Retribution (1)
With Father's safety secured, all that remained was the way home. Hauling this many people back in one piece, however, would be no small feat.
"You must leave us behind, my lord. We cannot afford to weigh you down."
Talon spoke with grim resolve.
"Out of the question. How would you even hold out in the heart of the Demon Realm?"
"We have a fair store of supplies left, including what we seized from the demons. This is the Neutral Zone, so we will manage to hold out until Stormrock Fortress is retaken."
"After coming all this way, abandoning you makes no sense. There's no guarantee we retake Stormrock in time, either."
"Young Lord Iden."
Talon did not look convinced.
"We failed to protect the Duke. If, on top of clinging shamefully to our lives, we go so far as to drag you down with us, we will no longer deserve to be called knights. I beg you, allow us to make an honorable choice."
Talon was as obstinate as a knight out of an old story. It was easy to see why Father had kept him at his side as adjutant for decades.
But I couldn't yield either. I wasn't about to starve Father's loyal retainers to death in the middle of this venomous swamp.
"I didn't come all this way without a way to get you out."
I had plenty of cards left to play. Worst came to worst, I could turn the whole detachment into orcs, or take a fresh form myself and ferry them five or six at a time. Kalman would handle any flying monsters that objected.
"You heard Lady Ulkaard, I trust. The one commanding the demon main force now is a Demon Duke. We crossed blades with that one. He stood on a wholly different plane from the other demon nobles. In a lifetime of war against the demons, that was the first time I ever knew fear."
A fine tremor ran through Talon's body.
"We cannot gamble on exposing His Grace the Duke... and His Grace's own son, to a being so terrifying."
Wariness stirred in me toward this Demon Duke. To plant that kind of fear in a Master-rank awakener, one of Father's finest retainers...
Talking him around looked hopeless. I would have to try another approach...
Not that I was entirely out of options.
"Lady Ulkaard."
The black-haired girl turned her gaze on me.
"Is there, by any chance, a passage nearby leading down to the Subterranean World?"
In my experience, every dragon I had ever seen preferred to nest atop a dragon vein. And the veins were the very spine that wove the Subterranean World together.
"There is."
Ulkaard tipped her chin toward the cave's depths.
"Follow the passage straight down."
"Thank you."
I turned back to Talon.
"You won't object to a detour through the deep, will you?"
"You truly mean to carry every last one of us with you."
"Of course. Don't you dare go sacrificing yourselves without permission. I still have plenty of use for you yet."
Talon gave a wry smile.
"Understood. I will have the wounded made ready to move."
The knights began bustling about. Father was strapped onto a stretcher thrown together on the spot. Our supplies were sparser than I'd expected; we would need to count on living off the land.
"So you mean to punch straight through the underground and make for home?"
Caroi wandered over and asked.
"With a force this size, scrapping with mushroom men beats locking horns with the demon main force."
"Quite the schemer you've become since I last saw you."
Caroi smiled faintly.
"You're coming with us, aren't you?"
I asked it half as a wish. With Caroi along, the road home promised to be a comfortable one.
"No, this is where we part. Now that I've seen Drek is safe, I'll be off to finish what I was doing."
"And what exactly were you doing?"
"Not yet time to tell. You'll know before long."
"Will I see you again?"
Caroi laughed without a sound and laid a hand on my shoulder.
"Wandering about on my own, it suddenly struck me that I never finished teaching you the art of ruling."
"Right, because all you ever threw yourself into was the sword."
Caroi leaned in close and whispered, his voice small as an ant's.
"Become a ruler, and I'll give you a lesson you'll lean on for the rest of your life."
"Which is?"
His expression was so dead serious that I felt myself turning serious to match.
"Court the dragon."
"...What?"
Caroi slid Ulkaard a sidelong glance.
"A dragon holding her own domain in the very heart of the Demon Realm. Can't you grasp what it means that a dragon of that caliber has shown you favor?"
"What favor?"
Ulkaard had wanted the demons pestering her driven off, and I had wanted my father restored. As far as I could tell, we'd done nothing but trade cold, mutual interests.
"You have no awareness whatsoever."
Caroi clicked his tongue.
"Dragons — and the most notorious villains of the lot are black dragons. Black dragons do not make deals. They kill, or they take, and nothing else. Think back carefully: of all the books you've read, was there so much as one being who ever struck a bargain with a black dragon?"
I combed back through everything I had ever read.
"I don't think there was... but those are books."
"Books written by those who lived it. When the words 'let us make a deal' came out of a black dragon's mouth, I doubted my own ears. I don't know the reason, but that dragon is looking kindly on you and your father. So do everything in your power to win her heart. Sealing the deal goes without saying — and if it comes to it, bring out the pretty-boy charms."
"We are still talking about the art of ruling here, right?"
"I'm off. Do well."
Caroi waved a lazy hand and made for the cave mouth.
I set off into the cave's depths with the knights. Perhaps thirty minutes of winding down the twisting defile brought us into a vast underground cavern, carpeted in mushrooms and glowing flora.
"So this is the Subterranean World."
There was a touch more animation in Kalman's voice than usual.
"Your first time down here, I take it."
"It is. The northwestern plains hold nothing but paddies and fields."
Whatever flicker of excitement I'd caught in him vanished so quickly I wondered whether I had imagined it.
The route itself gave us no trouble. All we had to do was follow the dragon vein's current southward.
The monsters were the nuisance. The creatures of the deep observed no boundary between day and night — no sun ever rose here to begin with.
So while the monsters came at us around the clock, we were forced to fight a strictly defensive battle.
Had Kalman not been with us, we would have started losing people immediately. Even monsters of considerable strength could not withstand a single stroke of his blade. Under an Imperial Pillar's protection, we inched our way forward.
Even so, descending had proven the right call so far. Short of running into a first-class monster like an earth dragon, nothing looked likely to derail the journey.
...I had better not get comfortable and have that complacency come back as karma. Srudal had made it plain that down here, anything crawling out of the dark would be entirely normal.
It was the second day of the trek. I stood the night watch beside the bonfire. There was good reason the heir of House Esterzy had grown sparing with his sleep.
"The Young Lord standing night watch — it's unthinkable, my lord."
I gestured at my unconscious father.
"Only if I stand guard myself can I rest easy."
"But still—!"
"You asked me to help you make an honorable choice. Then you can't very well stand between a son and his filial duty."
Faced with my insistence on guarding Father personally, even the hard-line Talon had no answer.
It wasn't a difficult thing, after all. At the Huashin realm, sleep stopped being a necessity; I slept these days purely because it felt pleasant.
The only real inconvenience was...
...that Kalman, that taciturn slab of a man, was apparently every bit as sleepless at night as I was.
Kalman stood with his hands buried in his coat pockets, looking out over the subterranean vista. The scenery down here was like dreaming with your eyes open: luminous plants of every hue spread in a boundless carpet across the dark.
"Iden."
He spoke without warning.
"You have rescued Duke Esterzy. Now I expect you to make good on your promise."
This man could stare at so beautiful a sight and keep nothing in his head but work.
"So you're here for the lead on your investigation?"
"That is so."
"I can hand you the lead, but what happens after? How does His Majesty mean to judge what happened in the duchy?"
"Matters within a duchy are ordinarily left to the Duke's autonomy. But His Majesty regards this affair as grave enough to loosen the discipline of the Empire itself."
"And so he means to do what, exactly?"
"Weigh the guilt from the innocence, and punish it severely."
Well, that was convenient. Mabel had been an awkward one for me to handle within my own authority.
"Here."
I drew a single root of Scarlet Blaze from Sanpedla's Travel Bag — the one I had stashed away to feed to Ruby.
"Scarlet Blaze. A second-grade mana source."
"The demons cultivated this as well?"
"No, that one is my brother Mabel's handiwork."
Kalman's expression turned grave.
"Your brother cultivated a second-grade mana source with his own hands?"
"He did. His awoken ability drives the land's vitality straight down into the roots — that's what starved the region. Where he got the seeds, I couldn't tell you."
"How long have you known Mabel was the culprit?"
"Since last year. I was the first to raise it as a problem. And as ill luck would have it, my brother was acting lord at the time, so he used his own authority to scrub away every last trace of evidence. You'll get little cooperation out of the ducal residence."
Kalman tucked the Scarlet Blaze into an inner pocket of his coat.
"Well? Does this count as the promise kept?"
"It suffices. The rest I will see to myself."
He had said the same thing back at the Floating Castles. That this much was enough, and he would handle the rest. And after he said it, look how many of the capital's nobles were swept away.
Coming from a man like that, the pledge meant Mabel would not slip free this time.
Five days after plunging into the deep, we came upon a colony of red-capped mushrooms. But the party waiting to receive us there was not a band of gulloks — it was Srudal's scouting detachment.
"Why is Lord Iden here of all places..."
"How are you here?"
We stared at each other in mutual astonishment.
"I was executing orders to widen our surveyed territory around the camp."
Srudal carried an enormous collecting net in one hand. Each of his scouts bore an iron cage, and the cages held samples of every manner of beast and plant.
"...You weren't just indulging your private appetites, then?"
"That is included within the advancement of ecological study. But we should not linger. I will go announce Lord Iden's arrival and fetch the disciples."
"Srudal, hold on!"
"Yes?"
"Leave us some food before you go. I'm about to sprout mushrooms out of my mouth."
"Dear me. My apologies."
We had been eating far too many mushrooms since the rations ran dry. While the scouting party handed over their food, I put a casual question to Srudal.
"How goes it up top?"
I wanted to know whether Count Andrassy was holding firm. Srudal, however, took my question another way.
"The mood is unsettled. Young Lord Mabel has marched out under Lady Thalia's command, and Young Lord Chris..."
"Let me guess. He's rampaging about as if he were already Duke."
"If you put it crudely, that is correct."
"Srudal."
"Yes, Young Lord."
"Don't bother announcing my arrival. I'll deliver the news myself."
"As you command."
We made a meal of the rations Srudal handed over, crossed the colony, and at last reached the base camp.
The camp had swelled far beyond its old footprint. Preparations for mining the Oradium were advancing briskly, and the scholars threw themselves into the excavation.
"All of you, get treated first. Carry Father to the sickroom."
"Understood."
Having made it this far, I could finally breathe. I left Talon and headed for the ducal residence. The Raven Knights held its guard, and they looked thoroughly rattled at the sight of me — the man who had erupted out of their mausoleum.
"Where is your master?"
"H-he is in his study. I shall send word at once that Lord Iden has arrived."
"No need."
I brushed past the knights and made for the study. The office that had been half-ruined stood repaired to spotlessness in the ten days since. I flung the door open and strode inside.
Chris, in a black uniform, had claimed Father's desk and chair for his own. He sat with his chin propped in one hand and one leg sprawled insolently across the desktop.
"Ah. There's my high-and-mighty little brother."
Chris sneered as he set down an empty liquor cup. A dozen-odd nobles stood arrayed before him — the council members I had sent home.
"W-we came only because Lord Chris summoned us."
"Quite so. There was merely business to discuss. We have in no way proclaimed Lord Chris Duke."
The councilmen stammered through their excuses. Chris laughed in their faces.
"You pack of bats, flitting this way and that."
He refilled his cup.
"And what became of 'saving Father'? A wasted errand, I'd wager."
"What do you think became of it?"
"You'll have to report it before I know, won't I."
I extended my open right palm toward him. His brow twitched.
"What are you playing at?"
"Thunderbolt Heavenly Bow."
"...What?"
The moment the echo left his mouth, a sickly-yellow bolt struck his leg with a crack of thunder.
"GWAAAAAAGH!"
The reek of searing flesh rolled through the room. He lost his balance and crashed down beneath the desk.
"Wh-what madness is this!"
"The only madness here is the one you committed."
Clutching his blackened leg, he wrenched his eyes open in a savage glare. I looked down at him, drenched in sweat.
"I did warn you. Anyone who reached for the dukedom while Father was absent would be punished to the fullest extent."
I raised my foot and ground it down on his burned leg. He could only stare, dumbstruck, as the charred limb crackled and crumbled to ash beneath my heel.
"Chris, you are under arrest for treason."