Traces Left on Purpose
A month passed after that.
I spent the days carrying out missions alongside Walter and my new escort knight, Greg, and filling whatever hours remained with grueling training. Before I knew it, the day of Walter's retirement had arrived.
"The time has come."
In the pale light before dawn, Walter spoke calmly, already dressed and ready for the road. The night before we had held a modest retirement ceremony, and now he was bound for his hometown with nothing but a pack worn soft by years of handling. At that lonely, yet strangely unburdened start of a knight's journey home, I offered him my farewell.
"You've worked hard all this time. I won't forget your service."
"Truly, thank you for everything!"
Greg, the new escort knight, bowed his head as well. Walter studied him for a moment, then turned back to me.
"Still, it does my heart good to see you looking so hale at the very end."
"Hale? Ah—you mean I've lost weight?"
I had slimmed down a great deal over the past month. No one could have called me obese anymore. I was merely a man with a little flesh still on him.
"It isn't only your appearance. You've changed a great deal, Young Master."
Walter said it with a gentle smile. When we first met, he had treated me as though he were thoroughly sick of the sight of me. Had he been worrying over Lucas all along, even so? The look on his face was as easy as a man setting down a burden carried for years.
"But do not grow complacent here. Devote yourself all the more to a knight's path. Ah—and Greg alone will not suffice as your escort. You must seek out others you can trust."
"I've already heard that. There simply aren't any talents worth appointing."
"Greg has also built a wall between himself and paperwork. You would do well to hire a clever maid with a head for administration, separately—"
Walter poured the nagging out without pause. What use was any of it, on the day of his retirement? Leave him like this and he would keep listing nothing but work for me to do, so I waved him off.
"I understand. I'll do everything just as you've said, Sir Walter, so set your worries down and go home in peace."
"Then may I say just one last thing?"
"You said that was the last. Start piling on more, and I'm going back inside."
At that, Walter managed only a bitter smile. A moment later, though, his face turned strangely grave, and he added one more line.
"Ask Duke Kaiser what happened on the day you learned swordsmanship from the Jewel."
A riddle of a remark. Before I could even ask what he meant, he bowed his head to me.
"May you remain unharmed. Greg—I leave the Young Master in your care."
"Yes, sir! Just leave him to me."
With Greg's ringing answer, Walter turned his back. A few knights and soldiers were already waiting to see him all the way home. I stared blankly after him as he left the estate behind.
"Will you miss him?"
Greg asked.
There was some of that in me, but I shook my head.
"No. He left well. He left at exactly the right time."
The Great Forest was already in an uproar, and talk of war hung over everything—war coming, war maybe not. I knew better than most that this war would be anything but easy. So in this moment, I could wish the old knight well with all my heart as he turned his back on this place.
"More importantly..."
I pulled my gaze from Walter, already gone from sight, climbed the manor steps, and made for Duke Kaiser's office. I meant to test the riddle Walter had left behind, and I meant to do it at once.
"What is it?"
Perhaps because I had already carried out the ducal house's missions several times over, Duke Kaiser was neither surprised nor annoyed by the sudden visit. He regarded me with nothing but a businesslike expression. I relayed the question Walter had left me, and a subtle air settled over the duke's face.
"...Yes. You ought to know as well."
With that, he handed me several documents.
"Read them."
They were reports Walter had written. And their contents—
"An assassination...?"
On the day I came to inhabit Lucas's body, there had been an attempt on my life. Walter had noticed and tried to investigate the hand behind it, but he had failed to dig all the way to the bottom, leaving only a handful of clues.
"You've no guess of your own?"
At those words I traced back through the memories of that day—not mine, but the scenes Lucas had witnessed in the moments before he died. All that remained of them was hideous pain and terror, and the shape of a strange curved blade bursting out through the skin of his belly.
"Doesn't seem you do."
Kaiser said it as if there were nothing strange about that. I lifted my eyes from the report and looked at him.
"Why did you keep this a secret until now?"
"Because I didn't trust you."
Said so bluntly, there was nothing I could answer. Had I been in his place, I would have kept it secret too.
An awkward silence passed, and Duke Kaiser spoke again.
"So. What do you intend to do?"
"Investigate, obviously. Someone tried to kill me. I can hardly sit still."
"...Foolish."
The duke sighed, and his eyes settled on me as though I were a pitiful sight. But—
"I know it's dangerous."
"What?"
"I'm saying I know this is a trap."
At the words that followed, a different light stirred in his sunken eyes.
"Why do you think so?"
"The assassin seems a fairly competent sort, and yet he left traces like these. That's strange from the start. Isn't it as good as telling us outright to investigate?"
The tracks began around the ducal manor and drew farther off at intervals of days, cunningly luring any pursuer beyond the borders of the ducal territory.
"You're saying the assassin left the traces himself?"
"Well, his target is still alive and well."
I didn't know who had killed Lucas, but I could guess the bind that man was in. He had not simply failed an assassination. The problem was that he had succeeded once. He would have confirmed Lucas's death with his own eyes, slipped swiftly from the scene, and then, proud of a job well done, demanded the fee for a successful kill.
A few days later, word arrives that Lucas is perfectly alive. The one who hired him would naturally have hit the ceiling, and the assassin—suddenly the author of a false report—would have found himself in a very awkward position.
Because I could guess at those circumstances, the traces looked to me like the man's desperate thrashing. Please, look at this and come find me. I'll tell you where I am, so appear before me just one more time. They read almost like a plea.
"So I'll go. If some other knight heads that way, he might catch on and give up entirely."
Walter had probably seen these same traces and been unable to press the investigation any further, for exactly that reason. At my words, Kaiser narrowed his eyes.
"But that means... you're saying you'll bring the assassin down yourself?"
"Something like that."
"It won't be easy."
"Since when is anything in this world easy?"
"Ha. That answer, at least, I like."
A hearty smile touched the corner of Kaiser's mouth. It was the first smile I had ever seen from him that was not a sneer.
"Very well. Then try it. As it happens, I have a mission for you as well."
The place where the assassin's trail broke off was the northern edge of the ducal territory, mountain country bordering another noble's lands. Recently, bandits had appeared in those mountains and reduced a village to ruins.
"So while I'm at it, I'm to deal with the bandits too."
"There will be no soldiers. The land borders another territory. Mobilize troops, and you may invite needless misunderstanding."
"Understood."
"And for the same reason, you must conceal your identity. I will not permit you to invoke the ducal house's name on this mission."
"Rather a lot of conditions."
Clear out bandits with no soldiers, while hiding who I was? It was not an impossible task, but set beside the others, the conditions were certainly finicky. Perhaps that was why Duke Kaiser added something he ordinarily never said.
"If you succeed in this mission... I will restore your rights. Temporarily, at least."
"My rights?"
"Yes. I mean that I will treat you once more as a member of the ducal house."
My eyes flew open. What he spoke of were the many rights Lucas had been stripped of in the past. Money, for one. Ordinarily a direct descendant of the ducal house was paid a considerable sum every month—enough, as befitted a noble, to indulge in a reasonable luxury. I had none of that. When I didn't have the Screaming Sword, I had been forced to make do with issued weapons, and even when a mission required coin, I could spend it only with Walter's permission as my escort knight.
Nor was that all. There was the right to keep personal servants of one's own, the authority to mobilize soldiers or knights in an emergency, and even access to the Second Treasury. The rights granted to the direct line of this house were considerable.
Of course, the fact that Lucas had lost every one of them said something impressive about his misdeeds, if impressive was the word. Getting them back would mean just as much. Did it not mean that he, the head of the ducal house, was acknowledging me again? For me, whose aim was to extend my influence within this house, that alone was a substantial gain.
"But you must succeed. I have no wish to let the rat who dared challenge the ducal house's authority on my own land walk away alive."
He said it calmly, and for that very reason his voice sounded all the colder. I nodded.
"I'll depart tomorrow."
"Good. Then go."
A tangle of emotions mixed in Kaiser's gaze as he spoke. The words had come from his own mouth, and still he did not seem certain of me. That, too, would change once I handled this matter. Thinking so, I rose from my seat.
"We have a mission starting tomorrow."
Coming out of the duke's office, I said as much to Greg. Even at the sudden news, he showed not a trace of displeasure.
"What kind? Are we hunting demons again? If I get a say, I'd rather it be a big one."
He said it with a grin. A month of sparring with me had sharpened his skill considerably, and confidence was spilling out of him.
"No. This time it's people."
"Ah... is that so?"
At the words that followed, Greg's expression stiffened just a little. The mission was to clean up bandits, and on top of that to find an assassin and dispose of him. Somewhere in that process, killing was unavoidable. It was familiar to me. To this apprentice knight, it might not be.
"What, think you can't do it?"
"No, sir. As your escort knight, I will step forward and cut down the Young Master's enemies myself."
"Good. Then get ready."
At my word, Greg left the room to prepare for departure.
The next morning, I left the manor with Greg. A robe was pulled deep over my head, there was no crest of a noble house on me, and I carried nothing but a single sword—all of it to hide my identity, as the duke had demanded. Even so, I couldn't help wondering what would happen if someone recognized my face. Fortunately, perhaps because I had lost so much weight, no one knew me no matter which village of the ducal territory we passed through.
We walked for several days and reached the village that had been laid waste. A shattered gate, a collapsed well, the burned foundations of houses, and corpses left sprawled like ornaments. The place the bandits had destroyed was more wretched than I had imagined. In some ways, it was worse than a raid by demons.
"Quite a few of them, by the look of it."
It had been a small village, a few dozen households at most. The people who lived here would have tried to defend themselves, and considering how miserably they had failed, the bandits who overran the place looked to number at least twice that.
"Sixty at the least... maybe a hundred?"
At that scale they were less bandits than a rebel band. I had thought that, being bandits rather than monsters, they would not prove all that difficult. A force this large was a considerable burden in itself.
"They aren't men who were originally from here. They crossed over from another territory, which would explain it."
Greg supplied the rest. This rampage of theirs was hardly a matter of a day or two. For nearly half a year they had wandered the Empire, robbing as they went, yet every time they struck only the villages along a territory's border. Whenever a lord raised soldiers in earnest to root them out, they simply fled into some other noble's lands, and so they had been left alone. In the meantime the band had swollen, until at last it reached this number.
"Still, at this size, finding them ought to be easy."
A company like that could no longer move in secret. This village alone made it plain where they had gone after smashing it. Countless footprints pointed toward the northern range. Their stronghold was surely somewhere in those peaks.
"Then what about the assassin?"
Greg asked. The traces left by the man who had killed me were in this area as well. Hadn't they said a gray horse, presumed to be the one he rode, had been found abandoned on the village outskirts?
"Don't worry about that side. Deal with the bandits, and he'll crawl out on his own."
So if he was still here, he was probably waiting for me in this very place. Until he showed himself, it was better to handle the certain target first. With that, I followed the bandits' footprints up the mountain.
Their stronghold was not far.