell had an elderly mother, and perhaps because of her, he rarely went out on outside business.
"Bag a good beast and bring it by again, y'hear."
The mercenary left the shop, grumbling his regret.
And a new one came in right after.
He was carrying a wolf, dead no more than hours, blood still dripping from it, and Russell took it in back as a matter of course and stripped the hide.
Not a customer worth any money, but Russell didn't care.
He ran his shop like a man with no greed for coin.
The mercenary took his hide and left, just like that.
The reeking tannery stood on the outskirts of the territory.
He'd barely paused to catch his breath before another customer walked in. And so Russell stripped yet another hide, and sold five.
The door opened the instant Russell settled into his chair.
A customer he'd never seen before. Tall and slight of build — an appearance you'd hardly find in the North.
Only, there was nothing weak about him.
On a day this cold the man wore short sleeves, and the neatly packed muscle of his arms looked dense and hard as braided rope.
Russell couldn't take his eyes off him.
Not merely because attending him was his duty. There was something about the man that pulled the gaze in.
"Oh. Quite the established shop you've got here."
The man's amber eyes were what struck one first.
Those eyes swept the interior of the shop, then came to rest on Russell.
"Would you be the owner?"
"Y-yes. Russell, at your service."
Russell answered with a smile.
In the North, that was a way of asking to be underestimated.
"Doesn't that get you walked all over?"
"That's why only the right sort come through that door."
"I see. Words only a man confident in his craft can afford."
"You're too kind."
Russell laughed, modest and self-effacing.
"No. I mean every word. Which is why I never knew, until now."
The man's amber eyes gleamed.
So it looked to Russell, anyway. That flash of something different was startlingly intense.
"Your work is astonishing."
Hides were displayed in profusion across the shop.
Russell hadn't worked them all himself, but sourcing and moving them was a skill of his too, if you could call it one.
"Flawless. Not a single seam showing."
But the man wasn't looking at the hides.
He was looking at Russell's face.
"Is it the sort that needs magic only when the mask goes on? In that case there'd be a limit to how long it holds."
"I beg your pardon?"
"And yet you've been running this leather shop for ten years. So that legal identity is all there is, I take it. The real business gets done under a different face."
"I'm afraid I don't take your meaning……"
"Does that face have to be burned off before the real one comes out?"
"The Church!"
Russell shouted it on reflex.
Burning magicians at the stake — that was the Church's favorite cry.
Sun and Moon, and of the two, the judgment beloved of the Sun.
Russell's hand shot out. A dagger sat in it.
He'd been empty-handed a moment ago.
Harad tipped his head just enough to let it pass, caught the wrist, and wrenched it.
"Ugh."
The cry was short, but the glare behind it was vicious. The left hand was already coming — and sure enough, a dagger was clenched in it.
"As expected."
Harad seized Russell's left hand as well and bent it back.
He shook both arms, and two daggers clattered to the floor — where they turned back into a pair of gloves.
"So you're the mask."
He had thrown the mask of "daggers" over a pair of gloves.
And it could alter more than a person's appearance.
A genuinely novel Origin.
Crash! Russell kicked the table clean over. The table became a boulder and came barreling at Harad.
There was no need to shape any magic of his own. Harad stopped the rolling rock dead with the sole of his foot.
"Weaker than I expected. Good in a fight — but that's all you are."
Harad cocked his head.
"Well, it figures. How strong could a mere mask be?"
The table had simply become a rock. That was the whole of the mask's magic.
"The Church, is it?"
"Somewhere far greater."
At that, a new light came into Russell's eyes.
It seemed anything was tolerable, so long as it wasn't the Church.
"Do you know who stands behind me?"
"And who would that be?"
That confidence. Harad's curiosity sharpened to a point.
Who on earth could the backer be?
"For the record, the Grand Duke's daughter is standing behind you."
On cue, the door in the corner opened.
The room where Russell's family lived.
"I'm curious myself."
Elaine walked out with her hand clamped around an old woman's throat.
"Just who is it you have behind you?"
Russell's face, recognizing Elaine's, went darker still.
"Serzilla……!"
"What's so surprising? This is Serzilla."
Elaine's face wore an anger she rarely showed.
"Don't tell me you thought you wouldn't be found."
Because he'd said it wasn't the Church.
Russell had turned suddenly, insolently confident.
"Is your nature less frightening than the Church's, then?"
That, apparently, was what grated on Elaine worst of all.
"Magicians are usually like that."
"You included?"
"If you wish it, I'll be frightening."
"Hm. That's quite enough. Don't. Now that I think on it, it's distasteful. Nothing good ever came of ruling through fear."
"As you say."
Arika was in the middle of wrapping Russell in a lavish cocoon of chains when it happened.
"Hah…… haaah……"
The old woman heaved out a great breath.
It almost sounded like words.
"Was she like this inside as well?"
"She could barely manage to move."
The old woman looked as though standing on her own was beyond her.
That was why she hadn't been bound in chains. Cinch them too tight and it seemed the breath would simply leave her.
"Strange, isn't it."
Harad nodded along.
Russell was the mask-wearer. The old woman was supposed to be the tunnel digger.
She's wearing a mask shaped like an old woman.
Gloves had become daggers; a table had become a boulder.
For as long as the mask held, the tunnel digger would be an old woman.
An old woman who couldn't even hold her own body up.
Why an old woman, of all things? She'd be nothing but a hindrance.
Wasn't that exactly the situation now?
Russell had at least put up a fight; the tunnel digger had done nothing at all before being taken.
"Hah! Ha, hah!"
The old woman kept heaving it out.
Only then did Harad realize it wasn't breathing. It was speech.
"Take it off. The mask."
Harad said.
Elaine swung her palm into Russell's face.
A light blow, yet teeth rattled loose. For some reason, Elaine's expression had gone rigid.
"S-spare me, please……"
A woman's voice spilled out of Russell's mouth.
The blow seemed to have cracked the mask.
Quick to fold, aren't you.
Russell — the mask-wearer — evidently didn't have much steel in him.
"Undo it, or you really die."
The words were barely out before Russell's face melted into a woman's.
A woman with strikingly pale skin and freckles scattered tight across her face.
"I-Isota. My name is Isota."
Russell — no, Isota — poured out even a name no one had asked for.
"Take that one's mask off too."
"……"
At some point the old woman had become a middle-aged man.
The tunnel digger's true face was that of a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man.
A man who was a woman. An old woman who was a man.
Shura's eyes had been right on the mark.
Then it happened.
The tunnel digger dropped to his knees without warning, bowing his head to the floor before Harad and Elaine.
"K-kill me. Please."
To Harad, it looked like a confession of guilt.
But that wasn't what mattered.
"Rick?"
Elaine knew the tunnel digger's name.