Beauty and the Beast - 10
Right now, Berne City holds three powers.
First, an army that wears the name of the Berne City Defense Force, though every soul in the city takes it for Marquis Gaston's private soldiers. Second, the Purple Twilight Society — citizens of Berne City who have forgotten what they first took to the streets to demand. And third, Victoria.
That Victoria alone is enough to constitute a faction is absurd. She is genuinely strong, and yet, looking through Maleficent's memories, it is difficult to imagine her becoming invincible on this power. Because she does not use mana, those memories say, she is far too weak for the strength she has.
Magic in this world has developed heavily along physical lines, but curses still exist, plain as day. The easiest way to explain them is this: a technique with no projectile. If you cannot answer it, you must guard your own body with the homeostasis of your mana. Curses are not Maleficent's specialty. They are, surprisingly, one of the ordinary arts. Even the soldiers' memories turn up plenty of similar material, and there is even a recollection that, among monsters that wield mana, a great many wield curses. Protective devices have developed considerably for that reason, and people have largely stopped laying curses on one another.
The army at Nantes Harbor was slaughtered without managing so much as a resistance because no one knew precisely who was steering the sea. By the time they understood their enemy, it was already too late. Had they realized a little sooner that Victoria was that enemy, they could have answered her — even if it meant stabbing one another to death. So the memories claim. It sounds like an excuse, which is funny.
And in the end, four factions will gather here. The royal army is moving.
When I first arrived in the capital, I treated soldiers waiting to die in the hospital at the military base, and they returned to the ranks in proper order. That means I can tell when the royal army moves. Whether because they looked into an airship that ought to have come back long ago and never did, they have grasped that something is happening in Berne City, and they have begun to stir.
The third world does not move information quickly, not the way the hyperconnected age does in my faded memories. There are methods of contact that use mana, of course, but the difficulty climbs sharply with distance, so the basic means of communication in this era is the letter. With television in the world, you would think things needn't be so slow — and astonishingly, they say television is the easier of the two, because it is not two-way communication but only one-way. I don't understand it. The memories insist, though, so I suppose that is simply how it is.
Accordingly, they are preparing to set out for Berne City. Among the Harvesters, no one sits high enough to hear every piece of information, but there are those placed where they can grasp the general drift. Looking through them, the kingdom had already been suspicious that something was wrong in Berne City. It was already running intelligence work. Information is scattered in every direction, and even gathered up it hardly says anything coherent. If they know, shouldn't they deal with it quickly?
But when I check a few memories that are shining, they say the kingdom has to do it this way. Better to let the matter grow and bring a raised sword down heavily enough to cut every enemy apart than to rush out in a fluster before anything has happened and let several slip away. Daegon's memory shines as well, saying that for now the former is still the cheaper course — a method you adopt once society is a little more connected, and handling a thing in advance has become easier and less costly than handling it afterward. Nationalism, socialism, and any number of other doctrines shine alongside it, so I suppose the meaning is that culture has to catch up. There is also a memory that they are waiting for the incident to swell until it furnishes them a cause.
If it may come to erasing an entire city, then it must be clear enough that anyone, thinking it over, would say the king was right. Isn't a king precisely the sort of person who can manufacture that?
Ah. Right.
Tisha's memory shines. Do it that way, and a crack forms, and someday that crack brings the kingdom down. So you must lift a blade of justice that anyone can see is righteous, and strike your opponent with it. Only then will people follow. Another king's memory shines as well. Erasing a truth once it has been born is tremendously hard. Rather than making the truth cease to exist, you scatter countless false truths until people give up on finding which one is real. And once the faculty for judging truth has broken down, that, they say, is when you can truly do as you please.
No — my thoughts have drifted somewhere strange.
Anyway. At present the royal army seems content to wait, however many people die, until the situation is cooked to just the right turn. People dying is, rather, what lets them take it up as a reason. In other words, they will appear after the protesters and Berne City's army have already collided. I don't know whether the kingdom is aware that three great corporations stand at Marquis Gaston's back. Even if it is, that knowledge does not seem to have filtered down to the level the Harvesters can see. I truly cannot tell how far their knowing goes. They are ready to move at any moment, all the same.
Meanwhile the protesters are advancing east, and Victoria and Polaris are heading east as well. As for here, I have no idea what is happening. Touch is the only sense I still properly have, so I cannot tell — though there is, at least, the feeling of being shut in somewhere. Even so, I do not regenerate at once. I wait until the fervor raised by the man who denounced me as a witch and beat me has cooled. Regenerate now, and they will only bind me all the more strictly. People need time to take information in. One or two of them, at least. They need only hear what I said — calling on the royal house to the very end — and begin to doubt. If they don't, I will have to use some other method.
Thinking that, I waited a long while for the moment. Then something touched my body. Familiar fingers of cold steel: a clockwork machine had taken hold of me.
Clank. Clank.
The vibration went on without end as it walked, so it was carrying me somewhere. If even a single Harvester had been here, I could have known what was happening around me. A shame, but you cannot wish for what is not there. It would be nice, of course, if I could regenerate only my ears, but how does one even do that? I cannot manage a setting so fine.
Still, it isn't as if I cannot guess the reason. Victoria is coming this way. This place is a mountainside, and above Victoria hangs an enormous sea. If she reaches the mountain as things stand, there is a good chance she will drown. Moving the base is hardly strange.
I waited a long time, feeling cold steel and the rocking vibration. Checked through a Harvester's eyes, the hour should still have been sunset. But because of the sea floating upside down in the sky, all of Berne City was already darker than night. Somewhere in the midst of it the cold steel vanished, and I was laid on stiff waterproof canvas. Perhaps because I was not so different from a lump of meat, the flesh was screaming. The body shouted that it would die if this went on, but so what — it is fine if the flesh dies. So long as it does not evaporate, I can restore it easily. Perhaps, if even some of the cells inside are still alive, that counts as living, and that is why I am able to remain within it.
The army was carrying me somewhere. Victoria and Polaris were following the tracks the soldiers had left across the ground, and the Purple Twilight Society, farther behind, had found those tracks and was coming after them as well. Clear traces ran from the defensive line all the way to the mountain. There was no chance of losing the way.
Time passed, and at last Victoria and Polaris caught sight of the army marching hard in the distance.
"Enemy!"
Put another way, the two of them had drawn close enough that the other side could find them as well. Of course. A rear unit would have been left behind. But the one who shouted at the sight of Victoria and Polaris died on the spot a moment later, because Polaris tore a tree out of the ground and threw it that way, and the one it struck was crushed with a sickening sound.
Whoa. Stronger, it seems, than the Polaris in my memories. I know that becoming a Harvester raises the performance of the flesh, but even so, isn't there a limit? Where did action and reaction go? That small body withstood an impact like that?
Now each side knew the other for an enemy. A battle ought to have broken out. Nothing of the sort happened. Just as Victoria and Polaris had planned on the way here, the sky began, little by little, to descend.
The plan was simple. Lower the surface of the water; let Polaris raise a commotion; Victoria slips inside and finds me. Once I am found, press in on the surroundings with water, slowly, and run. That was the operation, and the effect was splendid. As the sea, sloshing upside down, came slowly down, truly everything screamed. Each time the mountain sank it shattered and ground itself apart, and the howls of every living thing crying out in terror spread in all directions. Birds that had flung themselves into the sky drove straight into the water's surface, offered up a warmth no larger than a grain of millet, and were gone.
The army was thrown into utter panic. The Purple Twilight Society, coming up behind, stopped where it stood, flattened itself to the ground, and screamed. This is no natural disaster. It is a nightmare.
But once the surface had come down somewhat near the ground, the water descended no further. Victoria, having made a lid of it so that looking down from any great height would be difficult, slipped carefully into the brush and crawled toward the army. Polaris, rather than following her, tore up stones and trees at random and hurled them toward a spot a little removed from where she was. Overhead there was a field of instant death — touch it, and you were sucked in and killed — and perhaps because of that, the army, army though it was, milled about in helpless confusion. And Victoria, who had made that chaos on purpose, at last found me among the soldiers.
Whoa. Seen in person, it was even more horrific. The body had swollen like a balloon, and a liquid that looked like pus dripped from it. Maybe because the skin was white, the marks of fists stood out with terrible clarity on the bloated flesh. Dripping blood and fluids of no identifiable kind, it hung in the clockwork machine's hand like an object.
"Bell, you're all right, aren't you?"
Victoria murmured it quietly. It was not something she was saying to herself, and it was not something that had slipped out unthinking. It was a question asked in the certainty that I would hear it. While I was wondering whether I ought to ignore it — it was a distance at which I could not hear, after all — the pain left the body, pleasure-chemicals poured from the head, and then they cut off all at once.
Ah. This one's dead. Touch pulls sharply away as well.
But the lead has arrived, so it is about time I moved. I pressed down on reality and made it back into my original body.
Krrk—krrk—CRACK!
The clockwork machine gripping me bent the wrong way, and I was in exactly the same state as when I had come out this morning. In an instant, several hundred gazes locked onto me.
This is the moment. The moment to see what has become of the seeds I sowed.
I do not lie. In context I am not asking whether they are the traitors, but erase the context and it is simply a third party's question. Deceiving them that way, I swept my eyes over the people lost in confusion and waved toward Victoria, who was coming to me.