The Eve (1)

The nights in Erbern are damp and dark. Add rain to them and visibility stops at the end of your nose.

Tonight was exactly such a night. A night when, veiled by fog and rain, people could die and nobody would notice.

A weight came down over my head, and my eyes, which had been resting somewhere past the window, narrowed. Lilian had come up behind me and fitted the helm on; she tapped my shoulder with one finger.

“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”

Every preparation for the assassination had been finished through Rodrik Barther. On the administrator’s orders, patrol details had been organized for the wall, some of them deliberately made up of very few soldiers. The policy had been in force for some weeks now, and the defense army commander supervised every patrol in person. And as it happened, today, with visibility at its narrowest, was the day one of the thin details drew the wall patrol.

“Lilian. Let me borrow Leo.”
“Leo?”
“With Leo along, the commission would go more easily.”

Is there anything better suited to an assassination than a ghost? Invisible to the eye, indifferent to physical force, able to possess a human being and take that body for its own. To my mind, a ghost was a creature that existed to kill someone in secret.

An army administrative officer or an infantry captain I could handle alone, one way or another. But for someone as high up as the defense army commander, going in with a ghost was surer than moving on my own.

Lilian closed her eyes, and before long a figure showed itself out of the empty air. Leo was a bushy-bearded old man, not a hair different from the shape I had imagined.

“…I’ve told him to do as Roan says. And his shape will only be visible to Roan.”

“Thanks.”

Leopold Barther.

A member of the Barther viscount’s house, and something on the order of Rodrik’s great-grandfather. The viscount’s house had turned Erbern into a land of the undead, and so a descendant of their own had become undead and gone drifting through the netherworld. A joke in remarkably poor taste.

“Can he hold a conversation as well?”
“Probably not. Even for me it’s closer to communion than to talking… but he’ll understand what Roan says.”

Unlike with Pormel, none of Leopold’s thoughts reached me. The bond had not been made through holy power; no doubt that was why.

I waved a hand, and where it touched him Leopold scattered like dust.

“I’ll be off, then.”
“Mm.”

I drew the longsword from its scabbard, looked the edge over, and fixed it at my waist. Then I pulled a long robe on over my head, and the sword was hidden completely. Light preparations done, I took hold of the door handle.

“Roan.”

From outside came the muffled sound of hard rain striking the door and the window glass.

“Don’t be too late.”

“…”

It was going to be a long night. The thought came to me out of nowhere.

“All right.”

Without letting the thought that had surfaced past my lips.

I turned the door handle I had hold of.

The streets of Siltrein stood half filled with water from the flooded river. That river had fed the people through hardships past all counting, but sunk under the downpour it was nothing more than a beast, snarling savagely as though it would swallow whoever looked at it.

The rain drove down and a storm-swell rose. The water surged as though enraged and swept roughly over the bridge that joined one street to the next. The black river hammered the street once and rolled back, stained through with a darkness whose end could not be seen.

“I can’t go by this road.”

The square where the stalls had stood held nothing but the smell of river water and rotting fish, and not a person was in sight. I walked the streets the water had scoured into a wreck and headed north. The plan of crossing the river to go in by the western wall was off; I would make for the watchtower in the north instead.

There are four watchtowers on Siltrein’s wall. Each is built in three storeys, and the second connects to a half-enclosed passage running inside the wall. The first floor of the northern watchtower serves as a store for scrap material, and since it goes unmaintained it is rarely included in a patrol route.

The guards have been on edge of late. With the army’s own people disappearing one after another, it was only to be expected that a fire had been lit under the watch.

“…”

The scrap-material store of the northern watchtower.

Unmaintained or not, it is an army facility. Even a beggar slipping inside would be a nuisance, so there was always at least one guard standing before it. But the entrance, its outline showing through the rain, stood desolate, without a single person there.

Did they go under the roof to get out of the rain? Or the duty may have been dropped from the roster altogether.

Either way, that made it harder to approach carelessly, not easier. Rather than walk up on it rashly, I made a gesture at the empty air, and Leo, showing himself faintly, took my instruction and flew off to the watchtower.

If there is nobody inside, come back; if there is, put them out of action and then come back.

For infiltration and assassination, a ghost boasted cheating levels of performance.

A little while later I saw Leo come out of the watchtower. I went up, opened the door, and found a single soldier collapsed on the floor, convulsing at intervals.

“…”

Soundlessly I set foot on the stairs to the second floor. As I came closer to the passage inside the wall, the muggy air thinned and the smell of river water rose.

I stopped halfway between the first floor and the second. Faint voices leaked out through the sound of the rain.

“…Things are unsettled enough these days, and of all the duties going we draw the wall patrol.”

“And with the rain on top of it, it’s all the more irritating. That Wils, down below, is resting inside altogether. Can’t we just go down as well?”
“You think the one on the door and us are the same thing? The commander will be here any moment now, so keep your wits about you.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand either. Why is the commander running the inspection? Emergency or no emergency, it only leaves us walking on eggshells for nothing—”

The soldier’s words did not go on. The instant Leo went into that body, the eyes rolled back and the soldier dropped.

“Gkh—!”
“Wh-what the—!”

I ran up the remaining stairs in one go and drove my sword into the other soldier’s throat. Pushed back to the wall without managing one real attempt at resistance, the soldier turned wide eyes on me, as though unable to believe it.

“…”

The soldier tried to say something, but all that leaked from that throat was the sound of blood boiling. Even that was buried and lost in the downpour, and soon the soldier stopped convulsing.

There was a bitter taste in my mouth.

I can’t leave a witness behind.

I moved the corpse and the unconscious soldier off to one side and took cover. By the soldier’s account the defense army commander would come here without my doing anything, so there was no need to go walking about in person.

How much time had passed? Lightning struck several times, and thunder rolled. A shape caught at the edge of my blurred field of vision.

Two of them. The commander and a noncommissioned officer?

Both of them were looking this way, so I could not take them by surprise as I had the soldiers. I pressed myself to the wall and waited for the two to come closer. The footsteps ringing along the passage inside the wall grew steadily louder.

The squelching came right up under my nose, and then, the instant the two of them stepped inside the watchtower,

— CRACK!

Of the two, I rammed my sword into the noncommissioned officer’s throat. Before the commander could draw a sword I kicked them over, pulled my blade free, and leveled it at their throat.

Whether it was simply the temperament they were born with or whether they had set everything down, the defense army commander met the glinting edge without a flicker.

“So the soldiers going missing was your doing?”

The rain, far from showing any sign of stopping, was coming down harder still, and the sky held not the least glimmer of light, nothing but pitch-black darkness.

The night was still long.

“That’s right.”
“I thought it was no simple disappearance. Patrols thrown together in a hurry, and the places of the vanished soldiers filled again unnaturally fast — I said as much myself. What is it you’re after?”
“That I can’t tell you.”

Good and evil are grand words. But what Rodrik Barther is plotting comes down, in the end, to treason. Suppose Lilian steps forward and the soldiers of Siltrein no longer need to fight the undead. However Rodrik Barther might harangue them, few would actually agree to a war between cities. Even with the administrator ordering it, they would obviously refuse. And what Rodrik Barther had asked of me was precisely to cut off the heads that would refuse. With an unstable chain of command, mobilizing common soldiers for a war becomes far easier.

Which is to say, these people were being assassinated for being too capable.

“…And once you have killed me, how do you intend to get out of here? Even if you run tonight, you can’t hide in Siltrein for a lifetime. With me dead as well, it stops being a question of whether the posts get filled or not. The army will have no choice but to open an investigation.”

“Well. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for you to worry over.”

Kill the one in front of me and my part was finished. Was that not how it was put? Talking with someone who is about to die is not something I would ordinarily have done. Perhaps the sight of Lilian watching me had gone and changed something inside me.

I swung my sword.

The defense army commander said nothing more.

“Leo.”

The way to get clear of the army’s net of investigation.

Expose the culprit, and the investigation can be closed before it even begins.

Instead of killing the defense army commander, I struck them senseless with the flat of the blade.

When a ghost enters a person who is conscious, the mind collapses. But where there is no consciousness the mind does not give way, and a ghost can take control of the body for its own.

Leo went into the defense army commander’s body, and before long the commander rose to their feet.

The killings that took place tonight are, from here on, the deranged acts of a defense army commander gone mad.

The commander walked past me and headed into the watchtower, and a little later came out again, dragging the corpses of the dead soldier and the noncommissioned officer.

“Let’s go out to the streets.”

The more witnesses the better. The best place would be the square I had come through, but it was a fair distance, and hauling two corpses all that way would be too much for the commander.

A river with darkness surging in it.

That watercourse begins in the north of the empire and runs clean through as far as Erbern, passing beneath the wall and cutting across the streets.

Down below the wall, the commander began to walk along the river. A long trail of blood was left behind on the street, but the flooding water swallowed even that.

Before long the commander stood at the river’s edge. Buildings crowded close on every side, and the storm-swell beat there as it had at the bridge I had seen.

And there the commander cried out.

“The sea is coming!”

What is a ghost?

“The sea that mankind forgot is coming!”

A thing that stirs the madness deep in the human heart.

“The sea promised since ancient days is waking!”

Their wailing stirs the instincts of a human being, and—

“The waking sea looks upon me!”

—the prayer a ghost cries out through borrowed human vocal cords makes it impossible for the one who hears it to keep hold of sanity.

“Look upon me! Lead me to the source! Take me to the sea where all things began, the sea that conceived us and held us to itself!”

From somewhere the reek of fish and the stench of rusted ships seem to be drifting in.

It settles.

Siltrein wrapped in the downpour, the dead soldier and the noncommissioned officer, the defense army commander shouting words that make no sense, all of it is sinking into the flooding river.

If someone were watching the commander.

That this sight was real.

That the sea truly was coming.

That is what they would think.

“The sea is coming!”

The commander threw the corpses into the river, and then gave that body up to it as well.

The dark river whose end could not be known had swallowed two corpses and one madman, and still it surged on as though its belly were not yet full.