The White God and the Black Dragon

"■■, ■■■"

Merea sent a few more words of Dragon Tongue at the land dragon.

The dragon reacted, but no sound came out of its mouth.

"Maybe it can't speak."

"A dragon? Aphasia? Or perhaps it's too young to have learned the language—?"

Shaw, head tilted.

"Hmm. Hard to say. It would help if Dragon Tongue could be read off the mouth shape, but the language barely uses the mouth at all."

Dragon Tongue largely distinguished words by the length of the soundwaves produced by a special vocal organ inside the body — not by lip-shape.

"It's reacting to my Dragon Tongue, at least. So it's not that the language is unknown to it. Dragons are clever; they pick up language early. If this one was in a pack at all, it'll have learned it properly."

The dragon races, by virtue of their abilities and rarity, tended to be cast as transcendent beings — but in truth they were not so different from other wild animals. Their faculties were, certainly, head and shoulders above the average; but, like other socially-organised animals, they ran in packs.

Sky dragons (Teishia) lived mostly in the upper air and rarely came down to the surface, which gave them an extra coat of myth. But even sky dragons, in the heavens, lived in families and made up small communities. Cortista had told him as much.

"Then — would it be the disease? Eating away at internal organs?"

"Most likely…"

A sad look came over Merea as he met the dragon's eyes.

The vertical pupils were faintly clouded — the disease's mark, perhaps.

"…Yeah."

Even so, in the depths of those eyes, Merea felt he could see what the creature was feeling.

"— All right. It's presumptuous, but if you can't speak, I'll go by your eyes."

He stepped into the cage without hesitation.

"O-oh—"

A scream from the monocled middle-aged man. Zaido.

"Th-that's dangerous! Weakened or not, that's a land dragon!"

Young, weak — it was still a land dragon. A flick of the tail was enough to crush a man.

"More to the point—"

How had Merea got into a locked cage in the first place? The key was still in Zaido's pocket. He hadn't handed it over.

Looking again, Zaido noticed that the cage's sturdy metal lattice had been bent out of true — deformed, as if forced apart by something.

He let out a sound of disbelief — no, surely not — pressed a hand to his forehead, broke into a cold sweat, and looked imploringly at Shaw.

"— Like this."

Shaw, with both hands, mimed the motion of bending the bars.

Zaido's face twisted with such astonishment that you wondered, briefly, if it would ever return to its original shape.

---

Merea obligingly returned the bent lattice to its proper form, then turned to face the dragon inside the cage.

A man with white hair and red eyes, otherworldly in his bearing. A black-scaled land dragon. The two of them — facing each other in silence — looked like an image out of some old hero's tale.

"■■■■, ■■"

While the others held their breath and watched, Merea spoke a final line of Dragon Tongue, as if for confirmation.

The dragon showed only the slightest reaction. No cry came up out of it; only those drowsy eyes turning toward Merea.

"What did you say?"

— Aiz.

"— Do you want to live."

His gaze stayed on the dragon.

"If we leave it… it really will die?"

Aiz, watching the creature with worried eyes, said it sadly.

"〈Fatal Draconic Disease〉 — the name says it. A killer. Land dragons, ordinarily, don't catch ordinary plagues — but a few diseases run only through the dragon races. This is one of them. A particularly bad one, at that."

The answer came from Zaido, not Merea.

"For my information — what's the proof this dragon really has it?"

Now Merea, from inside the cage.

"The tongue. A dragon afflicted with this disease bears a cross-shaped mark on its tongue — a death seal. Of course, I couldn't bring myself to pry a land dragon's mouth open. After it stopped eating, I couldn't see the tongue at all. — But just the other day, the tongue was hanging out, and I saw the mark."

By the time Zaido had finished speaking, Merea had already put a hand to the dragon's mouth and opened it — easily.

Even Zaido was, by this point, getting used to Merea's fearlessness; though his eyes did widen, he just barely managed to feign composure.

"There?"

"…Yeah."

Merea nodded and gently returned the dragon's mouth to its place.

"How long does the disease take to kill a dragon?"

"About a week."

"What day is it on today?"

"About five days since it started looking unwell."

The dragon races were, as a rule, proud; chances were it had been stubbornly hiding the signs right after onset. The real count was almost certainly closer to the limit.

In short — they were out of time.

"Just to confirm. There's no cure."

"None. If there were, this dragon's parents would have cured it. There's no way the dragon races know nothing about a disease that affects only their kind — the disease is their own natural enemy, so they should know more about it than humans do. But evidently they have abandoned this one."

"— So this one was driven out of its pack."

"Most likely. The disease only affects dragons, but it spreads readily among them."

Hearing Zaido's explanation, the Demon Lords in the room understood the whole picture.

And, at the same moment, laid the land dragon's situation gently over their own.

"■■■"

Merea ran a hand along the dragon's body and spoke another short line of Dragon Tongue.

"It's going to get loud in here. You'd be better off waiting upstairs. — Ah, is it actually all right to make some noise down here?"

The last bit, he aimed at Shaw — as if seeking confirmation.

"As long as nothing else gets broken, no problem."

Shaw answered with a nod.

"Then please, upstairs. Lilium's still asleep — if we wake her up with the noise, that's on me."

The phrasing was a request, but the weight under it didn't leave much room for no.

"Granted. Just don't forget we haven't much time — ten minutes at most. I'd be glad to have the merchandise restored, but it's no saving if you ruin yourself doing it."

At those words, one face in the room looked startled.

Zaido. He was looking at Shaw as one looks at something not supposed to exist.

Shaw caught the look, took his eyes off Merea, and let a small smile come up.

"Surprised that I've attached to something other than money?"

"I-I — well, more — I was surprised that Sherwood-sama would put the concern in plain words. That's the rare part, I thought."

Shaw laughed cheerfully at the stammering Zaido.

"He's done me a few favours. — Also, he looks likely to make me money. — Wait! — that does mean he is also money. Could it be — a spirit of gold in person?!"

"You're my superior and a fellow money-grubber, but I can't keep up with that logic…"

Zaido sighed, but his face was smiling.

"In any case — the upshot is, I wanted a piece of evidence here that I had treated him with care. I owe; eventually I'd like the ledger to flip. One must always be watching for the opportunity."

Zaido met him, once again, with a wry smile and another sigh.

"Let's leave it at that, shall we."

"Hm. Not entirely satisfying. But fine."

Shaw and Zaido turned and headed up the stairs together.

"We'll wait upstairs. I'll take Lilium."

— Elma, then, gathering Lilium into her arms and following.

"It's… fine, isn't it…?"

"Yeah. It'll be fine."

Aiz's small worried voice, met by Merea's smile.

The smile straightened her own back. She gave a small nod and went after the others.

And —

"It would inconvenience me considerably if Merea-sama died, so I shall remain."

Marisa, last, planted herself in place.

---

"This is going to get pretty loud. He'll probably scream."

"And thrash, presumably."

Marisa, with a vague sense of where this was going.

"Probably. We can't smash up the rest of the stock, so I plan to keep it contained inside the cage."

As expected. Marisa's unwanted forecast had been confirmed; she knit her brows in spite of herself.

"What if the dragon's strength exceeds Merea-sama's?"

"Then it'll hurt a little. — I'm difficult to kill, though. Just have to hold on until the medicine kicks in."

"…Medicine?"

What Marisa wanted to say was I am not at all all right with this, but the resolve on Merea's face was already too set. Telling him please stop was unlikely to land.

She tried, at least, to find what reassurance she could in his cryptic phrasing — and asked.

"You have a medicine that treats the disease?"

"Not specifically the disease. A medicine that works on all kinds of illness."

Marisa had, by now, granted Merea's outlandishness a degree of trust. But the man wasn't carrying so much as a single bottle. All kinds of illness was not, on the face of it, something she could accept on word alone.

What was he going to do? She had no idea.

Then she noticed she was carrying only one dagger. The other, she'd handed to Merea.

The earlier line — to stab myself — came back, and with it, the rough shape of his plan.

"Could it be — Merea-sama's blood?"

"Sharp."

A small smile. The praise in his voice was sincere.

He was already holding her dagger in his left hand. The point was angled toward a finger on his right.

"To be exact — not all of my blood is medicine. Only the blood from the ring finger. The ring finger of my right hand is called — 〈Ring Finger of the Medicine King (Carla Nazar)〉—"

Marisa had heard that name before.