7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (8)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (8)
Before climbing into the carriage, Wonderstein glanced back toward the theater entrance.
Circus performers who had taken part in the event were filtering out in small clusters.
None of them were the person he was waiting for.
The doors closed as the last team emerged.
The one he had been looking for never came out.
It seemed the Morning Star Circus had fled the moment the event ended.
"Troupe Leader?"
Yurakne stuck her head out of the carriage door.
She must have been wondering why he had stopped in the middle of the road.
His troupe members knew nothing about Ruelo's fatal illness or the promise he had made with Minova.
He gave her a small smile and shook his head.
"It's nothing. Let's go."
He swept his gaze across the parking lot one last time, then climbed in.
On the ride from the cabaret back to the hotel,
Wonderstein stared silently out the window as though lost in thought.
The other three discussed their strategy for the test.
They passed around the guide sheet the cabaret had distributed, reading through the detailed rules.
*Every employee, including cooks and waiters, must be a circus troupe member (hired staff included).
*The cost of all goods provided to customers shall be calculated using the distribution prices recorded at the Rouge Trade Center.
*Performance will be evaluated based on net profit, calculated as sales minus cost.
These rules existed to prevent the test from being decided by the sponsors' wealth.
Otherwise, a sponsor could just pour money in to bring in dozens of first-class chefs from somewhere, ship in rare regional specialties to sell at a loss, or inflate revenue by offering expensive liquor and food below cost. The rules closed those loopholes.
Of all the clauses, the one about employees weighed heaviest on Ella and the other two.
Including the troupe leader, they numbered twelve in total.
Subtract Merisa, who had turned to stone, and the Trimery Triplets—who counted as one body split three ways—and the functional roster dropped to nine. Adding in the hired Ratmen barely brought them to twenty.
Compared with the larger troupes, they were overwhelmingly short on manpower.
The contest would take place in Halls Number 2 and 3 of the Rose Windmill Cabaret.
The two halls were exactly symmetrical, centered on the step seats.
Neither was as large as Hall Number 1, but running either with only twenty people was still clearly going to be a stretch.
"We still have to put on a show. How do we manage that? Some of us will be on stage, which means fewer hands for serving."
"We rotate. We already planned this as an exhibition-style circus, remember? One person takes the stage at a time, in turns. Everyone else works until it's their turn to go up."
"Heh-heh, a solo stage. That'll be rough on the bashful ones."
At that, Wonderstein, who had been listening quietly, broke into the conversation.
"What's the state of the troupe members' practice right now?"
Ella frowned at the question.
"You sure pick your moments to ask. Do you realize it's been a month since the last time?"
"Heh heh, has it?"
"That's not good. You're the troupe leader."
"I have faith in you, Miss Ella."
She let out a short, dismissive snort at his brazen reply.
Honestly, the man had a mouth and nothing else.
Arguing just wore her out.
"I told you before. If we set your script as 100%, we needed to have at least 20% of it built before the competition started. Thanks to everyone's hard work over the past month—" here Yurakne and Sven nodded vigorously "—we're sitting at about 23% now."
"Twenty-three percent... Is that enough to qualify through the preliminaries?"
"I can't say. This task isn't something we pass just by working hard on our own. Whether we win depends partly on how poorly our opponents perform."
"Heh heh, I see."
He laughed softly, his gaze fixed vaguely on the empty air.
Ella studied him with a suspicious sidelong glance.
"You aren't plotting something weird, are you?"
"Hmm? What kind of plot?"
"No. It's nothing..."
She let her words trail off.
No point in handing him ideas.
If she mentioned threats or convenient accidents, he might actually go and carry them out.
So what came out of Wonderstein's mouth next was enough to make her stomach drop.
"Isn't there a hotel around here where the Morning Star Circus is staying?"
Ella's hand tightened.
The paper she was holding crumpled faintly.
Her misgivings had been right.
Unlike the tense Ella, Yurakne answered his question with cheerful innocence, suspecting nothing.
"Morning Star Circus? Oh, right. I can see their balloon from here."
Swaying in the wind atop a hotel roof, a giant yellow chicken balloon several meters long wobbled left and right.
The Morning Star Circus had hoisted it up the moment they arrived in Rouge.
It advertised their presence more effectively than any signboard.
Rooster Minova's voice drew on lung capacity dozens of times greater than a normal person's.
Inflating a balloon that size with a single breath was one of the feats he liked to flaunt.
Gazing at that balloon, Wonderstein let himself drift for a moment into memories from the game, then brought the carriage to a halt.
"You all go on ahead. Something's just occurred to me."
He descended from the carriage, and with a flutter of his black cloak, slipped away like a shadow into a dark alley.
Yurakne tilted her head. Beside her, Sven shrugged.
Ella watched his figure vanish into the darkness, her eyes quivering.
She had dropped her guard.
He'd behaved so tamely for a while that her wariness had dulled.
This was a man capable of absolute ruthlessness when he had a goal.
Hadn't he wiped out an entire village just to take her with him?
For someone who seemed indifferent to most things, he was singularly obsessed with the Circus Grand Prix.
Doing something to a rival to get through the preliminaries wouldn't be out of character at all.
The image of Ruelo smiling at her, all guileless innocence, surfaced in her mind.
Over that face flickered the faces of her dead schoolmates.
Wonderstein didn't go easy on anyone just because they were young.
Without the slightest mercy, he had broken children's necks, skewered their stomachs, torn open their chests, burst their heads.
Ella pressed a hand over her mouth.
Nausea surged.
Hiiing.
With a whinny, the carriage began moving again.
Her eyes stayed locked on the direction Wonderstein had gone.
She had to stop him.
But what could she possibly do?
If the demon had decided to act, there was nothing she could do.
The contract between them had two conditions.
First, she would assist him in his work, and in exchange he would not lay a hand on her master or her surviving friends.
Second, if they reached the Circus Grand Prix Finals, he would free the troupe members and never show his face before them again.
Nothing in those terms protected anyone else's life.
She hadn't even thought to include such a clause; there was no way he would have accepted it in the first place.
Was there no choice but to stand by and watch?
Just then, a voice whispered from inside her—her own.
Those weren't your only promises.
- You'll show me your taming act again later, right?
- Yeah. The little ones said they're fine with it, too.
Right. She had promised to show her.
Not just any promise—a performance promise.
The show must go on.
She turned the weight of those words over in her mind.
Klunk.
She flung open the moving carriage door.
"Whoa, miss?"
Ignoring the coachman's startled cry, she leaped from the carriage then and there.
A dangerous move for an ordinary person, but for an acrobat of her caliber it was trivial.
"What the—? Ella, where are you going?"
"Heh-heh, she looked like she was about to throw up earlier. Motion sickness, maybe?"
"Yeah! Stomach's feeling off! I'll take a walk and catch up!"
Landing on the ground, she waved lightly toward the worried faces peering back from the carriage.
She retraced the route they had come.
The sky, still reasonably bright when they left the cabaret, had dimmed, and the street's gas lamps were beginning to glow. Before long, she reached the spot where Wonderstein had gotten out.
She plucked a sleeping pigeon from inside her hat and tossed it into the air.
The bird shot upward in exactly its sleeping posture, then promptly dropped right back into the hat.
Ella's face twisted.
"Hey, Gudol."
She shook the hat, but the pigeon kept its eyes shut and did not so much as twitch.
It merely squirmed, cooing something that sounded suspiciously like sleep-talking.
This little...!
She'd clearly seen it twist its body mid-drop to adjust its landing.
The bird was just being lazy.
Ehh.
Must be tired.
She gave up on the pigeon and fished a mouse from her pocket instead.
Jjiksun was twitching its tail, waiting for her to set it down.
"You got it? Follow that man Wonderstein. Be careful."
The mouse darted into the darkness and disappeared in a skittering rush.
Inspira-Spirit Link.
The blessing she had received from Kirkeus.
It allowed her to share the senses of sight and hearing with any animal she had tamed.
She sat down at a nearby café and waited for Jjiksun to reach its destination.
After several minutes, she closed her eyes and called Jjiksun's name three times. The view swam into focus.
'Eek!'
Ella stifled a scream at the sight directly in front of her.
Wonderstein. His face was right there.
Fortunately, he didn't seem to have noticed Jjiksun tucked among the books on the shelf.
"Apologies for disappearing on you earlier."
Seated across the table from him was a familiar face.
The leader of the Morning Star Circus, Rooster Minova.
Behind him, in a small corner bed, a little girl in a chick costume was sleeping softly.
This was clearly the Morning Star Circus's lodgings—more precisely, the troupe leader's bedroom.
The two leaders were speaking in hushed voices so as not to wake Ruelo.
"Why did you just leave? Didn't I say I would cure your child's illness?"
Ella shuddered.
Illness?
She thought back to Ruelo's patchy hair.
Wasn't it just that she'd been under the weather or gotten a bad haircut?
"As we came down from the stage, the child told me she didn't want to see her father bowing his head to an opponent. She sensed it right away. She knew the moment I asked you to heal her, it would paint a picture of defeat."
A quiet sigh escaped Ella.
How could she not understand that feeling?
She had no family, but she'd been through something similar.
She remembered her master, who had once seemed as vast as the sky, broken in body and groveling wretchedly on the ground before Wonderstein.
Ruelo...
It must be serious.
If it were a trivial ailment, that rooster would never have humbled himself like this.
"So I pretended, for the moment, that the deal was off and returned to our quarters first. I made a big show for my daughter, boasting that I'd take you down and seize the cure. I wanted to be a heroic father in front of her."
Fire kindled in his eyes.
"But healing my daughter matters more to me than any of that. Damn it! My pride means nothing! I am prepared to do whatever it takes! So please... please, cure my daughter's illness!"
Minova bowed deeply.
Anyone who knew the man would have been astonished to see him humble himself before another person.
Ella, who had pieced together his personality from rumors and a few brief encounters, was no exception.
That's how powerful a parent's love for their child is.
Now she understood what Wonderstein was really after.