SIDE:
Zephyr’s Actions in the Shadows
APPAS’S PERSPECTIVE
“GUILD MASTER, please, it wouldn’t hurt you to get angry! I’ve told him no again and again, but he just keeps pushing himself!”
“Fine, I get it.”
I could hear Eche’s enraged voice booming out in the hallway. Uh-oh… I think I made her mad for real this time. I’d better test the tea she brings me from now on. Maybe the food, too? No, first, I’d better apologize. I don’t think she’ll ever let me win this argument.
“So I hear you fainted?” Guild Master Uliga entered my room without knocking. I raised my arm from my position in bed and waved. I had gotten cocky and tried to move too much too soon, hence the fainting spell.
“Yeah, but I should be fine if I stay in bed for a while.”
“Okay… Just make sure Eche doesn’t poison you.”
Poison… It’s not poison I have to worry about with her. Then again, she’d have no qualms about drugging me so badly I couldn’t get out of bed for a few days.
“How’d it go?”
“In the village, you mean?”
“Yeah. I think we got a fair amount of intel, but I want to know how things look from the guild master’s seat.”
“In a word: Things look wrong. There’s this creepy blanket of apathy covering the whole village—it’s like nobody’s scared. If I didn’t know a summoning circle was responsible, I’d have run away from this village already.”
The summoning circles… I had never wanted to deal with those evil things again.
“And from the capital?” Uliga asked. “Surely you’ve heard from the crown.”
“I did.”
“I take it you didn’t tell them about our little friends?”
I sat up in bed and looked at Uliga. From the sharpness in his eyes, I could tell he was asking me the question not as a friend but as the guild master.
“Heh! Why’d you even ask? You know I can’t talk about it.”
Most people who get involved with summoning circles are placed under heavy surveillance out of fear that the circle’s powers would lure them into mischief. To be honest, anyone who would try to use something so terrifyingly evil was a fool. But there once was an adventurer who was bewitched by a summoning circle into causing great harm to a town, so I didn’t blame the crown for wanting to keep track of such people.
“Fair point… So you can’t get out of the contract, can you?”
“No. Whenever you sign that kind of paper, you get cursed if you break the contract without both parties’ consent.”
I glanced over at the desk by my bed. Uliga picked up one of the pieces of paper, which had Druid’s and Ivy’s signatures on it—as well as mine.
“It was cunning of them to use this paper, though,” Uliga marveled.
It was magic paper. It looked just like the paper people normally used when they signed contracts, but it had an unusual quality to it. It was often used when signing contracts with royalty because it was imbued with a special kind of magic. To be honest, I faltered for a moment when I saw what kind of paper that contract was on. I realized just how bleak the situation was once I knew we had to use that kind of paper. But in hindsight, Zinal and his men had made the right call to use it.
“What did the crown say?”
“They gave us more detailed information about the summoning circle as well as about the victims and the plan moving forward.”
“Ah. Did you manage to fool them?”
I looked at Uliga and met his gaze. It looked like he was preoccupied with Druid—or rather, with Ivy.
“Are you curious about the girl?”
“A little. I haven’t spoken with her much yet, but I sense something special in her.”
So Uliga had that feeling, too. When I first met her, I sensed something that I couldn’t put my finger on. It was hard to put into words.
“I couldn’t fool them. I told them about our helpers, but that only made them more suspicious. They assumed there were more people I wasn’t telling them about.”
Our current king was very shrewd. Rumor had it that he possessed quite a lot of magic energy, so surely he’d sensed something.
“So what did you do about it?”
“I told him I couldn’t say anything because I’d signed a contract.”
“Didn’t he order you to just break it?”
Even magic paper’s effects could be nullified if the royal family’s inner circle got involved. Then again, there were severe side effects, so this tyrannical method wasn’t used unless there were special circumstances. But we were dealing with a summoning circle this time, meaning the crown would be so desperate for intel that the king would resort to tyranny to get it. In fact, he did demand that I name names. I was only able to nip that in the bud by telling him I’d signed a contract on magic paper.
“He did try to do that, but he backed down when I told him it was written on cursed paper.”
He’d sounded quite bitter about it, but nobody liked the idea of being cursed to death.
“Can’t the curse on the contract be broken?” Uliga asked.
I shook my head. “No, not even those in the crown’s employ can do that. And if you stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong, you’ll get cursed, have your memory erased, your magic energy devoured—you might even die. Even if you survive, you’ll be sick or an empty shell for life. Anyway, keeping your nose out of it’s the best choice.”
I’d seen it happen just once and it was simply wild. The cloud of poisonous magic energy spilling out of the cursed paper…the screams of the person it swallowed up… To make matters worse, the poor victim had been acting under orders, so there was no escaping it.
“Is it really that horrible?”
“Er—what?”
“Don’t you know, Appas? Your face looks incredibly ghastly.”
My face looks ghastly? He could at least say my expression looks ghastly. Sounds like he’s calling me ugly.
“I’ve seen the curse take someone’s life before—I was just remembering it.”
It was a memory that haunted my dreams for the following weeks, after all.
“Oh. Well, do the gentlemen of Zephyr know what will happen to them if they breach this contract?”
“Yeah, I made sure of it. That’s why they used the paper—they knew how necessary it was.”
I frowned as I thought back to my discussion with Zinal a little while ago. He had such an angelic smile on his face when he handed me the paper and said, “Surely you know what this is. You aren’t going to object, are you?” What’s more, he’d said, “You honestly think we’d make a contract on normal paper, given the position you used to have? No way in Hell.” He obviously knew the crown had me on retainer. It was over twenty years in the past now—and I’d only actually worked for the crown for three years at the most—but…as it turned out, I was still a mole for the king about the nobles who opposed him.
“You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah… Zinal and his lot are shrewd. They’re some scary sons of bitches.”
How had they gotten their hands on such classified intelligence? They were truly terrifying. What’s more, they had a good enough read on how the king would act that they’d made those contracts, and that was even more terrifying.
I reached for the contract Uliga was holding and took it from him. It had the provision I will help the undersigned escape this village safely by any means necessary. The crown was sure to send in people to investigate my collaborators, as well as to dispose of the monsters and neutralize the summoning circle. They did say in their faax that they were sending more summoning circle experts than I’d originally anticipated. The king would never give up so easily; he was probably thinking of sending investigators to get the intel so I wouldn’t have to break the contract. Zinal had been several steps ahead of him when he made up this contract. I had a hunch the gentlemen of Zephyr knew a thing or two about summoning circles, but I didn’t think they’d told Druid and Ivy about it. Maybe they too were bound by a contract…
No, even if that were true, they were way too defenseless when it came to summoning circles. If they were bound by a contract, they could have at least said more by choosing their words wisely, but I didn’t get that impression from them when we talked. Besides, there’s something about them I just can’t put my finger on. It was like what they let me see was a facade. It’s a strange turn of phrase, but it seemed odd that nothing felt odd about them… It’s no use. Now I’m just confusing myself.
“By the way, has Nalgath’s party returned from the forest with Druid and Ivy yet?”
Hm? Come to think of it, I haven’t told him yet. He’ll probably get quite a shock when I do. I’m still having a hard time believing it all myself.
“They found a summoning circle drawn on the floor of the sharmy cave, so they went back with Sol to neutralize it.”
“What?! Sol?! Neutralize a summoning circle???”
Oooh, now that’s a great derp-face. Yeah, I suppose that wasn’t enough of an explanation. Okay, I guess I’ll tell him in more detail. Talking about it with someone else will help me sort out my thoughts, anyway. Then again, no matter how much I tell him it’s true, I doubt he’d ever believe a slime could neutralize a summoning circle unless he saw it with his own eyes.
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