Chapter 182
Mm.
This is hard.
No, truly. They've cut a path up a sheer cliff at the most awkward angle imaginable, and without the key of one particular magic you have to circle the whole mountain, fighting every sort of monster along the way, before you can finally arrive.
I know that magic. The trouble is that I can't cast it, so for me it might as well be a feast painted on a wall.
Still, there is a perfectly rational reason the whole thing was built like a game.
First, Maleficent.
She has no friends.
Her nature is foul to the point of having been set that way from the moment she was born. The species itself is made like that.
Worse, she never once had the chance to be scolded and worn down until the sharp edges rounded into anything you could call a social instinct, so she has stayed jagged exactly as she is.
Only, that isn't the solitude of the weak. It is the aloof pride of the strong, and in that she is my exact opposite.
Me?
A monster who was tortured until she broke, with nothing left but the comfort of submission? Surprisingly, enough of a mind remains that I have learned what happens if I simply act: I run into a wall. So I am clinging to patience with everything I have.
If a meal is the act of taking in what you need in order to live, then taking in warmth ought to count as a meal as well.
Grant that, and what I am eating is about as restrained as the formal fare of a Buddhist temple.
It keeps me healthy. Even so, there are times I want to taste a violent quantity of calories, the sort of thing you get from wrapping a hamburger in a pizza.
Which is why I go about quietly making Harvesters on the sly.
Anyway.
This is a neighborhood where a monster has drawn a line, called the inside of it her territory, and settled down to live, treating the hordes that sometimes come pouring in like a flood as a special banquet that arrives once every few years.
Add to that the fact that Maleficent has no friends.
Anyone who might come looking is an enemy to begin with, so the plan is to lure them into the monster's nest, grind their strength down, and only then meet them herself.
She has no reason to consider anyone else, and so there is no easy side path laid for someone else's convenience. There is herself, and there is everyone who is not her.
Just those two.
What I mean is that, left as it was, I wouldn't have gotten in even if I kept at it all night, so I mashed reality just a little.
I already knew the frame called Maleficent's memories. So I tried an experiment: even without mana, if I set into place the very reality that frame would open, could I get through? I could.
The most interesting part was that, inside a magical domain, no crack formed at all.
The security magic Maleficent had laid down was hardly a simple thing, and yet it took no more effort than the feel of turning a stone lying in the road into gold.
I am glad I don't have to worry that the world will come apart over something like this.
Thinking that I might have been able to break the magic called the Brambles of Self-Abandonment just as easily, I crawled my way up the steep face of the cliff.
Maleficent only has to fly, so she had offered not the slightest consideration to anyone traveling on foot, and it was genuinely exhausting.
And that was how I entered Maleficent's castle.
It is an abandoned old fortress, converted and put to use. A nest far too large for one person to maintain by physical means alone.
But Maleficent could use magic, and by means of it she had kept the castle by herself.
Which raises the question of what it has become, now that Maleficent is gone.
Whooo.
Ragged shards of stone cling together in a loose, crooked join and sway, and a cold wind passes through the gaps, giving voice as it goes.
The place is on the verge of collapse.
The one mercy is that I hold Maleficent's memories, so I have no need to search for where anything is.
First I ignored the gold and treasure inside the castle. There were things worth more than that: the magical goods she kept, the special implements. From among them I took mainly what was of high value.
My standard of value?
Whether killing intent had soaked deep into the thing.
And last of all, to torment the Maleficent who had put me through so much, I took the diary. Calling it a diary is generous. It was not written every day; years run between one entry and the next.
A diary of her true heart.
If that survives as a relic, she will be in tears.
Somewhere in a faded memory, they are restoring even the scribbles a person named Anne would have erased from her diary, and shaming her with them, aren't they?
Trusting that this would have a similar effect, I took the diary with me.
Then, all at once, I noticed an open birdcage near the desk. On the floor of the cage lay the bones of a bird, dried to a crisp.
She had no friends. She did have a subordinate.
Something that might, perhaps, have been a friend.
There was no warmth to be found in there, so I lost interest at once and left the castle.
Before long, this place will fall.
Inside as well, it creaks in place after place, badly enough to be serious. It has reached the point where tearing it down and building it anew would be safer than any work of reinforcement.
Luggage in hand, I worked my way back down the cliff.
My clothes were in ruins. What I had on was never a good outfit for a place like this. If anything, it is the sort of dress a little girl wears on a picnic.
But I don't own any clothes meant for the outdoors, so I had simply come as I was.
I all but rolled down the steep cliff and reached the bottom.
Hm.
There is more luggage than I thought.
A girl in clothes clotted thick with dirt and dust, strange objects dangling all over her.
That is what I look like now.
For the time being I cut across the spaces between the monster territories Maleficent had charted, and ran back the way I had come.
The load was very heavy, but this body does not break over something like that.
I arrived at the lodgings.
Astonishingly, in all the time I ran from the outskirts of the capital back to them, not a single person remarked on me. Judging by the screams the people at the lodgings let out when I returned, the state of my clothes must have been too wretched for words.
After the fussing maids had forcibly changed me out of the clothes gone to rags, I summoned the butler.
"Miss Bell. What is the matter?"
"May I meet the king? It concerns Maleficent."
To my surprise, rather than demanding any further explanation, the butler asked me to wait a moment.
I had thought he would at least ask why. A puzzled look crossed his face, but he never put it into words.
And that night.
Carrying the things I had taken from Maleficent's house, I climbed into the carriage waiting in front of the lodgings.
As before, I was taken not to the royal castle but to a building set a little apart from it. And in the room where we always met, King Hypion was waiting.
"I am told you sought me out on a matter concerning the witch."
"Yes. That's right."
I had come with my arms full. The surprising part was that no one remarked on the luggage. I had been sure a guard would inspect whatever I was carrying, but I was waved straight through.
No. Isn't this trusting me far too much?
What were they going to do if I had come to assassinate the king?
Turning that question over regarding the security of the royal house, I set the things I had brought down one by one on the table before the man whose face was now familiar.
"What are these?"
I considered how best to explain, and then gave him the answer that would let him understand all of it at once.
"This is Maleficent's diary."
I said it while pointing to one of the books, and the king's expression hardened. He looked down at the objects with a guarded face.
"Wherever did you come by such a thing?"
"In Maleficent's last moment, I learned the place where she had been living."
As far as I know, aside from Victoria, no one knows what I said at Maleficent's end.
I never spoke a single word about the place where she had been hiding. But it isn't a lie. I know because I obtained her memories.
"And from there, I brought mainly the dangerous things."
I really had brought mainly the dangerous things. Magical implements made to kill someone, to curse someone, to ruin someone.
Of course, I have no intention of explaining how to use them.
It would be strange if I knew that much, wouldn't it?
"Can you tell me where it is?"
"Yes."
At Hypion's question, I told him where Maleficent's fortress had stood.
And since I was already speaking, I added this.
"Metals like gold and silver were heavy, so I left them. Take them if you need them. But the castle is so far gone that I can't say when it will collapse, and I don't recommend going."
Set a time limit, and let them know there is treasure, and they will go looking.
Desire is stirred more easily by a prohibition than by an order. If the danger is only of a degree I myself would call acceptable, it is easier still.
"You went into a zone that dangerous, and came back?"
"I'm not a person. And they're Maleficent's things, aren't they?"
Only the facts.
But to the one listening, it can just as well be heard as me having gone in order to dispose of hazardous materials.
On top of that, I had left the gold and jewels, brought only the dangerous objects, and laid them out. I had brought a written account as well, one from which Maleficent could be known in detail.
Look at it any way you like. I seem kind, don't I?
And I really do mean to live that way.
I will add to the Harvesters the way one gives in to an impulse, but aside from that I intend to do nothing at all. I will hold my breath and keep quiet, sometimes behave like a good person, and wait.
Berne City is wrapped in the flames of war, and in the Brightshin Slums the number of people inventing technical devices keeps growing.
This, you could say, is a bribe.
I am living kindly, so let us get along.
"You give so much, and yet there is nothing I can offer you in return."
Hypion said it with a bitter look. Then he came toward the table, meaning to touch the objects.
So I told him they were dangerous, and that it would be better not to lay a hand on them carelessly.
Of course, a magical implement does not activate simply from being seized and swung. But if I put it that way, he will assume I don't know these things in any detail either.
Even so, if all I do is give, he will grow suspicious instead. Here I will put on just a little goodwill, and slip the flame into Berne City.
"The screams coming from the south haven't stopped."
It means I know that something terrible is happening. Whether what is underway in Berne City is the king's doing or not, it is a demand that he produce a result.
And that result will be the worst possible conclusion.
Because the Purple Twilight Society has lost every shred of trust in the country. If the king were to announce, even now, that he means to put them down, would anyone believe him?
Even if that somehow works itself out, the truly important problem is still beneath the surface.
A fundamental flaw in the power units that go into the clockwork machines.
Berne City, a cutting-edge city and therefore full of clockwork, is probably the first city to have crossed the critical point. If it is not corrected here, the accidents will happen again.
And after Berne City, where are there the most clockwork machines of all?
Yes.
The capital.
In the capital there is a time bomb with a slowly turning clock fastened to it.
Can they deal with it? Or will they watch it go off?
Either is fine with me.
Thinking so, I nudge events along so they will turn a little faster.
Now then. How will things flow?