The Barther Family (3)

Siltrein, settled into ash-gray.

Inside the gray city, a breath had come down that was nothing like the wind. That wind must be blowing beyond the walls, out over the fields, out over the plateau where the soldiers’ shouts and the two mages’ magical power tangled together.

Lilian’s fringe stirred where she sat by the window. A wind with the faint smell of grass and river water in it. She was gazing steadily at a sky gone unusually overcast.

Disaster is like the wind, isn’t that how it goes? There is no knowing when it will come, or from where. When it blows in you have to meet it; when it doesn’t, you can only wait.

That was not a story that applied to Lilian, who had inherited a god’s authority.

…The children are leaving.

The countless ghosts ringing Siltrein were disappearing. Across the whole of that vast city, hundreds of spirit-bodies ascended at once. Charitably, it was a sight to make you shiver; less charitably, it was grotesque and ominous enough to raise gooseflesh.

Something is coming. Something very dangerous, something that drives hundreds of spirits off by presence alone. There is no sitting here like this.

Only Lilian could watch hundreds of ghosts leave Siltrein and recognize the danger in it.

“Everyone, out here!”

Lilian burst out of the lodging and hammered on door after door, every building she came to. This was not a disaster you could shut out by throwing the bolt on your door. They had to get clear of Siltrein, and the sooner the better.

“Miss Lilian! What is all this?”

By the time she got into the drinking house across the way, the barkeep had already heard her voice and was on his way out the door.

“We have to run from here, quickly.”
“From here? Did you see something in the alley?”

“No, that’s not it… Siltrein, I mean…”

Her face went pale. All she had done was loosen the sense-sharing she normally kept shut, and what came through from the spirit-bodies was emotion at a density so far beyond anything she knew that she thought she might faint.

The spirits packing the sky howled all at once.

Screaming is what they always do, but… something’s different.

This time it is different. Closer to screaming steeped in terror than to screaming tinged with madness, isn’t it?

— WHOOOOOSH!

The wind blew. A wind like a nightmare, the cursed wind that rules Erbern, came down over Siltrein.

“That… do you see that?”

The barkeep raised his head toward where Lilian was pointing. It was a small dot. Unlike the ghosts drawing away, that small black dot was coming slowly closer, its shape growing clearer and clearer until it had dropped to a height where, if you narrowed your eyes, you could make out what it was.

“My name is Lashar Barther.”

It could speak. It had arms and legs as though it were a human being, it had eyes and a nose and a mouth, and it was gazing quietly down at Siltrein.

Though there was no way that could be so. Though there was no way that disaster could be human, falling as it was out of a Siltrein sky that even the spirit-bodies were fleeing upward from.

“Eldest son of the Barther viscount’s house, and the rightful heir of Erbern.”

Lilian could not believe her eyes. She had seen Rodrik’s magic before, but wasn’t this of an entirely different order? Rodrik, and even Morten, had done no more than set their bodies on the wind and travel with it. To hold still in mid-air as Lashar was doing, and to fly steadily, took a magical accomplishment the word art would fall short of.

“You were taken in by the sweet talk of the traitor Rodrik Barther, and you burned the banner of the viscount’s house and trampled it. You dared to raise a hand against the master of this land, and you turned spear and sword upon him.”

The disaster’s voice spread out over the whole of Siltrein. People trembling with terror and yet unable to master their curiosity were coming out into the streets in ones and twos.

“You dreamed a dream that was never permitted you, and you set about enjoying a freedom that was never given you.”

This is dangerous. She has to run, right now.

“Therefore I proclaim to you your doom. I proclaim death, and I proclaim the end. Foolish dreamers, it is time you woke from the dream.”

Lilian’s instinct, the god’s authority in her, was shouting at her.

“This is the will of the Barther viscount’s house, delivered to you.”

The sky began to come down. Split into thousands and tens of thousands of pieces, it drove down into the ground. It had been so unusually gray because tens of thousands of strands of condensed wind were distorting the light, and the instant Lilian understood that, the city was ground fine.

Countless slashes, too many even to take in, poured down on Siltrein.

“Sir!”

She snatched the barkeep’s hand and ran into the nearest building. A shock beyond describing shook the earth and came down over her. The one small mercy was that Lashar’s slashes could not turn a whole building to powder in a single stroke. Under a roof shuddering unsteadily, Lilian picked herself up off the floor.

“…Sir?”

The barkeep, dragged along by her hand, had a long wound drawn across him from the left collarbone down to the waist. A slash falling at random had caught him by ill luck, and he had been killed where he stood.

“Urgh—!”

Lilian threw up on the spot.

People are dying. Because of a decision she made herself.

The feeling she had known over and over in Oskalt, the stomach wrung out and the heart torn open, struck her again.

“Hurgh! Hurrrgh!”

Watching Roan go off to war and being dropped into the middle of one are not the same thing at all, not in what they do to a person.

Lilian had cried the whole day, down in the Oskalt underground, on the day a beast killed itself. Now, with people and not beasts dying all around her, there was nothing she could do but bring up her own stomach acid.

It is a cruel world still, and a world full of sin.

Lilian’s back was far too small to carry the catastrophe in front of her.

For the first time, she regretted having come out of the cellar. If she had known a thing like this would happen she would have stayed there. She would not have wondered about the world, would not have taken Roan’s hand, would not have asked him to give her a name.

“Ah, aah…”

Lilian went down flat on the floor and wrapped both hands around her head. She wanted to run. From a war where people were dying, from this reality she could not stand to look at.

‘Lilian.’

There was a voice, coming through the countless slashes falling on the city.

‘A caterpillar passes through the chrysalis and becomes a butterfly.’

It was a voice she could not tell the source of.

‘Breaking out of the chrysalis is hard work, certainly, but isn’t it a necessary process if it is to become a butterfly?’

But it was a voice she remembered perfectly well. How could she forget the voice of the one man who affirmed her?

‘Perhaps in that process the wings may tear.’

Lilian slowly raised her head.

‘But even so, isn’t a butterfly with torn wings better than a chrysalis that cannot so much as move?’

Curl up and you will achieve nothing. Do not be afraid of being hurt. Tear the chrysalis open. Lilian, get up off the ground.

“Hic… hk, hhk…”

It felt as though a voice like that had come to her from somewhere. Lilian braced a hand on the floor and got to her feet, swaying.

She does not think, for now, about whose fault this war is or why people have to die. Because now is not the time to curl up over torn wings. It is the time to tear the chrysalis and come out.

The buildings are still holding, so there can’t be many dead yet. I have to stop the mage somehow, before Siltrein sinks under.

A noise fit to deafen her and the reek that had seeped into every corner muddled her head. The slashes pouring down like rain were shaving away the whole of Siltrein. She had to stop Lashar before it grew any later and passed the point of no return.

Roan wanted me to be able to apply holy power.

Not the authority, but the use of holy power itself. Her task was to press Lucseon’s holy power down with her own. But she had learned the applications from Rodrik, who handles magical power and not holy power, so against the Lucseon church, which would come at her with holy power, Lilian had no confidence at all. Put the other way round, she was confident against a mage, who handles magical power.

Binding magical power with holy power, and making a fool of the mage. Wasn’t that the very thing Lilian had practiced for months, until she was sick of it? Perhaps all of it had been for this moment. That there was no priest in Erbern, that she had learned the applications from Rodrik, that she was standing here now.

…Too far. My holy power won’t reach him at this range.

She had secured the means of dealing with Siltrein’s invader. What she needed now was a strategy for putting it to use.

I either get close, or I drag the mage down. Getting close is impossible… should I move a beast and make him come down?

There was no undead nearby that could punch through countless blades of wind and pick the mage off, and any spirit-body that came near would most likely just be torn apart by the mage’s magical power.

A beast that could climb to where the mage hung high in the sky, and that had some resistance to magic.

“Leo.”

The spirit that came at Lilian’s call, the one that had shared the journey through Erbern: Leopold Barther. Was there anything better suited to this work than he was, a member of the Barther viscount’s house and a spirit-body under no physical constraint?

Lilian had no intention of dragging this out any further. Leo, who had been circling at her side, flew up into the sky over the ruined city.

Leo had been a mage in life, and the wind Lashar makes is, at bottom, magic. His body had long since gone back into the earth and he had lost most of his memories of life, true, but an edge is an edge, isn’t it? It could hardly have no effect at all. The proof was that Leo, unlike the other spirit-bodies, was not reduced to rags in a single stroke when Lashar’s slashes cut him.

A gray firmament, remote and dizzying, filling her whole vision. Toward the disaster of Siltrein standing at its center, Leo shot upward.

Though the hail of magic tore away flesh that had no substance, though the spirit’s own standing was shaved down, he went on without stopping.

No sooner had Lashar, intent on his magic, caught sight of the single spirit-body climbing at a savage speed—

“Kh—!”

—than Leo’s translucent body overlapped with Lashar’s.

A ghost’s possession. The nightmare in the downpour that had turned soldiers and the defense army commander into madmen was playing out again today, in the sky over Siltrein.

The slashes that had been shaving the city away scattered in an instant, and Lashar began to fall. Lilian, watching it, broke into a run down a street that was little better than a ruin.

Reach Lashar’s landing point like this, press his magical power down, and deal with him.

It was an operation no better than a gamble, resting purely on how Leo performed, but it had succeeded, so wasn’t that good enough?

…Roan.

Running through the broken city, Lilian was thinking of Roan, the man who had made it possible for her to be standing here at all. If it had not been for him, the one who showed her the world and showed her the road ahead, she would still be curled up in the Oskalt underground.

The day their breath scattered on the air. On that day, when a faint warmth came through the gauntlet, what expression had he been wearing there before Esmartin? With what feeling had he closed his hand around hers?

What face he had, hidden away inside the helm, she would probably never know.

“Idiot.”

Lilian hated the helm.