Perzen von Schweik Brutein
As I had expected, the youngest daughter of House Rosenberg was staying at Brutein, so I sat quietly in the reception room and waited for her to come in.
No need to go to the trouble of preparing some other corpse.
An elegant coffin rested on the floor. The duel could be fought with the body of Isabel Ron Pierre Genova, asleep inside it. Neither she nor I had ever commanded Isabel's corpse, so our familiarity with it was precisely nothing.
Knock, knock.
Just as the boredom was beginning to stretch, a perfunctory knock sounded, the door opened, and the youngest daughter of House Rosenberg stepped inside with her attendants.
"..."
A social world packed with people was, for Perzen, a place of pure and extreme stress, which was why he had never attended a single gathering. And so even I, looking out through Perzen's eyes, was seeing House Rosenberg's youngest daughter for the first time. I let an unfocused gaze take in the whole of her, as if she were something curious.
An albino?
Albinism, by another name. A hereditary condition in which the body lacks pigment, so that the skin and the hair turn as white as snow.
"Laura... de Charles... Rosenberg... o-offers her... greetings..."
The cadence dragged, slower than a turtle crawling.
"A pleasure. You speak very slowly. Have you always been like that?"
Her ambition had been bold enough to aim at surpassing her master, so I had pictured someone brimming with confidence, bright and lively.
"I-I'm... s-sorry. If I t-try to speak f-faster, the st-stuttering only g-gets worse..."
Perhaps because she was albino, the flush of shame rose across her face an unusually fierce red.
"No. I failed to notice at once, and I made you bare a private weakness yourself. Forgive me."
I had heard that she had no history of illness, and yet was frail from birth, and that Viscount Rosenberg had raised her with a foolish excess of doting. Added to that were the stutter, and the weariness of having to wear long clothes even through the heat of summer, when the sun grew strong. She seemed to have been born already hung with every pitiful thing there was.
And yet...
More than pity, what grated on me was the hair—only one side gathered and let down. A side ponytail. Even with my focus deliberately blurred, a feature like that struck the eye at once, and the urge rose to reach out, seize the hair, and tear the tie loose right then.
I clenched down hard.
I can endure it.
I curled my twitching hand into a fist, then opened my mouth with perfect calm.
"I heard your ambition was considerable. Will you go first?"
A neck so slender it looked as if it would snap in a grip moved slowly, forward and back, in assent.
"You are a black mage of the lower realm—Kether rank—so I will match the measure of mana to yours. Pay it no mind, and do your best."
"The c-corpse..."
"We will use Isabel's."
I looked at Laura with the faintest smirk.
When both parties stand as equals and spend an equal quantity of mana, the living Implementation Rate of the corpse they command depends heavily on understanding and on familiarity. Familiarity, as a rule, once one sets aside the matter of shared blood, is largely a question of how often the corpse has been commanded. The heart of it, then, is understanding.
A black mage's Corpse Command reproduces the abilities a corpse possessed in life, but more precisely it is closer to imitating that corpse's life itself. What temperament they had. What habits. What they loved. What they hated. The more correctly the mage recognizes the many particulars of the body they mean to command, the higher the living implementation rate climbs. Among the former heads of Brutein who had left their flesh behind, the difference in that rate between those whose diaries survived and those whose did not was considerable.
Isabel Ron Pierre Genova had been a witch of towering infamy, so no small store of documents concerning her would remain, and Laura would have built, from those, some recognition of her own of the woman Isabel had been.
How closely it matches is another question... but I can afford to give her a handicap. Once I win, I'll use it as the pretext for a small favor and have that hair tie undone.
I set the thought aside and looked at Laura. She folded herself down neatly onto her knees, opened the coffin, and at once began to work her mana.
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg."
"Yes?"
"You don't mean to confirm anything else?"
"No..."
Remarkable confidence. Even if the documents she had obtained let her construct a detailed sense of Isabel's self, she ought still to examine the corpse and revise that sense afterward.
Well, then...
On the chance that it might show me something, I activated Quantification, and the living implementation rate of the Isabel Laura had reproduced entered my sight.
It was still early, and the rate kept rising.
18.7%
21.9%
24.3%
27.3%
At the last, when Laura turned her head toward me, the figure Quantification reported was 27.3 percent.
Isabel had been an Apollyon-rank elemental magician. An implementation of about 27.3 percent was enough to draw out, nearly in full, the ability of a Kether-rank elemental magician. Had the standard of comparison not been Perzen, it would have been a heaven-sent talent. It seemed to owe more to familiarity than to comprehension, and I began to suspect she might possess something akin to Perzen's Corpse Affinity.
"Are you finished?"
"I... d-did my b-best..."
"From here, the result turns on whether I succeed in seizing her or fail. It will not take long. Keep her as she is."
A cold thread of nerves pulled tight inside me, but I stepped forward all the same and came to stand before Isabel's corpse.
"W-what are you... doing...?"
Watching me run my hands over the body, Laura put forward a question she plainly could not resolve.
"Isabel Ron Pierre Genova's corpse was kept in the very state it held at death, and only afterward put to auction. The vivid traces left on it are enough, by themselves, to yield fragmentary knowledge of her."
The color of the discolored right index finger.
She smoked a great deal of tobacco, it seems.
It had yellowed to a pale stain, and the discoloration leaned markedly to the right, so that the shape of the hand that had held the tobacco rose of its own accord. The white half-moons near the nails were large as well. She must have lived under considerable mental strain.
A twitch.
My hold on the corpse I meant to command was still vanishingly slight, but I felt it grow. Understanding of a corpse's life returns immediate Feedback in the very course of seizing it. That was why black mages who sank themselves truly deep into Black Magic carried a considerable store of knowledge in their heads, even when that knowledge was nothing but trivia.
"..."
"Ah..."
"What do you think you're doing."
"Th-th-that's..."
"Take your hand away."
I had been about to touch the lower body when Laura interfered, commanding the flesh to block me, and I frowned at her.
"B-but even so..."
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg. You read the documents concerning Isabel, gathered what they held, and inferred the shape of her life in advance, did you not. And now you would hinder me while I try to learn something here and now?"
"I-I'm s-s-sorry..."
"Tsk."
I clicked my tongue and let out a breath.
"Do not sink too far in."
To command a corpse more smoothly, and to raise its implementation rate, a black mage must understand that life's course as fully as possible. And of course, along that path, there were those who came to feel affection for the body they commanded. In the history I had retraced, there had been a black mage who went so far as to marry the corpse under their command, and one who killed another person for having defiled the corpse they commanded.
"However deeply you come to understand her, this woman is a corpse already dead. She is not a human being. She is a body."
"..."
Laura hung her head, as if the words had reached her. I drew down the trousers Isabel's corpse was wearing and went on with the examination. When that was finished, I reached out and set my hand upon Isabel's head.
Perzen seemed to have a keen eye, but that had nothing to do with Corpse Comprehension. Defined exactly, Corpse Comprehension was a Psychometry that could be used once, and only upon a corpse. What the ability read was a portion of the memories from life that had built the frame of a personality. If I took this body—Perzen—as the measure, it would show the memory of the day his compulsion had nearly driven him to kill his own elder brother.
!
And then Isabel Ron Pierre Genova. When I read a fragment of the memory of the atrocious witch whose infamy had shaken the world twenty-six years before, I clamped a hand over my mouth and stopped breathing, fighting the nausea that climbed my throat.
So this was why Count House Genova shut itself away so completely. That Isabel was a murderer does not change. But the word pleasure, set in front of that, ought to be struck out.
A lurch.
The moment I grasped Isabel's nature—above all, the core memory that ran the length of her life—the implementation rate answered with immediate feedback and shot upward at a geometric pitch.
"Hn? Ah! Ah... uh, uh...?"
And with Corpse Affinity added to it, that talent for commanding any corpse as though it shared one's blood, I tore Isabel's body out of Laura's hold in an instant.
"Th-this can't... th-this can't be..."
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg."
"..."
"It is still too soon to surpass your master."
I said it, and still a thin sweat broke on me. The knowledge of Isabel she had gathered must have failed to match the truth in a great many places, and even so she had reached an implementation rate of 27.3 percent. That meant a talent that conferred some particular merit in the commanding of corpses, something close to Perzen's Corpse Affinity. If the life of Isabel that Laura had inferred alone had been exact, then in a contest of equal standing and equal mana, I might have been the one who lost.
"W-w-wait... a m-moment...!"
"If either of us gained anything, it was you, and you lost even so. To refuse the result after that is rather unsightly, is it not."
"..."
"Or do you believe I was unfair as well?"
"If, if you were t-trying to ob-obtain information... th-then why didn't you l-look at the upper body?"
Did she think the examination had not been for the sake of learning anything, but a screen thrown up while I worked some other means? It was, surprisingly, a reasonable suspicion. But I could not answer her with the truth as it stood.
—Because a lopsided chest would have been a problem. It isn't as if I could tear one off.
"What clue do you suppose I would gain by looking there?"
I said it, and found it reasonably persuasive, and nodded to myself again and again. Isabel had died unmarried, though whether that was the precise truth, I did not know. So I had looked at the lower abdomen, roughly judged whether she had ever known a man, and meant to use that in understanding her. But the chest?
"If that satisfies you, stop picking quarrels and go. I arrived at Brutein today and received you before I had even shaken off the fatigue of the road."
"Th-thank..."
"And."
From the first moment until now, her hair had grated on me without pause. I reached out, undid the tie, and let it fall into long, straight hair that was easier to look at.
"From now on, when you come to hear my lectures, do not arrive with something like that in your hair. I am telling you beforehand. If you come that way regardless, I will call on you at regular intervals and make you present."
She stuttered. Threaten her with being made to speak before the class, and she would never again wear a side ponytail in front of me. Hair tied on both sides and let down would have been no trouble at all, but saying to her face, at a first meeting, that twin tails would suit her better seemed worse than this.
Ah...
And then it occurred to me. What was I to do if the students attending the lecture numbered something like twenty-three? I could not seat them two to a place. I could not seat them three to a place either.
Suppose I...
A whole host of unpleasant thoughts rose, but I forced them down, laid Isabel's corpse back in the coffin, and withdrew it into subspace. Then I left the reception room, bathed properly, and let the accumulated weariness of the journey loosen its hold. To keep my promise of showing her Brutein, I went to find Euphemia.