The Closed City (4)

The lord's office was nothing luxurious.

A rough wooden table, a few lamps to hold ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠back the dark, a coat rack, a sofa, and a small side table. That was everything the room held.

A spare chamber for the lord of a city to inhabit.

If there was anything that could be called a luxury, it was the bottle of liquor she held in her hand. Yuel set the bottle down on the table and opened her mouth.

"There's exactly one good thing about being lord. Want to know what it is?"

"What is it?"

"This. Right here."

Tap, tap — she rapped her knuckles against the bottle.

"Being able to stash a few bottles of the good stuff. Not the cheap swill — something you can actually drink. You can't get this kind of thing easily in this city. It takes being lord to get your hands on it."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. You won't find this anywhere else, so enjoy it while you can. Ha — I was saving it to drink alone."

Outside, it would have been ordinary liquor. In the Closed City, it was precious. She tilted the bottle slowly.

"As for me—"

The liquor pooled along the walls of the glass.

Watching it fill, she went on.

"I don't much care for baring my guts to people, or rambling on about whatever's eating at me. Why? Because it doesn't change a damn thing. All you get for spilling it is one more person feeling like shit — me and then someone else."

Her eyes settled into something heavier.

"That's how I've lived, and that's how I mean to keep living."

That's how I meant to keep living, anyway.

Yuel lifted her head.

She held out the full glass to Najin and smirked.

"You screwed that up."

"Excuse me?"

"Why do you keep showing up and making a mess of it? I said I'd sit in my own misery alone, so why do you keep coming around and talking to me? Don't tell me you're hitting on me."

Najin laughed, incredulous.

"Me? Hitting on you?"

"Aren't you? I may not look it, but I can hold my own in the looks department."

"That much I won't deny."

In the future, if anyone in the Empire spoke of beauty, she would always land among the top three — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a woman whose face left nothing to fault. The Yuel of the past, identical to that woman, was no less striking.

"Well, whether it's true or not, let's just call it flirting. At least that way I get to feel a little better."

"Then let's call it that."

"Heh. Good. A toast?"

"A toast."

She raised her glass.

A clear chime rang ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as their glasses met.

"So."

She took a sip, wiped the dampness from her lips with her thumb, and cocked her head. White hair spilled down along her collarbone. Still tilted, she tossed the words out.

"Just for tonight."

There was no need to ask what "just for tonight" meant.

"And only with you."

That I bare what's inside me.

Muttering as much, Yuel twisted up one corner of her mouth. A mischievous smile caught at her lips.

"I'm a filthy pain in the ass of a woman. But what can you do? Even if you're not hitting on me, you seem awfully interested in the kind of person I am…"

Another swallow.

She tipped her glass again.

"If you're that curious, I suppose I should show you. No walking out halfway, either. Even if my drinking habits are pure hell, you'll just have to endure them."

"I've seen someone charge a giant as a drinking habit. It'll take more than that to make me flinch."

"That's good to hear."

She looked at Najin across from her through the liquor in her glass as if it were a lens. The red wine, dyed the color of her eyes, swayed. Her gaze — fragile-looking — trembled the way the drink trembled in the glass.

"Isn't anyone going to kill me already."

She murmured it, and smirked.

2.

Yuel was a lightweight. She got drunk fast.

Watching her tip glass after glass, you might take her for a born drinker, but the truth was she grew tipsy almost at once — and she valued the being-drunk itself.

Pouring liquor in bought her room to breathe.

Nerves drawn tight went slack. The thoughts crowding her head settled. And what rose then were the things she usually buried deep. Her throat itched. Words she would have swallowed any other day floated to the surface.

"The previous lord was my godfather."

She muttered.

"When I first dropped into this city, the place was a complete wreck. It was split into factions, street fights everywhere, people dying day in and day out. A city where gouging out a kid's eyes for looking at you wrong was just part of ordinary life."

Her eyes darkened with the past.

"The previous lord took me in as his foster daughter. The spark was probably me muttering in front of him that a city like this had no need for a righteous leader like him. You know what that man said to a sixteen-year-old who told him that to his face?"

He laughed, she said.

And cheerfully, at that.

"'Yes. I've been waiting for a child like you.' That's what he said — and then he started teaching me things. As if he were testing me. Fuck, I should have run right then."

Another swallow of liquor.

"Hahh… I was a little too sharp, wasn't I? I must have fit the lord's tastes perfectly. And then that man put the legal code he'd spent his whole life preparing into my hands and told me this:"

When I die, proclaim this code.

In your name. As if you wrote it.

"'What the hell kind of bullshit is that, you old bastard.' I said it and tried to run, and what does he do? He puts a knife in my hand. Then he lifts my hand and drives it into his own heart — like this."

She made a sharp stabbing motion with her hand.

"He used my hand to kill himself. It was no different from murder. Half-dead already, the old bastard looked at me and said, 'You're the next lord.'"

She had been barely eighteen. The one person in this city she could lean on — her godfather — had killed himself before her eyes. The hot blood that had spattered her face and hands that day, thick and red, was still vivid in her memory.

Yuel came to hate blood.

Other people's blood became something to fear.

The girl trembling before the old man's corpse watched people pour toward the lord's castle. Rebels. And she understood what she had to do.

"I dragged the old man's body out in front of the rebels. I held up his head where they could all see it. I told them I'd executed the lord who ruined this city with my own hands. And that I would proclaim a new law."

The previous lord — who had cried out ideals, who had been good, who had believed other people would be good the way he was — met a wretched death. Murder and suicide at once.

What remained was the law he had poured a lifetime into.

The code he wrote was dense. A body of law that trusted no human, that treated every person as a beast-in-waiting. Reading that net of statutes, Yuel could only smile bitterly.

Because she could not know with what heart that damned old man — who had been handed the report card that said his convictions, his way of life, everything he was, had been wrong — had written that code.

"I distributed the code under my name, just as the bastard asked. And I pulled the rebels into the castle and turned them into my private soldiers. I cleaned up the city."

From eighteen to twenty.

For two years she scoured the city's criminals.

"How many did I kill… more than thirty thousand, fewer than fifty, so about forty thousand. Anyone who murdered, I hunted down without exception. Once I'd cleared it all out, the place finally became something people could live in."

Her voice shook as she said the number. With a trembling hand she snatched up her glass and drained it.

"Now the people of this city keep the law. There are still a few who break it and turn into beasts, but far fewer than before. But…"

Yuel raised her hand.

In her eyes, that hand was soaked in blood.

"How long do I have to keep doing this?"

She groaned.

"I can't leave. This city. So do I have to do this for the rest of my life? How many more do I have to hunt down? Why was I the one who had to do this?"

Yuel was torn. She wanted to stop. Blood frightened her. She hated killing. The acting was exhausting. And yet she could not quit.

Her godfather's request.

The words that from that day she was the lord.

They bound her hands and feet like a curse. The peace her godfather had forged with his death — Yuel had come to believe she was obliged to maintain it.

"He left it to me because he knew what kind of person I am. Bastard old man."

She gulped the liquor down hard.

Hahh — she let out a breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"I walked the city looking for someone to hand this seat to. There was no one. None. No one I could raise for it, no one fit to sit here. They're all carrying a beast inside them — put any of them in the lord's chair and you know exactly what happens."

She could not see anyone who would do it as well as she could.

No one who could restrain their wants the way she could.

"Every time someone new dropped into the city, I went to look. Is this one any good. Is there anyone I can leave this seat to."

"So the first person ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you met was me."

"Yes. Care to be lord?"

"I'll pass. I don't have the confidence to do it as well as you, either."

"I'm joking. One look and it's clear you're not the type for power."

She sank back into the sofa.

"I hate it. All of it. Every last bit."

Muttering that, Yuel felt a strange wonder.

The man in front of her was someone she had known less than a month. She barely knew him, had no idea what he had done before he came here. Almost everything about him was unknown.

And yet, somehow, he felt familiar.

For reasons she could not name, it felt as if she could bare her insides to him. Maybe she simply wanted to rest.

He had already seen her real face. He already knew she was performing. So the thought slipped through: maybe it was all right to say it.

"…"

He listened to her without a word. No pointed questions — only silence. And that silence felt easy to her.

"Fuck. I was a mathematician."

Yuel dragged a hand down past her eyes.

"These hands weren't made for cutting people open. These fingers were meant for writing beautiful equations — for holding a quill, not a knife…"

Her fingers trembled.

"Why me. Why the hell me."

"Then why not just stop?"

Yuel lifted her head. Her eyes were thick with drink, but the light in them had not gone out. She breathed out a breath heavy with liquor.

"The moment I do, I become a murderer."

"…"

"As long as I sit in this seat, I am a ruler who executed my godfather for a greater cause. His death has meaning. But if I run from this place without finding a proper successor…"

If she turned her back on the responsibility and left.

If the city slid back into what it used to be.

"Then my godfather's death becomes worthless. In that moment the previous lord truly dies — and by no one's hand but mine."

She smiled bitterly.

"Only then do I become the murderer who killed my godfather. No different from a beast."

She looked straight at Najin.

"In this damned city…"

In this city full of beasts — and where everyone would become a beast someday —

"I want to die as a human. Not as a beast."

That was Yuel's wish.

Hearing it, Najin smiled. She was thoroughly drunk, but the smile he wore in that moment — and the voice that left his mouth — burned themselves clear into her eyes and ears.

"That's magnificent. Truly."

Najin raised his glass. Dazed, she lifted hers, and with a bright chime his glass met it.

"I'll help you."

So that you can die as a human.

Those were the last words she heard before her mind cut out. She was laughing and babbling something, but she no longer knew what she was saying.

That's magnificent. Truly.

Turning that single line over in her mind, Yuel closed her eyes into the liquor's haze. Her heart felt a little lighter.

3.

Blink.

Yuel blinked. Her eyelids were heavy. Her body was heavy, and her head throbbed. How much had she drunk last night? She was fairly sure she had never drunk this much before.

"Uuuugh…"

Groaning, she pushed herself upright. Something slid off her and hit the floor with a soft sound. A coat, by the look of it — not hers.

Ah. That thing.

The coat the man kept flapping around, angling for a "Don't you know this coat?" reaction. From the circumstances it had been draped over her, but why on her body? She blinked blearily — then her eyes snapped wide.

It felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped through her skull.

Fuck. Don't tell me—

She checked herself in a panic. No. A button or two more open on her shirt, that was all. And she even remembered undoing those herself. She had never been this drunk; she had no gauge for her own habits.

The blank in her memory.

What the hell had she done after that. She was pressing her fingers into her pounding temples when a voice came from behind her.

"You kept tugging at my coat and whining that you were cold. 'Is that warm? Looks fucking warm. Let me try it on.' So I gave it to you."

Najin.

She turned her creaking neck to look at him, and her eyes wavered.

"Me? Whining?"

"You also got teary-eyed and said you were tired, fuck, you were so tired you could die, and why the hell was it always you."

"I— I mean, I? That's a hell of a joke to—"

She flinched. Scattered memories surfaced.

Dead drunk, yanking on Najin's sleeve, babbling at him — that version of herself flashed through her mind.

Sniff. You think I want to do this? I have to. Mm, if it isn't me…

Insane.

"AAAAAAAAAAAH!"

She screamed.

"Fuck!"

Yuel's face went scarlet.

Fuck, fuck — she shrieked and buried her face in the sofa. Even her ears had turned red. Najin shrugged and held out a cup.

Warm tea.

Not scalding — cooled just enough. Cupping it in both hands, Yuel glared at him sidelong.

"Be honest. You got dragged in here for picking up women outside, didn't you?"

"Hardly. I have been confessed to, though."

"So you have. Well, fuck — with that face it'd be weirder if you hadn't…"

She took a sip of tea, venting her embarrassment into curses. She still wasn't sure exactly what had happened last night, but a few things stood out sharp and clear.

That's magnificent. Truly.

That short line. And the promise that he would help her. Turning those words over, she glanced at him — and was just about to murmur, in a small voice, that yesterday she was, well, gratef—

Beyond the window.

From outside the lord's castle, a great voice rose.

It was not one voice.

Dozens, hundreds of voices were echoing through the city.

Shouts. Screams. And the sound of something bursting.

"Plague take them."

It was the sound of the city catching plague.