The Guest (1)
The Order was the natural enemy of magicians.
Not because divine power outclassed magic. The title existed because the Order's answer to a magician was to kill first and ask questions never.
A natural enemy, sure enough.
At least, that held true on the continent. Before the Order, a magician's options were few. Hide, run, or die. Even the Liberation Magic Tower, the greatest body of magicians on the continent, lived in hiding.
Such was the gulf in power — overwhelming. One against an organization. No, one against the entire continent. For the moment anyone on the continent laid eyes on a magician, their first act was to report it to the Order.
"Did worry for me bring you all this way?"
"If you're caught, it becomes Serzila's problem."
It was a fair point. But it was equally true that Arika was a woman incapable of plain honesty.
"And Kubel and Shura?"
"They've already been moved to an Information Bureau safehouse."
Harad nodded. He couldn't picture Kubel standing face-to-face with a member of the Order. A priest might not be able to pick a magician out of a crowd, but the psychological pressure alone would be crushing.
"But why the Order?"
The Order did not come north. It was a kind of unwritten law dating back to the Imperial Sabbatical, born of a wish not to further provoke Serzila's already-soured temper.
"Because of you, obviously."
That had never happened in the previous life. Even back in the days when he had been little more than an insect underfoot, a visit from the Order would have been answered with a warning coming down.
"So it's Pelatz, then."
A man of the envoy was dead. For an Empire that read Serzila's moods and wanted its favor, it was a matter it could never raise itself.
"He must have gone around brandishing that word — magician."
The Order was another beast entirely. They had long hungered to build churches in the North, and longed to see the North grow weak. A magician was the one pretext that drove the Order out of its mind. Armed with that pretext, there was nowhere they would not go.
"Exactly. The church at Fremont that hosted the envoy claims to have sensed a magician's hand in Pelatz's death."
Fremont sat at the northern edge of the Empire. There was no road from Serzila to the capital that did not pass through it.
"'Sensed it,' did they."
Harad laughed low. So it was — deceit came to the Order as naturally as breathing.
"Flimsy grounds. Hardly a pretext that would hold with Serzila."
The North dealt with its magicians in-house. For a priest to operate openly in such a land, a far clearer justification was needed — a wanted magician turning up, say, or a catastrophe on a grand scale.
"His Highness the Grand Duke has permitted it."
"Ah."
So that was why Kubel and Shura had been moved out of the Inner Castle — the safest place in the territory — and into a Bureau safehouse. Grand Duke Aratus fully intended to throw the Inner Castle open to the visiting priests.
"I see. A verification, then."
"Not a test?"
Ellen tilted her head, as though she had taken this, too, for another trial Harad had staged for himself.
"I wondered the same, but it isn't. If it were, Arika wouldn't have come all this way fussing over me and telling me to hide."
"It isn't fussing."
Arika shot back. This was Arika, after all — the woman who lived for Serzila. Had the Grand Duke's intent truly been a test, she would never have taken Harad's side.
"His Highness wishes to see how a priest, once admitted to the Inner Castle, will react."
"React to what?"
"The Order cannot tell a magician apart from anyone else. What they do have is a long record of hunting them."
They had flailed far more often than they had succeeded — but it remained true that they had hunted plenty.
"Me, Kubel, Shura, and Cassion, who drops by now and then. There are already four magicians under the Inner Castle's roof. That must be the point."
Would the Order find the traces of magicians? Aratus meant to see for himself.
"Which makes it a good sign. It means His Highness has no intention of casting out Kubel, Shura, or Cassion any time soon."
Pulling Kubel and Shura out of harm's way had been a careful decision. For the sake of what was coming, it was a door that simply had to be knocked on.
"And you?"
"Me? It goes without saying."
…
Harad said it with maddening ease. But it was the plain truth. Over the past half year, the merit he had piled up outweighed that of any knight in Serzila.
"His Highness will likely show the priests the annex where Kubel and I live as well. A little inspection, I'd wager."
"And if they actually notice something?"
"Then the priest will simply have perished on the road, in the treacherous North."
…
"Not that it will come to that."
Harad was certain. Men who couldn't pick a magician out of a crowd would hardly recognize a house where one lived.
"If they'd ever studied or researched the matter, perhaps. Otherwise, impossible."
And if they did notice — it wouldn't mean the priest was remarkable. It would mean the magician living there had grown careless.
"Is there anything like that in your place?"
"Nothing."
Harad had never been the type to hole up. Elaine had dragged him out into the world round after round, ever since the old days.
"Ah. Though I do have communication tubes and quills. Well — war spoils."
Taken from the Outlands and the Liberation Tower. Nothing that could raise an eyebrow.
"…Then you stay outside the Inner Castle, too."
To Ellen's eyes, it seemed, that read as complacency.
"I'll be fine. What did I tell you? I could share a meal with the Pope himself."
"Don't spout bullshit."
It was true, though.
"When does the Order arrive?"
"Today at the earliest, tomorrow at the latest."
The North was a land where schedules slipped. Priests, however, were the exception.
"Just go off somewhere and keep yourself amused. We'll see to clearing out your annex."
Ellen shooed him off with the order.
"Only for today?"
"Until the priests leave."
…
He had lost his house.
So what was he to do now?
In truth, nothing changed. The desert would have been another matter, but Harad could sleep anywhere in the North. So he would simply do as he had always done.
The Information Bureau's safehouses scattered across the territory were more numerous than one might expect. Most stood empty, for the Bureau of the present day had spread its reach across the entire continent.
Harad made for one of those empty houses.
The place was small, and the wind whistled freely in and out of its gaping windows. From the outside, it passed for abandoned. But examine the floor of the privy closely and you would find a groove so faint it barely registered — and at the center of that square groove, a hole no wider than the point of a needle.
Harad seated a needle into it. That was the key Arika had given him. Lifting the floor panel — a door in its own right — revealed a staircase.
The stairs were crude and short. That said nothing of the Bureau's capability; what was truly impressive was the underground space the brokers had assembled below.
Come to think of it, Rick must have dug this, too.
Rick the tunneler had, it seemed, dug tunnels branching off tunnels. Thirteen of them. And Rick had wasted ten years of his life on them.
So he digs better than I gave him credit for.
In truth, he had dug not only the thirteen tunnels but every underground chamber the brokers had wanted — and as an old man, no less.
Recovered, and in his prime again, he'll dig faster still.
Which meant Rick's value only climbed. The northern ground was hard as iron. If someone could warm it — no, make it scorching hot…
At the foot of the stairs, a door opened onto an ordinary room.
Rick sat slumped in a chair, staring blankly ahead. A few pebbles lay on the desk before him; a stone touched by his hand turned to soil and crumbled away.
"Practicing your magic?"
Rick jolted, snatching his hand off the desk as he shot to his feet.
"F-forgive me. When I use magic, I can't see what's around me…"
"I understand. There are magicians like that."
For Rick it would be far worse. He had worn the mask of a feeble old man and dug his tunnels alone — an environment in which his awareness could reach nowhere but inward.
"Have you been keeping well? You look all right to me."
Rick's voice was hoarse, but unmistakably better than at their first meeting. His once skin-and-bones face had filled out a little.
"Y-yes. Thanks to you, I've been well…"
For all the timidity in his voice, his color was good.
"'Well' is one word for it. The accommodations don't look like much."
Harad swept the room with an exaggerated, scrutinizing gaze. A cellar without a single ray of sunlight.
"N-no! I like places like this!"
It didn't sound like a lie. Rick's face was at ease.
The walls are bare earth?
The walls had never been finished — a cellar thrown up in haste. And yet it seemed to suit Rick perfectly. He drew a sense of calm from the earth pressing in on all four sides, because his Origin was the earth itself.
"Glad to hear it. It does look cramped, but there will be chances to expand it."
"If — if I earn merit…?"
"So Arika talked to you. Yes. What was it she said, again?"
"…That I might… might have to dig more tunnels."
Am I even allowed to say this? — Rick's face asked it plainly as he answered.
Harad laughed low. Arika had read his mind.
As expected of Arika.
That was why Rick had been turning pebbles into soil. He was practicing — rehearsing the work he had spent the past ten years doing.
Diligent fellow.
It was a temperament Harad liked.
"Right. I do mean to have a tunnel dug. One running through Serzila's ground, connecting to a stretch of the Boundary I have in mind."
Grand Duke Aratus's approval was still pending, but a few more rounds of pressure would see it through. The reward for capturing Psina had yet to be collected, after all.
"I can do it! I can dig bigger and faster than anything I've dug before!"
Rick was a magician whose will to survive ran fierce — and he knew perfectly well that doing exactly as Serzila commanded was his only way of staying alive.
"Of course you will."
Rick hunched into himself. Harad's voice had gone quite cold.
"You had better do it well. And doing it well won't be enough, either."
It was spite.
Looking at Rick, the previous life rose before him — Serzila, toyed with by tunnels, and Elaine, gnawed by regret at having missed the Outlands' tunnels.
This is not something to air.
It was a future that no longer existed.
Harad quashed the irritation. He had not come to take a man to task for things that had never happened. He had come to take the measure of Rick himself.
"A magician's child stands on one side, an ordinary child on the other. Which of the two do you kill?"
"Th-they're children. Must they be killed…?"
It was an answer that would surely have satisfied Elaine.
"You would make a fine Northerner."
And she would have said just that.
A magician must be rational.
Harad had never much agreed with the saying. Everyone had their own way of doing things. Not even the greatest magicians were uniformly rational — as proof, Harad was confident he would have been strong even without ever once reining in his own nature.
To be sure, keeping one's reason helped enormously on the magical side of things. But that was not why he strove for it. The decisive reason Harad worked to stay rational was that Elaine wished him to be.
A regressor must be more rational still.
It was why he had once agonized over whether Kubel, someday, would have to die — and why he had concluded that Cassion must.
The regressed Harad had meant to cut away everything that had poisoned the previous life. He had not managed it. Rationally, it had been the correct choice — but one day, Ellen would certainly have come to regret it. Someday, through her dreams, she would come to understand that magicians, too, were people.
This regression exists to erase Elaine's regrets.
Manufacturing new ones would render it meaningless. Perhaps such a day would come regardless — but in the end, the heart of the regression was Elaine. He would keep rationality as his foundation, and at times bend the road toward what Elaine wanted. The regressed Harad's role was, in the end, that of a mediator: endlessly balancing Elaine's heart against the exclusions inherited from the previous life, and through that balance guiding her growth and change.
That was why he had gone to see Rick. Elaine wished for the man's survival; but the regressed Harad had needed to verify it once more, with a clear eye. The tunnels were too grave a matter for less.
Wretched business, really.
Rick had been as docile as expected. Time wasted, then — but not time worth mourning. It had been Elaine's time to begin with.
If she minds so much, she should have come herself.
He was already doing more than well enough. Not that anyone remained to tell him so.
The sun had set before he knew it. The search had taken six days, which made tonight the seventh since the envoy's departure.
Seven days.
Seizing on Pelatz's death, the Order had sent a priest up north.
And then—
Something pressed, soft and deliberate, against Harad's coat. Judging by the area of contact and the sharpness of the point, it was a blade.
The northern night was dark as nowhere else. Even so, the streets stayed crowded; people had to drink, brawl, and move in packs just to keep their blood warm. Harad was in the thick of that crowd.
And the man threatening him with a dagger was at his back. The man whispered.
"Come with me."
The Liberation Tower.
At the conclusion he had drawn on reflex, Harad smiled to himself.
Kunrzban.
A fourth-tier magician whose Origin was the Bone Awl. A man of the Liberation Tower's Rebel Faction — and the superior of Isota, the woman behind the mask.
Harad had personally handed the man his own face and name — here is the wretch who ruined Isota's business, so avenge her — or words to that effect.
"Five? No — six."
Besides the man pressed to his back with the dagger, five more were shadowing him along his route.
Are the Rebel Faction short-handed this season? No — only a week has passed. The magicians stationed nearby must have reached him first.
Hence a mere six.
Harad walked on in silence. The longer the walk stretched, the firmer his conviction grew: the dagger at his back had no idea where it was going.
"Serzila's back alleys are a proper maze, it's true."
"Shut it."
The dagger pressed a little deeper. A sharp sting — he seemed to have drawn blood. Harad paid it no mind.
"This way comes out on the west boulevard."
"I said shut it."
The angle of the blade was clumsy. A magician through and through, then — the sort to cut loose with magic the instant things turned sour.
Any other day, perhaps, he would not have cared. But a priest was coming — might, by now, already be inside the territory. One way or another, this had to be moved somewhere without eyes.
"That way, then. There's no one about that way."
"I said shut it."
The man hauled him off in the opposite direction.
Easy.
For in truth, the direction Harad had pointed to crawled with brawlers. This way — the way the man had chosen — was the genuinely deserted alley.