Episode 4 — Perzen von Schweik Brutein
"You are quite certain you need no one to attend you?"
At the words of the maids Perzen had brought with Sebas, Euphemia nodded, sent them out, and sank into bathwater that had been warmed through.
"Ah...!"
The moment she leaned forward even a little, a thin, needling pain shot up through her. She winced on reflex and set a hand to her waist.
In the morning she had been too shaken to notice. Looking over herself now, she found the traces of last night's coupling written raw across every part of her body.
She knew they would not come off. Even so she scrubbed with her own hands until the skin stood up an angry red, and all that remained was the sting. Water clapped softly in the tub. Further stubbornness would only make her more wretched, so she let her hands fall, washed in haste, and left the mansion to walk the domain.
Walls that had collapsed through long years — left as they stood, for there had been no money — were deep in repair. Storehouses that had gaped empty, with no grain to share even had she wished to share it, were packed full, and since morning the people of the domain had stood in a dense line to receive that grain for nothing.
A few of them, waiting off at a distance, met her eyes and dropped their heads as if they could not face her. Euphemia felt she ought not to be standing there. Before any more gazes could catch on her, she moved quietly on.
Step. Step. Step.
Just as that man — Perzen von Schweik Brutein — had said, set her private feelings aside and the result was as fine as anyone could wish. What years of desperate thrashing had never won her was being settled with an almost dishonest neatness.
And yet, why? Euphemia missed those days. Among them, most of all, the stretch that had not even lasted a few months. Faint and far, the moments she had shared with Ciel Midford rose in her.
Was it because they were memories of not having to struggle alone — of being able, if only for a little while, to lean on someone?
Be safe. Please...
She had bound him to the only horse the domain possessed and sent him off. If he had lived, he could sell that horse in time, take the money he needed to live, and settle somewhere else. She did not think it a waste in the least. It was a shabby tribute, offered to a man who had followed her unimpressive self and served her as though she were his lady — a man who had seemed a steadfast knight.
In truth, in that moment, seeing Ciel force a hand out toward her as he drew away, she had suddenly thought she might flee the domain with him. But if she remained, the people of this place might be treated even a little better. Under that judgment she lowered the hand that had risen halfway, and only watched him vanish beyond the snow.
Of course, the worry no longer meant anything. The result had come out well enough to put all that fretting to shame, and so Euphemia felt like a child who had lost the road.
If that man, Perzen von Schweik Brutein, had at least been harsh with the people, there would have been something — anything — still left for her to do.
Step. Step.
She did not know where to set her feet. When a person loses the will to live as the author of their own life, do they grow this helpless?
Had she wanted only her private happiness, she would have escaped with Ciel then. That choice was a cost already sunk beneath the result now before her. Time that had run on, past all recalling.
Step.
"Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug."
"..."
A low voice, laid flat. A great shadow fell across the ground in front of her, and Euphemia lifted her head to his face — vicious in its self-righteousness.
"Ha..."
Was it a talent in its own right, to wind so far around the plain fact that he hated the look of her crying?
"The carriage is ready. You need not pack a thing, so follow. We leave this place at once."
"All right..."
She had no strength left even for an answer. If he had meant only to put a collar on her and keep her in hand, that would have been better. The man before her was crueler than that.
A bird shut in a cage still longs for freedom. It beats its wings, nursing the dream that someday it will rise into a blue sky. A bird whose wings have been torn out cannot.
To the man before her — to Perzen — she would be nothing more than an ornament for furnishing a house, a beast killed and stuffed. She had to hear whatever he said. Whatever she said never reached him, as if she were speaking to a wall.
"We depart."
The carriage moved without a single sway, so smoothly that even the reality of leaving Ruerug — the domain where she had lived through so many years — failed to take hold. Had she not been able to watch the land dwindling beyond the window, Euphemia might not have known she was leaving at all.
"Stop... looking..."
If he would only close his eyes and sleep a little, that would have been a mercy. The man seated across from her, Perzen, did no such thing. He propped his chin on his hand and simply watched.
In those crimson eyes, chilling enough to raise the skin, a glint of pleasure passed now and again. Was he recalling last night — how he had toyed with her as he pleased, and taken her in his arms?
Shame surged. Clothed though she was, she pressed her legs tightly together and laid her right hand on her left shoulder to cover her chest, and still she suffered the illusion of a touch sweeping over her skin. So Euphemia gave up a resistance that meant nothing. She rested her head at ease, closed her eyes, and quietly made herself something for him to look at.
Body and mind were spent. Sleep is a refuge granted equally to everyone. Drawing the drowsiness that crowded in over herself like a quilt, Euphemia courted it.
Of all places to lean her head...
By my measure, Euphemia sat across from me with her head tipped to the left, breathing even. Something twisted in my gut. At once I shifted to the right and propped my chin there.
Only when the place she occupied and the place I occupied fell into a proper diagonal symmetry did my mind ease at last.
Truly... a body that goes out and buys its own suffering.
A meaningless thought occurred to me. When I later died and was laid in a coffin, if that coffin's left and right failed to match, perhaps this flesh would refuse to be shut inside it even after death.
▶ ???
▶ Quantification
To reach Brutein in the central lands, one first had to cross the North, and the journey would consume no small amount of time. I meant to spend those hours as thriftily as I could, and so I set myself to reason out one piece of the status window — the special ability that would not display.
In truth, an ability that stays hidden becomes a drawback over the long term, however useful it may be. This body was, by the novel's setting, the villain who had plundered the protagonist's heroine. The more outstanding the talent, the more outstanding the protagonist's latent ability would be in equal measure. That was the formula.
Let me walk the memories back.
Survive at All Costs was a work whose setting archives — notes that unpacked the world on their own — had seen unusually heavy use. And because it was a work I had loved, I had gone in and out of those notes often after every new chapter. Of the world's settings, I remembered everything.
Perzen von Schweik Brutein was a black mage of the middle tier — Euclid. Cross-check the lore bound up with that, and I ought to get a sense of what the unmarked ability was.
A black mage. In ordinary tales they are despised, treated as taboo, and named enemies of the whole continent. This novel does not treat them so.
A black mage's identity is Corpse Command. According to one's own aptitude and skill, the damage done to the corpse, and one's understanding of it — one's familiarity — it was possible to reproduce up to ninety percent of the abilities it had held in life. For that reason, the older and more storied a noble house, the more strictly it kept the remains of those who had become Aura Knights or Elemental Magicians, decay held off for good.
On this point... there is no break with the setting.
Memories flickered past of a conspicuous aptitude, owed to the Corpse Comprehension and the affinity entered among his talents. But I could not lay a finger on anything that had shown what the setting never mentioned, nor on any element that had collapsed it.
Then...
I pressed a hand to my brow and reached a little further back.
In this novel a black mage, quite apart from the power to command corpses, holds the right to bargain with the Netherworld. The Anomaly brokered from that realm is random, and the price demanded is goods of high worth — not merely what is expensive, but, the higher the grade, what has kept that worth across a long span of time. For the poor, the power is in practice a meaningless ornament.
Found it.
Tracing the past on and on, I came at last upon a place where the setting and the fact diverged.
A black mage possesses, as a basic matter, an Altar of their own. Perform the rite and succeed even once at a transaction, and that altar becomes a Subspace. Naturally Perzen, too, had tried to deal with an Anomaly of the Netherworld in order to gain that convenience.
The problem was this. Though it had been his first transaction, the Anomaly brokered to him had judged the offering excessive and returned a portion of it. The work's setting records that a tribute is never reduced unless one reaches a certain number of dealings and becomes what people commonly call a VIP.
But is this really all it amounts to...?
Enough to earn the inconvenience of not being written down? I frowned and tried to press the memory further, but the carriage, which had been going along quietly, suddenly rattled and drew to a stop.
"A problem has arisen."
The coachman on the box opened the small partition with a flat face and passed in, dimly, word of what lay outside. At that I rose, glanced down at Euphemia where she slept deeply, opened the carriage door, and stepped out.
The moment I left the carriage, things like threads — exceedingly clear, and sticky — plastered themselves thick all over me. At the same time something pale showed far off. Inferring from Perzen's memories, it would be an Erbet Arachne, one of those that inhabit the snow mountains of the North.
Come down to lure the young, and to teach them how to hunt.
For an ordinary person to clear Erbet Arachne silk, one must coat it in oil, set it alight, and wait more than ten minutes. Give them that much time, and being hunted is more than assured.
I reached into the pocket at my breast, drew out a pair of glasses, and put them on.
Perzen suffered an extreme obsession where symmetry was concerned. For that reason, the act of wearing glasses carried a particular meaning.
A thin, high note rang out. Every web strung dense in all directions shivered at once, and the young Erbet Arachne came on like a swarm of bees. The moment I confirmed that the clumsy patterns marked across their bodies did not form a symmetry, instinctive disgust made me bite down on my lip.
What Perzen had taken for his altar was the ring on his left hand. Through the Subspace engraved in that ring, I lowered to the ground the coffin in which slept the remains of Bayern von Griel Brutein, twenty-seventh head of House Brutein.
A black mage's art of command is swayed by familiarity with the corpse in question. That we were of one blood was no small advantage.
To command him was to bind him in mana and set him to work. Even so, as if courtesy were only natural, I opened the coffin, and when Bayern von Griel Brutein rose I inclined my head.
It was gratitude, offered to a predecessor who had become a dead man without a soul and still left his flesh behind, out of the single resolve to devote himself to the house.
Certainly...
I felt it then — how readily pride in the house, and a clinging attachment to it, might pour forth beneath so fierce a conviction of chosen blood. Fierce enough that Perzen himself would click his tongue.
Black Magic. A link joining the past already gone to the present still flowing, so that the dead and the living might exist together.
At last the twenty-seventh head, Bayern von Griel Brutein, brought down upon the ground the staff he had favored in life. The crack of it rang out, heavy and final.