Siltrein (2)

Skeleton knights and death knights alike take mounts as a matter of course. The skeleton horses under them were no match for Pormel, but within the bounds of Erbern nothing could touch them for speed.

“They’re all gone.”

They vanished like mist, exactly as they had come, and only a faint sound of hooves was left to say they had been here a moment before.

For a while Lilian stared blankly in the direction the undead had gone, then turned her head all at once.

“Oh, right. Since they’re out searching anyway, I should have asked them to find us other cities too.”
“No. There’s no need for that.”
“Why?”
“I already know which way we’re going, and besides, if some city were to spot a mob of higher undead on that scale it would be a disaster.”
“If they spot them? What happens then?”
“They’d bar their gates, naturally, but if they went so far as to attack, that city would be wiped out. We can’t go wrecking the land we have to live on.”

Lilian had no real feel for the power she held, and that blind spot, naturally, cost us far more than it ever gained us.

“Lilian, keep this in mind. Beasts are the enemy of mankind, and you are as good as the king of beasts. What you did just now was far too hasty. If anyone so much as learns you exist, we’ll have nothing to say for ourselves when the capital hands down a top-priority subjugation order that very day.”

“…All right. I’ll be careful.”

We took up the journey again with an uneasy air between us. Pormel put its feet down on the wet ground, and Lilian silently wrapped her arms around my waist.

Even after we had left the streamside behind and reached the middle of the broad grassland.

She did not say a word.

…Did I speak too harshly?

Come to think of it, she must have arrived at that decision in her own way too, after turning over how she might lighten my burden even a little. I was the one worrying about her, so for my sake she had gone looking for a way to keep herself safe. I put what I meant to say in order in my head, and broached it carefully.

“Lilian, I’m grateful for the thought. And I understand wanting to be of use as soon as you can. But there’s no need to be so impatient… Hey. Are you listening?”
“Hm?”
“Are you listen… No. Never mind. What were you thinking about?”
“Ah, Roan. It’s just, something seems strange to me.”
“What is it that’s strange?”
“You said even the children I called together at random could wipe out a whole city, right? Then how can there still be people living in Erbern?”

Thirty skeleton knights gathered in one place bring a city down. And Erbern held skeleton knights in numbers that made thirty laughable. Her doubt was reasonable.

“Because they don’t gather.”

Higher individuals like skeleton knights have no occasion to gather in the first place, so naturally no defense had ever been prepared against them.

“However strong an undead is, it can’t bring a city down on its own. So do you see now what it meant, to rally together things that never gather?”
“Mm. I didn’t think it through. Sorry.”

After that the silence came back. Pormel went on setting one foot down after another without a sound, and Lilian had lost her words again. I had set out to soothe her mood and ended by lecturing her, and there was nothing left to do about it but let out a small sigh.

Uneasy as my own mood was, the journey itself went smoothly. Erbern’s notorious undead never came near us, so it was fair to say there was nothing whatsoever for me to attend to. As we passed beneath an enormous oak, Lilian whispered softly.

“Roan, the children are back.”

Lilian’s children could only mean those undead.

“Can you feel the ghosts?”
“Mm. An awful lot of them. So many it’s hard to think straight.”

She drew her brows together. I cannot see ghosts, so nothing around me felt any different. There are objects that let a man sense a spirit-body, the holy relics of the Selbien church among them, but regrettably I carried none.

“Everybody line up in a row.”

Lilian spoke into empty air and waved her hand about. She seemed to have leveled a finger at one of the ghosts.

“You first. Introduce yourself.”

A fair while after that, Lilian gave a small nod.

“Roan, I’ve decided which child to take with us.”
“Good. Can we set off again now, then?”
“Mm. Says that when it was alive, it was a mage.”

“…That’s a hell of a big shot to have been.”

So far as I knew, there were not even a hundred mages in the whole empire. In practice a mage is anyone born with a bodily organ that can sense and use magical power, which makes every one of them a mutant. Wasn’t it said that the moment a person is confirmed a mage, a viscountcy and a domain come down together on the spot?

Why the restless spirit of such a personage had been wandering Erbern was past knowing, but there was no doubt it would be of great help to Lilian.

Erbern is isolated. That meant every city but Oskalt with its trade road was set up to be self-sufficient, and Siltrein, Erbern’s second city, was no different.

A river runs through Siltrein. One tributary of a great river that rises in the empire’s northern basin cuts clean through Erbern, and Siltrein had raised its walls astride that tributary.

There is a reason people live even in Erbern, where ill conditions beyond counting pile one on another.

Erbern’s soil is fertile.

“…Roan. Are cities always like this?”

“What do you mean.”
“Are they… normally like this, I’m asking.”

Lilian could communicate perfectly with every lesser creature, and had a paradoxically hard time communicating with human beings. With a lesser creature she caught the faintest feeling without a word spoken; a human being had to carry the thoughts in their head over into speech themselves.

“I don’t know exactly what your words are pointing at, but probably not. Siltrein is an unusual case in a good many ways.”

The farmland lies inside the walls, and the river cuts across the whole of the city besides. That is why the city’s grounds could not help swelling to such a size, and only soil this fertile could support a spread so vast.

Siltrein was, so to speak, a fortified Pirberk. Lilian too had probably been wondering at the overwhelming scale of the place, so unlike Oskalt’s.

“We’ll try the gate first.”

In an isolated fortress city the very notion of an outsider is unfamiliar. For all I knew they would loose crossbows at us the moment we came close, so I put the helm on before the soldiers spotted us. Lilian’s face turned sulky, but the alternative was being shut out over the look of my face, so there was no choice in it.

“Halt!”

Fortunately, no bolt came flying at us without warning. The guards up on the wall did level their crossbows at us threateningly, though.

“A free knight.”

As I have said before, every city without exception has its troubles, and the more closed off it is, the more work there is going for mercenaries. Siltrein had no reason not to throw both arms open to a free knight.

“Where’ve you come from?”
“The southwest.”

“…And how did you get this far?”
“Killing undead the whole way here. I’d say the fact that I’m standing in front of you proves my ability well enough, so how about opening the gate.”

The soldier said nothing for a while. Something was being weighed behind that silence, but before long the gate opened.

“Welcome to Siltrein, sir knight. The tavern’s that way.”

With that the soldier withdrew, and we walked on into the city. It would be the same anywhere in Erbern, no doubt, but the whole of Siltrein had a heavy, sunken air about it. Lilian had been looking this way and that, and now she tugged at my arm.

“Roan. What was that about a tavern earlier?”
“That was the soldier’s way of telling us where to stay. There are no inns in a place like this, so it’s common enough for a drinking house to feed the mercenaries and put them up.”

The whole time we walked Siltrein’s streets, the open stares of passersby pressed in on us. Natural enough, given how unfamiliar outsiders were here, but Lilian seemed put out, as though the stares made her uncomfortable.

We went the way the soldier had given us and found a drinking house of a fair size. Inside, the place was boisterous on the whole. A mercenary’s motto being to eat and drink until it kills you, any space with mercenaries in it was an uproar.

“Not faces I’ve seen before.”

The barkeep said it from behind the long straight counter, with a sour look.

“Because we came from outside.”
“I see. Are you mercenaries?”
“A free knight.”

Every one of the carousing mercenaries was watching us while pretending not to.

“Do you have a room we could take for a few days?”
“It’s the first time we’ve taken anyone not born in this city, so… probably not. The truth is, even the ones standing empty just now are rooms with someone assigned to them.”
“I’ll pay. How much?”
“No, it isn’t a question of that.”

Strung tight with nerves, the barkeep refused with a shake of the head, but I was in no less of a hurry myself. Lilian’s stamina was weaker even than Kalen’s, and this was a situation where she might collapse at any moment. The glance I stole at her showed her only standing there blankly, but there was no harm in taking care.

“I’m willing to pay as much as two silver coins a night. All you have to do is give us the room.”
“Sir free knight, in this trade there are things that matter more than money. If I hand a room over because I was paid well for it, the owner of that room will do me harm.”

There was no moving the barkeep. I was wondering whether we would have to look elsewhere when someone came around behind me, and without thinking I tightened my grip on Lilian’s hand.

“Friend.”
“Ah, Mister Beloa.”
“My room’s empty right now, isn’t it?”
“Yes. We’ve kept it clear for you.”
“Give it to these two. I can bed down with one of the other lot.”

Someone shouted from the table where the drinking was going on.

“Tairen, you bastard! You’re not having my room, not a chance!”
“Shut it, you! Who said anything about sleeping in your room? The place stinks like a beggar’s hole.”
“Hahahaha! Pike does live like a beggar, right enough!”
“What was that?”

Lilian had been watching to see how it would go, and now she whispered to me.

“What is it? What just happened?”
“Well. It seems to have sorted itself out somehow.”

I was bewildered, and the barkeep no less so, but a key came out from under the counter soon enough.

“So that’s how it is. The building across the way, second floor, third room.”

“…There’s a lock on every room?”
“Yes. Seeing as the custom we get isn’t ordinary folk but mercenaries… we need at least this much to advertise that you won’t take a knife in the night.”

Crude as the thing was, a lock was a lock, and a hundred, a thousand times better than none. For that alone, if for no other reason, this place was worth a silver coin a head.

“Hey. Thanks for the help.”
“Hm? Ah, it’s nothing. Not for a little thing like that. If you’re really grateful… you know.”

The man they had called Tairen mimed tipping back a cup that was not there. I snorted a laugh and ordered him a beer.

“You’re not drinking, friend?”
“Drink doesn’t agree with me.”
“Ha. Is that so.”

He emptied the beer in an instant.

“You said you came from outside, friend. Just the two of you, all this way?”
“That’s right.”
“Impressive. You broke through that devil’s country with a woman in tow, did you. Your wife’s a fine-looking one.”
“I can see how it would look that way. We are not husband and wife.”
“Ah, my mistake. You looked so close, that’s all. Family, then?”

What is Lilian to me?

The question had come late, and my answer came just as late.

“She is the lady I serve.”

Lilian’s hand on my arm seemed, somehow, to tighten a little more.