A Banquet of Empty Words (2)
Hydra Inc.'s purpose.
Ortes had never said it in his own voice until now, but among the directors it was a subject that had already come up more than once. Why had a mage as powerful as Carisia come to Etna City? It had been a great city once. Now it was nothing but a frontier sliding into ruin.
Unify the city and pile up wealth? That didn't even qualify as a joke. This was Carisia, who had dropped two of Etna City's sitting tower masters in a breath. Without the nuisance of bringing the underworld to heel and incorporating it as a new company, she had more ways to build a fortune than she could use.
Fame was no different. A mage of that order might well receive offers not from some forgettable tower, but from the orthodox towers themselves.
Then again. You never know.
Arabelle turned over the possibility that a mage that strong had not come to the city so much as been driven to it. Beaten in a struggle for power inside her tower, she might have chosen Etna City as a place to hide and set her strength in order.
But that hypothesis had a hole of its own. A mage on Carisia's level, with a confidant like Ortes at her side, and still she had to lose and flee? The towers where a fight of that grade could even be fought were vanishingly few.
Paying no mind to the anxious eyes Arabelle had fixed on him, Ortes's address went on.
King.
Not a king in the sense of a nation's ruler, inherited by blood. This was a world from which the kings who had once commanded the age were gone — and with them, even the gods said to have laid their blessings on royal bloodlines.
For a very long time already, the order of rule had been rebuilt around the Ten Commandments and the magic towers.
The orthodox towers were the privileged class among magic towers. Even among them, only ten places could be called kings.
The ten towers that possessed the Ten Commandments, legacy of the Mage King.
They had no need of cumbersome names — Lernaean this, Torres that. A plain designation, nothing but a color of mana and an attribute, was enough to prove their history, because every tower that worked magic of that attribute flew under their banner.
The tradition that the ten towers had received the Ten Commandments from the Mage King's own hand had come down in the form of verse.
White Light, which announced the beginning.
Yellow Thunder, which divided heaven and earth.
Red Flame, which gathered the heat.
Azure Ice, which bound the cold.
Jade Wind, which mingled all things.
Blue Water, pooled in the great ocean.
Violet Earth, which shaped the land.
Green Wood, from which life first stirred.
Silver Iron, which honed the blade.
Black Dark, which declared the end.
A declaration that they would become a new king. Carisia's light magic. Every one of the directors thought of the eldest of the towers — the White Light Magic Tower.
Most of the Ten Towers' masters still carry bloodlines descending from the Mage King's disciples. Don't tell me Carisia is a bastard of the current master of White Light?
Across the long history of magic, a change in who held the Ten Commandments was exceedingly rare, but it had happened. A fight staked on the Commandments was commonly likened to a war between king and usurper — a rite of succession.
A new usurper has risen to challenge the throne. And if that person is my president...
Arabelle was still agonizing over what orders to give the brokers of the information guild when a declaration followed that outran everything the directors had expected.
"Of course. I don't mean to bore you with the dull little story of stealing the Ten Commandments."
This time, there was no mistaking it. Carisia smiled. The directors who witnessed that flawless smile felt a chill wrap their bodies, as if the cold itself had taken hold of them.
"I trust a man like you would know, Geryones. The tower master of Phytoes Magic Tower. Kaicl."
The thread of the talk swung back to Geryones, held captive. He felt the absurd and the fearful at once.
The strongest of Etna City's three magic towers. The urban legend of Phytoes Magic Tower's secret weapon.
"There's still someone who believes that superstitious rubbish? That story is decades old already."
Even among the eight bosses who had grown up in the marrow of Etna City, few fully understood what Geryones was talking about.
There was Arabelle, whose trade was to collect every rumor the city had to offer. And—
"……."
Only the old dwarf Bertrand, a native who had lived in this Etna City since ages past, and guildmaster of the Miners Guild besides.
For an instant they noticed Ortes's gaze sweep over them. He was plainly not so green a man as to botch a thing as small as where he rested his eyes.
A warning. Or an invitation.
A warning not to act rashly, or an invitation to say everything they knew. Every gesture of his snared a person this tightly. Arabelle revised her assessment of Ortes upward — from a suspicious character to a vicious one.
"And if it isn't an empty rumor?"
"Ha!"
Geryones forgot even that he was a captive and laughed. The lightness of an arm cut down by half woke him back to where he was, but if the sneer had vanished, the skepticism had not lessened with it.
"You'd know, old man Bertrand. Why Etna City is declining."
The dwarf stroked his beard. No mage powerful enough to be worth remarking on. No specialty that could not be replaced. Or a frontier standing apart from Elysion, the paradise of mages... Any number of reasons could be offered. But for a man who had passed a hundred years in this city with his hands in the earth, there was exactly one reason Etna City was waning.
"Mount Etna is cooling."
The cooling of the volcano that had been Etna City's lifeline. The city's miners had once made their living quarrying fire-attribute mana stones, formed where the volcano's energy gathered and settled. Now, even as the yield of those stones dwindled, the volcano itself was cooling.
"Phytoes Magic Tower did something to Mount Etna. They took the volcano's vital force and prepared a special magic with it. The rumors ran wild, but so far as our Miners Guild could learn from its surveys, nothing magical was ever installed outside the volcano."
"Kaicl means to condense Mount Etna's mana and forge a new Commandment!"
Geryones cried it like a line in a play. A moment later his expression went bitter.
"I let that rumor bewitch me once, and I turned this city upside down over it. Kaicl — was he ever an ordinary man? A formal disciple of Red Flame, then scouted away by Silver Iron. A legend of a figure..."
Geryones looked carefully toward Carisia. She gave his stare no reaction at all. Her eyes were on Ortes.
"A monstrous mage, besides, who went alone to the greatest tower in Etna City and took its rule into his own hands. Like that president of yours."
Perhaps the memory of what he had suffered at Carisia's hands came back to him; Geryones let his head drop. He lifted it again almost at once. It was the straightness of a certainty he had won by chasing it down himself.
"But this much is certain. There is no Artificial Decalogue in Phytoes Magic Tower. Nothing of the kind."
"No. From the very start."
"That bastard Kaicl isn't even in this city."
Phytoes Magic Tower was running unmanned.
The greatest magic tower in Etna City had no master in residence.
All right. Up to here, everything was going as expected.
Bertrand, who had spent nearly his whole life mining the veins of Mount Etna, and Geryones, who had competed with Phytoes Magic Tower for power. The two of them were cast as the opposition — the ones who would insist that no Artificial Decalogue of Phytoes existed at all.
I knew otherwise. I knew the "Commandment of Phytoes Magic Tower" was real.
To be precise, it wasn't anything you could honestly call a Commandment.
What was I supposed to call it? A Commandment with career ambitions? A Commandment candidate? A Commandment, promotion pending?
Two traits mark the Ten Commandments: a vast store of mana, and memory lying latent within them. Merely knocking at a Commandment's door swells a mage's maximum mana and lets them realize magic they have never once heard of.
The masters of the Ten Towers, linked directly to the Commandments, wield mana close to infinite and can use the Mage King's formulae.
Kaicl's Commandment, at Phytoes, could not. The limits of his own knowledge put a ceiling on the formulae he was able to imprint.
Even so, he had been siphoning Mount Etna's mana for a long time. It was not infinite, the way a true Commandment is, but a hoard had gathered that any ordinary eye would have had to call inexhaustible.
I knew it, of course, because White Nameless had used the thing in the original — in 2077, when the Mage King returned.
As for how White Nameless used that Commandment.
She just up and detonated it, didn't she?
She used it as an explosive that vaporized the whole of Etna City. A nuclear bomb doesn't stretch far enough for the comparison. You'd have to dress it up as an antimatter bomb to get the scale right.
A trap she had prepared when her clash with the protagonist was driven to the brink, all for the sake of killing him. The plan had even used Hydra Inc.'s headquarters as bait, and when it failed in the end, White Nameless put her own life on the line and faced the protagonist herself.
Which is to say — if I could get this used for something other than a bomb, I could strike one reason off the list of ways Carisia dies as she does in the original.
I smiled at the directors and spoke.
"No. Kaicl is in Etna."
The one who caught the off-note in Ortes's words was Arabelle.
"Etna? Not Etna City?"
As if he had been waiting for exactly that, Ortes opened his mouth.
"Yes. Kaicl is on Mount Etna."
"But..."
Bertrand didn't know what to call him. The man had never been granted a single official rank at Hydra Inc. And yet it was plain as day that he was the company's second-in-command.
"You may call me by my name."
As if he had read that hesitation, Ortes offered it. Bertrand pronounced the name with an uneasy heart.
"Ortes. Our Miners Guild has already investigated Mount Etna time and again. But all that was ever there was a flame dying out by degrees."
"Of course. The places you investigated, Director Bertrand, were exactly so."
"You're saying there's a place the Miners Guild failed to search?"
"Allow me to be more precise. Kaicl is inside Mount Etna."
Ortes looked left and right with an uncanny smile. The only stretch that smile did not reach held Carisia, and she alone wore a look of satisfaction.
"We are going to draw Kaicl out and acquire the Artificial Decalogue."
His gaze turned to Geryones.