Those Who Would Not Bow (1)
For the past three days, my accomplishments had amounted to exactly three things.
First, staring at the ceiling all night long.
Second, eating until my stomach turned on me.
Third, sighing hard enough to sink the ground.
Which is to say, I did absolutely nothing else.
From the moment I realized what I had done, these three were all I was capable of.
And on the fourth morning, standing before the front gate of the Southern Border Immigration Office, I released my two hundred ninety-seventh sigh.
"Haaa..."
But the knot in my chest refused to come loose.
Four days since the entry refusal. Not much had actually changed in my life as an immigration officer.
- BANG.
"Good morning, everyone!"
If anything had changed—
"The Central Officer is here!"
"A morning that is fair and just!"
"No exceptions at the border!"
—it was that every single employee in the office now looked at me with admiration bordering on excessive.
Where they used to cast the ordinary glance one gives a superior, respect was now practically spilling out of their eyes.
They never looked at me like that on payday, even.
And yet they were all moving briskly, sharply, even though they'd been stuck on unpaid overtime for nine days straight.
Has our Immigration Office ever been this full of life?
The mood of the office was flowing in precisely the opposite direction of my own.
They'd even taken it upon themselves to change their greetings.
"No exceptions at the border!"
"Oh, Central Officer! No exceptions at the border!"
That line came flying at me from every direction.
"...Pleasure to see you all."
I didn't even have the strength to tell them to stop, so I just let it wash over me.
- No exceptions at the border.
The words I had bellowed at the pilgrims—the Holy Crusade, rather—like a proclamation.
Why on earth is that our greeting now?
It had evidently left quite the impression, because it echoed through the halls at every hour of the day.
Meanwhile, I felt like I was going to die because of it.
Pushing through the endless chorus of no exceptions at the border, I had barely sat down at my desk when the two hundred ninety-eighth sigh escaped me.
"Haaah... What do I do now?"
The denial of entry to the Holy Crusade.
My choice: refusing even the Pope's proposal, upholding the regulations.
It was utter madness. Where in the world was the man who would refuse the request of the head of the continent's largest faith, right to his face?
I didn't regret the words themselves. Someday, when I stood before the Sight Officer, at the very least I wouldn't be ashamed.
But the storm that was about to follow—that terrified me.
I still remembered the words the Pope had spoken at the end, calming the Crusade soldiers as they raged in fury.
- Worry not, my children. This too shall soon be a problem that disappears.
A problem that disappears.
I didn't need him to say what that meant. Or rather, who it meant.
The instant his proposal was refused, the Pope hadn't even spared me a glance. He simply withdrew with Mohaim and the entire Crusade.
A refusal to engage. From a diplomatic standpoint, it was as bad as it could get.
Damn it, this is a textbook blunder. If they come after me for it, there's no way out.
I ran through the worry I had already rehearsed thousands of times over the past three days, fiddling aimlessly with some pointless paperwork, when the Five Senses Officers gathered around me.
"Central Officer."
"If you lot use that dog-vomit greeting too, I'm putting you all through retraining. Understand?"
Please, not you as well.
"No exceptions at the bor—"
The Taste Officer, who had just opened his mouth, froze solid.
"B-bor, buuugh, ahem... N-nice weather we're having."
Outside, a thick fog was rolling in.
I decided to let it go, out of respect for the effort.
The Smell Officer spoke up.
"Have you managed to rest at all, sir?"
"I slept a bit in the meeting room. I'm fine."
A lie. I hadn't slept a wink.
I felt like I was dying.
At the sight of me, the Smell Officer's face twisted in dismay.
"...Get some sleep. Even a little. We'll cover your duties."
"Why are you doing this, Smell Officer? It's unlike you."
"Because of the state you're in, sir. It's beyond words."
"W-what's wrong with how I look?"
The Touch Officer fetched a mirror and held it out to me.
"Honestly, right now the Central Officer looks less like a man and more like... a zombie."
In the mirror stood a grotesque figure, four days of stubble on his jaw, eyes bloodshot.
"Yikes."
I'd barely managed a rinse with cold water, so my hair was straw-dry, and everything I'd eaten had come back up with indigestion, leaving me gaunt and hollow-cheeked.
I shoved the mirror far away.
"I'm fine. There is nothing wrong with this official."
Lie again. There were so many problems they were crushing me flat.
"Now, as I was saying, I'm perfectly well, so everyone return to your posts and—"
"Keep this up and you'll drop dead before the Royal Castle even responds."
The Hearing Officer's remark hit the bullseye, and I shut my mouth.
"...I'm sorry. My mess has dragged all of you into trouble."
"It's dragged us in quite a bit, yes. You keep wandering around like a man heading to his own execution."
Said in a tone as if none of this were the least bit unusual.
Something seized in my chest, and I fired back.
"Aren't you all worried? About what happens next?"
None of them had done anything wrong.
Of course not. This whole affair had come about purely on my own unilateral decision. I hadn't given them time to stop me, nor the leeway.
Their fault? Zero. Not a shred of it.
But the world wasn't going to see it that way.
The Five Senses Officers were my direct subordinates.
The word direct carries a fearsome amount of weight. When I rise, they rise with me. When I fall, they fall with me.
And right now, whether I kept my own head was not guaranteed.
They knew exactly what that meant, every one of them.
The Smell Officer shrugged.
"Honestly? We're scared. Nobody knows what happens now."
The others picked up where he left off.
"Four days is plenty for the news to have reached the Royal Castle."
"Already over, if you ask me."
"Pick the wrong boss and look what happens to us."
Bitter as vinegar, every word.
Then the Smell Officer spoke again.
"But that day, you didn't compromise. Unlike Gerard."
"...Smell Officer."
I stared at him, wide-eyed. This man, bringing up Gerald.
Before he became my direct subordinate, he had been one of Gerald's people. He never committed corruption with his own hands, but he'd unknowingly waded into those waters, and the record remained. A man of tragic circumstances. He should despise that name more than anyone.
He looked at me and smiled faintly.
"You were a model to us all, sir."
There wasn't a trace of jest in the Smell Officer's expression. Behind him, the other officers nodded one by one.
Something felt strange. Shouldn't they be blaming me right now? Raking me over the coals for triggering an unprecedented crisis and dragging them down with me?
But instead of worrying about the storm to come, the Five Senses Officers were praising me.
Telling me I'd done well.
It felt strange. Too, too strange.
Which is why there was only one thing I could say.
"...Thank you."
"Yes, sir."
Just then, my personal aide approached from across the hall.
"Central Officer. Good morning to you."
Afraid the awkward silence might stretch on, I turned my head and answered.
"Ah—good morning to you."
Out of every attendant I'd met today, you're the first one who didn't use that dog-vomit greeting. Truly my direct subordinate, after all.
But he wasn't smiling like the other attendants either. Instead, he held out a crystal orb toward me.
"...The Minister of Foreign Affairs is calling, sir."
The inevitable had arrived.
"I've heard the news."
The Minister's opening words were flat. His expression was anything but.
"Look at the state of you. And you're supposed to be the chief officer of the entire Southern Border?"
He began with my appearance. He wasn't wrong. I'd made myself presentable as best I could before the call, but there was no hiding the wreck underneath.
"I... I was so preoccupied worrying about what comes next that I rather neglected myself."
"If you were worried, you moldy—of all the idiotic—"
The Minister flared up, then caught himself and took a deep breath.
"One question. Why did you do it?"
A short question.
"Why—why did you refuse them entry? At least give me a reason. Was the matter grave enough to defy my direct order?"
I'd braced myself for blame and rebuke, so the Minister's calm questioning made me hesitate for a moment.
Would he even believe me if I told him?
The people we'd taken for pilgrims were actually the Holy Crusade. Who on earth would believe an absurdity like that? Even I had only reached that conclusion after doubting myself over and over.
Besides, with his face that grave, there was no telling what information had already been traded in the shadows.
I had no choice. It was time to lay down my cards.
"They were not pilgrims."
"What?"
"The pilgrimage was a lie. It was an army transporting the First Holy Knight Order and their war materiel for a crusade."
"Then all those people—?"
"Every one of them was gathered deliberately to conceal the true purpose. Ordinary civilians, brought along to furnish the pretext that the First Holy Knight Order was guarding a pilgrim caravan."
Cards on the table. The unvarnished truth.
The reaction that came back exceeded my expectations by a mile.
"God damn it all—so that's why the Queen Consort threw such a tantrum about attending the State Council."
"The Queen Consort? What does she have to do with any of this?"
"You didn't know? That woman is a zealot of the Holy Church. If the Pope crooked his finger, she'd die on the spot."
He clicked his tongue like a sneer.
"And there was a State Council meeting yesterday. The Foreign Minister, the Intelligence Director, the Immigration Director, the Inspector General, the Home Ministry ministers—they all attended."
One heavyweight after another unspooled before me—giants, each occupying one of the nation's most vital posts.
The Minister produced an elegant letter and showed it to me.
"You came up at that meeting. Along with a formal letter of protest from the Holy Church."
A letter of protest.
The moment I saw it, I understood what the Pope's words had meant.
He intends to erase me from the world entirely.
"Insult to the Pope and the Holy Church. And the groundless denial of entry to a peaceful pilgrimage."
The Minister tossed the letter aside.
"On those grounds, the Queen Consort was shrieking that you should be summarily executed."
"..."
The Pope and the Queen Consort, in league. The sheer absurdity of it left me speechless.
"If any of that were true, you should have been executed by the Inspectorate ages ago. You understand that?"
"...Yes."
Overwhelming authority knows nothing of justice. What obstructs it is erased; what profits it is harvested. Those two laws are all that exist.
And I had been an obstruction.
Heartsick, I bowed my head. But the Minister's next words made me look up again.
"And then that woman, Hailin, put a stop to it."
"I'm sorry—H-Hailin, you say?"
Hailin Metaharashin. Director of the Crossline Kingdom's Immigration Bureau. The woman who had recruited me as an immigration officer.
"That devil of a woman. Standing right in front of the Inspector General and the Queen Consort, without breaking a single word of the regulations, she insisted there was no way you'd have done such a thing."
She had defended me. Something throbbed hot in my chest.
She still looks out for me.
"Thanks to her, instead of a summary execution, there will be a trial at the Royal Castle once this pilgrimage affair is concluded."
By a miracle, it seemed the worst outcome I'd imagined hadn't come to pass. Behind me, the Five Senses Officers let out sighs of relief.
But there was a blind spot in his words.
"...Won't it all end in my execution anyway? The Pope's word outweighs mine by a few hundredfold."
"Ha."
The Minister scoffed at my muttering.
"Yes, the penalty for an immigration officer's fault is execution. But that applies only when there's been a clear blunder—an irreversible, grave blunder!"
He pointed straight at me.
"Did you violate the regulations?"
"No."
"Did you hurl insults at the Pope and the pilgrims in front of the whole world?"
"No."
"Did you process the entry on personal grounds rather than by the rules?"
"No."
The Minister slammed his fist on the desk.
"Then why in the hell are you slumped over like a wilted weed!?"
His voice rang through the meeting room like a bell. The Five Senses Officers went white at the sight of a rage none of us had ever seen from him.
"Listen here, you wretch—is that how Hailin raised you? To curl up and shrink when you've done nothing wrong?"
"M-Minister?"
"The fault is theirs—those fanatic bastards stuffed a bribe of a request right into your face! And then they have the gall to pin it on you, and you're supposed to foam at the mouth and convulse? Rage about the injustice! Tear it all to shreds with the fury of a man overturning the whole table!"
His voice climbed higher and higher.
"You stamped that entry refusal in full accordance with the regulations, so walk out there with your head high, you blockhead!"
The tirade grew rougher still.
"Learn this, and learn it well—"
A thunderclap of a command fell.
"—there are people in this world who will believe your word. Why don't you know that!"
The shock of it struck me like a blow to the skull.
Perhaps from shouting so hard, the Minister kept coughing on the other side of the little crystal orb. It was a long while before he steadied his breath and spoke again.
"We'll manage this somehow. If we can just get to the trial—if we can gather witnesses—we might even get a stay of execution."
"Minister, you'd go this far for me—"
"But... there is one thing that can't be helped."
Cutting me off yet again, the Minister drew out a letter far more ornate than the protest from before.
"In three days, a royal decree from His Majesty the King will arrive. A decree ordering that the pilgrims be granted entry."
A royal decree. The King's command made manifest.
An absolute truth that could never—never—be refused.
"This one couldn't be stopped. Fending off the Queen Consort and preventing your summary execution was already a herculean feat."
"This official—"
"Truly, a first in my entire life. I can't even guess how to react. The Queen Consort attending the State Council was bad enough, but now she can brandish His Majesty's royal decree as well?"
Not even bothering to smother his temper, the Minister scowled fiercely.
"I'm searching every avenue to protect you, so understand that much. The moment the royal decree arrives, the border opens again. If you refuse even that, not even we can save you."
"...Understood."
"God, what a wretched world. Religion trying to dictate the affairs of state."
With that short curse, he shook his head in disgust.
"We're done here, then."
And so the storm ended.
No—it merely seemed to.
Still reeling, I fumbled to disconnect the orb—and then—
"...Nathan."
He called my name.
"Y-yes?"
I was thrown. The Minister had never once called me by name. He had always addressed me only as Central Officer, by title alone, and I froze in shock. I couldn't even begin to imagine why.
W-what more could he possibly have to say?
The Minister slowly removed the monocle he had been wearing.
Years of scowling beneath it had left deep marks on the skin where it sat.
Those marks were, to him, nothing less than the emblem of his career in state service—of his decades of experience.
And he was taking it off in front of me.
I realized that the man I was looking at was no longer the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Cartion Grayson.
Which meant that what he was about to say was not an official statement.
Cartion held his silence for a long time. Then, at last, he spoke.
"A public servant—and especially one who holds a single gate of this nation—will always be beset by countless temptations. Among them are offers that no man feels he can refuse."
His voice was no longer sharp as it had been. Rather, he spoke flatly, almost as if to himself.
"Unreasonable, unbearable proposals—the kind where refusing could cost you your life. Any number of public servants have bowed to them. Compromised. It has always been so."
He fell silent for a moment. Those deep, creased eyes studied me at length.
"You did well."
A short praise.
For the first time—in all five years I had known him, for the very first time—a flicker of pride passed through Cartion's eyes.
"Keep moving forward. Do not bend."
Something surged up from deep inside me.
And so there was only one thing I could say.
"...Thank you."
"End of transmission."
The light in the crystal orb went dark.
A long silence followed.
"..."
Hot. My chest was so unbearably hot.
That's right. I had forgotten.
The reason I became an immigration officer. The reason I do not compromise. The reason I do not kneel to authority.
[Do you henceforth promise, as an immigration officer, to face the world as it is—and to show your world to all who arrive at this gate?]
I forced down what threatened to burst out of me. I clenched my jaw and balled my fists.
Crying in front of my subordinates would be an ugly sight, after all.
Just then, the Smell Officer approached.
"Central Officer."
He came closer, his face grave, as though he too had resolved on something. He hesitated a moment, then said:
"You should cry here, sir."
Have you ever seen such a lunatic?
At that, the Taste Officer squeezed his eyes shut, raised his fist into the air, and shouted.
"No exceptions at the border!"
And from across the hall, every attendant echoed the cry.
"""No exceptions at the border!!!"""
These absolute lunatics.
"I told you not to do that."
Before I knew it, a helpless laugh had escaped me.
Perhaps because of it, the sighs stopped coming. The anxiety that had crushed me for three straight days was gone as well.
In its place, something fierce and blazing began to fill my heart.
Silently, I raised my clenched fist.
"...Everyone."
I still don't know exactly what to call it.
"You heard it—this official is in a great deal of danger. So, that being the case..."
But most people, I believe, would call it hope.
"Will you help this official?"
The answer came back instantly.
Along with ninety-six raised fists.
"""Yes, sir!!!"""
My life, granted a stay of a few days.
Three days remained until the royal decree arrived.
In that time, I needed something that would turn the entire situation on its head. Perfect evidence for the trial—or a powerful ally of my own. Something capable of holding back the entire pilgrim caravan and the Pope's outrages at once.
I had to find it before the decree came.
"Hmmm. A denial of entry, was it..."
Meanwhile, on a shabby street in the Crossline Kingdom, a woman stood quietly studying the papers posted on a wall.
She scratched her head, looking troubled.
"This makes things a whole lot more annoying for me. Contract says I snatch the target once it passes through to the north..."
But judging by what the posters said, there was no telling when the border would open for the pilgrims.
"And if it takes too long, the employer won't hand over the intelligence."
After a moment's thought, she hit upon a splendid idea.
"Oh, right. If I recall correctly, the contract said 'do not abduct within the Crossline Kingdom.' Precisely put."
Which meant anything was fair game outside the border.
Violet eyes turned slowly toward the walls of the Southern Border—to the rows of pilgrim tents spread beyond them.
"So right now, we're outside the Crossline Kingdom. That makes it fine, doesn't it?"
Carry out the operation out there, cross back through the kingdom with the target in tow, and there'd be no problem at all.
"Perfect."
The corner of Shahal's mouth—Vice Master of the Black Hand—curled upward.
There was no reason to hesitate.