Tairen Beloa (1)

She was not there.

Lilian was nowhere in the room.

…Stay calm.

It was early afternoon. Was it not an awkward hour either way, too late to be starting the day and too late to still be sprawled asleep in the lodging? Going by her usual habits, this was about the time she would be getting up and heading out for a late breakfast. And I hadn’t even checked the place she ate at every day, had I? There was no need to start worrying already.

I slipped out of the lodging and rounded the corner of the building. Lilian would not eat at the drinking house; too noisy, she said.

The meat-sandwich shop she liked. It stood a little way off from the lodging, and I walked a solid thirty minutes, then stopped in front of a small building, its inside open straight onto the street.

“A customer?”

The bustle of footsteps stopped, and a head poked out over the stall counter.

“A face I’ve seen every day. …No, hold on, this is the first I’ve seen the face, isn’t it? Hiding a face like that behind a helm—”
“I have something to ask.”

I cut the shopkeeper off. This was no situation for trading words.

“The woman who comes here often. Did she come yesterday too? And today?”

“…You mean the customer who comes in with you, sir knight. She came yesterday too and took a sandwich away with her. Today she hasn’t.”

Lilian had not come. That was plainly strange.

Was there anywhere else she might have gone? I could think of nowhere else she would wander to.

I started back the way I had come. I think I may have been gasping for breath; I think I may have been looking wildly about me. What I remember is that I covered in ten minutes a road that had taken thirty.

The drinking house where the mercenaries stayed. The last point on Lilian’s path that I knew of.

I opened the door. The barkeep was minding the counter as always, and there were no customers but a few mercenaries.

“Hey.”
“Mister Belgard?”
“Have you seen Lilian?”

“…Sorry?”

The barkeep took a step back. Only then did I realize how close I was standing to the counter.

“Lilian. Have you seen her today.”
“Wait — settle down a moment, please. Aren’t you rather too worked up?”
“I’d like an answer to what I asked. That makes three times.”

“…Well — I did see her, yes. Mister Beloa took her off with him this morning.”

“Where is Tairen Beloa?”
“That I couldn’t rightly…”

In a fit of temper I grabbed the barkeep by the collar. Now that I had a destination there was no time to dawdle.

“The rules of this trade, or whatever — is that it again? Listen up. Tell me where Tairen Beloa is, right now, or it won’t be a mercenary that wrecks you. It’ll be my hand.”

The barkeep, terrified, refused to answer. The struggle dragged on for minutes, and just as I made up my mind to force that mouth open if I had to.

“Roan!”

Lilian’s voice struck the drinking house like water flung over a heated stone.

“Stop it!”

“…Lilian.”

Lilian, who had kicked the door open and come in, and Tairen Beloa standing at her side, and several mercenaries.

While I was busy with the barkeep, the mercenaries must have run off and brought the pair of them here. Lilian, breathing hard and fast, came striding over.

“Good grief… look at the state of you. You’re not hurt anywhere?”
“I’m fine. Let’s calm down first.”
“Roan’s the one who should be calming down. Huffing and puffing away like that.”

Lilian’s hand touched my forehead. Whether her hand was unusually cold or my forehead unusually hot, it snapped me back to my senses.

“Everyone out, please.”

“…Miss Lilian?”

“We’ve something to talk about just the two of us, so I said everyone out.”

At Lilian’s flat command, Tairen Beloa drove the others out of the building, went out himself, and shut the door. The sound of that wooden door closing was what finally brought me back to myself.

“…A good deal has changed in the space of one night.”

“Right, one night, that’s all. And you go wrecking the place over being apart for that one night? You’re the one who tells me to stop worrying, and then you go and do this yourself… No, forget it. You kept your promise. That’s enough.”

Lilian pulled a chair out from under a table and dropped into it. I fetched a chair myself without a word of complaint.

“There’s a great deal to talk about. So much I hardly know what to bring up first.”
“Ask slowly. That’s what I threw them all out for.”

For a moment I looked at Lilian, sitting across from me. There were far too many questions to ask, but the first thing out of my mouth had nothing whatever to do with any of them.

“The dress suits you.”

“…Thank you.”

Lilian was in a black frilled dress, black from head to foot. Going by the look of her alone she might have been the lady of some great noble house, but set against her oddly blunt, careless way of carrying herself, the whole impression sat somehow out of joint.

“Tairen Beloa called you Miss Lilian. I’d like to know what the situation is.”

“…It’s nothing much. He came to me yesterday and put a commission in my hands. You’d do better hearing this from him than from me. Roan’s going to be taking the same commission now anyway.”

What Lilian said left me none the wiser. The rest was no clearer: why she had been with Tairen Beloa, what this commission she had taken was. In the end the talk could not go forward without him, so I looked steadily at her and turned the subject back to the dress.

“Did you get the dress from him too?”
“Mm. He said if I’m going to stand out front, how I look matters too.”

He evidently had an eye for such things; the frilled dress suited Lilian well. Still, had he taken her tomboyish temperament into account, something other than a dress would have served better. A robe, say. Or failing that, was there not always leather armor?

“Roan.”
“What is it?”
“You’re not put out about something, are you? You’ve got your brow creased.”

“…No. It’s just a habit.”

Lilian let out a sigh and called Tairen Beloa back in. He had been waiting just outside the door, and he came into the drinking house the instant she called.

“Have you finished talking?”
“More or less.”

Tairen Beloa.

The man who had put an unexplained commission in Lilian’s hands and made her a present of a dress on top of it brought a chair over to the table.

“…So. Exotic-looking, just as I heard.”

“Let’s take that as read and move on. Have you decided to stop hiding what you’re really after?”
“Ha. Well, I can’t very well deny it.”

When he asked, I brought out the skeleton knight’s head I had carried back. He checked the sack and held out the completion fee.

“I knew you’d come back, but in a single night… Why has your armor melted through?”
“Bad luck. The skeleton knight turned revenant.”

“…You met a revenant and lived. Was that commission more than I had any business handing out?”

“So you were the one who put the commission out after all.”

As I had guessed, the one behind the commission was Tairen Beloa. The man who held Siltrein’s real fighting strength in his hand, and who had made his threat against the lord of Erbern stick.

Think of it in the simplest terms and there was no one better suited to be the client behind a designated commission.

“I’ll come straight to the point. I need a force of my own.”
“You’ve already got force enough, haven’t you? Hundreds of mercenaries move at a word from you.”
“The order of it runs the other way round. It isn’t that a man with mercenaries at his back wants a force; it’s that a man who wanted a force ended up with mercenaries at his back. And since mercenaries aren’t enough, I’m gathering more of my own people.”
“Why?”

Tairen Beloa smiled at that.

“They can’t help but be nowhere near enough. Go up against Erbern with nothing but mercenaries and what is that but dying like dogs for nothing?”

“…So it’s the lord you’re aiming at? Let me hear the whole of it.”

“Where to begin explaining this… First, let me introduce myself again. Rodrik Barther. Second son of the Barther viscount’s house, and a descendant of the mage Albert Barther.”

Rodrik Barther.

Tairen Beloa was, in truth, of the blood of the viscount’s house that rules Erbern, and a traitor bent on overturning that same house. For some reason of his own, he stands against his own family.

So the work in Siltrein under the name Tairen Beloa, the force built there, the tests he set the mercenaries to sift out troops of real quality: every bit of it had been for the sake of striking at the main house in Erbern.

“A side question, but — was the previous administrator one of yours?”

“…You inferred that much from my background alone?”

“It’s no more than a perfectly reasonable deduction.”

What had let Tairen Beloa, that is to say Rodrik Barther, work the mercenaries as his own private soldiers was the previous administrator’s policy on the cut, a thing no different from an outrage.

There is no effect in this world without a cause. The one who profited most from the administrator making the mercenaries’ lives a misery was Rodrik Barther. Power enough to work an administrator as a piece on a board, and the cruelty to throw his own people away without a qualm.

A monster.

Rodrik Barther, standing on the far side of Tairen Beloa the manufactured hero, was a monster of a different kind from me.

“What I want is simple. To strike the city where the lord sits. To purge the viscount’s house and open Erbern up.”
“That’s a long way from simple. What correlation is there between purging a noble house and opening Erbern up? Isn’t it a natural phenomenon that cut Erbern off, not a noble house?”

Rodrik Barther was silent a while, ordering his thoughts, it seemed. He spoke only after enough time had passed to empty a teacup.

“I’m one of them. As family — there was a time we ate and slept and talked under the same roof.”

Rodrik Barther had turned his sword on his family. On the parents who bore and raised him, and on the brothers he had lived alongside.

“Which is why I can’t help but know them well. Well enough that I can say flatly there is nobody in Erbern who knows the house of Barther more closely, or more deeply, than I do.”

Because he shared in their every last gesture, he knows their bare faces. Rodrik Barther came to know everything, and in the end chose to set himself against his family.

“I’d like to make a confession. One of the foul sins my own house, the blood of Barther, is committing.”

Rodrik Barther’s gaze went out beyond the building. His eyes came to rest on the streets of Siltrein, and past the wall, on the fog that lay thick over everything.

“Erbern’s heavy fog draws in every undead nearby. Some of them rise here, and some have come from far away. Do you know why Erbern overflows with undead, friend? Why, of all places, only Erbern lies under fog like that, and why the city’s whole regular army is kept busy fighting the undead for their lives from first to last?”

There is no effect in this world without a cause. Erbern was wrapped in fog and undead, and as a result nobody could get in or out.

“It’s the house of Barther’s doing. That fog is itself magic. Under the name of keeping a pure mage bloodline, the viscount’s house chose to cut itself off from the outside. Shut the outside out to preserve a bloodline, and what comes after that is obvious.”

The sins of the Barther viscount’s house.

The first of them.

It was hereditary incest.