Pig Hunt (2)
About five minutes earlier.
— CRACK!
Shahal's foot connected perfectly with the inspector's jaw.
"Khagh!"
His body crumpled limply onto the carriage floor. And that was that. The man once called Nathan Kell sprawled out flat where he fell and went straight to unconsciousness.
"Haah... haah..."
It had been a flawlessly clean strike, yet Shahal was breathing hard. Never in her life had she been this rattled. One question kept circling through her head.
"How in the world?"
Everything had been flowing without a hitch. The potion her employer had supplied was a transformation draft the witches had labored over, and the saint who drank it had turned into a perfectly convincing piglet. Then, by some perverse twist of fate, even the Divine Holy Power the saint had once prided herself on had vanished entirely. No one — absolutely no one — could have recognized her now.
Abducting the saint's body outright would have been extraordinarily difficult, since her face was known to all the world. But a pig — a creature stripped of every trace of energy and aura? To anyone watching, she was simply one small beast.
'Even the Order's own people wouldn't have blinked if I'd walked right past them.'
She had stolen the body of a wide-eyed country boy along with a livestock cart — the very definition of a perfect disguise. No, suspicion never even arose; it couldn't have. Even the holy knights standing watch at the pilgrimage camp had seen her as nothing more than "an admirable boy trying to make an honest living."
Everything was going too well. Then, at the final checkpoint, the inspector of the Crossline Kingdom appeared — alone, without the attendant who trailed after him everywhere as a matter of habit. She had assumed this too would pass without incident. But the moment the man laid a hand on the saint's body, he murmured:
— Th-the Saint?
"How could he possibly know?"
It made no sense. She should have looked like nothing more than an ordinary pig. With the Divine Holy Power gone, there should have been nothing to raise the slightest suspicion.
'I sealed off every possibility — and he saw straight through it anyway?'
Her bewilderment didn't last long. In its place, her instincts as an assassin blared a warning.
'This man is dangerous.'
This was a kidnapping that must not attract so much as a flicker of suspicion or interest — yet this inspector had already identified the saint's current form. The one small mercy was that even his shout of "emergency" had been swallowed by the sealed carriage and the pig's squealing.
Still, the situation was far from optimistic.
'The real trouble starts when he wakes up.'
Once her identity was under suspicion, the witness had to be silenced. Shahal did not hesitate.
— Shing.
She drew her dagger. This man was dangerous. Too dull to even register killing intent — and yet more dangerous than anyone alive.
The fact that the saint had been abducted must never be allowed to spread. Not now, at the very least.
— Squeeeeal! Squeak!!!
The saint screamed. Shahal paid it no mind and advanced slowly on the inspector. The pig could cry out a hundred, a thousand times — nothing would carry beyond the carriage walls anyway. A sealed room in the middle of a square. All she had to do was finish this here and slip away quietly.
She dropped to one knee and raised her dagger over the man's heart.
"Ugh..."
His eyebrows trembled. His consciousness was creeping back. There was no time. The instant she brought the blade down with all her strength—
— Thud.
Something struck, and the carriage rocked ever so slightly.
"...!"
Her head snapped up. She darted to the carriage entrance and pressed her ear against it, but only the murmur of idle conversation drifted in from outside.
There had been few people about even when she'd rolled into the lot before the Immigration Office. The office staff were busy at something indoors; only three or four souls milled around the edges of the lot in a thoroughly lax manner.
'That dim-looking wolfman went on about some inspection period or other — said they were swamped because of it.'
That was surely why far fewer people than usual were outside. And since her cart held the final slot of the day, no one showed the slightest inclination to fuss over this corner. There was no way that sound had come from out there.
— Thud.
It came again. This time it was an impact — the dull, heavy sound of something striking something else. Shahal's gaze turned slowly toward the depths of the carriage. Then she stared at the saint in open disbelief.
— Thud.
The chained pig was ramming its head against the carriage wall.
— Thud.
"...Stop that."
The carriage was sealed. No matter how loudly she cried out, nothing would be heard — and it was precisely because of that that every one of the saint's throat-tearing screams for rescue on the road here had gone unanswered. Even if sound had carried, it would only have been a pig squealing. But an impact was another matter entirely: it became vibration, and vibration seeped outward. And a strangely rhythmic, metronome-steady sound repeating over and over was more than enough to draw attention.
Shahal hastily checked the outside. The chatter beyond had fallen silent.
Danger.
— Thud.
The pig slammed the wall hard enough to split the skin of its forehead.
— THUD!
Harder. Grimacing through the pain — and still harder. Outside, the conversation stopped. Shahal lunged over and seized the pig's shackles in a rough grip.
"I told you to stop."
— Squeeeeeal!
But still the saint thrashed, straining with everything she had to bash her skull against the wall.
The pig before her no longer whimpered. She wasn't frozen in terror, either. Instead, as though she had finally made up her mind, she clenched her teeth, tore free of Shahal's grasp, and hurled her whole body at the wall at full force.
— THUD!!
As if praying someone outside would hear. As if refusing to let this inspector die.
Shahal caught the meaning, and spoke.
"Stop this instant, or I'll tear that man apart alive right before your eyes."
Threats were an excellent means of suppression — Shahal's own specialty, the quickest way to take exactly what she wanted. But they only worked on the frightened and the rattled. And the saint, hearing her words, slammed her head against the wall one more time, with even greater fury.
— THUD!!
The wound on her head widened, and the sound grew louder still. One more repetition carrying beyond the walls, and attention would most certainly be drawn. And once attention was drawn, there would be no turning back — she would have to kill them all, and then the entire nation would hunt her down. With a pig in tow as her cargo, that amounted to near-suicide.
The disadvantage lay squarely with Shahal. In the end, she was the first to fold.
"Fine, fine! Damn it all — I won't kill him, all right?!"
Cursing under her breath, she tucked the dagger back into her coat. Only then did the pig's desperate struggle cease. Violet eyes glared at the saint with murderous intensity — and then Shahal made an unexpected offer.
"I'll let this man live. In exchange, you come along quietly. Deal?"
To think the only card left in her hand was negotiation. The realization made irritation and fury churn and boil in her gut.
'Ordinarily, I'd have severed the tendons in her legs and torn out her tongue, left her unable to so much as twitch.'
If her employer hadn't attached the single condition that the saint be delivered whole and unharmed, she would very likely have done exactly that without a moment's hesitation. But regrettably, Shahal had neither options nor time to spare. Having been detected once already, she had to hurry — sacrificing whatever it took. She could not linger here.
"I'll spare him. In return, you stop resisting and follow along quietly. Deal?"
And so she was reduced to this humiliating bargain.
The saint glared at Shahal for a long moment. Then she gave a short reply.
— ...Oink.
And that was that.
"Uuuuugh..."
A groan slipped from the man's lips. He would wake before long. Shahal did not hesitate.
— Snip.
She immediately cut a few strands of the inspector's hair with her dagger, then rummaged through his pockets and produced a single sheet of paper and a stamp. Holding the stamp reading [ENTRY APPROVED], she pressed it firmly onto Sota's documents.
Then she leaned out of the carriage and called out in the bright voice of a young boy:
"Thank you, sir inspector!"
At her cry, the chatter that had momentarily died resumed. Slackened vigilance has a way of dissolving even freshly minted suspicion. Seizing that instant, Shahal drove the cart swiftly to the far edge of the Immigration Office lot, then dumped the inspector's limp body in a secluded spot beyond the reach of prying eyes.
— Whump!
With a lifeless thud, the body vanished into the shadows.
'Somewhere like this, it should take a while before he's found.'
But before long, the doors of the Immigration Office burst open, and the wolfman she had seen yesterday came sprinting out from far across the lot.
— The Central Officer's blood! The trail leads this way!
There wasn't even a moment to catch her breath.
"Damn it."
Shahal cracked her whip, and the cart whipped around the corner at breakneck speed, at last clearing the Immigration Office behind it.
"At this point... there's nothing for it but to push through the Crossline Kingdom as fast as I can."
She no longer mistook this mission for easy prey. From here on, it was a race against the clock — a race to escape this damned kingdom before he woke and came hunting for her. For the first time in a very long while, she felt tension settle over her. The tension of a mission that might actually fail — something she had long forgotten — drew a murmur from her lips.
"Still, this country's crawling with carts. I've got time before anyone catches on. I'll just switch along the way — as long as I hurry, that is..."
There was a solution. Even if they gave chase, they would chase this cart; she need only transfer to another. She would discard the boy's body as well, so the only clue left them would be 'a pig.' Even that would be hard to find once it vanished into a merchant caravan hauling livestock, or into the crush of the crowd.
But one thing had escaped her notice.
When she had thrown the inspector out of the cart, she had failed to wipe away the spray of blood kicked up by the blow to his jaw.
Nathan's blood, mingling with the blood from the saint's forehead, was slowly drying on the pig's skin.
And the smell of blood lingers — thickly, and for a long, long time.
Long enough that anyone with a keen nose would catch it in an instant.