CHAPTER THREE

Ghost ships were said to occasionally appear in Nordstone territory.

Most of these “ghost ship” rumors spread throughout society turned out to be unfortunate vessels that had been attacked by pirates or smuggling ships.

Nordstone himself had admitted to using smuggling ships, and Col and the others had come here to salvage one of his.

But what they found stuffed into the false bottom of the ship’s hold was what was considered the most preposterous part of ghost ships: a mountain of human bones.

“Bones, and mice that can turn into humans,” Sharon said, placing the skull on top of the mouse she had caught to keep it in place, then resting her foot on top of the skull.

The dazed mouse regained his senses, then glared up at them through the eye socket.

Col imagined one could see a similar sight if there was indeed an alchemist that could transform mice into humans.

“Hey! Lemme the hell outta here!” the foulmouthed mouse hollered as he nibbled on the eye socket of the skull.

“Shut up.” Sharon stomped on the top of the skull, and the mouse fell quiet. “What should we do?”

Her question brought out a heavy, smokelike sigh from Col.

“Something real twisted is going on here, according to what that mutt told me, anyway.”

Twisted was certainly an apt descriptor. All that talk about ghost ships that were possibly the genuine thing had been framed as something caused by an alchemist who had been absorbed in otherworldly experiments.

But now, the bones which served as the basis for all the ghost ship tales sat in front of them, and there was also a nonhuman who had been sitting with them in the ship’s hold.

“We have two big mysteries right now. First, all this pyrite. And second, these bones.”

Col was about to ask, What about the mouse? But then he remembered there was an eagle, a sheep, and a wolf here with him as well.

“You plan on fessing up before I skin you alive?”

When Sharon peered into the skull, the calm mouse began to thrash about.

“I am a proud pirate, the great Dodd Vadan, leader of the Vadan Crew! Like I’d tell you anything about the ship!”

Sharon was the only one who sighed; Ilenia and Myuri were delighted at how spirited the mouse was.

“Maybe I should snatch up your friends, one by one, and feed them to the sharks.”

“Y-you’re… You’re kiddin’, right…?”

Vadan stuck his nose out of the eye socket, his tone pitiful; the rest of his mice friends peeked out from behind other boxes in the distance with obvious worry.

“Didn’t—didn’t Nordstone send you people here to help us out?! And this must be fate, ’cause you’re like us! Isn’t this supposed to take us to a happy ending all ’round or somethin’?!”

He was right, but Sharon turned to look at the cargo as she spoke. “Say I’m a tax collector, and I’m inspecting this ship. If all that was here was the pyrite? Sure, I’d let it pass. But it’s a different story when all these human bones come tumbling out of the hold.” Her sharp eagle eyes then turned to Col. “People all over call you the Twilight Cardinal, don’t they? Why did you even go to House Nordstone in the first place?”

They had gone to House Nordstone to confirm that all the strange rumors surrounding the family were not indeed fact, even though they had their circumstances behind them.

“…I am confused, too,” Col said and turned to Myuri, who was waving her hands about, occupied by the mice roaming around in the darkness.

“All I can think of…are reasons that forsake God.”

Myuri, who fully believed and supported Nordstone, sensed that the tide was turning against him and his cause.

“B-but this doesn’t mean the bones belong to the old man! Maybe they’re getting delivered to somewhere else along the way. See, didn’t he say that there were other companies involved in the smuggling?”

Sharon drew up her eyebrows.

“You’re pretty smart for a puppy.”

“I’m not a puppy!”

Ignoring Myuri and Sharon’s bickering, Ilenia lowered herself to the ground and sat on her knees before the mouse who called himself Vadan.

“I’m searching for the new continent.”

“………”

“That is why I would like to take this ship, a vessel used in trade to scrape together funds, an experimental ship for finding the new land, to Lord Nordstone along with you.”

“Me, too!” Myuri added. Vadan looked at her, then back at Ilenia.

“You… What’d you say your name was?”

“Ilenia. Ilenia Gisele.”

“Ilenia. You’d be a heartening companion to have along on a ship of ours.”

Much like how Myuri’s ears and tail were out, Ilenia, too, now had her sheep horns visible.

Vadan narrowed his eyes as though he saw what she looked like as an enormous sheep behind her fluffy, curly hair.

“I appreciate the concern. But we are proud pirates, and we don’t betray our benefactors. It’d be a different story if you guaranteed our acquittal if we told you about the cargo.”

Sharon, who had been listening with her arms crossed, snorted, but Ilenia did not take her eyes off Vadan.

“And that debt you feel is the reason why you work as pirates, right? So that means…”

“The old man knows about people like us?”

Myuri came to sit beside Ilenia, and there came a clatter from inside the skull. He must have been frightened by her fangs and claws.

“N-no… I doubt the old man knows. But he might have an inkling that…no, maybe he hopes that isn’t the case. According to the guys who keep watch in the area, he talks to thin air, like he’s hoping for a response from someone he can’t see.”

That had certainly happened. Nordstone had been speaking to someone else in an empty room. Col had thought it was a unique trait of old sages who lived in hermetic contemplation, but apparently Nordstone believed that some kind of spirit lived in his house and continued speaking to it with great alacrity.

But picturing the old man expecting a nonhuman to show up and reply to him one day as he spoke to himself was not a very happy sight.

“I don’t think we should let these guys go. This is just a job given to me by Hyland via the Bolan Company, but all the trouble they make will directly affect my monastery and orphanage. You’re telling me to cross a dangerous bridge for a lord I already have my doubts about, and I’m not inclined to do it.”

Sharon, her foot still on the skull that held Vadan, was not all that impressed by the prospect of a new continent. She also had people she needed to protect. No one could blame her for prioritizing self-protection.

“You weren’t expecting this either, were you?” He could not deny what Sharon said. “They might be hiding something, but this isn’t a trap,” she said, squinting as she looked out the small window in the hold.

Had it been inquisitors from the Church who came here in droves, then they would not have been able to explain this whole situation away. Here, on an eerie ship where the whole crew had vanished, was a huge cache of human bones. Naturally, there was no better chance than this to apprehend the detestable Twilight Cardinal, a character most troublesome for the Church, on the grounds of heresy.

At this point in time, neither Myuri nor Sharon seemed to sense anyone surrounding the ship, but they could very well be waiting for them on the mainland.

While Col believed that Nordstone would not do such a thing, it was still clear that he was keeping the bones secret, and there was a very good chance that he was lying about something else.

Col placed a hand on Myuri’s shoulder, clearing the way, before coming to kneel before Vadan.

“We hope to assist Lord Nordstone in finding the new continent. However, at this point in time, we cannot help you. You are working for Lord Nordstone, yes?”

What he said was no different from Ilenia, but he was the one who had spoken to Nordstone personally.

Beneath the skull, Vadan sighed. “Sorry, but it’s not Nordstone that we owe. It’s the alchemist, the other one you mentioned.”

The four exchanged glances before Ilenia spoke for them.

“Is she nonhuman as well?”

Vadan, his nose resting on the lip of the eye socket, wriggled his long whiskers. “A cat avatar. This is back when Raponell was a poor area and we’d pilfer from what little was in the grain stores from the humans. She came to town one day, gathered all the local cats to surround the grain stores…”

Life must have been desperate for Vadan and the others, but picturing it made it seem like a scene from a fable.

“And then she said to us, you don’t have to live like this anymore if you help me chase the sun.”

“The…sun?”

Inside his cramped skull cage, Vadan puffed out his fur, making it seem as though he was shrugging.

“She asked, do you want to live a wretched life in the shadows forever? She said that, to us—mice! I thought to myself, what kind of sick joke is this?”

Nonhumans did not have a safe place for themselves in this world. Vadan and his crew were, of all things, mice—they were not wolves that ruled the forests, sheep that lorded over the fields, or eagles that hunted in the skies.

Vadan lifted his round, black eyes, to look straight at them.

“But y’know what she said? She said that we’re just weak ’cause we’re fighting at a disadvantage, not ’cause we’re weak at heart.”

“Hah!” Sharon snorted, a genuinely disgusted look on her face. “I see, so that stupid cat put you up to no good.”

Myuri and Ilenia only reacted blankly, but Vadan rather seemed happy about it.

“We’re small, but that’s perfect for getting in small places. No claws or fangs on us, but we got our front teeth. This ship’s the perfect place for us, and I’d say smuggling’s our calling.”

Horrible memories of traveling alone came back to Col. He remembered waking up in the morning to find only crumbs left of bread he thought he had properly sealed away.

“And so, she led us to a whole new world. She saved us from a merciless existence. That’s why it’s our turn to help her as she keeps chasing the sun.”

Vadan’s straightforward words were accompanied by a straightforward look.

It was Sharon who spoke first.

“So is this alchemist still alive?”

She was right.

Nordstone had spoken of her as though she had died long ago, but the way Vadan spoke suggested otherwise.

“She…might be. I don’t know. She sailed west a long time ago. Literally, she went to chase the sun.”

“What!” Myuri exclaimed, and Vadan turned toward her. “But the old man said she died!”

Vadan narrowed his eyes and a vague expression crossed his face that both agreed and disagreed with her.

“They say cats hide themselves when their time comes.”

“………”

Myuri fell silent, and Vadan continued, tiredly. “She was an enigma, she was. She never even showed her true self to Nordstone, and they’d been together forever. Well, I’d bet the old man must have realized something was up… Anyway, we joined forces with that damned cat and helped her turn Raponell into one great big wheat field. We took our ship and sailed all over the world, collecting different kinds of farming methods and different kinds of grain. Collecting grain’s our forte, you know.”

Col sighed, impressed, because what he told them now shone light on the gaps among their clues that he had not noticed before.

He certainly should have thought about it. When Nordstone took headship of the family, the territory would have been a poor, barren wasteland, so there was no way he could have collected all the funds and connections necessary to gather farming techniques and grains from all over the world.

But a solution to problems like that neatly fell into place with Vadan and his crew in the picture.

“You stole that first boat, too, didn’t you?”

Sharon’s words were cold, because as a tax collector, she was on the side responsible for maintaining order in the ports.

“We borrowed it. We had a rental certificate and everything; we even returned it with interest.”

Sharon gave another exasperated sigh.

“And her only request was that we look after Nordstone, who’s still in Raponell.”

Myuri made a face as if a wound, almost healed, had gotten caught in a blanket—the alchemist was a nonhuman, and since she never told Nordstone about her true self, that greatly changed the composition of the wheat field’s story.

Nordstone was not the protagonist here. He was a supporting character, one the story had left in the dust.

“She felt ashamed about leaving Nordstone behind, but the damned cat reminded us over and over again that keeping our promise was the one way we could repay her.”

And that was why they would never tell on Nordstone if it meant putting the old man at a disadvantage, even if it put their own lives in danger.

“Does that mean you are not personally searching for the new land, then?”

Ilenia’s question drew out a toady smile from Vadan.

“This is our new world,” he said. “There ain’t nothing out there that could beat this.”

A silence came over them after he said that. There was a lot they needed to think about.

Then came quiet footsteps. Col’s head snapped in the direction of the sound, and he saw a small mouse dash toward the skull and stand before it.

“Hey, what’re you doing? Go back,” Vadan said, panicked, but the little mouse did not move. Its whiskers trembled as it looked hard at Myuri, Ilenia, then Sharon. Myuri made to stand, not because her instincts as a wolf had been spurred at the sight of prey, but because she had been so moved by the little mouse’s bravery. Those with the title of knight would know exactly what needed to be done in a situation like this.

But this did not solve the question of the cargo on Vadan’s ship. If they brought it to Nordstone, then it may cause unthinkable problems for them.

Sharon took a deep breath and asked in a strained voice, “…What are you going to use the pyrite and the bones for? We can’t discount the possibility that Nordstone is trying to ensnare us yet. Even if this isn’t the trap it seems to be, then why on earth would he want all these peculiar things, and so much of them at that? Are you asking us to help you deliver this cargo to crazed devil worshippers?”

Nordstone promised that if they managed to return this smuggling ship safely to him, then he would excuse himself to Father Lacrouts, who would then absolve him of his past sins. That would then repair the relationship between House Nordstone and the Church, which would bring relief to the area. They would remain secure in their position as national breadbasket, and the Kingdom could continue fighting the Church.

And Nordstone could continue his pursuit of the edge of the western sea.

But that sequence of events assumed that Nordstone was not some sort of heretic.

“If I were a practicing tax collector, I’d call in the Church right now and suggest they burn you alive. We should stay far away from problems like this. Hey, rat. Do you understand the kind of position you’re in now? I might not be human, but it’s not like I hate humanity. I’m not on your side unconditionally. We each have our ways of life that we want to protect. So listen to me carefully: Tell me exactly what you are using these bones for.”

When she said that, Vadan, underneath the skull, puffed himself up.

“W-we’re proud pirates! It’s back to a miserable life in the shadows if we break our promise with that damned cat and blab! Look, I’m enough for you to string up, right? Right?!”

Vadan’s small hand reached out to push the little mouse standing in front of the skull.

But the little mouse did not budge; it stared up at Sharon.

Ilenia and Myuri joined it.

“Miss Sharon…”

“Ch-Chicken!”

Myuri looked as though she was forcing herself to put on an angry face, and she had even put her hand on the sword at her hip. Her face told him that a knight had to draw their sword here.

It was impossible to tell who was right.

Even though it was wrong to julienne the little mouse’s tail in front of Vadan, that did not make Sharon’s statement any less logical.

Col could not stop himself from turning to look at Sharon, either.

“…You, too?”

“Miss Sharon, please…”

“Rgh—C’mon, you’re making me look like the bad guy here! Fine, fine!” Sharon said, under the gazes of Col, Myuri, and Ilenia, and kicked away the skull. With a light noise, it flew through the air, and the little mouse clung to the freed Vadan.

Though relieved Col was, he still prayed for God’s protection and peace for the soul of whomever that skull used to belong.

“…I—I still won’t talk!”

Col had a feeling that in reality, if they were to hurt the others watching him from the darkness, he would immediately spill the beans. But everyone knew that was the wrong thing to do.

But because everyone knew, that made for a big problem.

“Hey, Twilight Cardinal,” Sharon said, bitterly. “You understand what I’m saying, right?”

“I…I do,” Col said, gazing down at the silent pile of bones crammed beneath the hidden hatch.

“…You people gonna keep quiet and go home?” Vadan asked, embracing the little mouse as though shielding it.

“If we leave this ship and pretend we had the wrong vessel, then the lord out there might actually call in the Church this time for real.”

Vadan and his crew would be caught in a real mousetrap then.

“If you’re lucky, you could probably put your skills to work and escape with the ship while being towed to Kerube. But then the cargo here will get to Nordstone, and then this kid here’d be saddled with danger.”

Sharon looked at Col.

“…I came here to look into whether or not House Nordstone was free of religious problems. I would like to report that Lord Nordstone and family have no faults faith-wise, but if it becomes clear after I make the report that there genuinely is some kind of problem…”

He would be lucky if only his own reputation fell, and that was where it ended—it was far more likely that Hyland would be affected, too.

The Church would certainly see an opportune moment for them, which would then in turn affect the balance of power between them and the Kingdom.

What was even more troublesome was that he was not attempting to overlook something that could be vaguely interpreted as an omen. Clearly, before them sat the masses of bones that served as the basis for the ghost ship tales, and an amount of pyrite that was much too puzzling for a simple grave offering—and they were trying to let this all go.

When Col thought about the future reveal that the man was indeed a heretic, he could not simply ignore any of this.

“B-but then, what do we do?” Myuri asked, confounded, and she was right to ask.

What should they do?

“…Perhaps our only choice is to ask Lord Nordstone himself?”

Vadan and his crew owed their lives to the alchemist; they were simply cooperating with Nordstone to keep their word and nothing more. That meant they should not be hanging them up in the water above the sharks, but going straight to Nordstone, the root of this whole thing.

“If I may ask again, you really won’t tell us what you are using these bones for?”

“………”

Vadan’s silence gave Col a faint hope, because it was not a silence of denial, but one that felt more like hesitation. He likely thought that it was hard to judge whether him revealing the truth would indeed help Nordstone or not, but would possibly put them at a disadvantage.

If he were a clear heretic, then things would not have turned out this way.

“Well, going to talk to Nordstone is still a problem in and of itself,” Sharon said, staring down at the silent Vadan. “The story this mutt so passionately told us on the boat here is the same explanation you got from Nordstone, yeah? Sounds like it’s a lie that only comes off as true. If he went through all that trouble to make up an elaborate lie, then he’s undoubtedly hiding something bad. I doubt he’ll fess up if we go ask him ourselves. Best-case scenario, he just catches us with another crafty lie.”

And yet, Nordstone was like a pure ball of purpose. It was hard to imagine he would yield to threats, and Col thought it would be nigh impossible to force the truth out of him.

“Even if we went to go ask him, we would have to secure the perimeter around him first. If anything, I’d want to question him after catching him in the act.”

Stocked in the smuggling ship was an alarming amount of bones and pyrite.

Then there was the nonhuman alchemist who supposedly went to the western continent.

Was his story about his sickly wife all a lie, too? Was how he looked at Myuri with kind eyes as he spoke about how he had taken up the sword when he was still a baby-faced lad to protect his alchemist, who was being persecuted, ultimately nothing but show?

“Well, if there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s this Nordstone’s reasons for going to the new continent.”

Myuri pursed her lips, despondent.

“Why did the cat leave the old man behind…?”

Nordstone certainly would have wanted to go along with her. The alchemist had taken a young Nordstone out of their homeland of Gressia, so it would have made perfect sense for her to take him along again.

“Maybe Nordstone is getting tricked here, too.”

“Huh?”

“Did the cat really go west?”

The hair on Vadan’s back stood on end at the question.

“…You always pick out the most inconvenient parts.”

“You’re not sure either, are you?”

“Well… We don’t really know. We don’t even know why she wanted to go west—it’s empty out there. She’s following the sun, remember? Why follow it when you can wait a bit for it to come up in the east again? If Nordstone told us to take him to the western sea so he could follow the cat, we’d do it, but it’d be a fool’s errand. That’s how I honestly feel,” Vadan said, as though getting antsy that he was giving them more and more reasons to skin him.

“Cats do sometimes stare at empty space,” Ilenia mused, and Col thought she was rather on the mark.

Everyone walks a unique path through life, and for long-lived nonhumans, that path often led to distant places.

Perhaps that was even more true for a cat avatar, who had her own enigmatic qualities.

“So you’re saying the old man heading west would be a fruitless task?”

“I doubt he has much time left, so maybe in a way, this means he can die wrapped up in his dreams. You were thinking the same thing, weren’t you?”

“Well… Once he dies, we’re relieved of our duties.”

“No.” Myuri gasped, but Sharon’s implication was simply one possibility of many.

“Calm down, Myuri. There are too many things that do not add up in this situation. We still do not know what is real and what is falsehood here. The only thing that is certain…” Col stood, picked up the skull Sharon had kicked, and brushed the dust off of it. “…is what we can physically touch.”

“So this ship, the bones, the pyrite…”

“…And Vadan and his crew,”

Sharon and Ilenia, respectively, added.

“…And the old man’s wheat, right? Wait, so are you saying the alchemist was a lie, too?”

“It is possible that she was an illusion that Lord Nordstone has been seeing all this time…”

Col looked at Vadan, and the proud mouse pirate stood on his hind legs.

“You sayin’ our savior was a product of delusion?”

Perhaps it was more accurate to say that the alchemist did indeed exist.

“I guess we just have to look at one thing at a time… But ultimately, you’re here.” Sharon, eagle avatar and natural predator to mice, stared coolly down at Vadan. “I’d bet you’d fess up real quick if I started slicing up your tail.”

Vadan shivered, and Myuri stood between them.

“I won’t let you do anything so mean!”

“Do you need to bark at every little thing, mutt? It’ll just grow a new one.”

“We ain’t lizards!”

“Yeah, stupid chicken!” Myuri exclaimed, baring her teeth, but Col had not forgotten what she had told him about the legendary sword, of course.

She had casually asked him to lend her a bone or two of his, so it was all much the same.

“Hmph. And? What are we going to do?” Sharon asked, turning to Col.

In all things concerning Nordstone, the ball fell into his court. Sharon was following her own agenda, which was her desire for Hyland to build firm foundations within the Kingdom so that the orphanage she managed would be protected, and the Twilight Cardinal, who was working for Hyland, blundering about would cause her quite a bit of trouble because it flew in the face of that dream.

Ilenia was another soul hoping to someday reach the new continent, so she still wanted to deliver this ship to Nordstone, even though he was a touch mad.

And Myuri wanted to help both Vadan, who had gained this little world that was his boat, and Nordstone, whose wife and alchemist had left him behind in this world.

Everyone had something they felt was most important.

Everyone turned to look at him, and that made him a bit nervous.

“Ah… Well… Let’s see.”

Col placed a fist to his lips and sorted out the situation. He did have a good deal of knowledge when it came to heretical matters. He was also somewhat aware of how the Church acted and how they found fault within other things.

He also had the experience of coming out on the other end of all the chaos he had been through so far, and all the connections he had gained from those experiences.

“First, we should press onward with procedures to have the ship towed back to Rausbourne, as planned.”

Myuri’s eyes went wide.

“Wait, is that…okay?”

“The act of taking the ship back to Rausbourne itself will not cause any problems for the Kingdom, even if it means potentially getting involved with heretics. Miss Sharon and the other officials are only here following the trail of a smuggling ship, after all.”

“So you’re giving me permission to drag Nordstone to the Church the second his heresy comes to light, yeah? The rats…Well, I guess you can run away, if you want.”

Vadan’s head hung in despair, because he and his crew would have to return to a miserable existence if they lost their ship.

“And, just as Miss Sharon said, we may have to set aside the question as to whether or not we can trust Lord Nordstone for now. We should investigate these bones and the pyrite before we talk to him.”

“But how?”

“We do have several sizable leads, so we will pursue those.”

Myuri’s ears perked.

“First, the bones themselves.”

Everyone besides Vadan turned to look at the skull.

“Death occupies the center of faith. The Church will always be involved to varying degrees.”

There were too many bones here to have been secretly dug up from graves. One other peculiarity was how none of these bones looked like they had ever been interred in soil.

There were very few places where bones were kept in large quantities that were not buried. They could return to Kerube and find a religious institution that could have possibly kept something like this. And once they found out where the bones had been procured from, they might be able to find a coconspirator. Col did not like the thought, but they would get their answer in an instant if they happened upon a corrupted member of the clergy who sympathized with heretical ideas.

“And if we look into where this ship has been, that would narrow down where all these bones came from.”

“You can tell where the ship’s been?” Myuri asked innocently, and Sharon shrugged.

“There aren’t a lot of water barrels in the hold. That means they haven’t been trading with far-off lands that don’t have many ports. At night, they would have slinked to certain ports and docked there. And the ship is of good make, so I bet everyone at the ports would remember it.”

Vadan’s head continued to droop, his chin almost on the floor.

“We have a lead on the pyrite as well,” Col added.

The large company that supported him and Myuri on their journey for the little while after they left Nyohhira was the Debau Company, and they dealt in various ores. Kieman had told them that a merchant from the company was in Kerube to open a branch there. Their specialty was in ore, so it was likely they knew something.

“Now, let us clear the fog of ignorance and find the truth.”

Among the four, as they exchanged glances, Vadan crossed his short arms as though finding renewed strength of will and sat down on the floor.

The group explained the situation to the local lord and had Vadan and a few others take their human forms.

The group informed him that they were indeed suspected smugglers, and that they would be taking them back to the city as originally planned to dole out the proper punishment. They explained that most of the crew quickly escaped on the night of the storm, and that only three were hiding in a false bottom, under the floorboards.

Though there were ultimately flawed details in their explanation—Why would sailors abandon their captain and escape without a second thought? Why did the people keeping watch not find any trace of these escapees?—they had indeed brought out three bound individuals, which would have to satisfy the lord and other officials. No supposed logic could ever win out against a demonstrable truth.

Incidentally, Vadan’s human form was that of a sinewy young man with close-cropped umber hair—he looked just like any other spirited sailor. Myuri looked back and forth between him and Col, reaching out to squeeze the muscles in Col’s shoulders, as though she wanted to tell him something, but he decided to ignore her.

“I’m going to stay in the village so I can receive the towboat. I need to watch over the rats and get into contact with the other birds, too.”

“Then I shall look into the ship’s trail. I am not very fond of walking long distances.”

“What about us?” Myuri looked up at Col, who then confirmed the order of what they needed to do.

“We will look into the human bones and various uses for pyrite.”

“Isn’t it for extracting acid or whatever?”

That had been nothing more than Nordstone’s claim; he may have been led by logic in the past, but there was a possibility that was no longer true. For example, perhaps he once slit the throats of goats in the pursuit of knowledge or experimentation, but after some time he began to believe in the power of the act of ritual sacrifice itself.

And yet, Col did not want to make Myuri too upset, so he muddied his words.

“Just in case. There may be uses for it that we are not aware of.”

“Yeah. We don’t know a whole lot about alchemists, so we’ll do what we can.”

Myuri’s drive was geared toward clearing Nordstone’s innocence.

It gave Col another reason to pray that he was not embarking on some foolish errand.

But he reminded himself not to pre-judge and set the gears in his head to motion.

“We also need to report on our progress to Heir Hyland and make contact with Az. I do not want to think that Lord Nordstone is plotting something, but…”

If they made a mistake that subsequently put them in danger, they would be doing much more than regretting it.

As Col went over everything to make sure they were not forgetting anything, Sharon spoke up.

“You said Eve’s got one of her company men in Raponell?”

“Yes. Oh, would you mind if we asked for your help?”

Sharon shrugged. She was truly dependable, considering how birds flew the same over sea and over land.

“Forget that… Chicken!” Myuri interjected. “If you do something horrible to the mice while we’re away, I’m going to pluck all your feathers and make a roast out of you!”

Myuri was watching Vadan and the others, who were sitting beneath the eaves of the mayor’s house and glumly watching the villagers hastily build a stockade in the village center.

“Only if they behave.”

“I won’t let you do it!”

Myuri had clear reasons for supporting Vadan’s crew as well.

That said, Vadan and his crew had no reason to abandon their ship, and they likely understood very well that trying to make any furtive moves under Sharon’s eagle-eyed watch was pointless.

“It’s all right, Myuri. Despite her looks, Miss Sharon is a very kind person.”

“No way.”

Myuri was doubtful, but she seemed to reluctantly accept it when Ilenia said that to her.

And so, Col and Myuri took a boat back to Kerube, and Myuri enthusiastically waved to Ilenia as she watched them depart. Col sat beside her, and he could not stop himself from sighing.

He did not want to think about Nordstone tricking them, but he was most certainly hiding something.

He could scarcely imagine the old man smiling at them as he said he felt no need to tell them his secrets.

There was a vexed part of him that wondered why the man had to be a heretic, and there was another part of him that brushed that away, because nothing was confirmed yet. But all he could imagine waiting for them was something dark and cold. If Nordstone was truly a heretic, then he would have no choice but to convict the old man for his crimes.

Clouds once again covered the clear skies by midday, and a cold wind began to blow in anticipation of the eve.

Though strained and braced he had been in the presence of Ilenia and Sharon, now, atop the quiet seas in the unstable little boat, he could not help but feel uneasy.

As he gave another big sigh, something suddenly tugged at his cheek.

“You’re making that face again.” Myuri, now finished waving her farewells to Ilenia, looked at him with a cross expression. “Your enemy is whose enemy?” She turned his own words right back at him. “You’re nervous because you don’t know if the old man is a good guy or bad guy, right?”

“Ah… Well, yes…,” Col replied weakly, and she patted him on the back. Her hands were small, but they were surprisingly firm and heavy.

“It’s okay. If he really is a bad guy, then he’ll act like one.”

She was not comforting him with childish optimism.

She was telling him it was okay, fully acknowledging the possibility that Nordstone had a deep, dark secret he could not make public.

“I think the second he thinks he’s been found out, he’ll gather his things and run, even before you can timidly make the declaration that he’s a heretic. He’s not slow-witted enough for you to catch him anyway.”

Her estimation sounded right, and at the same time, something about it sounded off, but he could easily imagine such a thing happening, and he knew Myuri was telling him this mostly because she was being considerate toward him.

“Well, if we do end up fighting him, I might end up feeling a little sick, and my nose has been kind of stuffed up since I went to the bottom of the ship.”

She was telling him that she would deliberately let Nordstone go if it came down to it.

Though he knew he should arrest Nordstone according to God’s teachings, Myuri only thought of the scripture as a pillow for her naps, and her conscience reprimanded her for nothing.

She meant that the man would make it clear exactly what he was.

“So, c’mon,” she said, pinching his cheek again before trying to forcibly pull up the corners of his mouth.

It made for a strange face, but Myuri, at least, was smiling with glee.

He would be forcing himself if he kept a glum look before such a smile.

“You are almost like an upstanding knight in your own right.”

He grasped the hand that tugged on his cheek and squeezed it.

On the sword that hung from her hip was the wolf crest that only the two of them could use. It was originally meant for Myuri, who had been so scared at the prospect of not having a place in this world, but it had not taken long for it to start bringing Col comfort, too.

Myuri was a strong, smart girl.

Col had a feeling that as she grew up, it would get even more difficult for him to keep up with her.

“Yes, I am an upstanding knight.” She grinned mischievously, pressed her lips to his hand that held hers, and snuggled up against him. “But I need a break sometimes.”

He felt like he had seen the wisewolf snuggle in the exact same way once before.

“Brother? I want something warm to drink when we get to town,” Myuri said, squeezing his hand with both of hers. The wind on the water was cold and the sky was overcast, a sign of worse weather to come. Despite all that, at least, it was warm beside her.

“Let’s see if they will prepare some cow’s milk or goat’s milk with honey for you.”

Col deliberately suggested a childish drink. Myuri was not happy, as he expected, but he let her complaints go in one ear and out the other with a smile.

Many things changed over the course of a journey, but some things were still the same.

Col squeezed Myuri’s little hands in return, enjoying the hints of things in the process of changing.

They returned to the Rowen Trade Guild building and told Kieman all they could about the situation while hiding Vadan’s true nature, and Kieman readily offered his cooperation.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Simply having your help if I find something like the narwhal again would be plenty enough payback.”

Col gave a tense, twitching smile, but Myuri was amused, having sensed that Kieman was cunning just like Eve was.

“But a religious institution that might keep such a quantity of human bones? Since they were all together, I’d say it’s more a possibility they were purchased illegally from the Church, rather than stolen.”

Kieman must have encountered a similar situation in the past, even if it did not concern human bones specifically.

“Which means asking the priest here would be counterproductive.”

Even if he was not sympathizing with devil worshippers, he might have been dazzled by the amount of gold that would pay for such a thing.

Had he sold off bones from a religious institution under his care, then he would quickly act to destroy the evidence.

Col, however, did have an idea.

“One possibility that comes to mind for me is an old abbey. I believe there would be many bones still in good condition left in underground tombs.”

“An underground tomb, hmm? That could be possible. Considering how we are looking for big groups of bones, why don’t we search areas that suffered from outbreaks of plagues?”

It was a cold-hearted, rational thought, but that was what made Kieman such a reliable ally.

“Oh, hey,” Myuri interjected. “We want to talk to the people from old man Hilde’s company; you said someone was here, right?”

“You wish to look into the pyrite, I see. I will send someone immediately.”

“Thanks!”

Myuri smiled, and Kieman’s expression softened, despite the cynicism that usually occupied his face.

“But human bones and pyrite are such notable cargo… For what could they possibly want them?”

Even Kieman, who had undoubtedly dealt with all possible kinds of product under the sun, placed his hand to his chin in thought.

Furthermore, they had no other option but to ask the merchants who delivered goods to the Church about possible places a religious institution might keep such a large number of human remains, underground tombs aside. That said, they did not know if Vadan and his crew had come from the north or the south, nor how far they had come, so it was an endeavor that would likely take them quite some time. What made this an even bigger problem was that out of the several options presented, they had to pick the right one.

If only there were more information to go on that would let them narrow down areas that had once suffered a plague. It had to be a place where that many bones could be gathered at once, so perhaps a town with a larger population?

They left the Rowen Trade Guild to meet the merchant from the Debau Company, and as they walked along the harbor, Col put all the gears in his mind to work, thinking as hard as he could. And yet the single reason he managed to arrive at their destination without getting lost, running into anybody, or getting hit by a cart was all because Myuri would pull on his sleeve to stop him.

“Knights aren’t babysitters!” she shouted at him.

The place they eventually came to was a company hall where the merchant from the Debau Company was staying.

“My name is Lerick, of the Debau Company.”

Col exchanged a handshake with the merchant called Lerick, whose palms were unusually bulky. And his wiry beard and short stature made him seem like a mine spirit straight out of legend.

“I suppose I should say how nice it is to see you after all this time, Sir Col.”

As Myuri shook hands with the merchant, impressed with how rough his hands were, Lerick turned to Col with a flippant look.

“Oh, I’m sorry, where have we…?”

“I have actually shipped stone and ironware to your bathhouse many times. This was back when this young lady here was not yet around.”

“I see, all the way back then.”

The two shook hands again, and Col mused about just how small this world was.

Myuri, on the other hand, seemed unimpressed with talk of a time before she was born.

“What an odd story, I must say. You say there is someone purchasing pyrite and human bones?”

Lerick sat down in the corner of the loading dock in the trading house where he was staying. Goods were coming and going with great speed, as though racing to finish up before the sun set.

“And both in great quantities, yet I cannot imagine what they could possibly be used for.”

“Hmm…”

His short arms and legs were bursting with wiry muscle, which made him look like a round boulder when he crossed his arms, yet he had a different air about him compared to Simmons, who spent day in and day out doing heavy labor on a ship. Lerick uncrossed his arms with a sigh.

“First, the pyrite. Pyrite is essentially scrap stone—no one wants that. The only ones buying it are swindlers who can sell it as gold, or travelers who use it as flint.”

“The guy said you can get acid out of it,” Myuri mentioned, and Lerick nodded.

“I believe we use reagents to test ores in our mines, too. But you do not need that much to procure acid. So the strangest part I find with the pyrite is how this individual feels like he needs to smuggle it, of all things.”

Sharon, too, had said she would overlook the pyrite if that was all they found. Customs duties typically only applied to items with high value, so there was no need to go through the trouble of secretly importing pyrite, which was essentially free.

“Another sailor we spoke to mentioned that he had been purchasing pyrite through legal means as well.”

Lerick raised an eyebrow and hmmed.

“As I said, pyrite is generally considered waste rock. If you ask our company or any merchant that deals in ore, they would happily send a bit along as a bonus with any other regular product. But conversely, you’re going to draw attention if you purchase too much at once. It’s as good as trash, and the kind you can get very cheaply, yet if people around him found out it was an essential component for something, then the price would naturally shoot up. That may be why he’s been smuggling it, out of fear of sparking a price hike.” Lerick crossed his arms again. “Yet if we think about it along that line of thought, that would imply he needs a large quantity of it, which brings us back to our current mystery.”

“What exactly does he use it for.”

The ore merchant sighed. “I haven’t heard a peep from any of the many, many mining engineers or refinery workers that the Debau Company employs about new uses for pyrite.”

“…Maybe he is just giving it as an offering to her grave…,” Myuri murmured. It was the simplest answer, and she was likely hoping for it to be that instead of any stranger reason.

“I really cannot think of what it could be used for. Smithies, for instance, hate pyrite. Back when I used to work in the shops, I’d always sort it out with a click of my tongue.”

“Whoa, you used to be a blacksmith?” Myuri asked, shocked. Col, too, had thought about how much he looked suited to the mines, and indeed, his bulky stature had been forged from swinging a hammer against an anvil in a searing-hot workshop.

“I used to be a swordsmith. That’s why when the town smiths come to complain to me that they couldn’t forge a sword because the quality of our ore was bad, I shut them up by taking up the hammer myself. It works immediately.”

Lerick smiled impishly behind his beard.

One could not run a successful business with a silent artisan’s disposition alone.

“Ooh, a swordsmith.”

Col wondered what thoughts ran through Myuri’s head as she touched the sword resting at her hip.

He reckoned those thoughts were no good, but it was Lerick who spoke up first.

“I’ve been thinking about the sword at your hip there for a while now, young miss.”

“This one? The blue on the blade looks really cool.”

When Myuri unsheathed her sword, the blade shone.

She then re-sheathed it and handed it, sheath and all, to Lerick.

“Ah, thanks.”

First, he tested the weight and center of gravity before pulling the sword partway out of the sheath.

“Oh-ho, this is good steel. This would fetch you a fine price. The sheath is nicely made, too. Just as good.”

Hyland had given both to her; Col felt a bit scared thinking about how much both might have cost.

“That’s a stylish crest, too. You don’t really see wolves anymore.”

Myuri seemed to be much happier receiving a compliment about the crest than she was about the sword.

She flared her nostrils and took the sword back.

“That’s right, pyrite’s a nuisance in the workshops when it comes to sword-smithing,” Lerick said, gazing up at the high ceiling in the loading dock. “But there is demand for bone.”

“You use it in the hilts, right?” That had come up when Myuri had whined about wanting a legendary sword. “When I heard the tale of the legendary sword, I heard you have to use the bones of a saint. Can you use normal people’s bones, though?”

“That was the case for older blades, but it has far more uses than that. That’s what came to mind when you brought up just how many bones there were.”

“Huh?”

It was not just Myuri. Col’s interest was piqued now, too.

“But…you’re the Twilight Cardinal. I’m not sure if I should talk to you about this…,” Lerick said with a joking smile, and Myuri circled behind Col.

He wondered what she was doing there—until she covered his ears with her hands.

“Oh, it’s fine!” Lerick smiled merrily and continued to speak. “You add human bones to the furnace during the refining process.”

“For occult purposes?” Col blurted out his question, and Lerick smiled with satisfaction, not bothering to correct him, before a serious look abruptly took over.

“There’s something divine about refining steel. The furnace burns with a blinding light, and metal, which does not budge on a usual basis, melts and mixes inside of it. If you stare long enough at it, you start to feel like the marvels of life itself are hidden inside.”

Col had heard furnaces referred to as suns before. Once everything inside had melted together, it took on a new form, like the first spring buds sprouting from the earth. That was the very reason why the workshop artisans sat still before the furnace, quietly praying.

“But that superstition died out a long time ago, and now it’s all formal. You have the Church watching, after all,” Lerick said, a mischievous twinkle in his smile.

Col was certain these things were still in practice in secret rites.

“Every step of the refining process consists of hard, proven technique. Everyone knows that sacrificing lambs has no effect on the outcome of your steel. But conversely, it’s human nature to want to add extra steps to a process if you know it’ll get you the same results.”

Col took Myuri’s hands, which were covering his ears for no reason, and looked at Lerick.

Lerick was looking at his own rough hands. “Mercenaries would sometimes come to the workshop.”

“Mercenaries?”

“They’d drop their luggage and say, ‘please use these bones when you refine the metal for my sword.’”

The inside of the sacks would invariably be stuffed with human bones, stained by dried blood.

It was easy to understand what was going on.

“They live for battle, they die in battle. But their swords contain the souls of all their companions past.”

This was the sort of story that Myuri loved the most, so it was now Col’s turn to steady her head.

They would have no chance if her ears and tail popped out now.

“Incidents like that play a role in the old tradition of using human bones in sword handles.”

“So…it’s not just legendary swords?” Myuri asked, and Lerick slowly nodded.

“Swordsmen of old believed that by using bones in the hilt, you were giving life to your blade. Because our life still remains in our bones. I suppose we could call it a fragment of our soul.”

The word pagan was beginning to float at the forefront of Col’s mind. According to scripture, the body was nothing more than a receptacle for the soul, which went straight to God after death, and the physical body simply returned to the earth.

And yet he understood how people saw the person in the things they left behind, and he, too, had been surprised by how shocked he felt when Sharon had kicked the skull.

This internal conflict may have seeped into his facial expression.

Lerick looked at him and said quietly, “I find it strange to say this to you, Twilight Cardinal, but this is not entirely superstition or any kind of preconception. There is a solid basis for all of this.”

“A solid basis…? As in…the scales that judged the weight of a soul or something like that?”

It was a well-known experiment carried out by an enthusiastic theologist. This theologist built a precise scale, placed a person on the verge of death on one plate and an equal amount of weight on the other, and then waited to see which way the scales would tip once the subject died.

The scales ultimately tilted toward the weights, and it was said that three chickpeas were needed to re balance the scales with the lighter corpse. That was why the soul was said to weigh just three chickpeas’ worth.

“Oh, no, that is a fascinating experiment, but this is something else, made clear entirely by coincidence.” Lerick cleared his throat. “You usually add eggshells, lime, and bones when it comes to the refining process, but these are all necessary in removing the impurities in the ore. And like I said before, the effects they have on the metal are mostly the same. You do add more sometimes, though. And the reason bones are special is not just because of the fear or respect we have for the dead.” Lerick, whose fist had been balled tightly as though he was holding a hammer, slowly unclenched his hand. “There’s a myth that it was a blacksmith who first noticed that life force lingered in bones. He always had bones in his workshop since he used them for sheaths and in the refining process, and one day, he noticed that the plants were growing oddly fast only in the place where he kept the bones.”

Myuri was genuinely surprised, and Col was shocked for a different reason.

Satisfied with their reactions, Lerick continued. “Afterward, he started burying pig and sheep bones in his fields.”

“…As fertilizer?”

Lerick drew up his heavy shoulders. “That’s why, even though swordsmith and knifesmith guilds are constantly fighting over whether to forge swords or knives, they will never argue over farming tools. Any place with its own furnace will make them. That’s because all smiths are proud that their kind were the ones to discover fertilizer that made wheat grow. And so sometimes, they use human bones in their refining so that their work will be even more…fruitful.”

When he was finished talking, Myuri’s mouth was stuck half-open, and Col’s eyes were wide.

All they had to do was remember what Raponell was like.

It had been like a sea of grain.

“I’m certain all these silly stories must have bored you, but I hope it turns out to be of some help,” Lerick said, which brought Col back to reality.

“Ooooh, yes, very, very much so.”

It was possible all the bones were to be used for making farming tools. But considering what land compromised Nordstone’s territory, Col thought it would more likely be for fertilizer. He could not imagine how much fertilizer would be necessary to treat such an endless expanse of wheat.

Perhaps the reason Nordstone did not disclose this to them and smuggled it instead, was because he was afraid of being seen as a heretic, solid reasoning or no.

Yet there was one thing that caught his attention when he reached that point.

“Even if he is using them as fertilizer…then why has he deliberately chosen human bones?”

Lerick’s story mentioned using pig and sheep bones. So then why would he expose himself to the danger of being deemed a heretic and smuggle human bones?

“A good question. And I thought I had a keen eye.” Lerick crossed his arms and began to stroke his beard in contemplation, then turned his eyes to Col. “Sometimes, when it comes to steel needed in ceremonies, the smiths will ask for bones, but all the pigs and sheep will have already been sold to the butchers. It gets expensive, and sometimes it’s not easy to get ahold of as many as you need. But that isn’t the case for human bones.”

Because of course, no one went out of their way to collect such things.

“A good person who doesn’t mind crossing dangerous bridges could grow plenty of wheat for cheap by collecting human bones for essentially free and using it as fertilizer.”

It felt like they had all they needed to come up with a likely explanation. If Nordstone had used bones for fertilizer, then that explained Raponell’s fields. It also explained why he needed so many. There was also a financial reason why he had chosen the suspicious human bones, and not sheep or pig bones.

But it still felt like there was something important missing. It would all go up in flames in a heretical controversy if he were to be found out, yet he deliberately made the choice to cross his own dangerous bridge despite that—it seemed to be an unbalanced choice when the risks and rewards were weighed up against one another. Nordstone had built such logical-looking fields—surely, he would opt to choose sheep or pig bones, even if it meant a slightly bigger hit to his coin purse.

Was there something else they were missing? Or perhaps they were wrong to think he was using it for fertilizer?

Col wondered what Myuri, whose mental cogs ran much more smoothly in logical processes, was thinking.

It happened just after he turned to look at her.

He caught glimpse of her replacing the sword at her hip, and the sight stung deeply into his thoughts.

“What about…this?”

“Huh?”

Ignoring Myuri’s dubious response, Col reached out to her sword. What reminded him of this was what Lerick told them about the mercenaries. These mercenaries would come to his workshop and say:

Forge me a blade with these bones.

There was great meaning contained within that brief utterance.

They wanted to feel the dead nearby. They wanted the dead to stay with them.

In that case, Col immediately had a feeling that he now knew exactly where Nordstone procured those bones.

“Anyway, I’ve asked someone else to come along, but she sure is late.”

Brought out from his thoughts, Col turned to Lerick.

“It turns out someone that’s been helping me with work says she’s an old acquaintance of yours, Twilight Cardinal. I invited her along—why not, after all—but she might be lost. She always seems lost in the clouds, after all.”

Col had a feeling that Kieman had been talking about the same person.

But of course, he had no idea who it might be.

“I’ll go find her. This whole area is full of similar-looking buildings.”

Lerick stood from his crate and shuffled away. Col felt somewhat absent as he watched him leave, because there was one prominent image in his mind.

“What was it you noticed, Brother?” Myuri, who had been watching Lerick leave in the same way Col had been, turned back to look at him and asked. “The bones were used for fertilizer, right? But…”

She had wondered why Col had been staring so hard at her sword.

“I have a general idea where he got the bones from now. I believe we’ll be able to find the source without much trouble.”

“Really?!”

“That ship was indeed a ghost ship.”

Myuri stared blankly at him before giving him a disagreeable smile.

She thought he had told a bad joke, but that was not the case at all.

“Lord Nordstone had only inherited the name of Nordstone. His homeland was on the mainland, across the strait from the Kingdom, and was destroyed by war, remember? And abbeys with great underground tombs only build them when they have good reason.”

Most were erected during times when there were too many dead to practically give them all proper burials, which is why Kieman had suggested searching for areas that had suffered a plague. Other things like severe famine came to mind, but there were other incidents that directly caused mass death in one specific place.

A great war. It was the perfect cause for a whole region to die out.

“Then…you mean the old man’s bringing them all home?”

His ancestral land of Gressia was a royal territory that had been destroyed and lost to the passage of time.

It was the alchemist who helped him escape, and in the process, left behind many others.

He had been much too young back then to do anything, but he had transformed what had long been a barren wasteland into bountiful wheat fields.

Perhaps he preferred to have his former neighbors sleep in a lush wheat field instead of what was now foreign land. Perhaps he was praying that they would bring new life to a new land.

Along this train of thought, it did not feel right to treat the bones as eerie, or condemn the man to being a heretic. At the same time, he knew that the Church would not be happy if they found out about this, so he understood why he wanted to avoid the trouble and turned to smuggling them instead.

And just as Lerick had pointed out, human bones had the same effect as pig and sheep bones, but were much cheaper.

It was essentially killing two birds with one stone for Nordstone, and it lined up with his image of a logical ruling noble.

“If these are Lord Nordstone’s reasons, then I can proudly face the Church for his sake.”

It was a great step forward, but Col suddenly noticed how strange Myuri was acting.

“Myuri?”

He thought she would be overjoyed to see that all suspicion hanging over the old man was cleared, but for some reason she had a gloomy face.

“Hmm? Oh, I was just thinking…it all adds up, but something’s weird here… That’s all.”

Myuri brought a hand to her nose in thought.

“Weird?”

Perhaps she felt it a bit convoluted to say that the bones were being used for fertilizer in the wheat fields.

Or perhaps she was thinking more about the pyrite, whose factor they had yet to solve?

As Col waited for the contemplating Myuri to speak, Lerick appeared again outside.

“I found her! She was lost, like I thought.”

Standing beside him was a woman, and there was an air about her that made her seem out of place at the entrance of a merchant company.

Her black robes made her look both like a mourning gentlewoman and a nun who belonged to a monastery with strict religious precepts. Her noble bearing was only accentuated by the dark orange hues of sunset and drew the attention of practically every man working at the loading dock.

Had Col known someone like this? The woman had mentioned they knew each other long ago.

The beautiful woman looked at him and smiled, and the voice that came from her pale lips was much kinder than he thought it would be.

“Oh my, the cute little boy has grown to be such a fine man.”

Her elegance, of a different flavor than Hyland’s, was her bewitching beauty. But as Col searched his childhood memories for someone like this, Myuri blinked and murmured, “A bird?”

At last, his memories came back to him.

“Miss…Diana.”

She was a nonhuman who Myuri’s parents had come to know during their journeys. Though Col had not yet joined them at that point, she had been present at their wedding.

“Indeed, it has been quite some time. And I’ve heard you were having a very interesting conversation.”

Diana’s eyes softened as she spoke.

This beauty was a bird spirit—and a skilled alchemist.

She was the perfect person to ask about Nordstone.