Chapter 211
It's the weekend. On an ordinary day I would have spent the hours shut in my room, keeping an eye on how the Harvesters were getting on. Today, that isn't possible. The royal court has summoned me.
I live entirely dependent on them, so I have no right to refuse. I said I would come, and they dressed me in clothes far finer than anything I usually wear. They even laid a light touch of makeup across my face.
Hm? They didn't do this the last time I went to see the king. What is going on? Isn't this rather too much?
Polaris and Kanna. I hold the memories of those young ladies of the Barrington marquisate and the Theodore duchy, so now I know the worth of the clothes on me, the perfume, every ornament they have hung about me. This is attire meant for a place that is stiff, and thoroughly official.
What in the world is happening at court?
Still turning it over, I followed the person sent to fetch me and set out for the palace.
One amusing thing. It wasn't a horse that came, but a carriage drawn by some unidentified bipedal creature. Its light is much like that of the horses in this world.
Memories spill through my head, insisting that the horses here differ from the horses in my faded recollections in this particular and that. To my eyes, they are the same thing. The reason I can't compare their light is that I don't know how much light the living things of that faded world ever possessed. I have never actually seen a horse, either.
Even looking at people on television, I see no light at all, so I will probably never know. If I could return to the world where I was born, perhaps—but that would be difficult.
Not a single world excepted: every world I have confirmed through the Harvesters possessed some special power, whether they called it mana, qi, or spiritual energy, whatever the name. Even the world where humans were packed full of machinery and managed by machines was the same. And above all, the era...
Thinking of a place I can never go back to, I rode the carriage in through the gates of the royal castle.
Once inside, someone came to find me who had never once introduced herself, yet who occupied what could only be called the head maid's place. Address her as head maid and she will not answer; three people beneath her will. Mistaking that would be a serious matter.
A woman of considerable years slipped quietly in and inspected my clothes with meticulous care. Strip the feeling away and it looks as though she is merely setting the outfit to rights, but the emotion on her face says otherwise. She went back and forth over it. Did you do this properly? Yes. You did. And when she came out at last to announce that the preparations were finished, satisfaction showed on her face. The people at the residence where I live must all be very skilled.
She left, and a man in a knight's uniform came in. A young man only just come of age. The insignia on his dress uniform, though, made plain that he was no ordinary person. Talent turns up everywhere.
He looked at me with curiosity and wariness tangled together, and offered a greeting. Then, describing himself in an extremely long chain of words, he said the king had summoned me and told me to follow. So I did.
His eyes went to my hands, my thighs, my stomach, my arms. Memory gleams to tell me it wasn't anything untoward—he was checking whether I had a weapon hidden. I had thought the royal house was treating me with a strange degree of indulgence. Seeing this, are they suspicious of me properly after all?
The trouble is that, so far, there has been nothing. Not a word of what is happening at court just now, nor of where I am being taken.
But I know. No—the most accurate thing to say is that I didn't know until now, and that I have just come to know.
The second princess, Aurora. At this very moment she is being told to prepare herself, because she is to meet distinguished guests from the various foreign countries. In other words, I heard, and was made ready, sooner than the princess.
Hm? Is that right? No—my station is low, so of course I am the one who arrives first. Those with power normally appear later. You do not wait yourself. You make the other party wait. That is one of the ways of displaying your own authority.
Of course, you might be called an idiot who can't keep a single appointment. The people who do this, though, have the power to ignore talk of that sort. In short, they are the kind who can brazen it out: if you don't like it, go home.
So all I have to do is go ahead and be ready. Taking it that way, I follow the knight.
He is a man who appeared now and then in Princess Aurora's memories. He rose to a high place while still young, and his birth is as good as that rise would suggest. Unless he goes off to some war and his body is ruined, he is unlikely to become a Harvester. Or else, grown old and sick, begging for a new life?
Making his acquaintance in advance, against that day, wouldn't be a bad thing. Might I meet him in about eighty years? But I'm not moving yet. There are far too many uncertainties.
However boldly I have resolved to act, charging blindly into a fog where I know nothing is dangerous. If it were only failure, I wouldn't mind. What I have to avoid is being branded, as a result, as something wicked in this world.
I know that I am a monster that devours people, and I know that if that is discovered, it is over. I have to withdraw and behave.
Crush the world under my heel?
I won't.
The moment I choose a world for any reason and smash it, there is no next time. From then on, the instant I am summoned, I will break the world on whatever pretext I can fasten to it, just to obtain the heat. The heat was that intoxicating. Enough that, for want of it again, my body trembles before I notice. Enough that, wanting it again, I catch myself weighing whether to stamp something flat.
It is like a drug. And I am not the fool who believes that, having touched a drug, she can still come back.
Like a monkey with electrodes driven into its skull, forsaking food and drink and dying as it presses the button for electricity, I would do the same. No. I am more wretched than that. Those creatures can die.
I cannot even die. Death is impossible. All that would be left is sinking to the bottom forever, shivering as I glean whatever warmth happens to fall my way.
Because I can never meet the end that is the loss of life, I have to move with greater care. If I could die, I would have acted more boldly. That is why I let every chance slip, and why, even when there might be a better way, I never try it, and only go forward one careful step at a time.
Besides, the basic framework here is already in place. I don't need to do anything in particular. I can pass the time at my leisure, eyes fixed on a future a hundred years off, a thousand. No—though I have no idea how many years this body can last.
I have Daegon's memories. Once Daegon descends, he reworks himself, or brings back anything good he finds and upgrades to a new version, so that no one knows when he will grow old and die. Change bodies, and he grinds the discarded flesh down with secret magic and spends it as power. The memory has it recorded as extremely efficient.
Which reminds me—was Choseol also meant to give birth to the next-version Daegon and then be discarded? From Daegon's side of things, a subcontractor suddenly packed something strange in there, and the blast reached all the way to headquarters.
Even so, if this body breaks, so long as the Harvesters have left abundant descendants, I can grind those descendants down and climb back up into this world. Telling myself to take it easy, I stepped into the room the knight led me to.
It is an extremely large space, and it seethes with people of every kind. By the measure of my faded memories, they are varied enough that one would call them species rather than races. Kanna and Polaris both, set against those faded memories, are a tiger beastkin and a bear beastkin. They did, of course, land at the very bottom of the beast scale. Only ears, or only a tail.
Apparently a child always follows the mother's species, without exception. Daegon's memory glints. Strictly speaking both memories come up, and they say that when the species differ, the connecting terminals inside are taken for foreign matter outright, so it never implants.
Wasn't this supposed to be the more fantastical side of things? Then why does a world with beasts mixed through it have a law like that?
Ah. The part that binds to the genes for using mana is entangled with spirit-body information, and so, through Abuja spirit-fission synthesis, a single form is projected? And what is Abuja spirit-fission synthesis supposed to be—a universal rule that holds in every world observed so far? Abuja is a biologist's name, and he received a famous prize on that planet... No. Enough. I don't want to know the details.
The memories blaze like a storm. My part is to find the right piece in the midst of it, fit it in, and assemble the rest. And that takes a long time.
Honestly. What I mean is that even with the memories, I have no idea what any of it is saying.
Anyway, a law like that exists. This one.
I passed between the many kinds of people and arrived before Hypion.
The king looks at me and bows with careful courtesy. Among the greetings a king gives, it is a decidedly high one—which is to say, the greeting one offers a king of somewhere. Around us, the crowd begins to murmur.
Aha. So that's the angle.
He has decided to deify me outright. This man. There is not a trace, in the way he looks at me, of what one feels looking upon a sacred person, and still he says it so smoothly. I know that in detail. Whose was the warmth I gained in the first world, for the most part?
A fanatic's.
So if this is not worship, only use, I will accept it gladly. Had they been venerating me as some sort of god, I might truly have cursed them for it.
Yes. All right.
"Whoever calls for me, I'll come, whenever it is. Only call. So—who am I to be given to?"
I hold the part steady and say only what matters most. I speak so that I seem to know nothing, a doll that simply does as she is told.
In truth, if anyone calls, I come. I portion myself out to anyone at all. And so humans brimming with desire will try to restrict me and control me. Between them, I only have to sway this way and that, and watch in silence. Who is the strongest. Who means to deal in secret. Whose desire is the vastest.
No one is wary of a simple tool. They are wary of the person who uses the tool. Even Yasle, cautious as they were, in the end set down their wariness of me and turned it upon the people drawing near me.
A method of hunting already proven.
Slowly, I lowered the hook beneath the surface once again.