In Search of the Lost Kaicl (1)
Bertrand received Ortes with all the composure of a man who had just seen a ghost.
He had come up from the mine as usual, sighed over the output figures that kept sliding steadily downward, and no sooner stepped back into the guildmaster's office than that faintly smiling man was waiting for him.
"If it's Geryones's confinement that worries you, rest easy. We've fitted him with shackles that bind his mana and shut him in the deep levels of the mine. He hasn't so much as stirred."
"Wasn't that a charge the President entrusted to you, Director? I have nothing whatsoever to say on the matter."
Ortes waved the subject off, as if to make plain he had neither the will nor the standing to interfere. Bertrand's unease only sank deeper.
"Then I take it you've come on some other business."
"I would like to review the survey records concerning Mount Etna."
The look Ortes had turned on him in the meeting had not been his imagination. Bertrand nodded.
"But call them survey records and there's precious little in them. As you know, every last investigation came to the same conclusion in the end. Nothing unusual."
Ortes began to read the moment the report was in his hands. For a time the only sound in the guildmaster's office was the soft rustle of turning pages.
Bertrand watched him with a restless heart, but before long he too bent to his own work.
Pride as a dwarf, and a skill unmatched among the miners of Etna City, still kept Bertrand out in the field. Even so, the title of guildmaster meant the paperwork waiting on him was anything but light.
For a while the two of them simply attended to their respective documents — a scene that, viewed a certain way, might have passed for an ordinary day at an ordinary company.
"Director Bertrand."
"What is it?"
"Is this event at the Phytoes Magic Tower still underway?"
An event? Bertrand puzzled over whether there had ever been such a thing, then read the passage Ortes indicated and nodded.
"Ah. Yes. Though it's rather modest, to call it an event."
What Ortes had called an event was a rite — the sort of custom often kept at worksites that ran on heavy equipment and tools, places where a single moment's mistake could cost a life. A prayer for safety, and for luck.
The factory of the Phytoes Magic Tower turned out every kind of machine, automatic equipment and automatons among them. It held no absolute dominance over the market, but its wares were durable enough to earn the comfortable verdict of good value for the price.
That production went on without trouble even in Kaicl's absence told him the whole factory had long since been fully automated. Even so, why the machines themselves kept a rite was a mystery to Bertrand as well.
"Most likely a behavioral routine Kaicl put in and never canceled. With no one left who holds the authority to cancel it, the thing has simply gone on repeating."
What made it peculiar was the form it took: a burnt offering, a sacrifice given over to the fire.
"Every month, the first unit of each model is dropped into the crater of Mount Etna as an offering. Rather interesting."
"The Miners Guild worried once that it might be part of some wicked magical ritual."
A bizarre rite, burning automatons that were not alive as though they were living sacrifices — and with a mage presiding over it, anyone might have found cause for suspicion.
"But that, too, is long in the past. The rite began before Kaicl disappeared, and the investigation we ran back then turned up nothing out of the ordinary."
"Thank you. So no one pays the Phytoes Magic Tower's rite any mind anymore?"
"A few mages made off with the offerings, thinking they might be a clue to finding Kaicl's Artificial Decalogue."
Bertrand dredged the old memory up. There had even been a fool who, insisting Kaicl might lie beneath the volcano, threw himself into the lava alongside an android.
None of them, of course, ever came back up.
A mage capable of cooling the inexhaustible lava buried under Mount Etna?
It wasn't that no such mage existed. An elder of the Frostspear Magic Tower's council could work the preposterous miracle of freezing lava solid.
But a mage of that caliber would long since have been cherished at a proper magic tower, living a life fit for the heavens — not flinging himself into a volcano in a city rotting on its feet, on the faith of something that amounted to an urban legend.
"...And yet no one ever found him. Which is why I remain skeptical even now. Is Kaicl truly down beneath that volcano?"
"Yes. Seeing this rite has only made me more certain. Thank you."
In the brief moment it took Bertrand to nod, Ortes had vanished without a trace.
"...Some heir of the old assassin order, is he?"
When the Arcane King set the world's order to rights again, the names buried in history were beyond counting.
The temples, already declining before the Arcane King ever appeared, were not the only ones to fall. Factions that wielded powers other than magic gradually lost their glory as well.
A warrior's fighting spirit survived only as a formula — something to be written into mercenaries and combat androids.
A presence faint even on an ordinary day was a talent made for assassination. If Ortes had truly inherited the direct line of that vanished order, then why did he serve Carisia?
Bertrand went on turning over a question that had no answer.
Seriously. Was there not something like an SSS-rank stealth skill?
The kind that nullified every physical attack so long as you stayed hidden on the underside of the world. Didn't burn in lava. Didn't get wet in water....
"As if anything like that exists."
Not for me, at any rate. Not now.
Heavy with fatigue, I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. The deeper I dug into Kaicl, the more every answer converged on a single point.
"Lava diving.... Do I actually have to?"
That Kaicl had built some manner of secret laboratory inside Mount Etna was certain. The original had described the Artificial Decalogue as accumulating mana for decades, never once moving from the spot where it was first made.
The problem was how to get down there.
However brilliant a mage Kaicl might be, laying hands on word of the world above while sealed away at the bottom of a volcano would be no easy thing. Most likely he recorded what he needed of the outside in the storage of the machines offered up to Mount Etna, then drew it into the laboratory by some means of his own.
And the reason the mages who tore those offerings apart never noticed the hidden data was probably that the contents had been split and compressed across multiple drives — or that safeguards had been laid so no ordinary hack could reach them.
Could I draw a way into Kaicl's hiding place out of clues like these?
It wasn't that no one alive had the ability to find his laboratory.
"It's just that the person in question happens to be Carisia."
After I'd told the boss, all confidence, Haha, President, I'll go and bring Kaicl back myself! — what sort of answer would I get if I then opened my mouth and said, Hahaha, President. I'm afraid you'll have to find Kaicl for me?
"My. How entertaining. Shall we firm up our horizontal relationship?"
"Horizontal?"
"Face down. Arms out."
No. She wouldn't do it that way.
Carisia's dressings-down were considerably more refined. Even so, I had no trouble picturing something in the same vein.
"I have a rough idea of how the filtering works, but...."
As with most things in this world, an automaton's power source was mana. Even a unit fresh off the line at the Phytoes Magic Tower, still in its initial state, would of course be charged with it.
The source of that mana was the tower's mana core. Kaicl had surely devised a spell that picked out only mana of a particular wavelength and sent it on to his dwelling.
And a mage could, to a certain extent, alter the attribute or the wavelength of the mana they held. A mage born to fire could, with effort, still cast water. That was the idea.
Except.
I had no mana.
Not close to zero. Zero.
"Damn this mana-gap society."
The problem that had hounded me from the moment I opened my eyes in this world was acting up again.
"It's not a body that'd die the instant it hit the lava, but going in bare...."
Wait.
Bare?
I flipped through the Phytoes Magic Tower catalog among the materials I'd gotten from Bertrand, skipping quickly past the automatons that filled most of the listings. I was sure I'd seen one under maintenance at the Miners Guild.
"There."
Tucked in a corner of the catalog was a multipurpose powered suit.
Powered armor that ran on mana — which meant, of course, that it would be charged with mana from the Phytoes Magic Tower. If I, a man in whom mana did not exist at all, put the suit on and let myself be thrown into Mount Etna, wouldn't I be carried along when the suit itself was transferred to the laboratory?
The hypothesis would need testing first.
If, by some miserable chance, the reason those automaton offerings had gone on all this time was simply that Kaicl had forgotten to issue a shutdown order....
Then I would be an idiot, swimming through lava in a powered suit.
Arabelle received Ortes in the form that let her bring her full strength to bear. He had already seen through every one of her secrets; there was nothing left worth hiding.
A woman's upper body, set upon the body of an enormous spider.
The spider of steel was an external calculation rig she had forged across long years — special equipment, worn only when she had to hack a target shielded by a firewall as formidable as a magic tower's.
"So. What is it you want me to do?"
"I'll need you to hack the Phytoes Magic Tower's factory."