Deep Beneath the Sea — 3
When I returned to the lodging, the commander and the people there welcomed me with open joy. They had thought I was dead. Hearing them tell it, I could hardly blame them. The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was the brambles driving into the house, and if only one person was missing when the rest opened their eyes, it would not be strange at all to conclude that she had died.
"I'm all right."
"I'm relieved you're safe."
Having said that, the commander hesitated a long while, then carefully opened his mouth.
"What became of the witch?"
From the way he asked, he wasn't inquiring because he already knew. I was the only one who had vanished from this place, and the witch had vanished as well, so he was simply asking.
I lifted Maleficent.
"This."
"Pardon?"
The royal guards there, the commander among them, stared in thorough astonishment at the black-and-white crown in my hand. I held it out to him. Honestly, I have no use for the thing.
"Maleficent can still use magic, so please be careful."
I meant that the tool itself could cast magic, and that they ought to handle it with care — though it could just as easily be heard as a warning that the witch was sealed inside. A deception, in other words. I set it into the commander's hands.
"You'd do well to put it somewhere safe."
Flustered, the commander of the guard looked back and forth between the crown resting on his stiff gloves and me, the one who had placed it there.
"Ah— yes. Underst...ood."
I stretched. Whether from carrying Victoria around for so long earlier, or from the aftereffect of my neck having turned a full circle, I was a little stiff. And come to think of it — Merryweather was already dead, and it had been Maleficent all along?
Until now I had been under the mistaken impression that the royal family sent Merryweather in order to use me. Looking back on it, they may truly have regarded me as nothing more than someone who helped Aurora. The knights sent to guard me really had been sent as a guard.
Mm. From now on, when I try to read what lies behind someone, I shouldn't be so certain. One wrong step, and I might well have made a fatal mistake. I've learned one thing. I'll be careful.
Anyway, looking around, quite a few people were hurt, though no one was wounded badly enough to scream. Many had been scratched by the brambles when they fell, but those would heal soon enough. The harvesters are sturdy, so a great many of them had been working outside through the afternoon. That was why so many of the harvesters in Brightshin died.
I need to increase the harvesters. I need a way to regulate their numbers while keeping my persona intact. There's a strong chance the royal family sees me as the one who helped Aurora, and it would be convenient to put on the mask of a good person. Goodness loses its worth when you hand it out without care.
"On your way back, if there's anyone wounded past the point of recovery, please call for me. I'll put myself into them whenever you need."
Once I confirmed that goodwill had crept into the guards' eyes, I saw them off until they were gone, and afterward I joined in cleaning the wrecked lodging. I gathered the scattered debris, tore out and smashed whatever the invading brambles had weakened, and dismantled the equipment set up to seal off the outside, committing the structure to memory as I went.
"You knew how to do this sort of thing as well?"
I was setting the lodging properly to rights with the caretaker when the butler of the mansion came over and addressed me, lightly.
"It would be troublesome if the one staying here were particular, wouldn't it?"
I said it while wiping dust from the window frame, speaking as though I had acted from nothing but goodwill — as though I might have played the exacting sort who demands to know why the cleaning wasn't done properly, and had simply chosen not to. Of course, I could have pointed things out. Among the memories I gained when the first world collapsed, there are plenty belonging to people who worked in places like this. Change the world and the materials change with it, so some of the specialized knowledge has to be fitted to this one, but most of it is much the same.
"If anything is inconvenient, please tell us at any time. Our children need their opportunities to grow as well."
They raise them awfully strictly. But instead of nodding, I simply went on with the work. Wickedness is easy to pile up. Goodness is not. From here on I mean to swell the number of harvesters while pretending to be a good person, so I will have to manage my image. Change too suddenly, and they may catch on that I have something else in mind; better to help someone a little at a time.
But does the royal family know that I've been walking the slums, making harvesters? It was a method I worked out after Merryweather became my escort, so the odds are high she never explained it to them. How cleanly I smooth this part over will be the crux of it. For the time being, I should watch how the wind blows and live as I have been.
That was what I had been thinking.
That night, the royal family invited me. They called it an invitation, but in truth they were hauling me in as someone involved. I was not in the office where I had met the king before, but in a space like a reception room, meant for facing a person of genuinely high station. Before me sat King Hypion, making no effort to hide the joyful smile on his face.
"You have my true gratitude for sealing Maleficent."
Sealed?
Ah. Yes. Of course. The witch had become a crown, and once they heard it could use magic, a seal was the natural suspicion. They would never think I had turned the witch, entire, into an object.
"Please keep it stored with care."
I said it hoping that someday a harvester would take the thing up and carry out a massacre. At my words, Hypion nodded, his expression grave.
"I shall have it kept under the strictest guard, so that nothing dangerous comes of it."
He was taking it as though the sealed witch might burst free at the slightest mishandling, but that would never actually happen. I had stripped away all the warmth, and the light scorched black turns to dust and vanishes the moment she becomes an object. Once the matter of Maleficent was finished, King Hypion delivered a long expression of thanks, thick with the phrasing of the court, and as he did, he glanced out the window.
Beyond the glass, far off, the royal castle was visible. A high spire ought to have been rising there, but that part of it was gone. Now that I thought of it, when the brambles encircled the capital, a beam had flown from the castle toward the witch — and after she sent that beam back to where it had come from, it never flew again. It must have been smashed then.
"If there is anyone who has taken a wound that cannot be undone, please call for me."
"I thank you for your concern. Should the need arise, I will be certain to call upon you."
Then the king changed the air all at once. The mood, bright and steeped in joy, grew heavy with startling speed, making it plain without quite saying so that what followed was serious. So I made a show of straightening my posture, inviting him to say whatever he wished to say.
"You — you freed my daughter Aurora from the witch's curse, and you even went so far as to seal that witch."
The witch, Maleficent. From the memories that came along with her warmth, she was not human — not a person who had taken up witchcraft as a trade. She was not a person at all. Queen of Hell had not been empty talk. She truly was a fairy-like being, born out of the dark places of this world. Something brought forth on the boundary between the living and the dead.
Born already holding tremendous power, she wielded it as she pleased: a creature who did whatever she wanted and lived exactly as her desires led her, and who grew only more cunning with age.
And the witch was too strong. I had remarked that she fell far too easily for a provocation that would not have caught even Hyungkesuni, and it turned out she had never once needed to endure being provoked, and so possessed no resistance to it at all. Compare them simply in a witch's power, or compare their caliber, and Maleficent is overwhelmingly the stronger. The gulf is truly that between an ant and an elephant.
Maleficent had almost never lost to anyone and been forced to flee. By her own memories, at least, there was no single being in this world capable of killing her. It may be easier to grasp if I say she was strong enough that, had Daegon been summoned, the fight would have been well worth watching.
Yuanshi Tianzun's memory glitters, pointing in particular to the place where the magic was brought to a halt, while Daegon's memory glitters in answer, insisting that the victory was his regardless. Even so, she is considerably strong. That much is true — and that is precisely why she went down with such astonishing ease. Hypion doesn't know any of this. What stands before him is something that has already disposed of that witch.
"Is there something you wish of this country?"
Of course. The one before me is a king: a creature who must endlessly suspect what lies at his back. It is a trade in which the moment you forget to suspect, you are stabbed from behind and die. He suspects me. Admirable, if one sets aside that it is already too late.
I could shake my head here and fashion an image of goodness, but then Hypion would only suspect me more. I need a desire on a scale a person can understand.
Warmth?
That is far too fatal a weakness. So — something easy to grasp. No. Here, I change direction. Sink too deeply into what I need, and he might seize on some part even I cannot see, and come to understand me through it. So I change direction.
"South of here. I hear screams."
I pointed toward Berne City. They were already fighting at a pitch one could call civil war. Corpses and the wounded filled the place, and hope had gone out of people's faces. I nearly said that the ones who had given themselves to me were disappearing — and swallowed the words.
No. I must not say that. One slip, and they might realize I can see the world through the harvesters. To become something they cannot understand, I cannot be a creature they know nothing of at all. I have to become a creature they are convinced they already understand. Only then can I hide inside the shadow called truth.
"Hypion. Why am I hearing people's screams from the south?"
And so I pressed him. The mask of a good person, worn all the way through — that was how I took hold of the initiative. What I was saying, in that moment, was this: that I had no particular intention, that I was simply saving people, and that wasn't it he, rather, who was abandoning the work that was his to do? It is precisely the question a good person ought to ask. Whether the royal family is involved, or whether it is not. In truth, either one suits me. What matters is that I can slip free of Hypion's questioning.
This is how Hypion answered.
"You truly are an inscrutable one. The south, you say. Very well. I shall have it looked into. I only hope you do not become an enemy of this country."
I neither confirmed it nor denied it. At that, rather than press me any further, the king moved on to the next matter. Beginning tomorrow there would be a memorial for the catastrophe that had befallen the capital, and I was to make ready. And with that, it was over.
Instead of informing me of tomorrow's business and sending me back to the lodging, the king had me rest in a guest room of the royal castle.
It seems I won't be attending lessons tomorrow.