Chapter 42

After the enormous flames rose into the sky, the relentlessly gloomy atmosphere in Kalamap changed unmistakably. Whenever its citizens gathered, they spoke joyfully of the flames that had adorned the city's sky, of that majestic sight.

A mighty being stood firm in the heart of their city. They would not simply be slaughtered without resistance if invaders suddenly descended on them one day. That belief alone let people feel they were safely within a fence, and breathe easier.

Yet the great wizard Turan, now the object of every citizen's adoration, was not in a particularly good mood. He had to sit in the city hall conference room and listen to a discussion led by Daruk and several other officials, along with merchants and guild heads who had too much invested in the city to leave.

"First, we need to find firewood and materials to repair the houses. Dozens of people have already frozen to death this winter."

"Food is more important! People will soon be eating one another, and you're worried about firewood?"

What did a nineteen-year-old know that qualified him to take part in this? Yet in the city as it stood, any policy Turan had no hand in was worth less than a beggar's orders. Only when he attended, listened, and gave permission could the officials draw on his authority to implement anything. They had spent their time listlessly shuffling papers not because there was no work to do, but because, stripped of the authority of noble backing, there was nothing they could do.

"But we haven't the money to import anything from the villages or other cities."

"Well..."

It took only a little listening to grasp how dreadful the city's situation was. Not only did it lack all manner of supplies essential to keeping it running, it also lacked the wealth and labor needed to remedy those shortages. Most of the people who possessed either had left for other cities.

It was easy to see why the neighboring noble houses had not gone out of their way to take over Kalamap. Things were so bad that waiting for the city to perish entirely and then sending new settlers to rebuild almost seemed preferable.

As he quietly listened, a thought struck Turan, and he spoke.

"I'll take care of the food."

That single remark instantly silenced the noisy conference room. One of the older merchants ventured a question.

"Protector of our city, might I ask how you intend to provide food?"

"I'll go around the area and drive whatever animals I find toward Kalamap. You can stretch the meat by making soup at first, then salt or smoke whatever is left. That should be enough to see you through the winter."

It was not particularly difficult for Turan as he was now. He need only fly around on the black eagle and command every animal within the Holy Relic's senses to travel to Kalamap.

Try as he might, he could think of no other way to feed thousands of people through the winter. In time, animals from farther afield would move in to fill the void left by those driven away. Everyone stared at him wide-eyed in astonishment.

"S-surely even you couldn't... No, I would never doubt you, Protector!"

"But to use your god-given power to keep us lowly people alive... Could we dare accept such a thing?"

To commoners, wizards were beings who wielded immense power to defeat monsters, not convenient laborers who did work commoners could do themselves. Having someone with such transcendent power perform a task as menial as driving animals almost felt sacrilegious.

Turan brushed those misgivings aside.

"On the Dakayn Plains to the north, nobles strike the fields with lightning after the harvest. It makes the soil more fertile the following year. What I'm doing is no different."

Several dozen minutes later, as soon as the meeting ended, Turan made a wide circuit through the air around Kalamap, just as he had promised. Stretching the Holy Relic's senses as far as he could, he detected animals hiding throughout the gray, rocky mountains.

"All of you, go that way. Once you reach the wall, stay still and don't move."

At his quiet command, the animals began moving one by one: herds of mountain goats, rabbits, even wolves and leopards. Even those hidden in undergrowth, invisible from the sky, fell under his magic the moment the Holy Relic detected them.

This did not consume any tremendous quantity of mana. Turan had controlled sheep as naturally as breathing since childhood, and animal control was almost as well-practiced a form of magic for him as slinging stones. Before long, the citizens saw animals flocking to the city and standing in rows outside its walls, waiting to be slaughtered.

"Hurry and kill them all...! No, kill the predators first, and don't kill all the rabbits. Put them in pens. Better to raise them, even if all we can feed them is grass."

"I can hardly believe my eyes. Nobles could do this all along? Then why didn't our old masters..."

"Our new Protector must be a much stronger wizard, old man! Didn't you see that fire?"

"True enough. That was foolish of me."

Slaughtering hundreds of animals, cooking their meat, and distributing it was no easy task. Still, with every official and police officer mobilized, and the newly heartened citizens pitching in, they managed to get the work done. After filling their bellies with rich food for the first time in ages, everyone's face was lively again.

With the food shortage addressed, Turan also resolved the lack of winter shelter without much difficulty. He opened the former ruling house's residence in the city center to people whose homes were damaged or who had no homes at all. It had comfortably housed well over a hundred people before; with a little crowding, it could accommodate around a thousand.

"B-but then where will you stay, Protector...?"

"I can stay in the city hall lodgings. They even have a bed. It's not bad at all."

Turan answered the appalled officials calmly. Having spent his entire life as a shepherd, and grown used to sleeping outdoors on his travels since, he felt no attachment to the mansion. Besides, the few remaining people connected to the house had carried off everything valuable when they fled, leaving it practically half a ruin.

In any case, this order too was carried out at once, bearing authority little different from a god's command.

"Now, now! Move slowly, everyone! The Protector does not want any citizens getting hurt!"

"Children, line up over here!"

"Are we really allowed to live here?"

"Yes, you are. Give thanks to the Protector."

"Good heavens. Instead of tending his sheep to slaughter them, this shepherd tears off his own flesh to feed them. How can we ever repay him?"

The citizens now lodging in a lord's mansion they would otherwise never even have seen in their lifetimes spread tales that elevated Turan still closer to divinity. He paid little attention to that reputation.

There was only one thing he wanted now: for the city to return to normal as quickly as possible, so he could find a lead on his mother.

* * *

A few days later, the neighboring cities noticed the change in dying Kalamap. They could hardly miss it: not only had the stream of refugees abruptly stopped, but merchant caravans were even visiting nearby villages to sell pelts and buy grain and cloth. Since Turan had never asked them to keep his presence secret, the merchants freely told everyone about him.

"Turan of Kalamap?"

"Yes. Someone calling himself that has reportedly become Kalamap's master. Strictly speaking, he calls himself the city's Protector rather than its lord."

The ruler of Vigen, a city three days from Kalamap, exclaimed with interest at the news.

"Protector of the city. Quite an interesting title. How old is he?"

"I hear he looks about twenty."

"That's far too young."

"Yes. But he reportedly filled the sky with flames visible from anywhere in the city. Even allowing for the fact that this comes from commoners, he must be formidable."

At his knight advisor's words, Vigen's ruler stroked his beard in thought.

Nobles aged slowly, but powerful nobles who looked young were nonetheless rare. Opportunities to accumulate mana were limited, so building strength took many years.

There were two main exceptions to that rule. One was a lucky soul who had gone on pilgrimage from a young age and built strength by repeatedly encountering monsters just right for their abilities. The other... was a talent deliberately nurtured by a great house through preferential access to funerals.

"And someone like that happens to appear at this particular moment, right beside Arabion's army, and take possession of a hollow shell of a city? Something stinks here. Badly."

The war between the two great houses in the Gray Zone twenty years earlier had profoundly affected the locals as well. Countless commoners had been executed on suspicion of spying, while some masterless wandering knights had been forcibly conscripted and sent to die on the front lines.

Even the nobles had taken sides and fought. Vigen's ruler himself had borrowed Zahar's help to kill his elder brother, an Arabion supporter, and usurp the position of House Head. Small wonder he was sensitive to the great houses' movements.

"Which one could it be? Turan Arabion? Turan Kaman? Turan Ravistas? Turan Zahar... That one feels promising. It has just the right ring to it."

"Shall we contact Zahar?"

"Now, now, we couldn't dare do that. When a subordinate acts as though he knows something before his superior has even brought it up... the superior finds that quite unpleasant. It feels as though someone has read his private intentions. Besides, it's only a guess. What if we're wrong?"

"Then what position will you take on his occupation of the city?"

"For now, we'll quietly signal acceptance. It would be troublesome to protest needlessly and offend either side. Besides, what's the point of objecting now? Dark Elves might swarm in and devastate the city anyway."

One thing Vigen's ruler did not know was that every lord around Kalamap was expressing much the same opinion at that very moment. The only difference was that they suspected the newcomer to be a talent from Arabion, Karmine, or some more distant great house, rather than Zahar.

And so, without quite meaning to, Turan gained the tacit acceptance of the Gray Zone's rulers as Kalamap's Protector.

* * *

Once Kalamap had regained some semblance of normality, Turan had Daruk arrange for multiple copies of his mother's portrait to be drawn and distributed throughout the city. Truthfully, he held no great expectations even as he circulated them.

The Gray Zone was not particularly densely populated, but it still contained eight cities and more than a hundred small villages. What were the chances that his mother had lived in, or visited, Kalamap specifically?

She had lived on Hisaril Hill ever since his birth, which meant any stay here would have been almost twenty years ago. There was also a good chance that anyone who had met her then had forgotten her face, died, or fled the city.

What he had failed to account for was just how popular he was in this city. Told that the Protector was looking for this woman, the citizens all but wrung memories from nothing. As a result, Turan found himself hearing all sorts of information whose truth he could not judge.

"Um, Protector..."

"Another tip?"

"Yes..."

The official who had come to report to Turan looked downcast. He knew Turan had been disappointed by more than a dozen worthless tips over the past week.

"Still, I ought to hear it. Who is the informant?"

"A man named Egon. He used to run an inn, but gambled himself into ruin and became a vagrant. He says a woman who looked exactly like the portrait visited his inn eighteen or nineteen years ago."

"Let's see him."

Turan had heard this sort of report more than once, but this time he had a reasonably good feeling. In particular, the man had given the imprecise figure of eighteen or nineteen years, rather than the neat, round number of twenty.

A little later, a shabby-looking man entered the city hall conference room, bowed to Turan, and exclaimed.

"Protector of our city, it is an honor to meet you! Without the food and shelter you've given us, I'd have died in the street like a dog!"

"I'm glad to hear they helped. But I'd like to hear more about your story. You said you'd seen the person in the portrait."

"Of course, I'll tell you! This was before I ruined myself, back when I was running a perfectly respectable inn..."

Sometime eighteen or nineteen years earlier, Kalamap had been in turmoil over the war between Arabion and Zahar. Things had not been as hopeless as they were now, but everyone feared that taking one house's side might bring the other's army down on the city to wipe it out.

Amid those circumstances, a young woman had arrived at Egon's inn one day and spent the night.

"She looked barely twenty, and her belly was a little swollen, as if she was pregnant. I don't know whether her name was Vije."

That alone made Turan's heart feel ready to burst with excitement. He had never said that she was his mother, or that she would have been pregnant with him at the time.

No, he could not be certain yet. The vagrant might have invented the whole thing, or simply been mistaken. Turan gently pressed him.

"Do you have a good memory, then? I'd have thought you might forget a guest who stayed a single night almost twenty years ago."

"Heh heh. I may look a little dim, but I still remember the name and face of the girl I liked when I was ten. I thought I'd be good at gambling too, since I could remember the cards, but then..."

As he began muttering to himself about how that had not worked in the gambling world, Turan gave him a little nudge back to the point.

"A woman traveling alone was unusual enough, and she had a fine, rather large horse, so she stuck in my memory. Besides, she seemed so nervous and anxious, as though she was running away somewhere. I wondered what sort of high-and-mighty bastard had gotten a beauty like that pregnant and abandoned her."

"Why did you think he'd abandoned her?"

"Well, she stroked her belly during her meal and talked to herself. She said, 'My baby, please don't turn out like your father.'"