Siltrein (4)

What is a ghost?

A thought-form left behind by the dead.

Which is why a ghost exists only where there are people; where there are no people, there are no dead either. In that sense, it stood to reason that Siltrein should overflow with ghosts more than anywhere else in Erbern.

A great city where the living and the dead exist side by side: Siltrein.

Into that dull, hazy city, where not a day passes without the wailing of ghosts, two newly-made mercenaries had just now set foot.

“Lilian. You’ll have the commission by heart.”
“Mm. I just have to drive out the ghost that’s possessed the eldest son of the Balzenov family, over in the Third District.”
“You’ve remembered it well. Are you really sure you don’t want me along?”
“Of course. If anything, it’s Roan I’m worried about. What if some stray ghost bewitches you on the way? Are you sure you don’t want my help? If I put Leo on it, that ghost would turn up in no time.”
“Leo? You mean that mage ghost?”
“Mm. The name’s Leopold Barther, so I decided to just call them Leo.”

Ordinarily a ghost loses the greater part of its memories of life. If a ghost had reached as far as a mage, apparently, it kept hold of its own name at least. Not every mage is white-haired with skin gone all crinkled, but most of them are. Considering what sort of figure Leo must have cut in life, I was on the point of telling her what an outrageous pet name she had landed on, and then thought better of it.

“Leo. A good name.”

Praising her now and then would do no harm. Praise, I had heard somewhere, is essential to raising a child’s self-esteem.

“But I can’t have you harming a person. Even if the hand is Leo’s and not yours.”
“No — what are you on about? There’s no need for me to be the one to deal with it. Just finding them is enough, isn’t it.”

I meant to raise some objection, but however I turned it over, Lilian was right. In the end there was nothing for it but to nod.

“…Right. That isn’t a bad idea either.”

“Then I’ll do it? Igor, in the Fourth District, wasn’t it.”

The words were barely out of Lilian’s mouth before Leo flew off toward the Fourth District. Nothing of it was visible, of course, so that was only an inference on my part. Leo would come back to Lilian once the person was found, so in the end I had no choice but to go with her.

“Let’s head for the Third District, then.”

Siltrein was a dingy city, but a large one, and its infrastructure was on the whole quite well developed. My eyes went of their own accord to a procession of market stalls with no end in sight.

“Is there anything you need these days?”

“…Something I need? What is there that I’d need?”

“A hairpin, say… a ring or a necklace would do as well.”

Lilian stopped walking and looked me full in the face.

“I’m fine.”

And then, wasn’t she striding right past me at a good pace? I was made a fool of on the spot, and could only stand there without the least idea why.

“Wait a moment.”

Little by little, I was coming to feel that Lilian was a different person from Eladin. Eladin would never have refused coldly; she was the sort who would have picked out two hairpins and put one of them in my hair besides.

It did not take long to find the Balzenov house, where the ghost was said to be. The family was the foremost fortune in the Third District.

“Huge place.”

The mansion was so enormous it called to mind the Brus manor where the lord of Slonhar had stayed. A guard showed us to a reception room, and I had been watching Lilian sip her tea a while when someone came in.

“I’ve kept you waiting. I am Lavinia Balzenov, mistress of the house.”
“Roan Belgard, free knight. This one here will be doing the work.”

Lavinia Balzenov gave me a look that said, then what did you come for. I ignored it lightly, of course.

Lilian sprang to her feet without hesitating.

“Shall we go to where your son is, then?”
“Ah — you’re going straight there?”
“Yes, well. Is there something that has to be done first?”
“It isn’t that. It’s only that the ones who came before asked things — when my son was possessed, whether there was any grudge against us…”

Obviously there was no need to ask. If you want to know something, you ask the ghost directly.

“Not questions, no, but there are a few things I do need.”
“Anything we can lay hands on, we’ll fetch for you.”
“Could I have two ham sandwiches and some of your tea leaves?”

“…Are those, perhaps, offerings the rite requires?”

“Sorry? No, I haven’t had lunch. And the tea earlier was good. You must use fine leaves.”

“…”

And so Lilian made for the eldest son’s room with a sandwich in each hand. I wondered whether one of them might be for me. Instead she took a bite out of each and wore a look of deep satisfaction.

“Is that the one?”

“…Yes.”

The Balzenov son had been lying in the bed, and the moment Lilian walked in he came bolt upright.

“Mm. Mm. Ah — off with you, quick.”

Lilian mumbled something with her cheeks packed full, and the son, stiff as a board where he stood, dropped like a puppet with its strings let go. The ghost that had possessed him was gone.

“Ivan!”

Lavinia Balzenov ran to her fallen son. Lilian’s ghost-clearing was a job simple to the point of anticlimax.

“Ah… thank you. Thank you truly.”

Eyes red at the rims, she checked her son over and bowed her head again and again. Once the situation had more or less settled, we came out of the manor.

“…Money is easy to come by.”

The completion fee on the commission Balzenov had put up was twenty gold coins. A great sum, dropped out of a few words’ worth of talk. A god’s authority was such an unfair advantage that it made seventy-odd years of a wandering knight’s hard-won skill look worthless.

“Keep to this and we could go round five places in a day.”
“Just how hard do you mean to work me?”

“…No, I didn’t mean it that way. If it offended you, I apologize.”

“It’s a joke. I’ll work hard whether Roan tells me to or not, so don’t worry.”

Under a sky gone black.

The fourth commission finished, Lilian stretched as though tired. The day’s takings came to fifty gold coins. We had set out with forty-odd, so in a matter of a few hours our fortune had doubled.

“Hah… Friend, what sort of trick was that? First I’ve seen the like.”
“My lady happens to be on the capable side.”

Even Tairen Beloa, who had arranged the commissions, looked fairly staggered. That aside, I handed him a sack with blood dripping from it.

“Igor.”

“…In a single day?”

Lilian could take her completion fee straight from the client. I had no idea where my own client even was, so I had to hand the broker some proof that the commission was done. He opened the sack, about the size of a watermelon, checked the contents and nodded.

“I’ll collect the fee from the client tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”

Lilian had been nodding off for a while, and the moment we got back to our lodging she fell dead asleep. I drew the blanket over her carefully, so as not to wake her.

A fortnight had passed since we arrived in Siltrein. The mercenary work went smoothly, and we swept up commissions as fast as they came. To say nothing of Lilian, I too had won myself a fair name among the mercenaries for tracking and hunting skill the like of which had never been seen.

“Friend, here’s the fee from last time.”

A hunting commission chasing a wanted criminal is limited to one a day, however much help Lilian gives. The fees were not high either, so criminal-hunting was a trade whose sums did not add up. And yet I did not stop taking the commissions. The reason was simple.

“And a designated commission’s come in.”

That was exactly it. The designated commission.

On an ordinary commission the broker attaches whichever mercenary he likes. Here the client fixes on a mercenary from the outset and puts the work in their hands. As a rule you never so much as lay eyes on a designated commission without established credit and skill behind you. In exchange the fee is high, and above all it is work entrusted by the sort of client who would rather as few people as possible knew of it.

A client who keeps things quiet. Which was as good as saying someone highly placed.

“The client?”
“Anonymous.”

This client had to be very highly placed indeed.

“It’s a bit unusual. They want you to go outside the wall and bring back a skeleton knight’s head.”

“…A familiar commission.”

“The truth is, everyone who’d know, knows. There isn’t a mercenary with any skill who hasn’t been offered it. Though there’s never been one handed it as fast as you have, friend.”
“Some sort of test, is it?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“And where are the mercenaries who took that commission now?”
“No idea. They went out and never came back in.”

Not one mercenary had passed the anonymous client’s test. With a single exception.

“You passed that test. What comes after it? Is the client that new administrator they speak of?”
“Who knows.”

Tairen Beloa put his thumb and forefinger together and showed me the circle.

“I’ve had something out of it myself, so I can’t very well tell you.”

He chose silence, but I got a fair part of an answer out of him for all that. There was no chance the client was the administrator. For the very man who raised the rebellion to be taking the administrator’s money would have made a very nasty joke indeed.

“Well, fine. I’ll take it.”

A commission from someone highly placed had been the object from the start, so this test had to be passed. Someone of high station can pay a completion fee in something other than money. A priest, say, with no fear of the information leaking. Lilian needed a teacher to instruct her in the handling of holy power, and having one would cut the time down out of all comparison with her labouring away alone.

That night.

Lilian had come back from clearing away another heap of commissions, and somewhere in there she must have caught the news, because she spoke to me obliquely before we slept.

“Are you really going to be all right?”

Words that gave no clear sign of what they pointed at. Still, the worry in them came through keenly enough, and I turned them over a while. Considering what sort of thing I am to Lilian, I could understand her worry, even when it verged on obsession.

“You don’t have to help. A skeleton knight is nothing I can’t manage alone. And there’s Pormel if it comes to it. Besides, I don’t want to take you along on work that means killing a beast. Didn’t you say you feel the beast’s pain as well?”

Lilian lay with her back to me, facing the wall. The back of her head gave no reply, and it felt as though it were lodging a protest against me.

The words she needed. The words I would have wanted to hear first of all, if I were her. I added them to that troubled-looking back of hers.

“I’ll come back. Inside a single night, at the latest.”

The moon was unusually bright that night.

“Promise?”
“I promise.”

The bright moonlight broke against the thick fog and scattered. In truth the sky over Erbern is hazy wherever you look, so it was only from the whiteness of the fog that I vaguely supposed the moonlight was bright.

“…Mm.”

I did not like the sky over Erbern. It seemed no different from where I stood just then, veiled in uncertainty and simply believing things would turn out well.