Prologue

The Third Capital had changed much in the two years since I had seen it last.

“I can’t believe it...”

Every place in our Kingdom of Bahairam was developing quickly; it was no surprise that the scenery should change. For example, the way I remembered the Third Capital, much earlier, was as a crude place, with mud-and-brick longhouses the only thing that passed for buildings, and those packed eave to eave as far as the eye could see. Our capital had no massive, imposing castle like that in the Eldant Empire, nor any elegantly appointed shops. What I remembered was a city that embodied our nation’s roots as a nomadic people, a town of simple but sturdy buildings.

But over the course of more than ten years, the Kingdom had allocated much of its resources to rapid development, including inviting scientists and engineers from every field to visit us from abroad. We became better builders than we had been before, and now towering structures of five full stories and more lined the main thoroughfare as if to create a wall of buildings. Steel superstructures and the use of concrete had made them stronger, allowing us to add more floors. We owed that to dwarven engineers from other countries.

All of this meant that now, the longhouses I remembered were very much the exception rather than the rule. Walking down the street, the close-packed buildings on every side made me feel like I was at the bottom of a valley.

That, however, was how I had felt two years ago as well. The striking thing was that these buildings, the towering signs of Bahairam’s advancement, now showed obvious wear. Cracks ran along the walls, and some of the structures were tilting slightly. There was nothing that appeared openly derelict, but what had once been an organized, regular line now seemed to waver and twist in places.

What in the world had happened? What could have caused those brand-new buildings to seemingly age a century in just a couple of years?

“Elder Sister?”

Clara must have noticed me frowning at the scenery. She remained as expressionless as ever, but I detected a hint of confusion in her voice. She must have been harboring the same questions as I was about the state of the city.

“It’s nothing. It appears something damaged the buildings.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’d be the quakes,” said the soldier walking a few steps in front of us. He was a human man, still young, his rank lower than mine or Clara’s. He was attached to the local garrison in the Third Capital, and was currently leading us to General Headquarters, where we would make our report.

“Quakes? As in, earthquakes?” I furrowed my brow. It was an unusual word. I knew what it meant well enough, but it didn’t quite seem real—just a concept in my mind.

“Yes, ma’am. The whole ground shakes. Quick, nonstop flutters,” the soldier said to us over his shoulder. “You can be standing on solid ground and it’s like you’re riding in a dino-drawn carriage.”

“The ground shook...” Clara cocked her head. She probably found it hard to imagine. Well, so did I. The ground was made of solid stone. If it moved and shook, then you could never build a house on it. But then, maybe that was what made the cracked, tilting buildings stand out so starkly.

“They’ve gotten more common this last year or so. Those of us who live here have started to get used to them,” the young man said with a rueful smile.

“So this isn’t an isolated occurrence?” That was a surprising fact. The land on which the Third Capital had been built wasn’t likely to have been subject to common seismic activity. The dwarves who had helped us construct these huge buildings would have known better than to build in such a place. If any of the massive structures were to collapse, it would be a tragedy.

So the earth had suddenly started shaking in the last year or so, but what could be causing it? True, sometimes there was simply no accounting for natural disasters, but still...

“Most of them end quickly enough,” the young soldier said with the easy tone of someone accustomed to the experience. “Though we do find ourselves spending a lot of time repairing buildings.”

“And it seems you haven’t quite caught up yet,” I said, eyeing an especially large gouge in the wall of a building we were walking past. Evidently it had been deemed not critical enough to warrant immediate attention; someone must have felt there was no danger of the building collapsing right away. I didn’t know how it had been when this all started, but it seemed people were used to the earthquakes enough by now that they no longer felt immediately threatened by them.

As for me, I was anxious, though I would have been hard-pressed to explain why. Without any sense of why the earthquakes were happening, we had no way of knowing if they might start to happen more often or less, on a greater or smaller scale, or with heightened or reduced intensity. Soldiers are typically trained to prepare for the worst, but for some reason, maybe those here in the Third Capital hadn’t been.

Or perhaps...

The Third Capital had one special feature no other capital city had. In addition to the garrison and the usual contingent of soldiers, it was home to a special, elite unit known as the Undertakers. I had heard they were quite influential in this city. Perhaps they were guiding municipal policy, on their own authority and their own responsibility. Considering that they reported directly to the honored father-ruler, it would be difficult for the bureaucrats to countermand them.

My thoughts were interrupted by an angry shout.

“I told you, say whatever you like, I can’t help you!”

I stopped and turned in the direction of the voice. “Hmm...?”

Several large bird-drawn carriages were parked at a fork in the road. The big, ash-gray birds yoked to them, as well as the design of the vehicles themselves, made it clear that they were not from Bahairam. A convoy of foreign merchants, I supposed.

Bahairam’s rapid development had led to far more frequent visits from foreigners. Merchants tended to be a ruthless lot, not choosy about their business partners so long as there was money to be made, and of late they had been lining up at our door from every nation. Even businessmen from our long-standing enemy, the Eldant Empire, had allegedly begun to be admitted. (They worked through a third, unrelated nation as an intermediary so their behavior wouldn’t look like treason to the Eldant authorities.)

The very fact that trade was publicly outlawed simply meant that the flow of people and goods was severely curtailed, which further meant that if one could corner the market, there were scads of profit to be had. Hence why the Eldant merchants were so eager to conduct trade with Bahairam.

A name was displayed prominently on the side of several of the carriages: “Faugron & Associates.” I knew it; it was a prominent merchant house in the Eldant Empire, one supposedly led, most unusually, by an elf.

Demi-humans in the Eldant Empire, including elves and dwarves, along with werewolves and lizardmen, largely occupied a social stratum somewhere below the human population, but if they did well enough for themselves in some endeavor, they might be acknowledged for it; could even aspire to something like nobility. I seemed to remember that the founder of Faugron & Associates had been just such an exceptional elf.

“Looks like some kind of argument,” Clara said, her ears up and twitching. It looked like she was right: a detachment of Bahairamanian soldiers was engaged in a verbal shoving match with several elves I took to be with Faugron. I noticed, too, that the crest on the soldiers’ uniforms was different from that of the young man showing us around.

“The Undertakers,” he remarked. “It’s the security unit from the Dragon’s Den.”

The Dragon’s Den was what they called the military facility at the heart of the Third Capital. It was run by the Undertakers themselves, and from it they reported directly to the father-ruler, rather than going through General Headquarters. The existence of the Dragon’s Den was what made this city unusual. In fact, it could be said that the Third Capital had been located here not because it was convenient in view of the tendency to periodically move the site of the capital city, but because of the presence of the Dragon’s Den. That facility had contributed greatly to Bahairam’s development, and was an important, perhaps the most important, building in our country.

That was why the Undertakers, even if their basic unit structure was the same as everyone else’s, did things differently from the rest of the military, operating outside the typical chain of command. They had originated as a royal guard for the father-ruler, and they never let anyone forget it. This, I had heard, was a point of friction with the rank-and-file soldiers, and indeed when our guide spoke of them, he sounded distant, even contemptuous.

But none of that was what interested me at that moment.

“Who is that...?” I said.

One of the Faugron merchants, standing at the head of the contingent, was arguing vociferously with the Undertakers. To my surprise, it was a woman. But it was even more shocking than that.

“Myusel...-san...? I heard Clara whisper, sounding as amazed as I felt. And little wonder: the woman looked very much like someone we knew. Her hair and her clothes were a bit different, perhaps, but her features were so similar it was hard to imagine it could be anyone else. They didn’t just share the elves’ distinctive pointed ears. It was much more like the resemblance between myself and my older sister Jijilea or my younger sister Elvia: there was something deeper, something that hinted at blood relation.

But there was no way that young woman, Myusel Fourant, could be here, now. She was a maid working at the mansion of Kanou Shinichi, an outworlder guest of the Eldant Empire. She wouldn’t be leading any merchant convoy into our territory. Besides, Myusel Fourant was a retiring girl who seemed slightly afraid of everything. This elf woman was the exact opposite—she was arguing aggressively in the face of an entire contingent of elite soldiers.

It had to be someone else. Simple mistaken identity. And yet...

“Elder Sister...”

“I know. We can’t merely ignore this.”

We had come here in part to help address several tasks related to the relocation of the capital—but we had a bit of leeway before the time we were supposed to meet our commander. I nodded to Clara, and began to approach the argument.

“As I told you: you were the ones who placed this order,” the elf said, displaying a piece of paper. “I have the order form right here. Your official seal is stamped right—”

“And as I told you, the situation has changed,” one of the Undertakers interrupted angrily. “We can’t accept this shipment anymore. Unless we can get in touch with the person who placed the order—”

“I believe that’s your problem. As for us, we delivered what was requested, as promised and on schedule.”

“Listen, maybe tomorrow you can—”

“Come back? I’m not some child who’s been sent down the street for a cup of sugar. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to stay here another night? Will you pay for the extra expenses?”

“Er, well...”

“Hmm,” I grunted. Call me crass, but I found this somewhat amusing. Here were the Undertakers, the capital’s elite soldiers, overawed by an elf woman who looked like a maid I knew. The guard’s response lacked conviction; he clearly knew the elf was in the right. His hesitation was obvious. From what I gathered, the Bahairamanian army, or rather the Undertakers specifically, had placed some sort of order with Faugron & Associates, but was now refusing to receive delivery.

There had been an extensive purge of corrupt members of the military not that long before, and considerable shuffling of personnel. Even the largely independent Undertakers hadn’t been exempt. The process had left some orders of business up in the air with no one to follow up on them. Perhaps this was one of them.

“Might I intrude for a moment?” I asked. When the soldier saw my uniform—and specifically, my rank—he straightened up and saluted. The Undertakers might be outside the ordinary chain of command, but we still belonged to the same army, and rank had to be respected.

If anything, in fact, the man looked downright relieved. He’d clearly had his hands a bit too full with this Faugron girl, and was more than happy to pass responsibility—meaning to pass the headache—to a superior officer.

The elf woman took a breath, then turned to me. “Are you in charge here?” Now that I had a better look at her, I was even more convinced of how similar she appeared to Myusel Fourant. But a powerful light shone in her eyes, and she radiated a force of personality, as Myusel Fourant certainly did not.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have responsibility here. I’m just passing by. However, there is a question I wish to ask you.”

“And what might that be?”

“Do you know a girl named Myusel Fourant?”

The woman didn’t answer immediately, but her eyes went wide. So she did know the name. Some relative, I had no doubt.

“I was merely thinking, you look exactly like her.”

“Are you saying you know Myusel—that you know my daughter?”

“Daughter?” I heard Clara whisper. She sounded shocked, but as for me, suddenly it all made sense. Elves don’t age especially quickly—you might say the prime of their lives lasts a very long time. This woman might look exactly like Myusel yet be many, many years older than her. To my eyes, they might have been identical twins, but who knew?

“I once spent several days at the mansion where she works.”

“You? A Bahairamanian soldier?” the woman said, furrowing her eyebrows. So she did know Myusel. I’d said nothing of her being a resident of the Eldant Empire.

“I confess, the circumstances were somewhat complicated.”

And if I were to spell them out, I would end up having to explain how it had all begun with us kidnapping Kanou Shinichi. And speaking of my missions to an outsider like this was certainly not advised. To say nothing of the “side job” I was now indulging in without the knowledge of my superiors: namely, helping to smuggle products of otaku culture, provided by Shinichi, into Bahairam.

“But let it be said that Myusel Fourant was quite hospitable to me on that occasion,” was all I said. To me—and to Clara, if we were going to be specific. During our covert stay at Kanou Shinichi’s household, we had pretended Clara was a distant relation of Myusel’s, and had thus evaded the scrutiny of the Eldant Empire. As for me, I had dyed my hair and passed myself off as my little sister Elvia.

“In any event,” I said, casting a glance at the Undertaker soldiers. “I gather our military placed some sort of order with Faugron & Associates. But now we’re refusing delivery? Would someone care to explain to me? Am I correct that you’re unable to get in touch with the person who placed the order? Have you contacted a superior officer?”

“Ahem, well...” The soldiers all looked deeply conflicted. I had rank on them, yet they weren’t sure they should be divulging sensitive details to a member of another branch. But the man who looked like the oldest among them, evidently sensing that nothing would go anywhere at this rate, finally said, “We... can’t right now.”

“You can’t? You are members of the Undertakers, are you not? Security forces from the Dragon’s Den?”

“Yes ma’am! Second Security Squadron, Dragon’s Den!” the soldier responded smartly. He spared a glance at the elven merchant, then continued, “We’re forbidden from admitting outsiders to the facility without the permission of our superiors...”

“I’m starting to see the problem.”

To reiterate, the Dragon’s Den was one of Bahairam’s most important military facilities and one of its biggest state secrets. Hence, in principle, absolutely nobody except the Undertakers were allowed inside. Let alone someone from outside the military, someone who wasn’t even a citizen of Bahairam. By the same token, when someone from the Dragon’s Den placed an order with the Faugron association, they would have to grant special permission for the merchants to enter the facility. Or alternatively, they would have to enlist several dozen of their own troops to serve as porters. But anything that might have been requested by the Den was, almost by definition, likely to require secrecy. They couldn’t simply stand here unloading it out on the road, where any passerby might see them. Not to mention they were impeding traffic.

Then again, that wasn’t a decision for an anonymous security guard on the ground to make, and without being able to contact their superior, they had no choice but to turn the merchants away—or at least, that was how they saw it.

“What’s going on?” the female elf finally asked me.

“It’s not easy to explain, but—er, first, may I ask your name?”

“Falmelle. Falmelle Faugron,” she said. I wondered if there was some reason her surname was different from Myusel’s. But I had more pressing questions.

“Faugron? As in, Faugron & Associates?”

“I happen to be the president,” Falmelle said with something of a smile. “As this was to be our first delivery in Bahairam, and with it being a large order involving the military at that, I wanted to take care of it personally... But here we are.”

“Hmm...” I frowned. I didn’t actually have authority over the Dragon’s Den, so I couldn’t just go ordering people around. But it didn’t seem right to simply walk away, either. What to do?

That was when it happened.

I gasped. For an instant, I couldn’t process what was occurring. Did the sound come first, or the light?

“Wha—”

A bright flash and an explosion surrounded us. The intense light and noise temporarily deprived us of the ability to see or hear. As we stood dumbfounded, we were assaulted by—shaking. The ground we were standing on, which should have been solid rock, rippled up and down.

“Grr—?!” I instinctively dropped to my knees and looked around. As my vision came swimming back to me, I could see the Third Capital bucking violently. Fissures ran up and down the streets, even extending into the walls of nearby buildings. In fact, several structures tilted, cracked, or were reduced to rubble before my eyes.

“So this—!”

This was the notorious earthquake. It seemed so much more destructive than what the young soldier had described. Besides, I couldn’t believe the shaking of the earth had caused the flash and the blast. It was rather like if someone had set fire to gunpowder, or a barrel of oil, but I couldn’t imagine it happening everywhere in the capital at once. Yet that was what seemed to have happened, a succession of explosions all over the city.

This couldn’t be. A simple shaking of the earth would never explain what had happened.

“Fire?!” someone shouted, as if to second my suspicions. At the same instant, the distribution of light and shadow in my vision shifted wildly. Several powerful sources of light had emerged simultaneously. Awash in light from every direction at once, our shadows were cast starkly on the ground.

“What’s this?!” I looked around again to discover gouts of flame lancing into the sky all over town. These weren’t just typical fires; they were literally pillars of flame, bursting out of the rents in the earth. They didn’t spread to the side so much as they stretched up and up and up, giving off red—no, almost purple light. And then there was—

“The heat...” I could hear Clara and our guide groan. Great, hot winds came gusting from the fires, hot enough to roast skin if you stood in them too long. Again, I didn’t believe this was any normal fire. Most fires produced more smoke than flame, at least in the short run. But here I saw hardly any smoke at all, just a blinding conflagration. And so many of those pillars—dozens, even hundreds stretching above the skyline of the Capital, scattering embers near and far.

“The Dragon’s Den—!” the security officer from the Undertakers shouted.

He and the other soldiers were looking on, astonished; I followed their collective gaze to find the biggest pillar of all had erupted square in the middle of the Third Capital. It was, indeed, in the vicinity of the Dragon’s Den. We weren’t close enough to judge exactly how large the eruptions were, but I had to think each one was at least big enough to swallow a house.

Whatever the exact details, this was truly bad. A catastrophe.

I jumped to my feet, shouting to the Undertakers, “Fall back; we have to evacuate! Get away from the Dragon’s Den! Out of the city, if possible!”

Ordering such a move was wildly beyond my authority, but somebody had to take control here or people would die. I turned to our guide and continued shouting: “Tell the citizens to evacuate as well! Get everyone out of here!”

“Ma’am!” The security personnel and our young guide both hastened to obey. For the security officers, maybe it was the inability to get in touch with their superior. Perhaps they figured they wouldn’t be held responsible for following orders, even orders from an officer in a different branch of service. Next I turned to the elves of Faugron & Associates. “You, too. You all have to—”

“Say what you will, but we haven’t completed our delivery.” To my astonishment, Falmelle Faugron was reluctant to evacuate. The rest of the merchants—many of them elves, all of them presumably deferring to her—seemed likewise unwilling to leave the cargo and flee.

“You have to decide which is more important, your delivery or your lives,” I said in a voice which even I could tell contained a hint of frustration.

“They’re equally important!” Falmelle Faugron declared. That was the pronouncement of a dyed-in-the-wool merchant. But right here, right now, it wasn’t very admirable. Nothing, I assumed, could genuinely be as important as one’s life. And if you thought something was, you were most likely deluded. For once you were dead, whatever had been important to you would matter no more.

“I don’t know what’s happened, but we’ve got to get—”

I was interrupted by another massive tremor.

“Ahh!” Clara sounded genuinely panicked, a rarity for her. A crack split open the roadway on which we, Falmelle Faugron, and her merchants stood—broke apart the flagstone street as if it were made of paper. The fissure came at us as fast as lightning, accompanied by a hail of rubble and small stones. It would have been easy enough to jump over the crack in the earth—except that the next instant, several towers of flame spurted from the ground.

“Hrgh—!” We stumbled back, raising our arms to cover our faces against the blistering heat. The towers of flame were appearing everywhere, so that they formed something like a fence—almost a wall, in fact. We could see what was on the other side of them, although everything was distorted by heat haze.

The shaking had caused several buildings to collapse at their foundations, producing massive piles of debris. The once wide street was choked by the rubble, making it difficult to find a path around the gouts of flame. This was bad: we were completely separated. Falmelle Faugron and her merchants were on the side closer to the Dragon’s Den. That is, they had no way to get out of the city...

“Madam President!” I could hear the elves crying over the roar of the fire. Presumably they intended to follow Falmelle’s orders. Perhaps she was a brilliant merchant—I didn’t know—but in this situation we needed more than a sharp mind for sales. I didn’t expect she was equipped to deal with a situation this dangerous.

“Hm...?”

In the twisting, mirage-like image beyond the flames, I saw something almost miraculous: Falmelle Faugron, and she alone, appeared to me with no distortion. I had noticed the moment we met that she was, in fact, quite a beautiful woman, but now she appeared as more than that—she had an uncanny quality difficult to describe. As if even the heat were afraid to touch her.

Falmelle Faugron stood calmly among the drifting embers. As vivid as the rest of her seemed, though, the large eyes that stared out of her pale face appeared to look into the far distance. She reminded me of a mage contemplating the Ultimate before they used an exceptionally powerful spell. But it wasn’t quite the same, somehow. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t the same.

She gradually opened the fingers of her hands, stretching both arms toward the sky. It was as if she was receiving something from above, something none of us could see.

“Is this...?”

To my surprise, Falmelle began quaking. Then the spasms stopped, and she lowered her arms and turned toward us. She was unmistakably coherent. It was not that the sudden emergency had driven her mad.

“You there! The Bahairamanian soldiers!” she exclaimed, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the flames.

“You mean us?!” I shouted back.

“You said you spent some time where my daughter works, did you not?”

“Yes, but—”

I was confused: why ask about that now? This hardly seemed the time or place. I furrowed my brow, but Falmelle Faugron continued: “Then you know Shinichi-san, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course, I know him, but—”

But I still didn’t understand what he had to do with this situation. Falmelle Faugron, though, simply went on, “Bring him here!”

“Say what?!”

“I have a power, the Foreseeing Eye!” Falmelle said. So she was a prophet. Every once in a great while, a person might be born with some very specific, highly personal magic, something that couldn’t be taught, received, or inherited, but stood apart from the typical varieties of magical power. Some among the religionists of the world called such people prophets.

Typically, such people had a minimum of control over these powers. One with this “Foreseeing Eye,” for example, didn’t know every detail of the future at all times. Nor could she simply peer into what was to come on a whim. It occurred spontaneously, hence why it was prophecy and not mere prediction. It almost seemed to be given to the prophet by a god or some similar being.

Yet even so, it was said that at moments of great import for their own lives or indeed for the entire world, these people could be crucial keys to what the future held. Had Falmelle’s gift discovered a way out of this crisis?

“If he comes here,” she said, “things will be resolved!”

At that, I glanced at Clara. What could that mean? Yes, of course we knew the man Kanou Shinichi. Knew him very well. We both thought highly of him, but that was as a sort of missionary of culture from another world, and not because of his personal or physical abilities, which were indeed quite ordinary. Bring him—just him—here? What could that accomplish?

On the other side of the flames, though, Falmelle’s face was grim. “I’m begging you!” None of the other elves with her showed any sign of objecting or contradicting what she said. They, at least, trusted her prophetic powers, believed that what she said was true—that Kanou Shinichi could somehow solve this problem.

“Elder Sister...” Clara searched my face, disturbed.

I hesitated for a moment, but then shouted back to Falmelle, “Understood!”

At this moment, we had no way to help Falmelle Faugron and her subordinates, let alone rescue them. We couldn’t even clear away the wreckage, or quench the pillars of flame. The citizens would be evacuating by now under the guidance of the military, and as people who had come here merely to make a military report—in other words, as total outsiders—it would be difficult at best for us to divert anyone to help.

In that case, we had to do what we alone could do.

“I’ll have him here as quickly as I can!” I said. “Try to go to ground somewhere safe until we get back—the Dragon’s Den!” That facility had to be the most impregnable thing in the Third Capital. And its central location made it exceptionally simple to find, an excellent North Star for someone seeking a safe haven. I couldn’t imagine even the Undertakers would turn away civilians or outsiders under these circumstances.

“I wish you luck!” Falmelle replied. She clearly had the utmost faith in her Foreseeing Eye, for her face, there on the far side of the flames, was wreathed in a smile.