A Guide to the Great Path
By the time Bayul arrived at Professor Rothius's office, the man was just opening his door to step out. Any later, and Bayul would have missed him entirely.
"Hah—hah! Professor, you wanted to see me?"
"Good grief, it's hot out—why on earth did you run here? What if you'd collapsed on the way?"
Professor Rothius looked down at Bayul with genuine concern as the boy stood before him, gasping for breath. Bayul seemed to have recovered much of his health lately, but he still had a history of illness—not to mention a record of fainting in the middle of class. If anything happened to the boy, he would never be able to face Duke Randert.
"I'm fine with this much now. Hah—but you'd been waiting a while, haven't you? I'm sorry."
"I did wait a bit, but…"
"I'm really sorry. I completely forgot, and then—"
"You didn't commit high treason, so what's with all the apologizing?"
"…I beg your pardon?"
"I was just going to assume you were busy and head home. Exams are coming up, so I figured you'd be swamped one way or another. It wasn't anything especially urgent."
"Ah, I see. Though—what was it you needed…?"
"Let's go inside first. What we need to talk about is in there."
Professor Rothius pushed the door handle he'd been holding back open and stepped inside.
"I don't reek of cigarettes as much as I used to, do I?"
His office was as impossible to navigate as ever. Objects lay piled haphazardly in every corner of the room, and the acrid stench of stale smoke stung the nose.
"I've been cutting back lately. Everyone and their mother kept nagging me about it—it got too tiresome to listen to, so I decided to cut down."
"Smoking really is bad for you."
"Ha! You sound exactly like your father. The two of you are alike to an almost offensive degree."
"…I saw you at the imperial palace, with Father. Were the two of you close?"
"Didn't His Grace say anything? Not that I'm sulking about being left out of the loop, mind you."
"No, of course not."
Professor Rothius pulled a book from his desk and sat down across from Bayul.
"I've known him since we were children. I used to trail after Duke Randert so relentlessly he probably found me a nuisance."
"At the palace, you mean?"
"…So he did tell you."
Bayul already knew that the Crown Prince and Professor Rothius had met privately. What he didn't yet know was what they had discussed.
"His Highness the Crown Prince called you his uncle. I heard you'd come clean."
"That's right. Winter is my mother's family name."
A maidservant of common birth had somehow caught the Emperor's eye, borne him a son, and risen to the rank of royal consort. But she had been frail, and she passed away before her son was even a year old. It was the current Empress Dowager Priscilla who had raised the infant Rothius as if he were her own child.
"Quite a shock, was it?"
"Yes… I never suspected a thing."
"Hardly anyone here knows."
He had never found any reason to tell, any reason it was necessary, so Professor Rothius had simply kept quiet all this time.
"So you'll keep it a secret for me, then?"
"…It was a secret?"
"I told you just now, didn't I? I'd rather not deal with the headaches."
It took no imagination whatsoever to picture the fallout if it became known that he was the Emperor's brother. The people around him would start treading carefully, angling for favor, and sooner or later someone would come sidling up with requests, hoping to leverage a connection to the palace. The mere thought of it was exhausting and irritating.
"I like my job, you see. Teaching—it's my calling, I suppose."
Teaching young people was always rewarding, always meaningful.
"Bayul, you'd like to keep taking my classes, wouldn't you?"
"…Yes, I suppose so."
"Then you won't tell a soul?"
"Understood."
He had already told his friends, but Bayul saw no reason to mention it now. They had no interest in spreading rumors, and if the professor learned they knew, it would only weigh on his mind.
"Good. So—how was meeting my dear nephew? He's the type who takes himself far too seriously, so I imagine it was a bore. Am I right?"
"Not at all. Thanks to His Highness's consideration, I got through the visit without any major blunders. It was my first time at the palace, so I was frozen stiff with nerves—but he treated me very kindly."
"Did he, now? That's a surprise—he's a fussy one. Did he take a liking to you?"
"……!"
Those were the very words the Crown Prince Lindemann had spoken to him. The memory of that not-quite-confession, and how flustered it had left him, came rushing back.
"Ho-ho. Looks like I hit the nail on the head, don't I? Something must have happened for you to warm up to him that quickly."
"…There was an incident."
"An incident?"
Professor Rothius beckoned with his chin, inviting him to elaborate, but Bayul couldn't. He hadn't even managed a proper explanation to the Crown Prince—how was he supposed to explain it here, and to whom? It wasn't the right time. Not yet.
"You'd rather not say?"
"…It doesn't only concern me."
"Fair enough, I understand. If you say you'd rather not, I'm not going to force your mouth open. Here, take this."
Professor Rothius held out the book that had been sitting beside him.
Is today some kind of book-giving day?
It had been only a little while ago that Priest Wagner had handed him a holy text. Now Professor Rothius was pressing a book into his hands too, and Bayul briefly wondered if he'd somehow missed the existence of an official 'give-Bayul-a-book' holiday.
"You asked me about spirits once before, didn't you?"
"……!"
Bayul, who had been off in his own silly daydream, was genuinely startled when the unexpected words left the professor's mouth.
"It kept nagging at me. That was the first time in my entire career I'd failed to answer a student's question. It did quite a number on my pride, you know."
Bayul remembered it clearly—how the professor had calmly pointed him toward the Sterbenrauch Library and walked into the lecture hall without another word. He'd assumed the man had forgotten all about it since. What a twist, of all twists.
"But finding anything was maddeningly hard. I'd already pointed you to the Sterbenrauch Library, so going there myself felt a bit awkward—you know how it is—so I dug through the other libraries instead. Not a single book so much as mentioned spirits in passing. That's when my stubborn streak kicked in. Lit a fire under my competitive streak, you might say."
"…I see."
"That's about when I started getting curious about spirits myself. What on earth were they, that they were buried this deep? I half started to suspect something was being deliberately hidden."
They weren't buried at all—the Spirit Realm was destroyed. That's why they simply faded from human memory.
Bayul wished he could offer even a short explanation in return for all the professor's effort, but the reality was that he couldn't—and all he could feel was regret over it.
"And then—finally—I found this!"
Professor Rothius jabbed a finger at the book he'd just handed over.
"Care to guess where I got it?"
"D-don't tell me—the imperial palace?"
"Ooh, correct! Bayul, you've got a good instinct for this?"
He had, after all, recently accompanied Professor Rothius to the imperial palace—and had, quite unintentionally, learned his secret as well. Given that the man was royalty, with free access to the imperial archives, the guess wasn't much of a stretch at all.
"I spent days combing through the imperial archives before I finally, finally turned it up. You have no idea how happy I was in that moment. I thought, at last, I can be rid of this gnawing itch."
"But… are you allowed to just bring a book owned by the imperial family out like this?"
He'd gotten his hands on a book about spirits. He wasn't letting it show on his face, but inside, Bayul's heart was pounding so hard he thought he might lose his mind.
And yet, at the same time, a worry gnawed at him—was it truly permissible for someone like him to read a book from the imperial archives, a privilege reserved for royalty alone?
"Of course not!"
"…Excuse me?"
"I smuggled it out. I have to put it back."
Huh?!
Bayul momentarily lost his words as he stared at Professor Rothius, who was confessing his crime with the most unashamed aplomb imaginable.
"So you'll need to read it as fast as you can and either memorize it or copy it out by hand. I'm mailing it to my nephew afterward. He can deal with the cleanup himself."
"…Is that really all right? What if some harm comes to you over it…?"
"Worst case, they bar me from the archives. Don't fret over it—I'm not going to die over a book. I may not look it, but I am the Emperor's own brother, you know."
It would be a flaw of his, if one could call it that—bringing up his bloodline only when it suited him.
"By the way, can you read Sanskain?"
"Sanskain? I've never even heard of that country."
"Ah, Sanskain isn't a country—it's the written script the ancient elves used. Some people call it Elvish, too."
"Then, the language written in this book…?"
The book had clearly been made a very long time ago; the cover and its corners were worn down considerably. Bayul stared, flustered, at the unfamiliar script, and Professor Rothius spoke up.
"You can find a Sanskain dictionary easily enough at any library. No need to look so stricken."
"Whew, what a relief."
Reading with a dictionary propped open beside you was no easy feat, to be sure—but it was a hundred times better than being completely illiterate.
"Have you read it yourself, Professor?"
"I wish I had, but Sanskain is no joke."
"Ah…"
So he would have to learn an entire language just to read and interpret it himself. Setting aside the joy of obtaining a book about spirits at all, a new weight settled over Bayul—the burden of having to study something entirely foreign.
"But I still remember the title."
Gazing down at the script that covered the entire front cover, Professor Rothius murmured it softly.
"Guide to the Great Path."
"…Guide to the Great Path?"
"There was a line of small print beneath the title, too. 'Second Lecture: The Ranks of Spirits.'"
The ranks of spirits?
"As you can see, it doesn't seem to be a single volume. If that's the second lecture, then presumably there's a first—not to mention a third, a fourth, and beyond."
"Then, could you…"
"Whether I looked for them? Of course I did. But there were none. That one was all I found."
If he'd had more time at the palace, perhaps he might have turned up the other volumes. But for now, this one book was everything.
"Don't tell me you're disappointed it's only one volume?"
"No, no! Absolutely not! Why would I be!"
Bayul had been mulling over the ranks of spirits even as he stared at the Sanskain script. For him, this wasn't merely one book among many. It was a precious single volume.
"Professor Rothius, thank you so much! Anything I manage to learn from this, it'll all be thanks to you!"
"If you learn something, hm?"
"Yes! When the time comes that I can tell you, I'll come see you again! Thank you, truly—from the bottom of my heart!"
His heart was racing. Bayul sprang to his feet and bowed deeply to Professor Rothius—and then, without so much as a word of farewell, he bolted out of the office like an arrow loosed from a bow.
"Ha. In quite the hurry, isn't he."
Professor Rothius, too, rose from his seat to see to the rest of his errands.
"A Spirit User who commands spirits…"
Recalling a certain passage of the book, written in the Sanskain script, Professor Rothius murmured the words to himself in a voice too low to name.