More Will Come
"I'll keep that in mind."
The room Hisnil had assigned her was bright and spacious, full of light. It was less an act of human kindness than the designation of suitable storage for a sentient creature with two hands, but the result was the same, so it hardly mattered.
"We'll need curtains. It's too bright."
Ilesin said it after looking the room over.
"It's bright. I like it."
"It'll be glaring from dawn. You won't sleep. I'll send a craftsman later."
"I'll wait. And thank you for everything until now, Ilesin."
"Hardly worth a grand farewell. Set out from here and you'd be standing in front of me before you finished counting to ten."
Artila shook her head.
"Even so, you don't have to look after me anymore."
"Did that look like looking after you?"
"If you weren't, you wouldn't have gone and found me five pigs and work with your own hands. It's a pity the memories are gone, but there's no hope of them coming back, so I'll give up and live bravely."
"Live bravely if you like. If you get scared, come find me anytime. If there's someone you can't stand, curse them. I can listen to that much."
"So you mean you'll keep looking after me?"
"We're proper friends by now, aren't we? Of course I should."
"A friend."
Artila shrugged, then said, "I've only been alive a week, and already I've gained quite a lot. A room, work, pigs, curtains on the way—and now a friend."
As she named them she folded her fingers down one by one until they closed into a fist. Ilesin set his own fist against it and gave it a light tap.
"There'll be more."
Hisnil was the perfect housemate for Artila. Aside from the moments he had work for her, he paid her no attention at all, and once the work was done he regarded her as little more than a new piece of furniture brought into the tower. Artila, for her part, decided to think of Hisnil as a window that talked, or a wall that occasionally moved.
When the day's tasks were finished, Hisnil either slept or shut himself in the study to research new magical formulas. If Artila sometimes peered in, he shot her a look that meant clear off, or kept his head buried and waved her away at once.
At first she simply did whatever she was told, but she soon began to see how inefficient it all was. Hisnil was hopeless at arithmetic. He could handle magical formulas with ease, yet he utterly refused to attempt the simplest sums. The ledger he handed her had that day's usage and the estimated requirements scribbled in roughly, and the amounts used were often far too much or far too little. Looking it over, Artila fetched fresh paper and a ruler and made an entirely new ledger. In less than an hour she had it in order, and she showed it to him.
"Look. The figures are all wrong. This one's been ordered far too heavily, and this one far too little. And I think we ought to note how long each thing keeps, as well. The ones that store well, we can buy in larger amounts, and cheaper for it. Some of them need to be ordered differently depending on the mixing ratios."
"...How did you calculate that?"
"The world has things called addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication."
Hisnil could work through a complex formula in an instant, but simple arithmetic bored him too much to attempt. Because it bored him he never did it, and because he never did it he grew worse at it, and because he grew worse it bored him even more, so he did it even less.
"...Would you do it, from tomorrow?"
"All right. I'll do it. Someone who can't do a thing and still refuses to try is better off not doing it at all. You're a brilliant mage. It's enough if you concentrate on that."
"...Was I that pathetic?"
"Yes."
Artila nodded, beaming.
"Ordinary people do the things they dislike, if they have to. You don't even have that. You truly don't do them."
Hisnil was silent.
"Wait. Was there someone who used to do this work for you? From the way things have kept going, I thought there must have been."
Hisnil hemmed and hawed, then said, "No. The truth is, I... this is the first time I've ever done work like this at all. I've never settled in a castle before. I'm a young mage, still at the stage of making a name, so I've mostly eaten and slept on the road."
"You mean you don't know anything?"
"Well. Administrative... matters, I don't."
"Not at all?"
"I told you I don't!"
Artila understood. Settling into a castle and keeping a daily round of work was new to him, so of course he was clumsy and a mess. With no one to teach him, he had muddled through however he could. And the Hisnil she had seen was not a man with the diligence to fix or improve a thing merely because it was inconvenient.
"Then I'll take it on from tomorrow."
"Please see to it."
From the very next morning, Artila set the order of the work, added up how long each task took, drew up a schedule, and calculated precisely the total quantity of medicinal ingredients required and the yield of what they produced. Work that had dragged on until late afternoon began to finish before noon. The herbs that had been wasted dropped sharply.
A few days later, Hisnil called for her.
"Come to the study."
He was summoning her into the study he had never let her so much as approach, so it had to be important. Hisnil sat her down before the desk, stacked ten silver coins, and slid them toward her.
"I meant to work you in exchange for the lodging, but that won't do. You've been a great help. This is your wages."
"We never agreed I'd be paid."
"You're being paid from now on. This month was busy, so ten silver. From next month it'll be eight, so keep that in mind. It's a miserably stingy wage, so don't thank me."
"Is this coming from you?"
"No. I told Pamila. Asked her to settle your pay as well. And this is how she calculated it."
Most people would have gone on using her for free, but Hisnil had gone out of his way to Pamila and secured her a wage. Artila was a little moved. Just as she'd thought: Hisnil was a kind man pretending to be mean.
"You're honest, Hisnil."
"Mages are like that by nature. The principle is to receive as much as you give, and give as much as you receive. It has to be that way. Professional conscience."
Artila looked around the study she was entering for the first time. Hisnil had the air of a man hoping she would ask about something. She pointed at the orb on his desk.
"Where did this come from?"
Hisnil's eyes lit up. That was exactly what he had been secretly hoping she would ask about.
"It looked like one of the more impressive things in here."
"It is. Good eye. It came out of a maze."
"A maze?"
"Yes. I fought in the conquest of Abul's Maze. The commander, Nazares, and Zeldia all went in with the conquering party. The commander became the Maze Conqueror. He killed the demon that ruled the maze, in the final chamber. This is a spoil from that day. It was set in the demon's staff. As you can see, it's too heavy for a person to carry around, so it stays in my study."
Hisnil had been explaining with great enthusiasm, and when Artila showed little reaction he looked disappointed.
"You really don't remember a thing, do you. Conquering Abul's Maze is a feat that will remain in human history. There isn't a person alive who doesn't know it. Then again, you didn't react at all when you heard the names Ilesin and Hisnil, either."
"I know what a maze is. I also know that conquering one is a tremendous achievement."
"But not how tremendous we are?"
"The truth is... it was already too late to pretend to be surprised, and I didn't remember it well enough to be startled the moment I heard it."
Hisnil was silent.
She hadn't known any of it when she met Ilesin, but living here, it had begun to come back. The maze Hisnil spoke of was a demon's house: a place where the mortal world and the demon realm joined, which demons used as a stronghold from which to invade the surface. A Maze Conqueror was one who killed the demon that ruled a maze. When that demon died, the gate to the demon realm closed and the maze itself came to a halt. Then, by the principle laid down by the god of order, precious things were bestowed in turn, beginning with those of greatest merit, and became their owners' property. If Hisnil had come away with the demon's magical orb, she found herself wondering what Ilesin had received. He was a warrior. A sword, perhaps, or a shield.
"I do know what Abul's Maze is."
"And how do you remember that?"
"The way I remember how to calculate, or how to read, I seem to remember geography and history as well. It's a maze about a hundred years old, still in its prime... Abul was a demon who claimed to be the successor of the Primordial Demon—that mighty demon who tried to rule the world. He was deeply versed in magic, too. He waged war so aggressively that everyone feared him and hated him, they say. But when was it conquered? I have no memory of it. Judging by the two of you, though, it can't have been long ago."
Both Ilesin and Hisnil were very young. Even Nazares, whom she had taken for a man past forty, was only twenty-six.
"A year ago."
"It really wasn't long ago, then?"
"No. It was only last year that we put that maze down and thought nothing but good days lay ahead. The treasure is still almost all here, and the magical tools we carried out are just as they were, and yet now they feel like keepsakes a grandfather left behind."
"What happened, for them to feel that way?"
Hisnil sighed, opened a cabinet, took out a bottle, and poured its contents into a glass. Artila glanced at the bottles packed into the cabinet. She had thought they were medicine, or samples for magic. Every one of them was liquor.
"The commander was making a name for himself with the conquest, and the Emperor suggested he enter the swordsmanship tournament. An imperial command, so he entered. The prize money was quite generous, too. But that year—what was his name—the bastard son of some duke or other entered as well."
Hisnil pointed at a map.
"That one there. The duke who rules Anhar was that whelp's father."
Artila looked at the map. Anhar lay well to the east of Pobern.
"The fellow had gotten a little recognition in the lands where his father was lord, and he seems to have assumed he'd win as a matter of course. If the commander hadn't entered, he would have. He'd climbed easily as far as the semifinals. But the commander did enter, so of course the commander won. Even so, second place is a perfectly satisfying result, isn't it? It wasn't a war. It was a tournament. No different from a sporting match. Some people win and some people lose, but no one's life is on the line. And that bastard took a grudge over it and dragged an army here."
"Surely not. A war broke out?"
"Not quite a war. He brought his gang and picked a fight. It was no different from a fly smacking an ox across the back. He lost to the commander in no time and ran."
Hisnil ground his teeth, as if the anger had gotten the better of him.
"The bigger problem came after that. He went back and woke a demon. And an enormously powerful one, at that."
Hisnil pointed to the lower part of the map.
"He broke the seal on the one right there."
His finger indicated the lands south of Pobern.
"Moravik? There?"
"Yes. Because of the demon that bastard called up, that place is nothing but ashes now. And the freed demon came charging here. That was the war that broke out the day you appeared."
"Did the demon take a request from that bastard? Ordinary demons don't grant the wishes of the ones who revive them. I've heard that revived demons are generally weak, so the spiritualist or mage who brought them back keeps them as familiars—but the demon revived this time was such an immense being that it shouldn't have been possible."
"You remember that much?"
Artila nodded.
"Yes, I remember. I must have learned it from books. Everything I still remember has been like that."
"That's right. It isn't a demon of a level he could command, so it's a mystery why it attacked the commander's castle—the man he bore a grudge against. Whether it came as payment for being awakened, or simply because we happened to be the house next door, we still don't know. Of course, if that demon truly became a familiar, that would be extraordinary. A demon that nearly destroyed the world, serving nothing more than that bas— wait. Did you say bastard?"
"Yes. Bastard. Isn't he someone you want to curse? He's illegitimate, isn't he? So—a bastard."
"That's a rather cutting insult, in his case."
Hisnil poured her a drink and held it out. Artila took a sip, found it quite good, and drained the rest in one go.
"If what you say is true, then you don't know why the demon attacked."
Hisnil nodded.
"No. That's what makes it such a headache. There's nothing more troublesome than an opponent whose reasons you can't understand. They rampage as if everything is your fault, when none of it is."