The Morning After the Deal
The morning after the deal ended.
Lian dreamed.
A dream of hanging upside down in a vast spiderweb.
"Merchant. Why did I die, and you alone get to live?"
The woman said, a spider's leg run through her chest. Her unfocused purple eyes glared up at the upside-down Lian.
"It was because of that cheap potion."
"...The shop didn't have anything better."
The merchant bound in the web. The woman gripping a longsword. A situation the exact reverse of reality.
"And yet you kept the sword for yourself."
"It looked expensive."
Chaaeng—!
The woman hurled the longsword away.
"If you want it that badly, then take it."
Having finally let go of the knot inside her, she turned her back. And never once looked back again.
Sssk—
The spider monster, already missing half of its eight eyes, released Lian from its web and melted into the darkness as well.
"...And where are you going? Not going to eat me?"
Bound in a spiderweb.
Bound to reality.
A dream of being left alone.
All Lian could do was watch the woman's retreating back as she walked away, light and unburdened.
Long arms reached out of the darkness and gently embraced the weeping child.
…
…
(Live as though you were dead.)
(No one will care about you. No one will spare you a single thought.)
"……"
He came to. Forced his heavy eyelids up.
Lian grimaced at the ache that came from every inch of his body.
'This is... the shop, isn't it.'
The first thing he saw upon opening his eyes was the wooden floor he had spent so many idle hours staring down at from the counter. He blinked blankly for a while, then realized he was sprawled across the shop floor and dragged himself upright, swaying.
There wasn't a single place that didn't hurt. Was this what it would feel like to be trampled flat by a giant's boot?
"My head... why am I face-down on the floor?"
He pressed his temple with his right hand. His stomach churned as though someone had stirred his brains with a stick. Lian furrowed his brow and held down the rising nausea, and then—
the moment he planted his left hand against the floor and pushed—
Wobble!
"Ugh."
He lost his balance and toppled over to the left.
Thud.
His chin struck the floor, and Lian looked down at his own left shoulder.
The left arm that was supposed to be there was gone.
"Ah..."
Hummmm—
There were marks of something having been torn away from the shoulder, clothing and all. On the severed stump, dark grey particles pooled like a puddle after rain. His recovery had evidently kept working even while he was unconscious; the shoulder joint jutted out bare past the ruin of his sleeve, where the arm had been ripped free along with the cloth.
'At this rate... it'll take about two days before it grows back, I suppose.'
Only then did Lian remember.
The Tall Woman. The spider monster. The dark dungeon.
Those unfocused purple eyes.
He flinched!
His heartbeat quickened. Propping up his upper body with his right arm, he looked around the shop.
The first thing he saw was the crimson glow of sunset spilling through the window by the entrance.
Evening already, then. Quite a lot of time must have passed.
The wooden floor where he had lain was filthy with blood and viscera gone stiff and dry, and beside it a bloodstained longsword and its scabbard lay where they'd been carelessly dropped.
"……"
And last of all,
he saw the woman's body tangled in the spiderweb,
and the Back Window, veiled behind its black curtain.
For some reason, the window the Tall Woman had shattered was spotless, as if nothing had ever happened—
but his customer, lying there with her eyes peacefully closed, was telling the Lian who had just woken from a nightmare that this place was real.
"Haha..."
It had not been a dream.
He tried to summon his business smile to cover his expression, but for some reason the corners of his mouth refused to rise.
Creak...
He moved. As if fleeing from the corpse, he crawled his way up onto the chair behind the counter. Only once he had leaned back against the rest could Lian finally release the breath he'd been holding.
"Haah..."
A sigh.
He sat in the worn old chair and closed his eyes.
(Live as though you were dead.)
What surfaced was a memory from long ago. The memory of looking down at someone's corpse in a dark forest.
It was so much like that time.
Shhhhhh—
Cold sheets of rain came pouring down as an auditory hallucination.
(See you later, Merchant! Next time, I'll come visit you!)
"Why did you make a promise you couldn't keep? Thanks to you, I nearly died too."
He spoke to the corpse.
Returning the slander he'd heard in his nightmare, as if handing it back.
(I have an older sister, you know. I snuck this weapon out without her knowing... so I have to bring it back to her.)
"It's mine now. Your body, and the sword... I picked you both up in the dungeon, so I'll have to sell you for a good price."
He muttered it curtly.
Because he was a merchant.
Because he'd been taught that a merchant must always stay cold, and must always smile in front of a customer.
"……Would it really be all right to sell this sword?"
He probed at his own insides. As though the enraged customer might spring to her feet at any moment and scream, why would that be yours?
The shop was silent.
Naturally.
Screeech—
He opened the counter drawer.
Inside rolled the 'jeweled necklace'—the very first thing he had ever purchased from a customer. A crimson gem wound about with a chain of gold, and engraved along that chain, a magic circle of unknown design. It had looked so expensive that he'd tucked it away in the drawer like a treasure, but now Lian picked it up lightly and hung it around his own neck.
'So this... is... my first time wearing jewelry... is "wearing" even the right word for it?'
Click...
He fumbled the clasp closed with one hand. A profoundly unfamiliar weight. The strange sensation of his body being pulled forward. Why did rich people love these cumbersome things, why did they buy and sell them at such prices? What possible worth—
"Ta-da."
He held the necklace up, showily.
The shop gave no answer.
Beyond the window, the sunset faded and night came down.
"Ta-daa."
He smiled brightly.
The corners of his mouth didn't lift.
"It was worth her life."
In the suffocating silence, Lian felt that maybe, just a little, he understood why he had been dragged beyond the Back Window.
Value deficit.
This necklace had been worth nothing at all.
Squeeeze...
What had he even wanted to do?
On the chair, he hugged his knees to his chest.
Without the will to clean the filthy floor, without the courage to deal with his customer's body. Alone in the shop he'd been left in, listening to the phantom rain, he buried his face in his own knees like a small child.
"It's dark."
The luminous lamp on the ceiling shone down on him.
"I can't breathe."
Fresh night air slipped in through the gap in the door.
"……Save me."
A body that would not die. He had come back from the dungeon, woken from the nightmare—
and yet he was still inside a dark one.
Hummmm—
Dark grey particles seeped out of Lian's body. Drop by drop they fell, and touched the customer's body where it lay on the floor.
Slide...
And in that instant, the customer who had been creaking upright quietly gathered the head-bowed Lian into her arms.
"…"
"It's okay."
Cold arms wrapped around his back.
It was not the warmth of a living person.
Unlike the nightmare, where she had spat her resentments and turned away, the woman did not leave. She held him, and offered words of comfort instead.
"Don't."
"It's okay."
Had his mind gone so far that he was hallucinating?
Or was the corpse truly moving?
Either one was fine.
"……Just don't touch the merchandise. You'll get blood on it."
He was certainly seeing things out of sheer exhaustion. A little rest and it would pass. He would nap for a while, wake up, and then clean. Wipe the floor, change his clothes, deal with the body.
Return to the everyday.
"So... just for now..."
Because from tomorrow he would live with everything he had,
just for now... let him stay like this.
"It's okay."
The sound of rain that had seemed to ring in his ears fell silent.
Lian sat in the chair, knees drawn up to his chest.
A night where the darkness flowed by, quiet and still.
Pat. Pat.
Held in his customer's cold embrace, he closed his heavy eyes.
…
…
A day passed.
Morning broke.
Maceta, the small city as peaceful as ever. The place where a novice merchant's shabby shop sat at the very end of the abandoned warehouse street. It never bustled like the capital, but the smell of people living their lives played through every alley and lane.
As the morning sun settled over the town, people stirred from sweet sleep and opened their windows one by one, and the sight was like a cluster of potted flowers blooming all at once.
Click. Click.
The sound of windows opening announced the start of the day.
…Every window but one.
"Goddess of Order. I humbly pray that today, once again, I may safely slip away with the alcohol that wicked merchant has hidden from me."
A cleric who had escaped the temple faster than the sun could rise... the woman with a face like ice straightened the fit of her suit. Yesterday she had been chased out of Lian's shop while trying to make off with his liquor. What would today bring?
She spread her arms toward the rising sun, praying to her goddess with exaggerated ceremony. Her light morning ritual finished in the deserted back alley, she set off on her way.
Rustle. Rustle.
Footsteps as light as footsteps on fallen leaves carried her steadily toward the outskirts.
Rustle. Rustle.
The noise of the main road faded little by little behind her. She passed through the workshop district with its glassblowers and smiths, through the old street lined with abandoned warehouses—
and at the very end of that road,
a single shabby shop stood.
'How does anyone manage to do business in a place like this.'
Rustle.
The woman smoothed her expressionless face and approached the shop.
The signboard was so old that its letters had worn away entirely. Every other building had thrown open its doors to greet the morning, but the shop before her was lazily sleeping in, its windows shut fast.
'This is different from usual.'
A strange unease prickled at her, and she quickened her pace. At this hour, she should have been able to see Lian through the open window, wiping down the display shelves. Had something happened?
"Back again, little one?"
A beggar sprawled comfortably against the wall beside the shop called out to her, lazily waving at the expressionless woman passing by. The beggar woman who always lurked about the shop draped in her tattered ochre robe.
Clang!
The expressionless woman found the conversation not worth her time. She dropped a single silver coin into the iron plate before the beggar and walked on without a word.
"……How generous."
The beggar gathered up the silver, her lips curling upward with visible effort—then, like someone burdened with a great sin, she pressed herself flat to the ground and folded both hands over her head.
As if she wished to repent before the cleric herself.
This, too, was different from usual.
'What is with the atmosphere today. Did thieves get into the shop?'
The expressionless woman arrived at the shop's entrance.
The wooden door, with its 'CLOSED' sign.
Knock knock knock.
She rapped it lightly.
CRASH!!
From inside came the sound of someone falling over in a heap. Startled by the knock, perhaps.
But there was no sign whatsoever of the door opening.
"……"
She peered through the window at the dark interior for a moment, then brought her brief deliberation to an end and opened the door herself.
Ding-a-ling~♪
A cheerful doorbell chimed.
The door hadn't even been locked.
"Pardon the intrusion."
And so, feeling an inexplicable sense of dread, the woman opened the door and...
She flinched.
A strange smell leaking through the gap minutely warped her ice-cold face.
The smell of blood.
BAM!
She kicked the door wide and surged inside, mana already gathering around her.
The dark shop. Behind the counter, blood and viscera gone completely stiff and dry upon the wooden floor. And on the wall, a 'window' she had never seen before, hidden behind black curtains.
"……"
And in the midst of that scene, which looked exactly like a murder site—
there stood a blood-soaked Lian, a rag dyed red clutched in his right hand, frozen in a half-crouch, staring blankly at the woman who had invaded his shop.
"Uh..."
"……"
"...It rained yesterday, s-so the ceiling, um, leaked."
A lie that could not possibly hold.
The woman swiftly scanned her surroundings. There were no other signs of life anywhere.
Scratching her head out of habit, she walked toward the counter, firing off her questions.
"Merchant Lian."
"Ah, we're not open today. Please come back tomorrow."
"What happened he—"
But the question died on her lips.
Because where Lian's left arm should have been, as he scrubbed diligently at the floor, there was only emptiness.
Hummmm—
The marks of cloth and flesh alike having been torn away in one rough pull, and the bloodstains. And the 'dark grey particles' plugging the severed stump drew her gaze.
"Lian..."
"...This arm... I handed it over to a new era."
"She will be angry."
Lian, clutching his own shoulder, had thrown out a pointless joke and earned himself a scolding from his customer. Then he grumbled under his breath and resumed cleaning, scooping the shreds of viscera stuck to the floor into the wastebasket.
"Really, don't worry about it. I sold it for quite a lot."
"Sold it..."
What on earth had happened here overnight? Was every drop of blood on that floor Lian's? She genuinely debated whether she should report the situation to the guard.
But before long, the expressionless woman, who had been surveying this corner and that of the shop, glanced down at the 'jeweled necklace' hanging around Lian's neck—
and stopped.
Hidden from the doorway by the counter—the scene behind it.
"...Merchant Lian."
Beside Lian, who was still wiping the floor, there was another bloodstain.
Someone had lain there.
'There is one more person.'
And yet the only sign of life was Lian.
The woman, having thought that far, quietly raised her mana and asked.
"Did you kill someone."
"……"
Lian's hands stopped.
There was no answer.
The novice merchant who had once handed a cheap potion to a dying customer could not bring himself to say that he had not killed her.
......Slide. Slide.
His frozen hands began to move again.
No matter how hard he scrubbed, the filth on the floor would not come out.
"You must answer me. I can only help you if I know the situ—"
At that very moment,
the woman, now a single step closer to Lian,
saw the longsword lying beside the bloodstain. Someone's longsword. Hilt and blade alike, smeared head to toe in blood.
Tremble...
For the first time, the doll-like blankness of the woman's face broke apart.
"What on earth is..."
She could not understand it. Why? How? The questions echoed through her mind.
A longsword of utterly ordinary design.
Before she knew what she was doing, the woman reached out her hand to pick it up off the floor.
CRASH!
Lian came stumbling over in a half-tumble and frantically snatched the longsword up first.
Like a child terrified that someone was about to take it away.
"...It's for sale."
Setting down the bloody rag, Lian wrapped his one remaining arm around the longsword and put on his business smile.
"It's not... for sale..."
What was swimming in those dark-grey eyes, trembling with anxiety, she couldn't tell.
The woman had no choice but to draw back the hand she had extended.
…
…
A long, long silence passed.
Another meeting, with another customer.
A merchant cannot stop doing business.
"Blame the gods, child."
It was morning, and the beggar woman leaned against the wall outside the shop, gazing up at a cloudless sky. And in the shop still ringing with the smell of blood, another fated connection quietly began.
"……As you may know, my name is Amone."
The expressionless woman. Introducing herself as 'Amone,' she lowered herself to one knee.
She met Lian at eye level, with the look of someone who had made up her mind about something. What thoughts had passed through her as she took in the carnage around her? She gave no sign of it—she simply faced him with that ice-cold expression.
"I am a cleric in the service of the Goddess of Order."
"……Are you going to report this to the guard?"
"Let us make a deal, Merchant Lian."
What merchants do. Buy at a cheap price, and sell dear.
"I will help you clean. If there is anything 'difficult to dispose of,' I will dispose of it for you."
"What?"
"In exchange."
Amone's gaze brushed across the counter.
"I want you to tell me everything that happened in this place."
Lian quietly met Amone's purple eyes, which betrayed nothing of what she felt.
It was time to do business.