III
The Sixth City of Rue Shalla is destroyed!
The shocking news arrived at the Third City of Bay Grand, carried not by the intelligence agents of the Wolfpack, but rather by a handful of soldiers fleeing together with the mistress of the Sixth City—Luciana Hartley herself.
Lion’s Workroom at Rizen Castle
“—and that is what has brought us to you. I am the lady of the Sixth City, but even I...even I was helpless...” Luciana had not once touched the cup in front of her. Tears poured down her cheeks and soaked into her dress, turning the purple fabric black.
Lion took a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her, but Luciana only thanked him and did not move to take it. He glanced at Julius, who stood beside him, and the other man saluted before leaving the room.
According to the gate guard who had first spoken with Luciana, her face had been smeared with mud, her clothes so filthy as to make it impossible to know their original color. If the others had not been dressed in the distinctive cassocks of Rue Shalla’s army, the guard had said, they would have been turned away as beggars.
“Now, those ghouls—” At the word “ghouls,” Luciana shrank back in terror. Cursing his lack of tact, Lion cleared his throat to try and mask the blunder. “That, ah, force, has halted, then?”
Her lips remained set in a tight line and her eyes were downcast, but Luciana nodded. Lion contemplated her in silence, suppressing a heavy sigh.
I certainly wasn’t expecting this just when we’re on the eve of war with the empire. The Sixth City of Rue Shalla was situated to the north of the Third City of Bay Grand. In other words, chances were high that if the army of ghouls were to march again, Bay Grand stood right in the line of fire. As they were not human, he could not guess at why they had stopped, and the amount of information he had been able to obtain was vanishingly small compared to the vast scale of the destruction that wretched force had left in its wake.
What they knew now was that the first eyewitness reports had come from soldiers from a fort on the northern edge of Rue Shalla, and that the ghouls went after the living. Lion, hearing that Luciana didn’t want to wait to tell what had befallen her, had set up the meeting with all haste, but now he decided that her mental state could not take much more of this.
Softening his expression, he said, “At any rate, I am glad to see you safe, Lady Luciana. A room has been prepared for you. Won’t you rest a little?”
“I thank you for your kindness. I...” She hesitated. “I know not whether I now have the right to ask this of you, but if any of my people or my soldiers should flee here...”
“Rest assured, Bay Grand will welcome them all.”
“Thank you. Truly, thank you.” With a faint hint of relief in her eyes, Luciana rose and left the room.
At once, Julius returned to take her place. Lion moved from the sofa to his desk, where he sat back in his chair and let out a long breath. On the other side of the window, the sun hung low in the western sky. In less than an hour, the room would fill with the vermilion light of sunset.
“You sent off the Wolfpack?”
“Yes, my lord. With orders to capture a ghoul.”
“Excellent work, as always.”
“It sounds, from what Lady Luciana said, that they are effectively mindless. I believe it should be possible for the Wolfpack to catch one, with their experience.”
“A good call. We can’t begin to deal with an opponent we know nothing about.”
“Indeed. I also gave word that all our forces are to move to alert level one.”
Lion gave a small nod, then looked properly at Julius again. “And? What do you think?”
“Lady Luciana is not lying, of that I feel certain. Her tale is difficult to believe, yes, but such are the facts.”
“Agreed. You’d never expect anyone to buy a story about an attack by a horde of people who ought to be dead. It just makes me all the more sure that it’s true.”
For better or for worse, Luciana was known as a gentle soul. Out of the thirteen lords and ladies of Sutherland, she was the least inclined toward violence and ambition, another thing that gave credence to her tale.
“I did not anticipate that before fighting the empire, we would find ourselves fighting off inhuman creatures.”
“What’s that, Julius? Are you thinking of fighting those things? I’ll beg off, myself.”
“When you don’t even believe they will stay in Rue Shalla,” Julius said pointedly.
“Ah, well,” Lion sighed. “If the situation calls for it, I can always use that. Even I had mixed feelings about using it on humans, but if we’re calling them former humans, I can act without scruples.”
“Are you sure that is the right move?”
“It isn’t right,” Lion replied with a note of indignation. “It is the means, as I live and breathe, by which I am going to unite not only Sutherland, but the entire continent.”
Julius chuckled. “That there, Lord Lion, is why I would follow you to the end of everything.” He gazed at Lion with a look in his eyes that said, I know everything. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable, Lion spun his chair to turn his back on the other man. The city on the other side of the window was as full of life as ever.
“I’ll be going to see her next.”
“You think there is mage involvement with the ghouls?”
“You really have to ask?” Walking corpses were an abnormality; the way these creatures attacked and fed on humans was a gross departure from the natural order of things. And in Lion’s opinion, the majority of unnatural occurrences involved mages—mages, those folk who had transcended the boundaries of what it meant to be human.
“Then may I accompany you?”
“Suit yourself.” Swiveling his chair back, Lion rose, then he and Julius set off down into the bowels of the castle.
Beneath Rizen Castle
“What is this?”
“Who can say...” Julius smiled nervously. Lion turned to the door, to which was affixed a paper sign that read DO NOT OPEN. DANGER, and unceremoniously shoved it open. There, sitting before a gigantic contraption, her hands a blur of motion, was a woman. Before Lion could call out to her, her hands stopped moving and her shoulders began to shake with laughter.
“People can never resist opening something when they’re told not to,” she chuckled. “And boys who laugh in the face of danger like you, Leo baby, are the worst of all.” The woman turned to face them. She wore enormous, black-framed glasses that dwarfed her small face, and a white coat that was similarly ill-fitting, its sleeves flopping about over her hands. The woman’s name was Heaven Mercury, and, to the best of Lion’s knowledge, she was the United City-States of Sutherland’s only mage.
“You’re as incomprehensible as ever, I see,” Lion said.
“And you’re as drool-worthy as ever, Leo baby. Mm-mmm.” Heaven ran her eyes slowly over him, then pretended to wipe her mouth with a dirty chuckle. Lion was sure she wasn’t actually drooling until he saw a patch of her sleeve that was a decidedly darker color. He shuddered.
“But what brings you here?” she asked. “I told Lord Julius just today that I’m not finished yet.”
“I got your report, of course. Today I’m here on another matter. Before I come to that, though, why’s he ‘Lord’ while I get ‘Leo baby’? How does that figure?”
He knew Heaven was too much of a nut to have a solid reason, so he didn’t expect a straight answer. Still, he asked, holding on to a pinprick of hope.
“Why, because you’re Leo baby, and Lord Julius is Lord Julius. You ask the oddest questions.” Heaven blinked at him as though he’d utterly mystified her. As much as he wanted to ask who she was calling odd, he knew all too well how much good it would do him; that was to say, none at all.
I’m the idiot for daring to hope for a real answer, he thought. Glancing at Julius, who was facing away from Lion with his hand over his mouth as his whole body shook with repressed laughter, Lion got straight to the point.
“Can magecraft be used to control corpses?” he asked.
“Magecraft to control corpses?” At once, Heaven’s face took on a look of cool intelligence, making her seem like a different person entirely. Lion thought he saw her glasses flash, but it had surely been a trick of the light. “Magecraft is what I live for,” she went on warningly. “I won’t stand for anyone making a mockery of it—not even you, Leo baby.”
“The thought never entered my mind. But if that’s how you feel, so be it. Killing me should be a breeze for a mage, if she were so inclined.” Lion spread his arms wide and grinned.
Heaven gave him a searching look. “To be honest, I’ve never heard of magecraft so fantastical. Such magecraft—if that’s really what it is—would have to be the work of a unique-type mage like me...” She paused. “If you’re not making fun, why the sudden interest?”
Lion told her everything he had been able to learn. In a flash, Heaven threw herself into his arms. He and Julius stood there frozen in surprise as she buried her face in his chest.
Then, her head shot up, and she said, “I want to see.” Her face kindled with delight like Lion had never seen before.
“You what? You mean the ghouls?”
“Obviously! There’s nothing else I could mean, it’s so obvious!” She shoved Lion away, as though suddenly irritated by him, then began to pace back and forth, issuing a stream of dark muttering.
The whole day was going to slip away while he stood here quietly waiting to see what Heaven did. This was not acceptable to Lion.
“The ghouls are definitely a mage’s work, then?” he asked.
Heaven came to an abrupt halt. “Maybe...” she said at length.
“‘Maybe’? What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”
“As I think you know, in order to use magecraft, one needs a power source—which is to say, mana. Now, mana is generated within the body, but one’s capacity for wielding it is fixed at birth. At present, there is still no established method for acquiring a greater reserve of mana.”
“You told me once that just having deep mana reserves is enough to make someone extraordinarily gifted.”
Heaven nodded, then resumed her restless pacing. Every now and then she also pulled at her hair, making her look like a madwoman.
“I could see making a few corpses move, but controlling fifty thousand at the same time is absolutely impossible, by the laws of magecraft.”
“You’re trying to say that the mana would be massively insufficient?”
“Massively? Try entirely insufficient. You see how hard I work, don’t you, Leo baby?”
A little annoyed by her patronizing tone, Lion nonetheless looked past her at the enormous, clear vat that overshadowed everything else in the room. It was close to ninety percent full of a yellowish green liquid that glowed dully.
“And that’s why you can’t say for sure there’s a mage involved...”
“Just so. Maybe if there were someone even more powerful than a mage, but as far as I’m aware, no such person exists or has ever existed.” Heaven’s hair was now a hopeless tangle.
I suppose the only thing to do is wait until the Wolfpack returns with... he thought, then stopped as a memory came to him. Hold on. Within his vast personal library, there was a volume that told of a creature, worshipped as a sacred beast, that had been able to use magecraft. At the time, he had laughed it away as a bit of fantasy, but now that the borders between fantasy and reality were growing less and less certain, he found he could not dismiss it so easily.
“Heaven, do you know about the sacred beast?” he asked. Heaven stopped pacing again.
“The sacred beast...” she murmured. “Yes, perhaps, with the sacred beast...”
“You do know about it, then?”
“If anything, I’m shocked that you know about it, Leo baby. Though I hear these days they call it the ‘Cataclysmic Maw, class three dangerous beast.’”
Lion had heard of the Maw. But it had never entered his mind that the sacred beast and the Maw might be one and the same.
“Maybe we should consider the possibility that the sacred beast is pulling strings behind the scenes,” he said, voicing the idea as it came to him.
Heaven’s expression grew dark. “All right,” she said, “assuming you’re right and the sacred beast did this, what would its purpose be?”
“How should I know how a beast’s mind works?”
“When you don’t know, it’s best not to go jumping to conclusions. You’ll only end up further from the truth. On which note,” Heaven went on, “make arrangements for us to go see these walking corpses.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?!”
“I just told you that the ghouls laid waste to the Sixth City. You might be a mage, but I don’t see you taking on tens of thousands of those things. How could I give permission when I know your life would be at risk?”
Besides the staggering sum of gold he had invested in Heaven, Lion had not the slightest intention of giving the ghouls more to feed on—especially not a rare mage.
Julius too tried to persuade Heaven, but she wasn’t budging.
“It’s not as though I want to die, not when I’m still so young and perky, not to mention adorable and gorgeous. I swear I won’t do anything dangerous. Plus, if I see them in real life, I might be able to tell if it actually is a mage controlling them. See, Leo baby, there’s something in it for you too.”
Lion considered for a moment. “True, there is,” he admitted. “But you’ll have to wait a little. At the moment—”
“Why do I have to wait?!” Heaven shouted, rounding on him aggressively. “I want to see them! I want to see them right now! If you tell me no, I’ll just go myself!”
Lion had had enough. “Let me finish. At the moment, I have the Wolfpack inspecting the site. I also gave them orders to catch me a ghoul while they’re at it, so all going well, you’ll have the pleasure of its acquaintance in the next few days.”
“You’re serious?!” Heaven exclaimed, suddenly beaming. Next, she wormed her arm through his. Lion extricated himself from her, somewhat forcefully.
“I know it’s no good lying to you,” he said. “So wait.”
“Oh yes, of course. I’ll wait until your Wolfpack gets back. But if they fail to catch a ghoul, I will go get one myself, and you won’t stop me.”
“Yes, fine. Works for me.”
“Excellent!”
“After we catch the ghoul, we’ll need to run tests. Can you get it ready by then?”
“Leave it to me. I’m really going to pull out all the stops.”
“I appreciate it. The vessel will be ready soon too.”
Heaven tore off her white coat and tossed it aside, then turned back to the contraption, licking her lips. Julius averted his gaze, looking embarrassed as her petite yet still voluptuous figure came into full view.
Still so innocent, Lion thought as he called to Heaven’s back, “I’m counting on you.” She gave him a careless wave, then, facing the contraption before her, began to intone something in an unknown tongue.
“No one can get through to her when she gets like this.”
“So long as she devotes herself to the work, that’s all that matters. The rest will have to wait until the Wolfpack returns.”
“I expect the Council of the Thirteen Stars will be convened at once, won’t it?”
“It’s a massive nuisance—but I can hardly say no after Rue Shalla was destroyed.”
Two days passed. The Wolfpack was successful, returning safely home with several of the ghouls held captive. But the report they brought him left Lion reeling with shock. For they had learned that the ghouls flew the banners of the imperial army.
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