15. Frankenstein's Successor (5)
Kaldir, the provincial capital of the Duchy of Amur, was famous as a city built on an island in the middle of a lake. In truth, that was an optical illusion born from the city being ringed by rivers, mountains, and lakes—it didn't actually float on the water.
The misunderstanding had spread thanks to a song called "Kaldir Above the Beautiful Lake," composed by a traveler who'd been struck by the scenery here. The piece became so famous that the name Kaldir now automatically conjured an image of a city resting on a vast lake.
Nika strolled along the water's edge, studying the city spread out across the way. Buildings with wooden frames and brick infill stood packed in neat rows, their roofs aligned along a line parallel to the lake's surface. Above them a pointed snow-capped mountain sat like a hat draped over the entire city, and atop the sheer cliff that dropped from its slope loomed the lord's castle. It was every bit the picture-postcard landscape people said it was.
The Duke of Amur's fortress sprawled across the entire midsection of the mountain, its scale rivaling the royal palaces of a fair few kingdoms. That stood to reason. The Amur region had been absorbed by the Empire barely twenty years ago. Until then, that castle had belonged to the king who ruled this land.
The duke who held it now was a distant cadet branch of the Amur royal line. A man who'd been farming in the countryside twenty years ago, suddenly dragged here and handed the reins of Amur. The authority given him was less than a tenth of what the old royal family had wielded. He was nothing more than the figurehead of a puppet regime installed by the Empire.
But maybe he's not just a simple puppet after all.
Nika had been with the circus troupe for over three weeks now. He'd had several reasons for going undercover like this. Genuine curiosity about Wonderstein. A desire to step away from politics and rest for a while. A few strategic experiments he wanted to try while his double's collapse had created an opening.
His primary objective, though, was always to extract Wonderstein's information. Who stood behind the attempt on the Emperor's life. Where the Imperial Slush Fund accounts were hidden. And exactly what secrets Wonderstein knew about Comprachicos.
These weren't things he could simply ask outright. Nor could he pressure the man with authority—that would not only draw public attention, it might push Wonderstein to sell the information to a hostile faction. Koka's atrocities had left him with a low opinion of the Crown Prince. And judging by how Wonderstein had handled those assassins, this wasn't a man he could easily bend with force.
So Nika had adopted a strategy of watching his reactions, tossing out the names of plausible suspects in the Emperor's poisoning whenever an opportunity presented itself. Three weeks of that, and he still hadn't pulled anything meaningful out of him. The man kept his cards close to his chest.
But a few days ago, when the Deputy Leader brought up the Amur region's festival, Nika had caught a disturbance in Wonderstein's composure. It was subtle—far too faint to explain away as a reaction to an abrupt schedule change or a subordinate's request.
He'd waited a little while after the Amur trip was set, then cornered Wonderstein with a prepared probe.
—But the Crown Prince is awake now. Won't he start asking again about the deal you made back then? The Imperial poisoner, the slush fund accounts, Comprachicos, that sort of thing...
—After a whole month, I doubt he'll bother. Probably forgotten all about people like us by now, don't you think?
Wonderstein had brushed it off, but Nika caught the way his mental cadence shifted at the word "poisoner." And he didn't miss how the man's eyes flicked to the newspaper Ella had handed him earlier.
The Duke of Amur in Kaldir hadn't been on Nika's list of suspects. The man had shown no sign of ambition in over twenty years, devoting himself entirely to placating the locals while tiptoeing around the Empire's watchful eye.
A man like that had tried to assassinate the Emperor? If he truly had, Nika could guess the endgame. Take advantage of the chaos of a civil war to push for Amur's independence.
Or, a more ambitious play still—eliminate every current heir to the throne and seat his own child upon it. When the Amur region had been annexed two decades ago, one of the Emperor's cousins had married the Duke of Amur. Her place in the line of succession was remote, but if a civil war upended the balance of power and the political landscape, the prize might become worth reaching for.
"Am I reaching too far?"
Nika scratched the back of his head. This whole line of reasoning hinged on the assumption that Wonderstein genuinely knew who was behind the assassination attempt. If this trip proved the duke had no hand in it, then odds were high Wonderstein had simply been bluffing. In which case, Nika would have no reason to linger here any longer.
He scooped up a pebble from the ground and flung it toward the distant shore, putting a snap in his wrist the way the Deputy Leader had shown him to make it skip across the water. The stone bounced a few times, then sank.
It hadn't reached the far bank, but it was a big improvement over his first attempts. He was about to let a satisfied smile show when two stones whistled past him. One skipped across the surface dozens of times and settled lightly on the opposite shore. The other traced a clean arc through the air and embedded itself in the far bank without so much as touching a drop of water.
"Nika, what're you doing out here all alone?"
"Special stone-throwing training?"
A horned monster in red hide and a cocky early-teen boy were walking toward him. Nika, Mickey, Umon. The three of them were the troupe's only teenage male members, so they'd wound up hanging out together more often than not.
"Just... thinking about how to top up my allowance, that's all."
"Oh, now that's the kind of talk I like to hear."
"I was already worried, y'know—Yurakne said she'll only do breakfast while we're here..."
The Monster Circus Troupe had scattered across Kaldir for some free time upon arrival. Securing a performance venue would've been ideal, but with the schedule changed so abruptly, there hadn't been any slots left.
In the old days, they'd have booked a luxury hotel and rested in comfort with three full-course meals a day. Under the current austerity budget, that wasn't happening. There was only one room available to rent in the city, with space for four people.
Their sponsor Anais, Maya with her bad leg, and young Ruelo got priority. Natasha, Nika's lady-in-waiting, was tapped to attend to them. Everyone else would be sleeping at a camp set up outside the city, near the lakeshore.
"Honestly, I'm kind of excited. I've never slept rough before. Are we doing a campfire and all that at night?"
At Nika's innocent expectation, Umon and Mickey exchanged a look before shaking their heads.
"This is what you get with a sheltered young master from the nobility..."
"Give it three days and you'll be desperate for a bed. Oh, wait—you'll be fine, won't you, Nika? You're sharing with the Troupe Leader. Curled up in his arms..."
"Guh—y-you're still on about that..."
Nika's face flushed red. Since the budget cuts, troupe members had been pairing up—the Trimery Triplets had snorted at that piece of news with exaggerated disbelief—to share rooms. The partner Wonderstein had designated was Nika.
Aside from Maya, Reina, Yurakne, and Anais, who'd spun out a few theoretically impossible fantasies, everyone considered the decision reasonable. He was of noble birth and a three-month temporary member—effectively a guest. Bunking with the Troupe Leader made sense.
Of course, Wonderstein had made that offer because he thought Nika was a woman. Having her share with the other male members would clearly be uncomfortable, but he couldn't exactly room her with the women after she'd been introduced as a man, so sharing with him was the right call.
At first, the two of them had slept as though an invisible wall ran down the middle of the bed. Then, at some point, Nika had started creeping across the line by inches until, one morning, he'd been found with his arms wrapped tight around Wonderstein's waist.
Nika had no idea why he'd done it. He could only put it down to half-asleep instinct—the same sort of groggy, pre-dawn impulse that made men wake up clutching things. Something whispered low in his belly, and before he knew it, he'd been fumbling over Wonderstein's body and pressing his nose into the man's skin.
Everyone ribbed Nika about that morning every chance they got. Nobody seriously thought anything was going on between them. The incident stuck in everyone's memory because Maya, who'd discovered the scene, had flipped the bed with her telekinesis and made a huge racket about it.
"This bastard seizes every opening to mess with his big bro!"
"What'd I even do..."
Umon put on an exaggerated innocent face and looked away. Mickey burst into giggles beside him.
"You just react so hard, Nika, it's impossible not to tease you."
"Heh heh, yeah, yeah."
Umon nodded, a mischievous grin on his face. He'd grown a lot more talkative since the two of them had joined. For the first time in his life, he was spending his days horsing around with friends his own age. His face was brighter than before, and he'd started cracking jokes and stirring up trouble on his own.
The shift in atmosphere applied just as much to Mickey. When he'd first joined the troupe, he'd kept to himself entirely. He'd been told that Wonderstein was the sworn enemy who'd murdered his friends, and that Ella was being blackmailed into following him. His own prejudices about the monster circus had done the rest.
But the troupe proved unexpectedly close-knit, and Wonderstein showed no trace of malice. If anything, he doted on and looked after Ella more than anyone. Even Ella herself, the very person who'd told Mickey the man was her nemesis, treated him with an oddly lukewarm attitude.
Mickey had heard about past incidents from the other members. The one that caught his attention was the business in Dvalchev. The Curse Plague. It resembled what had happened in his own village—the bodies warped into strange shapes, the monsters appearing, the way it had all ended in a desperate flight.
Could something similar have happened back home? No matter how he looked at it, Wonderstein seemed nothing like a bad person.
Still, he hadn't voiced those doubts to Ella. She probably had her own inklings, and that was why her treatment of him stayed so ambiguous.
Mickey had survived as a pickpocket in the back alleys of Vegas since he was little, and the habits he'd picked up in those days hadn't left him. He'd decided to ease back on his hostility toward Wonderstein and watch how things developed—at least until he knew for certain what the man's true motives and identity were.
"So how're we gonna make that money?"
"Any decent ideas come to you?"
The three boys had agreed to earn some coin in the streets during the festival. Better than sitting around idly spending money, they'd figured. Umon had strength, Mickey had skill, and Nika had brains. Put the three of them together, and a street performance was worth a try.
"Right, so here's the thing..."
Talking it through with the two of them, Nika felt an unfamiliar sort of pleasure—something he'd lost track of since he was five years old.
He'd been so focused on reading Wonderstein's off-kilter mental rhythms that his ability to hear ordinary people's thoughts had naturally weakened. He could still see through people's intentions without much trouble, but he was nowhere near the near-mind-reading power he'd once wielded.
"The setup is, I bought Umon as a monster gladiator at a slave market, and—"
"Ugh! I'm sick of that setup! I wanna be a noble boy too! I got a Role Name Tag from the Troupe Leader, y'know! I can do it now!"
"That's nonsense! A role tag only changes how people see you, not how you actually look! What kind of noble are you supposed to be? An Abyss Demon Baron?"
"Pfft-hahaha—th-that's great! Actually kind of fits, doesn't it?"
"Gaaah! You older boys are the worst! I'm being serious here!"
"And we're giving you a serious answer, dumbass!"
"Hey, hey, this punk! The second words fail him, he just tries to muscle through!"
The three boys headed on toward the lakeside city of Kaldir, laughing and bickering the whole way.