“I’m surprised you let him do it.”
The man had indirectly caused the death of the guildmaster’s daughter and abandoned his granddaughter. Knowing the old man’s temperament, I’d have assumed he’d just kill him.
“Oh, trust me, I wanted to. But it would cost dearly to start trouble with the Devil’s Alliance. And even then, he was April’s father.”
So the old man got Morris to agree to never approach April and reveal he was her father. I understood his intent. In April’s mind, her father was a prestigious scholar, and he didn’t want that illusion to be shattered by the truth. So Morris kept to himself and managed a mobster’s secret haul.
“But then I heard from him just two months ago.”
Heather was deeply ill and had only a short time to live. It was a chance to make off with the secret fortune. He was going to take it and run. This time, he’d go clean and have a good life with his daughter. So he begged the old man to let him see April.
“But it didn’t work out.”
The plan got leaked, and Harrison, Heather’s subordinate, caught him. Instead of escaping with the treasure, they tortured him to get the location out of him.
“They even gave him drugs, trying to force it out of him, but he still didn’t tell them.”
It was during this time that the stampede happened and all hell broke loose. Morris slipped out of his cell. Naturally, the Devil’s Alliance went mad trying to get him back. The old man tried to look for Morris, too, but with all the responsibilities of dealing with the stampede and cleaning up afterward, he could only do so much. And part of it was that the Devil’s Alliance was keeping tabs on him, too.
“Somewhere, somehow, they found out I’d met with him. So that was why I came under suspicion,” he said.
That reminded me of when we were questioning that low-level thug named Rob. He’d said there was a rumor the safekeeper was a former adventurer and close to the old man. Someone must have been mistaken and assumed that because he was the guildmaster. It was ironic that this mistake was why April was targeted, just for being the old man’s granddaughter.
“The last I heard from him was just after the stampede. He’d blended in with the ‘Gentleman’s Alliance’ and was looking for a chance to make his move, but that was that. Haven’t heard a peep since.”
I’d assumed he had fled the town, but there was no sign he’d gotten out.
“You think he’s dead?”
“Probably,” the old man said with a shrug. “Despite everything that’s happened recently, he hasn’t come forth. And the Devil’s Alliance hasn’t caught him, of course. I’m guessing he found himself in the middle of some trouble.”
No one paid the gentlemen of the street any mind. When they turned up as corpses, they were quietly dumped in the dungeon, never to be heard from again.
“But you never know what might turn up. Let me know if you spot him. You seem to be good at finding hidden things,” he said.
So the trail was cold. The old man had probably given up on him already.
“Well, what’s this Morris guy like anyway?” I couldn’t search for him without knowing what he looked like.
“Like this,” he said, holding up what looked like an unfinished piece of artwork. It was an image of a young couple. The woman was holding a little girl. I recognized the girl, at least.
“I had a painter working on their portrait, but it fell to the wayside after all the unfortunate business. This is all I’ve got of the three of them.”
The family portrait was left incomplete, only a sketch. There was no finished painting.
“So this is April’s father, huh?” I stared at the drawing. I recognized the man’s face. “…You said they gave Morris drugs before he managed to escape?”
“It was Release,” the old man spat. “Based on the amount they were giving him, he had to be pretty far gone. You’d be able to tell, because he would’ve had spots on his wrists and the back of his neck.”
“……”
It couldn’t be.
To the very, very end…from the very, very beginning, I had committed a grievous mistake.
He was the gentleman of the street who died of complications after I’d used him as a test case for the decompositioner, the solution that would make Arwin’s black spots go away. That was Morris, April’s father. He had been trying to say something in his death throes. Perhaps it was his daughter’s name.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying not to let on about my sudden realization. “Stick around and live long. And don’t mess around with young girls.”
He might be a degenerate old man, but he was all the family she had.
“Mind your own damn business,” he said.
I was on my way down the stairs when a wave of exhaustion came over me, and I had to sit down and throw my head back. A groan escaped my lips.
I hadn’t been trying to kill him, but the dose I gave him was as large as it was because I didn’t care if he died. Nothing I could say would excuse what I’d done.
When April talked about her father, I never felt any kind of negative emotion from her. Even if he was a shell of his former self and had sunk to doing mob work, he was still her father. I couldn’t say if their reunion would have been a happy one or a tragic one. But now neither possibility would ever happen. And it was all because of me.
I’d done a terrible thing to April. And yet I wasn’t racked by horrible pangs of guilt, either.
I had committed many sins in my life. I’d ended the lives of innocent people, those who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to protect Arwin. I had ended many lives before I met Arwin, as well. It was far too late. And this was a man I’d never really talked to. Yes, I was stunned when I realized he was April’s father, but that knowledge barely caused a ripple in my heart. I was completely calm. That side of me chuckled to himself, because other people’s lives meant nothing to him.
Karma might catch up to me in hell, but here on earth, no one was going to find out. Even the old man didn’t seem to notice my reaction. If I didn’t say a word about this to anyone, the secret would go to the grave with me. And from the moment I had tied my fate to Arwin’s, my life was heading straight to hell anyway.
I was on a one-way path to Tartarus, the deepest level of hell.
“Here you are,” Arwin said when I got back to the first floor. She’d left for the dungeon that morning, so I hadn’t expected to see her still around.
“…Is something wrong?” she asked. I thought I was hiding it, but she’d seen something in my expression.
“Just feeling annoyed. The old man stuck me with an obnoxious task to complete,” I said. I wasn’t lying—I just knew I would never be able to complete it.
“Do you want help?”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with fighting.”
“You think the only thing I’m good for is violence? Talk to me when you’ve got problems on your mind. As long as it doesn’t involve money.”
I couldn’t talk about my problems. Repentance just meant placing my burden on someone else’s shoulders. I didn’t have the right to escape my guilt.
Instead, I asked her if she’d forgotten something. By way of response, she pulled me to the corner of the room, checking to make sure no one else was within earshot.
“It’s about the ‘sufferer.’”
“You found him?” I asked, trying to brush aside the oppressive mood that had come over me.
“The name is different, but he seems to fit the description. He matches Donald’s records perfectly. I think he’s our guy.”
So he had hidden among the adventurers after all.
“Where is he?”
“Inside the dungeon. His body is, at least.”
That was when I realized why Arwin was finding it so uncomfortable to talk about openly.
“He was found dead in town the other day, bleeding from the head,” she explained. “According to the eyewitness, the attacker was a young woman. It sounds like they were breaking up and got into a fight.”
“Where was that?”
“Near the Golden Stagecoach, I believe.”
I thought of a young man’s face. A very stupid man who had tried to destroy me and paid the price for it very quickly.
“The body was dumped into the dungeon, and his friends recovered his items. But they, too, were found dead in there.”
“…I see.”
“It’s not clear whether he was really killed or just silenced by someone, but that’s the end of our leads. We don’t know if there are any other sufferers lurking around.”
I recalled a woman’s voice saying:
“I’ll handle the cleanup, then.”
“Excellent service, from start to finish.”
“Hmm?”
“Just talking to myself,” I said, putting on a fake smile. “Just be careful. You never know if he has more people lurking around.”
Arwin nodded gravely. “And one more thing—about the Scissors of Lombardi you mentioned.”
“You figured it out?”
Even the old man hadn’t known, so I figured we were lost on that one. But Arwin pulled out a dusty old tome.
“As you know, they worship a Holy Book. I found a mention in some pseudepigrapha.”
When compiling a holy text for any god—not just the con-man sun god—stories and writings that could not be verified were removed. These bits and pieces that were purportedly part of the religion but had been relegated to outsider status were known as apocrypha or pseudepigrapha.
“Basically, they’re heretical teachings. Many believers and priests don’t even know about them, so it was hard work to track this down,” she continued. That would explain why even Nicholas hadn’t been familiar.
Arwin looked around cautiously once more, then said in a quieter voice, “Simply put, the scissors are another relic with the sun god’s blood on it, like the Shroud of Bereni.”
After Bereni’s death, the shroud had been torn to pieces and scattered to the wind. A bit of it was contained within Arwin’s body.