Beyond The Darkness

“Are you really going to be all right?”

Enri asked. He had just triggered the binding magic and checked that it had taken properly.

Keith sat bolt upright on the bed, as though he were partway through some sort of training. Enri let out a long, exaggerated sigh.

“It’s different from last time, I’m telling you. It’s not as if I’m only stepping out for a few days. That woman—”

“Viscountess.”

“Sorry?”

“She is Viscountess Pai Deluosa. Mind your tongue.”

“Ah… Sorry ’bout that.”

He scratched awkwardly at the back of his head. Keith had never gone out of his way to shield anyone like this before, least of all a woman. Enri was finding it very hard to get used to.

“Er, will the Viscountess on her own really be enough?”

“I was in her care the whole while we went south and back. She’s better than you.”

“So this is you casting off the faithful old wife who’s waited on you all this while, is it.”

“That’s right.”

Keith gave his blunt answer, straightened the set of his nightclothes, and sank into thought. His hand, still fiddling with the carelessly gaping front of the garment, slowed by degrees.

“And don’t forget to sound Kalada out.”

After hearing from Pai that she had settled matters with Kalada, he had received word from his master separately as well. She asked about Pai. How they had met, whether he had looked into her background… Perhaps she found the answers he had ready less than convincing, because she went on to press him about why he had come to love Pai.

He had not expected the word love to come out of Kalada’s mouth. Even so, he had a trump card in reserve, prepared back when he had talked the matter over with Enri.

‘I like her face.’

‘The pair of you are properly mad for a pretty face, aren’t you.’

Nothing made a feeling convincing like a face. Pai Deluosa’s peerless beauty was convenient in more ways than one when it came to concealing what their relationship really was.

As it happened, he had something to ask Kalada himself. Pai had passed on no more than ‘The talk went fine,’ and had said nothing about the particulars. Beyond that, all he had was the escort knight’s strange account of going into the study once the confrontation was over and finding the furnishings in a shambles.

What reason could there possibly be for the furnishings to end up smashed? Even Kalada could not wield sword energy with her breath. He was left wondering what secret talk had passed between the two of them.

But about what had gone on in the study, Kalada clammed up tight.

‘If she suits you then that’s that, but you had best know this much: a woman is not to be trusted.’

‘And are you not a woman yourself, Guild Master Kalada?’

‘Which is my point — don’t believe everything I say either.’

Judging someone to be a good person and trusting them are two different matters. He thought Pai a good person, and so he had thrown in his lot with her, but that did not mean he gave her his blind trust. Trust and a person’s real character are questions that arise even between people who have known each other a long time, and even between master and disciple.

“You’ll want to be careful when you go digging into Kalada’s business. It will come off more naturally if you open the conversation with the beasts tainted with demonic energy.”

“Good day to you, Guild Master Kalada. And how have you been keeping. Oh, me, I’ve been keeping splendidly, of course. A little while back we cleared out some beasts tainted with demonic energy near the Atalan Temple, and there wasn’t the slightest trouble! Lovely weather we’re having. I don’t suppose you could run a background check on Viscountess Deluosa for me? Like that.”

“…”

Honestly, there was something excessive about what Keith was asking.

Sounding out Guild Master Kalada… I’d have an easier time hanging a bell on a dragon’s neck.

Still, orders were orders.

“That’s a joke. I’m well aware my own life is precious to me.”

“Good. Be careful.”

If he meant to set out at first light tomorrow, he had to have his packing done tonight. Enri looked Keith over like a man watching a small child turned loose at the water’s edge, and swallowed a sigh.

Nothing had better go wrong.

He was worried about the Captain, but instead of letting any of that into his parting words, he needled him like this.

“Well then, shall the faithful old wife make her lonely exit? Ah, and how will you bear it tonight, with nobody to warm your side?”

Keith Paragon, naturally, did not answer.

After the meal Pai had followed Keith into the study. He had every right to worry over whether Hamel was a man fit to be entrusted with a child’s education, so it was only proper that she make her report.

She made up something serviceable: that she had met Hamel some years back while wandering the continent, and that their acquaintance had begun when he saved her life. She had not said in advance that she was going to see him, she added, because Hamel was such a creature of whim there was no telling how he would take it. Keith listened closely and gave a dry assent, ‘I see. Understood.’

All the same, it was true that Hamel had saved her. It had happened in the previous life, but the two of them were each other’s benefactor and beneficiary both; they had saved each other’s lives any number of times.

“Things are going along smoothly enough.”

She had knocked off a light thousand sit-ups and a thousand push-ups, and she said it to herself as she stretched. Better than not moving at all, but a bit of stretching was never going to work the stiffness out of her body.

“Can’t even digest my food. This is killing me…”

It had been a month now since some power she could not begin to fathom had given her a second life. In the previous life she had been a wandering knight who crossed the continent in every direction; she could clear a rugged mountain range in a day, and now and then she hired on with a mercenary company and took the lead in every kind of violent, filthy work. After a life that vigorous, working as a maid at the White Castle was stifling enough to kill her.

“Do people really live moving about this little?”

She could not understand it.

“I can’t even remember the last time my heart beat fast. Keep this up and one day I’ll just drop dead, won’t I?”

She had lain down in bed to sleep, and now she sprang up. She crammed her feet into her boots and threw a robe on over the gauzy nightgown.

“Let’s see… Where would be a good place to loosen up?”

Outside, she tapped the toe of one boot against the ground a few times and rolled her ankles lightly.

“Maybe I’ll go take a look at the Black Forest for the first time in ages. All right. Then… Hm?”

— Rustle.

She was just stepping off in high spirits when the sense of someone nearby brought her up short.

“What’s that?”

She did not tense up; she could feel no killing intent at all. And even if some assassin had bottled his killing intent up tight, it would have been useless in front of her. An assassin who made a rustling noise right out in the open could do her even less harm than that.

Then, as she looked unhurriedly about her, she caught sight of a figure.

“…”

A cloud drifted across and hid the moonlight. The figure was pitch-black, its head and shoulders and arms hanging slack, like a marionette with its strings cut. It came on slowly, staggering.

“Not… human, then.”

She drew the dagger she kept hidden at her thigh. There was no demonic energy to feel, so it was not a demon either. The wraith of something, then? Ghosts were a real thing after all? Once she would have snorted at the idea, but after the outlandish business of having her neck cut and waking up ten years in the past, her standards where the supernatural was concerned had loosened.

‘It’ came toward her. She took a step toward ‘it’ in turn.

With only a few paces left between them, the cloud changed course again and the moonlight came quietly down. The silver light poured over the crown of its head, and a face pale as a dead man’s came clear.

Pai’s lips twitched.

“…Keith Paragon.”