The Guest (2)
The people of the continent feared mages. It was fear of every stripe — and at times it would be no stretch to call it suspicion, for there was no telling who among them might be a mage. And when they pictured one, they tended to imagine someone sullen and withdrawn. Cunning, or else vicious.
It was a prejudice born of the belief that mages were creatures who lived in hiding. Even as continentals worried a mage might be living right beside them, they assumed any true mage would go about concealing their identity — swaddled in an oversized robe, or with the face kept covered.
From a mage's standpoint, that was sheer lunacy. A mage had to stand proud, anytime, anywhere. Nor was that Harad's thinking alone; every mage living on the continent conducted themselves accordingly. The ones who weren't proud — or couldn't afford to be — were all dead.
At the end of the alley, Harad calmly took stock of the ones who had backed him into the corner. They wore the leather coats common throughout the North, and every last one of them carried a blade. These, then, were the proud kind of mages — mages who behaved in exact opposition to the continental prejudice.
Five. One's holding back.
The presence he had sensed earlier had numbered six. Yet only five stood before Harad; one had peeled away at the corner he had last turned.
Keeping watch, is it? That was the proper way to go about it. A mage gained nothing from drawing needless eyes.
"Harad. That you?"
The mage who had been prodding at him with his dagger demanded it with chest out. His gaze, however, was fixed not on Harad but on the paper his comrade held up. Harad's portrait.
The Liberation Magic Tower, after all.
The portrait he had drawn for Kunrzban while passing himself off as Psina was right there in their hands.
"That's me. What's this about? If it's money you're after, I'm afraid I'm broke."
Harad stripped off his coat and shook it out briskly, the way one beats laundry before hanging it to dry. It had grown warm, as it happened.
"We've come to kill you."
"Then you ought to have stabbed me back there. Why on earth......"
"What?"
"Just thinking aloud."
As expected, they were mages sent by Kunrzban.
"Answer when you're spoken to."
"And then you'll spare my life?"
"No. You die here."
"Announce it that way, and no one will feel much like answering."
The five mages looked young. It showed — they were plainly short on experience.
"We'll send you off without pain."
"Pain means nothing to the dead."
He waited, but no answer came. This was the part where you promised to spare him — even as a barefaced lie. For a moment, Harad found them pitiful.
"Still, I'll answer. I do hate pain."
At that, the stiffness went out of their faces.
"Answer honestly, now. You — do you have ties to Serzila?"
"Intimate ones, as it happens."
The man with the dagger gave a level nod, his expression flat.
Not a question asked out of fear of what comes after, then.
The Rebel Faction was the violent breed. Hadn't they tried to blow up Kubel's entire house?
"You wouldn't know this, but the name Serzila means nothing to us."
"So I see."
Insufferably presumptuous, the lot of them.
The Rebel Faction didn't spare a thought for Serzila's scrutiny. Not because they were formidable, but because they hid themselves exceptionally well. They were certain that even if individuals died, the Liberation Tower's home base would never be uncovered.
"Did you truly meddle in our affairs?"
Something flickered oddly in Harad's eyes.
So that was why they hadn't simply run him through back there.
The Rebel Faction. No — Kunrzban did not trust Psina without reservation. Isota, a subordinate he cherished, had died at Psina's hands. That would be why. A promising sign.
Smothering a smile, Harad echoed the question.
"What affairs?"
"Don't play innocent. We already know you interfered with our work."
"If you already know, why ask...... ah, never mind."
They were asking, presumably, because they didn't know. Whether the answer displeased them or not, the other four each laid a hand on their blades. To Harad's eye, all of it looked hopelessly green. Take up an unfamiliar weapon, and everything becomes unfamiliar.
Their hearts must be itching.
Harad could sympathize with their frustration completely. Back alley or no, unsheathing magic on a public street was an exceedingly dangerous thing to do.
"'Have I meddled in your affairs?' If that's the question, I honestly couldn't say. The things I've stuck my fingers into number rather more than one or two."
"Can't we just kill him?"
It was the smallest of the five who said it — the one who looked youngest of all.
About Ellen's age, that one.
The young one's expression was imperious to the last degree. An audacity unbecoming of a mage — though as displays of thick skin went, the plating had been laid on impeccably.
"Not yet, Marez. Wait."
The man with the dagger spoke like a commander giving an order. He was, apparently, their leader.
"But it was a good point, Marez."
Having gently soothed the young mage, the man turned his gaze — to the woman whose most memorable feature was the mole on her nose.
"Heisel. Anyone about?"
"No. No one at all."
The woman called Heisel seemed to be a mage gifted in detection. She shook her head.
Harad tipped his head to one side.
Why ask her?
There were six of them, not five. One stood watch at that very corner. And yet the dagger man had consulted not the watcher, but Heisel at his side.
Keeping the man hidden — insurance against contingencies?
Just then, Harad's eyes met the dagger man's.
"You haven't the faintest idea who we are. You can't even begin to guess."
"That's right."
"So that's why you show no fear. Then listen well. We are the Liberation Magic Tower."
"......?"
"So?"
Harad gazed back at him, blank-faced.
"Ah."
Only after a considerable pause did his mouth open.
Right. That was the sort they were.
The Liberation Tower's Rebel Faction was a singularly strange breed. Branded demons by the world, they yet nursed a conviction of their own chosenness. Probably why the young one, Marez, had worn such an imperious look. The dagger man, proudly proclaiming his allegiance, was no different — an affiliation no one anywhere could even verify, and still they believed mages the superiors of ordinary men.
"Don't tell me you've never heard of the Liberation Magic Tower?"
The dagger man laughed as though at something ridiculous.
Just then, something flashed at the edge of Harad's vision. A brief flare, born at the corner — the spot where the watcher stood.
That light. No — that power. Harad's face went rigid.
"We are......"
The dagger man opened his mouth with towering self-importance, letting the pause stretch. He had noticed nothing whatsoever, it seemed.
They ought to be kept alive. No — they had to die, every last one, at Harad's hand, without a soul the wiser.
"Mages."
But the dagger man, insufferably, finished the sentence wearing a face swollen with pride.
Harad lamented it from the bottom of his heart. And then he cried out.
"This can't be! A demon!"
"A demon!"
Without warning, someone echoed his cry. At it, the mages' eyes went round. Those eyes — no, those heads — lifted into the empty air and began to spin.
Amid flashes of blinding white, the severed heads spewed up fountains of blood. The culprit walked calmly between those fountains. Even so, not a single drop of blood marked the gleaming-white instrument.
"Are you quite all right?"
The priestess asked in a mild voice.
"I am called Ceria, a faithful servant of the sun god Ra-an?"
"Where is Harad?"
"He has not entered the Inner Castle, my lady."
"Have word sent to the gate — he isn't to get anywhere near it."
"Yes. I have already passed word to the guard detail as well," Arika added, "and told them to throw him in a cell if he so much as tries."
"And the priest?"
"Confirmed to have entered the territory."
"What manner of person?"
"They say she is called the Guillotine of Fremont Central Church."
Guillotine. She could not have earned that name without having taken rather more than one or two swings at a mage's neck.
"If she's earned the name Guillotine, her skill must be considerable."
"Yes. She is not yet thirty, but she has already been earmarked for the Inquisition Office next year."
A priest's calling wasn't, as a rule, the hunting of mages. But the priestess arriving this time was set, from next year onward, to become one who hunted mages and mages alone. In truth, she had already killed enough to earn the name.
"Moon?"
"Sun."
"Of all things, the Sun."
By bitter coincidence. Elaine gave a laugh with no humor in it at all.
Sun. To the church of the sun god Ra-an, flame was sacred — for in their doctrine, fire was to be wielded by Ra-an and his faithful alone, and by no one else. And so the Sun's church flew into a singular frenzy over fire-wielding mages above all others, believing such mages defiled that sanctity by their very existence. Mages were rare, and fire rarer still among them — which, as Harad had once explained, was likely part of the reason.
"I ought to have thrown him in a cell with my own hands."
Elaine clicked her tongue.
The church of the Sun. The nickname Guillotine, and the next Inquisitor besides. Every last item on the list was ill-omened.
"Even Harad will not be able to rest easy, my lady."
"He had better not. This is the Church we're dealing with."
Why, I could even share a table with the Pope. So Harad had claimed — though he was also forever swindling Outer Realm mages at the drop of a hat. This time, at least, some bluster had surely been mixed in. For all Harad's cunning, his opponent here was the Church — the Church that killed first and tortured after at the merest whiff of magecraft. Even if his confidence about dining with the Pope held true, Elaine had no intention of letting him anywhere near the priestess. What-ifs had a way of growing out of precisely that kind of complacency.
"Not even a shred of suspicion may be given."
She had already moved the two communication tubes and the quill that had sat in Harad's annex into her own chamber. Nothing suspicious had turned up in Kubel's annex.
"Do make one last check."
Afterward she would receive the priestess in person; that, she judged, was the only way to quiet her unease. With careful eyes, Elaine swept her gaze over every corner of Harad's annex. The collapsed ceiling had been restored at some point, and nothing that caught the eye remained — no objects, no traces. She had learned this much while nursing him: Harad kept the spaces he used immaculate.
Pointlessly so. Elaine clicked her tongue. There was not a speck of dust.
"No one would ever take this for an empty house."
Harad had predicted the priestess would come calling on this annex — that it was Grand Duke Aratus's little experiment, a measure of whether a mage's traces could be recognized.
"When she does, I'll simply have to fool her into thinking someone lives here."
"I'll be here."
"Then Kubel's annex we can pass off as Ellen's, or Cassion's."
The former was a kinswoman of the cadet line; the latter, a knight commander. Either had reason enough to keep an annex in the Inner Castle. Arika's pretext was sound as well — she was a talent the Information Bureau's Director treasured, and the Inner Castle's annexes had never wanted for empty rooms.
Elaine made for Kubel's annex. The sun had gone down, yet tonight the dark seemed strangely bright — and Kubel's annex brighter still. ...The lamps were burning.
Did I walk out without dousing the lamps?
"......You didn't, my lady. I put them out myself."
Which meant someone had come back and relit them. It could not be Kubel. Elaine's brow drew tight. Her steps quickened, and through the lamplight spilling past the window, voices drifted out.
"Killing them outright was a wasted chance. You should have wrung them for information first."
"I'm sorry. But — didn't your eyes meet?"
"They did. Though I hadn't the faintest idea you were a priest."
"You cried out so earnestly, I took it for a call for help."
"Did I really look that desperate?"
Not idle chatter, then — a conversation. And one of the voices was Harad's. ...The other belonged to a woman.
"That lunatic......"
With a woman, at a time like this.
Elaine flung the door wide open.
Harad looked at her with eyes that asked what had taken her so long. The woman seated across from him went wide-eyed. A radiant beauty with sunny golden hair.
"And that person is......?"
"Our Grand Duke's daughter. A most fiery lady, at that."
The woman answered with a smiling glance and a small bow of her head.
"And I am rather fiery myself."
"You don't look it in the slightest, Harad."
"I'm merely holding it in. Should you wish it, I could always show you."
"Oh my?"
The woman gave a soft, honeyed laugh.
"What in the......"
Elaine was left speechless. Harad was, to be fair, telling the truth. He was also, at the same time, flirting with the woman.
"My lady?"
Just then Arika came slipping carefully through the gap between the door and Elaine's back.
"Ah — that person is my direct superior. A very capable one, at that."
"I see."
"Superior......?"
Arika's brows knitted. Elaine's face mottled red and pale.
"Let's begin our introductions anew, shall we? These two seem a little flustered."
"Gladly."
The golden-haired beauty smiled and held out her hand to Harad, saying with a glint of mischief:
"I'm called Ceria, a faithful servant of the sun god Ra-an?"
"Harad. A mage."
"What a wicked sense of humor you have."
"Ha ha. Harad — of the Serzila Information Bureau."