Dawn of the Dead?

I was certain she had been groaning that her back hurt. When I opened my eyes, Euphemia was still curled tight as a shrimp. It had to be a sleeping habit worn into her by the cold of Ruerug — a cold one could try and try to grow used to, and never quite manage.

I laid a hand lightly over her lower belly and stroked. At once she unfolded of her own accord and gathered both hands near her chest. The trigger by which I had trained her was branded in clear, so I could coax her body into a proper line without wasting the effort of force.

"Mmm..."

Moonlight, slipped free of the clouds, seeped in at the window. Beyond the sheer white negligee, countless red kiss-marks were stamped across that fair skin. The moment I took the sight in, satisfaction surged up like a flood, and I could not keep the corner of my mouth from curling. Set beside a favorite possession, she was the sort handled so long she bore the print of my hands.

The floor creaked. I swept a hand once down Euphemia's hair, took up the lamp that had been softly lighting the room, and stepped out onto the balcony. A lit cigarette clenched between my teeth, I watched the sky where a faint dawn was rising and let the dregs of sleep blow off.

"Hah..."

Now and then, when I had the time, I turned that unmarked ability over in my head and tried to guess what it was. I still could not get a grip on it.

For now... The only conclusion I had reached was that, in all likelihood, it had something to do with the Netherworld.

I looked ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠down, stroked the ring on my left hand — my altar — and poured mana into it, linking the Mortal World to the Netherworld. A black door appeared before me, inlaid with an uncanny pattern. What that door presently allowed lay on its far side: the first floor of the Netherworld, and the second.

The first floor held things with intuitive names, like Rulekeeper, or Mimic — no. One could hardly even call those names. Epithets would be the truer word, because the anomalies that dwelt on the first floor had no names at all. And so, when one dealt with the first floor, it was possible to steer the brokerage toward the anomaly one wanted. They were jackal-like things, scraping along in the hope of being granted a name and climbing to the second floor.

The hinge creaked. For a moment the Netherworld showed through, fathomless dark lying in wait, and the nameplate seated at the very top began to shift, moment by moment, through one form after another. Proof that it was searching at random for a second-floor anomaly that would answer the mana I had connected. I looked no further than that. I cut the flow of mana and forced the door shut.

Perzen had never once dealt with an anomaly of the second floor, so I had wondered whether the unmarked ability might be something else. I thought it might be a kind of right to designate. It wasn't.

The instant a transaction was brokered, there was no third path. One had to choose: borrow that anomaly's power in a diminished state, or bring the thing down in person. Sounding it out was forbidden. Why hide it away so tightly... If it were the favorable sort, it would only prove how vast the protagonist's latent power was, so in my heart I hoped it would turn out to be the worse of the two. The odds of that were slim. Perzen was the villain who had plundered the main heroine. Whatever this was, it would surely be a device meant to visit a greater crisis on the protagonist.

... Surely it was not the sort of thing that would trigger only after I heard a line like "Are you dead?" from Ciel Midford. This was reality, yes — but it was also the world inside a novel. A cliché might well be the trigger. No. I had let the thought run too far. I finished the cigarette, glanced at the brightening morning, and went back inside.

Yesterday I had asked when the corpses to be issued to the students would arrive, and been told around lunch today. I would have to go in and inspect them.

In her own room, seated face to face with the mirror, Elizabeth had her hair tended by the maids and slowly turned through the papers that set out this year's plans for the first half at the Imperial Academy.

Too quiet. Nothing snagged. Of course, the gift bestowed by the god who governed wisdom — the power to divine fortune and ill omen — fired as it pleased. Even so, she could not believe every plan for the Academy's first half would pass so cleanly. There would surely be nobles intent on checking the imperial authority before it grew any stronger, and the Elmark Empire, above all, would try to put a hand in.

"Mmm..."

Nothing served so well to drag the imperial house's authority down as the Academy stood now. To hold the children of every noble house as hostages meant accepting a risk of equal weight the moment something went wrong. But a single place to strike was, turned the other way, proof that the place was also simple to guard.

"Your Imperial Highness, it is finished. You are as beautiful as ever today."

"Honeyed words I hear every time. They move me not at all."

Presently another maid brought her jewel box, opened it, and held it out.

"That will do. Dispose of every ornament in this box. Or, if there is something you desire, take it."

"Pardon?"

They were maids who had tended Elizabeth a long while, yet they could not adjust to the sudden change, and blinked again and again.

"Today I shall go wearing nothing. And... henceforth, should ornaments made by this craftsman be offered up, you are not to accept them."

"Then we shall dispose of all of them before you return."

At those words Elizabeth's brow twitched, inwardly. That box held a considerable quantity of ornaments. Did they truly mean there was not one thing in it they wanted? Imperial maids, unlike household servants, were for the most part daughters of noble houses. They could not fail to know the worth of the gems set in those pieces.

"Then see to it..."

But the words were already spoken, so she let nothing show and walked on. Today of all days, the unguarded voice of Perzen's heart — the one she had heard last week — rose clear in her mind.

"Good work."

"Not at all, sir!"

"The chart?"

"Here it is!"

In the basement of Education Hall A, looking over the coffins that held the fourteen corpses brought down there, I took the chart. All fourteen were the bodies of men and women who had lived as mercenaries. The midterm was to set them under autonomous control and subjugate the monsters dwelling in Kelium Forest, not far from the capital. What I held went past the brief notes the students would be given, down into the details.

"They were brought in only after the screening for corpse poison was finished. That was what I was told."

"Yes, sir!"

Corpse poison was like lead poisoning. It did not show at once. Little by little it ate into the body of the black mage who handled the corpse, and in the end it killed. In the past there had been no small number of black mages who died that way — assassinated, to put it plainly. The screening had been carried out under imperial direction, so the chance they truly harbored the poison was vanishingly small. Even so.

"Just in case, buy some Ellanya and keep it on hand."

"Ellanya, sir?"

"Yes."

Ellanya was a bizarre toxic plant. It tried to propagate by flinging its seeds at venomous animals or insects, or else at any place where toxin ran. Leave the coffins open in a sealed room, and if corpse poison were there, the toxin would ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠seep out by degrees and stir the plant. The bodies would not be issued to the students until next week, after the third week's lectures. This would do for a reliable catch.

"Then..."

I opened the coffins one by one and ran the last inspection against the details on the chart. The first task was to confirm the person by birthplace, the places they had lived, age and name, trade and family. It meant little. Human memory is not absolute. Brainwashing beforehand can overwrite it as one likes. Make a man believe he had three mothers and twist the memory, and even if he had truly had only one, the feedback that raised the implementation rate would be the part about three mothers.

Laundering a corpse's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠identity was that simple. The crux was drawing feedback from particular facts only the dead themselves had known. In a world where black mages were not scorned, the trade in corpses ran just as freely, and many mercenaries signed a clause that if they died carrying out a commission, their body would be sold and the payment passed to family or acquaintances. What one was required to enter then were facts the black mage performing the enslavement could never hope to infer. Such things bore directly on the implementation rate, so a mage naturally preferred to buy the corpse that carried more of them.

This one...

The first coffin. I radiated mana into the young man lying there, brought him under control, and kept my eyes on the chart alone.

Reading it, I frowned. Commoners usually cannot write, so more often than not a clerk at the mercenary association listens and takes the words down. The seat is a kind of confession. At the start it is trifles — stole his parents' money as a child — and only later do facts of every color come spilling out. He laid the iron across his face from the very first word. To sit facing the association's clerk and open with a shame of this degree...

My head began to spin. A greenhorn's body — a D-rank mercenary's — will not sell, so only from C-rank, what one might call a veteran, may one sign the papers to sell one's corpse. In the span between, he seemed to have weathered no small number of ordeals.

Enough... The feedback had taken, so I drew the control back. A fact with causality tangled to this degree would be hard to brainwash into a thing genuinely believed. I moved on, quietly, to the next body.

"Hah..."

By the time I had finished the sixth, I was rubbing the crease between my brows with a finger. Better to do it myself.

Perzen's talent: Psychometry, a single look into the core memory of a life, and only where the subject was a corpse. I changed my mind and decided to inspect by means of it. The imperial black mages would already have repeated the same process, and I was only going through it once more out of caution. For me, at least, the method was too wretched.

The fourth corpse had been too much. He had twin older sisters, and he had taken one of them to bed and gotten her with child. He had probably died at mercenary work for that sister's sake. By now the child would have been born. The trouble was what came after. That he had not gotten the remaining twin with child sat in me, violently wrong.

There were too many facts that soured the mood merely by being read. Careful not to let it show before Alphonse, who was waiting, I laid a hand over the head of the seventh corpse.

...?

It did not activate. No — not that it failed to activate. More precisely, the core experience that had done the most to fix a human being's character, self, and identity would not be read.

What? Before I used Psychometry, the feedback on the basic personal details had come through cleanly. I tried again, just in case. It still would not take. Was there some difference, corpse by corpse, between those that worked and those that did not? In Perzen's memory, at least, there had been no such case, so I touched the eighth, right beside it.

This one read. From there a wrongness set in, and after I had touched all fourteen I confirmed it: Psychometry would not activate on fully five of them.

"Alphonse."

"Yes, sir!"

"You weren't passed any other word?"

"Ah... no, sir! I wasn't told anything."

Then again, who but me could have noticed that something was wrong? Radiate mana, bind the corpse, grant it a will, and the enslavement takes. Just as the chart says, the feedback comes in real time: each time the relevant fact is recognized, the implementation rate rises. But... Psychometry, which fires only on a corpse, will not take.

This... What does it mean?

A dead body that is not, in fact, dead. The conclusion arrived on its own. An absurd thing. A lump of contradiction. And yet.

In truth... I had wondered, now and then. Drowned — more precisely, in cardiac arrest. If the golden five minutes had not yet passed, the span in which one could, with high probability, bring them back, could that person be enslaved? I did not know. There had been no way to test it, and no cases. But the answer was here. The five corpses Psychometry could not read were plainly moving under my control. Yes. Which meant — hard as it was to believe — that these five had, by some means, fallen into suspended animation.

"Hah..."

By the measure of this place's civilization, the thing was absolutely impossible.

"Professor?"

But what remains after the impossible is struck away is, however hard it is to believe, the plain truth. Had Sherlock Holmes not said as much?

"Alphonse."

"Yes?"

"Step outside."

"And you, Professor..."

"I'll inspect a little longer, then go."

"Understood."

"And thinking it over, there's no need to buy the Ellanya."

"Ah, yes, sir...!"

Whether standing there with me had been deeply uncomfortable, he nodded hard and left the basement of the education hall.

The door ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slammed. With that, I was alone.

No. Not alone. Five little rats were with me — dead, and yet alive.