Town of Strife II Read online

  It was a living narwhal, after all.

  “What do you want me to do specifically?”

  Kieman cleared his throat. He closed his eyes as if reviewing the entire plan.

  “We literally wish you to convey messages for us. We do not trust her, nor does the wolf trust us. But we trust you, and she does as well. You need only bring our proposal to them: The condition of the narwhal. The price. The method of delivery. The time. Or possibly the contingencies for escape. You’ll carry that information to them and then bring their replies back to us.”

  “And the profit?”

  Kieman grinned, his canines strangely prominent behind his thin lips. “I’d like this to result in the Rowen Trade Guild becoming the preeminent guild on the south side. The current guild house chief, Jeeta, has become complacent—I’ll replace him. And the resulting profit…” He paused for effect like an actor. “…I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

  Instead of hauling goods by himself, selling them in person with his own words, that work was left to others and the profits simply piled up in the ledger.

  It was like another world. A transformation from merchant to something completely different.

  In receiving a small share of that, the profit that would fall from the sky would be astounding.

  “Of course, this is a mere verbal promise, which means the wolf has a chance to sway you to her side.”

  “Indeed. And she could offer me concrete profit, no doubt.”

  That is, she was able to swindle everyone so spectacularly that she gained the narwhal for herself. Eve, the former noblewoman, could then sell it off to the highest bidder. It was quite possible that she would then be able to offer him a sea of gold coins as compensation.

  “I’d prefer not to have to deal with the wolf, but without doing so, there’s no chance for success at all. She’s simply that powerful.”

  Kieman’s words were heavy with meaning.

  It was already clear that the landlord’s son who was so infatuated with Eve would not betray his family solely for his own gain. But if it was for Eve, that was another story.

  Excuses were very powerful things.

  And when the reason was love, even a dwarf could defeat a dragon.

  “Understood, then. I believe I see my role in all of this.” Lawrence smiled, and Kieman returned the expression.

  An exchange of smiles signified the conclusion of a secret deal. It was so in all the legends of clandestine, nervous dealings—bearded merchants snickering to each other over their successes.

  “I’m glad to hear that. However…”

  “However?” asked Lawrence, which made Kieman smile like a guileless boy.

  “However, I truly thought I’d had you completely under my control. How…how did you regain your footing?”

  At these words, Lawrence smiled and looked at the floor.

  It was true, after all.

  At the branch office on the delta, Lawrence had been completely trapped by Kieman—utterly and perfectly, like a puppet.

  And yet after only a short time, the puppet had regained its soul. No wonder the puppet master was surprised.

  Of course, Kieman himself ought to have some notion as to why.

  So seeing Lawrence smile silently, Kieman spoke. “I apologize for asking such a foolish question. Neither merchants, knights, nor kings can accomplish so very much on their own. Priests are no different.”

  Lawrence understood merchants, knights, and kings—but not priests. Every great merchant, knight, or king had a great lover to become his wife and support him.

  But what of priests?

  “They have their God,” Lawrence could not help murmuring to himself past his smile.

  So with Holo supporting him, how far would he be able to go?

  “Well, we’re both walking on thin ice made solid only with lies—so let us each do our best, eh?” Still sitting, Kieman extended his hand.

  Lawrence took it and gripped it with obvious force.

  “Now then, I can’t very well do side dealings all day. If you need to contact me, simply speak to the innkeeper. Also, we won’t do anything so tasteless as eavesdropping on you, so if you’d be so kind to return the favor.”

  “Indeed. Doubt and misunderstanding lead always to misfortune.”

  Kieman nodded and stood.

  Unlike their initial meeting in his office, he escorted Lawrence out of the room. “This should all be settled by the evening after tomorrow.”

  He hid the word desperately behind a sly smile.

  “In that case even if we can’t sleep from nerves, we should be able to see it through,” said Lawrence, which made Kieman smile, and he began to walk.

  His footsteps were easy and casual, and if someone had happened to chance upon that hallway, he would never have suspected that Kieman and Lawrence knew each other.

  Alone in the hallway, Lawrence smiled wryly. “He didn’t say a thing about what’ll happen if we fail,” he murmured.

  He himself had done something similar in the Church city of Ruvinheigen—swindling a poor shepherdess by speaking only of the possible profits.

  Back then he had felt nearly crushed with guilt for this. But what of it?

  Kieman had acted as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Lawrence had no confidence that he could be or act like that.

  Thanks to Holo, he had a way to recover if the situation became truly untenable.

  But that was absolutely a method of last resort for the sake of his own reassurance. What she really wanted was for him to extract his own share out of these dealings, not just complete his tasks safely.

  Could he truly outwit such opponents?

  He had no choice but to try, and having come this far, he rather wanted to.

  Lawrence scratched his forehead and began to walk.

  In the darkness, he bared his teeth in a smile.

  He felt like reading an epic.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That evening, Lawrence was unable to sleep and not just because he had declared that it might be so.

  Kieman would likely pass the night immersed in planning and preparation, but Lawrence had to worry about executing those plans.

  He knew he was not particularly skilled.

  Nearly any merchant would be seeking more information to try and gain the upper hand. But this time, Lawrence had to stay passive. And outwitting his opponent under such constraints required significant ability.

  He had only a small amount of time during which to formulate a plan, and his information was limited. It was not even clear whether he would be able to protect his own position.

  Without Holo, he would have unquestionably chosen self-preservation and acted as Kieman’s pawn. In which case, he would most likely have been used and then abandoned.

  Lawrence smiled self-deprecatingly and rolled over.

  His bed was next to the cold windowsill, so if he lifted his head up a bit, he could see the faint blue moonlight slipping through the gaps in the window.

  Lawrence realized how great the distance was between his own ability as a merchant and Eve’s; he had to doff his hat to her. Against her, a man like Kieman was putting forth his greatest effort. And Lawrence had jumped into the middle of their battle.

  Lawrence rolled over again and sighed.

  He had no intention of turning back now, but he was still nervous. The more he willed himself to sleep, the more his eyes stubbornly remained open.

  Smiling wryly to himself, Lawrence got out of bed, compelled by thirst, and he decided to feel a bit of the night breeze.

  Owing to the chilly air, the copper water jug was cold, almost like ice. Swirling it gently, he walked through the silent inn.

  The inn was built around an enclosed courtyard, and in the courtyard was a well. Farther south, most buildings were constructed along such lines. Naturally it was easy enough to differentiate between the buildings of different trading companies, but the basic layout was the
same. This was not because people everywhere had somehow decided on it, but rather because the carpenters and masons that did the construction tended to travel around from work site to work site.

  Before his travels had taken him far abroad, Lawrence had assumed that such buildings were common the world over. He could still remember the shock he first felt when he discovered this was not the case. The farther he ranged, the more he realized how narrow his preconceived notions had been. As the years passed, he came to realize how large and complicated the world was and how small he was by comparison. There were infinities above him and infinities below.

  Someone else could always do what he could do, and no matter what he might think of, someone else had realized it sooner. There in the pale blue moonlight, Lawrence lowered the well bucket down into the skyward-facing mouth of the well.

  Things did not generally go the way one would hope, and usually they were decided by surrounding circumstances.

  Lawrence had become involved with Eve while in the process of collecting information about the wolf bones, but the real beginning had been their encounter in Lenos. And the reason they had arrived in Lenos was none other than Holo.

  Lawrence was certain he was swimming toward his goal, but he was not in a pond; he was in a swiftly flowing river.

  He pulled the bucket up and looked at the moon’s reflection in the water within.

  He wondered if it was a consequence of his dislike at being nothing but a minor character in the story he currently faced that made him think back to the delicate time when he had been just starting out as a merchant.

  If Lawrence were a historian, he would not be able to categorize himself as the pivotal character in this. No, that would be Kieman—or Eve, perhaps.

  He smiled ruefully at the thought, and the moon’s reflection in the bucket distorted even as his face did.

  Deciding this was all too silly, he looked up, and there was Holo. Somehow, he had expected her.

  “’Tis a lovely night, is it not?”

  Her hands were clasped behind her back, and she smiled as sweetly as a town girl on a sunny day.

  Lawrence returned the smile and agreed. “It is.”

  “As the moon waxes and wanes, so too does my mood,” said Holo, dipping her finger into the bucket, her breath coming out in faint white puffs. “You left the room so suggestively, I couldn’t help but follow.”

  “Did I look so desperate to be spoken to?”

  In place of a reply, Holo grinned.

  “…I suppose I did.” It was surely progress for him to be able to gracefully surrender.

  “Still,” said Holo, picking up the pitcher he had left at the edge of the well and playing with it in both hands. “I did want to speak with you a bit.”

  “With me?”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you going to teach me some secret technique for controlling human nature?” Lawrence asked, which made Holo chuckle quietly. She then sat at the edge of the well, still holding the cold pitcher.

  “If it were so, I’d have no need to tell you. After all, I’ve been controlling your nature for quite some time, have I not? You should know how to do it yourself by now.”

  “I suppose you want me to answer, ‘I guess you’re right.’”

  “There’s a fine attitude.”

  Holo smiled, revealing her fangs, and the smile then receded like a tide rolling out.

  She was a wolf of many faces. Like the waves of the sea when viewed from afar, there was no way of telling whether dangerous rocks lay beneath the surface. When the tide receded and the truth was revealed, there was no telling what extraordinary things could happen. Lawrence teasingly stroked her head, wondering how many times he had nearly been sunk on those rocks.

  “I…”

  “Hmm?”

  “I…I am regretting having pushed you into this.”

  Lawrence sat beside Holo.

  She clutched the copper pitcher as if it were warming her, though it was probably even colder than the water.

  “Well, I’m grateful. It’s thanks to you that I can stand up to Kieman.”

  That was no lie. And yet Holo’s ears moved busily as though trying to ascertain the truth of the words. Finally she looked down and nodded.

  “That is what I regret.”

  “It is? Well…I suppose you should have let it go unsaid, then…”

  “That is not what I mean.” Holo shook her head and took a deep breath.

  She then looked straight at Lawrence and continued speaking.

  “One as clever as you can accomplish nearly anything so long as he has clear knowledge of his surroundings. But everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. I urged you on, despite knowing that what lay ahead was not something you were suited for. I knew it wasn’t something you wished for.”

  It was true that Lawrence was heading straight into a conflict among town merchants, all of them very skilled and cunning.

  But if he were to open a shop in a town somewhere, that would be the world he faced, so this did not seem like something with which Holo should be concerned.

  Before he could say so, though, Holo headed him off.

  “In any case, if you’d had the backbone to cross swords with them, you would’ve already been using my abilities to their fullest extent.”

  Surely Eve or Kieman would have done so.

  They would have used Holo right from the start. From a logical perspective, she was the strongest weapon.

  “You seem to wish for a steady, reliable course of events, and I can see that it suits you. But what I pushed you into is the precise opposite of that. Is it not so?”

  It was so.

  One needed only to look back on Lawrence’s profits prior to meeting Holo to see. They gradually rose, and to that extent he was satisfied with the steady business he had been doing. Why did he want to have a shop in the first place? It was hardly as if he wanted to hold the world in the palm of his hands. It was nothing so grandiose—he simply wanted to be part of a smaller world, a town, and to have a place in that town.

  “Still,” Lawrence said, “Still, it hurts a bit to hear that you don’t consider me suited to such things.”

  Holo’s ears flicked beneath her hood. She slowly looked up. “But you aren’t, are you?”

  “When you say it so plainly, I can’t seem to be angry at you.” Lawrence gave a pained smile.

  But as he looked up, his breath rose into the sky toward the moon, and the pain in that smile seemed to go with it, dissipating like so much smoke.

  “But I’m not going to drop out of this story,” he declared.

  When Lawrence looked back down, he saw Holo making a face as if she had breathed in some of the bitterness he had exhaled.

  “Especially when you make faces like that.”

  “Ugh…” She didn’t try to hide her anxiety when he poked her forehead.

  To look at her, Holo honestly seemed to regret having pushed him in this direction. While every time they encountered some incident or another she would joke that she would be in trouble if he turned out to be a clumsy merchant, Holo did seem to be genuinely worried about him.

  But Lawrence got the feeling that it was not just because he was not well suited to this particular problem.

  “If you’re this regretful, it must mean you’re expecting me to encounter something extraordinary.”

  Holo hated it when Lawrence agonized alone and drew his own conclusions, but the truth was she did precisely the same thing. However, the clever Holo seemed to think silence was more effective than raising her voice to point that out.

  “It seems as though you’ve plans to write about your travels with me.”

  “Huh?” He did remember saying something like that but failed to see any connection.

  Holo glared at him a bit angrily, evidently expecting him to understand. But perhaps deciding that Lawrence was at the limits of his intellect, she pouted and continued.

  “And if so, wouldn’t that make y
ou the protagonist? I wanted my protagonist to act like one. At least…at least if I’m to be but a side character.”

  In the tale of the destruction of her homelands by the Moon-Hunting Bear, Holo was not even a side character—she was out of the story entirely.

  As she sat at the edge of the well, Holo’s dangling legs made her seem very childlike indeed. And it was true, the wish to be a main character in the story of the world was a very childish one.

  “But that is truly naught but my own selfishness. Should that desire put you in harm’s way or cause you to wander so sadly out into a courtyard at night like this, it pains me,” admitted Holo, putting a hand to her chest and wincing in apparent pain.

  Lawrence pinched her right cheek lightly and replied, “I do see what you’re trying to say, but…” As Holo rubbed her tweaked cheek in irritation, he had no choice but to strengthen his tone and continue. “The more you say such things, the more unable I am to back down.”

  This was because she had expectations of him.

  When Holo had expectations of Lawrence, he had to live up to those expectations.

  “Aye, and ’tis why I did not wish to tell you…”

  “Because I’d be stubborn?” he shot back, grinning and earning a punch to his ribs.

  Holo then regarded him with a look so serious it could hardly be a joke. “Surely you understand how costly ’twould be to ignore my care.”

  “…”

  He was fully aware, and Holo saying as much amounted to her telling him she had high expectations.

  Lawrence paused for an appropriate interval before nodding firmly. Naturally he took this very seriously.

  But Holo regarded him dubiously. “Do you truly understand?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “Truly?”

  At her excessive persistence, he finally realized.

  If she wished for him to be the protagonist of this story, what did that make her? If she could get everything she wanted by simply wishing and worrying, it was quite a role indeed.