Interlude: Garden of Chirping
Interlude: Garden of Chirping
The Caribbean Sea, which bordered three nations along the eastern edge of the Columbia Continent, had earned the nickname "The Most Dangerous Sea in the World."
It was a reputation honestly come by—scarcely a day passed without the newspapers reporting yet another ship vanishing without a trace.
In fact, maritime disasters in the Caribbean were a staple for magazine journalists. They made for easy copy.
Whenever a deadline loomed and there was still empty space to fill, an editor would assign some idle reporter to write a feature on Caribbean disappearances.
The reporter would then pull up a list of recently vanished vessels, track down a shipowner who happened to live near a restaurant that had received favorable marks from the Christian Guide, travel there, enjoy a little leisure on the company expense account, and then simply swap out the ship names and cargo descriptions from a previous Caribbean article before submitting it. That was the method.
Thanks to editors and reporters who pulled that stunt every month, a rival publication had mockingly dubbed them "Caribbean Monthly." When the magazine responded by running a feature titled "Misconceptions About Caribbean Sea Disappearances," it was a rather clever counterpunch.
The article explained that two factors were responsible for the Caribbean's mistaken reputation as a dangerous sea.
The first was accessibility.
A place like the Forbidden Zone Sargasso—the truly most dangerous sea in the world—was, by its very nature, impossible for people to approach. The sight of colossal tentacles, rising high enough to brush the sky, was visible from hundreds of kilometers away. People steered clear of it on their own, so accidents never happened there.
The second factor was frequency.
The Caribbean was the most heavily trafficked sea on the planet. It was no exaggeration to say that the Sierra Madre Mountains, which bisected the continent, forced nearly all trade between the eastern and central regions to rely on maritime shipping. And at the heart of that shipping lay the Caribbean. When that many ships passed through, accidents were inevitable.
The author of the article was a freelance journalist famous for his precise information-gathering and keen insight into the hidden side of events large and small. His piece promptly put an end to the magazine journalists' Caribbean disappearance features—and the culinary tourism that tagged along with them—for quite some time.
But behind this laughable little episode, a few sharper minds caught the scent of conspiracy lurking behind the article.
The journalist had originally been preparing an exposé on "the collusion between Caribbean pirates and merchant association officials, and the Voodoo Cult operating behind them." Then, abruptly, he had changed course and written an article suggesting the Caribbean was safer than people thought.
Friends who sensed something amiss and tried to contact him learned that his house had recently burned to the ground in a gas-lamp explosion—and trembled with fear.
The journalist's closest friend felt the same fear. But his reasons differed from everyone else's.
When the journalist had fled, evading the Voodoo Cult's threats, he had entrusted his friend with his materials. And those materials had vanished just one day before the friend was supposed to sell them to the cult.
Who had stolen them?
Had his friend figured out what he was up to and come back to retrieve them in secret?
Or had those Voodoo Cult bastards broken into his room because they didn't want to pay?
Several kilometers away from where he was panicking, Hunting Dog Mars sat on a café terrace, nursing an iced beer and using the very materials he had obtained as his drinking snack.
Like any other Madosa of Sinepekus, Mars was a specialist in gathering information and tracking targets.
Sinepekus was a Demon God who delighted in rumors, fame, and slander. He gifted his followers the right to stroll through the garden where he walked.
The Garden of Whispers.
Within it echoed every murmur, every piece of gossip collected from every corner of the world. Mars typically gathered his intelligence there and traced it back to its source.
Sometimes, however, it was more efficient to step directly into the field and seize information in person, as he had done now. The sheer volume of data obtainable from the Garden was overwhelming, and telling the difference between a "Whisper" and a "Chirp" was difficult.
Those terms were jargon among Sinepekus Madosa. A Whisper meant valuable intelligence or a fact. A Chirp meant worthless noise or a lie.
"Chirping is a waste of life."
Mars had taken his master's words as a personal maxim and held silence as a virtue.
Sipping his beer, he committed each piece of information to memory beneath the harsh sun. Not a single wasted word ever left his lips.
Among the intelligence the journalist had gathered, Mars noted several items.
An island suspected to be the Voodoo Cult's headquarters. Officers believed to be core members of the cult. And the channels they used to communicate with the outside world.
Once he had read all the documents, Mars entered the Garden of Whispers—closing his eyes and sending his consciousness to that place.
There, he examined the information he had gleaned from the journalist's materials. Most of it was factual. As expected of a capable reporter.
Mars made a mental note to read more of his articles when he had the time, then rose from his seat.
His movements were more hurried than usual, and for good reason. The owner of the Bergson Trading Company, the master he served, had been exposed to the Voodoo Cult's schemes. He had learned this only days ago.
Tracking the company's betrayer, Pierre Maupassant, had been difficult. Pierre had been sworn brother to the company's previous owner, Jeral Bergson, and had served as its vice-chairman besides. He knew Mars existed. He knew his abilities. He knew exactly how he operated. No one understood better how to evade a hunting dog's pursuit.
He used aliases instead of his real name—different names for each contact he made.
That tactic proved devastatingly effective against a Madosa of Sinepekus. Tracking his movements in the Garden of Whispers became dozens of times harder.
But a few days earlier, Mars had chanced upon a scrap of conversation in the Garden.
—Welcome, welcome, Mr. Pierre.
—...It's Luazel.
A brief exchange that had taken place at Pirate Island Freeport. The other party was a pirate captain known as "Claw Hand," a man known to have dealt with Pierre.
Luazel. That was the alias Pierre used when dealing with the Voodoo Cult.
Once Mars had that name, he gained access to several pieces of intelligence he had been missing. The plot against his master was among them. Now he had to determine exactly what it entailed.
Using the journalist's materials, Mars traced a route and infiltrated the island that housed the Voodoo Cult's main headquarters. As a Madosa himself, he was able to neutralize several of the cult's security measures.
The island was called Ginen.
After Pierre had been indicted for embezzlement, breach of trust, and attempted murder, the company's audit team had zeroed in on his misconduct. This island had been on their list. But it had been assigned a low priority.
Not only was it located in waters that were extremely difficult to access, but on the surface, it appeared to be little more than remote wilderness—a tangle of mangrove colonies and tropical rainforest. The audit team had concluded that there was no way embezzled materials and funds had flowed into such a place.
That judgment had been a miscalculation. Nestled deep within the dense jungle, the Voodoo Cult had erected structures of breathtaking grandeur.
Mars had never seen anything like them in his life.
A small train hurtled along a track that rose and fell. A circular steel framework, dozens of meters wide, rotated while carrying seats filled with people. Swings suspended from chains swung left and right and spun in circles.
And all of this had been invisible from outside the island...
The power of magic was undeniably at work here.
Mars blended in among the laborers and entered the site. A sign at the entrance read "Wonder Island."
Beyond those first structures, many more buildings were under construction across Wonder Island. Like the rides, their purpose was unfathomable no matter how long you looked.
While pretending to work and drifting through the site, Mars spotted a ratman in the middle of the construction zone, squeaking away as he gathered the site supervisors around him.
"Rail rides usin' centrifugal force, they ain't but a handful of 'em in the whole world, eh! And the spinnin' wheel—that there's my own design, eh! Squeak-squeak!"
Unlike most ratmen, he spoke remarkably fluently. He wore a white coat and dark-lensed protective goggles. But the most striking feature was his head. His skull was open wide, covered not by skin but by a transparent glass dome. Inside, a massive, convoluted pink brain lay fully exposed.
Mars recognized him as one of the cult officers he had seen in the documents.
Then the ratman shifted, revealing the person behind him. He hadn't been addressing the site supervisors at all. He had been chattering at a girl with rabbit ears who stood before him.
Her appearance—and the fact that an officer was addressing her in polite speech—left only one possibility.
The Vice Cult Leader.
In that instant, a wailing siren split the air across the entire island. The laborers were still reeling when a Voodoo Madosa rushed up and reported to the Vice Cult Leader.
"An intruder! Traces discovered at the Florand channel lead directly onto this island!"
The rabbit-eared girl shouted in fury, and the ratman beside her squeaked with a flustered expression.
The laborers were directed by the Madosa and returned to their quarters. Mars slipped deftly away from the group while supervision was lax.
He hid himself well off the path and closed his eyes.
Extraction was not a concern. He had a flawless escape method. But he couldn't leave yet—not with so little to show for his efforts.
As a test, he attempted to connect to the Garden of Whispers. The attempt succeeded. From all directions, sounds centered on the island rushed toward him. Whispers he could never have heard from outside were audible within its borders.
He ignored everything else. He gathered only intelligence bearing on the plot against Bergson, sweeping it up indiscriminately.
"The intruder is here somewhere!"
"Pursue him!"
Could they detect the use of magic somehow?
He had barely connected to the Garden before pursuers began converging on his position.
Mars organized the gathered intelligence in his mind, then employed the method he had prepared in advance.
I erase my name.
Madosa of Sinepekus had to live their entire lives concealing their own names. If anyone perceived their existence and spoke their name, they could hear exactly where the sound originated—even from the opposite side of the world. For this reason, they taught their names to only a very few and warned them never to utter it casually.
Living cut off from society, wandering back alleys while overhearing rumors—that was their fate. Using too many aliases was also dangerous, since an alias could potentially supplant the true name. In the end, many found it easier to simply abandon all attempts to live among others.
For such people, the ritual of erasing one's name signified nothing less than the annihilation of existence. It meant casting oneself into the sea of information that drifted through the Garden of Whispers. A nameless drifter vanishing without a trace.
But Mars did not worry. His master, exactly as she had promised, periodically performed a rite in which she spoke his name. When she called his name, he could finally become Mars once more.
Through that rite, he could reclaim his identity from the flood of information and choose whether to restore his existence to this world.
The next rite is a few days away. I can stop the plot.
The intelligence he had just gathered contained enough clues to do so. He activated the spell that erased his name.
"Here!"
"Traces over here!"
The Madosa zeroed in on a specific thicket and rushed to surround it. But when they thrust the undergrowth aside, no one was there.
"To think we nearly let someone infiltrate the main island. Good thing we took countermeasures the moment we heard the materials had been stolen."
Rel Rohhera, the Voodoo Cult's Vice Cult Leader known as the Rabbit Witch, turned to a Madosa beside her and asked,
"Well?"
He was one of the Voodoo Cult's own Sinepekus Madosa. He nodded with confidence.
"A success."
From the moment they had learned that the materials had been stolen—likely by Hunting Dog Mars—they had been seeding the island with this false scenario. Fake meetings, fake orders, fake rumors whispered.
The Voodoo Cult was a coalition of Madosa. They had collected more magical knowledge than anywhere else on earth and relentlessly researched how to apply it. By the same token, they had also discovered numerous methods for neutralizing an opponent's abilities. Opening a passage to the Abyss across the entire island to prevent information from leaking outward, or flooding the Garden of Whispers with Chirping—these were among their techniques.
Rel Rohhera smiled, already anticipating the outcome the false intelligence he had gleaned from the Chirping would produce.