The Tomb
Before I followed Madangbal, I gave them the last of the instructions.
"I'll give you two hours. Come back here then, and I'll collect the outgoing mail."
Delivering the mail doesn't mean the work is finished. Gathering what the people here want to send is part of the job as well, which is why a completed delivery rarely lightens the load. Sometimes it gets heavier.
There's a reason I leave them those two hours. Some of them mean to answer the letter they've just received, and they mean to do it at once.
A postman doesn't spend the interval sitting quietly somewhere, either. That's when you scramble to trade with the settlers, clawing together whatever you can, because survival gear doesn't buy itself. A bottom-rung civil servant's pay is a stingy thing.
Madangbal started leading me off somewhere. He wanted a core looked at.
"You pick a core up off the ground or something?"
If he had, he could sell it to me. It might even be an Ability Core.
"Ah, I didn't pick it up. Aigo, elder, what are you doing out here!"
Here we go again. The man never simply lets people pass.
"Hey, troublemaker. Your old man doing all right? Ooh, making a waterwheel? Looks like it'll spin just fine."
Madangbal, holding a real conversation with every last person he met. Not a greeting. A conversation.
"Princess, you been good? Hmm? You haven't? Why haven't you!"
One man like that does put a little life into a settlement. Now and then he drives the people in it out of their minds, too. People like me, especially. Clean out of them.
"Princess, what's that on your back? Oh, angel wings? How'd you make them? Your mom?"
A temperament like his, once you step outside a settlement, goes one of two ways. You die of loneliness for want of anyone to talk to, or you start talking to stones.
"Well now, gathering clothes you peeled off zombies to make angel wings? Your mom's got a good hand! Shall this big brother try a pair on his back, too? Hmm? No? Aigo, Princess is being mean."
Following him, we came to the clinic. The doctor who used to own it was dead, and Moon-ssi's son had taken the place over, or so I'd heard. That man, running a clinic. This settlement was finished.
"Why here."
"Because this is where you look for someone who can read a core."
"Don't tell me it's Moon-ssi's son. The one who just became the new owner."
"Head turns quick, doesn't it?"
Tsk. Of all people. A man who balked at dealing with me. So much for buying the core.
"Figures."
"Figures what?"
"Forget it. What's coming your way, that you'd go this far?"
"Hey now. The world doesn't turn on calculation alone."
"Right. So what did you agree to take?"
Creak.
Madangbal pushed the clinic door open and let out a snort of a laugh.
"One free session of physical therapy."
While Madangbal took his free physical therapy, I looked over the core in question.
The moment Moon-ssi's son saw my face, he wore the look of a man who had bitten into shit. When I said I would examine the core, though, he nodded. His expression did not change.
Well. I hadn't come to look at him. What mattered was the core.
Green.
Green—the color with a high chance of successful use. Anyone who can tell one color from another knows that much. Common knowledge, and a core that commands a high price.
Even if it isn't an Ability Core, every core has to be used once by somebody before its function wakes. A fuel core you can burn, a communications core that becomes a part in comms gear—that sort of thing.
Using a core isn't difficult. You set your hand on it and think, I will use this. That is the whole of it. A side effect means you failed. Nothing happening means you succeeded. Once it succeeds, the core does its proper work from then on. Light it and the thing roars up, and you've got a fuel core. Soak it in filthy water and the water runs clean, and you know it's a purification core.
A core with its function awake makes an excellent piece of trade. Anyone with money has no need to risk using one in person. They buy what somebody else has already used, and that is the end of it.
An Ability Core, money cannot touch. The ability is granted to the one who uses the core. If you want the power, you stake your life and use it yourself.
Time for a proper eyeball appraisal.
I lifted the core and blotted out the sun beyond the window. An unused core is turbid inside, impurities lodged in it, and held to the light like this the interior shows itself in detail. Between those impurities, you can find a fine pattern.
A wave pattern.
That is what people call it, though whether it truly looks like waves is a little doubtful. Easy enough to recognize, and this would be common knowledge too. Hard to put into words, but inside a core there is a peculiar pattern, and you see only as much of it as you already know.
The pattern alone, of course, cannot tell you a core's secrets with any precision. A true appraisal belongs to an appraiser with a real ability, like Elder Heo. From a pattern, all you get is a rough guess.
Even so, finding a wave pattern was a windfall.
"You do know how to read a core, I take it?"
The owner, face gone indifferent. The physical therapy seemed to be finished.
"Aigo, that feels good……. This is living."
Madangbal, flat on his back, with no intention of getting up. His own business was done, then.
"Well. I know a little."
"A little."
The owner rubbed his chin and narrowed his eyes.
"A little……."
So what.
There had been a time I wondered why the man disliked me. I couldn't get a feel for it at all. The answer came through Madangbal in the end, and the reason was absurd. After failing the postman hiring exam five times, he had taken to hating postmen. Failing on the personality test is not an easy thing to manage.
Anyway, the Woo Jungkook-brand appraisal was in.
"An ability, or a communications core."
"Are you certain?"
"No."
"Hm."
Too honest, maybe. Even so, I won't say a thing I can't stand behind.
"I'm not appraising with any great ability. It's eyeballing. I trust my own result, but I can't tell another man to believe it without question."
However little I liked him, using a core is a very dangerous business. There was always the chance I had misread the pattern, so I couldn't call it certain. I trusted my eye all the same. A green core with a wave pattern is top grade. I wasn't about to let it go.
"If I use that core, will I die?"
"If your luck's rotten, yes."
"Can't you be a little more specific?"
If I could, I'd be appraising cores at Headquarters. Still, a wave pattern will tell you roughly.
"Lower than the odds of getting food poisoning. Higher than the odds of dying of it."
"Specific in a completely useless direction, so I still have no feel for it."
"But it is specific."
"Hm."
"You asked me to look at the core because you mean to use it yourself?"
"Who knows."
A precious core like this, even unused, sells for enough to live on for three years at the least. Have it appraised, so the failure rate and the side effects come into the light, and it does better. Use it outright until the purpose is certain, and the value climbs higher still.
"Hm……."
The owner stared a hole through the core. The more precious the thing, the worse the side effects when it fails. If this was an Ability Core, failure meant death. A communications core, and you barely kept your life. Did the man even have a route for trading something that expensive? Worth checking whether he meant to sell it to me.
"A thing this precious, selling it is work in itself. A big buyer you can trust isn't easy to find, and neither is a verified appraiser solid enough to write you a certificate."
"And so?"
The owner lifted his brows out of step with each other.
"For me, though, it's easy. I meet state-certified core appraisers as a matter of course, and I know a black-market boss who buys even top-grade cores at a fair price."
"……Are you bragging?"
"Hardly."
"Then you'll have it appraised and sell it for me?"
"No. I'm telling you to sell it to me."
"Hear a thing like that, and somehow I don't want to sell it."
The bastard always did this. He hadn't meant to sell it anyway.
"If you'll have it appraised and sell it for me instead, I'll pay you for the service."
"Run the errand, and take nothing but the errand fee?"
"Hm, well, that would—"
He stopped halfway through the sentence. What he'd wanted to say was plain enough. Isn't running errands a postman's specialty? On an ordinary day he would have glared at me and said it, and then some. Just now he wanted something himself, so he wasn't taking it that far. His mouth stayed shut. His eyes said it anyway. As far as I was concerned, I had heard it.
"Forget it. I'll take the appraisal fee and go."
Three rounds of homemade ammunition lay in front of me. The owner had set them down as payment. He wasn't about to hand over all three. That much was obvious.
"All but one. Two only. You said yourself the result isn't certain, so you've no cause to complain. It isn't a precise appraisal."
There it was. I'd expected as much.
"No. I appraised it precisely, so I'm taking all three."
"Two things out of one mouth? You clearly said it wasn't certain—"
"I said it wasn't certain, and that's what makes it precise. Eyeball a core and then call yourself certain—that's the fraud."
"Hm……."
He wasn't a man with any confidence he could win a war of words against me. While he smacked his lips as if something sat wrong, I swept up every round and dumped them into my pocket.
Then—
Creak.
"Aigo, I'm dying……."
The clinic door opened, and someone came groaning through it. The owner turned to the patient.
"Where does it hurt?"
"My stomach, my stomach……."
The patient went to where Madangbal lay and flapped a hand at him. Madangbal flustered his way upright, and the patient dropped onto the spot at once.
"Rub my stomach a bit. I'm dying, I really am, aigo……."
Nobody had asked. The patient was already baring the belly to be looked at.
"Food poisoning. I'll treat you."
As if well used to it, the owner began to stroke the stomach with his hand. So this was what Madangbal had meant.
"He said healing hands. He actually treats people with his hands?"
"Told you. What's a doctor for? Long as the treatment works."
"And that counts as treatment that works?"
"Healing hands, I said. There's energy in them. Energy!"
I looked around the room. Not plentiful, but there were antibiotics, plain as day. In food poisoning, what matters most is replacing fluids. If the case is bad enough, you consider antibiotics according to the state of it. First, though, whether that quack's diagnosis was even right.
"The only clinic in the place treats food poisoning by hand?"
The owner glared my way, as if he'd heard.
"Shh."
Madangbal set a finger to his lips.
"Aigo. A clinic just needs to treat people well. What does it matter how?"
"It has to actually treat them well."
"Healing hands, I said!"
"If that's a healing hand, my foot's a healing foot."
"Oh. Really?"
"Want me to step on you?"
"Sorry, but……. That isn't my taste……."
"Drop it."
No more of that.
"I really am sorry……."
"I said drop it."
The healing-hands treatment ended sooner than I'd expected.
And then—
"Aagh……. I don't feel any better."
The patient, groaning exactly as before. Of course it wouldn't help.
"Go home and rest a little, and you'll be fine. Drink a glass of water on your way."
At least he was replacing the fluids. The patient tipped a glass back and drank it down. That was the real treatment.
"I think I might be a little better……."
"Don't worry too much."
"Mm. Could you take a look at my daughter, too?"
"Your daughter's ill as well? She's ten this year, isn't she?"
"The Princess is sick!?"
Madangbal cut in, badly startled.
"No—I saw the Princess perfectly fine just a little while ago. She was running around with angel wings on her back."
"This is why they say it's dangerous outside the blankets……. She said her stomach hurt a little, all of a sudden. Doesn't seem serious yet, but you never know. I'm worried she caught it from me……."
"Understood. Let's go."
The owner took up a canteen and followed the patient out.
"Watch the clinic for a bit."
He left the place to Madangbal and went out the door. Madangbal lay straight back down where the physical therapy had been.
"Worried about the Princess……. Shouldn't my civil-servant friend be going, too? Look at the time. I'm fine here on my own."
The time for trading was running short. Even so, the way this was turning sat rotten with me.
"Shouldn't we check first whether the patients all ate something together? Or whether the drinking water's gone bad? Something like that?"
Now and then mass food poisoning, or a plague, wipes the people of a settlement out. A few would survive, more than likely, but once it reaches that point everyone simply leaves. The place becomes a ghost town. And when a cooperative settlement like this one goes under, a postman takes a heavy loss as well.
"Of course I checked."
"Nothing that stood out?"
"Mrs. Park, same as the old owner. They never ate anything together, is what I'm saying. Hard to blame the drinking water, either. The ones who are sick, you can count on one hand."
If Madangbal said so, it was probably true. No one inside these walls had cleaner news than he did.
"If I had to name one place they touch, though……."
When a man lays the groundwork like that, it is usually the answer.
"But you don't get food poisoning from a core. Not unless somebody licked it."
"What are you talking about."
"That core."
Madangbal pointed at the green one.
"Mrs. Park's the one who found it. Originally."
Something smelled wrong. It wasn't the first time. Cooperative people. A peaceful settlement. No guarantee the underside of it was clean.
No matter when I come, this place always sits wrong with me.
The settlement's name, like the names of other places, came in two. The insiders, the settlers, called it the Cradle. Inside, I called it that too. But the name used for it from the outside was the one more familiar to me. I was an outsider myself.
That name was the Tomb.