Chapter 191
The sky was falling.
There was no other way to put it. Look up, and a darkness thicker than pitch heaved and rolled overhead. Lift a light into it, and the water glinted and lapped, as if you were staring down at a night sea.
In nature, water falls. Now every drop under heaven was being dragged upward, spreading in all directions until it sheeted across the sky.
To the east, the mountains, struck slantwise by an orange dusk, showed more than half their bulk already sunk beneath the water. To the west, the sea had bared black mud. The water that ought to have filled that place was being hauled into the sky, and the bottom kept showing itself, more and more. It looked like the mouth of hell out of some old myth, and no one so much as considered going near it.
Turn your eyes the other way.
North, climb as you might, there was only sea. South, a great river barred the road. Except the river was no longer there. Run hard enough, and you could reach Berne City — but the water overhead had shut out every scrap of light from the sky, so that way too was nothing but plain dark. For all practical purposes, it was sealed. Common sense insisted a river must still be flowing there. It was already late evening. With the faint light of the sky swallowed by the sea and the ground itself invisible, who would find the courage to cross?
There was nowhere left to run.
And the surface of the water was slowly descending from the sky toward the earth.
Everyone watched it, blank. Fighting no longer meant anything. The soldiers here, the citizens who had been resisting — all of them lifted their heads and stared up at the water.
Some knew how to swim, and fooled themselves into thinking that if it came down this slowly, they could still get away. But the moment the tip of the highest spire slipped under and let out a sick, grinding shriek as it crumpled, they threw that thought away at once.
A crushing.
This was not simply water hanging in the air. Almost no one understood what it was. What they did understand, with perfect clarity, was that there was nowhere left to flee. Touch that water, and you died. That much, at least, was certain.
There was no particular mana in it. The world was suffocatingly still — no mana, and an air so viciously quiet it had gone bone-dry. So no one knew the culprit. No: from the start, no one believed a human being could do this. Which meant no one could reach the conclusion that killing whoever was making it might let them live.
So what do people do?
A flash. Then a beam that had been melting the ground leapt from the earth toward the water and shot into the sky. They did not know why the water was floating, but if it was only water, surely it could be boiled away. Thinking that, they attacked the thing in front of their eyes. Simple. Intuitive.
But water is heavier than anyone thinks, and it can hold an appalling amount of heat. The beam vanished before it had gone far. And if there is a force that can force evaporated vapor back into liquid, then damage from heat might as well not exist. The disturbed surface settled at once, as if nothing had happened.
No. It did not merely settle.
A roar. As if the surface had been built of countless blocks, the wall of water overhead dropped straight down on the place the light had come from and stamped it flat. Craft Nine, the crystallization of magical science that had stood there, was torn apart and gone in an instant, crushed under sheer mass.
A small port, some distance from Berne City.
The people in this town denied that what was happening could possibly be real. Denying reality did not make the water covering the sky disappear. If anything, it came down from above by degrees, like laying wet sheets of tissue one by one over a breathing mouth. Or else the land itself was sinking.
The moment they understood it could kill them, people lashed out at the sky in a fit — because they were terrified, because everyone else was doing it, because hitting that water might, somehow, let them live. Magic and hurled objects rose from every corner. Light, heat, fire, ice, stone, steel, arrows, bullets, flame, bricks: every attack anyone could imagine shot upward. To claw their way clear of dying, they poured magic like a seizure.
But just as a single drop of oil leaves no mark on the sea, the magic that fell into the water was swallowed back into darkness, as if it had never been. The spells had brightened the surroundings for a moment, so when every one of them cut off, the dark looked darker still. With that darkness, despair and terror bored into the heart.
In many societies a river is a symbol of death. That is how cruelly, across long ages, floods have taken human lives. Those looking up at the sky fell into despair, and the despair shattered their minds.
Fools say that in extremity a person's true nature comes out. In extremity, all that flies in every direction is the wreckage of a broken mind. Smash a little glass bottle with a hammer and call the shards its original form, and you are either an idiot or an artist.
Some prayed blindly into empty air. Some shoved the blame onto others — this is your fault. Some tried, with whatever they had on them, to build something that might get them out alive. Some simply despaired, sank to the ground, and waited to die. All kinds. Most of them stood there clutching minds shattered like glass. Even if despair ran from their hands like blood, letting go would only mean going mad.
A creak. A groan.
The water had passed the second story. Now the buildings were being uprooted by the pressure drawing them in, dragged up toward the surface. On every side, more and more people fell into panic. Every structure that might have held them was hauled into the sky and crushed, and the sky hung low enough to choke. Overhead lay a sea of death. Touch it, and you drowned where you stood.
A fear that might be called claustrophobia spread, and those who could not bear waiting to die — who could not overcome the despair — leapt into the sea just to be done with it.
Dying was absurdly simple. Jump, and your head went under at once, and the pressure burst it. Instant death. Nor did the pressure stop there. It dragged the body that had stood on the ground up after the head. Like a ship in the last moments before it sank, the village went under by degrees.
And in the middle of that village, one girl stood on a broken mind.
Victoria Vett.
However full her head was with rage, if she could not think coldly here and now, she would already have died at Daegon's forward base. She had thought this through with a cold head, and she was doing it because it had to be done.
She had heard from Polaris everything that had happened. They had come by airship, and a clockwork machine had killed people — worse, someone had struck with a powerful weapon to bring the airship down. She had the report that people trying to enter Berne City were being held at this port, demonstrating, begging to be let in. And just now she had seen all of it: soldiers killing the protesters.
So, thinking coldly, the first thing was to make this place safe. After that, find out what was happening in Berne City, and somehow get back to the house where her family waited. She set the order without hesitation.
When the water rose a little above Victoria's head, she stopped it. Among girls her height was average, but set beside a grown man she was small. Leave the water at about this height, and the enemy's movements would be hampered. So she did.
Judging that she had secured a measure of safety, Victoria started toward the place where the protesters had been gathered.
The barbed wire was wrecked. A few soldiers clutched their heads and shook. Some had driven their own weapons into their skulls and died. Others had their eyes shut, trembling, praying. Victoria checked the line the soldiers had drawn, and dropped the water.
The defensive line vanished underwater. Everything that went in shrank in an instant and flew apart. Having cleared the people the way one flushes a toilet, Victoria walked on. It was far too late to look at the dead and feel shock or grief. Her anger was already at the crown of her head.
Instead she brought pillars of water down around the buildings and raised walls so that no one could escape. Going in, whenever there was a person, she dropped a pillar on them. Most things beneath a water pillar cannot withstand the difference in pressure, and they shatter. Like simple labor, killing the low-ranking soldiers as she went, she entered a building whose second floor and everything above it had been torn clean away.
Inside, Victoria looked up. The ceiling was still there. That would leave a gap when she attacked, so she lowered the water a little and ripped away the second-floor floor — the first floor's ceiling.
A thin scream rang from within.
Victoria did not walk toward it. From the entrance she carefully surveyed the interior. She could reduce everyone here to scraps of cells in an instant, but she searched with care, one nearest room at a time. She left the great central passage as it was and worked along the corridors branching left and right, turning the rooms over one by one.
What met her eyes was mostly paper strewn in disorder, and spent weapons lying everywhere. She picked up the papers and skimmed them one by one. She lifted the weapons one by one and checked, roughly, how they worked. Having searched the surroundings that way, she moved carefully deeper in.
She set her back to the wall beside the large door farther inside and pushed it, just a little.
"G-gaaah—protect me!"
Someone inside was shouting. Hearing the murmur and the scuff of feet, Victoria carefully put distance between herself and the passage. She readied a water pillar to seal the entrance at any moment, held her breath, and waited. The instant a soldier burst out, she blocked the space behind the door with the pillar.
One man. The moment he realized he was cut off, he understood he had taken the bait — but the way back was already sealed. So he swung a gun-like weapon, built on a power unit that turned mana into kinetic energy, and aimed it in every direction. Then he found a girl, body lowered, looking his way.
Has she come, in a mess like this, to beg for help? That was what he decided, and he slowly lowered the muzzle.
He judged wrong. The price of it fell on him.
Thin streams of water came down from every side and wound around the soldier like snakes. He was not dragged by pressure the way the others had been, but a mass of water covered his face, and he could not even scream as he was hauled into the air. He thrashed for a long while. When the oxygen ran out, he went limp. The water did not stop. It rode his airway and filled his lungs.
Only then did Victoria lower him to the floor and search the body. She checked the weapon he had used, and drove streams of water through the protective gear he wore, testing it. After that she took out something that could identify him, and her brow furrowed. Set it beside what she had found in the scattered documents — a soldier of a marquis's house — and an outline appeared.
"Marquis Gaston? Mayor of Berne City — and you're the one who did that to it?"
The target was set. Victoria went straight into the room.
"A—a wench?"
Two men who looked like guards. One woman. And in the middle of them, a man holding a glittering sword, hunched in on himself. He was large to begin with, with a manly face, but crouched as he was, he looked thoroughly wretched.
"Marquis Gaston. You're the one who sealed Berne City?"
"This wench knows who I am, and she still talks to me like—"
When you negotiate, do it with your head high. And if you must, a light threat does no harm. Recalling Beatrice's words, Victoria drew a square pillar of water down from the surface onto the spot where the foremost soldier stood.
There was no time even to scream. The soldier at the front was sucked into the pillar and, before everyone's eyes, crushed and gone.
"I'll ask once more. Gaston. Right now, you've got two refusals left. That's all."
She said it while looking at the man and the woman who remained on either side.
A negotiation is safest, Beatrice had taught her, once you have cut off all four limbs, shoved the head into the mud, and hauled it up by the hair. Victoria did exactly that. Of course Beatrice had meant it as bringing an interest, or a weakness, that the other side could not look away from, and bargaining with that. But Victoria, who took after her father and had more aptitude for the sciences than for language, took the words literally.
This was less a negotiation than a threat.
"Tell me why you sealed Berne City."
What was certain was that she had given everyone in the room a reason to answer.