Artist
Artist
While a battle raged somewhere in the city, the Artist withdrew to the drawing room that had been prepared for him and rested.
Both legs stretched comfortably atop a well-crafted chair, his body sank into leather and fur cushions that cradled even the backrest.
In that relaxed posture, the Artist drank wine.
He poured it into an ornate brass goblet that surely wasn't his own, let it linger in his mouth, and savored the aroma.
The old man wore his indulgence with no trace of awkwardness, as though long accustomed to such pleasures.
As if this space had always been his, as if it had always been this way.
It might have flustered anyone else, but Valerie, sharing the room with such a man, remained composed.
She simply sat there calmly, cradling the large goblet he'd offered in both hands and sipping from it.
The woman, who had been stroking the carpet with her toes—her feet still clean despite having trod upon countless things on the walk to Olpasbet—lifted her eyes as she felt his gaze.
Her red irises lay dark and sunken even in the flickering candlelight.
"Well? To your liking?"
The Artist asked this while staring into that darkness, slick yet impossible to trace to any source. The darkness vanished between her eyelids as she nodded.
Valerie smiled as she gave her reason, a smile without the faintest hint of intoxication.
"I do like wine."
"Is that so?"
She tilted the goblet cradled in her hands and took another sip. The woman answered without a single shift in expression or manner, which made the claim ring hollow.
"What else do you like?"
"Coffee, perhaps?"
Coffee. The Artist's face betrayed puzzlement, and Valerie merely smiled past it.
So the Artist quickly dismissed it as some exotic foreign thing he didn't know, grinned, and tilted his own goblet.
The liquid sloshing inside the brass cup was unmistakably a luxury vintage.
A vintage whose fragrance stirred old memories in the Artist.
He soon let his attention drift from Valerie, turning the fragment he'd taken from the office over in his other hand and studying it. The occasional sip of wine was a bonus.
Though the fragment had been forged by melting and carving white iron, it bore a somber form, yet within it lingered a purity that could not be suppressed.
A hue that called someone to mind. The Artist, lost in thought for a long moment, parted his lips and let out a chuckle.
"A pity."
When Valerie's gaze found him, the Artist closed his hand around the fragment.
"Do you know about Ereta?"
Valerie didn't answer, but the Artist continued as if speaking for his own ears.
"Ereta has three titles. Saintess of Slaughter, Master of Blunt Weapons, Daughter of the Spider. Which of the three do you think is the truest?"
Silence, still finely splintered, stretched on. The Artist paid it no mind.
"Saintess of Slaughter—that no longer applies now that she's lost her power. She can't slaughter, and she's no Saint."
True enough. Abandoned by her god, she was no Saint. Slaughter, he supposed, depended on one's viewpoint.
"Master of Blunt Weapons. The War God and the Warrior Monks might disagree with me, but I consider that title nonsense as well."
"Why?"
"She simply cobbled together something resembling technique with brute strength, which caught the War God's eye. I, who was a true Master of Blunt Weapons, do not regard that as genuine skill. Now that her strength is gone, what's left but clumsy form?"
Valerie tilted her head.
"Then it's Daughter of the Spider?"
The Artist smiled thinly. Instead of answering, he spoke something entirely different, as if it amounted to an explanation.
"What kind of being do you think Ereta is?"
Valerie didn't answer. The silence held. The Artist sipped his wine and gazed down into the cup.
"Ereta is a hybrid. But a hybrid without the physical traits one usually sees in hybrids."
Valerie offered no reaction to the murmured words.
"How do you suppose that came to be?"
Valerie only smiled. The Artist recognized that smile—the unhurried smile of someone who knew everything—and spoke anyway.
"Because Ereta was a hybrid made to be that way from the start."
He said this, tilted his cup, and leaned his head back. The wine poured into his mouth and vanished down his throat, leaving no trace of intoxication.
His body possessed complete immunity to poison.
Holding the empty goblet, the Artist leaned far back, almost burying himself in the chair.
"A vessel capable of holding divinity. A vessel perfectly adapted to Geladrion yet able to receive divinity in its entirety. That is Ereta."
Before Valerie's presence—so faint it seemed a blink might erase it—the Artist fixed his eyes on her and went on.
"The Three Evils and other exalted ones have each sought their own way to set foot in Geladrion. The War God pinned his hopes on human skill capable of altering the world's laws. The Self-Birthing Mother means to crush the world under her own weight. The Unfalling One simply aims to swim his way through. But..."
He straightened his reclined body, leaning forward instead. The Artist's long frame remained sharply defined even as he inclined it.
Despite his age, his body was large and hardened—the body of an old man who had fought as a high priest across long years.
He leaned that body forward and spoke to Valerie.
"Among the Three Evils, the Spider pursued a special method. To pour all her divinity into a vessel already inside Geladrion—one that had received her divine power over a long period and grown sufficiently attuned."
Valerie sipped from her goblet. The Artist grinned.
"The daughter she made with her own hands for that purpose is Ereta."
When she lowered the cup, Valerie looked quite intrigued. The Artist saw the expression, knew it was false, and spoke anyway.
"She ground up twenty Lesser Deities. Then, over a long span, she used her own divinity as the matrix and made the child. Once completed, she poured abundant divinity into her as she raised her. What else would you call that but the Spider's daughter?"
That completion was around twenty years ago, wasn't it? At the Artist's words, Valerie quietly inclined her head.
"But the finished Ereta turned out a failure. For all the pains of her birth, the vessel was too small for the Spider's true form to transfer into. Naturally, she racked her brains for some other use."
Which was surely why she'd made Ereta a high priest.
The Artist found himself recalling the moment of Ereta's birth.
The spectacle that had rivaled the emergence of a demigod. That instant.
A life the Fire-weaving Spider had spun not from flame but from something else.
A life that had teemed and coalesced between flame and ruin, intricately woven like spider-silk.
A body made from the flesh and bone of Lesser Deities.
Already little different from a priest at the moment of birth, yet made solely from what had come out of Geladrion, so that she was no different from human—Ereta.
A new life who had held in both hands from the beginning what the Artist had abandoned.
The Artist stared blankly at the drained brass goblet, then let out a dry laugh.
Crunch!
He crushed the goblet and dropped it to the floor. The metal, crumpled into a ball, rolled across the carpet, leaving a dark stain in its wake.
"Well, anyway. Because of that, Ereta could be a high priest even without a transformed body like Blaz or myself. A vessel for containing divinity—of course."
Creak. The Artist rose and paced with aimless steps. The drawing room's spacious interior was filled with things he had broken and carved away.
"How she became human, I never learned. She's unlikely to explain it, either. I did think about seeking the answer once."
The pacing stopped. The Artist settled into the tallest chair. As the old man leaned his thinning head against the backrest and closed his eyes, Valerie spoke.
"Once you found out, what did you want to do?"
A weightless question, coming from one who knew everything. The Artist smiled faintly.
"What, eat her? Maybe if it were my friend Blaz, but human flesh isn't to my taste unless it's properly prepared..."
The trailing reply died away. The Artist opened his eyes and met Valerie's unwavering stare.
Darkness seethed in those eyes, devouring the light around them.
The Artist's bitter smile twisted, the bitterness curdling into something savage as the corners of his mouth lifted.
"Or am I wrong?"
Valerie asked.
"Didn't you want to eat her?"
In a voice clear and soft, yet heavy as the darkness of deep night.
"A work of art carved from Lesser Deities and steeped in poured divinity. Didn't you want to devour her?"
The Artist didn't answer, but Valerie drew her half-lidded eyes even narrower and smiled. A pair of crescent eyes, a crescent mouth. The deeply etched smile was chilling.
"A high priest cannot help but be shaped by their god. The Poison-spitting Dragon—no, the Apocalypse's Grounds—is a god starving with hunger. It would be difficult for even you to escape that influence."
With those words, she swept aside every excuse he had offered and propped her chin on her hand.
The Artist had no thought of denying it, nor of hiding it.
The woman asked softly, almost intimately.
"So, what do you want to do?"
The Artist laughed.
The laugh was answer enough.
*
"Guhk!"
A foot covered in red scales shot out—a foot larger than a man's face—and the body it struck flew through the air and tumbled helplessly across the floor.
Aslan watched the bodies fly, flicking his hands lightly.
The men who had filled the warehouse, clutching crude daggers ground down from broken pickaxes, were already sprawled on the ground.
The causes varied, but most had been beaten into submission.
Overpowering them hadn't been difficult.
All things considered, it was only natural: every member of their group was a Master or near enough.
Even Tiyamal, who was called a Master of the Bow but had trained extensively in martial arts, possessed the skill of a first-rate warrior. Convicts armed with nothing but small knives couldn't possibly defeat Masters.
Before Ereta's mana-tattoo-amplified strength, Rumel's fists, Fay's kicks, and Tiyamal's traditional martial techniques, the prisoners crumpled in droves.
Neither Aslan nor Angie had needed to step in with any real effort.
By the time the warehouse was filled with the groans of figures crawling across the floor, Aslan let out a sigh.
'There was no real reason to fight this hard.'
He'd shouted that he only wanted to talk, but they'd charged with daggers drawn—just to shut him up.
Even when he'd said he came to help their rebellion, they hadn't believed him and attacked.
Now that the dust had settled, Aslan exhaled with irritation at the fact that there was no room left for dialogue.
It was enough irritation to keep the fallen prisoners cowering in fear.
"See, when our young friend here called for a talk, you should've talked. Only after taking a beating do you get nice. Honestly..."
"They must have seen it as life or death. And then strangers suddenly appear and start talking. I understand it."
"True, if someone showed up out of nowhere saying they'd help, Fay would probably not trust them either."
Amid all this came the voices of Tiyamal, Rumel, and Fay. Listening to them, Aslan nodded, already guessing that this rebellion had not been a smooth affair.
Their mistrust and aggression spoke of the betrayals and obstacles they'd faced while preparing the uprising.
Regardless, the fact remained that conventional persuasion wouldn't work. So Aslan lifted his head.
"Catherine."
A murmur spoken without preamble. A figure seemed to shimmer faintly in the gap between the warehouse's wooden rafters—then someone dropped soundlessly to the floor.
A woman with scars on her face and animal ears where human ears should have been: Catherine.
She landed lightly, swept her hair back, and shot Aslan a look thick with irritation.
Just as Aslan had expected, Maria had apparently assigned Catherine to shadow him.
Which meant he wouldn't need to relay every piece of context. Aslan spoke.
"I've changed the plan. We'll join the rebellion. Relay everything to Lady Maria."
Everything.
Catherine might not have been an exceptional frontline fighter, but her skills as an intelligence agent were considerable.
True to form, she seemed to grasp the situation in full; she asked no clarifying questions.
"When is the execution?"
The date. Aslan looked at the Northern Empire men lying on the floor and judged that, now that things had come to this, the time needed to prepare the rebellion would be drastically shortened.
A matter of simply adding their spoon to a meal already cooked.
In that case, the execution could happen immediately after the Artist's departure.
Aslan spoke with confidence.
"Execution will be when the city's guards are at their busiest. Right when most of them empty the city to keep watch on the mine tunnel."
Catherine vanished without a word.
*
An axe at his hip, a breastplate strapped over splendid garments, a short-trimmed shaggy beard.
The man with the look of a greedy warrior was the master of this city.
He was more often called the Baron of Olpasbet than by his name, and the man himself preferred the title.
After all, the times he was addressed that way were usually the times he got to sate his greed.
But today, uncommonly, was not one of those times.
With a thoroughly drained expression, he gazed out the window of his office toward the distant stream of figures disappearing in the direction of the mine tunnel.
The man who had called himself the Artist, who claimed to be a high priest of the Evil God that had become the Apocalypse's Grounds.
A part of the Three Evils still known in the wider world as the Poison-spitting Dragon.
Hosting and then sending him off had been no ordinary hardship.
How much had been broken, how many meals had gone out, how many prisoners had been spent to satisfy those foul urges?
He sighed, thinking that for a while he would have to exercise restraint.
If he meant to cover the losses he'd just suffered, he'd have to tighten his own belt at least.
'At any rate, I've put the pointless business behind me for now.'
A small mercy in the midst of misfortune. Perhaps because the baron had ordered the mine tunnel put under watch, the guards beyond the window were moving with purpose.
The baron had been staring out that window for some time when he began to notice something strange in their bustle.
"Baron! Baron!"
The office door burst open.
"A rebellion! A rebellion has broken out!"
The guard who had rushed inside shouted the words.
At the same moment, the baron's face twisted.