The Culprit Returns to the Scene (2)
"Ugh, took me long enough to find this place."
I'd figured that retracing my steps would get me there in no time, but the back alleys of the ducal territory were alleys in name only — in sheer scale they dwarfed any decent-sized village — and I'd ended up thoroughly lost. It took a good thirty minutes of darting this way and that through the maze before I finally stood at the slave market I'd smashed to pieces earlier that day.
Good thing they picked somewhere with people around.
Tucked away in a blind corner as the spot was, the security force had apparently been slow to receive the report — even with nearly half a day gone by, the guards were still bustling about, busy sealing off the scene.
"Which means this whole mess might turn out even better than I planned?"
It was never my intention, but thanks to those guards, who knew — I might just catch something today.
My memory was solid from here on, so I stopped wandering. Once I'd confirmed the route leading to Serpe's headquarters, I deliberately left the path I'd taken that morning and chose the alley beside it instead. Piecing together my memories of morning and now, sketching the back alleys into a map inside my head as I wound along, I finally came to a corner that rejoined the route I'd walked before — and there I held my breath and dropped low.
Presence suppressed to the limit, I stuck just my head out far enough to peek. There it was: the scene of this morning's scuffle with the kidnappers.
Just as I thought.
Unlike when I'd walked away from the fight, the blood that had spilled across the ground had been cleaned up almost without a trace.
"Someone's already handled the cleanup, huh..."
Judging by how Karma had reacted — he hadn't even known Feri had nearly been snatched — this wasn't Serpe's doing. I kept an eye out for anyone left behind to watch the place as I eased toward the scene, studying the vicinity carefully.
"Tsk. They're more thorough than I gave them credit for."
They'd swaggered in bold enough to target the Serpe boss's daughter, yet apparently his retaliation still frightened them — the stretch they'd scrubbed stood out clean against everything around it.
"But they can't have had it easy, right? They never in their wildest dreams imagined packs of guards would come flooding into back alleys like this."
The guards were still scurrying back and forth, but judging by how much ground they'd cordoned off, they must have arrived at the scene no later than around the time Serpe's men took me. And of course they couldn't just look the other way — a murder scene, blood pooled everywhere, sitting right beside the site of a public knife fight. Whoever had done the cleaning clearly lacked the nerve to take on the security force on top of Serpe, which meant they'd have had no choice but to rush.
Clunk.
Rushing like that, they were bound to have slipped up once or twice — or left something behind that they simply couldn't carry off.
"For instance... ah, there we go."
A stack of wooden crates piled into one corner. If my memory served, they weren't in that position this morning. And on the underside of the crate sat a tiny bloodstain — the kind you'd miss unless you looked properly. It was almost as if the stain were rewarding my expectations.
I opened the crate. Empty.
"If they weren't putting something in it, why move it at all?"
No — hold on. It was only because a box is, by nature, a thing that holds things that I'd grown prejudiced. The box itself probably meant nothing. They hadn't moved it because it was a box; they'd simply needed to shift some object of roughly a box's mass and bulk from one spot to this one. That was all.
Wading deep into thought, I began to walk, treading deliberately on every tile set into the ground with the shoes a month of travel had reduced to rags. Tap, tap, tap — every step rang out exactly as expected, the sharp knock of brick striking hard-packed stone beneath, and I drifted on with no particular destination.
Thump.
"Bingo."
After a while — just once — a tile gave off a sound like pressing down on something softer than stone. I drew my knife then and there, slid it into the seam of that tile, and pried it up.
"Twisted bastards, the lot of you. Just watch."
The blade I'd wedged in to lever the tile caught on something with a soft, sinking bite — a texture unlike any prepared cut of meat. No, closer to the feel of a blade skewering wild game.
I eased up another tile, and there it was: a severed arm from one of the hacked-apart corpses. Not something they'd cut off to hide, mind you — it was the arm of some poor devil I myself had sliced apart during the fight.
"I must have diced them up so thoroughly they had trouble collecting it all, huh?"
Still, picturing whoever it was dutifully prying up the tiles one by one, digging out a hollow, stowing the body inside, and stacking everything neatly back in place was honestly pretty funny. The walls of the corpse's hiding hole were fairly clean-cut — carved out in an instant with a small bomb or magic, maybe? Either way, they were clever bastards.
"At this rate, this whole stretch of ground is worth tearing up..."
My memory said there were unmistakably more of them missing body parts — ankles, the backs of hands. If all of those were buried here too... it might just be worth prying into the walls, or the tiles elsewhere.
"Hey, you there! What do you think you're doing!? W-wait a second — is that an arm!? Everyone get over here!"
"Ah, shit."
Pweee—
I was still standing there loosely holding the arm I'd fished from the hole, weighing my options, when my movements apparently looked suspicious enough that a guard got an eyeful. He blew his whistle loud enough to rattle the whole district and called for backup, and I scrambled over the wall and bolted.
"Agh, goddammit — and I'm already hurting on top of it..."
At some point I'd stopped feeling the pain, which was why I'd gone over the wall without a thought, but the moment I landed, agony climbed up from the soles of my feet — pain so deep it throttled the scream in my throat.
"Hoo... shit. Slowly. Slowly..."
Being chased off the scene by the guards stung a little, but so what? I wasn't moving for Serpe's sake. My only aim was making sure the bastards who'd set their sights on Feri could never aim at her again — so whoever caught them, as long as somebody shook them up badly enough that they'd never dare try twice, that was all that mattered.
"Hey. Where the hell did you run off to?"
I was coaxing my aching body along, somehow back at the mansion and just heading for my room, when Karma appeared in the corridor — apparently the butler had passed him the news.
"I told you. I went to work."
"What work could a guy who showed up today possibly..."
"Shut it and take this."
I had no desire to chat with an irritating old man while I was in pain, so I tossed him the evidence I'd stashed inside my coat where no one could see it.
"What's this? A presen—AAAGH, FUCK!"
"Gift, he says."
Karma had caught it without thinking, realized what it actually was a heartbeat too late, shrieked, and flung it to the floor — then noticed the arm's leftover blood on his hand, glanced around frantically, and made do with a curtain for a towel.
"The hell are you doing? Gross."
"You absolute lunatic, where did this arm come from!? What did you do out there — tell me, and don't lie!"
"As a model citizen of the Empire, brimming with conscience, I merely picked up some trash that had been carelessly dropped."
"What trash?!"
"Ah — no, correction. I didn't drop it; the trash dropped it, and I deliberately picked it up. Doesn't that make me an even more model citizen?"
"That's not — what kind of bullshit are you even..."
"Kidding. It's the arm of one of the bastards who went after Feri. With the guards swarming everywhere, someone couldn't deal with the bodies, so they stashed them there."
"...!"
Karma — who'd shrieked at one severed arm in a way that didn't much suit his job description as a mafia boss — changed completely the instant his daughter came up.
"This is one of theirs?"
"I got spotted by the guards, so this was all I could bring back. But if you put magic to it, or some of the goods that trade hands in the underworld, there's use in this, no?"
"If we go looking, we'll find some... Right. Would've been better if the guards hadn't seen you, but the investigation's only going to be for show anyway, so we move once it's wrapped up. Good work, brat. So you really did go to work."
"I told you. Keep my parents truly safe, and I'll keep your daughter truly safe."
"...I promise."
Like it or not, this was one refreshingly clean bargain I'd be bound to for a long time to come.
"Go to the kitchen. There's a dining hall back there where the servants eat — have a meal. Everyone's waiting."
"Perfect timing, I'm starving. I'll just wash my face and head straight over."
Looking myself over now, the clothes I wore had at some point picked up a coat of dust and blood. I'd have to get the butler to lend me something old later. They were waiting, so I wanted to get moving as fast as I could — but Karma, who'd been gazing blankly at the arm I'd worked so hard to dig up, called me back yet again.
"...Hey. Brat."
"What."
"You need anything?"
"Like what?"
"You earned merit, so you get rewarded — that's how it works. And even setting that aside, you'll be living here."
"Nothing I particularly want right now. I'll be sharpening my blade, so get me a whetstone."
"I'll mention it to the old man. Anything else?"
"Hmm... Ah — give me some free time. Whenever suits."
"...What for?"
"There's something I need to look into."
"I'll think about it. Get going."
No telling what had gotten into him all of a sudden, but there was no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"What's with that guy?"
Having parted with Gul, Karma stared blankly out the window for a long while, then left the house and made his way, arm in hand, to the familiar headquarters of Serpe.
"Boss, you've arrived."
"Galing. Get this to the boys."
He tossed the arm Gul had secured to Galing — Serpe's founding partner and his trusted right hand — and Galing caught it without so much as a twitch, calmly turning it over to study the tattoos etched into it.
"...Whose arm is this?"
"One of the kidnapping bastards who laid hands on Feri."
"...I'll get on it at once."
"Can you identify him?"
"I can't promise certainty, but the arm still carries its tattoos. It should be enough to work with."
"Good."
At his dependable man's answer, Karma nodded and set a cigarette between his lips.
"If you smoke again, Miss Feri won't like it, sir."
"Then I'll simply skip her goodnight kiss tonight, that's all."
"Has something happened, sir?"
Here was a man who'd readily give up his time with his daughter — time he wouldn't surrender even in the thick of a feud with a hostile organization. When Karma indulged whims like this, it was almost always because he couldn't face her with a clear conscience.
"That? The brat brought it back."
"That child...? Don't tell me he actually moved in that state?"
"He did. Even after the guards caught him at it, he apparently slipped away clean."
"Hard to believe, sir."
Their acquaintance had been brief, but Galing, too, knew Gul wasn't the type to lie or posture. Even so, the thought of him running and fleeing in that condition was beyond believing.
"I did it after giving it some thought, but I still don't know whether I did the right thing."
"In what way, sir?"
"Just... putting a kid barely a year older than Feri to work like this."
"For all that, he didn't seem to mind it much himself."
"It would sit easier if he hated it. If he were afraid of it..."
Whoo. With his mouth full of cigarette smoke, Karma let the anguish piled up in his head pour out.
Galing watched his lord sink into self-reproach for a moment, then reached back to the shelf behind him and took down the whiskey he usually saved for himself.
"Will you have a drink, sir?"
"I'd appreciate that."