A Day Off (2)
I'd had all the sleep I was going to get. Rather than doze off at Carisia's side, I decided to sit in the chair and put my thoughts in order.
Her breathing was a faint, thread-thin sound — so pleasant to listen to that it was almost too good to use as white noise while I worked.
"The directors."
Until now, I'd had little reason to worry much about what the directors did. Crito's enterprise — the one that would have put Hydra Inc. in the crosshairs of the protagonist's party — had already been dealt with in advance.
But a department I'd never so much as heard of, Sacred Investigations, had been established, and I was its sole member and its chief. That called for a different line of thought.
How do I arrange things so I do less work?
Ideally, the directors would mobilize their own organizations, bring in anything connected to the divine, and I would simply compile it all and file a report. I could collect a paycheck without taking a single step outside the office.
The problem is whether anyone actually has the ability to investigate goods like that.
Of all the people Hydra Inc. could call on, the one closest to the sacred was, without question, Kaicl.
A career spent probing ascension across two of the Ten Towers would be extremely useful. But he was one of the pillars of the three-way war drama about to be staged in Etna City. I couldn't just turn him loose outside.
Geryones was out for the same reason. Carisia?
If I asked the president, "Would you mind taking a short business trip?" the reply I'd get would be something like, "Hahaha, this one's lost his mind." Better that I do the running myself.
Carisia and me, the two of us?
"That doesn't seem like a good idea..."
A business trip with your superior. Tolerable enough.
A business trip alone with your superior. Awkward, but that's the nature of the job.
But when that superior is the president?
Yeah. That's a no.
After Kaicl and Geryones, I drew a line through Carisia as well. Bertrand wasn't suited to fieldwork of this sort.
Arabelle's body made recharging difficult in rough country. To put it another way, she was a desktop that needed proper cooling and a stable setup to run, not a portable laptop.
Which left only the somewhat unreliable ones.
A drug peddler like Meconion, or Taros — a mutant most people treated as a monster — were not the sort you could casually show the outside world. That left three directors.
Divius, the specialist in illegal body modification, had a history of being wanted from every direction and had still managed to flee all the way to this neighborhood.
He also handled aftercare for his "clients" often enough that he had a real knack for survival and for information. Set aside for now.
The hunter Noiro and the beast tamer Dimedes looked similar at a glance, but there was a major difference between them.
The beasts Dimedes raised were fed on ordinary people. His specialty was hunting humans. Noiro, by contrast, specialized in what most people pictured when they heard the word hunting: culling dangerous wildlife.
He did sometimes hunt humans with bounties on their heads, but most of his quarry were magical beasts mutated by mana from other dimensions. The same was true of most of the hunters belonging to Etna City's Hunters Association, which he headed.
A man who commanded beasts that hunted humans, and a human who hunted beasts. The two were bound to be bitter enemies.
If I factored in social skills as well, Noiro was clearly the best fit for outside work. But most of those likely to be holding sacred relics would be human. In that case, Dimedes was a rather attractive option too.
I'll get a lead from Meconion first, then think it over.
Meconion herself had said as much: among her trading partners, there were people who spoke of vanished gods.
The question was whether they were truly heirs to the old doctrine, deep enough to possess sacred relics — or merely addicts borrowing a god's name.
Petty work like this, in the end, I had no choice but to run down myself. Asking the directors for their cooperation and coming back empty-handed would waste both time and manpower.
Today was a holiday, so Meconion would be staying in her grotto.
I'd have to go ask her in person. Sometime in the morning, after sunrise, ought to be a reasonable hour.
Unlike Carisia, I was a person with a sense of time.
Once I'd neatly folded the paper I'd scrawled on and thrown it away, there was nothing left to do. Sunrise was still about three hours off.
I might as well kill the time watching Carisia.
Meconion took pride in her grotto, filled as it was with mist of every color.
It was the gift of an Alraune mixed-blood, a half-spirit. Plants bloomed even out of season and gave rise to hybrids never seen in nature.
Strange crossbreeds dripped poppy sap while trailing the leaves of the coca tree. Not merely the narcotic compounds contained in the plants, but rare spirit-herbs that bore mana as well.
The vapor from carefully refining them and letting them smolder dyed itself in brilliant hues and bestowed gracious hallucinations upon the grotto's residents.
A natural paradise steeped in happiness. Nothing like the instant goods of illusion magic, or electronic drugs delivered through neural terminals.
Into that paradise of hers, one clammy intruder had settled.
"It smells wonderful."
"Want a drag?"
A single flower on Meconion's green hair withered of its own accord. The blossom crumbled, the leaves rolled tight, and what remained was already a finished cigarette.
A sweet, dizzying scent drifted through the air. This cigarette, made from a flower bloomed of Meconion's own body, was the finest of the drugs she handled.
For a human with no tolerance, the fragrance alone was a crystal of pleasure strong enough to drop them unconscious.
Ortes only smiled, mild and unruffled, and waved a hand.
"No, thank you. I'm sorry to bring this up on a holiday, but I came on business."
"Right. You were that sort of man."
A languid reply. Meconion reviewed the information she had bought from Arabelle.
Slick and flexible on the surface, but at the core, closer to a fanatic who worships Carisia... was that it.
Having watched countless moths burn their lives away, Meconion knew well that human faith could sometimes prove more dangerous than pleasure.
The cigarette made from her own flower — Alraunepin — had been bait cast to take his measure.
The sorts of people who didn't so much as waver before Alraunepin fell into three broad types.
Terminal cases whose threshold for pleasure was so ruined that even Alraunepin could no longer stimulate them.
Or powerful mages, whose control over their own flesh exceeded the flower's temptation.
And last, those so deeply devoted to something that they held pleasure in contempt.
In simple terms, people whose minds had gone rotten in one particular place.
Ortes was obviously not the dregs of the first sort. She had wondered whether he might be a mage of the second, but if so there ought to have been at least some sign — venting the toxin through his breath, or the beginnings of a purification spell.
The faint smile that had not wavered once since he entered hinted at the third possibility.
That type was hopeless. There was no way to shake a blind loyalty aimed at Carisia.
Target Carisia instead? Setting aside whether seducing Carisia was even possible, the odds of getting her throat cut by Ortes along the way were exceedingly high.
Honestly. Honestly, I was right not to fight.
The number of addicts who used Meconion's grotto was not small. Plenty of people would stake their lives for a single dose of the Alraunepin she bestowed.
But when Ortes and Carisia turned Etna City upside down, Meconion had chosen to flatten herself and wait for the storm to pass rather than stand against them.
She had been lucky. Crito's organization, and Dimedes's beasts, had charged in ahead of her.
Above all, looking at what had been done to the Lernaean Magic Tower, opposing them was the worst of bad plans.
"I don't wish to keep disturbing your holiday either, Director. Would you give me the information on the followers of the old gods?"
"I started preparing it the moment I heard about it at yesterday's meeting. Take it."
Inwardly, Meconion let out a sigh of relief. Arabelle's information had said his way of handling people was identical to the president's, so she had prepared just in case.
She had never actually expected him to barge in on a holiday and press her for it. Should she count the single night's notice as mercy?
"Oh. I thought it would take at least an hour or two. You're quick."
The way he praised her, as if he knew nothing at all, grated.
No. Is this assessment really just because I organized the information quickly?
Transactions of this kind ordinarily treated a client's confidentiality as dearer than life. In that sense, the attitude Ortes had maintained since yesterday's meeting — hand the information over, obediently — was close to a threat.
Whether I'd push back against that decision, which was more like a notice, or accept it. A kind of loyalty test...!
The praise just now was for the choice itself: loyalty to Hydra Inc. over keeping faith with her clients.
Sensing that she had just brushed past a threat to her life, she feigned ease and waved a hand, loose and careless.
It was a rather rude dismissal to aim at the organization's second-in-command.
But Ortes dipped his head once in a short bow and quietly vanished.
Sure enough, it was exactly as the assessment had it. So long as the work was handled on time, he paid no mind to anything but Carisia.
When he withdrew meekly from her deliberate rudeness — a probe meant to learn where his line was — Meconion drank water she had kept chilled and let the tension drain out of her.
"Haa. Crazy bastard, mad for the boss..."
She grabbed more herbs by the handful and stuffed them into the incense burner where the plants were already smoldering.
The meeting had been short, but the tension had been heavy. If she wanted her peace of mind back, she would need to breathe the incense for a few hours.
"...So. That's why you left your room on a holiday?"
Those were the first words that greeted me when I came home, still impressed by how briskly Meconion had handled the work.
It was Carisia's voice. She still hadn't left my room.
"At dawn today, weren't you the one who told me that the president, too, ought to rest in accordance with the Magic King's will? And yet you yourself—"
Carisia. What is it this time? A look that held something almost like resentment stung.
"It's preparation for the work that starts the day after tomorrow. Before I assign tasks to the directors, a minimum of verification is necessary."
Carisia let out a short sigh and leaned her face in close.
"The one who needs to be told to rest isn't me. It's you."
I shrugged. She knows perfectly well whose fault it is that I can't rest, and she's still doing this.
I was skimming the information on the USB when Carisia dragged a chair over and sat down behind me.
"So, do they actually seem like people who believe in a god?"
"So it would seem. Smoking narcotics and tearing people apart — that does sound like Bacchus's crowd."
Bacchus. God of pleasure, revelry, and wine. Those suspected of following him were a traveling troupe that stopped in Etna City on a regular schedule.
Troupe or not, they were no ordinary circus. They specialized in extreme, eccentric performances: illicit electronic drugs, android dismantling shows, that sort of thing.
"Whether they're genuine priests, or dabblers playing games with scraps of old myth, is something I'll have to confirm in person."
They came through Etna City about once every two months. The next scheduled visit...
As luck would have it, it was next week.