Making A Scene

That was the first one.

“Wheeeet!”

Enri let fly a magnificent whistle and sang his captain’s praises.

“Nice one, Captain!”

“Whoa! Wooooah!”

The soldiers had shrunk back in fear from those grotesque shapes, no question, but in an instant their spirits soared.

“Haa. Hoo…”

Keith steadied his breathing and leveled his gaze at the biggest of them. The brute, for its part, seemed to have singled out the strongest warrior in the party. It had been tearing chunks from the thigh of a fallen horse; now it twisted its head around and raked at the dirt with its forepaws.

“…”

He rolled his wrist and charged straight in. Three seconds was more time than he needed to close the distance. The sword’s sharp point drove in between the beast’s eyes.

— Shunk!

“Krrrrrgh!!”

Jet-black, viscid blood poured out like a waterfall. The swarm of maggots that had swallowed the brute’s body went into a frenzy and reared up. But Keith took the hilt in both hands and drove the blade deeper.

“Gurrrrr…!”

Once more the red sword energy blazed up. The surging power boiled hot as fresh-spewed lava and burrowed down into the beast’s body.

— …Bang!

And then it burst.

“…”

The blast tore the brute’s body into small pieces and flung them in every direction like droplets of water.

“Uurp.”

At that ghastly sight, dry retching broke out here and there. Not everyone who uses a sword has a strong stomach, after all.

“…”

Keith, too, swallowed down the nausea rising in him and thought:

Why, I wonder.

Beasts that live near a labyrinth are slowly tainted by demonic energy. Once the concentration of the taint rises high enough they generally die deep in the forest, though on rare occasions, as now, they come as far out as a road people travel.

But there has never been a time when this many were roaming about at once, as though they had been poured out.

Put like that, didn’t it look exactly as though someone had deliberately gathered the creatures up, tainted them, and turned them loose?

— Swiiish.

“Kkrrdd, glurk!”

— Shunk. Shrrrk…

With Keith leading the charge, the situation was quickly brought under control.

“Kweeeee…!”

Enri, who had cut the last beast’s life short, came trudging over, his face gone pale. Drenched in bloody water, they were a spectacle and then some. He buried his nose in his forearm, sniffed at it, and asked:

“What do we do if the priest faints?”

Keith stripped off his blood-soaked robe, rolled it up, threw it aside, and climbed into the carriage. Then he said, in a flat, dry tone:

“Then we wake him.”

The North, which shares its history and its roots with the Demon War, is a region of deep faith even reckoned against the Empire as a whole. Yet temples were few, and the ones that existed stood far from where people actually lived, so Northerners served their god in their own homes. With few devout worshippers the temples’ power waned as the years went on, and priests who volunteered to come all the way out to the barren North were rarer still. So even the Atalan Temple, the largest in the North, held no more than one priest and three assistant priests.

Andrea, the priest of the Atalan Temple, was very young. The moment he made full priest he had been dispatched out here, as part of the usual ‘dump it on the new man.’ Barely a year in Atalan, he had been thrown by Elrod’s sudden death, and when a rite as weighty as an investiture landed on him on top of that, the strain felt like enough to drive him out of his mind. Above all, when the Regent Duke’s party turned up well past ten o’clock looking like a pack of beggars and he had to receive them, he even caught himself thinking he would rather simply faint.

They said they had been set upon along the way by beasts tainted with demonic energy. Horrified, Andrea shoved them into the bathhouse, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and resolved to report the matter to the Great Temple without fail.

Fortunately, once the gore was scrubbed off him and he was put into formal dress, Keith Paragon was beautiful as a porcelain figure that a master craftsman had shaped with care, glazed, and fired. Andrea looked down at the Regent Duke, kneeling on one knee in black under a silver robe.

Well, he is handsome, just as they say… No. That is not the point.

What mattered in the end was whether the new man in power gave generously to the temple. Elrod Paragon had possessed a breathtaking charisma, and for all of it he had known how to josh with those beneath him and put a room at its ease.

But what of this man? From the moment he set foot in the temple there had not been a trace of a smile on him. Like a prince under a curse that had made him forget how to smile, he wore a dry face and simply followed the rite.

“…”

Andrea had barely so much as heard of Keith Paragon, at that. All he knew was that by Elrod Paragon’s will the half-brother had taken up the regency, and that this man was none other than the Mercenary King who held sway over the North.

So the investiture had to go off without a hitch. Put the man they called king of the mercenaries out of temper, and there was no telling what reprisal might follow. The trouble was that he had nothing like the years behind him to preside over a rite of that order.

All I wanted was to pass the time quietly in this desolate city and go back to the capital when my term was up…

It was an unseemly comparison, but in the end he was not so very different from a convict hoping to serve out his sentence without incident and be let go.

“Ahem. Ahem…”

His throat was maddeningly dry. Andrea wetted his lips from the water glass beside him and carefully lifted the scroll with the Emperor’s message magic sealed inside it.

A message from the Emperor himself, no less. The Emperor’s assent was no more than a formality, and yet even priests in the capital rarely came by the chance to handle a message scroll with their own hands. In that respect Andrea found the present situation rather stirring. He half-wondered whether the god had taken notice of the heart he had prayed with in that cramped little temple.

“I shall now unseal the message of His Imperial Majesty.”

As he spoke he stole a glance down at Keith, still on his left knee, both hands wrapped around the hilt of an enormous ceremonial sword. His head dipped slightly, baring a white forehead that shone like sunlight scattered on water; his thick lashes curved beautifully along the line of his eyes.

— Gulp.

The priest unrolled the scroll. There were several kinds of message magic, and the Emperor’s kind named precisely who was to trigger it, so that no blood but that person’s could unseal it.

An assistant priest came up holding a small knife. And then, the instant the knife came to rest against Andrea’s thumb.

“Hold!”

A booming voice rang out from the cloister beyond the hall. There was no need to check whose it was. It was Count Luigi Husslix’s voice. The tiles rumbled with the tread of many feet coming on at once.

“This cannot be!”

The Count came storming into the temple, dragging along the kinsmen who had thrown in with him and a body of private soldiers. Forty-odd of them, at a rough count.

“Nnngh.”

Andrea groaned. In truth he had foreseen something like this blowing up. While hunting up material on Keith Paragon he had read the oracle concerning the black blood.

Not simply a half-brother by another mother but a child born out of wedlock, and to a mother of base birth besides? And on top of that, the ill-omened oracle… Blood falling out with blood is only human nature.

He muttered it bitterly to himself, but outwardly, at least, he had to keep up his dignity. Two young assistant priests were watching for his reaction, eyes wide and sharp.

“What is the meaning of this! Soldiers without leave, in a consecrated temple!”

While Andrea wrung out every last scrap of strength he had, Enri, standing below the corner of the altar, laid a hand on his scabbard. Keith brushed off his knee and rose to his feet. He caught Enri’s eye and gave a short shake of his head. Enri shrugged and took his hand off the scabbard.

Luigi stood halfway along the red velvet carpet. He moved a couple of steps toward the altar and flung both arms wide.

“Priest Andrea, weigh the gravity of the matter and make allowance for the circumstances that left me no choice but to bring private soldiers.”

Then, without leaving Andrea so much as a moment to answer one way or the other, he went on:

“That Keith Paragon should become Regent Duke. The late Duke’s last wish or no, this is preposterous! Surely none of you have forgotten that oracle of seven years ago?”

Luigi thrust out his forefinger and pointed it straight at Keith.

“Black blood shall be the ruin of House Paragon!”