Chapter 195
Nothing stands in Victoria's way anymore.
She cuts straight across the city. For a moment I thought she was making for the center, but no—she's bound for the east, or so I guess.
The address on the letter was in the eastern part of the city. Checking it against what I remember of the Harvesters, the east is where the common folk live, one of the four layers: the rich, the middle class, the commoners, and the poor.
High-density buildings crowd in on every side, and the wider streets at least have commercial buildings along them. Modernization must have standardized the architecture all at once; nearly identical structures line the roads as they sprawl out in a tangled mess. They seem to have thrown the buildings up in bulk and never planned the streets at all. Even so, the whole of it stretches in a single direction.
East. Upstream.
A great river runs from east to west, and the city has been flung outward at random as it climbs against that current.
To put the geography simply: take the site of what used to be Berne City's city hall as your mark, and a river flows to the north. The west is the old downtown, slummed over now, where the poor and the commoners live. The south belongs to people of the middle class and above. Or belonged to them.
Victoria is from the south. Beatrice is the Berne City branch manager of a fairly large firm, and until Morris quit, he was a researcher at a subsidiary of Gun and Lepeu Company, one of the great conglomerates.
Anyway.
The east, last of all, is a residential district that swelled as people drawn by Berne City's lights came up to the capital with nothing but hope, found work, and settled. Morris and Beatrice said they had moved out that way. Victoria seems to be heading there.
I share everything she sees and feels, and yet I can't tell what she's thinking. It's a little frustrating.
Meanwhile, among Berne City's Harvesters, the ones who had held power began to grumble the instant Victoria vanished from sight. She was a witch playing the good child, nothing like the papers had said. She was human garbage, and the royal family must have known as much. Everything that comes out of the press is a lie. Words of that sort spilled from them. They poured speech out in a spasm, like people frantically trying to shake filth off their own reputations—as if they themselves would be in danger unless they could tear Victoria down somehow.
In a moment the square was steeped in curses.
That was when it happened.
Kreeee—krik.
At the sound of steel warping, every face turned upward. A lightning rod rising the full height of a building had touched the sea hanging upside down in the sky, and was being torn away. Unlike Nantes, where the sea had sunk lower than the ceiling of a first-floor building, this sea hangs considerably high. Even so, anything that juts up like a lightning rod had reached it.
The way the Harvesters' hearts pound then is honestly hilarious. It is a calamity, pure and simple—especially given that Victoria didn't do it on purpose.
But the fear born of it didn't last. Perhaps to forget they were afraid, they shouted even harder. The more frightened a dog is, the louder it barks, and their words grew worse and worse. Somewhere along the way the denunciations turned into talk of doing away with her. The story twisted until Victoria herself was the source of everything now unfolding.
When someone with real malice stirs a crowd, it warps with uncanny speed. I turn every Harvester's gaze on that person. He isn't even hurrying. He just sidles along, slipping in one extra remark. Unless a Harvester concentrates very hard, they can't make out what he's saying. It isn't even loud. Like a plague, wherever he passes, people take up his words and do nothing but repeat them.
Could there be something like a brainwashing spell?
No. There isn't. Magic still can't be used in Berne City. A few Harvesters are standing where the power units have been gathered. From their talk, once proper mana increases past a certain amount, only corrupted mana remains, so they adjusted the machines to keep running until they malfunctioned, and then shut down.
Of course.
Among the Harvesters there were quite a few, like Morris, who knew how to handle clockwork. Half of those skilled enough to work in a laboratory, or to teach, are already dead, and yet things are somehow still moving. Anyone who wondered what was wrong with the clockwork machines and pointed it out was assassinated, every last one of them. It stopped only when the protests intensified and some of Berne City's residents began fleeing the city.
Until now I didn't understand why. Now I do.
Back then Marquis Gaston pulled back the assassins who, from the inside, had been killing the intellectuals branded as protest ringleaders. He meant to drive the protesters into the city and kill them all. If a space where mana could not be used had opened, and if no one inside that space could use a supernatural power, Gaston would have succeeded. Or even if mana could still be used, the army he commands is strong. Armed with clockwork equipment, they would have put the city down cleanly.
But the Harvesters were the cause, and he failed. The companies threatened that they would not pay him if things went on like this. Pressed, he set up a command post in Nantes and began attacking the city in earnest. And so, sealed inside the jar called Berne City, people broke one by one.
Ah. I see.
Now I understand why the one I take for a company man is driving the Purple Twilight Society toward violence. And I understand that their plan has already succeeded in all but name.
Treason. In a monarchy, there isn't a fool alive who doesn't know what treason means. Even if Gaston fails, they have manufactured a reason that leaves no choice but to hunt every survivor down and kill them, so that no one from Berne City can ever set foot in this country again. Whatever a traitor says will be buried. If anything, they will try to leave not a word of it behind.
Clever. But it's a fundamental flaw, so sooner or later it will happen in another city too. I don't understand why they would go this far to stop it. Or perhaps they simply aren't thinking on that scale.
Once people grow drunk on power, they do astonishingly foolish things. Faded memories are enough to show it: a man who was president of a great nation saying filthy things unsuited to the office, or the head of a vast corporation running wild on social media. Sociability is something you build in order to survive opponents capable of striking you in the head. If no one can strike you, it collapses on its own, because it isn't needed. Thinking burns a great many calories. In other words, it hurts. And the human body dislikes anything that costs too many calories. Skip even a little exercise, for instance, and muscle vanishes from the body at a startling speed.
Thought is the same. Weighing this and that and restraining yourself is far harder than simply doing as you please—not in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of calories spent. An ordinary person who behaves that way is checked by violence. Stand above that violence, and there is no reason to mend yourself. With no threat to your life, you have no need to think. Looked at logically, it's strange. Looked at biologically, it isn't.
Do you know what that means? It means I was right. Give a person power, and they will kill another person without a second thought. Victoria, and any number of other Harvesters, are showing me as much. From now on, when I make Harvesters, it would be better to take people driven into even more extreme circumstances, so their abilities are forced to manifest.
Hehe.
While I was laying plans for the future like that, dawn began to break, little by little, far away. The moment the sun rose, the Harvesters scurried into the buildings like insects that live indoors, because enormous stones and metal shells were flying in from a long way off.
For the record, there is no gunpowder in the metal shells. They are solid metal, nothing more. Even if mana has warped into something strange, physical laws such as inertia still hold, so they are firing stone and metal from a distance. Set beside a bomb the destructive power is small, but an object accelerated to a monstrous speed by magic has force enough to shave the city away, little by little. So after the soldiers who came inside were wiped out, they surrounded the zone where mana cannot be used and pounded it with bombardment from beyond its edge.
But today, no magic comes flying.
Someone who survived Nantes, where Marquis Gaston's command post stood, must have gotten word out. A great deal of warmth was born in Nantes, but that doesn't mean everyone there was slaughtered. The Harvesters lucky enough to live through it don't know that what happened was a person's doing. When I listen, through a Harvester's sight, to what the survivors are saying, Victoria's name never comes up. On top of the fact that a kill order was given against the protesters, a story has spread that the god of the sea, enraged, sent down divine punishment. That the sea descended from the sky. Not one person says a human did it. Most of the protesters and the soldiers were vaporized or knocked senseless by the bombardment then, and they don't seem to know what came after. Or they know, and simply aren't saying.
"Nnngh... is it morning already? Until I have to leave for school—haaah—how much time is left?"
Polaris's gaze climbs up from the bed. She stretches. By the clock it's still dawn, with quite a while left before school. She's up early.
I woke my body and got up as well.
"It's morning."
"Who? Huh? Belle? What is this—this isn't the blanket I was under... oh."
Sleep seems to have left her completely. With a dazed look, she takes in me and the room.
"This place is..."
"Victoria's house. This is the guest room."
"Ah. Yeah. Right."
Judging by the luggage still inside, they haven't fully moved out. Most of what Victoria's family used is still here, just as it was. Morris and Beatrice must have sent the letter after taking refuge in the east. So where they are right now, there isn't a whisper.
Victoria is checking the address and steadily making for the place the letter came from, so I'll be able to see that side of it too.
I got up and took the blanket. I folded it quickly, put the room back as it had been, and led Polaris—still standing in a corner, looking utterly stunned—to the bathroom. The water wasn't running, but I gave reality a light knead, drew water out, washed the child in a hurry, and went down to the kitchen.
Ah. Right. There were no ingredients.
"The infrastructure's still alive..."
Polaris, trailing after me, murmurs it. It isn't alive. I kneaded reality. Unlike the second world, it warped more lightly than I expected. There, drawing water out split things with cracks. Here, nothing of the sort. Whether that's a difference between worlds, or because this is a place where water was meant to come out, or because I've gotten better, I couldn't say. But if it works, then we're good.
So I sat Polaris at the table, took warm bread from a heater something like a microwave, and took fruit juice from the refrigerator. At first I tried for milk, but reality was strangely hard, and it was difficult. Forcing it felt as if it would crack, so I went with fruit juice instead, and it changed. If a thing is plausible enough, does it change easily? Is that what it means?
I set them on the table.
"This is all?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Still. Bread and juice."
Polaris tears the bread, puts it in her mouth, and complains. Then she stops mid-word, and her face goes deathly pale. Huh? From Polaris's senses, it isn't that she's choking.
"Yesterday, this place was picked clean... mm. Right. I should be grateful even for this."
Wearing the look of someone closing their eyes to something frightening, Polaris eats in silence. I eat a little something light as well, and look outside through Victoria's eyes.
Right now Victoria stands before a blockade the army has thrown up, worrying over how to break through. Once breakfast is finished, I ought to head that way.