Night Duty
"Mmm..."
It was 7:40 in the evening.
Laura had bathed in the room assigned to her in the dormitory, changed into something light, and sat at the desk, faithfully working through the assignment Perzen had given her. She had been a woman in her previous life and a woman in this one, so setting down a list of things a woman was likely to meet with at least once was no difficult task. The problem was men.
No. Not only men.
Women who were not noble — commoner women, in a word — would share certain things they were bound to experience at least once. Men would be no different. So Laura meant to stop by the Mercenary Association in the capital later and post a commission. When a war broke out, or a war between domains, those conscripted and sent to the front were mostly commoners.
And if I subdivide it by occupation as well...
A perfect mark on the assignment, she thought, would not be hard to come by.
Laura's present goal was to challenge Perzen once more and win back the body of her previous life.
"Hah..."
She rubbed at a shoulder gone stiff, stretched, and then frowned at the calendar that happened to catch her eye. Her birthday. The day she would be fully nineteen. It was not far off.
I no longer carry on the blood of Genova.
She turned that over once more and was just about to settle back into her work when—
Knock, knock.
Someone was at the door. She had formed no particular friendships. Who would come looking for her at this hour? Puzzled, Laura rose, crossed the room, and opened the door.
"Oh — hello!"
"Ah... yes..."
Unfamiliar, but not strangers. They were young ladies from the same general lecture, Understanding Culture and the Arts — Pianoforte.
"Wh-what... is it?"
"Won't you teach us the p-piano?"
"What?"
"J-just what I said..."
Rosenberg, holy land of art and culture. A place where artists of painting, music, sculpture, and every other craft nurtured their dreams, and where those who admired them were drawn to gather. Laura, a young lady of that Rosenberg, naturally stood higher than most — in music, especially. So their request was not incomprehensible.
In the modern age it might have been different, but at this point in history the piano was an instrument of short lineage. Short as that history was, its popularity had exploded, and so its worth stood far above that of other instruments. Put another way, there were few who could teach it. The thing had already passed beyond what commoners could scrape together, coin by careful coin, and buy at any decent quality. Nobles were little different. A title did not mean one was rich. To purchase a piano, invite a teacher, and take lessons was no small luxury.
For that reason, Understanding Culture and the Arts — Pianoforte boasted an overwhelming rate of competition even among the general courses. Thirty students were provided, each class hour, with pianos they might play as they pleased; those same thirty could use the pianos placed in the dormitory music room for practice whenever they wished. It was a wonder the administrative assistant in the department office had not taken their own life that day.
"All... right."
"Really?"
"Yes."
Teaching the piano — and only setting the fundamentals properly in place — would not require her to talk very much. Laura agreed without refusing.
"One... moment. I n-need something to p-put on..."
"Yes! We'll wait!"
"Hurry back!"
She left their girlish squeals of delight behind her, threw on a light coat, and went up with them to the music room in Dormitory A.
"First... w-would each of you tr-try playing, just once?"
As slowly as she could manage, so the words would not stumble. Laura spoke softly, coaxingly, and the three young ladies nodded and set their hands to the keys.
"N-no, that won't do. The th-thumb — you must..."
It was the mark of those who met the piano for the first time, with no knowledge at all: they tried to strike the keys with four fingers and leave the thumb out, because bringing the thumb into it felt too strange. Let that habit harden, though, and one was only laying a penalty on oneself. A woman, with less stamina than a man, would tire all the more from nothing but seeing a single piece through. So Laura corrected them step by careful step, and the time went by.
It was drawing toward ten when he appeared — Perzen, come to send the students back to their own rooms.
"That will be enough playing."
"Ah..."
Laura and the three young ladies started, as if only now noticing how late it had grown, and rose from their places in a fidget.
"You will have a lecture beginning at nine again tomorrow. If you wish to go on, I can permit you until midnight. Beyond that, I cannot. Should you be late, the complaints would come flying to me."
"Oh! Th-then...!"
Bright with smiles, the three clung to Perzen and wheedled out of him permission to use the music room until midnight — Laura's share included.
"P-Professor Perzen, do you like the piano as well?"
Second son of Brutein, a handsome man who gave off an air one did not easily approach. When that Perzen showed them a little kindness, the three grew warmer still and put the question to him.
"No. I do not like the piano. Personally, I would place it among the worst of instruments."
"Ah..."
At the answer that came out of him, the three drew back, awkward.
The reason Perzen disliked the piano was, in truth, nothing much. The piano of the modern world where Lee Seojin had lived possessed eighty-eight keys. The piano here possessed seventy-three. For that alone, the piano was, to Perzen, the worst of instruments. But a noble — a trueborn son of Brutein, no less — could not be allowed to fall behind the fashion, and so whenever he practiced he would pry one key forcibly free and play on what remained.
"Is it be-because its history is sh-short? Is th-that why?"
"It has nothing to do with that."
"The p-piano... until you've tr-tried playing it..."
"Laura. You cannot truly think I have never played."
"......"
When she was Isabel, searching through every possible means of resolving the curse — the Full-Moon Quirk — the things she had sometimes chosen as a way of fleeing reality were precisely the piano and tobacco. And this life she was a daughter of Rosenberg, holy land of culture and art. Her musical gift was considerable, as befitted that house, and she had played often since childhood, so the instrument could only be a thing to which she was deeply attached.
And so Laura, though it might be impudent of her, dared to toss a single line at Perzen as if in provocation.
"Th-then please p-play just one piece for us."
"......"
"I-if you can't, th-then it can't be helped..."
"L-Laura...!"
The three young ladies at her side went ashen. Perzen himself, the one concerned, only smiled faintly.
"Very well. I will play you one piece. When that performance is finished, you, Laura, will grant me a single request."
"O-of course."
A small regret stirred in her, but she did not let it weigh. She sat up straight and fixed her eyes on his back.
"Now that I think of it... it should be all right to show you this."
Stroking the ring on his left hand, Perzen opened a Subspace, set Isabel's coffin down, and at once seated her at his side by Enslavement.
"Watch from there, and see what it looks like to grow proficient in Autonomous Control."
If it was only a single piece, he could well suppress the obsessive fit brought on by those irksome seventy-three keys. Nor was it Perzen alone. The self mingled with him — Lee Seojin — had gone to a piano academy through middle school, so the act of playing itself stirred no reluctance. And the piece the present Perzen meant to play was a score still vivid in Lee Seojin's memory: White Out.
He drew one deep breath, and began.
The opening was a harmony of thoroughly quiet notes, placid enough that a listener might have felt nothing at all. The turn was not long in coming. A small tone stretched on and left its resonance behind, and before that resonance could fade, the volume climbed, steep and sudden. It was a considerable burst of speed, and what rose in Laura's mind as she listened was a squall arriving without warning, a blizzard. The air of the notes themselves was urgent enough that a figure came with them unbidden — someone running this way and that, fleeing the rain and the snow.
Before long the sound slowed and grew quiet again. Unlike the dry beginning, the timbre now was unmistakably frustration and sorrow. This weather driving in so suddenly — closer, yes, to a blizzard than to any shower. Was it a figure for that wandering, the search for a place to hide from snow that never ceased to fall? At the same time the volume of the gloomy timbre rose by degrees, and the steep rush of a moment before returned. And that rush — steep, no, steep past the point of wonder — began to drive so hard it seemed determined to grant the listener not even the leisure to steady a breath.
Laura, quietly taking in Perzen's playing, understood at once how fiercely emotional it was. Music is emotional by nature, of course, but this was like feeling poured out exactly as it stood. Yes. Only well wrapped in the name of music. A wretched excretion of his inner self.
Laura, too — no, Isabel of the previous life as well — had given this very same performance as the Perzen of now. For her in those days, the piano had been a refuge from reality, a bin for cast-off feeling and a comfort besides. This piece was surely his own composition. Music she had never heard anywhere in Rosenberg. His alone.
Presently the notes sank, as if to announce that the piece was slowly coming to its end. Like someone buried under savagely falling snow, someone who had never found a refuge, slowly dying. The world before her eyes seemed to go white.
A whiteout, in the most literal sense. White Out.
Then it ended — the performance in which he had pressed the keys together with Isabel's corpse under Autonomous Control — and the three young ladies breathed out their wonder. Their knowledge of the piano was shallow; they were merely marveling at the clean, overwhelming speed Perzen had shown them. Laura was different. She went a little further, and empathized with what had lain within the piece just now. With the image in Perzen's mind. That wretchedness, that sorrow, that pain — imagining what they might have been.
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg."
He called her. Laura started out of her thoughts and flinched. She was seated, and he was tall enough that she nearly had to tip her head all the way back; he had come to her side and was looking down.
"You do know you are to grant me one request."
"Yes..."
What was he about to ask? The red eyes bent upon her were too dreadful. Laura clenched her fists tight.
"The woof-woof's oink-oink woofs yet oinks, and the oink-oink's woof-woof oinks yet woofs."
"Pardon?"
One long sentence, whispered to her as he bowed his head.
"Say it."
"......"
"If you have not memorized it, I will say it again."
Closer to compulsion, to a command, than to any urging. Laura glanced at the three young ladies, caught hold of Perzen's collar — his necktie, to be precise — brought her lips near the nape of his neck, and spoke in a small, coaxing voice.
"Th-the w-woo-woof-woof's oi-oink-oink..."
But the further she went, the smaller her voice became.
He knows I stutter, and still he makes me do this. A mean prank. Nothing but a punishment.
"Once a week you will come and be examined on the words I have just given you. Speak them through without a single stammer, and we will consider the matter finished."
"...!"
Quite unbefitting her mental age, Laura puffed her cheeks full and shot Perzen a fierce glare. But he had already laid Isabel's corpse back in the coffin, retrieved it into Subspace, and was leaving the music room.
"......"
Unlike the three young ladies, chattering this way and that over Perzen's performance, Laura let out a sigh within and opened her mouth.
"W-woo-woof, w-woof-woof's..."
Hopeless. Stammering like this from the very first syllable, when would she ever carry that long sentence cleanly through, without a stumble?
"W-woo-woof..."
She sounded like a dog. She felt as if she had become a puppy.
"D-damn him..."
Her face flushed deep red at last, and Laura flung a petulant little curse after Perzen, who had already vanished from the place without a trace.
No matter how I look at it...
The difficulty was far too cruel for her. Better, she thought, to write the performance he had just given down as a score and send it to Rosenberg. If it could win him even a little honor there — and, should fortune be kind, go one step further and have the God of Art bestow a blessing...
"Th-the w-woo-woof-woof's... oi-oi-oink-oink..."
Might he not cancel this punishment that amounted to a sentence? Laura prayed, with all her heart, that it would be so.