Norbelgard (2)

An authority is absolute. Just as physical force is, just as the food chain is. Under no circumstance whatever can a beast go against the authority and set itself against Lilian.

So the odds were good that the luminous bodies outside were something Lilian had called in.

“Lilian.”

At my call she finally stirred and rubbed her eyes.

“Mm…? What is it, why is it so cold.”

The moment Lilian opened her eyes she bundled herself up tight in the robe. The temperature around us had dropped abnormally.

“The torch… Damn.”

The tin that held the embers had frozen over, and there was no easy way now to get a torch lit. I made do by putting another layer of clothing on her instead.

“Can you feel the beasts outside?”
“Huh? Hang on.”

Lilian shut her eyes. When she opened them again she had the face of someone who had gone and done something.

“That’s… um…”

“Are they not beasts you called in yourself?”
“They are, but… it was only a dream.”
“Meaning?”
“Someone kept talking to me in the dream, so… I just told them to come over here. They kept whining that they were cold. There are embers here, so…”
“You are saying you called beasts in a dream?”
“That’s right.”

Whether she had used the authority without knowing it or something else I could not account for had happened, the first thing to do was plainly to go outside and look. I reached out and drew back the wagon’s waterproof cloth.

“…”

Spread out before me was a landscape steeped blue on every side, as though someone had plucked a great many stars down out of the sky and carried them here.

“Roan, look at this. It’s another world.”

Thousands of small, bright luminous bodies drifted across the dark sky. Only then could I tell what sort of beast it was that Lilian had gathered in her sleep.

“Elementals.”

An elemental is, in some ways, even more purely a spirit-body than a spirit-body proper is, which was why it was possible after all for Lilian to use the authority inside a dream.

“Can you talk with them?”
“Mm. They’re grateful I called them, but they’re complaining that there’s no fire here either, so it’s just as cold.”

Strictly speaking, it is open to question whether an elemental is a living creature at all, let alone a beast. So much so that the imperial academy in the capital has a saying of its own.

If you want to pick a fight with a biologist, raise a question about the organic nature of elementals.

That the saying still holds shows just how alien a thing an elemental is.

“If that lot had seen this, it’s the academy that would abduct Lilian first, not the church of Lucseon.”

Lilian called, and the elementals came swarming. That settled it. An elemental is a beast. And a beast of intelligence high enough to hold a conversation, at that.

Whether or not Lilian knew she had just blundered into solving the academy’s single greatest problem, she spoke up in a sulky voice.

“Roan, what should we do? Send them back?”

“…Look around you.”

The coachman and the mercenaries stood shivering with cold, staring our way. They had come from Siltrein and knew Lilian handled the undead as she pleased, so even now they were dimly guessing this was her doing.

And since it was, the guess was not a wrong one.

“If you don’t send them back, everyone here may freeze to death.”

“…All right.”

Lilian must inwardly have found the glittering elementals a marvel, because she made a great show of her reluctance as she waved a hand. Thousands of them surged upward, small and shining, staining the night sky with a cool light.

And then, all at once, the elementals that had lit the sky went out like stars.

The coachman and the rest of the party were all watching Lilian as though they had seen a miracle.

“Roan.”

Half a year had passed since Lilian came up out of the underground at Oskalt. She had been growing without cease, and—

“Let’s go in.”

—somewhere along the way the look of someone afraid of being seen had vanished, and all that was left was a woman who had accepted the authority wholly, as a part of herself.

“We’ll have to get the embers going again first.”

The wagon ran another full day, and at last we left Erbern behind. From here on the land counted properly as the north.

“Roan, where is this?”
“The north.”
“No, I mean what domain.”
“The north, literally.”

The domain Norbelgard sat in had no particular name; it was simply called the north. And was the city’s own name not, at root, exactly that? Norbelgard, the place that guards the north.

“Norbelgard belongs to no domain at all. Which is how it gets to play the gateway joining the north and the west.”
“It doesn’t belong to a domain? Then who rules it?”
“Money rules it.”

Norbelgard stands in the north, and the west, the south and the east each have a city like it, with no lord. Rather than collect taxes, such cities exist to drum up as much trade between the regions as they can.

“Norbelgard is as good as a holy land for merchants.”
“It has that much money? And it’s still more backward than Siltrein?”
“Because in exchange for no taxes there’s no benefit from a domain either. To make a new life in a city like that with nobody behind you, you’d have no choice but to start out a beggar.”

In a city with no lord, a free city, the poor grow poorer and the rich grow richer, and both to an extreme. The rich evade tax legally and pile up wealth without end; the poor, literally, sleep in the road.

“In Bestraum, in the west, the most recent free city I visited, about one person in ten lived in a house.”
“And when was that?”
“It’s been about twenty years since I came into the west, so roughly around then.”

That startled her, and she came back with a question of her own.

“Twenty years? …Roan, how old are you, exactly?”
“Did I never tell you?”

Thinking it over again, apart from telling her once about the business with Eladin and Lucseon, I had said nothing that would let her guess my age. Even so, that was a story out of my own past life; surely she did not put me at thirty or so.

“My age is—”

The words never got any further.

The wagon lurched hard, as though it had suddenly pitched over.

“Lilian!”

The tough waterproof cloth tears like a sheet of paper, and—

— HRAAWF!

—a brutish animal’s paw comes down on Lilian.

With no time to think, I hurled myself forward.

— CRACK!

The animal’s paw tore away a fistful of the place where Lilian had been. Pinned beneath me, she came to herself at last and stretched a hand out toward the animal. And went white in an instant.

“…The authority isn’t working?”

“Out of here, first!”

I hauled the blank-faced Lilian onto my back and kicked my way out of the wagon.

Paws the size of a human head, and feathers sprouting about the shoulders.

It was an owlbear.

The mercenaries had frozen where they stood, and the thing was crushing them brutally.

— KHRAAWF!

It was huge. Fully upright it looked as though it would come to about the height of the wagon.

“You said the authority isn’t taking?”

“…It’s strange. It’s a beast, but it feels like it isn’t one.”

A thing Lilian’s authority does not reach. Had I not seen one once before?

“Lucseon has been playing tricks.”

Things sculpted by Lucseon’s authority. If Lilian can hold dominion over beasts, then is it not enough simply to sculpt them into something that is not a beast?

“Is there no other beast nearby to protect you?”

“…No. But I can look after myself, so don’t worry about me.”

At that I looked back at her. She was nodding, as though she really were all right. I had no idea what she had in mind, but now was the time to trust her.

There must be an Ecclesia church in Norbelgard too.

A beast nearby that would not answer Lilian pointed to one thing in particular. It might be one of those that had left the traces I saw at Oskalt. They had ridden beasts as far as the north, and if they had been pasturing beasts near the city, it made sense.

“Kind of them to let me know I’ve come to the right place.”

I drew my sword and threw myself at the owlbear. In the dark it was flashing its bird’s eyes and roaring at the mercenaries.

In the instant a huge forepaw was about to drive down onto the head of a mercenary scrambling to get clear—

— SCRRK!

—sparks flew from my sword as it drove in, aimed below the thing’s shoulder.

An owlbear’s feathers are hard as stone. Feathers in name only. In function they were next to indistinguishable from scales, and the thing was covered in them from head to foot.

“Any old beast turns a blade these days.”

At this rate I might as well go about with no blade at all.

It howled and swung a forepaw across. I dodged the blow driving at my flank and cut in on a diagonal. Feathers over every inch of it or not, surely they could not be hard enough to turn a sword from crown to sole. From the thing’s left I thrust the sword once more, aiming between beak and neck.

— CLANG!

If anything it was far harder than the shoulder. A vital point, so no wonder.

All it had done was stoke the owlbear’s temper. The thing came charging in with its beak thrust forward, and just before we collided I ducked and slid in beneath it.

And then a thrust to the belly.

— KA-KLANG!

Sure enough, it slid my sword off. Having missed me, it gave a savage growl, as though piqued. For a creature with an owl’s head, its behavior was mammalian to the letter.

Nothing for it.

Things being what they are, there is nothing for it but to give up a piece of my body the moment the owlbear charges again and gouge out its eyes.

If there was one thing that snagged at me.

It is that I had never yet shown my undeath in front of Lilian.

It was something I would have to explain one day, but I had not thought it would come about like this. Merely imagining how she would react at the sight of me being torn apart by an owlbear was enough to bring out a cold sweat.

“This is a headache.”

And the northern sky was dark as ever. The wagon was in rags, and every one of our few companions had departed this life.

I have to get Lilian as far as Norbelgard, one way or another.

I walked slowly toward the thing.

— HRAAAWF!

The owlbear, drooling blood-mixed spit in long strings, finally sprang.

What it is going for is the upper body. It takes my flank, and I put my sword through its eye. The sword, taking the force of the charge head-on, will bury itself deep in the thing’s brain.

I extended the sword. The thing’s forepaw swung round.

And in the instant I was about to collide with the owlbear—

— SKROAAAAAK!

—along with a roar that shook the air, a black mass fell upon the owlbear.

It had struck from the side like a bull ramming a mountain, and it seized the owlbear in its jaws and dragged it bodily away. Then came a sound like steel grinding rock to powder.

— GNAAASH! GNAAAAASH!

It did not take long for the owlbear’s mournful cry to stop. The black mass that had bitten clean through the thing’s neck, feathers and all, was Pormel, and it flicked out its long tongue and smacked its lips. And then, blinking its red eyes, was it not looking this way?

“…Hah.”

“Pormel!”

Lilian came running, her face lighting up, and Pormel thrust the bridge of its snout out hard and lowered its head.

— Krrrk.

At the same time it turned a glare on me, as if to ask how I could have forgotten it.

This was, of course, a misunderstanding on Pormel’s part. I had certainly let the connection go slack since we arrived in Siltrein, but that was because there was no longer any reason to have Pormel’s mental images relayed to me as well, absolutely not because it was no longer needed.

I state it categorically. I did not, the instant I was reunited with Lilian, blot Pormel’s existence clean out of my mind.

— Skraaaaak.

“Aww, did he now? Did Roan go off and leave you behind?”

— Kwek-kwek.

“You were really upset, weren’t you, our poor Pormel. He’s a totally awful person, isn’t he?”

— Kwek! Krrak!

Pormel licked Lilian, the way a puppy wheedles to be petted. Soaked through with blood, she laughed and laughed.

“You two get on famously.”

Watching that moving reunion with Lilian, I thought it would not be strange if the thing spoke to me like a human being one day.

Krkbadmankrk.