Revenge Belongs To The Devil

“It’s put about publicly that the fire was a gas explosion. But that isn’t the truth of it.”
“You mean to say someone set it deliberately?”

At my question Herman heaved a deep sigh, and then he answered.

“Yes. That fire was the work of the Lagreb Republic.”

The Lagreb Republic.

The republic had been born of a citizens’ uprising against a monarchy long grown oppressive and corrupt. Republicanism sat at the heart of its creed, and countless citizens had rallied beneath its red banner. Their revolution had seemed to herald the dawn of a new age. With the monarchy abolished, Lagreb was reborn as a republic, and the military men who had stood at the revolution’s center took up the reins of power as though it could be no other way. In word they held fast to republican ideals; in practice they ran a dictatorship. Where royals and nobles had once stood, the generals had installed themselves as a privileged class of their own.

“The Lagreb Republic, of all things.”

That republic was the very aggressor that had set the Central Continent War alight.

“The records are unofficial, but there’s no doubt it was Lagreb’s doing.”
“But why…”
“When the fire came, my father’s body alone was found unburned. He’d been down in the cellar, where the flames never reached. I hardly know whether to call it a mercy, but thanks to that we were able to carry out a post-mortem.”

Herman drew a hollow breath and went on.

“My father didn’t die in the fire, they told me — he died set upon by someone. His body was covered all over with stab wounds none could account for, and most of them were marks left by something serrated, like the teeth of a saw.”
“…”
“And according to my old mentor from the military academy, there was no nation that used such a weapon save Lagreb.”

Unable to keep the horror from my voice, I asked:

“If that’s truly so, then why on earth would the Lagreb Republic do such a thing?”

“A few months before the fire — that affair when a deputy of the Lagreb Republic defected to the Empire of Balter. Do you remember it?”

The Emilien Leclerc affair. Yes, I remembered that clearly.

He had been a deputy of the republic, a man who condemned its leaders’ dictatorship and staked his life to escape. For days on end, or so they said, he had crossed the river without a single sip of water, nothing beneath him but one small skiff.

The papers had run the picture of him — found at the border, worn away to skin and bone.

At the time, even within the Empire of Balter, opinion had been sharply split over the defector. Most of the high nobility held that he was likely a spy and had to be put to death without fail; a handful of officials, the late Duke Ernst foremost among them, argued that no ideology could ever stand above a human life.

“I remember. His Majesty decided in the end to take him in as a subject of the Empire.”

Even so, I couldn’t see what any of that had to do with the fire at the Ernst townhouse.

Just because the late Duke Ernst had argued for taking the defector in, the Lagreb Republic turned its blade on a noble of the Empire of Balter?

There was far too much here I couldn’t make sense of. Carefully, haltingly, I put the question to him.

“Why should they take such touchy offense at a defector being taken in?”
“Around that time, discontent had been building within Lagreb against those who had newly seized power. And then, with our Empire taking in a deputy of the republic, the sense of crisis among Lagreb’s leaders ran all the higher.”

The Empire of Balter wielded the greatest influence on the whole Central Continent, and House Ernst’s political sway within it was considerable in its own right. Once word reached Lagreb that such a house had taken in an enemy defector, and unconditionally at that, the republic’s internal rifts had only cut the deeper, or so he said.

“That day my parents had invited Deputy Leclerc to dine with them. For Lagreb it must have seemed a fine opportunity — do away with my parents and the deputy together, and they could send a warning to their own people and to foreign nations alike.”

“It’s despicable, monstrous. Why in the world was none of this ever made known to the public? I never even knew Deputy Leclerc had been caught up in it and died.”

Herman answered without hesitation.

“Because that was His Majesty’s choice.”

I could never have imagined such an answer. I looked at him with startled eyes, but his face held nothing like resentment, and he spoke firmly.

“The Lagreb Republic was no mere nation of idealists. It was a body possessed of formidable military power. From the very moment the revolution broke out within Lagreb, His Majesty had feared its embers might spread into a war between nations.”

“Surely — the reason the fire at House Ernst was never made a great matter of… was that too because he needed time to prepare for war with Lagreb?”
“Just so. Had this been made known to the public, it would likely have led to war on the instant. And then Balter would have had to meet the republic’s assault without preparation enough.”

For a long while I could not find my voice. Herman had recited it all so calmly, composed enough on the surface, and yet in those dark eyes there lay a faded anger.

“Then, Herman.”

I gazed at him and murmured as though I could scarcely believe it.

“Is that why you went to war?”

Not many months after that affair, the continental war broke out. Unable to bear its ever-widening fractures within, Lagreb had been the one to start it. A people long renowned for their prowess at sea, they fought the Central Continent War chiefly on the water, seizing the Empire of Balter’s trading ports and shipping lanes at a stroke and pressing their threat home. But Balter met them as though it had been braced for this all along.

And Herman Ernst was among them, of course.

“That’s right. Not out of any great patriotism or loyalty, but for nothing more than a paltry thirst for revenge.”

Herman had kept digging after the truth of the fire, he said, even buying off an officer of the Lagreb military to unearth an enciphered document. And the man who had given the order to murder Duke Ernst, he added, had been the leader of the Lagreb Republic himself.

“Everyone tried to stop me. His Majesty among them.”

For the heir of a ducal house to march off to war was a rare thing indeed, and with no sibling to stand in his place, it must have been reckless past all reckoning. The people dressed that recklessness up as a noble sense of duty. Yet now, with the gaudy wrapping stripped away, Herman confessed that his own nobility had been a lie.

I think I dimly understand, now, why Herman wore such a sheepish look every time he was hailed as a hero of the war.

Herman forced a smile at me, who could find nothing at all to say.

“Had I truly been a man who cared for the Empire, I would have put His Majesty’s will before all else.”

The Emperor was the Empire itself. His Majesty had opposed his going to war to the very last, Herman said, and he, burning with a contemptible thirst for revenge, had defied that will.

But that was Herman running himself down too harshly. It struck me almost as a kind of slander against himself. Whatever the motive, to march off to war took tremendous courage.

“In the end, after no end of sacrifice, I got what I wanted.”

What Herman Ernst had wanted.

That, surely, had been the execution of Lagreb’s leader.

As the Empire’s allies and the republic’s coalition partners were drawn in, the war swelled in scale until, in the present day, it had come to be called the Central Continent War. Victory fell to the Empire of Balter and its allies. The defeated leader of Lagreb was made to pay vast reparations, and his legitimacy as a ruler was dragged through the dirt. Caught up in the power struggle that erupted within the republic afterward, he vanished like dew upon the execution ground.

“At first I believed, firmly, that repaying death with death was the only way. Back then I didn’t fear even death, and so I thought of nothing but revenge.”
“…”
“But even when it was all over, the things I’d lost never came back to me. It was hollow — barren, and empty, and all for nothing.”

In the end, whose sake had all that vengeance served? For me, burning with a thirst for revenge no less fierce than Herman’s own, his words were not something I could easily let pass.

“And so, of late, I’ve come to think revenge may not have been the answer after all. You know — there’s that saying among the maxims of the Empire.”
“…”
“Forgiveness belongs to God; revenge belongs to the devil.”

At those words I stopped short in my tracks.

“But, Herman. If you hadn’t even had that…”

Somehow I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to argue against what he’d said.

“If you hadn’t even had that thirst for revenge, you could never have endured it. Had you not so much as done that, then I— no, then you could never have borne that situation.”

Herman had stopped beside me, and he gazed at me now with a softness in his eyes. Like sorbet melting in its cup, his lingering gaze slid over my face.

“You’re right. Sometimes a thirst for revenge is the very thing that keeps a person alive.”

Then, without warning, he scooped up a generous spoonful of chocolate sorbet with the spoon he’d been using and popped it straight into my mouth.

“But you can’t live on that alone your whole life long — that much I’ve learned.”

With the little spoon still in my mouth, I stared at him in a daze. A moment later, as it dawned on me that the thing rolling about on my tongue was the very spoon he’d just had in his own mouth, I yanked it out at once.

“Wh— what do you think you’re doing—”
“Enough of bitter talk. Time for something sweet.”

Herman grinned, insufferably pleased with himself, then lifted his head toward the sunset that had flooded the whole street.

“If only I’d known a moment like this would come to me once all those trials were behind me — then the enduring of those dark hours might not have been so hard, so full of pain.”

I couldn’t tell whether his words were regret or lament. I gazed quietly at his face, stained with the sunset, and all at once I found myself wondering what sort of face I would wear once my own revenge, against Cedric and Gloria, had run its course.

…I have no idea.

Nothing came to me at all. And it wasn’t only my face; the future that lay beyond it I couldn’t picture in the least, either.

After that we walked the street a while longer before making our way back to the carriage. The sunset had vanished entirely before I knew it, and stars had risen in a sky washed over with grey.

And it struck me all at once that the distance between Herman, who had already passed through his revenge, and me, who had mine still ahead, seemed as vast as the gulf between one star and the next in the night sky.