After Hours, a Meeting with the Boss
My tongue was trying to spit out words my brain had not approved.
I very nearly answered by spinal reflex — And why, exactly, did you shut me in a cage on a whim? — but reason caught the words in time. Well done, reason. Credit where it's due.
The chair turned slowly and stopped aimed dead at me. The foot in Carisia's shoe swayed, soft and idle.
"Won't you tell me what you're thinking?"
I had floated some outlandish plan without clearing it with her first. Surely this wasn't about to end the way it had for the man who watched Cao Cao tearing into chicken ribs, suggested a retreat, and got himself executed for the trouble. And yet we'd had years together.
Taken slowly, the situation was plain enough. She had sent everyone else out, and only the two of us were left. If she had meant to make an example of me in public, she would have done it earlier, not now. So this question was not Carisia venting a sour mood by some roundabout route. She was simply, purely curious about what I thought.
...Probably.
"Ah. Would you rather sit? Standing there can't be comfortable."
The man who sits just because he's told he may is an amateur. Take that seat for real, and it would turn straight into a scolding — My, how horizontal our company is. An employee even sharing a table with the president.
I am a seasoned subordinate. The years I have worked under Carisia are not merely for show.
"Not at all, President. How could I possibly dare?"
"And here I confirmed there isn't even a wiretap. Between us."
"Precisely because it is between you and me, President, I am bound to be all the more careful."
Carisia's eyes sharpened. Had there been something in what I'd just said to grate on her?
This is why a capricious superior is so hard to serve. You would need, at the very least, to know where the reverse scale lies.
"And why is that?"
I drew myself tight and assembled a plausible answer.
"You may be indispensable to me, President. But I must never become indispensable to you."
"Human attachment is a weakness."
Ortes's expression was, for once, hard. A line drawn like a blade. The line between him and her never changed.
Relief at that constancy, and, contradicting it, the wish that it would waver. Rather than sigh, Carisia straightened in her seat.
Just as Ortes had taught her: a solemn posture, fit for a ruler.
"Let us compare your war, President, to a game of chess, and — though it is more than I deserve — compare me to the queen. The queen is, without question, a powerful piece."
A game of chess played against the White Light Magic Tower. It had not been a fair match. The White Light Magic Tower held pieces beyond counting, while Carisia had only just come into eight pawns and a single queen.
"But one must not grow attached to a piece merely because it is strong. For the sake of the game, there come times when a move that sacrifices the queen must be played."
Strength gathered in Carisia's right arm where it rested on the arm of the chair. She did not care for what Ortes was saying.
"To ruin the match in order to save a single piece is not only ridiculous. It is foolish."
Carisia knew perfectly well that persuading an Ortes this much in earnest was next to impossible.
"...Haa."
In the end she let the sigh out. Years could pass, and still that one line was the line she could not cross.
"Fine. Let's go back to what we were discussing. Starting with why you explained a different plan to the directors."
"You are a heretic, President."
I'd thought it over, and the trouble had probably been that overly familiar turn of phrase — between you and me. There are people like that. They may come down to a subordinate without standing on rank, and yet the moment the subordinate comes up to them, it's How dare you! Unless we were wandering a desert alone together the way we used to, I had to mind my manners. She pretends otherwise, but she likes being treated with deference. I'm telling you.
"A heretic. A word better suited to fanatics who believe in gods that have vanished."
"And is that not precisely the reality? The Mage King is the god of mages, and the Ten Commandments are the sacred relics he left behind. The mages' obsession with ascension is not unlike a yearning for religious salvation."
Carisia's mouth twisted into a smile — a sneer shot through with hatred and rage, aimed at mages, and at the White Light Magic Tower most of all.
"In this world, the Ten Commandments are the precepts of salvation. Most mages make it the goal of their lives to connect to the Ten Commandments even a single time. Set against that, your plan, President, is far too radical."
"You think the directors might go so far as to inform on us to the White Light Magic Tower?"
I nodded. Carisia shook her head, as if the worry were groundless.
"President. A secret grows weaker the more it is shared."
"Even if the purpose were to build a loyal inner circle bound together by that secret?"
She asked it with a look that was, somehow, mischievous. I, however, could answer without a moment's hesitation.
"It is premature."
Carisia and I were the strange ones. As far as I knew, there was not a mage in this world, aside from her, who would even contemplate destroying the Ten Commandments.
"Your wish, President, lies outside anything the directors are capable of understanding, and what cannot be understood has a way of becoming an object of worship — or of fear."
Most mages would fail to grasp the very idea of destroying the Ten Commandments. Not monopolizing them, not challenging ascension with the knowledge sealed inside, but simply smashing them?
"And the directors are highly likely to fear your objective."
The odds were by no means low that one of them, dreading the thought of the clue to ascension vanishing from the world for good, would carry word to the orthodox Magic Towers. Yearning for the Ten Commandments and for ascension ran that deep — deep enough that even a mage of the underworld, steeped in hard reality to the bone, could not quite bring himself to give it up.
"It serves us better to show the directors some other plausible goal, and to move the real plan forward beneath the surface."
"Yes. That's rational. The puppet show with Geryones and Kaicl suits me well enough, too. But the Artificial Decalogue."
Was she about to ask whether it actually existed? Tension surged up without warning, and the back of my neck went stiff. If even Carisia doubted the thing was real, there would be nothing left for me but to beg her, in tears, to believe me.
"Does that really have to be used the way the Ten Commandments are?"
Fortunately, she did not seem to doubt its existence in the slightest. Fair enough. Even in the original, where I had never been, Kaicl's Artificial Decalogue still ended up in her hands. She might have felt something like its ripples the moment she set foot in this city.
"Like the Ten Commandments? Do you have some other use in mind?"
"Whatever magic formulas are inscribed in the Artificial Decalogue, they can't amount to much more than Kaicl's knowledge and that of his tower. The quantity of mana, though — that ought to be considerable, shouldn't it?"
The colossal bombing the original White Nameless had carried out flashed through my mind.
Surely not.
"If we refine it into a mana bomb and throw it at the White Light Magic Tower—"
Good God. So that nature of yours really was innate.
"...I will look into an application of that sort as well. But, President. The Artificial Decalogue can become an object of the directors' desire."
Make a thing like that, and there was no telling when she would decide to spend it on a suicide bombing. If, by some lapse of management, Etna City up and evaporated, most of my plans for the future would be ruined.
"Wouldn't it be a clue to an ascension that has never existed before? The substance may be something else entirely, but what matters is making the directors believe it."
First, get her mind off the bomb. Let's not. Please. Not us.
"Fatten their desire, and grant it to them a little at a time, so that they come to crave it all the more."
Carisia sometimes thought Ortes's words resembled a teacher's instruction.
In truth, from the moment she escaped the laboratory of the White Light Magic Tower down to this very day, she had spent most of her time with him.
"If you yourself, President, act as though the Artificial Decalogue holds great meaning for you, you will be more than able to guide what the directors do."
The only knowledge she had been able to gain inside that laboratory was confined to what concerned magic. Of course, in the faint past before she was dragged there, she had memories of having learned something else. Those memories, though, had been crushed beneath the data of the Ten Commandments the White Light Magic Tower poured into her, and had crumbled. All that remained were fragments, guttered down to ash.
For Carisia, who had lost her past, the one who taught her anything beyond magic had been Ortes.
"Have them take the lie — that a new king is to be made — for Hydra Inc.'s greatest secret."
Her confidant, her teacher, smiled.
"And then no one will spare a thought for the true secret."
Bring down the name of White Light. The Ten Commandments and the Magic Tower — both.
She listened, well satisfied, to the blueprint of the future whispered by the staunchest ally on her path of vengeance.
At the same time, she recognized a problem.
The counsel Ortes had pronounced at the very start of their talk alone: that one must also know how to sacrifice a piece.
Carisia did not like those words.
"It seems every question you had has been settled. May I head up now?"
I needed to get upstairs quickly and work out a way to meet Kaicl. The shape of the plan had to be finished as fast as possible, while Carisia still harbored no doubts — finished enough that, even if a surprise inspection came down, I could blur my way through it with something that sounded impressive.
"Yes. Go on."
"And you, President?"
"There's something I need to think over for a moment."
For some reason, Carisia's eyes on my face stung. I took my leave as naturally as I could and stepped out of the conference room.
Then I made for my room at a dead run. First a proper wash. Then I could think.