The Pressure Interview (2)
How had it come to this?
Ortes coming and going without a sound through the Information Guild's zones barred to outsiders had long since become routine—so ordinary it no longer even felt wrong. Watching him slip past the countless surveillance devices she had installed, only to ask whether she might care for a cup of tea, still raised the hair on her neck, but she had more or less adapted. A tower master who had vanished decades ago walking in at his heels, however, was a sight even Arabelle had never seen.
"Good day, Director Arabelle. This is Kaicl of the Phytoes Magic Tower."
Two questions held Arabelle's mind in their grip.
Was Kaicl really inside the volcano at Etna all this time? That was the first.
He brought Kaicl back without killing him? That was the second.
The latter weighed far more heavily.
In Ortes's plan, Kaicl had been assigned the same part as Geryones: a piece meant to stage the appearance of competition with Hydra Inc. But that was only a plan on paper. Just as the old maxim said that the first thing to die in a war is the operational plan, nothing vanished more easily than a scheme written into a document. Arabelle had expected Kaicl to die, and with high probability. Mages were a breed whose minds warped to some degree as a matter of course, and a mage who had truly spent decades in wall-facing seclusion beneath a volcano was especially likely to have come unhinged. At the same time, mages were a people who would rather die than have their magic taken from them. Would a man who had poured decades of blood and sweat into completing the Artificial Decalogue quietly render up his masterpiece? Far likelier that he would blow himself up along with the Decalogue than that he would bow his head beneath Hydra Inc.
"Is the tea to your liking?"
And that very Kaicl was, at this moment, drinking the tea Ortes had brewed, right in front of her.
"What is going on?"
It was the first thing Arabelle managed to force out, straining to hide her confusion. Ortes shrugged.
"We need to see this gentleman received at Hydra Inc., but simply bringing him in would raise quite a commotion. I believe that you, Director Arabelle, can guide him to the company courteously—and discreetly."
Unease bled off that single word, believe. By now Arabelle knew that Ortes's true face was not the pressure of intimidating others, but the shamelessness of pawning work off on people whenever he grew bored.
"Then, Director. I'll see you tonight."
Her ominous feeling was not wrong. Before she could stop him, he rose and was gone.
Pressing the corner of her eye with her left hand, Arabelle turned his instructions over again. Bring him in discreetly.
To hide, as thoroughly as possible, that Kaicl is in league with Hydra Inc. That has to be it.
In Ortes's design, the three magic towers were staging a play in which they prepared for war with one another—a puppet show that would never, however long it ran, flare into a real war. Kaicl would break his long silence and rescue the imprisoned Geryones. After Geryones's defeat, the only party Hydra Inc. could turn its attention toward was, naturally, the Phytoes Magic Tower. The two towers would form a temporary alliance to check the rising power that was Hydra Inc., and Hydra Inc., for its part, would reorganize to meet an opponent that was anything but easy. An arms buildup under that kind of tension was so natural that even the orthodox Magic Towers would not think to suspect it.
In truth, however, every magic tower in Etna City already lay under Hydra Inc.'s control. Competition among the three would, in the end, only raise Hydra Inc.'s own strength, and through that reorganized system they would drive the completion of the Artificial Decalogue forward. That was as far as the first stage of Ortes's design went.
I thought the Artificial Decalogue itself, the starting point of the whole plan, wouldn't even exist...
She had been wrong. Arabelle tried to picture what it would mean if an eleventh Commandment were truly completed.
A new king.
She shook her head once, dragging herself out of that absurd vision, and turned toward Kaicl. Ortes had entrusted him not to some other director but to her, and this was her chance—the moment to speak with Kaicl and judge whether Hydra Inc.'s plan was something that could actually be realized. Carefully, Arabelle chose the question she would put to him.
It was over. My work was truly, completely finished.
The concrete means of carrying out the company-improvement scheme that used Geryones and Kaicl? I'd sketched the big picture well enough; the rest, the people on the ground could handle. A few of the directors were rash, and less than diligent, sure—but none of them were truly incompetent. They all had at least enough ability to stay alive while playing big shots in the underworld, didn't they? If each of them simply dragged in their organization's staff and brainstormed, something reasonably positive would come of it.
For the first time in ages, I drank in the freedom of being cut loose from every last task. Maybe I should just sleep.
I was making the bed, already set on sleeping straight through until the next afternoon, when it came.
"Ortes."
Damn it.
The call had come through the communicator built into the gauntlet. The sender, of course—
"Yes, President."
—was Carisia.
Bertrand could not believe the sight before his eyes. Decades had already passed since Kaicl vanished from Etna City. A frame pushing four meters, and a prosthetic right eye set with three pupils—it was Kaicl exactly as Bertrand remembered him. Geryones, dragged in with his arms bound, let out a hollow laugh of his own.
"Figured you'd kicked it somewhere ages ago..."
Ortes and Carisia, who must have arranged this gathering, had yet to arrive. Ortes, who had a way of being absent, was one thing, but for Carisia—always the first into a meeting and the last to leave—it was rather unusual.
With a clunk, the door opened. Through the door Ortes held for her, Carisia walked in.
The eight directors had seen a scene like this somewhere before.
Right. The day she announced the founding of Hydra Inc....
The day Carisia had gathered the directors and locked them inside her grasp. Remembering that moment, Arabelle's body went rigid.
"A pleasure to see you all."
Even the opening was identical. Arabelle understood that the present arrangement was a deliberate reprise.
"With this, every executive recruited to carry out our company's first objective is gathered in one place."
Their president smiled, looking as delighted as a person could look.
"Today we are here to hear Mr. Kaicl's presentation on the results of the Artificial Decalogue. Now. Would you stand?"
Kaicl rose as if something had taken hold of him. In his right eye, Carisia was reflected with an eeriness wholly unlike Ortes's.
"You... you people...!"
Behind Carisia, Ortes lifted his index finger—a smile worn with that finger pressed to his lips. Caught between terror and awe, Kaicl looked around him. Some of them he had faced in person, back in his past. Others he had only ever seen through data gathered while he hid beneath Mount Etna. The powers of Etna City. The ones who moved the city, gathered in a single place, under the name of Hydra Inc.
Slowly, Kaicl began to lay out the true nature of the Artificial Decalogue he had made. A question born of studying under both the Red Flame Magic Tower and the Silver Iron Magic Tower. A history of trial and error that had started from What, in the end, is ascension?
"If ascension is the process of becoming a god, and the Decalogue its milestones, then I believed that by gathering the traces the ancient gods left behind, I could forge another milestone..."
Among the directors listening closely, Bertrand's expression grew heavier with every word. The decline of the fossil-mining industry had, in the end, sprung from Kaicl's desire. And Carisia, who had taken Kaicl, had set the Artificial Decalogue at the very center of her plans, so the future of the Miners Guild looked only darker.
"There is no longer any reason to go on accumulating the mana of Mount Etna."
What cut that worry short was Ortes's flat assertion.
"The Artificial Decalogue Mr. Kaicl created no longer grows any stronger simply by increasing the volume of mana. We have to focus on something more essential."
"Essential?"
The woman who spoke wore green hair let down loose, flowers blooming through it. Meconion—one of the eight directors, an Alraune half-blood, half human and half spirit. The greatest narcotics dealer in Etna City.
"Yes. Didn't Mr. Kaicl say it first? That he meant to gather the traces of gods and make an Artificial Decalogue of them. This city has no traces of the divine left in it."
Meconion felt Ortes's gaze turn on her. It was nothing like the sordid, desire-soaked stares her customers habitually gave her. An utterly businesslike look, closer to a machine's.
"What belongs to the gods, the gods themselves will be holding. We ought to be able to find clues to divinity among those who still believe in the gods who vanished."
Hearing him, Meconion knew what would follow.
So that's it. This is why he looked at me...
"Among the buyers of the drugs you sell, Director Meconion, aren't there followers of the old gods?"
"Yeah. There are. Pitiful things, trying to find the gods' footprints inside their ecstasy."
"Then we start with them."
With that, Ortes stepped back behind Carisia.
"You have all come to see that our company's plan is sufficiently grounded in reality."
Somewhere along the way the smile had left her face. Carisia declared it calmly.
"If you have any objections, speak. I will listen."
No one raised a hand. Hearing that answer made of silence, Carisia nodded.
Ortes.
God.
All this time, pinballing through unofficial side duty without a single formal title had been everyday life—and now they meant to put people properly under me and work me into the ground?
So the one sitting the pressure interview wasn't Kaicl. It was me?