I'm Pretty Sure I Have an Evil Twin
At the words of Rekdos, chairman of the Larks Free Cooperative, Pale felt the blow land like a hammer to the skull.
"Irok Dehaja's magic?"
Irok Dehaja—the strongest mage in history, and the worst. The arch-criminal who had drowned the last Christmas of the twentieth century in blood and slaughtered a multitude.
That he was the strongest was something no one could deny, not from the moment he annihilated the Guardian Saints and the Holy Paladins, the greatest mages in the world. The magic he used, however, remained wrapped in an absolute veil.
Even the man himself, whom Pale had gone to the trouble of reviving by drawing a brain out of a corpse—the magical puppet Capra—possessed no memory of Blood Christmas whatsoever, let alone of the spells he was said to cast. Living at his side, Pale still had no idea what magic had been used to kill all those people.
And now that same magic was supposed to lie sealed inside the little silver-white iron sphere.
"More precisely, I am told it is only the smallest fragment of the magic."
"A fragment?"
"Yes. But even that small fragment inside the sphere, I have heard, could erase the whole of the Larks District without leaving a trace."
Rekdos set out what he knew in a calm voice for the stunned Pale, and Pale found it difficult to credit.
"Information like that... how did you come by it? Everything concerning Irok Dehaja was supposed to have been buried."
"I did not uncover it myself. Surprisingly, it was Zamir who brought it to us first."
"Zamir?"
Zamir—the very woman who had commissioned Pale to recover the silver-white sphere and tangled him in this strange affair. One of the great hands of the underworld that ruled Devis Street. That her name should surface here was enough to startle him.
"Zamir stands in cooperation with our Larks Free Cooperative. We smuggle the goods she desires, and in return she provides what we require."
"That woman... she was doing that as well?"
"Then one day she said it outright. Someone, she told us, meant to blow the Larks District apart."
Rekdos began to explain his dealings with her.
Out of nowhere, Zamir had declared the Larks District in danger. Its destruction would do her business no good, she said, and so they ought to join forces. Rekdos cooperated only half convinced, and before long they struck at the people moving suspiciously through the district and took the silver-white sphere off them.
Put to torture, those who had carried the sphere into the Larks District let something shocking spill from their mouths. Someone had ordered them to plant it there, for the purpose of wiping the district out of existence. Who that someone was, they never revealed, not even as they died, and so the name could not be learned. For the Larks Free Cooperative, the fact itself was shock enough.
"We barely go on living here, enduring contempt and persecution, and yet there are those who would erase even this from the world. It is not a thing I can forgive."
Rekdos ground his teeth in fury.
By then Zamir and the Free Cooperative had parted ways. She wanted to sell the silver-white sphere abroad and turn a handsome profit. The cooperative, and Rekdos, thought otherwise.
"A power that can destroy the Larks District is equally a power that can destroy any other city of the Azurik Free Federation. We resolved to seize that asymmetric strength and take our autonomy with it."
And so the sphere passed out of Zamir's hands. She had hired Pale to get it back. That was the whole of the matter.
Pale turned Rekdos's account over in his mind, then spoke.
"Do you know what magic of Irok Dehaja's is sealed inside that sphere?"
"I do not. It is enough to know that the thing is a threat."
"If you mean to wield a power you do not even understand, it hardly seems advisable."
Speaking as a mage, Pale let his misgiving show.
"To use magic you cannot comprehend is no different from juggling a grenade with the pin already pulled."
"Was it not your Azurik who meant to use that very power and slaughter us? Why, then, may we not do the same?"
When Rekdos pressed him, Pale shook his head.
"If you lead an organization, you have to look at a situation rationally. A moment ago you asked me what happened at the abandoned factory. A Guardian Saint showed himself there. And after that, a dragon appeared."
"What?"
Rekdos looked as though he could not believe his ears.
"A Guardian Saint, I might grant as possible... but a dragon? You expect me to believe that?"
"What being other than a dragon could raise a blaze great enough to blow an entire factory apart? If you cannot believe me, question the witnesses. It was only a brief moment, but more than a few people will have seen that enormous shape."
"......"
The certainty in Pale's voice led Rekdos to wonder whether the man might not be lying after all.
"Very well. I will have people look into it. If what you say proves true, we shall take this up again."
"In the meantime, I would like to treat my magical puppet. Can you help?"
"I can. You would do well, however, not to expect a high standard of medicine in this place."
"You needn't worry about that. I've had a certain amount of medical training... Supply me with a few materials, and I'll see to the people here as well as my puppet."
At the offer Rekdos's eyes widened for an instant. Then he accepted, readily.
With Rekdos's permission, Pale began offering medical care to the people of the Larks District. It was a means of winning the trust of the man who held the silver-white sphere, and at the same time a means of obtaining what he needed to treat Capra.
Once the work began, he came to see that the district was in far worse condition than he had imagined. Its medicine was wretched. Infectious diseases that a simple antibiotic or an ordinary drug could have cured ran rampant, and even small wounds, left untreated, festered and rotted until hands and feet had to be cut away. Such things were commonplace.
When Pale opened his clinic, a great many people thanked him. He had never completed a specialist's training, but the knowledge and skill he did possess were enough to do considerable good here.
Capra, for her part, improved remarkably. The first time he examined her properly, the wounds were so severe he thought she might truly die. Now even the hand that had been burned entirely to ash had regenerated. She could have been thrown back into a fight at any moment.
Is that the Twisted Beast blood at work? The regeneration is absurd.
A wound grave enough to cost part of the body would ordinarily have demanded ruinously expensive high magic. He was fortunate that no such thing was required.
Once she had recovered, Pale passed along what he had heard from Rekdos and pressed her, lightly.
"What lies inside the silver-white sphere is, of all things, Irok Dehaja's magic. Or so I'm told."
"Oh my... how fascinating."
"Well? Any idea what it might be?"
"No matter how I turn it over, either someone has been impersonating me, or it turns out I have an evil twin brother. Itok Dehaja."
Under the questioning, Capra answered with a thoroughly fed-up sarcasm.
"Answer me seriously. I'm not in the mood for jokes."
"I'm not exactly joking either. Why do you people keep calling a worthless idiot who never cast a single spell in his life the greatest mage in the world? Who are you making fun of?"
"Then how do you call up that sword of yours—the one that nullifies magic?"
"I don't know. If I decide I need it, it simply shows up in my hand on its own."
At that, Pale only shook his head, as if he had expected nothing else.
"You really are useless."
"That's rather harsh. I'm the benefactor who saved your life from that enormous lizard, am I not?"
"That much is simply what a magical puppet is meant to do."
"Do other magical puppets find it so easy to save their masters from a dragon's breath?"
"......"
Pale let out a sigh.
"Fine. I'll see that you're rewarded later, so for now keep your mouth shut and stay still. You seem recovered. From here on, you'll help me."
"And where is this, exactly? What is it you're doing, Master?"
"This is the Larks Free Cooperative. An organization fighting to win freedom for the Larks District."
"Hmm... Freedom, from a pack of refugees. How spoiled."
"Don't ever say that out loud here. I'd rather not have things turn sour over nothing."
Capra's careless tongue set Pale's head throbbing.
The Fullerene Ghetto really was a dangerous place. People died in the space of a breath, and then a dragon turned up on top of it. Diving into the furnace had been the wrong idea after all.
When that dragon's breath caught me full in the face, I honestly thought I was finished. For better or worse, my luck had not yet curdled far enough to kill me. I kept my life.
Anyway, while I wandered the border of death, my master seemed to have made new friends in the ghetto.
Deep tan skin, blue eyes, hair gone stark white—these were a people called the Rox. They were not well regarded. That was true not only in our Azurik Free Federation, but across the European continent as a whole.
Long ago the Rox lost their country and became wanderers, drifting over the whole of the continent. And like most wandering peoples, they never managed to put down roots anywhere. They lived by petty theft and begging and made a nuisance of themselves, so of course the general opinion of them was a complete mess. I'm sure they had their own circumstances and their own bad luck. That doesn't mean anyone else is obliged to carry that luck for them.
This, however, was their home ground, and my master had told me to watch my mouth. I had no desire to be lynched by the Rox, so I kept quiet and trotted along at his heels.
A magical puppet is strange-looking enough to draw the eye wherever it goes. The Rox were no exception. Wherever I walked, I could feel the stares.
The Larks Free Cooperative, their stronghold, looked from the outside like a village of small, shabby buildings huddled together. At its center stood a large, squarely built structure they had clearly put some care into, and there their leader conducted his business. My master met with him regularly. The talk was political and tangled enough that I let it go in one ear and out the other. As far as I could tell, the silver-white sphere we had been hunting was in the hands of the Rox chief called Rekdos.
Rekdos was... how to put it. The old saying about the smallest pepper burning the hottest, made into a man. Like the other Rox he had deep tan skin, blue eyes, and hair bleached white. He was short for a man, barely five-foot-three, and something had happened to his left eye; he kept it covered with a patch at all times.
His hair was cropped short and his frame was gaunt, but there was strength in his voice, and in conversation with my master he never showed so much as a crack. That was probably why the Rox had raised him up as their chief.
While we stayed, my master somehow became a popular man. Plenty of Rox wanted his company, and the women in particular were desperate to get even a single word out of him. Let him so much as smile and they wore the faces of women in full heat. In the end, wherever people live, they live the same. There was almost something warm in that.
He also played often with the children. To Rox children born and raised nowhere but the ghetto, outsiders like my master and me must have looked like quite the novelty. They made a habit of coming to where we worked and asking to play. One mannerless brat even had the nerve to grab my horns and shake them. I endured it.
I was treated like a toy. My master, meanwhile, was an object of outright reverence. He taught the children their letters and other useful bits of knowledge and, overnight, rose to the status of a star.
"Is it true that dragon's blood runs in the Dragonheart family?"
Some little girl's question. I wanted to tell her that was obviously bullshit, you moron—but my master only smiled.
"Well... According to the legend passed down in our house, the blood of the Celestial Thunder Dragon, who commands the weather, is said to run in the Dragonheart line."
"Really?"
"A legend may be nothing more than a legend. But one thing is certain. A magic the Celestial Thunder Dragon taught our house has been handed down through the generations."
"What kind of magic?"
"No one knows. Not a single mage in the history of the Dragonheart line has ever managed to bring it forth... If I could complete that magic in my own generation, it would be an honor."
"Whoa!"
At his words the children gaped like fools and cheered, drooling, without even noticing.
Well... there was drudgery of that sort. But staying here had its comforts for me, too.
The greatest of them was that my master did not come for me at night. He was busy in his own way, and perhaps he was wary of the eyes around us; either way he hardly laid a hand on me, and I could live at ease. For once I had a bed all to myself. I stretched my legs out and slept more comfortably than seemed decent.
Those peaceful days held—until a sudden blast, and screams sharp enough to split the eardrums, hurled us back onto a battlefield.