The Leak

Keith was not particularly surprised when he heard the rumor about the mage.

“Er, really? He researches demonology, you say?”

“Shh! Someone will hear you.”

“Shouldn’t we report it?”

“I only heard it secondhand myself, so reporting it feels a bit much.”

“There’s even talk that the mage is really a hundred-year-old man.”

“Oh my. Truly?!”

“That alone tells you how shifty he is…”

He had had suspicions enough from the moment the man demanded entry rights to the Black Forest. Still, he could not go on suspecting him without grounds, so he had set Enri to look into it and had been keeping an eye on him in the meantime. Fortunately, nothing in the man’s conduct looked especially suspicious.

Hamel was zealous about teaching Ardine, too. These days Ardine talked of nothing but her magic lessons all through mealtimes, and whenever she did, Hamel watched her with genuine pride in his eyes. That fond look was hard to take for a lie. Just to be safe, Keith had gone so far as to put no fewer than two escort knights on him, and their reports came back clean as well.

And then he had happened to overhear the staff talking with their voices lowered. On top of that, word came from Enri that same evening.

“He’s quite famous among the grave robbers, apparently. The mad mage, they call him.”

“Grave robbers?”

“Because he goes in and out of the labyrinths. He throws such fits about them laying hands on his precious research material that they give him a wide berth, they say.”

“Surely he isn’t a demon worshipper?”

“That he doesn’t seem to be, either. It looks as though he studies it for the fun of it?”

“…For fun?”

“Yes. Just, well, he seems to treat demon research as a discipline in its own right, the same as herbology or magecraft.”

“Peculiar.”

“An eccentric, they call him. Shall I dig deeper?”

“Simply keeping your antennae up should do. There’s no need to go digging actively; report whatever snags, as and when.”

“Yessir. Anyway, it’s good to hear the Captain’s voice. Do you remember? How sweet our nights together used to be…”

— Click.

“Demonology, is it…”

For the moment he called Bishe in and ordered her to see that the staff kept their mouths shut. So far the talk seemed to have gone around only among grave robbers and wandering mercenaries, but now that it had reached the White Castle, it could just as easily be carried to the temple in the capital. Hamel was officially the White Castle’s retained mage, so an Inquisitor turning up would be an enormous nuisance.

And if my luck is bad, I may have to answer for it.

But that was that… reality was reality.

Late in the evening, with a crescent moon hung in the sky, Keith paid a visit to the mage’s quarters, made ready for him on the Third Drill Ground. That was where Ardine had taken her mage test, and it had been settled on because the Frost Rose Knights kept mainly to the First and the Second. Keith had given the mage an empty three-story lodge, the whole building to himself.

The mage used the second floor as a laboratory and slept on the third, and Ardine’s lessons were held on the Third Drill Ground as well. The Black Forest had to be entered and left out of sight of other eyes, so he came and went only after the sun had set, reporting to Keith no more than a bare record of his movements. After such a trip he would shut himself up in the lodge for days at a time, skipping meals, throwing himself into nothing but his research. In practice, then, he had almost no occasion to step outside that quarter.

“…”

He drew a deep breath. The moment he raised his hand to knock, the door opened by itself.

— Creeeeak…

He stepped inside with the feeling of an unseen hand pushing at his back.

— Clack.

Behind him the door closed quietly. To the left was a small drawing room; to the right, a kitchen where simple meals could be put together. In the middle stood a wooden staircase.

Halfway up that pitch-dark stairway a violet orb appeared. Glowing like a jewel, it spoke to Keith.

— Come up.

The orb blinked, its saturation and its brightness shifting from one instant to the next. Its light was brighter than he had expected, and Keith climbed the stairs without missing his footing.

Unlike the first floor, where the lights had been out altogether, the second was lit by a dim lamp. As he remembered it, two rooms had originally faced each other across a narrow corridor, but the layout had evidently been changed. The opened-out space looked fairly large; but for the litter of things, it would have felt far larger.

“…”

The sight in front of him left Keith at a loss for words. The place was such a shambles that it was hard to believe anyone had been living in it for a bare week. A bookcase that took up one whole wall stood crammed with thick volumes, and, as though even that had not been storage enough, towers of books of differing heights lay strewn untidily across the floor.

And then the display cabinet.

Brightly colored bottles, no two the same shape or size, filled each compartment several rows deep. At a glance the whole thing looked exactly like a collection of pretty glass marbles. How could anything be so lustrous.

Among them, a bottle of a familiar color caught his eye. Translucent aquamarine, it stood there among hundreds of objects like a treasure, as though all the other shabby bottles were sleight of hand, as though this whole scattered clutter had been contrived for the sole purpose of hiding that one treasure.

“What are you staring at so hard?”

The wooden chair facing the window spun around toward Keith. Hamel sat in it with his legs crossed, still wearing the shape of a fourteen-year-old boy, the chair’s back narrow and high behind him. The orb that had guided Keith up blinked slowly and then winked out of its own accord.

The boy looked ready to die of amusement. A beaming grin sat on his slender face.

“Coming to me alone at this hour, it can’t be a very above-board favor you’re after.”

The remark struck home. Keith flinched, but kept his face blank.

The mage was right; he had come to ask a favor. But leading honestly with the main point was a stupid move. With not a rat’s tail to your name you still had to puff it up, and bluff, and sound the man out. Only then could a request be made over into an offer with some appetite in it.

He pitched his voice low and struck an ominous note.

“I have heard a strange rumor of late.”

“…”

“There is talk going about among people that the Elixir is a pretext, and that you took the entry rights to the Black Forest in order to come and go from the Great Labyrinth.”

“And so?”

“Is it true?”

“Snrk.”

Hamel let out a snicker and waved a lazy hand back and forth, the picture of unconcern.

“Sorry, sorry. I had no idea Your Grace commanded such a direct manner of speech.”

A flare of irritation rose in Keith at the sight of that pretty boy’s face sneering at him, and settled again just as quickly. He rather thought he understood now why Enri went on and on singing the same song: the face, the face.

For no particular reason he nudged the knee-high stack of books with the toe of his shoe.

“Because there’s no need to waste time talking around it.”

“Economical. I like that. That rumor is absurd. I have never so much as been near a labyrinth. Seeing how your staff let their tongues wag, one can guess the quality of the master.”

“…”

“Somehow your face says this isn’t the answer you wanted?”

The question that followed the smooth lie came as a relief. Had the mage been of no more than that caliber, Keith would have been genuinely disappointed.

“Let me ask again. Do you study demonology?”

“I do. Is it your turn now to report me to the temple?”

“You answered honestly because you knew I would not, didn’t you.”

“…”

“Did you expect me to come, as well?”

“Who knows.”

The two of them fell silent, each putting his own hand of cards in order. What to hide, and what to show… In a conversation of this kind even a glance, a tone of voice, a scrap of breath was bound to be controlled by design.

He studied Hamel’s eyes, narrowed to slits. The air around him was all bluff, as if to say that you could scratch at him all you liked and still be sitting in the palm of his hand.

But if it isn’t a bluff—

The thought he had been having ever since the lodge door opened by itself spilled out of his mouth.

“…So you have heard about me.”

Hamel folded his arms.

— Scrrrk. Something scraped along the floor, and the round stool that had been shoved into a corner moved of its own accord and came to a stop beside Keith.

Keith shrugged and planted himself on the backless stool.

It looked as though the talk was going to run long.