She had experienced an unbelievable level of violence and danger in the stampede. I hadn’t noticed anything particularly off in her behavior, but it seemed it had just taken a little while to show. And if we didn’t do something, they might get worse.
Arwin hung her head in shame as I examined the spots. She looked like a child being scolded.
“Anywhere else?”
“Just here for now,” she said, hastily showing me her left wrist, which was all clear.
“You’re all right,” I said as gently as I could. “If it worries you, just wrap a bandage around the area.”
“But—”
I grabbed her wrist and pulled it to my mouth to kiss it. Arwin froze but didn’t pull her arm away. I fantasized that I might be able to suck out the poison, but naturally, when my lips left, the black spots were still there on her wrist.
“You must be tired. Some rest will do you good. Or would you rather have an early breakfast?”
“No need. I’ll sleep until the morning. I’m sorry about this,” she said, shaking her head. Her expression already looked softer. Her concerns weren’t gone, but I could tell she felt a little better after showing me.
She told me to go back to sleep and turned to go to her room.
“I’ll help you change,” I said, reaching out. Arwin flinched away from my grasp.
Instantly, things felt awkward.
She seemed to come back to her senses and apologized, then scurried away to her room and shut the door. The hallway was quiet.
I could imagine that on the other side of the door, the princess knight regretted her actions and blamed herself. There was no sign of the town’s graceful, noble hero.
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
“And? When will the antidote be ready?”
“That’s the first thing you have to say to me?” Nicholas grimaced.
After preparing breakfast in the morning, I headed for Nicholas’s house. The former priest had betrayed that plague-on-humanity sun god and now worked as an herbalist and member of Aegis. It was a rather sordid personal history. These days, he spent his time in the dungeon and created herbal medicines and other remedies when back on the surface. Even as we spoke, he was fiddling with leaves and ores at his desk. I took a seat behind him and yawned. There was nothing I could help him with, and if I wandered around his place, he would snap at me for distracting him.
“My answer hasn’t changed. I can’t make it without money,” he said.
He claimed he had completed an antidote to the Release that tormented Arwin. But the cost of the materials was so steep, he couldn’t make a full dose. Plus, they were temporarily hard to come by, so the price was even higher.
All kinds of tools and items for delving into the dungeon were scarce and selling at inflated prices. Arwin didn’t have any room for extra expenditures. So she’d had only one dose of the antidote so far, and nothing since.
To neutralize the poison building up in her body, we would need plenty of antidote. There wasn’t a magic cure a person could take once and be done with. Arwin told me not to worry about it, but of course I still did.
“What if you sold the recipe to the antidote to make the money?” I suggested.
There were people suffering from Release withdrawals all over the country, not just in this town. An apothecary would likely pay good money for the formula to make it. And they could get the materials, too.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Nicholas. “The materials themselves are too hard to come by. And if the recipe gets around, the rich and powerful will rush out to buy them all up. There will be even less available to the poor or the one you love.”
He lowered his voice even further.
“Plus, you don’t know that the antidote will be properly mixed and prepared. I guarantee that for the people who need it most, they’ll only find crude imitations.”
Whether it was weapons or tools, there were always people looking to get into the counterfeiting game. Just watering it down would be the most benign possibility; some would substitute ingredients to save on costs. They would be much less effective than the real thing—and at worst, what should have been an antidote could turn out to be poison.
“Besides, it usually takes years to develop a solution like this. And I’ve only started on this in earnest since I came to this town.”
“That’s too long.”
“I’m not just sitting on my hands, of course. I’ve been trying everything I can. This is one of them.”
He opened his palm to show me a green ball of medicine.
“I handed out this test the other day, and it went over very well. People were asking for much larger orders.”
While developing new antidotes, he’d wound up with mixtures that served other purposes. Though they were still in the testing stages, some had turned out to be useful.
“What is that, an energy booster?”
“No, a contraceptive. It also protects against venereal disease.” That was the biggest problem facing whores and brothels. And it could prevent unwanted pregnancies. “If I can sell this, it will help me get more materials.”
“And how long will that take?” I said, shaking my head in disappointment. “Listen, I didn’t help you out to save the poor, suffering whores. It was to put a boot up that bottle fly of a sun god’s ass.”
I left Nicholas’s home. The antidote wasn’t coming along anytime soon. It was disappointing but to be expected. I had gotten what I came for.
There were black pills clutched in the palm of my hand.
I’d helped myself to them while wandering around his office. I was the one paying him anyway. Surely I deserved to help myself to some. I replaced them with a similar-looking laxative, so he wouldn’t notice for a while. He still hadn’t noticed the last batch I took.
With this, though, Arwin would gain a bit more peace of mind. I wrapped them in a handkerchief and tucked them away. If I kept them in my hand, they would melt and stink up my palm.
“Hmm?”
I was just turning off the main street into a residential area when I came across someone on the ground. He was somewhat unkempt but did not seem to be a gentleman of the street. Probably just a drunk who had failed to stumble home and ended up sleeping on the path.
As I passed him, he groaned in pain. I stopped to think.
He could be faking illness or injury to trap someone intending to do good and help him. That was a popular tactic for thieves and pickpockets. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to ignore him. Even if he really needed help, I was under no obligation to do so.
Just as I made the decision to abandon him, the collapsed man croaked, “H…hel…”
Then I noticed the dark shadow behind him.
I couldn’t quite make it out. At first, I thought it was just something silhouetted against the light behind it, but then I noticed it was a figure with black fabric covering their face. They wore a black pointed hat and a black robe that went all the way down to their feet, and they held a forked staff with a red jewel between the prongs.
If they happened to have a pointy nose, they would be the spitting image of a witch in a story. I thought it might just be a costume, but even standing there, the figure exuded a menacing presence. I intuited that whatever was standing before me, they were the real thing.
Alarm bells clanged inside my head. They were warning me not to get involved with whatever this was. But as I moved to leave, the figure swung the staff.
“O Demonic Crown,” said a muffled voice. Instantly my head began to throb. It was like I was stuck inside a giant vise. Was it sorcery?
“Who are you?” I demanded. “An agent of that obscene sun god?”
There was no response. The pain only got worse, moment by moment. Compared to this, the clobbering from that would-be hero was like a feather’s caress.
It was daytime, so I had more than a good chance of winning in the sunlight, but the witch kept the staff raised and refused to leave the shade of the alley.
For whatever reason, their target appeared to be me. No one else was around, so I would just have to fight. I squeezed the temporary sun in my pocket. Suddenly, I felt a hand grabbing at my leg. Dammit—the collapsed man.
“H-hel…”
“That’s what I was going to say.”
I’d been wary of him, but the pain caused my concentration to lapse. He had my ankle in his hand. It didn’t matter whether he was an accomplice or just another victim. If he was going to stop me from acting, I’d show him no mercy.
I lifted my leg back, ready to kick him off me—and then I gasped.
He had no eyes. The skin of his face was peeled off, and the white of his skull showed between tufts of hair. Was he undead? What was he doing there? I kicked the head out of revulsion, and it popped clean off. Like a ball with a hole in it, the skull bounced unevenly across the stones. It struck a wall and began to emit something like steam as it vanished. The torso was disappearing, too.