If You're Lucky, That's Enough
Irok Dehaja — the worst magical criminal in history, and the sworn enemy of his comrades.
After scattering the remains of his family and his comrades into the river, Pale swore revenge, choked with rage.
The trouble was that the target of that revenge, Irok Dehaja, had already been put to death and was no longer of this world.
Don't talk nonsense... I will not allow a bastard like that to be let off easy by something as gentle as death!
Blinded by hatred, Pale did something insane. He broke into the state's morgue and stole Irok Dehaja's head. As the worst criminal and mage in history, the man's corpse had been kept under the strictest watch, but his magical terrorism had killed countless mages and soldiers and torn a gaping hole in the nation's security. Through that gap, Pale succeeded in taking the head.
Even so, stealing it was a task of trivial difficulty beside what Pale meant to do. Transplanting a human brain into a Magical Puppet was unprecedented. Transplanting the brain of a dead man, no less, was no different from raising the dead. Even with the aid of magic, not once in the long history of humankind had a dead person returned to life. At most, scripture spoke of a saint's resurrection — and that was religion, not a history anyone accepted as fact.
Even so, Pale clung to a single thread of hope. He believed in the power of an existence that broke every measure: Irok Dehaja. A monster who had single-handedly swept away the finest magical force the Azurik Free Federation could boast — that was Irok Dehaja. The Federation was the strongest nation in the world, so its greatest mages were, without exaggeration, the greatest mages alive. That gathering of the world's strongest, Irok Dehaja had annihilated alone, in an instant, as if it were nothing at all, and then vanished at his leisure. A monster like that might even overcome death itself and rise again.
Pale's threadbare hope struck true with absurd precision. Irok Dehaja really did return from the dead.
"He actually... came back..."
It was enough to stun even Pale, the man who had committed the madness himself. If the deed were ever made public, it would overturn the history of magic and shake the world to its foundations.
After reviving Irok Dehaja, Pale put a string of questions to him.
"Why did you kill them? What in the world were you thinking, doing a thing like this?"
Before he let the vengeance boiling in him explode, he wanted the reason behind everything Irok Dehaja had done. He never got that answer.
"What are you even talking about..."
Irok Dehaja had no memory at all of what he was supposed to have done. Of the magical terrorism that had come to be called Blood Christmas — the twenty-fifth of December last year — he remembered nothing. All that remained were his memories through the twenty-third, and the memory of being sentenced to death.
"I killed people with magic? This again? I don't even know how to use magic in the first place."
"Huh? The worst magical terrorist in history? Me? The only place I could commit the worst terrorism in history is an online forum."
"Have you been drinking?"
On top of that, there was a vast gap between what the world believed and what Irok himself understood. He insisted he was a human who couldn't use a scrap of magic, and that he had neither the will nor the ability to carry out anything like magical terrorism. A Magical Puppet cannot lie to its master. Which meant the truth was what the puppet before his eyes was saying, and the world was the one telling lies. Pale decided not to believe it. If he did, he would have no way to quiet the fire of hatred burning inside him.
"If you can come back from the dead, then slipping the constraints of a Magical Puppet and lying should be just as possible. We'll see how long it takes before you tell the truth."
And so their meeting ran on parallel lines from the very start.
Pale inflicted every kind of brutal torture, and still it was impossible to hear the truth of that day from Irok Dehaja. In the end he had no choice but to accept one thing as fact: that Irok truly had no memory of the day.
"Memory loss, as a side effect of resurrection...? Well. Being able to speak at all with something that has already died once is a miracle in itself."
Pale could only sigh. To him now, Irok was both the key that might reveal the truth of that day and a wretched burden he could not put down.
Everything in this world is decided by luck.
Contrary to the idiots who think some grand providence or divine will is at work, everything that happens is nothing more than the sum of accidents, occurring with no pattern whatsoever. A human life, likewise, is nothing but one dice game after another. The successful and the failed, the happy and the wretched — the difference isn't much. One side had luck on their side. The other didn't. Life is decided entirely by luck, and so nothing that happens ought to be strange.
A man who smokes his whole life can, if the dice come up kind, live out his full span of years without ever getting cancer. Turn up a one, and a young person who never touched a single cigarette drops dead of lung cancer out of nowhere.
So I hold that whatever happens in this world is only the result of a game of dice — and even I had to click my tongue at the fix I was in. Overnight I was branded the worst criminal in the world and executed, and as if that weren't enough, I wasn't even granted the rest of death. I was revived in the body of a Magical Puppet and worked like a slave. I couldn't begin to guess how the dice would have to fall for luck this rotten. Roll them a hundred times and get a one every single time, and it still wouldn't be this bad.
From that angle, my master was a man who had lived the opposite life — dice that came up beautifully, every time.
Like I said before, his name is Pale Dragonheart. At first I knew nothing but the name, but trailing around after him I picked up information about my master that I wasn't particularly curious to have. For one thing, he was a young man of twenty-five, over a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, with a solid build and a handsome face. Size him up for a second and you already knew how kindly his dice had fallen.
But the outside was only a sliver of the luck he'd been born with. He was what people call a genius. He had the kind of intellect that let him skip grades straight through every school reserved for prodigies, and he held a doctorate while still young. More frightening still was his talent for magic. My master, Pale, possessed a magical gift that might show up once in several centuries, if that.
His house, the Dragonheart family, was one of the oldest mage lineages in the Azurik Free Federation, and legend said dragon's blood ran in their veins. Pale's magical talent was carved into that blood as the eldest legitimate son of the Dragonhearts — a mage house of long renown and honor in Fullerene — so much so that people called him the family's greatest masterpiece.
The world of mages isn't well known to ordinary people, but even I had heard of the Dragonhearts, which told me clearly enough what a fine bloodline he'd been born with clenched in his teeth. A lucky man like that was apparently famed as a person of character, too. From where I stood, harassed and abused by him every day, person of character, my ass came out of me on its own.
Anyway, after failing to raise money at the bank, my master abruptly hauled me off to a pleasure district. In Fullerene, the city where I lived, there was a street with a reputation so foul it would have been offended to be called merely the second-worst. People called it Godom Street. Its real name was Devis Street. Godom was only a nickname — the name of a fallen city in the scripture of the Church of the Cross — and the fact that it had stuck was enough to tell you how immoral the place was.
Devis Street was the largest pleasure quarter in Fullerene. It was packed with bars, clubs, and houses of entertainment, and when night fell the blaze of neon burned brighter than the midday sun. Some places sold nothing but drinks, tamely enough. Most dealt in gray-market goods, or in services that were flatly illegal, and if you came and went too often you were sure to draw sharp looks.
With the sun still high overhead, though, Devis Street was a long way from opening hours, and a long way from that blaze. Most of the shops were shut or still getting ready, quiet enough that a person could have sat and read.
"Coming to a place like this in broad daylight?"
"There's someone I need to see."
My master answered lightly and stopped the car in front of a building — the front of a lavish hotel. The moment he arrived, the woman at the desk flushed scarlet, then guided him to the elevator bound for the top floor.
The top floor of that glittering hotel, walls shining, and in the innermost room what waited for us was a thoroughly decadent sight. On a great bed draped with a splendid purple canopy lay a young woman, nearly naked. She was so tall the hotel's oversized bed was packed full of her from head to foot. Her whole body was an unnatural chalk white, as if she had been dusted with powder, and her hair was a deep red, like a wildfire burning. Exposed as she was, she showed no hint of shrinking. She had raised her upper body and lay with both legs stretched long.
And on either side of her, women in clothes so scant they hardly counted as clothes lay alongside her. Five or six half-naked women covered the body that hadn't a stitch on it, as if they themselves were her blanket.
When her crimson eyes met my master's, she smiled and spoke.
"Pale. For someone who sticks his nose into my business at every turn, you've got some nerve showing your face."
Her voice felt like a whisper tickling the ear, and for a moment I flinched. Pale, for his part, didn't look away. He met that gaze head-on.
"Interfere? You wound me, Zamir. I've never interfered with your work. Though I'll grant there are times when something I happened to be doing ruined yours."
"Ha. Shameless as ever."
At Pale's attitude the woman called Zamir looked incredulous, though she didn't seem particularly displeased. She drew deep on the opium pipe a naked woman beside her held to her lips, exhaled a stream of black smoke, and spoke.
"So. What business brings you here?"
"Zamir. Does anyone who comes looking for you ever come for anything but money?"
"Money... Now that you mention it, I heard that sweet little lady from Elphelit Bank went after you to collect a debt. Is that what this is?"
"You really do catch wind of things like a ghost."
"But of course. As one of the rulers of Godom Street, keeping track of the Elphelit bank president's precious jewel of a daughter is the bare minimum."
Zamir drew on the opium pipe again and breathed out a vicious black smoke.
"But listen. Do you really need to pay that debt? You could simply not."
"Theora seems to mean it this time. I have to show, at least, that I've got the means to raise the money."
"No, that's not what I mean... Just sweep that girl's legs out from under her. Forget paying the debt — Elphelit Bank would be yours. Why are you running yourself ragged trying to pay it off?"
"...... Theora and I don't have that kind of relationship. And I have no intention of toying with her heart just to line my own pockets."
"Hmm... I don't know about that. I think that girl would like being toyed with by you."
Zamir shrugged.
"So. You came to borrow money from me?"
"Either I borrow it, or — same as always — I take care of one of your headaches and you pay me."
"Want me to tell you a way to take the money right now, without all that fuss?"
"Oh? A woman who looks like she sold her soul for coin, suddenly teaching me how to make money for free? I doubt it."
"Of course not. To put it bluntly... give me that Magical Puppet standing back there with the blank look on its face, and I'll give you enough to clear what the Dragonheart Office owes and still have money left over."
At the sudden mention of myself, I gave a small flinch. My master scowled as well.
"I didn't know you had a taste for buying Magical Puppets."
"Takes one to know one, doesn't it? The Pale Dragonheart I know isn't shameless enough to buy a Magical Puppet when his wife has barely been dead."
Zamir smiled a slick, knowing smile.
"I pride myself on having a good eye for people, in my own way. Because here in Godom, if your eye isn't accurate, you end up crammed into a trash bin by the next morning as a cold corpse... So I'm curious. What secret does that Magical Puppet have, that you're keeping it at your side?"
"There is no secret."
My master cut her off in a single stroke and shut his mouth tight. It meant he would never speak my secret. Zamir seemed to decide she couldn't bend that will; she raised nothing more that had to do with me, and instead entrusted him with a job.
"Lately some nasty bastards stole my goods... I want them back."