Chapter 184
Like someone hastily throwing up a wooden wall over the bare lot where a rampart had been smashed to nothing, Kanna raised a wall around her heart. She hid it as well as she could, though, and said what she had meant to say from the start.
It was gratitude. Gratitude that so much had truly changed since she became a Harvester. She went through it one fact at a time—things I already knew—laying out a life that was no longer what it had been. The way her family looked at her had changed. What she could do had multiplied past counting. She told me how happy it was, simply to have come back to normal.
“Yes. I see.”
“Your reactions really are flat. This isn’t what you wanted?”
Ah. So that was why she had said it. She seemed to think I was making Harvesters so I could feel some sense of reward. I meant to go on pretending to be a good person, so I ought to offer something suitable.
“More.”
“More?”
“I want you to go farther, Kanna.”
The happiest future a Harvester can reach. This world is zero-sum. For one person to be happy, countless others have to be made unhappy, and if they die sunk in that unhappiness, their warmth is mine to take. When the cause sits, causally, with a Harvester, I can harvest it. It doesn’t seem to run truly from the first instant to the last, and there appears to be a limit of sorts—but then, where else is there?
I learned a great deal in Tisha’s time. When Tisha ordered bandits wiped out from the royal capital, I received the warmth those bandits carried no matter how far off they were. Kanna stands in that same kind of place. Therefore, as with Tisha—
“At the very least, you ought to keep your grandchildren beside you and fall asleep in peace.”
Great-grandchildren as well, if she can manage them. That would be better still.
Kanna blinked, trying to understand, and then she laughed, small.
“What is that supposed to be? Aren’t you looking much too far ahead?”
“To me, it’s soon. Kanna. It may be hard to tell, seeing me like this, but I’m a monster. I live a very, very long time.”
I said it knowing full well it would sound like something a good person says. I don’t even know whether I can die of old age. Forget aging—dying of an injury is impossible too. Whatever I do, I cannot cut my own life short.
“Right. Even if we call you a monster… are you actually a monster at all? Not something like a god? Really? All this time, you’ve been saving people.”
“I am neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. I often get complicated things wrong, and what I thought I was doing well has, more than once, turned out to be me crossing a rotten bridge. I merely live longer than other people.”
A wicked monster that endures by stripping the warmth from living things. I had no intention of saying that much. I cut it off exactly there, shaping the words so I would seem a kindly being beyond humankind and yet also as if I were belittling myself. Once they reached the point of thinking I was, in truth, someone extraordinary who simply did not wish to be called so, that would be just right.
Good people are easy to use. And in the end, isn’t a good person just a fool who hands you a profit? On top of that, I live a long time. People will turn eyes of anger and envy on long-lived me, and scramble however they can to feed on the byproducts. Cults lead their flocks by shaking trinkets that don’t exist at all, so set beside that, one might even call me refreshing. Of course there is a penalty harsher than anything a cult could lay on a person. Even so, sometimes someone has a reality they want changed badly enough to take it. Or they simply never think of it, the way people do at a gambling table.
“Every time I talk with you, I can feel you aren’t human.”
I am doing it on purpose. Rather than say so, I answered with a smile, and Kanna let out a small sigh.
“Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if it’s even right, ordering you around with a tilt of my chin.”
“Use the tip of your foot. Make use of me as much as you please. I give myself away without a second thought. So long as you haven’t died, I’ll remake your body into something better. At least once.”
“I get the feeling you’re taking the most precious thing as the price.”
I said nothing. She had not reached the truth, but perhaps she had brushed close beside it; Kanna’s expression stiffened, just a little. I seemed to be pressing her too hard. Better to turn her eyes with something easier to grasp.
“If this feels like too much of a burden… I have one request.”
“What is it?”
Days had passed, and still there was no word from the royal capital. Berne City kept sliding from bad to worse. The chance that my request had simply vanished was growing—or else a great many people had died there, and it had been waved off as nothing worth noting.
“Victoria sent a letter to her parents in Berne City, and the reply is strangely missing. I would like you to look into it.”
A power of the north casts its influence into the south. What will the royal house make of that? If the blocs are on good terms, it will be settled one way or another, but Kanna feels she is in my debt. Whatever the answer, she will have to bring it back to me. The mere fact that she has approached the matter of Berne City will remain.
And there is room, besides, for an excuse. To King Hypion I said that people were dying in the south. To Kanna I said that Victoria’s family could not be reached. On their face, two entirely different problems. They only happen to occupy the same place. So if I am suspected of having failed to trust the king—more precisely, of trying to drive them apart—I will have something to say for myself. I am not sure this will truly work. Still, what I have done until now ought to shore it up with a measure of persuasion.
“Victoria Vett. What are you to that girl? She isn’t family.”
Kanna looked at me with a face that genuinely did not understand, and asked. That? Ah. Of course. It was a touch of humanity I had put there on purpose, so I had assumed anyone who knew us would take me as falling inside the circle of Victoria’s family. In truth there had been no relation at all, and it seemed she knew as much. I would reinforce it a little, here.
“Victoria was the first person I contracted when I came to this world, and the name Bell was one Victoria gave me.”
Words that sound as though the bond runs deep. Parent and child are made by a chance of that same kind, so at a glance the two resemble each other. It looks as if we have tied ourselves together like family. Unlike a real family, there is no function here of carrying genes onward. Nothing of the sort. Yes. We are not family. We are truly nothing to each other. The name Bell can be thrown away whenever I like, and a first contractor is not special.
She had put her finger squarely on the facts, and I drew them off toward a denial, adding the human touch as if those people were no different from my own family. An easy weakness to understand. I couldn’t say what it would be once the age moved on a little further, but even in noble houses that live by survival of the fittest, family is generally taken to be one’s own side. And one’s own side is a weakness.
“So that’s why the two of you went around together so often.”
Kanna looked startled. Was it really so surprising? From everything until now, shouldn’t she have taken Victoria and me for the closest of friends? Victoria is a Harvester. That means she contracted with me. And during the Berne City affair we grew famous together and transferred into the Royal Academy side by side. It didn’t seem like something to be so surprised by. If you don’t know, you ought to ask.
“Is it strange?”
“Yes. It is. The girl called Victoria, maybe. But you carry yourself as if you stand apart from the world. I never thought you’d let your own business pass and come ask me to see to someone else’s.”
Mm. She was seeing it exactly. So that was why the surprise had been greater. My own business—she meant the time I had nearly been bullied for meeting the prince. That had truly not mattered to me in the slightest. If they attacked, I had meant to take it as an opportunity and make Harvesters of them. The skin improves. The flesh settles into just the right shape. People generally call that becoming beautiful, and there are many who would do anything if only they could be. So the jealous ones had been prospective customers, easily turned into Harvesters.
Anyway. She understood me too well. To wipe an understanding away, one needs a shock, and at a time like this, spelling it all out at length does less than saying it like so.
“Can it be compared to Maleficent?”
“No. Next to that, it’s nothing but girls being jealous. How do you set it beside some witch who’s lived for hundreds of years… So it was you who dealt with her, after all.”
Ah. Now that I thought of it, the story had been that the royal house handled it. But no one had told me, separately, not to speak the truth, so it ought to be fine. I had brought Maleficent’s things as bribe and snare both, and handed them over.
“That one killed people past the point where I could look away.”
Harvesters, of course, and those who would have become Harvesters later—she had ground them all down. Because of it, the capital was still a wreck. My aim now was the spread of Harvesters in a far-off future, and if that was the goal, it was better that people live happily and go on multiplying.
And why had I been trying to set Berne City off, again? Ah. Because I could obtain warmth. Hehe. A great deal of warmth. Besides, in the middle of a fight they would scrape together whatever was there, and among those things would be something capable of breaking the situation open. Morris was not strictly required in order to use it. Knowledge of that order I had already set inside the Harvesters’ heads. Need calls technology up.
In truth, unlike Brightshin, where there had been only the poor, the Harvesters made in Berne City were a mix of every station. If these people were living well, there was a strong chance the materials I had sent would vanish into empty air, because a mind in good health had never once drawn out the information I sent. But in Berne City now, every Harvester was at an extreme. The perfect moment for my knowledge to seep into their heads. And in fact, several of them were already tinkering away with clockwork machines. They had also taken a fair number of war machines that, the moment they entered Berne City, became coffins with people shut inside. Before long, weapons would appear that raised zones where magic could not be used and still brought terrible power to bear. When that time came, a great many things would change.
I was turning over the profit in binding Berne City to House Theodore when Kanna laughed under her breath, amused by something in the claim that I had killed her because she was too dangerous. We drank our tea in quiet, and the conversation came to an end.