The Cursed People (2)
The following afternoon.
Once the royal council that had begun at dawn was finally done, I made a little time for myself and sought out an empty chamber in the detached palace. The night before, His Majesty had pressed a mysterious key into my hands, and I meant to see for myself what this special thing—passed down, so they said, through the royal house—actually was.
"Only someone with the proper qualifications can make it show itself. That's what he said."
His Majesty had told me that only those who possessed the qualifications would be able to see whatever lay beyond the door. Which was another way of saying that nothing at all might appear.
I let out a slow breath. Tension coiled through the hand clenched around the key.
"If something's going to come out... please, I'm begging you, let it be something normal."
It was an object that had been handed down among royalty alone for a very long time. What if a treasure vault appeared, crammed to the rafters with riches beyond counting? The hope of it bloomed quietly in my chest.
And so I used the key.
Click.
A moment later, the sound of a firmly locked door coming open rang through the room.
"......"
Creeeak.
Beyond the door as it began to swing wide, a landscape unlike any other entered my sight. A sight that had no business existing inside a royal palace started to reveal itself from the far side of the threshold.
"This is......"
What met me was a sky glittering with stars. A night sky sunk in darkness. Here was a view that should have been impossible in a kingdom where the sun had not yet gone down.
"Don't tell me they recreated the night sky."
A dome of glass covered the heavens, and over it, as if brushed on in layer after layer, the stars packed the sky until not a gap remained. Day and night coexisted with nothing but a single door between them, a sight as strange as it was beautiful. Beneath that sky, an armillary sphere of interlocking machinery was turning at a busy clip.
Rrrrr.
Each time the enormous sphere revolved, the night beyond the glass changed its face.
"......"
A bizarre night blanketing the ceiling. An armillary sphere reproducing the motions of the planets. The landscape before me was so far beyond ordinary craft that I doubted human hands had made it at all. And beneath that profoundly mysterious sight, eyes holding the starlight looked down at me.
"It's been a long time since a leader of the cursed came here of his own will."
Hair the blue of a melted sky fluttered before my eyes.
—A witch.
There was no other word for the being in front of me. Hair bound in twin tails defied gravity, swaying in time with a witch adrift upon the air.
"Do you, too, hope to save those pitiful people with your own hands?"
Floating before the armillary sphere, she looked down at me and posed a question whose meaning I could not grasp. The cursed people. Subjects who had to be saved. Weighted words, every one of them—and yet, meeting this witch for the first time, I had a rather more urgent question to ask.
"Where is this place, exactly?"
I was asking, in short, what the place I had walked into actually was. At that, the witch who had been flying through the sky lowered her altitude as naturally as drawing a breath.
"The Archives, at the deepest core of the Demon Realm. A place permitted only to a king who possesses the qualifications."
"......The Archives?"
"This is a space that observes and records every phenomenon that occurs in the Demon Realm."
So saying, she caught—with a perfectly indifferent face—a book that had been flying through the air.
"And I am in charge of managing every record kept here, and of translating them into human language."
The Archives, which set down the phenomena unfolding in the Demon Realm, and the witch who managed them. Having introduced herself and the place, she did not forget to add one small remark.
"Of course, the records I translate do contain a little of my personal opinion."
Why in the world would anyone stuff their own opinions into a translation? The thought crossed my mind, but I did not bother saying it aloud. Once you were face to face with a witch sailing through the sky, quibbling over a thing like that was meaningless.
So the key passed down through the royal house is for entering the Archives.
This place, too, seemed to be one more anomaly among those that existed in the Demon Realm. Perhaps the witch before me was of a similar sort to Chief Minister Blane.
Ahem. Hm.
I cleared my throat and settled the body that had gone rigid with nerves, then put to her the second most important question.
"So what was that first question of yours supposed to mean?"
The very first thing I had heard from her upon stepping inside. A cold voice revived in my head.
The cursed. Words that anyone could see pointed at the Mertians—and along with them, she had asked whether I wanted to save my people. I may have suspected they were Satan's own blood, but even so, I had never gone so far as to think of them as a cursed people.
"......"
Perhaps she meant to answer that doubt. At some point she had landed on the floor, and now she regarded me with indifferent eyes.
"You're quite well aware that the cursed are in this kingdom, aren't you?"
"......"
"The record of a chief minister more outstanding and remarkable than any other... this volume here, for instance, would be the proof."
Thud.
She snatched one of the books drifting through the sky and held it out. I read the letters written across the cover of the record she offered.
"Haa......"
There it was: the name of Lord Blane, the GOAT Chief Minister. As if spellbound, I accepted the record that bore it.
"......"
Flutter. Flutter.
While I turned the pages of the volume with Blane's name on the cover, the witch watched me and, wearing an expression of pure boredom, launched into a history lecture.
"Vartia, the nation of the Mertians, is a state founded in the Demon Realm hundreds of years ago, after they sealed the Demon King."
"......"
"The valiant Mertians, however, had to pay the price for what their ancestors did."
Deeds from long ago spilled out as a tale of martial glory. The great founder of the Vartia Kingdom had sealed none other than the Demon King and succeeded in raising a nation. Only the ending of a story that so resembled a hero's epic was, it seemed, no happy one.
"They didn't understand the true meaning of living in the Demon Realm. The will of the Demon Realm refused to leave them be."
"The will of the Demon Realm?"
"All of you are cursed. Your names, your fates, even your territory—none of it can escape that curse."
If her account was to be believed, the Mertians were cursed to the last one of them.
"Some will assimilate into the Demon Realm and be reduced to ridiculous spectacles. Others will be bound by rules they cannot comprehend, and wander the same ground forever."
No one could be free of the Demon Realm's curse. And so they were a cursed people—an object of terror, feared by every nation of the faith of the Chief God, the Holy See among them.
"......"
The shocking tale circled in my ears. At the same time, everything I had gone through the night before flashed through my mind. Phenomena the laws of the world could not explain. Things that ought never to happen were happening, even at this very moment, all across Vartia.
"That is the Demon Realm's curse, laid upon the Mertians who sealed the Demon King."
The witch's eyes reflected me.
A thin, creeping smile.
A cold smile settled at the corner of her mouth. There was something chilling in it.
"Do you, like your ancestors, wish to liberate your people from a curse of such long standing?"
"......"
"It will certainly be difficult. But if you follow my advice, it won't be entirely impossible."
The moment I heard her proposal, I answered her honestly.
"Do I actually have to liberate them?"
"Pardon?"
Blink. Blink.
The witch, blinking, stared at me in a blank daze. Then she asked again.
"You did understand what I said, correct?"
"I understood."
"Then surely you'd want to lift the Demon Realm's curse......"
"Why would I?"
Sssk.
Bewilderment flooded her face in an instant. She looked exactly like an insurance agent whose pitch had just been refused to her face.
"A-aren't they even a little pitiful?"
Flustered, she asked me once more. I answered honestly.
"They are pitiful."
"Then isn't it only natural to want to save them?"
Listening to her, I felt my chest grow heavy. Yes. They were pitiful. Just as she said, they were terribly pitiful, and terribly unfortunate.
"Of course they're pitiful. How could they not be?"
"Then if you follow my advice......"
"I feel so sorry for myself I could lose my mind."
I was the one who had to run a country while dragging that lot around, and I was so pitiful I was on the verge of tears.
The fact that a country like this is still standing is the anomaly.
And in the middle of all that, what—lift the curse? To save a few hundred doppelgangers with the same name and the same face, and a chief minister who gambles with a year's budget?
It was absurd. Far better to work them until they volunteered for nirvana on their own.
"......"
Had that sincerity of mine reached her as well? The witch looked at me the way a mother looks at a report card. Which is to say, she had begun to regard me with open contempt.
"If I'm going to keep a country running under conditions like these, I have to put the anomalies to work."
"......"
"Can't we duplicate Hans and raise an army? I feel like something along the lines of the Proposal to Raise a Hundred Thousand Hans might be worth a try."
With that, I opened the record she had handed me.
Fwwwwip.
Pages turned, and elegant script rose into view. One by one, I began to check the notes on Blane that the witch claimed to have recorded.
Chief Minister Blane. He is a man worthy of being called the greatest chief minister in history.
He has accomplished feats no other chief minister on the continent has managed, and he replenishes the kingdom's insufficient food and finances by innovative means.
What is truly astonishing, however, is this: no one has ever appointed him chief minister of the kingdom.
It would seem that bizarre something wishes to be acknowledged as chief minister, and so the nobles—the king included—all praise him, and call him the GOAT Chief Minister.
The entries on Blane swept past my eyes. Immediately afterward, I quietly looked at the witch who had handed me the book.
"......"
"......"
She was still wearing the expression of a mother who had just checked a report card. A short silence hung between us. When the awkward quiet had run its course, I asked her with a serious face.
"Is everything written in here true?"
"Yes. It's true."
"......"
Blane, you absolute madman.
You weren't even a chief minister to begin with.