The Tunnel Digger (2)
"P-please, kill me."
Elaine's call seemed not to reach the tunnel digger at all. He looked for all the world like a man gone deaf—so earnest were his pleas, so utterly desperate.
"P-please!"
Rick's voice came out like ragged breathing, the rasp of an old man with ruined lungs.
A side effect of the mask? It seemed he had simply worn the old woman's face for too long. Isota is fine because the mask is her own Origin. If anything, Rick might be younger than he looked.
"Who is it you want killed?" Harad asked.
Rick's fingers trembled like an old man's. But one of them pointed, unmistakably, at Isota.
"Rick! You dare—!" Isota shrieked.
Bad blood between them? An unexpected turn, but Harad had no attention to spare for it.
"So it really is Rick."
Elaine was nodding slowly to herself.
How did she know? Elaine knew the tunnel digger's name. Harad glanced at Arika for a moment, but her face was pure astonishment. Which meant only Elaine had known.
A dream? That was the only thing he could point to. The tunnel digger turned up in a dream she had on the way here? Harad's brow furrowed. The Elaine of his past life could never have known the tunnel digger. He and Elaine had not been close enough to share secrets of that magnitude.
"How did you know?"
"...At Flowerbed's Flesh." Elaine murmured it as though entranced. "He's in better shape than in my dream."
Presently she blinked, as if waking, and struck her own cheek with her fist. "Forget that. I mustn't be fully awake yet."
Harad realized Elaine had been talking about a dream. So she ran into him by chance while drinking. She couldn't have known Rick was the tunnel digger—which meant it was simple coincidence. Nothing about that strained belief. The only secret Elaine had ever kept from Harad was her own sex. That was the sort of relationship they had.
"We should put things in order first."
Elaine was right. The leather tent was a shambles.
"Please, kill me..."
"Rick! You son of a bitch—!"
Rick lay prostrate, begging, while Isota, bound in chains, raged at him for it.
"I'll spare one of the two of you. Whichever bears the lighter crime."
"He's the one who dug the tunnels!"
The words were barely out of his mouth before Isota howled them. Harad clubbed her over the head, and she slumped, out cold.
"Then we'll hear yours first. Name and background."
"R-Rick. From Tourem."
Tourem was a city west of Serzila. Which made him a Northerner. Rick. Elaine stroked her chin, her face gone stiff.
"Would it be easier to write?"
"I-I'll speak."
Rick's voice only grew rougher. Every word dragged up worse coughing; even breathing looked like a struggle.
"I was a vagrant."
Perhaps he couldn't write at all. A mage born on the continent who wound up a wandering beggar was a common enough tale.
"Couldn't control it well, I take it."
"Not when I was young."
The moment he let his guard slip, he said, the earth would come crawling up his legs. Rick showed them: through the gaps in the wooden floorboards, soil rose like insects. So Rick's Origin was earth.
"What Circle?"
"I was told 2nd Circle."
Rick answered with his eyes on the unconscious Isota. He was a mage of the continent, ignorant in the ways of magic. So he's not one of theirs. Isota, on the other hand, knew what Circles were.
"2nd Circle. And you managed to dig tunnels anyway. Must have taken ages. How many?"
"Th-thirteen."
"That's a lot."
A single tunnel would have taken months on its own.
"Why did you dig them?"
Tunneling was a fine trade. Given Serzila's indifference, it could hardly have failed—continent mages desperate simply to live existed in every age. But Rick's purpose had never been escape. He had dug thirteen tunnels, and he was still in Serzila.
"To make money? To crawl out of vagrancy?"
"..."
Rick gave no answer. Harad considered a beating, then clicked his tongue. One blow might well finish the man. Besides, the reason hardly mattered. What mattered was the tunnels.
"Thirteen tunnels. Where?"
Harad held out the map and pen he had brought along. A map of Serzila Territory.
"Talk, and you live."
Rick took the map and pen and looked up at Harad with blank eyes. It was just as Harad sensed something amiss that Elaine spoke up.
"Rick. Do you need help, by any chance?"
"..."
"I can help you."
Rick's eyes wavered, ever so slightly. Tears gathered at their corners.
It had been ten years ago. He couldn't remember the exact date—only that it was a night when even the cold North felt colder than usual.
All Rick had done that day was dig a hole. Because it was too cold. Because he felt he would truly die if he didn't get out of the wind. It hadn't taken any great resolve; Rick did it often. He was a vagrant, and Tourem was a small city with no shortage of deserted back alleys. ...He had simply been a little unlucky that day. That was all he'd thought at the time.
"I'm a mage too." That was what the woman had said when she saw Rick bending the dirt to his will. The woman Rick spoke of was Isota.
Now he was glaring at her as if he would kill her where she knelt.
"So he fell into the wrong hands."
Harad clicked his tongue, Rick's past laid bare before him. For ten years, Rick had lived as the old woman. The old woman—that mask had never been a disguise. It was a shackle. A shackle that made escape impossible.
Not a person to her. A tool. Isota dug her tunnels through the tool called Rick. Day to day she kept him as the old woman; whenever business called, she hauled him underground and set him to digging.
"So she gave him back his true face when it was time to dig."
Even so, there was nothing Rick could have done. He was a mage who couldn't afford to make noise. What was more, Isota stood a Circle above him. Whenever he dug, she was at his back. Had he so much as resolved to try something clever, he would have died. So Rick could dig nothing but tunnels. All he had ever wanted was to live.
"So that's why he begged for her death."
The moment the mask came off, Rick had begged for Isota to die. How deep the hatred must have run for Isota—she who had fawned over him like a devoted child the rest of the time.
Now this, I never saw coming. Kubel drifted through his mind. There was dust in Harad's judgment, and that dust was called prejudice. Prejudice was clouding his eyes yet again. In his past life, the tunnel digger and the mask mage had been inseparable, so naturally he had assumed them partners in crime. To think the mask mage had been wringing the tunnel digger dry all along.
The tunnel digger defects to the Outlands. Harad finally understood why Isota had never appeared in that line he'd heard in his past life. Perhaps Ios hadn't met Rick in secret at all—perhaps he had saved him. Kill him, or take him in.
But judging by Elaine's expression, Rick was to be kept alive.
"We need the tunnels' locations, and everyone connected to them."
"...I know that as well."
Elaine, who had been a breath away from grinding Isota's skull underfoot, exhaled. Rick knew only that he had dug thirteen tunnels with his own two hands. Of their locations, or the brokers tied to them, he knew nothing.
"I trust there's no lie in what you've told me."
Rick answered with a cough thick with blood. His throat had worn out from so brief a spell of speech—after so many years as the old woman, his body had come to follow the old woman's nature.
A more dangerous Origin than I thought. The mask was an Origin well worth having. If only its bearer weren't a criminal.
Elaine drove her boot into Isota's stomach. Thud. The dull weight of it rolled through the leather tent.
"Hurk—"
Isota came to with the cough. There was far more blood in it than there had been in Rick's.
"S-Serzila..."
Isota couldn't even voice her pain. Elaine was looking down at her with eyes like a sheet of ice.
"H-he's the one who dug the tunnels!"
Isota pointed at Rick without a moment's hesitation. She was weeping freely now, too—call it the mask's nature, but her acting was remarkably fine. It was enough to raise the doubt that Rick might have been the liar after all.
"I know. He confessed. But press him as we might, he wouldn't breathe a word about the locations or the brokers."
"..."
"Now it's your turn."
Isota drew in one long, deep breath. A long while passed before she let it out—the time it took to grasp reality, and then to accept it. Her mind moved quickly, as a mage's would.
"You mean to kill me regardless."
Death stood an inch from her face, yet Isota balked at speaking. The reason was plain.
"Whoever stands behind you must be truly terrifying. No—an organization, I'd say."
"..."
"But the only one who needs to fear them is you. This is Serzila."
Harad said it, pointing at Elaine. If the backer were genuinely formidable, they would have run the tunnels themselves rather than hand them to brokers.
Not the Outlands. Each magic tower acted on its own, and none touched another tower's affairs. Ios, moreover, had belonged to the Ivory Tower. Ios made contact with the tunnel digger. In my past life the Ivory Tower stayed neutral. They would never lay a hand on another tower's business. Isota's backing was on the continent. And any organization of mages the continent could field was nothing to write home about. Nowhere outdid Serzila.
"There is a way to lighten your sentence. I imagine you know it."
"..."
"Think wisely. This is the North."
Isota's eyes rolled in her head. Before long they stopped—on the floor, at the end of her gaze, where the map and pen Rick had dropped lay waiting.
"The locations... the brokers..."
"For the record, we will be verifying them."
"...I understand," Isota murmured.
Arika, standing behind her, drew Isota's right arm free of the chains. The hand took up the pen and dragged the map close to her face. Lying prone as she was, she circled one spot after another. Harad, naturally, recognized every last one. So did Elaine and Arika. Thirteen circles in all—the same number of tunnels Rick had named. Among them were the three tunnels Harad and Ellen had used. Isota, it seemed, had no intention of feeding them lies.
"Now write down those who bought their way through as well."
"...Yes."
Isota gripped the pen again. Beneath each circle she wrote several names—some Elaine knew, some she didn't.
"Nobles among them. Nobles with no Northern blood, at that."
Elaine's face went cold and still. Isota's whole body shuddered once. Elaine's fury was cold as ice. She had been that way in his past life, too. When Elaine grew angry, her expressions dwindled to nothing. Is this how she rages when she's being the Grand Duke's child? Ellen had always worn her emotions in the open.
"What would you have me do?"
Arika asked.
"Verify it first. If it holds, deal with it as you always do."
"Understood."
At Elaine's word, Arika gathered the papers and left the leather tent. As you always do. Harad knew exactly what that meant. From time immemorial, the North had never once forgiven an enemy.
"I trust you haven't lied."
"I-I haven't. ...Is that all, then?"
Isota asked with elaborate care. She was more docile than he'd expected—because that was the only hope she had left.
She wants to live rather badly. Hers was the sort for whom nothing mattered above her own neck. Harad's eyes narrowed as he watched her. If there was a thinking organization behind her, they would never let a creature like this simply walk away.
Is there a plant? Nothing in particular made itself known to him. The Sun. With it for an Origin, Harad's senses were exceptionally keen. And beside him stood Elaine, keener still. If such a person existed, Elaine would react first.
"The tunnels' exits bother me. Some lie close to the Outlands, some far. Why?"
"He was clumsy."
Because Rick was no good, she meant. Gauging direction underground was, admittedly, no simple matter. That was why the exits lay scattered across the 1st and 2nd Boundaries.
"That's why I dug thirteen."
"Trial and error."
Having gone to the trouble of digging them, they had kept every one rather than let it go to waste, he supposed.
"What were the tunnels for? Did the Outlands order it? Or was it money?"
Isota bit her lip. But her deliberation was short.
"The Outlands didn't order it. Truthfully, I hardly know anything. I only did as I was told from above."
"Told to do what?"
"To make connection points with the Outlands. Along the way, I got lucky and found him."
So the tunnels had been Isota's own idea, it seemed.
"You've a real knack for business, my friend."
"P-pardon? Ah—y-yes."
"And the profits?"
"I handed it all up to them."
Isota was clever, and her loyalty was impeccable. She simply hadn't been devoted enough to offer up her own life along with it.
"I-Is that all now?"
"One last question. Who is this 'above'?"
"..."
Isota bit her lip once more. This time the deliberation ran long. The silence stretched thin—yet in the end, she opened her mouth.
"I, I—"
Thump. A faint, muffled burst sounded.
Isota went limp in the same instant. She crumpled to the floor. Elaine, her eyes gone round, turned her gaze on Harad.
"What am I supposed to do if she's dead?"
"...It wasn't me."