Those Who Would Not Bow (2)
"Khack, khack!"
He had tried his best to hold it in, but the cough burst out of him in the end. Katon's whole frame lurched, and the crystal orb tumbled from his hand onto the floor.
"Minister, sir!"
His secretary, startled out of her wits, hurried over with a handkerchief and a glass of water.
"I'm fine. Merely went down the wrong pipe."
But the coughing would not stop. Perhaps it was the price of losing his temper beyond all reasonable limits for the first time in ages — even after draining the glass in one go, his body shook again and again with each ragged breath.
"Damn it, khack! The physician will lecture me again."
"Medicine...! Where did I put the medicine?"
Flustered, the secretary cast about frantically, searching for it. At that moment, a long, slender hand appeared from behind her and set a small vial on the desk.
"Swallow this. It should ease your breathing for a while."
A calm voice, entirely mismatched to the urgency of the scene.
"What now, khack! What is it this time?"
"Snail essence, ground with herbs. In this officer's homeland, it is the customary remedy for a cold in the throat."
Katon seized the vial without hesitation and tipped it into his mouth. And sure enough, the coughing stopped at once.
"Whew. I've grown so old I can't even afford a proper temper anymore."
Watching him catch his breath with difficulty, the owner of those long fingers spoke.
"It seems this officer is the only one who looks after you old folk, hm."
"And there is no one but you who barges in unannounced at ghostly timing, Director of Immigration."
So saying, Katon tilted his head back to look up at the tall woman.
Hailin Metaharashin, Director of the Immigration Bureau. A woman of the western desert, exotic in feature, who scooped up the fallen crystal orb and answered as she rose.
"I was treated to quite the spectacle, so I'd say we're even."
The fine spectacle she spoke of, naturally, was Katon flying into a fury like a house on fire.
How many years had it been, since his anger had boiled up this high? For a long while now, heeding his physician's warnings about his health, he had kept his emotions on a tight leash — but this time, he simply could not swallow it down.
"If you were going to rage like that, you might have done it at the Council of State."
Katon shot her a look of pure incredulity.
"That's rich, coming from you."
After all, who was it that had held forth for a full two hours against the Inspector General and the Queen Consort?
"The Central Officer has rendered five long years of illustrious service at the Southern Border. And yet you would sever a public servant's head so easily, over a single letter!"
"Yes, the official penalty for an Immigration Officer's infraction is summary execution — but nearly every precedent lies in bribery and illicit petitioning. And to demand summary execution without even hearing his testimony? That is injustice!"
Recalling that hour, Katon let out a sigh before he knew it.
"Well. At least we were spared the worst of it."
The Queen Consort's argument at the council had gone past mere stubbornness into outright presumption.
"Nathan Kell, the Central Officer, has committed slander against the Pope and the Holy Church. This constitutes a grave diplomatic discourtesy, and therefore the Central Officer must be executed."
What manner of nonsense was this?
Worse still, the "evidence" she had produced was nothing more than a letter of protest flown in from the Holy Church — one claiming, in its boundless absurdity, that the Central Officer had judged the pilgrimage's true purpose to be war, and had refused them entry on grounds of "irrational conduct stemming from personal judgment rather than regulation."
Katon was not so easily shaken by any of it. However authentic the Pope's seal upon the letter, for the Church to dictate the treatment of another kingdom's civil servant was wholly without precedent.
And besides, it was strange that the Pope should know of the pilgrimage affair this quickly.
No matter how swiftly the saint acted, the news of the insult should have had to travel to the Church's southern branch and back before arriving here in letter form — and the timeline was far too fast for that.
Fortunately, such doubts were ones any of the other vassals could raise as well. Thanks to sound argument and unyielding resolve, joined by the objections of the directors of the Foreign Ministry's subsidiary agencies, the Queen Consort's motion was ultimately rejected.
But it was no clean rejection — the ruling instead was that the accused would be summoned to the royal castle at a later date to stand trial. A handful of vassals, led by the Inspector General and the Finance Minister, had thrown their weight behind the Queen's position.
"Those damned wretches. They've lined up behind the Queen."
Katon spat the words out as if chewing gristle, then went on.
"The one mercy is that none of the people under me share the Queen's cause."
Which, put the other way around, meant that among those who were not under him, there were those who followed her.
"How did the country come to this..."
Katon murmured it like a lament. The Crossline Kingdom he had known looked nothing like the one before him now. It had never been so fractured, never so easily swayed by foreign hands.
Barely a dozen years ago, this country had borne a rather splendid epithet.
The Little Beast.
A nation perched at the world's crossroads, on ground every power coveted, was bound to breed those who hungered for it. Great empires, a militant Church, spies and lobbies — those had never once vanished from Crossline's soil since its founding. The attempts to pull the kingdom under one banner or another had never ceased.
And yet its land, its people, and its autonomy had endured — because there had always stood a leader who fought off every external pressure and every interference with his last breath.
A little beast of a little nation.
"It was never like this when His Majesty King Leo Castor first took the reins of state."
Master of every road in the world: Leo Castor.
Back when Katon was still chief of the Intelligence Department rather than Foreign Minister, he had once witnessed the true face of King Leo.
It was fifteen years ago, after the Holy Church's great crusade in the south — when the defeated remnant fled north, and the Church seized on that pretext to demand the opening of the border.
"Abide by the treaty. We shall grant you the road. For peaceful ends, We permit any soul, and any cargo."
"But if your spears and blades must indeed cross Our border — if you mean to trample, with that strength of yours, upon the accord that We and Our forebears have upheld through the generations —!"
"Not a single grain of rice, not a single carriage, not a hand's breadth of road will We leave standing upon this earth."
"Aye, We are weak. Beside you, We are nothing worth the naming. But our spears and blades are quite enough to destroy US!"
"Choose! Break the treaty and cross the shattered valley — or turn back to your own lands!"
A horrifying threat: to smash the crossroads of the world and sever it for good. Faced with those words, the Holy Church had no choice but to abandon the remnants and hold its forces in the south.
And now the land of that Little Beast had grown so frail it seemed weaker than a hare in a meadow.
"Back then, there was no such thing as compromise or capitulation. How is it that now the Queen Consort has become the Church's own trumpeter?"
Lost a moment in nostalgia for the past, Katon clicked his tongue. Hailin dropped heavily into a chair and answered.
"How did it come to this? Why, it came slowly, ever since His Majesty became as he is now."
She clenched her fist and tapped it twice against her chest — the desert folk's particular gesture of mourning.
"They call it a great tragedy, don't they. A father burying his own son."
At those words the Minister held his silence for a long moment before answering briefly.
"It was a tragedy."
"A tragedy it was."
Nothing more needed to be said. No one, truly, could have seen it coming. And on the day the prince's funeral rites concluded, King Castor's resolve and ferocity were buried in the ground alongside him.
"Let it be as the Queen Consort wills..."
All that remained was a hollow shell without a soul — and the woman who, offering that shell her comfort, clutched real power in its stead. How long had His Majesty secluded himself now? Katon could no longer remember.
"Had there been another son, he could have been named crown prince and checked the Queen's overreach — but there was only the one daughter."
Hailin spoke as though in regret.
"And even that daughter has lived her whole life crushed beneath the Queen's heel, ever since she was a child."
A state ruled by a man who had abandoned all governance to cradle a dead son's portrait was, in the end, easy prey. And so the Crossline Kingdom grew less and less worthy of the name of neutral power.
Precisely as in this very moment.
"Anyone who doesn't curry favor with the Queen at this point is the strange one."
Katon gave a hollow laugh at that.
"Like you and me?"
"Just so. Unless His Majesty rises again, the country will sway to and fro like this without end."
Hailin's expression had turned grave.
"A dark age is coming. So it feels to me."
A heavy silence settled over the room.
"...That is one damned disagreeable thought."
"If there is a golden age, a fall must follow — what can anyone do about it? In times like these, there is only one thing left for us to do."
She idly turned the crystal orb over on the desk.
"Delay that hour by every means we can — and pray that when the season of the next generation arrives, a golden age comes with it."
Katon, gazing at the orb, quickly understood whom she meant by the season of the next generation. He asked again the question he had failed to ask before.
"...Will he be all right?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"You could have said a single word to that boy earlier. Something to hearten him. That you were watching."
Hailin's laughter filled the room.
"What saccharine sentiments you propose. That child will do well. Of that, this officer has no doubt."
"Everything is spiraling into absurdity, and yet you remain a dreadful optimist."
"The more the world whirls into chaos, the more order and principle shine. Think on it — even at the Council of State, we turned aside the will of a Queen who raged so furiously, did we not?"
It was true.
No matter how far the world ran backward, no matter how mad it went, there were things that could not easily be broken.
"And those such as us have a duty to uphold that order and those principles. A duty to protect those who uphold them."
The Minister nodded.
"As His Majesty King Leo Castor once did."
The Director of Immigration took up the thread.
"And as the Central Officer does now."
Even in these turbulent times, there yet remained those who would not compromise with the world.
And now the hour had come to protect them.