The Commander's Seal
Johan had assumed as much, but in truth, none of it was the priest's fault.
The tale that a wound could be healed by the mere touch of a noble saint was an old one, worn smooth by generations of retelling — and what was more, it was a miracle the Order itself officially recognized. Of course, the Order had never seriously believed that some minor aristocrat would actually work a saint's miracles. But the Church had always had to mind the sensibilities of its noble lords. Saying that divine worth ran in the bloodline of high nobility was a courtesy they could well afford to extend.
"Yes. Take it. Here."
"Ooh... oooooh...!"
But Johan's sanctity had never been born of such noble blood at all. It had been forged by mythic deeds of his own doing. It was only natural that the mercenaries, who watched him closer than anyone, believed exactly that.
"C-could I maybe...?"
"You little wretch, where do you get off?!"
"You dying to get yourself killed, is that it?!"
The hapless mercenary who'd spoken up earned himself a snarling torrent of abuse. Johan's mercenaries had no desire to share in their employer's sanctity — least of all now, with curses prowling about.
"Pirates, my lord. Shall we hit them from behind?"
"Hit them. Better not to let it become a nuisance."
The moment outriders spotted pirates hauling carts of plunder in the distance, Johan gave the order without hesitation. The pirates themselves would hardly dare touch a column of cavalry, but if any of them made it back to report, they'd have a tail on their hands for nothing.
So Tamir and his crew should be loose by now.
After the battle with the minotaurs, Johan had kept his word — and then gone a step further, extending mercy beyond the bargain, as payment for the warning about the second minotaur. On Johan's orders, the Republic's merchants had marched the pirates off as if to sell them as slaves, then simply released them at a midpoint along the way.
Should I have at least squeezed a few coppers out of the sale?
Pirates simply weren't valuable merchandise. Oh, slaves always sold well in the Republic and the free cities alike — but even slaves had their grades. Only the talented, the learned, or the beautiful commanded real prices, and pirates were none of the three. They'd most likely have gone cheap to some dungeon-keeper. Hardly worth selling, nothing gained by killing them, and pure waste of provisions to keep them fed. Under the circumstances, Johan felt no particular pang about his act of mercy.
There was another reason besides: Kaenerna had mentioned that Tamir seemed to be noble-born. Plant a little goodwill, and perhaps it would bear fruit someday.
Not that Kaenerna cared for such vague calculations. She'd far rather have silver in hand on the spot. Some noble you couldn't even name was easier sold and forgotten, she'd argued — and honestly, she wasn't entirely wrong.
"Enemies!"
By the time the panicked pirates fumbled for their weapons, the mercenaries were already upon them. Johan's guards, cavalry to a man, simply operated on a different plane of speed.
A crossbow bolt punched through a pirate's skull, and Johan's lance skewered two men in a single thrust. Realizing they faced mounted, elite opponents, the pirates shrieked and broke for it.
"You idiot! Come back!"
One pirate with a working head on his shoulders screamed himself hoarse at his fleeing companions. What good was running from cavalry across open, level ground? But terror had scattered them to the four winds, each man clinging to the absurd faith that no one would bother chasing him.
"Kill them all — leave one alive!"
Thanks to that, Johan enjoyed a leisurely hunt. Every last one of them went down except the fellow with the functioning brain, and even he took a blade in the course of resisting.
"Where did you come from?"
Goiden handled the interpretation. His Eastern tongue wasn't polished, but he managed well enough. Trembling with pain and terror, the pirate answered that he had come from the Marquisate.
"Ask how many of them there are, what they're about, and why they've come to this area."
The pirate answered readily. Thousands of pirates had gathered at the Marquisate; he was roughly a captain of ten; and his band had slipped out here on a raiding run. With the Marquisate's central keep refusing to fall while losses kept mounting, even the pirates had begun drifting away.
So the Marquis is holding out better than expected.
In this world, a siege overwhelmingly favored the defenders. Crucho was a seasoned commander, and however many soldiers he'd lost during the landings, he'd kept his elite core about him. He would have restored order well enough by now — holding a keep was surely within his means.
A shame he's holding out so well, though.
Not that Johan could do anything about his disappointment. It wasn't as if he could make the man blunder from a hundred leagues away.
The pirate groaned, murmuring something under his breath.
"He asks you to show him mercy. To finish it in one stroke..."
"Grant it to him."
The mercenaries obliged. It was fortunate these were deserters — no tail would follow.
"Could there really be thousands of pirates out there?"
"Hard to say. A captain of ten wouldn't have an accurate picture of the whole force. Still, there's nothing implausible about it."
Pirates routinely scraped together whatever they could find and inflated their numbers for it — arming captured serfs and slaves and counting them as brothers-in-arms. With rabble like that clumping and clumping again, several thousand was no surprise at all.
An older mercenary, Khan, spoke up.
"If the pirates have gathered in numbers that great, I'd wager some noble is leading them."
"Oh, come now, Master Khan. What would a noble lord stand to gain from piracy?"
"Don't talk nonsense. It's not as if you've never seen nobles commanding mercenaries. The heathen lords down south ride at the head of pirate fleets themselves, plundering merchant ships and hauling off slaves."
"Goodness. The heathens are base in their deeds as well, it seems."
Continental nobles commit plain highway robbery too, mind you...
Johan thought this to himself but saw no reason to intrude on the mercenaries' conversation.
A company of mercenaries camped anywhere left its mark quickly. Where the pirates were absent and the village looked suspiciously intact, there the mercenaries were sure to be found.
They too had been raiding as circumstances allowed, though when lingering long in one spot they refrained from scouring the surroundings bare. Thanks to that, the nearby villages, though visibly tense, remained more or less whole.
"Where are the mercenaries?"
"Th... there's a camp over that way, my lord."
Faced with Johan's column of horsemen, the serfs were too terrified to string a sentence together. They'd taken them for yet another band of fresh raiders.
The weary mercenaries on watch spotted the riders and leveled their spears.
"Halt. Who goes there, and from where?"
"Count Eitz."
"......"
The mercenaries stood dumbstruck, wearing the look of men struck across the back of the head with a hammer. The name was simply that unexpected.
By rights, noble visitor or not, they should have made him wait, sent word up the chain, made preparations, and received him properly. Johan gave them no such chance.
"I'm coming through. Stand aside."
"Ah... yes. P-please, come in."
The mercenaries stepped aside before they knew what they were doing. Johan's bearing — the posture, the diction, the gaze, the voice — every element of it compelled their acquiescence. And the ranks of mercenaries behind him, glaring in perfect formation, cowed them further.
Johan was merely their employer, holding no formal authority to command these men at all — and yet the mercenaries accepted him as their commander all the same.
"You're Gorgalle Company men, aren't you? Where is your captain?"
"He's lying down in his tent, my lord."
"Lead the way. I'll see his face myself."
Johan rode through the camp at a canter, taking stock of his surroundings. Quite a few mercenaries lay collapsed, looking wretched — but it seemed more like contagion than curse. There was no trace of magical energy about them.
It was always easy for sickness to spread when a crowd packed itself into one place, and mercenaries who'd moved in haste, scooping up whatever they could grab along the way, were doubly prone to it.
The water source isn't much of one, either. Are the company captains just down with ordinary plague?
So thinking, Johan approached the command tent. The captain's bodyguards moved to block him in flustered confusion — but it was the company's own mercenaries who shouted them down.
"It's the Count! Will you not step aside!"
"Move, you fools, move!"
"N-no, but we can't let him in without informing the captain first—"
By the time the stammered protest left their lips, Johan had already pushed open the tent flap and stepped inside. The bodyguards stood gaping in their own little zone, utterly useless.
"...Ughk! Wh-what in the — what are my guards even doing?!"
The company captain, Dirsam, shrieked in alarm. The crow-beastman jabbed a finger at Johan.
"Intruder! Intruder!"
"Compose yourself, Captain. It's Count Eitz."
"What kind of nonsense is— *khough, khough.*"
Mid-rant, Dirsam broke into a coughing fit, then blinked hard. The young human really did look familiar from somewhere.
"...I... I beg your pardon, my lord Count."
"You'll forgive the rudeness, I trust."
Johan looked Dirsam up and down. The mercenary captain lying there was unmistakably sickly — but he was different from the men outside. From Dirsam, Johan could feel magical energy. Feral, grotesque energy.
When he brought the numerological talisman close, it shivered violently.
...So it wasn't plague after all.
Johan felt a flush of embarrassment. Honestly, he'd assumed the company captains had simply caught the sickness too.
So the captains caught the curse, the rank and file just got ordinary disease, and because everyone assumed the sickness was the curse, the whole camp's been trembling in its boots?
It was an absurd, almost comical situation — but not a light one. Left unaddressed, the company could come apart at the seams.
"You're in no condition to command. I'll take charge of the company in your stead."
"Th-that is absolutely—!"
Even flat on his back, Dirsam flailed against it. To a mercenary captain, command of his company was life itself. No captain alive handed that over to his employer like a gift.
"Your seal and sword are here, I see. I'll make good use of them."
"W-wait, please!"
Johan gripped Dirsam's shoulder and bore down, pinning him in place. The pain radiating from the grip twisted the captain's face.
"The Order entrusted this task to you, and look at the state of things. If you're too sick to rise, you pass the work to your vice-captain; if the vice-captain can't manage, you pass it to the next man in line. That's how it ought to have been done."
Johan's rebuke was all but an open threat. The bodyguards were outside, and here stood Johan, sword at his hip, alone before the captain. Dirsam plunged into dread, convinced Johan might use this very moment as pretext to kill him.
"Ugh... ugh..."
"You do seem unwell. Rest well."
Johan's tone brooked no further argument. Dirsam had no choice but to nod.
"Envoys should have arrived by now. Have they come through here, by any chance?"
"They have, my lord. They're lying down as well."
"...You can't be serious."
Johan was astonished all over again. He'd honestly assumed they'd been waylaid by pirates—
What in the world did they do to catch the curse along with everyone else?
Most of the mercenaries hadn't caught the curse at all, yet envoys who'd only just arrived had. It was remarkable.
"No need to go confirm it now, I take it. Very well — I have received command from your captain. This sword and this seal are the proof of it. From this moment, I command! All centurions who can still move, assemble at once! Those who cannot, send deputies in your place!"
At Johan's bellow, the mercenaries scrambled. Fierce, savage, greedy men — they submitted before Johan like lambs.
The centurions, for their part, were bewildered that some high-born noble had barged in and started issuing them orders. So he carried the seal and sword — but wasn't all this just too strange?
What in blazes is going on?
Weren't you going to ask him that?
...No. That would be unwise.
Not a single centurion opened his mouth. A centurion's rank among mercenaries meant years of rolling through battlefields — and with those years came a certain keenness of eye, a certain feel for danger. Above all, instinct was screaming its warning.
"Yes, my lord! We pledge our loyalty!"
Johan swept his gaze across the men, sorted out those in poor condition, and gave orders for a new water source to be found.
Going by the look of things, it's probably dysentery.
Johan was hardly an expert, but he knew the broad strokes of dealing with it. Wash, clear away the filth, find clean drinking water...
"Boil the water and mix in salt. Do you have any honey?"
"There's a little left in the storeroom."
"Living in luxury, I see. Mix honey into the water for the worst off and make them drink it."
A simple oral rehydration solution, then feed it to them...
Johan moved fast. That much alone would settle the outbreak quickly. The curse had made the rumor far more terrifying than the reality; fortunately, the situation itself was far from dire.
The moment a few of the healthier mercenaries began rising from their beds, the mood of the camp turned on a coin's edge. The mercenaries murmured Johan's name in wonder.
Truly, a blessed and sanctified knight was a different creature altogether!