It's Work Because I Don't Want to Do It
The woman their master had come to see—Zamir—was evidently one of the great patrons of the underworld. Danger rolled off her in waves, and she greeted the man who had come begging for money with a languid, knowing smile as she began to lay out her request.
"Recently, you see, some petty thieves made off with something I treasured. I want it back."
"Oh? Zamir, one of the rulers of Godom Street, and some two-bit thief laid hands on your property. That's a brave little thief."
The master snorted at her words. He clearly didn't believe a syllable of it.
"So? What did they steal?"
"How should I put it... If I'm describing the outside, it's an iron sphere."
"An iron sphere?"
"Silver-white. About the size of a baseball, I'd say. I'll have one of my people send you a photo, so you can see for yourself."
"......And what's inside it?"
"You don't need to know that."
The amusement left Zamir's face. She stared at the master as she spoke.
"You bring me the stolen sphere, and I give you money. A simple transaction. Nothing to doubt."
"You want me to fetch something when I don't even know what's in it?"
The master bored into her face, and the two of them locked into a silent contest of nerves. But he was the one who needed the money, and in the end he had no choice but to bend.
"So where was it stolen from? I'll have to start there."
"Ah, that I can tell you. The Fullerene Ghetto."
"The Ghetto... You do like sending people to interesting places."
"Don't I?"
Zamir flicked her hand as if to say their business was finished and they could get out, and once his errand was done the master left the hotel without a backward glance, got in the car, and put Godom Street behind him.
"The Ghetto, though. Off to another dangerous place."
Fullerene Ghetto wasn't its real name—only a nickname. The place was actually called the Larkes District, and it was extraordinarily dangerous.
To understand why, one first had to understand Fullerene's place on the map. Fullerene sat at the eastern edge of the Azurik Free Federation, a bridgehead joining the Federation to the continent of Europe. The Federation was the wealthiest nation on the continent, and even now illegal entrants and refugees poured toward it in droves. The border city had answered by shoving its unwelcome guests into one corner and sealing them behind long walls and checkpoints, and that corner was the Larkes District—the place people called the Fullerene Ghetto.
The Larkes District was dangerous. Deeply, seriously dangerous, in a way Godom Street couldn't begin to match. On Godom Street, so long as you didn't borrow from loan sharks, the worst you could expect was a venereal disease or gambling your money away. In the Larkes District, you might not live to see the next morning's sun. The people of Fullerene wouldn't go near it, and every time a mayoral election came around, the district became the political hot potato of the season.
"You need a pass to enter the Larkes District, so we can't go today."
"Oh, is that right? I didn't know."
I had lived in Fullerene for more than thirty years and never so much as pissed in the direction of the Larkes District, so the fact that you needed a pass was news to me.
Which meant the car had only one place left to go. Home.
The Dragonheart Office was far too large and sprawling for two people living alone. Once, it seemed, the master's comrades had filled it. Now it was a desolate place with no one in it but me and him. As I'd said before, the office was a residential officetel joined to a commercial building, and the master and I were using one of the units on the residential side. For him alone it was spacious and comfortable—room enough for a family of four, at least—with a large master bedroom, two smaller rooms, a kitchen, and a living room where a television sat.
Traces remained of someone else who had lived there besides the master. That someone, I was sure, had been his wife. Unopened boxes of baby supplies had been left sitting where they were, and standing in front of them my mouth shut of its own accord. Say the wrong thing, even a little, and I was fairly certain the master would beat me senseless.
Anyway, the day's work was over, but my ordeal was only beginning. Tormenting me at night was the master's hobby.
"Haa... He really needs to take a new wife soon..."
I sighed to myself.
Pale stood before the bathroom mirror and, for the first time in a very long while, began to shave.
Since losing his family and his comrades on Blood Christmas, he had barely been in his right mind, even now, a month later, and the wreckage showed on his body. Hair and beard had grown out thick and wild enough to pass for a vagrant on the street. His eyes were hidden behind his hair, giving him the look of a shaggy dog, and the beard called to mind an immortal out of an Eastern legend.
Once he had roughly cut and neatened the beard, his sharp features emerged. Unlike the beard, though, he couldn't tidy his hair alone, so he scratched at his head, then stuck his face out of the bathroom and called.
"Capra!"
He shouted the name of his magical puppet, and from the master bedroom a white-haired woman emerged, hesitating.
"You called, Master..."
Slightly curly, snow-white hair fell to her waist, and she wore a plain black set of pajamas that stood in stark contrast to her pallid skin. She was Capra, Pale's magical puppet. He looked her over and let out a light sigh.
Dera had every right to be angry.
Aside from the two curved horns on her head, Capra looked a little frail. Bringing home a magical puppet who looked like that—from the eyes of an old acquaintance, disappointment was inevitable. But Pale felt wronged, because Capra's appearance had never been his will.
That damned woman's taste...
Making a magical puppet required high-level biomagic, so he had needed a collaborator who could help him in secret. Capra's looks were the result of that collaborator's tastes, not his own intentions.
He set the thought aside and had her come into the bathroom.
"We're doing it in the bathroom today?"
Capra said it with a tired look on her face, and Pale frowned as he answered.
"I just want a haircut."
"I don't know how to cut hair."
"Stand behind me and hold the mirror. So I can see the back of my head."
"Ah. If that's all..."
She was shorter than he was, so only after she fetched a chair could she angle a hand mirror to show him the back of his head.
Pale watched the mirror and began trimming his hair with scissors. As the strands that had hidden his face fell one by one to the floor, a face like sculpture began to emerge—slowly, the way a great sculptor reveals a figure from marble, carrying the impressions of many kinds of handsome men. Smile gently, and he looked like a prince out of a fairy tale. Turn sharp, and he was a beast at the head of its pack. The point, in the end, was that Pale was devastatingly handsome. He knew his looks were exceptional, and he took pride in them.
For the first time in a long while he gave the mirror a confident smile, then slipped back into a blank expression. He spoke to Capra, still holding the hand mirror at his back.
"Capra. How's my face?"
At the question she lowered the mirror and looked at him. Her face was empty, without a trace of feeling.
"Your hair isn't covering your face anymore."
She said it as if she hadn't even understood what he was asking. Her vacant pupils, paired with that dazed expression, made it impossible to tell what she was thinking.
Pale, for his part, found something fresh in a woman who showed no reaction at all to his face.
Until now there have only been two women who looked at my face and didn't react...
One of them had been a lesbian to begin with, so she didn't count. The other had been his wife, Sabia.
Well. This one was a man to begin with... and before that, she isn't human. Of course she wouldn't react.
Having settled on a reason for her lukewarm response, he promptly hurled her out of the bathroom.
"Get out. I'm going to shower."
"......"
He could have just said so, she thought—but Capra had no desire to get any more tangled up with her master than she had to, so she quietly got out of the way.
When Pale came out, washed, the house lay before his eyes. The walls were a warm beige, and the furniture was less antique than it was cozy, set out in neat order. That had been his wife's taste more than his—Sabia Dragonheart's. This home, a little too large for one person, had been the nest he and Sabia were going to share.
In one corner of a room sat unopened boxes of baby supplies, a large black cloth draped over them. The house had been left almost untouched from the moment Sabia was gone, but living with Capra had changed things here and there. And every time it did, Pale beat her nearly to death. After that happened several times, Capra seemed to have had enough of it. She sat formally on her knees in a corner, staring at the wall in a daze.
Pale glanced at her sidelong, then changed into black pajamas of his own. Those pajamas had originally been a matching set he'd had made with his wife, but now Capra was the one wearing them. Realizing it a moment too late, he snatched a glass from the table and hurled it at her head.
"You goddamn—who said you could take those clothes out and wear them?"
The one who had killed his wife, wearing his wife's clothes. A sight fit to crawl out of hell.
The glass struck Capra's head and shattered, and blood ran from the split in her forehead. Even bleeding, her expression didn't change. She simply stared at Pale with empty eyes, then let out a sigh.
"Master, you really are no fun."
With that one line she turned her head back to the wall.
Rage surged in him at her attitude, but he had just washed and had no desire to work up a sweat again, so he swallowed it.
For the first time in a long while, Pale sat at the desk in his room. He meant to work. In the month since he had lost his wife and his comrades, he hadn't worked at all. He had spent each day soaked in drink like a wreck of a man, and the only thing he did from time to time was beat Capra, the enemy of his family.
"Damn it, that Dera... sticking her nose into useless business..."
As he gathered the papers the job required, he muttered a small complaint about Dera, the one who had forced things to this point.
To Pale, Dera was, simply put, something like a younger sister he had known for a long time. He had been the legitimate eldest son and heir of the Dragonheart family; she was the cherished daughter of Elferit Bank, a house bound to the Dragonhearts as their patron. They had been close since childhood. To her regret, that closeness had never been the relationship between a man and a woman. To him she had only ever felt like a younger sister he had watched over for years.
"Well... the state I'm in now is indefensible, so I suppose she had to take a hard line..."
When Dera declared she would acquire the Dragonheart Office, Pale had suddenly needed money, and fast. But because of that, he was taking up the work of a mage's office that had been shut in all but name for a long time. Perhaps what she wanted was for him to get back on his feet.
"Right... I have to get back up. The Dragonheart Office is all I have left now."
Fullerene's foremost mage's office, built by his comrades and his family together—the Dragonheart Office was the last thing remaining to him.
"But what's the point of reviving an empty office? Sabia's gone. My comrades are gone. There's no one left."
And once again a dark despair lifted its head inside him.
"Sabia, my love... Tell me. What am I supposed to do?"
He looked at the photograph on the desk—Sabia, smiling—and spoke as if pleading. No answer came.