Norbelgard (4)

“I’m going to go and look.”

We had just finished talking with Kyle Rowellin and reached our lodging under a soldier’s guidance. Lilian had sprung it on me out of nowhere, and she was already standing outside the door with her mind made up.

“…What do you mean by that?”

“What the Ecclesia church looks like, what kind of people they are — I want to see it with my own eyes.”

From far off, the faint bell of a spire reached us. The wind blowing in past the window carried children’s voices and the sound of iron being struck.

“Just like Roan said — people following them, them doing good for people. I’m going to go and see it.”

I closed my eyes quietly. Sunlight over a canyon, clouds towering like mountains, rising slowly and sinking again. The peaceful view of Norbelgard had come to resemble the landscape a certain soldier once loved.

“That’s the only way I’ll know how hypocritical the ones who did that in Oskalt are, and how much they deserve to die.”

I opened my eyes. What stood in front of me was still Lilian and not Kalen.

“I’m sorry, but that is one thing I can’t grant you.”
“Why?”
“Lilian, there was a time when I swore I would never again lose anyone precious to me.”

It is a vow I make every time. A vow I have taken every day without fail since Eladin died.

“And you are more precious to me than anything. Enough that nothing else compares.”

I do not want to lose what is precious to me. A simple enough desire, but stretch it past a hundred years and on toward two hundred. You go past obsession, past fixation, and become a man who lives for that alone. The wish for revenge, too, was no more than a by-product of that same feeling.

“…Roan. I know you worry, but I think sometimes you treat me too much like a little kid.”

“Aren’t you actually young, though?”
“I’m not, though?”

She let out a sigh and folded her arms.

And in the same instant that she snapped her fingers—

— SHHAAAA!

—a crushing pressure came down over my whole body. It was cold, though not the cold of the north. A chill closer to a deep blue-green void than to white snow was closing tight around my heart.

If I had to put it briefly, yes. It was like being thrown into the deep sea.

“…What is this?”

“Leo.”

Lilian snapped her fingers again, and the dull heaviness dragging at my body ebbed away like a tide going out.

“Was he not snuffed out fighting the mage?”
“He got right to the edge of it.”

From what Lilian told me, the Barther mage’s attack had damaged Leo badly enough that he could no longer hold his shape. So of course I had assumed he was gone.

“So you managed to bring him back after all.”
“I had Leo possess me while he was fading.”
“You did what?”
“You don’t have to jump like that. All I did was scoop up a scattering spirit-body into a vessel.”
“And you are that vessel?”
“There’s no better vessel than me, is there. He isn’t going to do anything to me anyway.”

Even the word reckless would have fallen short of what she had done. I had not liked it even when she was merely carrying him about, and now she had gone and let him possess her.

“Even for you… can you really be certain there will be no side effects at all?”
“If there were side effects they’d have shown up ages ago. Going mad, or dying because I couldn’t breathe.”
“No, this won’t do. Take him off, right now.”
“Can’t. Leo’s half fused with me now.”

When I dropped to my knees, Lilian started babbling at me in a rush.

“And thanks to that I can use Leo’s power too, like just now. This is something that wouldn’t even have been possible if Leo were still in one piece. Hallucinations are about my limit for now, but once I get used to a spirit-body’s power…”

It took her a full day of hard persuading, which also meant that I spent a full day sitting on the ground.

“…I wanted to be able to protect myself. Because Roan always worries about me like I’m a little kid.”

Outside the window it had long since gone dark. Only the torches in the street scattered a faint light.

“Lilian.”

Perhaps this was heaven’s punishment, called down by my own habit of overprotecting her. Punishment handed down on me for thoughtlessly seeing her not as a person in her own right but as an object of protection.

“Do you want to go and see the Ecclesia church?”
“Mm.”

In the distance I could make out the cathedral’s spire. The wind must have been strong; even in the dark the bell swung slowly. It was as though the afternoon bell were ringing still.

“We’ll go together tomorrow morning.”
“Really? Is that allowed?”
“Yes. In exchange, I would rather you didn’t go disappearing on your own.”
“Hehe. All right.”

She laughed and nodded. A little kid through and through, after all.

The next day.

Lilian hauled me out of the lodging the moment it was light. Norbelgard must have felt different again from Siltrein; she was busy craning about, taking the street in.

“Roan, look at that. They’re beating a huge piece of iron with a hammer.”
“Blacksmiths. The north is famous for good iron.”
“So that’s why Norbelgard is the city of fire and iron? But it’s a bit of a stretch to even call this the north, isn’t it.”

Better iron than this, of course, comes out in quantity much further inland.

“What you get here is the cheapest, though. Most of the iron that comes out of the north goes out through Norbelgard’s blacksmiths.”

Cheap iron makes the whole of Norbelgard turn out iron weapons like one enormous factory. The strongest man here would be Kyle Rowellin of the guard corps; the richest would be whoever distributes the iron ore.

“The blacksmiths here, they’re all in the — what was it, the workshop guild? Didn’t you say they all belong to it?”
“That’s right. And the commission I took from Kyle Rowellin yesterday was to look into that place’s leader.”

The mission Kyle Rowellin had set out. To rake together every scrap of information touching the head of the workshop guild.

From what he told me, the guild is led by Baron Lestein, out of the north. It supplies iron ore to its member blacksmiths at far below market price, and it is swelling fast.

We walked a long way past the street of smithies, and the sound of iron being forged, far from dying down, only grew louder on every side. The afternoon was still early, and with bellows going everywhere we went on without so much as a chance to feel the cold.

“People are gathering.”

We reached the cathedral, and sure enough a great crowd caught the eye. The Ecclesia church held up loving-kindness and love, and wherever it went it staged the same scene: something handed out, and people receiving it.

The sound of the bell spread through the city. It was afternoon, the hour when the poor were issued their barley bread.

“Thank you… Thank you…”

The grace a god sends down.

The doctrine of the Ecclesia faith was a single piece of barley bread. A religion for the poor, and therefore a religion for the greater part of the city.

This moment had long since settled into place as one of Norbelgard’s sights, and Lilian watched it with a blank, absent face. Only after a long while did the line of people in front of the cathedral slowly begin to break up.

“…How many of them took one, do you think? The little loaves, I mean.”

“It looked like several hundred.”

Winter though it was, the sky today was unusually blue. After the people had scattered, Lilian kept her eyes on the slow-moving clouds.

“If the cathedral went away, all those people would starve, wouldn’t they?”
“For a while, yes.”

The moment the Ecclesia church is gone, hundreds go hungry. The city is paralyzed, in the literal sense of the word.

Whatever she was thinking, Lilian said nothing after that.

“Hundreds will go hungry, but there is something you ought to know.”
“Know what?”
“The world got along perfectly well back when there was no Ecclesia church.”

You share out food to several hundred people. That is the same as clapping a shackle on several hundred people. Obvious as it is to say, a reward given without labor erases the need for labor. And the hunger would last only a while; once people accepted that bread no longer falls out of the sky, they would go back to their ordinary lives.

“But charity is supposed to help people who couldn’t work in the first place, isn’t it? If the cathedral went away it’s not as though those people would suddenly have jobs.”
“Free city or not, you can’t be thinking that all several hundred of them belong to a poor class with no way to earn money.”

Wearing the shape of charity does not mean the Ecclesia faith is really saving anyone. Handing out food is a good act, certainly, but the dependence they breed on it is out of all proportion.

“So you’re saying the Ecclesia church bewitches people with nothing more than a piece of barley bread?”
“That would be what makes religion frightening.”

Proselytizing is not so grand a thing. Making people follow a particular organization. At the very least, if they merely think well of that organization, the proselytizing can be called a success. Becoming a believer is not so difficult.

“More than half of Norbelgard took bread away, which means half of Norbelgard is on the Ecclesia church’s side.”

Naturally you could not call every one of them wholly the church’s. But even so, if you insisted on weighing it up, could you not say they stood nearer to the church’s side?

“…Somehow it’s just left me in a filthy mood.”

“However you look at it, it’s true that they hold out a helping hand to people in hardship.”

Late afternoon.

We had been on our feet since first light, so by now hunger was setting in. We finished a meal at an eating house on the square, and then I walked along behind Lilian, who wanted to keep looking around the city.

“Oh, right. Roan, isn’t your armor a bit worn out?”

At that I looked the armor over. I had done no real repairs to it since facing Morten Barther, so “a bit worn out” was, if anything, an excessively kind way to put it.

“We’ve come all the way to the city of fire and iron, so I’ll buy you a good one.”
“It feels like putting my child’s snot-smeared pocket money toward the housekeeping.”
“What are you talking about, I’ve got way more money than Roan does.”

I thought back on the sum in gold coin Lilian had earned in Siltrein and had no choice but to concede it in silence. However little of it was left, she would be carrying more than enough to laugh at my purse.

Where her confidence came from I could not say, but Lilian strode up to a smithy she had spotted nearby.

“Do you know how to tell good armor from bad before you walk in there?”
“If it’s expensive it’s good, isn’t it? I was going to ask for the most expensive one.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but anywhere you went in Norbelgard a certain standard of quality was guaranteed, so she was not entirely wrong either.

“Expensive doesn’t automatically mean good.”
“So is it no good?”

“…I never said it was automatically bad either. I only meant that I prefer leather plate armor to full plate armor, so don’t go buying something expensive for the sake of it.”

“Why do you never wear the better thing and always wear that instead?”
“Full plate armor is for knights who go about on horseback. For going about on your own two feet it’s far more punishing than leather. And it costs enough to make your jaw drop. Empty out your whole fortune and you’d still be lucky to manage it.”

Full plate armor is the very thing that even nobles cannot afford to wear. A master’s finest trades at a price equal to a castle.

“You still need new armor, though, right? I’m going in to look first.”

Before I could get a word in, Lilian slipped inside.

“…She doesn’t listen to a thing I say.”

In the end I followed her and opened the smithy door.