Four men were walking along the main street that ran from north to south through Friedland.
Of course, there were plenty of people walking along that street, but these four stood out. They were wearing full suits of armor and had swords at their hips. Any one of them would have drawn attention; all four together couldn’t fail to get noticed.
Friedland was not in a state of war, so they had their visors up, but even so they were quite intimidating. Their armor bore pockmarks and dirt, but when one considered that these showed the men had been in battle, even these details were unsettling.
Leading the four was a golden-haired young man. His neat facial features always seemed to bear a somewhat imperious expression—he didn’t come across as especially approachable.
His name was Arlen Lansdowne.
Originally, he had been a missionary knight of the True Church of Harris who had come to convert the people of Friedland to his religion. Actually, “originally” was the wrong word. If you asked him, even now he would say he was a missionary knight of the Church. Indeed, his armor still bore the Church’s emblem.
But as far as Friedland was concerned, the Church was their enemy. Arlen’s unit had failed to convert the town and had even lost the statue of the guardian saint, which was supposed to be a civilizing expedition’s trump card. They and their statue had been defeated by Yukinari, Friedland’s own guardian.
Hence, one would not normally expect them to be walking freely through town. But Yukinari and Fiona had come up with a plan that had won them over. If the unit had reported to headquarters that they had failed in their mission, they would certainly be disgraced. Hence Arlen and the others reported that they had succeeded in converting Friedland and would garrison the town with Yukinari and Fiona as their subordinates.
Arlen and the other defeated soldiers had few options. In the time since the plan had been proposed, the knights and the Friedlanders had come to a strange kind of coexistence. When a demigod attacked while Yukinari was away, Arlen had fought to protect the town—and he had done so again when Angela Jindel and her forces assaulted his new home. As a result, Arlen and several of the knights close to him had been given back their weapons and equipment and charged with protecting Friedland, as well as escorting the trade caravans to Rostruch. Within the boundaries of these responsibilities, they were given free reign.
But Arlen could feel the townspeople watching him as he walked along, and see their various reactions. Many of them scuttled away as the knights drew near, and more than a few looked deeply anxious. Yukinari and Fiona had made it clear that they felt indebted to Arlen, so there was no longer open hostility toward him. But many of the Friedlanders still seemed afraid of him, or at least of the way he presented himself. After all, they weren’t very experienced with armored knights.
Most of the work Arlen and his companions did took place outside the town walls—patrolling the fields and looking after trade. It was unusual for them to walk the city streets in full regalia. Public safety and order was primarily the responsibility of the community watch, and Arlen’s group generally left them to it. Generally.
There was one other thing. Some of the villagers’ anxiousness could be attributed to the strange goings-on of late. That was, again, supposed to be the purview of the community watch, but as they were unable to figure out what was happening, these armored knights had begun patrolling the town streets. It was as good as telling people that the community watch could no longer handle things on its own, and that naturally made people wary.
“Captain!” From across the street, a knight who was supposed to be in a different group called out and came over.
“What is it?” Arlen asked, intensely aware of the stares of everyone around. He gestured the knight closer.
The other man got so close their helmets could have touched, then whispered, “They found another body. A house on the eastern outskirts this time.”
“Another one? How many does this make?” Arlen frowned.
It was a series of murders. When a man who had been working on the new fields was found dead, his wife had been suspected as the killer. But before they had managed to crack that case, another one had occurred. New victims continued to appear every three to five days. The modus operandi was always the same: the heart pierced by a single blow from a thin blade.
Whether or not the first victim’s wife was the killer, this clearly went beyond a minor conjugal dispute. They had never announced the details of the first victim’s death, so it was unlikely that these were copycat crimes perpetrated by someone else. Most likely, they were all the work of the same person.
But why? The MO made this look like the work of a serial killer, but the victims didn’t appear to have anything in common. Gender, age, occupation, where they lived—not one of these things was common to all of them. And that left everyone in the dark as to who could possibly be doing this and why.
Perhaps the one thing that could be said of all the victims was that they were residents of Friedland. That meant the next target was likely to be located in the town as well.
“Sir knight.”
Arlen turned, surprised at the voice. He found a strange-looking middle-aged man standing behind him. From the neck down he looked perfectly ordinary, but his head was clearly different from that of a human. He had green hair and horns bearing a striped pattern.
He was a familiar of Yggdra, the erdgod who watched over the neighboring town of Rostruch. In that area, they took the elderly, injured, and ill who had no hope of recovery and offered them to Yggdra as living sacrifices. Unlike animal-based erdgods, Yggdra did not eat them as such, but planted sprouts in them and made them familiars, like branches that had been grafted onto her.
Ulrike was her representative here, but at the moment there were several of Yggdra’s familiars visiting Friedland. They were helpers sent at Yukinari’s request.
“Another victim has been found?” the familiar asked.
“So it seems,” Arlen said with a grimace. He found Yggdra’s familiars made him uncomfortable in a number of ways, but this was no time to be worried about trivial personal preferences. “I’m going to visit the scene now,” he said. “Perhaps you could be so kind as to let the deputy mayor know?”
“Understood,” the middle-aged man said with an exaggerated nod—and the next instant, he had set off running at a fantastic speed. It was not the way a human would run; no one could go flat-out like that for very long, but the man showed no sign of slowing down. These familiars generally retained their human appearance, but their human lives were long over. Now they were animated by Yggdra’s spiritual power, like dolls. They were no longer subject to things like physical exhaustion.
Arlen found it profoundly strange to have creatures like that wandering openly around town. It made a few knights in armor seem unremarkable.
He turned to the men with him and said, “Let’s go.” Then he set off for the site of the murder at a quick clip.