All Quiet on the Southern Border (4)
Silence.
An ominous stillness settled over the open ground.
Crane, a free mercenary and smuggler out of the Mahalan Kingdom, shot a quick glance back and forth with his men.
Their eyes finally landed on the cracked underside of the wagon.
Hidden inside was the crate carrying the goods their employer had commissioned — a specially modified defensive artifact.
Were we made?
No, that couldn't be it.
The plan had been flawless. Everything was thoroughly disguised, and the operation had been running smoothly, right on schedule.
The intel was solid, too.
Before setting out, Crane had drummed one warning into his men again and again.
"Listen carefully. The Crossline Kingdom has people with extraordinarily sharpened senses — all five of them — and those people run the immigration inspections. Fool them, and you can consider the smuggling job as good as done."
The Five Senses Officers.
Their notoriety was already common knowledge among smugglers far and wide.
There was the Smell Officer, a werewolf who had sniffed out hundreds of smuggled goods by scent alone. The Hearing Officer, said to pick out the beat of a bird's wings beyond the horizon. The Taste Officer, a young girl rumored to remember anything that ever touched her tongue. The Touch Officer, who commanded dozens — no, hundreds — of hands. Or rather, tentacles.
And then, by sheer stroke of fortune, there was the vacant seat of the Sight Officer, left empty after his death in an accident.
Ever since these five had taken charge of the Crossline Kingdom's Southern Border, transcontinental smuggling had withered on the vine.
Inspectors who could not be bought with compromise or bribes.
None of that ever concerned me, to be honest... until now.
Crane had only ever run smuggling as a side business within the Mahalan Kingdom. It paid well enough without ever having to cross the continent.
But this time was different.
"I need a powerful artifact to catch a dragon. Three thousand as an advance. Deliver it to me at the active volcano in the west, and I'll pay you triple."
The client had come with terms far too good to refuse.
Three thousand silver. That's more than I've earned in my whole career at this trade.
And if it succeeded — triple that. Nine thousand silver.
Enough money to buy out a mid-sized trade company outright without blinking.
Desire was, after all, a mercenary's greatest fuel.
If there are only four Senses Officers on duty, it's doable.
Crane had used his head. To fool the nose of the most dangerous one, the Smell Officer, he had deliberately loaded the wagon with barrels brimming with rotten fish.
"Ugh—hack! Hey, shut the window!"
Just as predicted, the werewolf had been no match for the reek.
He had padded the wagon's undercarriage with cotton so nothing would rattle — the Hearing Officer wouldn't detect it — and the Taste Officer would taste nothing but spoiled fish.
The Touch Officer was the real problem, but for her, the plan was to boldly point out the crack in the wagon floor himself, planting the fear that careless handling might destroy the vehicle.
In the end, no matter how competent they are, they're still civil servants. If they break a traveler's property through their own carelessness, the blame lands squarely on them.
What civil servants feared most was an accident — especially one caused by their own mistake.
Which was exactly why he had dragged in a wagon teetering one step from collapse.
And if he borrowed the name of a major trade company on top of that, his identity would be guaranteed beyond question.
Even if the forged crest was discovered, by then they'd already be well past the border.
As if heaven itself were lending a hand, so many travelers had flooded in today that the cargo inspection had been left to a single officer — the nomad girl, the Taste Officer.
The plan is perfect.
And it was about to be executed perfectly.
If only this man standing right in front of him had never appeared.
"What's that hidden down there?"
He was an utterly ordinary man — no distinguishing features, no peculiarities, not even a whiff of danger about him.
A moderately thin build. A body that looked like it had never seen a fight in its life.
The way he offered only the bare minimum of courtesy and all but announced he had no intention of inspecting the cargo himself almost made him seem like a rookie.
And yet that man had pinpointed the exact hiding place of the contraband.
Who the hell is this guy?
No amount of luck could explain this.
Crane, who had only ever worked the Mahalan Kingdom, didn't know one thing.
He didn't know that someone had handpicked those very Five Senses Officers and swept every last underground organization out of the kingdom's south.
And he didn't know that this man was looking at him right now.
Two seconds, give or take.
I watched the mercenaries trade glances with one another.
And then came the predictable answer.
"The hell are you on about? Hide what, exactly?"
He probably thought I wouldn't know. Or that I could be fooled.
I smiled at the pathetic answer.
"You would know better than anyone, sir."
"So what is it, then?"
He was stonewalling to the very end.
"Since you're pretending to know nothing, allow me to explain the grounds for my suspicion."
Draping the towel — now wrung clean of fish brine — over my arm, I stepped forward.
"You claimed the fish was fresh, yet it reeks."
Hauling salt-cured fish across a continent — no ice in the barrels, no cooling magic, nothing — made no sense whatsoever.
"You call yourselves the Hallas Trade Company, one of the great southern companies, yet you're escorting a single wagon."
Trade companies never traveled alone.
A trade route was a place where safety could not be guaranteed. Unable to protect their own lives alone, merchants always banded together in convoys of a dozen or more wagons.
That was precisely why they were called companies — and these men had shown up with exactly one wagon.
"Your supposed escort captain doesn't even know whether a letter of delegation exists."
Moreover, any company crossing the continent was required, alongside their immigration paperwork, to declare the purpose of their journey — all to leave not even the smallest room for misunderstanding.
It was the most basic of basics, taught in the first week of any merchant academy, the first procedure every company performed.
When I had first extended my hand toward Crane, it had been a request for documents.
But he had never submitted a letter of delegation — as if he had no idea the procedure even existed.
"And you've loaded cargo to near-overflowing capacity onto a wagon with a cracked floor that could give out at any moment."
On a long journey, your means of transport was your life. The health of the horses and the sound maintenance of the wagon had to be the absolute top priority.
When the Mage Society had sent wagons to excavate ruins, hadn't they layered them with every manner of fearsome protective enchantment?
Yet these men had crossed the continent in a broken-down wagon.
I let out a hollow laugh and glared at Crane.
"I am not a fool."
Their expressions shifted.
From rigidity to alarm.
From alarm to open hostility.
A menacing hush descended over the clearing.
"Hey. Now that's just reaching, even for you."
Crane began walking slowly back toward me.
He lowered his voice.
"Quit nitpicking. Is it your job to declare something smuggling with no evidence whatsoever?"
"Doubting everything is an inspector's duty. And I haven't said a single word about smuggling... though from where I stand, you look suspicious enough."
"So you're just dragging this out, angling for a little pocket money, huh."
The words every mercenary spat out, and the words an inspector least wanted to hear.
Bribery.
He was looking at me as just another corrupt inspector.
"Ha."
The tension in the clearing climbed higher and higher.
"Criminals always say that. Where's your evidence?"
I said it flatly, like flicking something off my sleeve.
"We'll know once we look. So let's take a look, shall we?"
"And if we open it up and there's nothing? Who's paying for the wagon you wrecked?"
A sharp point.
What civil servants feared most was a blunder. And if a problem arose from a unilateral judgment call like this one, the fallout would be anything but small.
"Very well. If there is no contraband in there, I will personally — out of my own pocket — compensate you with the finest wagon in the South for the one I damage."
But when the moment was certain, you had to commit.
And I was certain you were a smuggler.
Every last circumstance said so.
"You little—!"
The mercenary's rough hand twitched near his waist.
"Ah—!"
The instant Elaine noticed and hurriedly moved toward me—
GRGRGRK.
Came the sound of some enormous mass of stone beginning to move.
"Huh?"
Far away atop the ramparts, the border guard who had received the attendant's signal slowly lowered its head.
And then—
the captain of the border guard, which had stood frozen like a statue, leapt down from the wall and landed between me and Crane.
WHOOOOM!!
A violent gale roared out with the thunderous impact.
"Wh-what the—!?"
"Wh-what? That wasn't a statue — it was a golem!?"
The captain of the border guard answered the mercenaries' cries of disbelief.
[SUSPECTED SMUGGLER DETECTED WITHIN BORDER. COMPLYING WITH IMMIGRATION OFFICE REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE.]
Crane slowly raised his eyes toward the source of the voice.
His head tilted back, and back, and back.
"Good lord..."
A blue power core pulsed ominously in the border guard's face, where a man's features would have been.
Its two hands gripped a colossal, pillar-thick sword, hewn like a column from some ancient ruin.
As if it intended to sweep away everything in its path the moment circumstances went even slightly wrong.
[ENTRANTS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO COMPLY WITH INSPECTION. NON-COMPLIANCE MAY BE CLASSIFIED AS DISTURBANCE WITHIN THE BORDER.]
"What is that? A golem?"
"Whoa — it's the border guard!"
The captain's sudden intervention began drawing the attention of the surrounding travelers.
"Tch...!"
Cowed, Crane hurriedly spoke to me.
"L-look here, Mr. Inspector. I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding—"
"I will ask one final time."
I cut through Crane's attempt to smooth things over, grinding the words out between my teeth.
"What did you hide in the bottom of the wagon?"