Chapter 13
"Phew… why does my back ache? I didn't even train today…"
Maybe it was that little devil of a young lady and her habit of dropping things for me to fetch. I hadn't moved all that much, yet my joints and spine were protesting all the same. Thud — Perry's wastebasket had brimmed over, so while I was at it I gathered up the trash from her whole floor, hauled it out to the incinerator in the yard, and was stretching the kinks out of my back when the old man who tended the garden came shuffling over.
"Gul, how's the bodyguard life suiting you? Working at your age — must be hard, no?"
"It has its moments, but I used to help out at my father's shop, so I manage."
"Good lad. My own son, at your age, was too busy running off to play to so much as touch his books. Hah hah!"
The gardener, whose bald crown gleamed the instant his hat came off, fished a cigarette pack and matchbox from his back pocket, struck a match to the cigarette between his lips — then dropped the burning match straight into the incinerator.
So he smokes…
We'd crossed paths only a handful of times over the past week, and I'd never once caught him with a cigarette in hand or even heard him so much as mention one, so the small discovery took me by surprise.
Crackle, pop. The matchstick seemed to vanish into the incinerator — then, buried under the sound of burning refuse, the flames began swallowing the trash whole.
"Phew~ Ah — keep this between us, would you? Butler's ear especially. Lady Perry can't stand the smell of cigarettes, so she won't let me light up while I'm on the clock."
"Oh — sure… But won't the smell give you away even if I keep quiet?"
"Not a chance. I just call it the stink of burning garbage. And as luck would have it, the old master's quite the chimney himself, so I tell the butler I caught it burning up some smoke-soaked junk from the old man's room, and he waves it right through."
The way I saw it, that wasn't waving anything through — it was the butler knowing full well and choosing to look the other way…
I had no intention of souring things with a man I was on good terms with over nothing, so I let it pass without a word.
Hiding it under a bigger smell, hm…
All that aside, there was something about the gardener's excuse that lodged in my mind. It was like camouflage — a creature fleeing a predator, or a hunter melting into the terrain so the prey never spots it — the trick of burying the thing you don't want found inside something bigger.
…
Even I couldn't say why those words stuck. I only had a vague, drifting thought — maybe that bastard x, the one keeping me on edge, had been impossible to find for the very same reason: he, too, was hidden inside something bigger, just like the gardener's cigarette smell.
…Maybe it's time I changed my point of view.
Whatever else was true, I had no clever plays left at the moment, so the smart move was to try everything I could.
As always, once I'd confirmed Perry was asleep, I quietly left her floor and slipped into Karma's office one story below.
"What is it? Something to report?"
Work for Serphe, apparently, arrived in mountains — even at what should have been bedtime, Karma's desk was still stacked with papers that looked nowhere near finished.
Scratch, scratch. Busy as he clearly was, the man hadn't lifted his head so much as once when I walked in, eyes locked with his documents at point-blank range, scribbling away.
"Hey — has anything big happened in the duchy lately?"
"…What kind of 'big'?"
Not following where I was going, Karma stopped his pen, pulled off the glasses he'd been working through, and raised his head to me for the first time.
To get my meaning across, I walked him through the camouflage idea — leaving out the part about the gardener's cigarettes. When I finished, Karma went quiet and rested his chin on his hand.
"So what you're saying is — the reason this watcher's never tripped up our people is that he's tucked himself inside something so blatant we either can't touch it or have no reason to?"
"More or less."
"Sounds plausible enough. But what, specifically?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't be asking — I wanted to see if any incident came to mind worth using as a reference. Trivial is fine. Anything since the day I arrived here, or maybe a little before that. He'll be hiding inside some change that looks like nothing at all."
"So what exactly do you want from me…"
Grumbling as he was, he apparently bought the logic — Karma swept the papers in front of him aside and began wringing his brain in earnest. I did the same.
Never mind wherever he usually holes up — as long as he's hunting one of the three of us, me, Karma, or Perry, surveillance and tailing are a given…
Ever since the attempt to snatch Perry, both Karma and Perry had loosed their people to sweep for watchers and tails every time either left the mansion — and not once had they snagged so much as a thread.
If I were x, how would I observe a target crawling with eyes…
Forget my own perspective. Become the assassin. Think like him.
No. Inside a noble estate where duchy soldiers and even the civil guard walk the walls, surveillance is next to impossible. Serphe's stronghold keeps its windows to a bare minimum against exactly this — short of infiltrating, it can't be done. Which leaves one opening: the times the target steps outside.
But while that might not hold for Karma, Perry wasn't the type who much enjoyed going out — and as her shadow, neither was I. In an entire week, the two of us hadn't set foot off the grounds once.
That was long enough to drive any watcher frantic enough to force a play — yet there wasn't the faintest sign of one.
Maybe I'm reading shadows into nothing…
Maybe the timetable for touching Perry was simply generous, and the enemy patient to match. But whoever had let his killing intent slip into my sight by accident didn't strike me as that disciplined.
Why, then? Why not a single slip, not a single change?
The question only tangled further the more I chewed on it — and whether I was alone in the suffering or not, at some point Karma had a cigarette clamped between his lips.
"Phew~ Ah — don't go telling the other staff I smoke. The old man above all. My daughter can't stand the smell, she's the one who banned me. If it gets out, I'll never live down the shame…"
"Then don't smoke. What's so damn good about those things anyway…"
"When I hold out, the craving crawls under my skin till I'm half mad. Can't breathe right. Can't even think straight."
I shot a sidelong glance at Karma — a walking textbook of pathetic adult excuses — and kept grinding away at the problem.
Why wasn't he moving? Why wasn't he getting twitchy, like that chain-smoker over there…
Then something flashed across my mind.
What if he was never twitchy in the first place?
Deprived of his cigarettes, Karma looked wretched to any passing eye, his forced abstinence written all over him. But the gardener, who'd been sneaking his smokes on the sly, gave off no such signal — I'd never have pegged him for a smoker until I saw it with my own eyes.
By the same token — even with Perry and me never leaving, what if he had a way to watch us unseen? What if he'd always had it, and simply never stirred because he'd never once been anxious?
Which meant x was inside this mansion. He was watching us from within it.
From anyone else's mouth, even I would have laughed it off as an absurd delusion — the rambling plot of some far-fetched novel.
But my instincts were ringing every alarm they had, at full blast.
"Wh-what's wrong…?"
My face must have frozen over something terrible, because Karma stammered and broke out in a sweat.
"Hey… just to be safe, I'm asking — among the staff, who came on most recently after me…?"
"…Huh? The staff? Why do you…"
Karma had been about to toss the question back at my stunned face — but one look at my expression and he seemed to grasp where my mind had gone, because his own words died on his tongue.
"No. You can't mean one of our own servants is a traitor — no, a plant?"
A traitor was someone whose devotion, once given, had since rotted. But x would have walked through that door from the very beginning with surveillance as his purpose.
"I don't know — so shut up and answer!"
"…Ah."
Then, as if something had snagged on a hook in his mind, Karma fumbled, unable to shut his mouth.
"Th-the maid who cleans Perry's room… Her old nurse got too old for the work, and Perry's grown now, so we hired her — it's been under two months…"
"Dorothy?"
The maid Karma had named was, by the simple fact of my guarding Perry, the woman I crossed paths with most in the entire household. Save for today, when one of Perry's moods had struck, Dorothy was the one who set out her tea and snacks every single time — the only attendant allowed at her side when she bathed or dressed.
That Dorothy — an assassin?
A cold prickle. The blood drained from my face. It was like turning around without a care in the world only to find the blade of an intruder who'd been standing behind me all along kissing the bridge of my nose — a lurch of pure vertigo.
Two months. Long, if you chose to call it that — but time enough to spend, for someone who meant to. The moment the words landed, the shock hit me like a hammer between the eyes.
Thump. I kicked up off the sofa and walked straight out of Karma's office.
"Hey — where are you going!?"
"One last check… You stay put… No — go sit with Perry. Just in case."
Leaving Karma behind, I descended to the first floor and stopped before a room tucked into a corner — a door I'd always known existed and never once opened. I knocked.
"Butler? Forgive the hour — are you awake?"
Instead of an answer came the weary scrape of a body rising, and the door opened on the butler, immaculate as ever.
"What brings you at this hour?"
"Do you remember the day, one week ago, when I escorted the young lady and the master out?"
"Why, that makes it exactly one week ago to the day."
Old he might be, but his memory had lost nothing; the butler summoned it up on the spot.
"The master wants a few things confirmed — did you happen to do the shopping that day?"
"…Mm, it got done. The provisions had run low just then, and there was a rush to restock. Why do you ask — has the master been saying the food tastes strange?"
"Yes — not that it tastes bad. He says it's subtly different, and he's wondering where it came from."
"Hm. I never heard of us switching shops. Hold a moment — who was it went out that day… Ah, Dorothy. As it happened, with you two out and about, the one with idle hands was that girl, Perry's maid, so I set her to the shopping… Gul? What's the matter? You've gone quite pale."
"…Does Dorothy do the shopping often, then?"
"Not often, no. But whenever the young lady's out and her hands are free, she volunteers for it herself. A diligent girl, that one — never finds the work a bother, not like you. Quite the admirable child."
A testimony airtight from every angle.
"…Understood. I'll pass it along."
Out of the butler's room, I smothered my presence and slipped into the annex, then up one floor above my own — the floor where the female staff roomed.
Step, step. Some of the servants were not yet asleep; faint lamplight or the stir of movement bled through the doors. I stopped in front of one of them.
I had no idea which room was Dorothy's — no, x's.
But one room in the corridor stood alone: lamplight glowing faintly beneath the door, certain proof that someone was awake — yet not a whisper of movement, not the sound of a single breath.
"Seems they've already noticed I'm on to them. Then I'm coming in now."
Snick. I drew both Gurkha blades from the sheaths at my hips, sheared clean through the door handle, and eased the door open with my foot.
Creak. I swung the door wide and slipped through the gap — and strange to say, there was no one inside.
No — that wasn't the problem…
The room was empty. Completely.
Not stripped in haste — an abandoned room, its long neglect written in the dust caked over the mattress, nothing in it but a lone lantern sitting forlorn.
I'd been played—
Bang. In the very instant the truth struck me — that I'd lost the last move of our little game — the wall of the neighboring room burst apart, and as if to mock me, a chain tipped with a blade shot out and wound around my body in a blink.
"Oh dear — so close!"
Then out of the shattered wall leapt Dorothy — not in her usual maid's uniform, but in black leather gear clinging tight enough to trace every line of her — and she smashed through the window and plunged from the mansion, the chain dragging me out of the building right after her.
"Damn it all."