Chapter 249: Where the Light Points (4)

The Prozen World Expo was a success.

Perhaps the greatest success in the history of expositions.

Attendance had long since surpassed pre-opening projections, and ever since the Imperial Pavilion’s night became the talk of the continent, crowds crossing the border just to see that light packed the train stations every day.

Every hotel in the capital was booked solid half a year out, the railways and passenger liners kept adding extra services again and again, and every trade in the city, from restaurants to theaters to tailor shops, drank in the Expo windfall.

Factories that had ground to a halt during the strikes were turning once more to churn out souvenirs, and Parliament, brandishing the falling unemployment figures, was busy patting itself on the back.

But— Jean Pierre knew what lay behind those dazzling numbers.

Whose brother-in-law had won the pavilion construction contracts, and the later demolition orders? Which councilman’s nephew had landed the operating rights to the concession stands and entertainment zones inside the expo grounds?

And why, of all places, had the exclusive printing rights for the commemorative stamps flowed to a print shop run by an in-law of the ruling party’s financial advisor?

Corruption funneled entirely to the ruling faction’s families, their families’ acquaintances, and so on down the line.

And so, for the ordinary people of Prozen, nothing would change.

For his part, Jean Pierre could only hope this country wouldn’t be left with nothing but debt.

“……Haah.”

As a professor, he felt powerless. But he was only one man and there was nothing he could do.

His family was called prestigious, in its way, but its authority went no further than that.

He owned a few properties in the capital, but his wealth went no further than that.

He was no Maximilian.

He held no position that could change a nation, and had never even harbored such an ambition to begin with. He was nothing more than a scholar.

“We will now begin admitting visitors to the Imperial Pavilion!”

Jean Pierre joined the crowd at the Imperial Pavilion’s entrance. Even in daylight, their line was long.

“You may enter!”

Guided by a staff member, he walked down the corridor.

“From this point on, we ask for your silence.”

Then, the moment he crossed a threshold somewhere deep inside.

The sounds of the world cut off. The space sank into total darkness.

Just as his eyes were adjusting to the dark, an aurora of mana stone came pouring down from the ceiling to his feet, whooooosh…….

“Wow.”

“Whoa.”

“……Insane.”

Thus the Empire’s light was put to use not only without, but within.

Past the dreamlike corridor, one entered a gallery hung with the Empire’s art.

It thronged with people, echoing with every language of the continent.

The most successful pavilion in history, at the most successful exposition in history.

Robrus had been beaten by the Empire, inside and out.

After touring the Imperial Pavilion for a while, Jean Pierre came out and walked through the expo grounds.

The Ezenheim Pavilion and the Mer Pavilion happened to catch his eye. They too were holding modest events of their own, handing out promotional trinkets. The Empire’s citizens eyed them sideways as one might eye filthy beasts, but did nothing beyond that.

Behind this, too, lay Maximilian’s control.

Just as a military operation minimizes civilian casualties, any act outside the objective, any needless hostility, was treated as waste.

Clumsily persecuting minorities and handing them martyrs, that sort of thing, Maximilian did not do.

There were even rumors, streaming into Jean Pierre’s ears one after another, that Maximilian himself was the one who had helped the pavilion of war-torn Mekerel, and the one sponsoring ‘that painter’ of Zerpha.

Because he was a scholar who studied people, every scrap of news concerning a person of note found its way to him.

“Hm? Jean!”

On one of the streets, he ran into Arthur of Highland. His face, too, was far from bright.

The face of a man displeased less by the Empire’s success itself than by an entire continent translating that success into peace and breathing easy.

“Ah, Sir Arthur. Perfect timing. There’s something I’ve been wanting to show you.”

The Zerpha Pavilion, quiet in the early days but lately drawing a fair crowd of its own. Jean led Arthur there and stood before「Zernica」.

Arthur gave a small laugh.

“You and I seem to share the same tastes. I was meaning to see this myself.”

“Is that so.”

Black and white. Collapsed tunnels and broken silhouettes. Mouths gaping open in the shape of screams, arms reaching halfway toward empty air. Broken people crying out in their brokenness, a painting that struck the viewer square in the chest.

──Massacre and destruction.

Many had passed this abstraction by, finding it grotesque, and yet of late it was drawing uncommon attention in Prozen.

The people, the critics, the painters who had scoffed ‘what on earth is this’ kept coming back, day after day.

“Pablo Sobakin. Do you know of him?”

“Yes. A very renowned painter.”

The painter of a generation, born in Zerpha. A prodigy who at fifteen had won the unanimous vote of the judges of the Zerpha Royal Salon. Not content with reproducing the styles of the old masters flawlessly, a monster of orthodox realism said to contain a model’s entire life in a single portrait.

Then one day, that same genius had taken his flawless technique and broken it apart with his own hands, arriving at last at this point.

Whether this was a ruin or a summit, posterity would have to be the judge.

“Excuse us. Please make way.”

Just then, Zerphan officials approached, parting the crowd. In their hands, carried with great care, was a single canvas wrapped in white cloth.

On one wall of the pavilion, in a space left empty in advance, the painting was hung and the cloth drawn away.

Arthur’s and Jean’s gazes drifted naturally that way.

“Let’s have a look.”

“Yes.”

Together, the two of them stood where the canvas could be seen in full.

The title─「Where the Light Points」.

Smaller than 「Zernica」, but distinctly larger than any ordinary oil painting.

Within it was the face of a man.

Or rather, what had once been a face.

“…….”

The canvas was split precisely in two along the line of the nose. One half sunk in darkness, the other in white light.

What the two halves gazed upon lay beyond the canvas, somewhere the viewer could never see.

Golden hair, golden eyes. The features seemed skewed and overlapping, having passed through Pablo’s particular dismantling, yet the form could still be made out.

The brush had stopped just short of complete abstraction.

As if even the painter himself could not bring himself to break this face to the very end.

“There’s something uncanny about it. As if the painting itself straddles darkness and light…….”

Between the real and the rendered. Between the figurative and the abstract. Between darkness and light.

The painting stood upon all those borderlines, refusing to step down on either side.

“…….”

Jean Pierre studied it for a long time. He had no interest in paintings, but perhaps because this was a ‘person’. It was an attempt to fathom its meaning.

Arthur Winston stood beside him.

No, it was not just the two of them.

One, two, four, eight….. before he knew it, hundreds of visitors had slowly gathered, gazing up at the canvas in silence.

Even those who shrugged before difficult paintings, who frowned and walked on, stopped in their tracks before this one alone.

“……Ah.”

Suddenly, Jean Pierre caught hold of the familiar something that had been flickering in his mind.

Darkness and light.

The being who was at once the current Empire’s darkest ideology and, increasingly, its brightest reason.

“……Maximilian.”

He spoke the name aloud.

At the low voice dropped into the stillness, a few visitors nearby flinched and stared at the painting once more.

* * *

These days, the「Sentinel Duty Examination」was known as the most difficult, most highly regarded examination in the Empire.

An examination in which the Sentinel knights personally selected the Operations Officers, Administrative Officers, Agents, and others who would serve under them.

For some, an event tens, hundreds of times more important than any World Expo.

Practically the only ladder by which an ordinary citizen could reach the heart of the Empire. The highest gateway to advancement there was.

And this time, of all people, it was ‘Maximilian’ who had declared an open recruitment, for the first time in a very long while.

There wasn’t a soul in the Empire who didn’t know how well Operations Officers under Maximilian were treated. The base salary alone was said to run past several hundred thousand Imperial Dollars.

Hundreds of thousands of applications poured in on paper alone, but through the first-round written exams held across the land, the second-round essays and ideology screening, and the third-round polygraph.

Fewer than a mere thousand remained.

And then, the last.

The fourth stage of Maximilian’s duty examination─interview day.

The grounds before the Sentinel Knight Order teemed with hundreds of interviewees and their families.

“You’ve got this! You’ll pass, no question about it!”

“Pass this and three generations of our family are set. Three generations!”

“Don’t be nervous. Just making it this far is a credential in itself……”

A mother smoothed her son’s collar again and again, while a father said nothing and simply patted his shoulder twice. A little sister tucked a note, folded like a talisman, into her brother’s pocket.

A group of men, ex-soldiers by the look of them, shouting encouragement together with their friends.

The scene before a gateway to advancement was the same as it had ever been.

“……Whew.”

Into that crowd stepped a man.

Seen off by his family, he set foot in the Sentinel Knight Order’s annex.

“Whooo…….”

With a tag reading ‘No. 37’ pinned to his chest, he sat in the long row of waiting chairs, taking one deep breath after another.

“Numbers 1 through 10, please come in.”

And so, ten at a time, people went in and came out.

Most came out paler than when they’d gone in.

“……Haah.”

The air in the waiting room hung damp with tension.

“Excuse me…… are you a Yaken?”

Just then, the interviewee in the next seat asked cautiously.

“Yes. I’m a Yaken.”

“Phew…… thank goodness. No wonder you looked so well built.”

“Thank you.”

Maximilian had understood, early on, the backlash that would come if a perception took hold that the knights favored Yaken.

The bitter resentment of ‘I, a pure Aran, failed because of a Yaken’.

Let that pile up and it became hatred, and hatred gnawed at an organization from within.

So from the very start, he had set the Yaken slots apart.

Yaken competed only against other Yaken.

In other words, a Yaken in the same interview group meant one less rival for the remaining Aran.

“Good luck in there!”

“Thanks. You too.”

Meanwhile, the door opened.

“Numbers 31 through 40.”

The man stepped inside.

At the interviewers’ table sat Hans and Otto, Maximilian’s First Operations Officers, along with an Administrative Officer whose name he didn’t know.

Among candidates dreaming of becoming Sentinel Operations Officers, Hans and Otto were celebrities in their own right.

“Hm. Number 37, you’re a Yaken?”

Hans asked Number 37.

“Yes, that’s correct, sir!”

“Then your aptitude would place you in the Agent track.”

“Yes, sir!”

At his vigorous replies, the other nine, none of them Yaken, let out breaths of relief they tried not to show.

“Looking at your essay answers…… it seems you’ve practically memorized 「Under the Moonlight」.”

“Yes, it’s true, sir! I memorized all of it!”

And in that manner, the interviews for Maximilian’s Agents proceeded.

* * *

I returned to the Knight Order to a welcome from the whole of Sentinel. In truth, I barely managed to talk Chiron out of firing a commemorative salute.

“Everyone’s carving out time for leave right now. To Prozen, sir.”

At the Operations Officer’s report, I smiled faintly.

“Tell all the Agents to go as well. It’s a place well worth seeing.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it. However, just now…….”

The Operations Officer lowered his voice and delivered the news.

Hannah had detained nine suspicious Ezenheim down in the sewers, and they appeared to be connected to the Blue Rose Society.

“Ezenheim. Are we certain?”

“Confirmed by the Yaken, sir.”

Operations Officer Milan answered. He, too, was a Yaken.

“Then…….”

I started to rise to verify it myself, and stopped.

“…….”

All of a sudden, a thought struck me.

Not once, until now, had I skipped the final inspection. When it came to Ezenheim, the last set of eyes had always been mine.

But now there were eyes besides my own that could recognize the creatures.

The Yaken, and Leo. They eased my crushing workload, my solitude, my isolation.

So was there any reason not to trust them, to go on verifying each and every case myself?

No, before that, did I even have the time to re-examine each and every one?

I sat back down.

“If the Yaken confirmed it, then it’s certain.”

“Then how shall we handle them?”

Digging up their other crimes would be troublesome. Difficult, and labor-intensive.

“Manufacture a connection to the Blue Rose Society. Make it look good, and make it easy to see.”

“Yes, sir.”

The easy road was to simply fabricate it and kill them.

Even Ezenheim came in grades. For small fry, even the time spent on them was a waste.

“Also, one Yaken Agent has passed the final interview. Grading for the remaining Aran is still in progress, however.”

Whatever other inspections I delegated, the interview’s final verdict remained mine alone.

“Send him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Operations Officer went out first.

There seemed to be some manner of preparation going on outside, and before long, a man came in.

“……?”

Somehow, the face was familiar.

A simple, honest sort of impression, but with lines far bolder than the face lingering vaguely in my memory. The softness of the boy had been carved away, and the frame of a man had risen in its place.

“……It’s an honor. I’m ‘Yan Novak’, sir.”

The name brought a smile to my lips.

The memory came back vividly.

I crossed my arms for no particular reason.

“Hmm…….”

Back when Genen was at its most unstable.

A Yaken boy who had thrown himself into the protest, been seized by the police, and been driven to the very brink of death before I saved him.

It seemed he had faithfully kept to my words all this time, hiding his strength until he could look after himself.

“You’ve grown. Quite a lot, it seems.”

In that instant, Novak’s eyes quivered. He quietly bit his lip. For a long while, no words came.

He was moved, most likely.

That I still remembered him, a man who was nothing more than a single passing encounter from years ago.

“……Yes, sir.”

His voice shook, thick with tears. Novak bowed his head.

“All of it was thanks to you, Sir Knight.”

Past the thick hair at the crown of his bowed head, his shoulders trembled faintly.

The prodigal son of Genen, whom I had once set free, had returned to me like this.

And thoughtfully enough, he’d arrived with his loyalty already maxed out before he even walked in.

“You pass.”

* * *

Hannah arrived at the site Julian had relayed to her.

A basement in the industrial district on the outskirts of the imperial capital.

In the musty air, every wall was crammed with indecipherable writing, and bundles of documents lay scattered and trampled across the floor.

“……Sir Knight.”

Several corpses sprawled here and there among the papers. Julian stood in their midst, his back to her.

Hannah asked, scanning the writing on the walls.

“Did you also master that Ezenheim way of communicating, Sir Knight?”

She thought of those scrawls down in the reeking sewers. If it was Julian, perhaps he had cracked that code.

He shook his head.

“I don’t know it. Their code.”

“Then, how…….”

“I used an Ezenheim. One of them led me here.”

Julian gestured with his chin toward one spot.

Among the sprawled corpses lay one that had died noticeably more recently than the rest.

“……A traitor among the Ezenheim?”

“Who knows. Could be betrayal. Could be sacrifice.”

Julian’s answers were always ambiguous. Hannah picked up a single sheet from among the documents on the floor, some kind of roster.

“…….”

As she read down the page, her eyes narrowed bit by bit.

Professors from Zestfall’s renowned universities, mid-ranking civil servants, newspaper editorial writers, even literary figures whose names anyone would recognize.

The signatures and fingerprints of the people who made up Zestfall’s educated class.

“……All of them?”

That was when it happened.

CRASH─!

The basement door flew open with a bang.

“Huh?”

Inspector Gewin. And behind him, rushing in one after another, the investigators of Georgen.

“Good to see you, Knights. My my…… so it really does turn out this way.”

In this basement full of corpses and scrawled walls, he strode in with a bright, smiling face that didn’t belong to the scene.

As if he had expected this sight all along.

“We’ll be collecting the evidence.”

The investigators fanned out with practiced precision.

“Hey! What do you think you’re……”

Hannah moved reflexively to stop them,

Thud.

but Julian’s arm blocked her way first.

~~~

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