The Canticle of the Betrayed — 14
The car rolled a little way, then stopped.
When I stepped out, a great gate showed far off in the distance. I followed the commander into a building, and the moment we crossed the threshold a thick reek of disinfectant washed over me. A hospital, then. Nothing about the entrance looked like one, and inside there was no desk where anyone might check in—only that heavy chemical smell, and people hurrying back and forth.
A soldier came toward us from the side, saw the commander, halted, and saluted. The commander returned it, and they fell back. Then the commander took me deeper in.
Farther inside, a strange fishy stench threaded through the disinfectant. I found where it came from at once. Beds stood in rows, and on them lay soldiers with holes bored through their bodies. From those openings a dark blue-green ichor seeped, little by little, while figures who looked like doctors, sealed inside protective suits, cut the wounded flesh away.
"These men were cursed by the thing that came from beneath the sea, and they are dying. Recovery magic barely takes. Even if we sever the wounded part completely and regenerate it, it grows back already contaminated. Can you save people in this state?"
A curse. Now that he said it, there had been such a thing. Maleficent had been especially fond of them. Looking through her memories—full of gaps, like something eaten through with holes—a curse acts upon the soul. That was why Victoria could be killed so easily back then. She had been a witch powerful enough to lay, in a single instant, a curse that would have taken a human shaman all day.
I went first to the nearest patient, took hold of them, and recited the contract verse.
The patient's skin swelled as if it might burst, then hardened at once. Cracks ran through it the way they run through breaking porcelain, and as the shards fell away a skin of pure white showed underneath. The curse was nowhere to be found.
All at once the place went quiet. In its place, stares sharp enough to pierce turned on me from every side. I looked at the commander.
"Shall I contract with all of them?"
The commander bowed their head to me.
"Please. I beg you."
So they had thrown their soldiers into the worst possible situation without a moment's hesitation. Unfit to command, I thought, even as I took the patients one by one and recited the verse over each of them. What I learned in the first world is that a contract is best made with one person at a time. If the mere act of reciting it were enough to bind them, control would become difficult.
Most of the people in that place came out with white skin. But where the critically wounded lay gathered together, most of the skin turned blue. Even when a curse cannot be lifted and death is already certain, the body does not seem to go blue unless they are right at the edge of dying. To my senses, white skin and blue skin feel exactly the same when I put myself in. It is awkward that even the one who uses it does not know what it truly is—but what can I do? It is the most powerful weapon I have.
In that way I spent quite a long time making my rounds of the hospital, and made a great many harvesters.
There was a blind spot, if that is the word for it. One of the harvesters in the critical ward gained a power that lifts curses. Sure enough: when there is something that must be resolved, and they are in a state where they cannot accomplish it, they gain a power that can. Of course, what that harvester can resolve is only the dismantling of a curse. It cannot restore severed limbs or vanished organs. Still, if the curse alone is lifted, wounds of that degree can be treated in this hospital. So I could not turn every patient into a harvester.
A shame, that. Even so, a harvester manifesting a power is not necessarily a bad thing. It raises my value.
Then I left the hospital, ate dinner with the commander and the adjutant who had been there, and went to the lodgings set aside for me in the city. An extremely luxurious room. Even so, set beside the place where I stayed in the capital, it was terribly crude—but that could not be helped. They told me it was the lodging ordinarily given when someone of royal rank visits from another country. In any case, they said transport would be prepared so that I could reach the capital tomorrow. The way back ought to be comfortable too.
Thinking that, I lay down on the bed.
As for how things are on the other side—
Over here, I am hanging just as comfortably.
I do not eat, and yet calories keep being supplied to the body, so the tubes driven into me must be feeding me nutrients. In a faded memory, the faint glimmer of lying under an IV for more than two days sparks and goes. I was not hungry then, either.
Ordinarily, if you do nothing at all, the muscles waste and the body falls rapidly into ruin. This body has no such worry. Why? Because when pain and pleasure come rushing in, the flesh acts on reflex. The muscles all through the body contract and swell, over and over, so it seems I get my exercise automatically.
I do wonder, though, whether it is really all right for this much fluid to keep pouring out of me. I did not ask. Instead, whenever the woman came to check my condition, I went on reciting the contract verse.
Of course I do not expect it to work. From the start, every one of the women with the same face is already under contract. If I pushed myself in, I could fill them at once. I do not. Until I understand this world, I have no intention of acting rashly. So I hold my breath and, mechanically, recite only the verse.
A blindfold does not mean I cannot tell what is around me. Once I contemplate the flesh, covering the eyes does not keep me from sensing the outside. If I had to compare it to something, it is like looking into a belly with ultrasound, or seeing through the inside of a building with a special kind of radio wave. The resolution is poor beside the eyes, but I can tell, roughly, that something is moving. Add footsteps to that, and I can grasp the situation well enough.
The woman always comes from the same direction, stands somewhere off to my left, and vanishes. When my vision opened for a moment there was a machine with gauges there, so she is probably checking my condition. The pain and the pleasure come at wildly irregular intervals, but I have learned that they repeat within a set cycle, as if some program were running them. Fully automatic, then.
A considerable time had passed when I heard heavy footsteps, different from the ones that usually came. And not just one set. There were a great many of them.
Hmm? What is this?
I waited, hoping some incident was about to unfold, and then a familiar voice reached me.
"Did you enjoy last night? Even a powerful demon, once it enters that flesh, drops at once and howls like a beast. Above all, what they find most agonizing is their very existence being sucked into my child."
He laughs, a thin little giggle.
My child? Ah. He means this thing in the belly. It does not so much as stir, and it has grown strangely light, so the chances are good that it is dead.
But—a demon?
Aha!
So they have already run their experiments. They did not summon me right away. I thought it odd that he never seemed anxious; he had already tested it several times and grown confident. And if he uses the phrase my child, then there are works of his from which he stole power in just that way. Still, in that case, couldn't he simply produce offspring after summoning me? Perhaps those have some defect.
"Well? Feel like submitting to me now?"
Hmm. Here I could hold a proper conversation, or pretend to be a monster that cannot understand, or else act. No—scratch the acting. I am no actress. I would certainly be caught. I want to decide while looking at him. A face will tell me what he is feeling, and for once I regret the blindfold.
Hmmmm.
Right now a number of breaths sound beside him. A tremor runs through that breathing.
Hehe.
So this is an experiment, is it? You've brought in test subjects, haven't you? Then there is only one thing to say.
A brief silence. Then a rustling. The sound of pages being turned.
"Hmm. There isn't a single memory in the brain. Powerful demons, even petty gods—once they're summoned, information gets written into the brain. Is it a monster beyond cognition? Or a god so primordial that it has no will at all? And yet that thing just tried to hold a conversation."
Eep!
That was close. He can read memories too? Fortunately he doesn't seem to have pulled mine out. So I'll avoid lying as much as I can.
A mutter echoes. Then a scratching sound—something being written on paper.
"Assistant. Bring the first subject before it. From this moment, the experiment to confirm the state of contractual mutation begins."
At the mage's words, a muffled moan of terror rises beside him. The ones shaking with fear have their mouths stopped.
Several sets of footsteps tangle, and soon a heavy tread draws near me. A rattling clatter—and my body lurches suddenly forward. No. More precisely, my head drops downward. With a metallic click, the place where head meets body locks fast. So I cannot turn my head.
A moment later, my sight opens all at once.
Before me, a boy with a ruined face stares up in terror. Two women with the same face stand holding him, and one of them holds the blindfold. Around the boy's neck is a necklace, one of the kind I saw before. So they are checking for a harvester.
Good. I am entirely in favor of an experiment like this. While you try to study me, I study you!
I recited the contract verse. The boy trembled and shook his head from side to side, but when one of the women struck him in the groin he screamed, foam spilling from his mouth. A little later, he nodded.
Mm.
The connection was made, but I waited on purpose. What I need is the words. They are easier to handle if they believe there are limits.
The mage ordered the gag bitten between the boy's teeth removed. Once it was off I recited the verse again, and the boy, his face rigid with terror, accepted it. Then I pushed myself into him.
A harvester was made.
And besides that boy, one more man. Five women. All of them young, or children. After the last of them became a harvester, the blindfold was set over my eyes again, and I was hung in something close to a prone position.
Through the harvesters' eyes, I look around. I can see the surroundings I failed to see last time. Enormous machinery stands above me and below, and metal needles are driven in along my head and spine. At the end of each needle is something like a wire, running up into the metal apparatus overhead. Besides that, a number of tubes are sunk into the body. Some of them seem to be in the blood vessels: blood goes out into equipment like an artificial kidney, then comes back into me.
Tightly packed equipment.
The mage told one of the same-faced women to keep observing me, then dragged the harvesters out of the room. And the harvesters were dissected alive.
Then the memory of Daegon, an expert in biotechnology, flares. From the tools around them, from the viewpoint of the dissection, and from the information the mage records, it explains that the technology here is of a considerably high level. The harvesters were all people who had lived in the city where this laboratory stands. Some were sold here as slaves. Some were kidnapped. Even so, it says, the technology itself is likely more advanced than the world as seen through these harvesters. The reason the world I have seen still looks undeveloped is that the gap in technology between the upper class and the common people is staggeringly vast.
And so, through the harvesters, I learn about this world one piece at a time.