Workshop Guild (2)

“I don’t recall ever saying I was a mercenary.”

A moment later the innkeeper came back out carrying a bowl. I drew two copper coins from inside my coat and handed them over.

“My apologies, then.”

The bowl held boiled beans. I took one spoonful and set it back down. This inn, it seemed, cooked its food without ever once tasting it.

Perhaps business is bad for the simple reason that the food really is this bad.

I cleared the stray thoughts away. To look into this place any further, I needed a pretext to keep coming back.

“The area round here is unusually crowded.”
“There’s no shortage of drinking houses. Only natural, isn’t it.”
“When did the drinking houses go up?”

The innkeeper stopped speaking and stared straight at me, with the look of someone working out whether this was an outsider’s plain curiosity or whether some other design sat behind it. The answer came after a moment.

“A good while back. Though I don’t see why that should interest you.”

The innkeeper’s face had gone thoroughly sour, perhaps from sensing that I was sounding them out.

“Any guests staying tonight?”
“Not a one.”

If this place really does have something to do with Baron Lestein.

An inn with people going in and out is not suited to handling secret business. Had it been me, I would have kept this area a residential quarter as it was and moved only the warehouse when the new manor went up. But the entertainment district is plainly a street the baron willed into being. The land belongs to the baron, so the houses that once stood here came down on the baron’s word, and out of all the people in the world it was that one barkeep the baron picked to set up an inn.

So why, of all things, settle on an inn?

On the assumption that this place is the baron’s secret ground, the business that has to be handled here is most likely the kind that involves meeting people.

The way one hides a tree in a forest. People coming and going often in a quiet residential quarter would look strange, so the whole area was turned into a raucous entertainment district instead.

For now it is closer to a leap than a deduction, but it does explain both the old man’s son disappearing here and the street changing abruptly into an entertainment district afterward.

“I’ll come again.”

There is no sign of anyone in the building, and the barkeep’s word that no guests are staying does not seem to be a lie either. With no one here, today is not the day.

“…”

The innkeeper said not a word until I rose from my seat and pushed the door open on my way out. The look from before unchanged by so much as a degree.

After that night I spent a good while ordering that place’s boiled beans, in which not a scrap of flavor was to be found, every single night. So long as I did not know the cycle of the meetings, it was an unavoidable choice.

One day Lilian even came along, announcing that she would find out for herself how delicious this place I visited every day really was. The price of ignoring my warning to the very last was steep. She took one mouthful, screwed her face up as though about to cry, and in the end brought it all back up once we were back at the lodging. Having thrown up her fill, she came in and left a merciless review of the barkeep’s boiled beans.

Had she not said the vomit she had just been looking at looked more appetizing?

“Are you going there again today?”

Lilian came over to me as I was getting ready to go out and poked me in the side. It suddenly called to mind the way she put a finger to every ant she came across.

Surely that does not mean she goes about eating whatever an ant would eat.

“I am. I may not make it back tonight, so don’t wait up. Go to sleep.”
“You say that every day and then come back anyway.”

“…You never know. Today might be different.”

The night was dark without fail, the day cold as ever. Lilian brought me my helm and said,

“Off you go, Roan. And let me know if anything happens.”

I took the helm from her. A faint warmth still clung to the place where she had held it.

“I will.”

One by one the lights that had come on here and there went out. Even the smithies, which kept their fires burning latest of all, went dark. People crossed the square as though drawn toward a brighter light. In this place the day only began once the sun had gone down. The inn in front of me was no different.

“So you’ve come again.”

“…It really has been a while since I met a face that stays this unwelcome no matter how often I see it.”

I took a seat at the long straight counter, across from the barkeep. Today as ever, there was no one else to be seen on the first floor.

“The usual, will it be?”
“Yes.”
“A strange sort you are, and no mistake.”

Since the first day I had never once ordered food and left any of it. The reason was simple enough: ordering food day after day and never eating it would look more than a little suspicious. Thanks to that, the innkeeper had me down as the greatest lover of beans in the world.

“Here you are.”

I was mechanically shoveling down the plate the barkeep had brought out when a sound reached me, very small and fine, so quiet that catching it took all five senses bent toward it. It was the sound of a foot on floorboards.

Unmistakably a sign of someone there.

“No customers but me tonight either.”
“Hasn’t it always been so.”

The mere fact of having a guest is not information anyone needs to hide. And that the barkeep lies about it even so.

So that’s the answer?

In all likelihood, tonight is the night it breaks open.

“Is the lodging upstairs?”
“Staying the night, will you be? Up to the second floor, then; one silver coin a night.”
“Is there nothing here but a second floor? Personally I prefer a basement.”
“There’s no basement.”

The footsteps had come from below. In that moment suspicion turned into hard evidence.

“I’ll stay the night.”
“Do that.”

I could take the innkeeper by the collar right now, but one slip and the innkeeper would be all I had hold of, and not whoever stands behind them. This was a time to move carefully.

I went up, stepped into a room at random, shut the door and took up position beside it. If anyone came in, the door would hide my body. I waited like that. Beyond the window the moonlight slowly swelled, then slowly waned again.

A long while after the noise of the street had gone, around the time some four or five hours must have passed by the feel of it.

Footsteps began to sound. A steady interval, climbing the stairs. By the weight of the sound, one grown man.

The footsteps reached the second floor and kept drawing nearer, until at last they halted right beside me. Perhaps feeling for signs of life inside the room, the man stood there without moving. Through it all, time went steadily on.

Time enough passed that having heard those footsteps came to feel like a dream, and—

— BANG!

—the door swung open.

“—Gkh!”

In the same instant I thrust out an arm, smashed the door apart and took the man by the throat as I did. The wooden door tore in my grip like a sheet of paper.

A man I had never seen before. The owner of the footsteps from below, most likely, or else one of that party.

“I’ll say this once. Give me an answer that has nothing to do with the question and I kill you. Try to resist with that dagger in your hand and I kill you too. Twisting your neck off as you are is no work at all. Nod if you’ve understood.”

The man nodded slowly. He was not panicking, which said he was at least no ordinary civilian.

“Where do you belong?”

“…N-nowhere. I belong to no one.”

“The sort that takes money as it comes and kills people for it?”
“That’s right.”

“At whose instigation?”

The man hesitated to answer. With the hand that was not holding his throat I pulled out one of his back teeth and clamped his mouth shut. He thrashed quietly.

“I’ll take them one at a time, starting from the back. Speak when the will to answer comes.”
“I-I’ll talk now. It was the owner here who put me up to it.”

“And you heard nothing else besides?”
“Kill the guest in the second room on the left from the end of the corridor — that was the whole of it. Damn it, if I’d known it’d be a bastard like you I’d have turned it down from the start.”

The innkeeper’s own private instigation, then. In all likelihood the man was simply a means of shutting my mouth. That I had come every day for the last several days and then, of all days, chosen tonight to sleep here must have grated. Which meant that in the end this one knew nothing either.

— SNAP!

Leaving the slack corpse behind, I came out into the corridor.

Whatever the innkeeper means to do, it has not started yet. That much I can be sure of. Had I been in the way, I would naturally have been dealt with before the business was carried out.

I have to find the passage down to the basement before it is too late. From what I took in on the way up to the second floor, there is no way down anywhere on the first floor or near the stairs.

One place I have not yet checked. The back, where the barkeep brought the food out from.

I went over the long counter and inside. A filthy cauldron and a pot or two, dented cooking tools hanging on the wall. The kitchen was crude and on the whole held nothing out of the ordinary, but in one corner of the floor there was an unnatural spot.

A wooden board with a wide gap around it. When I pulled, instead of tearing away it simply lifted out whole. It had not been fixed down at all, only laid over.

“…”

I climbed down the ladder that had been laid bare. After a long descent a passage opened out, and at its end was a door. No sign of life came from the other side. When I opened it, stairs leading further down appeared once more.

Fond of digging downward, this lot.

I walked on, taking care to make no sound. Having come this far, there would be no greater waste of effort than to be noticed now.

The innkeeper belongs to Baron Lestein. What is it the baron has to do in secret, and here of all places?

The baron gathers arms, so those, at least, must have been brought this far. Otherwise there would be no proper reason for this passage to exist.

Then why, instead of keeping this place as the warehouse, go to the trouble of moving them to the baron’s own manor and then bringing them back again? Because others must not know that there are weapons here. That narrows the baron’s purpose considerably.

Were the weapons being handed over to somebody else?

A place for secretly passing weapons to someone who would gain nothing by having it known they were taking them. This inn is the exchange ground where the baron and that somebody else can meet halfway.

And it is not hard to guess who that somebody else is. The three bodies that split Norbelgard’s power between them. The guard corps, the workshop guild, and the Ecclesia church.

Surely the party Baron Lestein deals with could not be Kyle Rowellin? The baron sweeps up the arms from the blacksmiths and hands them over to the Ecclesia faith. Which would mean the baron, too, is one of the church’s own. They have already taken hold of manufacturing, the very foundation of the city.

This won’t be easy.

It seemed that lifting the Ecclesia faith out of Norbelgard was going to mean clearing a great many more hurdles than I had thought. If Baron Lestein was a stooge of the Ecclesia faith, that would also explain the financial power and the volume of iron ore, both well past what the rank of baron accounts for.

The one thing that snags is the reason the Lucseon lot are gathering arms. Weapons are, by nature, what those preparing to fight lay in. Baron Lestein came down to Norbelgard twenty years ago, and is there any reason for them to have been preparing for a war from that far back?

The arrival in the city was twenty years ago, so the plan was actually laid a good deal earlier than that… putting it at about twenty-five years would be right.

What incident was the Ecclesia church tangled up in around that time? Nothing in particular comes to mind. Back then I did not give them careful attention.

…No. There is one.

One hypothesis came to mind. Somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-seven years. Does that not fit Lilian’s age with an eerie exactness?

If Lucseon made Lilian and, from that very moment, foresaw that it would stand against her at exactly this time, or if it set the board that way itself, and has been arming the church for it.

“A madman if ever there was one.”

It is an absurd conjecture. But if by one chance in ten thousand this conjecture is true.

Then perhaps I have been dancing in its grip from the very beginning.