Tairen Beloa (2)

“Let me put a commission to you.”

Rodrik Barther needs a force. A force vast enough to plough Erbern under.

“I’d like you to become my man. So that I can strike down the Barther viscount’s house and open Erbern up.”

He had laid bare his own background and his family’s shame, in the end, all to bring out that one sentence.

Effective, as persuasion. But is it not just as dangerous a choice?

“And what do you mean to do if I refuse the commission? There’s a far safer option, after all: report your treason to the lord and stand with them.”
“Gambling isn’t remotely to my taste.”

Rodrik Barther does not like to gamble. That much is clear enough from the way he threw the administrator away like a discarded card, purely to take a sure grip on the mercenaries’ leash.

Then why let information sensitive enough to turn the domain upside down slip to me? Because he was certain I would accept his commission.

“This can’t be a gamble.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your lady sided with me, friend.”

Lilian.

Rodrik Barther had already finished his talk with her and brought her round, and he was playing that too, as one more card in persuading me.

“Roan, it’s my choice. I decided to go along with him.”

Lilian’s worried eyes went back and forth between Rodrik Barther and me. I did not like it, and I turned my glare on him.

“…What did you do.”

My hostility did not touch him. He answered as evenly as before.

“If anything, I’d like to ask why you think I pulled some trick. For anyone with an ordinary sense of right and wrong, isn’t it obvious? Cast out evil, and follow good.”

To cast out evil and follow good. The argument was so plainly sound that I was left with nothing to say.

The Barther viscount’s house has turned Erbern into a land of the undead and goes on living inside a world of its own. Evil, plainly. Then what of Rodrik Barther? He deceives the mercenaries and lies to everyone, all to strike that house down. Does that make him good?

“Roan. He told me the same story too. Incest and all the rest of it. I don’t think I have any right to pass judgment on that… but even so, this isn’t right. Calling in the undead to tie people down inside the domain. This is wrong.”

Erbern’s soldiers have one enemy above all others, and it is the undead. They are fighting at every hour, and that leaves them no room to strike down the evil inside, the Barther viscount’s house. The viscount’s house profited in any number of ways from Erbern becoming a land of the undead. The whole structure was built that way.

“Even so, wasn’t that decided too hastily?”

“…If something plainly wrong is right there in front of you, and Roan is the only one who can put it right, would Roan not step forward?”

I had no answer for what Lilian said. If a thing comes within reach of my hand, I take hold of it first. Had that not been the measure I had gone by all this while?

“People have a right not to be shut away. Not everyone wants to be set free, of course, but at the very least the people didn’t choose this isolation.”

A memory out of the past rose up without warning. The face of the small undead that had chewed at my leg in Oskalt. That small thing had craved, with its whole body, the warmth it had known for however short a time, and it had somehow never left my mind; it lingered there still.

If I had had the power to bring that undead back to life. Would I really not have used it?

In the end there was nothing I could add to a judgment Lilian had reached on her own.

“…”

Is the viscount’s house evil, and Rodrik Barther good? And is that why the house is to be cast out and he is to be followed?

That is wrong.

There is no such thing as good in this world, so taking his side according to some structure of good and evil makes no sense. Everyone carries a malice of their own. It is only that the Barther viscount’s house’s malice is the uglier of the two, and so I am joining hands with the malice that is relatively less ugly.

“There’s no discussing a commission without a reward. What can your side give me?”
“Anything that can be had in Erbern.”

What I wanted from Rodrik Barther. The road to it had run long, but was this not the very thing I had taken a designated commission for in the first place?

“I’d like an introduction to a priest who can handle holy power. One with no risk of the information leaking.”

“…Of all things, you’ve picked the one thing furthest removed from Erbern. What do you want a priest for?”

“That’s awkward to tell you. I didn’t attach the condition about leaks for nothing.”

Rodrik Barther let a pause run on, feigning deliberation.

“Would this be on account of your lady, friend?”

“…What makes you so certain?”

Lilian was the one who took the question up.

“I told him. If I’m going to help him, he has to know what I can do.”
“You told him everything?”
“Of course not.”

She would have told it her own way, changing what needed changing and holding back what needed holding back. In any case, his approaching her at all meant he had already sensed that she held some special power. He knew roughly how things stood, then, and there was no longer any reason to hide why I wanted a priest.

“She’s unpractised at handling holy power. I want a priest so as to find her a teacher who can sit beside her and show her how.”
“If that’s all, it seems to me I could simply do it myself.”
“You?”
“I’m of a mage’s blood as well. I was born holding an Arcane Heart, so I can work simple magic at least. And holy power and magical power are similar in nature, aren’t they.”

Arcane Heart. The bodily organ that belongs to mages alone, said to let them sense magical power and put it to use. Holy power is open to everyone who has received a god’s grace; magical power is the exclusive property of a chosen few of mankind.

“Magical power or holy power, either way it’s a formless power that works miracles. And it’s better for keeping this quiet if I’m the one helping, instead of dragging some third party into it.”

In the same vein, I had at one time hoped Leo might be able to help Lilian. But the memories of a life evaporate the moment one becomes a ghost, and the Leo of now seemed to remember only that it had been a mage, without grasping the concept of magic at all.

And besides, had I attached myself to the lord’s side instead of to Rodrik Barther, information on the working of holy power would have been just as hard to come by. Our value would naturally be higher to him than to the lord.

“So there was never a choice from the start. In that case there was no need to explain it all at such length, was there?”
“Even so, explaining is better than saying nothing at all, wouldn’t you say?”

Rodrik Barther put out his hand. What it meant was obvious enough, but I paused deliberately before I took it.

“I take it we’re in the same boat now.”

He grinned and rose from his seat. Only a good while after he had gone did Lilian let out a sigh.

“Anyway. That’s how it turned out.”

“…Right. I understand.”

Tairen Beloa’s identity and his purpose, and the direction the two of us would take besides. A great deal had come to light and gone by, and nothing at all had changed.

Serve as Rodrik Barther’s hands and feet, and in exchange raise the level at which Lilian handles her holy power. Dressed up however elaborately, it came in the end to the mercenary’s ordinary business of finishing a commission and drawing the completion fee.

“Was there nothing he said to you apart from that?”

“…He asked me to wait just a little longer. That it’s almost finished, and the moment Siltrein’s fighting strength is in his hands the war begins.”

“After the mercenaries, the city’s soldiers? Making allies of them won’t be much help, though.”

Undead attacks pick neither time nor place, so the fighting strength a leader in Erbern can call on at their own discretion is trifling. What could change that was Lilian. With her power he could gather the undead and drive them into the lord’s city, or leave the defense of Siltrein to her and commit the whole fighting strength to the war.

“Rodrik Barther means to leave Siltrein to you. If it were me, I’d use the undead rather than the soldiers.”
“As it happens, he said that too. This war has to be done with their own hands, or something. He’ll take indirect help from me, but not direct help, the way using the undead in the war would be.”
“How very noble a conviction.”

That freedom and liberation had to be won by one’s own hand made a fine-sounding story, but in anyone else’s eyes he was no more than a child digging in his heels.

A thought struck me out of nowhere and I gave a small shudder. Surely my helm did not look the same way to other people.

“…We should get up as well. Have you eaten?”

“I was about to. If it hadn’t been for that older mercenary who came bursting in to tell me Roan was wrecking the drinking house.”
“My apologies. That was purely out of worry for you—”
“Never mind that. If you’re sorry, buy me a meal. You’re earning well these days, aren’t you?”
“A crow-tit chasing a phoenix.¹ As for earnings, is there anyone in Siltrein these days who could keep up with you?”
“So you’re not buying?”

“…Is there something you want to eat?”

“A sandwich. The one with the cured meat in it. You know the sandwich shop at the crossroads? Thirty minutes from here.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

Lilian stood and pulled me by the arm. I made a show of giving in and followed her out of the building.

The smell of water-mold grown in among rotted timbers. You could catch it anywhere in Erbern. Breathe it and you felt mushrooms might sprout in your lungs, and yet at some point even that had become familiar enough to stir nothing in me.

“Hey. Put the light up a little.”

The drinking house’s barkeep turned the lamp’s flame up. I watched it burn without much pleasure. Fire of that strength was nowhere near enough to dry the damp out of Erbern, was it?

I was on the point of asking for a second lamp instead when the flame gave a small shiver.

“Roan!”

Lilian flung the drinking-house door open and settled herself beside me. The dress no longer looked out of place on her.

“Look at this.”

Lilian snapped her fingers, and an energy like a flame rose at her fingertips. Her smile had something expectant in it, so I offered a word.

“Remarkable.”
“That’s all?”
“Was I supposed to jump out of my skin?”
“There’s fire coming out of my hand. Isn’t that the natural response?”

The energy wavering at her fingertips was white.

“It isn’t fire, it’s holy power. And holy power coming out of your hand isn’t particularly surprising.”

About two months had passed since we came to stay in Siltrein, and roughly one since I had taken Rodrik Barther’s hand. In that month Lilian had learned how to handle holy power under his instruction. In exchange I dealt with his odd jobs, chiefly the assassination of key figures in the soldiers’ force.

“Even if it isn’t surprising you ought to be surprised. Do you know how hard I worked so I could show you this?”
“A month of toil, and at the end of it you can kindle holy power with a fingertip. That’s surprising.”
“Praise me a bit more.”

She let the energy at her fingertips grow larger still. Her holy power wavered like a lamp before the wind.

“Friend!”

Rodrik Barther came through the door and made his way over all warmth and friendliness. A month on, his brazen harping on ‘friend’ was still hard to take.

“Let’s talk a bit of business.”

He jerked a thumb at the outside. I rose from my seat.

“I’ll be back shortly. Don’t cause any trouble.”
“Says the one who causes more of it.”

Once outside, Rodrik Barther came straight to the point.

“It’s the last job. Once this one is tidied up we can begin at once.”

He had been steadily eating into Siltrein’s fighting strength. One thing I had come to learn along the way was that the newly appointed administrator was his man as well. By doing away with the commander-grade figures who stood against that appointment, he was working to swallow Siltrein’s regular army whole, and the plan now stood on the threshold of completion.

“I’ll need you to assassinate the head of the defense army, friend.”