Brus (5)

I slipped out of the room where the beast and the lord had been. The Lucseon church had shown its hand at last, and the lead that could take me to it lay somewhere in this bedchamber. There was no time to waste. I had no notion of what shape the clue might take, so in the end there was only one thing for it: comb the whole room, one item at a time.

I toppled the bookcases along the walls and tore the walls themselves apart, and once I’d finished with those I went through the books scattered across the floor, one by one. The room lay silent. Moonlight poured in through the window, its curtains flung wide, and filled the chamber. The night was still deep.

By the time the moon had sunk halfway, I’d found something worth a second look.

No title.

I opened it. The cover was blank. Inside, just as I’d guessed, was a collection of poems the lord had composed himself. If he’d wanted to leave behind anything tied to Lucseon, no method would have been more discreet, or more convenient, than a book penned in his own hand.

“Quite the refined hobby.”

The poems ran to every kind, but there wasn’t hide nor hair of Lucseon in any of them; women and landscapes, start to finish. I set them against one another too, for good measure, and no cipher seemed to be hidden there either. I tossed the little book back onto the desk. Then I reached for another, and my hand stopped.

“…”

A sheet of paper stuck out from the book’s last page, and it had caught my eye. After a moment’s hesitation, I pulled it free. Odds were it was just one more poem like all the others, but there was no harm in looking.

What was written on it came down to a single line. A letter, asking after a son who had gone north. If anything about it stood out, it was that the hand didn’t match the other poems.

…Is this the sender’s name?

At the bottom of the sheet was written the name of the man who seemed to have penned it.

Pindel Morein.

It was the kind of letter you’d find anywhere, a father fretting over his son, and for all that I tore apart the rest of the lord’s room afterward, I turned up nothing more remarkable than this. I read it over once more, and still nothing out of the ordinary leapt out.

A letter, hidden away among the lord’s journal…

If anything, its very ordinariness made it stranger. There was no reason for a letter this trifling to be sitting among the lord’s poems. This one sheet seemed set apart from all the rest, as though its subject had nothing to do with the room it lay in. Somewhere in it, in a letter that looked for all the world as though it had come from another place entirely, there was a clue.

I knew it by instinct. There was a clue in that sheet of paper, and yet the sheet alone gave up nothing.

In the end, what I had to do was simple.

“I’ll have to look around some more.”

I left the lord’s room and widened the search to the whole manor. The letter had felt out of step with this room from the very start, so perhaps the answer had never been here to find in the first place. I headed down to the first floor without hesitation.

The soldiers were nowhere in sight. Fled, by the look of it. A fair while had passed since the lord’s death, and no one had come storming up to the bedchamber in all that time, so I’d already guessed as much.

Anyone who hadn’t run even after facing the carnage on the first floor was one of two things: either sure enough of his own skill, or a madman. By that measure, whoever had fled was simply being sensible, and I had no reason to hunt them down. But surely not every soldier had run; someone who knew about the letter might still be hiding somewhere in the manor.

As it turned out, my reasoning held, and I came across a soldier who had chosen hiding over flight. Though “came across” was generous; in truth I merely hauled him out of the storeroom corner he’d huddled into. When I found him, he was nodding off among the stacked goods.

“Hey.”
“Gah! P-please, spare me!”
“…I’m not going to kill you.”

Whether he was fearless by nature or simply had nothing much rattling around upstairs, he’d stayed boldly put while the others fled, sleeping here, drooling even.

“I’ve got something to ask you.”

The soldier’s eyes rolled this way and that. Judging by how he found his voice after only a short silence, fearless he certainly seemed.

“Wh-what do you want to know?”
“Do you know a man called Pindel Morein?”
“…Pindel Morein, you say?”

The lord could hardly have missed a sheet like that, tucked into his own book of poems. Which meant he’d known the letter was there and left it where it sat all the same, and that in turn meant he’d grasped the significance hidden inside it. I held out no hope that the soldier in front of me knew a thing about Pindel Morein. Where on earth was I to dig up anything on the man, and when was I to find the clue buried in that letter? My head was beginning to ache already.

“I know him.”
“…You know him?”

But the thread lay closer to hand than I’d expected.

“He’s the secretary of this manor. Hasn’t been here long, either.”

Pindel Morein.

So the man had been in the manor’s own employ. His identity was far plainer than I’d imagined.

“Where is he now?”
“That I couldn’t really… ah, the secretary’s quarters are on the second floor, next to the library.”
“I see. Show me the way.”
“…Sir?”
“How am I supposed to know where the library is?”

I drove the soldier ahead of me, reluctance written all over him, and climbed to the second floor. He screwed his eyes shut at the sight on the first floor, but I’d grown too pressed for time to spare him any sympathy. The secretary’s quarters, by the time we reached them, stood empty. Not a soul, not a sound.

“He’s run.”
“Th-that is…”

The soldier’s eyes darted about. The look on him all but declared that Pindel Morein’s flight was somehow my doing. I watched him a moment, then let out a small sigh.

“Read this.”

I handed him the sheet I’d carried out of the bedchamber. It wasn’t as though I had any better plan just then; I pressed the note into his hands on the off chance. The soldier’s eyes ran quickly over the letter, and then he asked:

“Uh — what is it you’d like me to do?”
“Anything. Just tell me whatever comes to mind when you look at it.”

This was something I’d stared at for ages and gotten nothing out of. I didn’t imagine a mere soldier would turn up anything either, but I held my tongue and waited for him to speak.

“…I’m not sure. Hmm, the paper’s a fine grade, and it looks like a scribe wrote it, most likely…”
“Wait. Wait a moment. What did you just say?”
“Y-yes?”

Pindel Morein was a secretary. And a scribe, of course, was a different post from a secretary.

“You’re saying the one who wrote this wasn’t Pindel Morein?”
“Well, the scribe was a childhood friend of mine. Latio Beltran, his name is… I’d know his hand anywhere. It’s the very same as this here.”

It landed like a blow to the head. So the one who had actually written the letter was no secretary, but a scribe. And wasn’t a scribe precisely the man whose whole office was to set the lord’s words down on paper?

“You’re certain? That the owner of this letter isn’t Pindel Morein?”
“Yes. For one thing, so far as I know the secretary has no son.”

It made little sense for a secretary, a man who could write perfectly well for himself, to go to the trouble of having a scribe ghost-write a letter. So in the end, the one who had written this note was the lord.

So does that mean the lord was passing himself off as this Pindel Morein? And by a trick so transparently false — a letter to a son who doesn’t exist, no less?

There wasn’t nearly enough reason for the lord to do any such thing. I needed to come at it from another angle. Perhaps what deserved attention wasn’t the letter’s contents at all, but the plain fact that the lord had left it behind.

What did the lord stand to gain by leaving it behind? He could set the name Pindel Morein before one particular person: not the secretary, but his son.

“Among the lord’s children, is there one likely to receive this letter?”
“Uh… I’ve heard the lord’s second son has gone up north.”

That settled it. Through this letter, the lord had meant to point his child in the north toward Pindel Morein. The reason wasn’t hard to guess.

So he must have been the contact line those Lucseon bastards used to reach the lord.

Pindel Morein.

That man was the heart of the whole affair. Having followed the thread that far, I tore the paper to shreds.

I have to find him.

Finding the vanished Pindel Morein was the key to reaching the Lucseon church, which had surfaced once more after all these years. But how? Fortunately, in this case, the answer was plain. I turned to look at the bewildered soldier.

“Do you remember what Pindel Morein looks like?”
“Sorry? Ah — yes. I do.”
“Come with me.”

I strode out of the secretary’s quarters. The soldier hurried to keep up, and spoke.

“Er — where are we going?”
“To Pindel Morein.”
“And how would you know where he — “

Without a word, I leveled a finger at him. The soldier went pale as a corpse.

“You can’t mean… when you said come with you…”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Without you, I’ve no way of knowing who Pindel Morein even is.”

The soldier wore the face of a man who’d just heard something he’d sooner not have. As though he’d clean forgotten the corpses we’d stepped past on the first floor only moments before, he spoke up as if in protest:

“Come on, why do I have to be the one to find Pindel Morein? You’re a busy man, sir knight, and I can see there’s some story behind all this, but… travelling with you, I don’t think I’d sleep a wink for the fright of it.”

For a man who claimed I frightened him, his tone was remarkably matter-of-fact. Dumbfounded, I added:

“If you want to run, you’re free to run.”
“Truly?”
“Yes. Only remember one thing.”

If I frightened him, he was free to run whenever he liked. I had no intention of stripping him even of his freedom to flee.

“Just pray I don’t catch up to you.”

But then, running him down was a freedom of mine as well, wasn’t it? No being has more time to spare than one who lives forever. Since the day I became undying, time has never once failed to stand at my side, and now is no different. The one who ought to be sweating is the church that stands to be hunted, not me, the one doing the hunting.

Decades, centuries, it makes no difference. In the end, the victor would be me, the one with time for an ally. If I had a single worry just then, it was whether Pindel Morein might come to some grisly end before I could find him.

“Er — no. Never mind.”

Whether or not my sincerity had gotten through to him, the soldier gave in at last, fell into step behind me, and set about gathering his things. He could hardly wish to spend the rest of his life being hunted by me.

By now the moon had set completely, and a dim light was beginning to stain the horizon. The soldier had more or less finished gathering his things, and the two of us were on the very point of stepping out of the manor.

— KA-BLAAM!

The wall along the staircase up to the second floor blew outward with a deafening roar. The soldier dropped where he stood; I held still.

— SKRAAAAAK!

What came tearing through the wall was the beast from before. I’d been certain I’d knocked it clean out. Had it come round already?

“Get back.”

A crushing menace rolled off it and stood every fine hair on my body on end. Unluckily, I’d left the spear back in the lord’s room. Then again, whether the same trick would work on it twice was another matter.

“Hiiieeek!”

Once I’d made sure the soldier was scrambling away on all fours, I drew my sword; there was nothing else for it. As a rule, I avoid fights with beasts like that one wherever I can. Regenerate though I may, having my whole lower half torn clean off is never a pleasant experience. But this was a time to put the thing down for good, bleeding be damned.

“There’s no such thing as slipping through quietly, is there.”

In the end, this was a hunt.

A hunt in which, no matter how it tore at my lower body or crushed my skull, the one who would die at the end had already been decided.