14. Melting Point (32)
14. Melting Point (32)
Koka scowled. He had been seconds away from steering the scene somewhere truly entertaining, and now this wretch had ruined the mood.
"You have something to give me?"
He narrowed his eyes and raked Wonderstein up and down with his gaze.
"Don't tell me you intend to strip and bow in her place. I'd rather not have such a grotesque sight seared into my eyes..."
Sneers and jeers erupted from all directions. A few guests pantomimed vomiting. Wonderstein merely smiled through all of it.
"Perish the thought. What I wish to offer is information."
"Information? What kind of information?"
"I will tell you who attempted to poison His Majesty the Emperor."
Silence dropped over the gathering like a blade. The scattered laughter died mid-breath.
'Wh-what is that bastard saying?'
'P-poison His Majesty?'
'He's lost his mind...'
The heat rising from the bath did nothing to stop the chill that swept through the crowd. People traded tense, sidelong glances, mouths clamped shut.
The Emperor's prolonged illness had officially been attributed to old age. Darker rumors of poison and curses certainly circulated in the shadows, but no one voiced them openly. The subject was too politically volatile.
Yet some vagabond circus leader had just dared to speak of it in front of the Crown Prince of the Empire. Worse, he claimed to know the culprit.
"You— you insolent— where do you get off spouting such—"
"The poison used is called Potassium Cyanide. An item classified as a Level One secret by the Alchemy Guild."
Koka's hands trembled, fists clenched. To an onlooker, he appeared to be shaking with rage at Wonderstein's insolence. In truth, he was frozen with panic.
He enjoyed being the Crown Prince's body double. The role let him live with a luxury and recklessness far beyond anything he'd known back home. He wanted to stay in the Crown Prince's good graces so he could keep playing the part.
So he followed the rules the Crown Prince had given him to the letter. Staying within bounds was easy—kids who'd grown up dancing on the line knew exactly how close they could get without crossing it.
Avoiding political remarks had never been a problem either. The companions the Crown Prince gathered around him were all libertines of a similar stripe. Grave topics rarely came up at all, and whenever one did surface, he was deft enough to smooth it over.
But this had landed before he could even flinch.
The identity of the would-be imperial poisoner? Even among his hometown friends, that was a subject people shied away from.
Yet now that the offer had been spoken aloud, refusing it outright was equally dangerous. That alone would invite poisonous speculation—whispers that perhaps the Crown Prince himself had administered the poison.
'What on earth is this man talking about...'
Nika was equally stunned by what had come out of Wonderstein's mouth.
Only a very small handful of people knew that the poison that had felled the Emperor was Potassium Cyanide. Within Nika's own faction, the count could be numbered on one hand, starting with Nika personally.
The culprit's identity remained a complete blank. A few suspects existed, but all of them were powerful figures—people too dangerous to so much as investigate lightly.
How did this man even know about the poison? And what did he mean by claiming to know the perpetrator? Was he simply throwing out a name to see what stuck? Potassium Cyanide was infamous, after all.
Or was this merely a gambit to redirect the crowd's hostile attention away from that woman and onto himself? If so, he had miscalculated badly. Koka might not react, but the Imperial Guards flanking him certainly would.
Just then, Koka—scrambling for survival—latched onto an escape. He slapped his palm against his forehead and burst into loud laughter.
"Haha! The circus troupe leader, was it? Tell me, is this some kind of comic routine you've prepared?"
At the word "comic routine," the suffocating tension in the chamber ruptured. Knights who had been half a breath from drawing their swords hesitated. Stony faces thawed into awkward, uncertain smiles.
"Ah— was that all it was?"
"Good heavens, I thought he meant it for real..."
"Bold fellow, isn't he."
In this era, even the most irreverent speech was smiled away by the powerful—so long as it came from a jester's mouth and was dressed as jest. Certainly, jesters did occasionally cross the line and lose their heads. But a jester who let fear curb his tongue was equally rare.
Over the past year, the Emperor's bedridden state had already been worn threadbare as comic fodder among clowns.
Paired with the Third Consort's pregnancy, the jokes practically wrote themselves: the old man had been drained dry of vigor by his young bride, or his body was simply too stubborn to die despite the mortal illness brought on by all those miracle elixirs he'd consumed. Jesters wryly skewered the transactional power dynamics with the Third Consort or wittily twisted his once-fanatical pursuit of an immortality drug.
The guests readily accepted that Wonderstein's gambit was simply the setup for a joke of the same breed. Or rather, they hoped it was, and they looked at him with that hope.
He betrayed it instantly.
"I am speaking in earnest. I know the identity of the person who commissioned the poisoning of His Majesty. Ah, and if that is insufficient, I can also tell you the location of the Imperial Slush Fund that the Snake Witch embezzled."
Oblivious—or indifferent—to the chaos around him, he showed an untroubled smile. The guests paled. This, too, was a topic that had once convulsed the Empire's political establishment.
Among the Crown Prince's reform proposals was a plan to transfer retention funds held by provincial lords back to the central government.
A retention fund was precisely what it sounded like: a portion of the tax revenue owed to the central government that was retained by the local administration. The Empire was vast—sending every coin of tax revenue up to the capital every year only to send a fraction back down again was a logistical headache. And the provinces often needed to act swiftly on local matters without waiting for funds to trickle down from the capital.
Hence the system: keep a share of the taxes on hand, spend as needed, and report afterward. Predictably, such funds had become deeply entangled with local power brokers and riddled with corruption. The Crown Prince's advisors estimated that ten times the genuinely necessary amount was bleeding into these retention accounts.
Overhauling this system was essential to any meaningful fiscal reform. The Crown Prince wanted it abolished entirely. In an age of trains, telegraphs, and banks, there was no justification for retaining the practice.
Then the Imperial Slush Fund scandal had erupted. A nobleman who had once served as Finance Minister revealed the existence of an immense secret fund the Imperial Household had siphoned from the national treasury. The Crown Prince's reform push screeched to a halt.
'All that scolding the provincial nobles for lining their pockets, and look— tsk, tsk. A big thief lecturing the little thieves.'
'Reform? What reform? He'd steal a hundred, pocket eighty, and toss the remaining twenty to the rabble so he could play the benefactor.'
'We're better off as we are, aren't we? The areas with high retention ratios are usually rough borderlands with no infrastructure. Abolish the system for no good reason, and the damage would be catastrophic.'
The nobles who had long resented him rose as one. Even the moderates who had supported reform turned their backs.
To salvage the situation, Nika had tried to locate the slush fund and return it to the treasury.
But the opposing faction hadn't exposed the fund on a whim. They'd already gathered evidence that the accounts had flowed into the hands of the Snake Witch.
At the time, the Snake Witch had vanished. Which meant the vast fund had vanished with her. The Crown Prince's plan to recover it collapsed, spawning a fresh crop of ugly rumors in its wake.
'His Highness secretly disposed of her and swallowed the money himself.'
'Exactly. Her sudden disappearance seemed strange. Should've known...'
'Disappointing. Getting rid of the Snake Witch was a service to the realm, but using it to line his own pockets...'
'Tsk, tsk. Reform, my foot. Only the hands taking the money ever change.'
Nika could hardly stand tall before their accusations. Had the Imperial Slush Fund not become such a public firestorm, the money would indeed have been used to strengthen his faction—which consisted largely of impoverished minor nobles perpetually short of funds.
In any case, the episode remained a bitter memory and a persistent political vulnerability.
The guests were certain Wonderstein had just prodded the Crown Prince's most sensitive wound. He had now crossed well past the line where a quip about jesters and jokes could smooth things over.
Koka clenched his jaw and gauged the room. Everyone was still reeling from Wonderstein's words. But soon they would turn to see how the Crown Prince chose to react.
And then? What was he supposed to do?
What the situation demanded right now was—
"Alternatively, I have other information. If Your Highness has heard of an organization called the Comprachicos..."
Wonderstein, utterly oblivious to the climate around him, was still beaming.
Koka let out a furious roar at him.
"You wretch!"
The young nobles and courtesans flinched, heads snapping downward.
Watching the magician who wouldn't wipe the smile off his face even under that bellow, Koka felt a pulse of private relief.
Good. If you're going to hand yourself to me like that, I'll gladly accept.
Bringing up the Imperial Slush Fund had given him more than enough cause. He could simply charge the magician with insulting the Imperial Household.
He swung around toward the Imperial Guards standing nearby and shouted.
"Cut this bastard's head off this instant—"
That was when the howls rose in the distance.
"Awoooooo!"
"Ooooo!"
"Woof, woof!"
Judging by the chorus, it was not one or two wolves. Dozens, at least.
"Wh-what is that?"
"Wolves? Near the city?"
"Dozens of them?"
Panicked, the guests whipped their heads around. On top of the already suffocating atmosphere, the sudden howling sent every heart plummeting into the pits of their stomachs.
The Imperial Guards were also scanning the darkness with taut expressions. From the sound, the wolves did not seem far away at all.
Then the young man who had been sitting calmly throughout the evening rose. He lifted a hand as if to reassure the crowd and still the room.
"Please don't be alarmed. That's a signal hunters use to coordinate a drive hunt."
"Is that so? But why would hunters be all the way out here—"
"Probably some group outing. A picnic."
"That's right. Come to think of it, isn't this area near that province?"
"Which province?"
"You know. The one famous for its bear hunters... what was it again...?"
The same young man who had just calmed everyone supplied the answer.
"Tylops."
"Ah, that's it! Tylops! You're rather sharp, aren't you?"
"I should be. I'm from that province."
He brought his hand out from behind his back. The thick gold bracelet he had been wearing had reshaped itself into a wickedly sharp stiletto.
The guards lunged at him with trained reflexes, but his motion was faster—the fluid, lethal economy of a seasoned hunter.
Shouting his prepared line, he drove toward Koka.
"Die, you degenerate who tried to poison your own father!"
"I-I'm not— urkh!"
The blade sank into Koka's chest.
"Kyaaa!"
"A-assassination!"
"Murder!"
"Your Highness!"
"You bastard!"
"Assassin—!"
"Everyone, stand back!"
The Imperial Guards roughly shoved the young nobles aside and formed a ring around the Crown Prince. The knight who served at his immediate side swiftly subdued the attacker.
They hurried to assess the Crown Prince's condition. A surge of bright red blood gushed from the wound, then gave way to a black, viscous ooze. Starting from the point of impact, dark discoloration crept along the veins, slowly fanning outward.
Poison? A curse?
As the soldiers reeled in confusion, another wave of howls tore through the air.
"Awoooooo!"
"Grrrrr!"
"Woof, woof!"
The signals the hunters used for their drive hunts. This time, they were much closer. Still drawing nearer.
From every hidden corner of the hotel, assassins rose—swords, axes, and crossbows in hand.
Their target's code name for tonight was Iyomante.
The bear hunt had begun.