Song of the Betrayed — 15 (End)
While the harvesters in the fourth world were being put through horrific experiments, Belle woke in the third.
Nothing in particular had happened. Morning had simply come. I got out of bed, washed, and made myself presentable, and when I stepped outside a guide was already waiting to lead me to the dining hall. I ate breakfast there and was lounging at my ease when someone who looked like a soldier arrived and took me off somewhere, and so I crossed the heart of a city I had barely known until yesterday.
But I know this city well now. I had gone through the memories the harvesters carry.
I am not limited to a handful of thoughts, the way a person is. I watch the world through every harvester's eyes at once, and I can move Belle and the lump of meat in the fourth world at the same time. It isn't that other personalities split off from me. All of them are me. We share our memories and move by a single mind.
If I have to put a comparison to it, a cell at the fingertip and a cell at the toe still belong to one self when they move, don't they? It isn't as if each cell has an ego of its own. Harvesters, Belle, any other flesh—that is how it feels. So there was time enough to sort through the memories I had gained, set them in order, and analyze them.
Arranged, the harvester memories I took in this time come to this.
The place is called Atlan Fortress City. It was built to hold back the sea monsters that climb out of the eastern ocean. It looks dangerous enough that you would expect few people there besides soldiers, and yet the city is full of merchants as well as troops. There are so many merchants because cargo is taken off the ships at sea and hauled all the way up here.
The eastern coast has no proper harbor. Anywhere a human hand has touched, the monsters sweep it clean, so the goods come off the ships and are brought straight to the city. No one finds that strange. If anything, they consider the place safe precisely because its defenses are so thorough.
It strikes me all over again that the third world has a great many monsters too.
No. No, that isn't right.
In the second world, you had only to step a little way into the forest before monsters came leaping out, and I saw plenty of them in the first world as well, back when the harvesters were spreading in every direction. Set aside the faded memories, and every world has monsters.
Hmm. Perhaps, in those days, I simply didn't know what a monster was, and they were there all along.
In any case, the things that live wild are dangerous to that degree—far more vicious than anything in the faded memories. Some are huge and strong all on their own. Some are frighteningly intelligent. Some gather into packs and hunt.
All that distinguishes the eastern sea is that the monsters living there are the kind that mass together and hunt as a swarm. Being creatures of the water, they can hardly climb a mountain range, so people have thrown up walls across the approaches they might come swarming down, and hold them there. That is Atlan Fortress City.
But they could not simply seal the place off. They could not afford to give up transport by ship, and so, cumbersome as it is, they unload cargo where there isn't even a proper port, hire people, and have the freight carried here by human labor. Calling it labor is generous. Only a few actually bear the loads on their own backs. Most pull carts, drawn by beasts or by wagons—though if too many people crowd together, the monsters attack. That is why the soldier was hurt.
And in this world a human life is fairly cheap, while the tariffs alone on export goods that have no choice but to come by sea leave the region immensely rich. So what comes of that, you ask? They buy people with money and use them up. This may, in fact, be the most modernized place of all. Modernization is the shift from an age that used people and threw them away to an age that pays money for them and throws them away.
Of course, in the age of using and discarding, they at least gave out the minimum of food and a place to sleep, if only to keep the labor force intact. Now they pay wages, then take the money back again in goods, and leave people to starve. There is that difference. Doesn't the labor force shrink, then, you ask? New workers come pouring in from the frontier, don't they? What used to be something you had to keep for a long time becomes a disposable.
Even so, consuming them as disposables does not mean the people who handle them hold human beings in contempt. They have the sort of character that can pity a person injured on the job.
When I stepped down from the carriage, the commander came out to meet me. I had arrived at a hospital—not the military hospital I visited yesterday, but the hospital of Atlan Fortress City. The commander led me inside.
The moment I entered, I saw people packed tight: some in hospital gowns, some bearing old scars and missing a limb or more, and others afflicted with every kind of defect and disease. Then the commander, a man who looked like one of the local notables, and a person I took to be the owner of the hospital came forward and bowed their heads to me. Please, they said, work a miracle.
I nodded, glad to. And I began the production of harvesters, under the name of treatment.
A great many of them had suffered grave wounds, but everything that could already be treated had been treated. They were people who ought to have left the hospital long ago. Once I made them into harvesters and looked through their memories, I saw that soldiers had come for them last night, suddenly announcing that wounds could be healed, and brought them here. It was goodwill—goodwill that could not bear to keep a blessing for themselves, and meant to extend it to everyone who was hurt.
And so they arrived at the worst possible end. Truly unfortunate.
The three who bowed their heads to me all stand high in Atlan Fortress City, and even so they are respected by many. They have the character to deserve it. That is why they gathered the injured and sold them to me.
The old saying comes back to me. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The one who paved that hell with goodwill was me. Those three are not bad people. They are the sort who ought to be respected, and the one who deceived people like that was me. Only a fool reproaches the person who was deceived. The only wicked one is the deceiver. However crude the trick, the people who blame the deceived are only fooling themselves that they would never have fallen for it—pitiful losers, unable to go on living unless they cut the weak down into idiots.
Heehee.
I know the defeated very well. Every light that sank beneath the water was a creature of that kind: people broken so completely by defeat that their minds were ruined, people who had learned the truth that everything in the world is an enemy and that no one is coming to save them. So when I held out my hand, they were deceived again. They were under the illusion that being fooled would cost them nothing, because they had nothing left to lose.
My thoughts wandered. In any case, the only bad person here is me. They look happy for the moment, so let that be enough. They have no idea they have taken out a ruinous loan. They are simply delighted that money has appeared.
Look. They are even singing me a song of thanks. It is an old folk song, one every harvester from this country knows. Judging by the words, it is the sort of thing sung at a harvest festival, once the autumn reaping is done.
The hospital had become the site of a festival. Some wept as they touched limbs that had grown back. Others clasped hands with the harvesters beside them and went running about. The harvesters wore happy smiles and sang a song praying for blessing.
An ending of perfect misfortune has already been reserved for them. Even so, if the present is joyful, it is better to smile. I slipped in among the harvesters as they ran out of the hospital crying their joy aloud, and I laughed without shame.
The fourth world is boring.
This body of mine still has no name, and it doesn't even have memories. At first the unusually hollow cheeks confused me, but my face is identical to those of a great many women who all wear exactly the same face. Clones, or chimeras, most likely. Artificially made humans.
That makes the wretched state they have been left in easier to understand. The vessels were manufactured, so there is no fear that the person turned into a vessel might contract with a god or a demon that entered the flesh and tear everything apart. Daegon's memories glimmer with the knowledge that the technology here would have a hard time making a vessel capable of holding a god, and I think I have found the reason.
I was searching the memories of the harvesters annihilated here, used up in the mages' dissections, when I came across something interesting. The language was a foreign one that harvester did not know. I did.
There was a woman from a house that was well-off, in its way. An arranged marriage fell through; she was cast aside, and the family was ruined. She made a contract with me while she was dying of a venereal disease. She never gained a supernatural power, but with her improved mind and body she hunted down and killed the people who had destroyed her, until a returning stroke of vengeance struck her dead. There is a harvester like that. Her memories glimmer with the sense that this resembles her own childhood face. This is probably the world she lived in.
And then, one after another, the reasons came clear: why Yasle's art had been mixed into the summoning formula; why the entire clone legion was already under contract with me; why clones were used as vessels to hold demons and gods.
Ah. For reference, according to Daegon's memories, a replicated subject degrades. That is why they are rarely taken as vessels. But there is Choseol. She, too, was originally the mother meant to bear Daegon's vessel. A harvester has more than enough ability to serve as a vessel for some minor entity, and if one truly means to raise the quality, one has only to breed the clones and pull a second generation. There is a good chance this is the result.
Until now, I thought only a harvester could draw me up. But the possibility of being drawn up by following the traces the harvesters left behind is right in front of me.
Hehe.
My luck really is something.