IBTRFL Chapter 27

Crossed Paths

Sailors, describing the sea, often resort to crude expression.

Among these is one blunt, rather rude little phrase: "a senile old hag."

The sound of it isn't especially pleasant, but the phrase captures the sea with precision.

The sea is a rotten one, foul-natured and fickle.

It carries on gently, endlessly soft, and then without warning turns savage, thrashing. It rears like a mad colt one moment, then goes docile and mild the next.

Not even a winged infant angel could toy with a person so thoroughly.

Sailors are made in that vicious caprice. They wade through seawater that floods the deck, soaking themselves through, and ripen, salted, under a blazing sun.

That process, by which a person of the land becomes a person of the sea, they call "being pickled in salt."

If a farmer plants his life in a field, a sailor loads his life onto a ship. And the fate of that ship is decided by a spiteful, swaying old hag gone soft in the head.

A place to live and a living graveyard, a wellspring of wealth and the ruin of fortunes, a symbol of freedom and an aimless wandering with no promised end.

The sea that keeps a person alive but will, someday, swallow them whole—the people pickled in its salt hated it, and loved it, both.

Today, that sea stirred, calm on its surface and sinister underneath.

Even the lighthouse had lost its way in the gray, salt-laced sea fog, and the water's surface, holding the dim gray of dawn, rippled with a heavy gloom.

It seemed, at any moment, some sea monster out of old stories might rise with the spray and sink its teeth into the figurehead at the bow.

"Noksa, apparently the sailors call a day like this a mermaid's funeral."

"Is that so."

"You're so stiff."

Solua, shooting Noksa a sidelong look, swirled the porcelain cup in her hand. The strangely colored liquid inside rippled, giving off a faint, mysterious scent.

She raised the cup to her lips and tilted it back. An unfamiliar, harsh taste toyed cruelly with the tip of her tongue. Her face twisting at once, Solua spat out what was in her mouth. The lingering scent in her mouth and nose was enough to make her retch.

Solua twisted her wrist and turned the cup over. The quiet, solitary sea swallowed the liquid whole, gluttonous as a starving beast, as it fell.

"What in the world makes someone tell you to go buy this crap? Expensive, and doesn't taste like a damn thing."

"Not my place to say."

"Right, right, sure you're not. Whatever—let's get to it."

"Understood."

Noksa answered flatly, then hauled his subordinate up by the hair, brutal and rough, as the man bled and thrashed feebly beneath him.

A face, seared over and over until it melted into something hideous, came into view.

Through a mouth missing all its teeth, a voice came out like escaping air.

"Sol...... ua. M'laaady. S-spare me."

Solua drew a dark red liquid from within her robes. Some instinctive dread made the man twist his neck in feeble resistance.

Noksa, his face perfectly blank, drove a hard blow into the man's solar plexus.

"That's what I'm saying, why'd you go and do it. Told you to keep quiet in the city, didn't I. What would we have done if that woman hadn't been some back-alley whore."

"Sp-spare, spare me."

"It's the Cult's law. Good for something, at least, at the end, eh."

The man tried to wrench his head back, but Noksa wouldn't let him.

Solua popped the stopper and jammed the bottle straight into the man's mouth.

The viscous liquid squirmed like a living thing as it poured into the man's mouth. From eyes with no eyeballs left in them, not even tears could fall.

Solua tossed the empty glass bottle into the sea and began chanting a prayer.

At once, a dark red light burst from the man's body. Skin melts away. Muscle tears. Bone twists.

Amid an agony beyond any words dared for it, the man turns into something new.

Solua watched him, eyes bright with interest. But before long, that interest ran cold.

The man's body, still mid-transformation, buckled and dropped, limp.

Solua's brow crumpled all at once, hard.

"Another failure. What went wrong this time? The composition of the holy water? Or my prayer?"

"The baptismal prayer was flawless. I imagine the holy water's composition must have been wrong."

Noksa offered the comfort. Solua pressed hard, again and again, at her throbbing temple, staring at the hideous corpse.

"Ended up the same sorry mess as that woman, hm."

"...I'd like to ask about that. It bothers me that we left the hideout as it was."

Solua leaned against the railing and spoke, testy.

"It's stuck in some rotted-through corner of that filthy slum—no one's coming to look. And I erased all the traces, just in case. Unless that woman comes back to life by some miracle of holy water, no one will ever know."

"..."

"Besides—my oh-so-great teacher did tell us to keep the secret hideouts intact as best we could, didn't she."

Solua added, sarcastic, and looked out over the rolling sea.

Through the thick fog, a shadow approached rapidly.

"Ah, damn it."

Solua ruffled her own hair in irritation. A bird, cutting through the fog, landed on the deck.

Six eyes, crammed tight onto its ugly little skull, darted this way and that, taking everything in.

Having finished its inspection, the bird puffed out its feathers and disgorged a small, tightly rolled scroll.

The paper, soaked in a viscous, blue-green mucus, was visually repulsive. Solua, turning her back on it entirely, gave the order in a voice thick with contempt.

"Noksa, read that for me."

"But."

"Go on."

"...Yes."

Noksa picked up the letter and unfolded it carefully, so as not to tear it. Solua tilted her head to one side.

"What does it say?"

"Deliver the item to the other Apostle, then move toward Candesco and seek out the seed we spoke of before..."

Solua glared at the bird with icy eyes. Killing intent, and with it, air that froze solid.

The bird shrieked and beat for the sea. But it froze solid, alive, still in the air, and dropped—swallowed whole by waves that surged and gorged themselves on it.

"Solua, ma'am."

Noksa looked at Solua with reproach in his eyes.

Solua shrugged and gazed out at the rolling sea. Her green eyes, brimming with irritation, slowly went dead.

"Honestly. Makes me want to jump in myself."

The city rose again from a silence like death.

Having passed the night untroubled, its people were readying themselves to live through another day.

To the sound of clanging bells, ships that had crossed the sea finally came to a stop.

Sailors disembarked in a clamor, shouting as they hauled cargo off, while merchants came tearing out like hounds off the leash, eyes glaring, picking fussily over the goods they'd ordered.

In the market, quick-footed merchants prepared to open their shop doors.

They brush away the dust the night has left behind, and set the best of the freshly arrived goods out where they'll catch the eye first.

Goodwives with baskets on their arms headed to market for their groceries, and laborers, dark-eyed and heavy-lidded, trudged heavily toward their work.

A priest, hungover from wine he'd drunk in secret the night before, rose late and belatedly recited the morning's prayer of blessing.

Everyone was at peace. Peaceful enough to feel almost heartless.

Aer, her hood pulled low, slipped out of the indifferent city.

No one caught her by the ankle on her way out. Only two young-faced night watchmen stood there, dozing at the gate.

"..."

Aer fidgeted with the pouch at her waist.

She hadn't met Malva in person. Instead, Malva's agent had delivered words of thanks and a reward.

Fifteen gold coins. A sum large enough that even in her most active mercenary years, she'd rarely handled that much at once. Both the pouch and her heart felt heavy.

This money wasn't hers to keep.

Her head felt stopped-up, muffled, as if water had flooded her skull.

Aer lifted a hand and pressed it to her throbbing forehead. Then, remembering something she'd nearly forgotten, she pulled the paper from her pocket and unfolded it carefully.

The writing on the paper looked less like standardized characters than chaotic symbols. But to someone who knew what to look for, a clear pattern ran through it.

Aer called up the cipher she'd picked up on the sly, watching out of the corner of her eye, long ago. Except for a few sentences smeared with blood, she could make it out without much difficulty.

「The seed.」

Something else was written after it, but it had run too badly to read.

Without the surrounding context, there was no way to grasp its meaning.

"Goddamn bastards."

Not being able to decode it wasn't going to cause any great problem.

These were bastards who did nothing but rotten, vicious things anyway.

Blocking them, obstructing them, one thing at a time—sooner or later, she'd run into whatever this business of "the seed" was, too.

Aer read the sentence written below it.

「Do not stop searching for the sinner.」

The sinner. Aer's gaze stuck fast, lingering, on the smudged word.

There was only one person in the world the Extinction Cult would call a sinner.

"You, this time too—"

She didn't know when this order had been issued, but the Extinction Cult hadn't managed to kill "the sinner" yet.

Which meant Kardo had survived, evading the Cult's relentless pursuit.

It was a relief, at least, to be able to confirm he was alive, even in this roundabout way.

Though thinking of Kardo, spending his lonely stretch of time somewhere out there, didn't sit easy on her heart.

Aer folded the paper away and murmured to herself.

"Might he be around Nivalis."

She recalled hearing that, around fourteen, he'd been somewhere covered in deep snow.

Aer's shoulders sagged, limp, all strength gone out of them.

She was helpless. Powerless. Nothing she could do for him. Nothing, ever, she could make happen.

"..."

Aer let out a long breath. Then she raised both hands and struck her own cheeks, as hard as she possibly could, one after the other.

A meaty smack rang out, and her cheeks flared red. The hot, stinging bite of pain cleared her head.

She couldn't afford to fall apart here.

Her legs, which had stopped dead, began to grind forward again, step dragged after step.