Balzenov (1)

The sun that rose in the east had passed its zenith and hung now at the western edge of the sky. We had been running a solid half-day on Pormel. Whether it was the sunlight beating down for the first time in an age, or only that I had been moving too fast to spare a thought for the temperature, even winter’s chill seemed to have thinned.

Pormel had shown no sign of strain, though every so often it let out a whitish breath. I scratched its head, and some while after we had set off again. Far off, a black silhouette slowly came into view.

Siltrein, shadowed under the dying light of the sunset.

The fog that had blinded the eye was gone, and even from a good distance the marks of breakage showed here and there.

The walls are not right. The damage is severe, far past anything I had expected. Enough that it would be no surprise if they came down this instant.

It is ominous. The blood-red sunset seems to be hinting at the state of things inside Siltrein.

I sent Pormel off and hurried my steps toward the city. It is excessive, but if a mage is allowed to strike first, a city could take damage on this scale. It was too early to jump to conclusions.

“…Goddamn it all.”

Something was standing on top of the wall. Black armor with the red light caught in it, the same as the wall that was ready to come down. A death knight I have never seen before.

Two possibilities. Either Lilian works it, or half-wrecked Siltrein has become its nest.

Whichever it was, I could only pray it was not the latter.

A death knight is a high undead with a keen intelligence. It had seen me as surely as I had seen it, and still it did not come at me straight away.

It is sizing me up.

On the half-collapsed wall, apart from it, not one other watchman was in sight. It is strange after all. There is no way Lilian would use her authority this openly, is there? Undead standing watch on her orders made no sense, unless she was a fool, or unless not one human being was left besides her.

An emotion beyond describing binds tight around my heart. My breath will not come, as though a hand had hold of my windpipe, and my eyes hurt as though seared with a heated iron. Something is surely churning inside me, and yet all that comes out when I open my mouth is a sigh.

I do not know. Not what emotion has hold of my whole body, nor what it is I want to say.

Quietly, I drew my sword. Whatever it is, first let me kill that undead in front of me. Thinking it over slowly afterward would not be too late.

A death knight is no idiot. It knows at least that when an opponent gives off killing intent, the fight has begun. By now it should have come at me. But with my sword up and a fight deliberately offered, it held its place without so much as a twitch.

“…”

My heart is pounding. More vividly than at any other moment. Lilian’s voice, the voice calling for me in desperation, seems almost to reach me.

It is no trick of the ear. Feet sounded on a heap of stone, and a figure showed itself atop the wall.

“…Roan!”

Was it that the distance was great? Or the fault of the sunset throwing the shadows into relief? My sight blurs. Every point of focus crowds in toward her. From the instant Lilian appeared, in all the world only she existed.

“Lilian.”

With the death knight’s help she dropped down from the wall and came running in a single burst. It is the face in my memory. The look in her eyes, full of worry, had not changed in the least.

“Roan!”

What should I say? That the magic had been broken? Whether she was hurt anywhere?

“I kept my promise.”
“Hm?”
“I promised I’d be back soon, didn’t I.”

The corners of Lilian’s mouth go up. So slightly that I would not have known it had I not been watching closely.

“So you did. Awfully quick about it, too.”

We had been apart barely a week. But the air she gave off was different again from the last time I saw her.

“I ended up shoving the burden onto you without meaning to.”

I can tell by instinct. Something inside her had already changed into a shape different from the one I knew.

“It’s fine. I was braced for this much. More to the point, your armor’s gone to rags again.”
“For once I’ve got something to say myself. How did you come by that cut on your cheek? Was he swinging a razor at you?”

Lilian did not ask about the fog that had scattered. She only took my arm and pulled.

“Looks like there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s get inside first.”

Every time I breathe out, a faint steam scatters through the gaps of my helm. With the fog lifted, even the sky of Erbern, which had seemed as though it would last forever, could not escape the faded coloring particular to winter. Siltrein, dried out at last, no longer wore a gray cast.

In the city I followed her into, not one sound building was left in sight.

“He must have been quite something.”

“…Mm.”

No sooner had I brought it up than Lilian’s face darkened sharply. It was only a few days ago. Better not to touch a wound that has not closed yet. Instead I turned the subject to her new clothes.

“Has your taste in clothes changed in the meantime?”
“The dress tore, so I threw it out. There was this in the drinking house we were staying at instead.”

She caught up the hem and turned a full circle to show it off. The tunic was long and black, with tough leather and straps added onto it, and it looked something like a robe and something like a coat.

“Something a mercenary used, by the look of it.”
“Feels like our styles overlap somehow.”

Seen like this, she looked every bit a wandering mercenary.

“Isn’t there anything else besides that hard-worn mercenary getup? Look around and there ought to be a dress somewhere.”
“There’s no particular need to dress up the impression I make anymore. And it was fairly uncomfortable, too.”

She had worn the dress at Rodrik’s urging, so that people would see her as a wondrous, mysterious noble lady who drove ghosts away.

“…It’s nice, not having to bother about it.”

Since she was alive, Siltrein had not yet been ruined. But it was also true that the city had been driven near enough to ruin. Enough that Lilian had had to give up the good name and the reputation she had built and call the undead.

“How are people reacting?”
“How do you think? Exactly the way Roan thinks it is.”

The sun is going down now, and the sky is beginning to darken. This was still the hour when you should hear stalls being packed up and parents calling their children, and yet no sound at all came from the street, save one. The sound of the undead clearing the wreckage of collapsed buildings, that is.

“…It’s not as though I didn’t expect this much. Roan said so. That people hate beasts, and I’m the king of beasts.”

The holy mercenary who drove out ghosts was in truth a wicked witch who worked monsters as her hands and feet. It would be stranger not to be cast out.

The people here neither thank Lilian nor even hate her. They only wish she would take the corpses wandering the city and disappear. Without knowing that if she vanished the city would lose its military strength and cave in outright.

“…Roan. It’s all over now, but I still don’t know whether I made the right choice. Do you know what people said when the fog lifted? That I’d worked sorcery and angered the sky, and that’s why hot sunlight is touching their skin. That’s what they said.”

Rodrik and Risha came to mind out of nowhere.

“People aren’t grateful. Not everyone takes the freedom Roan and the others bled to put in their hands as something to be grateful for.”

If the process is evil but the result is good, is that justice? If we did evil for the sake of those who take even good for evil, can we truly say that we were right?

“Lilian.”

Risha whispered to Rodrik as he agonized. That that was justice. And so that he should do evil to the end.

“There is no need to be just.”

I have no wish to defend Risha’s words, nor to deny them. Because that is Rodrik’s story, not ours.

“…What?”

“I mean that you shouldn’t pay too much mind to what people say.”

Evil or good, in the end they are only words made for pointing a finger at someone else. While others are swayed by such things and hesitate over a single step, I have spent my life walking forward.

“If a person is dying in front of you, will you not save them because they are a wicked person?”
“No, of course not. I think I’d save them first and think about it after.”
“Then do as you please, just like that. If you truly turn out to be wrong, it will be a matter of setting it right when the time comes.”

Lilian, who had been walking all this while without a word, lifted her head. Her face looked a good deal less tormented.

“Right. What does it matter how people see me. I’m the one saying I’ll help.”

Walking on after her, before long we came to a familiar street. Broken in places though it was, the neighborhood was one my eye had grown used to over these last few months of living here.

The Third District. Where the moneyed Balzenov family lived, and the best-off neighborhood in Siltrein.

“The first commission was here, wasn’t it.”
“Only a few months, and it feels changed past recognizing.”

Much had changed since then. The street, and us as well.

The wreckage had not been cleared away entirely, let alone the repair work finished, so the city lay dark on the whole. Even so, the Third District alone had its lamps lit, driving the darkness back, however feebly.

Was it because of that?

“Ah! Lady Lilian.”

Beneath the light a man caught my eye, breathing out white steam and rubbing his hands together. It was a face I knew from somewhere.

“The eldest son who was possessed by that ghost?”

“…Haha, yes. Ivan Balzenov, at your service. As it happens, I had been meaning to call on you before long.”

“Me? Why?”
“You are the benefactor who helped us, are you not? And I have this and that to say to you as well. The day is cold. Have you eaten?”

It did not seem he would be making a belated show of gratitude now. Besides, back when the eldest son recovered, had the Balzenovs not already sent gifts by way of thanks? Judging by Lilian’s reaction, she had nothing in particular in mind either. She stared at me with a look that asked what to do.

“If you have not, might we treat you to a meal? We were just about to eat ourselves.”
“Let’s do that.”

When I answered in Lilian’s place, Ivan went into his mansion. She wore the expression of someone who did not mind but could not understand either.

“Why did you agree just like that? Things are ugly enough these days. How do you know what they might do?”
“Lilian, you said that not everyone is grateful for a freedom forced on them.”

The people of Siltrein certainly fear Lilian.

“Then, conversely, it will not be that everyone shrinks from the freedom they were given either.”

But that does not mean that every human being in Siltrein casts her out and is afraid of her. Somewhere in the city there must surely be people grateful to her as well, to the woman who held Siltrein together and went so far as to work the undead to keep the city safe.

“Like them, for instance.”

She had shown her authority, and the good name she had built up came to nothing. But it had not vanished entirely.

Lilian, blank for a moment, scratched the reddened side of her nose.

“Feels strange.”

The mansion of the house of Balzenov is a match in size for an inner keep. If I did not hurry after Ivan, I would be left behind on the cold street.

“There’ll be no end of strange things. You haven’t experienced the whole world yet.”

“Ah, wait!”

Lilian too came hurrying after me, so as not to be left behind.