Business Trip to the Partner Firm (3)
Ortes sank to a kneel at Taknia's bedside. All Taknia could manage was a feeble twitch of the left hand he had barely kept.
A careful stirring of mana. Somehow, he succeeded in coaxing life back into the internal circuitry of the control panel wired to the microphone.
A sudden wave of doubt washed over him. Suppose he did get word of this to the men outside. Would that be enough to bring the intruder down?
He was still weighing his subordinates' strength against the intruder's, still groping for some path to survival, when Ortes's voice fell.
"There are a few things I'd like to ask."
Crude as the work was, the microphone line was connected.
"By any chance, have you seen a blond child about this tall recently?"
I lifted my right hand and marked a rough height. Given that Crito had no dealings with the main tower of the Torres School, the odds that Astrape had been delivered there were vanishingly small. Still, this was the final check, for that one chance in ten thousand.
"What kind of… mad talk is that? Thousands of slaves have passed through my hands. You think I remember every last one of them?"
"Oh? And yet the special ones you manage yourself, don't you? The wild-mage sort, I mean. There must be procedures you have to see to personally before they're delivered to the main tower."
A procedure that suppressed the mana circuits inside a mage to a manageable level, so they wouldn't run wild in transit. There was exactly one way Astrape could have been delivered without ever drawing the Torres School's notice: if she had been among the slaves Crito handed over in the transaction immediately before this one. In that case she would still be waiting in the queue for the procedure.
An absurdly slim chance. Even so, I had no intention of missing it and handing Carisia the occasion of her death.
"So you were a slave hunter after all. Your prize got sold to our tower ahead of you, and this is the tantrum? Heh. Must've been one filthy expensive slave."
"The next time we meet, I'll be sure to introduce myself that way. I'll ask again. Among the slaves under your special care right now, was there a wild mage with a truly exceptional gift for lightning magic? Blond, most likely."
"Meet you again and it'll be hell…. No."
Taknia answered without so much as opening his eyes, as if he had given up entirely. There was something like resignation in the words he let fall — the bearing of a man who understood there was no longer any way to dodge death.
In the original, Taknia burned with the ambition to win a promotion by offering slaves up to the main tower. Astrape's potential as a wild mage had been extraordinary, and the merit of presenting her was what earned Taknia his transfer there. But he misjudged that potential. He set the strength of the mana-circuit suppression wrong, and that mistake was what let Astrape recover her sense of self. Later, in the battle against the Torres School, she threw the fact in his face and mocked him, and he could not hide his fury.
Judging by the emotion written into him then, he was not a man who could lie cleanly even driven to a pass like this. A tell would have shown.
"Good that there isn't one. Then, last of all."
"Where would you like it?"
The words from the opening of the fight came back around. The bastard was asking, with a persistence that bordered on obsession, how he wanted to die.
Taknia let out a breath thick with blood and muttered.
"Keep it simple. Just cut me."
It was not loyalty that moved him — no fear that the wounds left on his corpse might spark a war with another school and cost the Torres School dearly. He only wanted, even at the end, to spoil the intruder's design. Taknia opened his eyes and waited for the last thing he would ever see.
The intruder, who had not let slip so much as a scrap of a name, was smiling to the very last. Slowly he raised the high-frequency blade and brought it down.
Without even the sound of a cut, smooth as silk, Taknia's neck came away.
Ortes carefully recovered the brain chip that would have been mounted in the man's skull, then activated a Magic Inscribed Drive. The basic fire spell, Flame Bullet, came loose. Whether because the control panel had been smashed, the fire-suppression system never engaged.
Once he had confirmed the flames taking hold of Taknia's corpse, Ortes stepped out through the door. It was time to head back from the business trip.
The slave breakout was at its height. Magic Inscribed Drives or not, the people dragged in as slaves were no proper mages. But the difference in numbers was overwhelming, and that was why the mages of the Torres School had yet to put the escape down. Had it been nothing but a mob of incompetents with no magic at all, the matter would have been finished long since. Instead the drives poured out without end, going for the mages' throats. Put down one, and five surged in. Put down ten, and twenty came flooding after.
Until now they had used only nerve-severing magic, so as to preserve the value of the merchandise. They were on the verge of turning to genuinely destructive spells when a crackling broadcast suddenly cut through the air. An unstable, static-laced sound dropped into the middle of the uprising.
The mages went rigid at the voice spilling out. A broadcast was transmitting from the supervisor's office, and the voice coming through it belonged to a stranger. What else could that mean?
No sound of fighting came over the line. Only a dry exchange of question and answer, going on and on. The mages rushed to contact their superiors. Nothing came back.
In that bewilderment, the slaves saw hope. And when Taknia's voice finally burst through — just hurry up and kill me — the mages broke and ran.
Among the slaves crying out in the joy of liberation stood one child with golden hair.
Crackle.
A flash of electricity leapt at her fingertips and vanished. The child turned the words from the broadcast over again — someone's murmur that it was a good thing she had never been brought here. The tone was like that of the nameless man who had been passing out Magic Inscribed Drives.
No. Surely not. A one-in-a-million story, truly. And yet—
Did he come to save me?
Astrape looked toward the open exit and thought of her hometown, faint and far away. Etna City. A decaying city of vice.
What waited for me when I got back from the trip was an executive meeting. How was it even possible to be ordered into a meeting the instant I returned? I clicked my tongue at Carisia's warped notions of labor.
I left a word of thanks with the driver who had brought me this far and made a passable effort at straightening my clothes. I'd gotten blood on them here and there, but going off to change before I showed up would have been the amateur's move. Knowing Carisia's temper, she was far more likely to be irritated at my being late because I'd changed than at the smell of blood on what I was wearing. If I'd known it would turn out like this, I should have brought a change of clothes from the start.
I tidied nothing but the set of my clothes and went straight to the conference room.
Knock, knock.
"Come in."
Carisia's voice, cold as a blade. Wondering what whim she meant to indulge this time, I opened the door as quietly as I could.
At the sight of Ortes coming through the door, Crito flinched, a shudder running through him. The reek of blood was unmistakable. He didn't need to be told whose it was. The Torres branch he had been dealing with all this time.
From the moment he said he needed no one else, just one empty seat beside the driver, I had an idea…
Had he really gone and wiped out the branch alone?
Ortes came gliding in without a sound and took his place behind Carisia, standing in attendance as he had at the founding ceremony. Crito caught the faintest tremor at the corner of her mouth. Satisfaction, or displeasure? The lingering trace of battle on Ortes's clothes might well grate on her. Or she might be pleased that her confidant had carried out the task so cleanly.
Before Crito could finish reading that expression, Carisia's face settled.
"Ortes."
"Yes."
"You told me not to factor death into the plan. And yet you don't keep that advice yourself."
A rebuke? He couldn't read her face. Not a tremor disturbed Ortes's smile as he laid the words out, smooth as if he had prepared them in advance.
"An attendant's duty and a master's duty are different things. The methods I use would not suit you, President, and the reverse is equally true."
Carisia nodded, readily enough.
"You heard him. Geryones."
Wow. This workplace really was beyond anything I could have imagined. I finish a business trip, come straight back without even time to change, and the first words out of the meeting are her chewing me out.
Ah, boss. You really didn't have to take it that far. All I'd meant was that she might try having some attachment to being alive, but I'd apparently said it at too random a moment, and the meaning had gotten twisted. I'd have to explain it properly sometime when it was just the two of us.
I answered that the President sat too high for fieldwork — the staff tensed up the moment she set foot on site — whereas I was middle management, and going out to look things over when there was work in the field was simply my job. And then a name I had not expected came drifting in.
"You heard him. Geryones."
Geryones? That was the name of the tower lord who had held one of Etna City's three magic towers, back before White Nameless took the city. A mage rebuilt through cybernetic modification into a body with six arms. A mana core of a different attribute had been set into each arm, and with his own chant added he was a combat mage who could manifest as many as seven attributes at once.
Now that I thought about it, there had not been nine people in the conference room. I looked at the tenth figure in the corner. Two arms on the right. One on the left. The other three had vanished, leaving nothing but the machinery visible around the shoulders.
Carisia's cold, stern gaze ran him through. To Geryones, head bowed, she spoke as if reading out a verdict.
…What?