Chapter 198: Beauty and the Beast — 8
I headed east with the soldiers. We had to walk a long while before the water overhead finally disappeared.
Victoria's sea had covered a staggering expanse — wide enough that, with her in the east, it reached all the way to the south. Even after we left the city and got clear of that reach, we walked on for quite some time, out to a mountain standing a good distance away.
From the mountain's mouth onward, perhaps because an army had passed through, every tree lay snapped and sprawled across the ground, and the earth was scored with countless footprints. The marks of an army's passage. Following those marks, still clenched in a clockwork machine's hand, I was carried up to the mid-slope.
The moment we arrived, an old building came into view, half its paint flaked away, snarled together with temporary tents that could not have been standing long. Between them, soldiers soaked through like drowned rats showed here and there.
What caught the eye most were the clockwork machines — from units a little larger than a person, like the one that had brought me, all the way up to great machines some three times a person's size. They were not exoskeletons. They were the sort you boarded and operated, robots outright. There were hundreds of them. I could see why Marquis Gaston had been so confident he could stamp out a trifling disturbance in Berne City in short order. Had there been no zone where mana could not be used, it would already have been settled.
Where those clockwork machines were massed together, a peculiar building jutted up. There was also a place that looked like a supply depot for the machines, and a company name was stamped into it.
I remembered them as a company that dealt in programs. Seeing them furnish equipment like this, did they handle hardware as well? Or was this the equipment needed to alter the internal programs of the clockwork machines stationed here? I would know soon enough.
The man they called the captain went into what looked like a command post, leaving only the soldiers and the people mounted in the clockwork machines. And perhaps because I did not look so very different from a harvester, a sharp gaze came flying my way now and then from a distance.
Once I met the highest person here, I meant to take two facts in hand — that Marquis Gaston was already dead, and that they had attacked the royal family — and give them a thorough shake. Either one would be fatal for an army.
That was when it happened.
Out from inside, together with the man called the captain, came a man dressed not in a uniform but in clothes of extremely fine material. The instant he emerged, he kicked my chest with all his strength.
Thud!
Ah. A rib broke.
"Soldiers, hear me! Berne City has been wretchedly destroyed. And why? Because this witch was there! This bitch organized the protesters and plotted treason against the royal family! In other words, she is a rebel who deluded the world and deceived the people!"
Saying so, he kicked my chest and belly again and again. Mmm. From the way he was going about it, he did not seem to want me speaking.
He meant to brand me a rebel along with the rest, and to recast everything that had happened back in Berne City as the business of putting down a treasonous faction. Clever of him.
On top of that, he stepped in close and struck my cheek. It was a sharp enough hand that an ordinary person would already have been reeling. Judging by the calluses, this man knew how to use his strength quite well.
"Look! Look at this filthy color, this face! This is the face of the witch who massacred your own people and drove Berne City into hell!"
After saying that, he struck my jaw and gave me a concussion. Of course, I do not stop functioning over a thing like that. But when I let my body go slack and feigned unconsciousness, he came up before me, seized a handful of my hair, and hauled me upright. Then he struck my stomach again.
Hm? Was he trying to wake me?
So I put on a show of coming to, matching his intent, and the man drew my head close to his own and demanded an answer.
"Apologize, witch. You turned Berne City into hell and massacred countless people — admit the crime and beg forgiveness! If you have sinned, you ought to beg forgiveness! Speak! Now then, soldiers! This witch still does not know the sin she has committed! Then we shall simply have to inform her ourselves! All forces — assemble before me!"
At the man's command, people gathered one by one. Quite a few of them watched with delight, faces that said it served me right.
Once a fair audience had collected, the man holding me addressed the soldiers.
"Each of you, teach this witch the crimes she has committed!"
In other words, he was telling them to vent their grudges. One soldier cursed me, saying the lover who had lived in Berne City had been caught up in the protests and died, and that his family had died in the midst of the fighting as well. Then, one after another, they poured their grievances over me — comrades lost fighting the protesters, kin who had vanished in Berne City.
Skillful work. Was he gaslighting them because this was a gaslamp fantasy?
Put simply, you manufacture an easy target for resentment, smash it, and thereby bind the group together. First they cornered me with collective pressure and branded me a criminal. If I yielded to that pressure here and answered yes, the plan of the man holding me would be complete.
Right here, right now, the truth did not matter. The person denouncing me came to believe it himself as he spoke, and the people listening around him came to think I was wicked too. As this ran on in a chain, I became the witch. The madness of a crowd shatters an individual's sense of self with ease. Judgment dulls, and one simply follows what others do. This was a witch hunt in the proper sense of the term — the sense in which people grow happy by designating a victim and tormenting them.
From my faded memories, this happens without regard to era. There are, for example, inquisitors they call cyber wreckers. They divide the world into us and you: you are evil, and we are justice. And so we dispose of evil and set justice upright, then spend the whole process as entertainment.
In short, this man beating me was what people would call a cathartic scene of righteous correction. He was thrashing the criminal who had wrecked the city. Who would not enjoy that? Rather, if you failed to look as though you were enjoying it, you might end up suffering for yourself what was being done over there. Everyone denounced me fervently, at the top of their lungs.
And even if it later came out that none of it was true, they could slip free of it easily.
Or not. So what.
You went along with it too, so you are guilty of the same thing, are you not?
The funniest part was that this was still the better case. It meant that, at the very least, a minimal sociality was still functioning — the sense that doing justice feels pleasant, and doing wrong feels bad. If even that broke down, and people came to say you were a fool unless you did bad things, then it would truly fall into the pit.
Anyway.
The pressure to conform was a magnificent thing. A cruel trick that a person would find hard to endure.
Yes. If one were a person.
Right now my body was a wreck of bruises. My eyeballs had been pulped, and my teeth were all gone. There was not a single intact place left among my organs. The soldiers around me condemned me to a one, and this man tormented me relentlessly, trying to drag an answer out of my mouth.
Just one little girl.
He must have been thinking that once he trampled me, made a criminal of me, and had me executed, he could simply pretend afterward not to know a thing.
Heehee.
Already, I was connected.
Of course, if I only stole their warmth, they would become monsters. Do that, and there was no telling what they might do. They might even expose a weakness that would be truly fatal to me — because they would come to see just how horrific an act it is to steal warmth.
Yes. So I would not use that method. Instead, I would do this.
"Contact the royal family."
With nearly all my teeth gone, it came out closer to "cunnat th' woyal fam'ly," but it was not as if they could fail to grasp what I meant, was it?
Sure enough, the man flew into a rage and struck my cheek with every bit of strength he had. With a crunch, my jawbone shattered and my face caved in. But the surroundings went quiet, as if someone had just swallowed a mouthful of cold water.
No — my eardrums had burst. Of the senses left in my body, the only one still alive was touch. Through it, I could faintly feel the air vibrating. It was probably full of shouts and cries.
My words would not raise any great commotion. The madness of a crowd can bury a thing like that with ease. But a doubt had sunk its roots in. I had sown a seed.
I was dragged off somewhere. What I could faintly see was a dirt floor. The cold hand of the clockwork machine let go, a weightlessness came over me, and then I touched a cold floor. From the texture, it seemed to be canvas. Dark all around — was I inside a tent?
Belle's body was not in mortal danger from damage of this degree. In other words, it could return to normal at any time. I could have recovered whenever I wished, but I deliberately held myself in this state. Regenerating now would only sweep me up in the madness again. I needed a little more time.
During that time, I watched Polaris and Victoria meet. It was terribly interesting.
Polaris, having heard the address from me, was checking it when she came to stand at a barricade made by smashing every obstacle in the way. She paced back and forth around it several times before realizing that Victoria's house had originally stood in the very middle of that line. Victoria approached Polaris, who had sunk down with a blank, devastated face. She had been checking the numbers on her own way there, so she understood why Polaris was sitting in that spot.
The sea that had been falling, drop by drop, came to a complete stop. Polaris stared at Victoria, goosebumps risen on her face.
Victoria walked up to her without a word. Polaris kept looking at that face, then sprang up in a hurry and told her I had been taken. Victoria regarded her with an extremely strange expression, and asked back how I could possibly still be alive when only my hands had remained.
Huh? No — had Victoria not watched me regenerate any number of times?
No. Well. If the head or the body had still been there, perhaps. But it was not strange to think regeneration would be difficult when only the ends of the limbs remained.
Even so, why was this turning into a story about Polaris seeing hallucinations? And why were Polaris's eyes wavering too, as if she were wondering whether that was really it? It was strange, was it not, that she could have escaped alone earlier if I had not been there!
Pale-faced, Polaris stammered that they ought to search the area first — that if no one was inside, then I must have fled somewhere else — that they should check, and if I was not there, go back.
Excuse me? And what about me?
No, it was not as if they particularly needed to come. But I was not dead, was I?
Victoria, brimming with killing intent, seemed likely to ignore what Polaris had said. Surprisingly, though, she cleared away the wreckage at the bottom. A wordless agreement, then: check, and if I was not there, go back. Even if Maurice and Beatrice had died inside, the corpses would already have been cleared away. Neither of them was in any state to think that logically. Both of them.
The two dug through the wreckage, confirmed there was nothing like a corpse underneath, and both came to a stop where they stood, wearing the faces of people who had lost their way.