Chapter 197
A thick reek of fish mingled with the sickly stench of rot, and the two of them spread a truly awful perfume through the air. I ran a long while through that smell, taking the drops that fell from the pitch-black sea overhead, and at last we crossed the cordon.
Victoria had cleared it long before us and was still pushing east. She did not actually know where she was going, though. She was hunting by the address written in the letter, and so she was drifting well wide of the real place. Follow the house numbers and you have to circle in from a long way off. Guess that it ought to be somewhere in the middle and cut in at random, and you land on an entirely different address, which only makes it worse. The streets themselves are a ruin, and the numbers are nailed up just as ruinously. If I allowed for Victoria losing her way and wandering, we would reach that address ahead of her.
That was when it happened.
"There! The fugitives!"
I was running with Polaris's hand in mine when someone far off caught sight of us and shouted. Her eyes found them before mine did. Two men in uniform. One clockwork machine shaped like a person. Set beside the clockwork device that had been killing people aboard the airship, this one looked far more formidable. The killer on the ship had been unmanned. This one had a rider.
It lit up at once and came charging toward us. The light climbed overhead, while the thrust poured out behind it, which struck me as odd. I am used to rockets. Thrust ought to push the opposite way from the light, or I cannot quite settle.
Polaris clicked her tongue, caught hold of me, and leapt with me in her arms. A single bound carried us up level with a two-story house.
Surely that was taking the laws of gravity a little too lightly.
She gave me no time to say so. A ring of light came flying in. Polaris drove her palm into the wall that blocked our escape.
KRAAANG!
Monstrous strength?
No. Even monstrous strength would have jarred her arm, and there was no shock in it at all. This was not raw force. It was mana.
The living things of this world spend mana even on the simple business of moving, so a great many of them get about in ways that look like magic. Some of the memories I carry say that a creature which burns a great deal of mana merely as fuel for its body is not, for that reason, a superior creature. To spend mana freely is to make good use of the mana of one's own habitat. In that habitat it grows powerful. The cost is that mana from anywhere else no longer agrees with the body, and the habitat itself shrinks. Should that home change too quickly, the creature cannot survive, and it vanishes. Strong on its own ground, fragile before a shifting world. There is a gain, and there is a loss.
Which is why the creatures that have spread the farthest are, oddly enough, the ones that barely use mana at all. Rabbits, for instance. What can live anywhere remains in greater numbers and travels farther, and so most ecosystems are thick with life that spends mana at the bare minimum. Use none whatsoever, though, and you lose on raw output. The things that have prospered are the ones that spend just a little mana on moving.
That is also why this world does not have cripples who cannot work magic. It has mages who can. The average creature simply cannot.
In any case, it means that someone born already strong, if she lays mana on top of that strength, can bring out a force that is genuinely appalling.
"Kh—!"
That, however, was before the higher magic arrived.
The air around us hardened until movement itself was hindered. And as if it had slipped the aim of that spell entirely, the clockwork machine came flying straight at us.
"Type One!"
"Purple Twilight Society! We don't think it's a Type Two. Restrain them and interrogate!"
One of the soldiers shouted it from behind.
Mm. Fair enough. Two young girls. Most of the Harvesters still left in Berne City belong to the Purple Twilight Society. A Type One, I would guess, means a Harvester who is purple, or whose skin is unusually white. From the way they spoke, a Type Two would be someone who uses supernatural powers. So if they see purple hair, it is hardly strange to call it the Purple Twilight Society on sight. And the direction Polaris and I had come from was the west. It would have been stranger if they had not read us that way.
"Polaris."
"What?"
She was moving as if she were forcing her way through sticky gel. I offered her another plan.
"Leave me. Go."
"What?"
She whipped around, startled. I put my mouth to her ear and spoke low.
"This is number thirty-nine. Follow that alley up and the numbers climb. You remember the address?"
I had said ninety-one a little while ago. She seemed to remember. She gave a small nod.
"Don't worry about me. Go on ahead."
"No."
Mm. Quite firm. Given everything she had done so far, it was not surprising. Right now, though, it was in the way. I had heard restrain and interrogate, which meant I was not about to be reduced to dust on the spot. In other words, that was a space I could move in easily.
Polaris tightened the arm around me. She was doing this because she had decided I was something she had to protect. So I turned the relationship over.
"Polaris. Do this, and you become the hostage."
I pared the words down on purpose, so that what she heard was this: you become a hostage, and that is inconvenient for me. She understood at once and looked at me as if I had struck her. Honestly, though, an ordinary schoolgirl is not going to beat a soldier who is already using magic. If Polaris were exceptional, perhaps. Looking through Kanna's memories, there is no such story. Which means she is an ordinary student. One against one might be another matter. There are three professionals here. Even at the same level, one against three is dangerous, and if the skill is not equal, it is a certain loss.
"Are you really all right?"
I watched the clockwork machine draw nearer and nodded. The strength in her arms eased, just a little, and I shoved hard and slipped out of them. Then I stepped, on purpose, into the steel hand that had been reaching for her.
Ghk—!
Was that not gripping rather too tightly?
First I had to buy Polaris time to run, so I provoked them.
"Are you planning to rebel against the royal house?"
"What?"
"My name is Belle. I am under the protection of the royal family, and I came because something about what is happening in Berne City felt wrong. Humans. What exactly are you doing here?"
That I am under royal protection is true. That I passed word of something feeling wrong in Berne City is also true. Set the two side by side, though, and it sounds as if the royal house sent me out to investigate.
"What are you talking about!"
"I have been in the papers more than once. I appeared alongside a member of the royal family. Are you going to tell me you don't know that? Whose protection are you under, exactly?"
I asked it as if I had every right, and the man riding the clockwork machine stopped. While I was at it, I gave an order.
"Let go."
He did not. Through the brass mask I could feel the rider of the clockwork exoskeleton hesitating. In that pause, Polaris left. On her way out she glanced up at the sea hanging in the sky, which suggested she was already calculating that, if it came to it, she would join Victoria and come back for me. Either way was fine with me.
Then the other two soldiers arrived.
"Marquis Gaston is already dead. So take me to whoever holds command directly beneath him."
They would not, of course. Who believes a little girl just because she says so? They would write it off as nonsense, or decide to treat it as nonsense. Even a truth becomes an accident if no one left alive knows it, doesn't it?
I was turning over the question of what shape I was about to be torn into when one of the soldiers who had come up beside me looked at me and caught his breath.
"Lady Belle?"
Oh dear. He knew me. I did not know him. It was not as if I had relatives among the Harvesters. Had he remembered my face from the papers?
"Soldier. Do you know who this girl is?"
"Yes, sir! During the disaster in Berne City, there was someone who healed every kind of wound, wasn't there? The royal family took her in themselves!"
Ah. So that is how an ordinary person has it. I could read the ranks in front of me well enough. The man who was a little older stood highest. Beneath him were the rider of the clockwork machine and the soldier.
Hm. This looked as if it might end far too ordinarily.
"Why would someone like that be here?"
I heard the senior man mutter it. It was not a question meant for me. Still, there was something I wanted to test, and this was a fine place to throw reason out the window.
"Because the royal airship was shot down. A clockwork machine inside it was killing people. It meant to seize the ship and bring it down. Then they attacked me from the ground. I barely escaped, and I reached Berne City."
I had put in at Nantes Harbor and watched, start to finish, as Marquis Gaston, the real master of this army, was murdered. I did not mention that part. I twisted the trail so that anyone who later tried to confirm my movements would get lost. The airship had flown itself out over the sea, so they might just as easily decide I had escaped at sea and washed up on the coast by some miracle.
And why do it this way? Simple harassment.
"Where is the person who will take responsibility?"
For the record, what that meant was bring me the one at the top. A soldier had survived back there. If word had reached the army, they would already know Marquis Gaston was dead. If it had not, they would know nothing at all.
"Captain, what do we do?"
The man who had recognized me asked his superior in a rush, looking thoroughly unsettled. As I thought, the one riding the clockwork machine was the junior.
"First..."
The man they called captain let out a long sigh.
Well. What would he choose?
"We take her back to base. Until we confirm she belongs to the royal house, watch her properly."
"Yes, sir!"
"Yes, sir!"
The young soldier and the rider saluted. The wording had been polished, but the meaning was plain enough. If she is lying, we will have to catch her and make her suffer, so keep an eye on her.
Huh. Less aggressive than I expected. I had thought that, faced with treason, they would be frantic to bury the evidence. The experiment would have to wait. I could always run it once we got over there.
And so they led me off, under a sky that leaked sea instead of rain, toward the place their captain had called a base. For the record, traveling in the grip of a clockwork hand was not what I would call a comfortable ride.