The Existence of Divinity
After my private talk with Sir Ragnar, time slipped past without much of anything happening.
The nearer the magic warship's refit drew to its end, the more Jin fretted, unable to keep still.
"No matter how I turn it over, this last trial is far too dangerous."
"At worst you'll meet icicle hounds or frozen corpses. Small fry. What is there to worry about?"
"If demons were truly so trifling, three gods clinging to them still wouldn't have failed to kill them—and I wouldn't have spent more than a thousand years sealed in some nameless cave."
"You're worrying too much. You really think Demon King Moloch himself would stroll out to the Homeland coast just to personally cut down a pack of nobodies from the Human Lighthouse Order?"
"Meeting Demon King Moloch might actually be the better of the two. At least that one kills cleanly. But if the day comes that we meet a demon of the highest order…"
Jin let a beat fall, then went on.
"You'll be begging it to kill you."
There was no lie in what he said. He had fought them himself.
I looked at him with a face gone entirely serious.
"So what is it you want me to do?"
"Call the trial off. Even now. The whole point of sitting the entrance exam was to buy time. We've done that, so let's stop here. Lose your life and everything else is worthless."
"You know I can't. If it were only you asking, maybe—but I made Sir Ragnar a promise as well. I'm not about to throw away the chance to land one solid blow on Canniel."
"And what, exactly, do you get out of that?"
"The grievance."
Jin was silent for a long while. Then he spoke as if he had given up.
"Right. I knew you'd say that. Don't come regretting it later."
Planting a flag, neat as anything.
At this rate, isn't he practically cursing the thing into happening?
However deep Jin's worries had piled, the entrance trial of the Human Lighthouse Order had come to the end of its road.
When day broke, all fourteen candidates, myself among them, mustered at the harbor. Those who had lasted to the very end were already scarcely different from knights of the Order. Only one gate remained: the Order's rite of passage, to go up into the Homeland, slay a demon, and offer it up as a sacrifice.
Drawn up at attention for review, their faces showed a fear they could not hide, and an excitement greater still.
"Sir Knight of the Deer. The latrine is that way. Do try not to piss yourself."
"Don't go souring a perfectly fine day."
Let their eyes meet and Barton and Amber were at each other's throats. The sight was so familiar by now that the other candidates simply let it pass.
What truly stole their attention was not the pair who fought every day, but the Order's magic warship lying at anchor in the harbor. Three enormous sails rose from her. She ran on wind and on a mana engine alike, and in speed and fighting power she yielded to no vessel in history. Not the newest of her class, perhaps, yet she was the pride of the Oxburg Empire and one of its principal flagships.
The Order kept three such magic warships in all, and besides them some twenty lesser sailing ships, patrolling the waters along the enemy line.
Admiration poured out of the candidates. I ground my teeth and glared at the ship.
That was the black hole eating a hole straight through the treasury of House de Jevitz. Together with Keldarin Fortress, where the Order held the threshold of the Grey Mountains, it was a money-pit that swallowed a staggering weight of gold every year, as if determined to bleed the house dry. It would have rankled less if the thing were at least of some use in the war against the demons still to come. In the Esteria Chronicles, the demons' invasion south and the freezing of the sea arrive in the same breath, and the ships are left with no use at all.
Today the candidates would board that magic warship and make for Pareta Island, an isle near the enemy line and the site of the Order's forward base. From there they would change to skiffs and go up into the demons' land, the Homeland.
A short while after the candidates had assembled, the five instructor-knights who had shared the last three months of hardship with them, and Senior Knight Helga Sentle, took their places beside the platform. Then Lighthouse Master Sir Ragnar mounted it, to bring the gathering to its close.
The knights were in full plate, just as they had been the day I first met them. Helms were pressed down over their faces, and the cloaks of the Human Lighthouse Order covered their bodies. The lighthouse emblem standing proud on the cloth was everything the candidates had yearned for.
"As you men know, the Human Lighthouse Order has a long tradition and a long history behind it. We began as a petty coastal guard on the southern shore of the Homeland. Today we serve the imperial house and House de Jevitz—sword and shield of humanity against the demons."
From the platform, mana laid into his voice so it would carry, Ragnar launched into a lengthy charge.
"But our aim is not merely the guarding of mankind! From the day we were driven out of the Homeland onto the continent of Esteria, one wish has passed from ancestor to ancestor: that we of the Rodal should take back the home we lost! That will has come down generation after generation, and it crowns the final stage of this Order's entrance trial."
Knowing the Order's inner truth, I sneered at his words.
A yearning handed down from our ancestors, and he calls it a will. Which ancestors, exactly? Everyone who meant to defend the Homeland from the demons became one of the frozen dead. They never found rest. They ended as the demons' own hands and feet.
Even so, it was a perfect piece of salesmanship for clubbing candidates already blinded by the Order's halo. Their eyes glittered like freshmen drunk on the name of a grand university.
Ah. Nothing so pitiful.
"Today, candidates, you go up to the Homeland! There you will slay a demon, and offer that sacrifice to our ancestors of the Human Lighthouse Order, who have weathered away in the sea wind and fallen into sleep—and you will show them that their will has been carried down, even now!"
"When you put to sea you will be nothing but candidates. When the rite is done and you return to this harbor, I will receive you as members of the Human Lighthouse Order, comrades who will fight the demons at our side. Fortune attend your final trial!"
When the charge was finished, the candidates boarded the sailing ship with the instructor-knights. She was packed to bursting: supplies for the outpost on Pareta Island, Lighthouse knights rotating onto the watch, mages embarked to drive the vessel, and the candidates themselves.
A few of the Order's knights, the mischievous sort, looked the candidates over and all but drooled, the way a sergeant drools over a fresh batch of recruits. Not that it amounted to much. Most of them were only Sword Users. The moment the instructor-knights turned those razor eyes on them—posts a man could even apply for only after becoming a Sword Expert within the Order and proving his own excellence—they tucked their tails. They did not dare come closer under that glare. Even so, every unwatched gap betrayed how desperately they itched to torment someone.
"Keep this up and I'll die of being glared at."
"Agreed. The senior knights are staring so hard I don't dare step outside."
For once, Amber and Barton were of one mind.
Under the cascading affection and attention of their seniors, the candidates could hardly slip away even to relieve themselves. None of it, of course, applied to me, eldest son of House de Jevitz. The knights feared even to meet my eyes. They were men who had already learned, in their own flesh, how fearsome that house could be, and the candidates looked at me and envied me for it.
If the wind blew fair, the instructors said, Pareta Island lay some ten days off.
One afternoon, while a smooth voyage ran with the swells and we were at our meal, Barton spoke to me.
"Is that tale true?"
"Which tale?"
"They tell me no monsters live in the northern sea. Too afraid of the demons, they say. Is that the truth of it?"
He had it right. No monsters lived in the northern sea. As if they felt the Demon King the way a beast feels a natural disaster coming, they never so much as drifted this way, and because of that the fishermen of Lighthouse Village could work safer waters than any other sea.
By now you'd think it was believable enough. Is the existence of demons really so hard to credit?
He was from the southeast, near the capital, and perhaps for that reason demons sounded to him like a story out of some far country.
"I hear the iron horses have started running in the capital, Oxstantium. In an age like that, demons do make for a musty old tale."
"Well. I suppose they do."
Set beside the center or the southeast, the north was hardly more than a country fringe. The center was the capital; that needed no saying. In the southeast a moderate fall of ash and vast plains brought a bumper harvest every year, and the only gate between the Oxburg Empire and the other continents lay there as well. The entrepôt trade through it had heaped up enormous wealth. It was no exaggeration to call the place the Empire's lifeline.
Were it not for the class system, Barton Wigner would have had no cause to raise a fuss about becoming a knight at the ragged end of the countryside.
"But suppose I pressed you on how a carriage made of iron can move at all?"
"……"
He stared at me as if I had said something absurd.
"Yes. That's exactly the face I wanted to wear. Wait quietly. However little you want to believe, once a demon is standing in front of you, you won't have a choice."
"……So it really is true, then. Damn it all. I had a bet on with Amber!"
"You took the side that there aren't any, I gather?"
"I did. Amber looked half in doubt herself, but she reckoned they wouldn't kick up a fuss like this merely to go hunt a few monsters."
"How much did you stake?"
"Ten thousand libra."
"……What?"
This time I was the one struck dumb.
Ten thousand gold coins?! With money like that a man could buy a splendid great house in Oxstantium, capital of the Oxburg Empire, and still have coin to spare. He had wagered a sum that would make even a luxury estate with its own vineyards in the southeast look laughable?
"What of it? 'Twas only a wager for the sport. I haven't got money like that. Surely even Amber didn't make the bet meaning to wring every last coin out of me."
Barton seemed to think no more of it than a bet made for fun in boyhood. That was only because he did not know Amber Cutter.
In the Esteria Chronicles, Amber was a miser of appalling degree. For the rebuilding of the Human Lighthouse Order, where money was concerned she threw herself in with no regard for fire or flood. Barton did not seem to realize a rope three feet long had already been run through his nose.
I set a pitying hand on his shoulder and offered what comfort I could.
This affair would suck him dry, marrow and all. Poor bastard. In the next life, be born into a world with no Amber in it.
I carried a bellyful of worry for Barton, and the ship ran smoothly on toward Pareta Island.