A Step of the Mad King

"Hasim-sama. We have the place and date for the next Summit of Three Kings."

"Which country leaked it?"

"The Kingdom of Zuria."

"— Honestly. Crisca's always been the soft one in this regard."

That day, Hasim was hearing Aisha's report.

The next 〈Summit of Three Kings〉. Hasim intended to insert himself into it.

"Well — apart from this, she seems to run a tight ship. I'll save the lecture. And — at this point, I'm the small fry."

In an earlier time, Hasim had infiltrated Aios Academy.

Unlike the first and second princes — who were favoured by their father — Hasim had never been so much as tolerated, let alone permitted enrolment at Aios. So he'd gone in under his own steam.

He had attended lectures with a perfectly innocent face.

He had stacked the cover-stories to keep clear of the first and second princes; he had kept his guard up at all hours; and he'd had — frankly — the nerve and skill to actually pull it off. He'd been turned out at the end, when his cover finally cracked, but the fact that he had managed it for several months made him an infiltration operator on par with any seasoned spy.

For Hasim, those few months — until his cover cracked — had been an irreplaceable stretch of time.

He'd made a number of friends in those months.

Three in particular — who carried a subtle elegance about them — became especially close.

A slim man with hair tied back and an unflagging easy air about him.

A great-framed, blunt-built man whose eyes carried a quiet tenderness.

And — last — a woman whose cold beauty, by any reckoning, lived up to the praise people gave her: as if drawn out of a moonlit night. Always in deep blue. A thorned sort of beauty, and one she made no effort to hide.

That those three friends were, in fact, the heirs of the Three Kingdoms — that, he'd only learned afterwards.

Aios Academy, in pursuit of pure scholarship, kept political intrigue at arm's length. By long custom, then, students hid their names and ranks at the door, like attendees at a masquerade. So it had been pure accident that Hasim had become close to those three. On the other hand, their home countries bordered each other, and shared cultural ground, which may equally have been why they got along.

But unlike them, Hasim wasn't a legitimate heir.

Even so — when, later, those three had taken their places at the Summit of Three Kings, freshly turning the page on the era — he had quietly rejoiced.

And when those three, after the summit, had publicly turned the Three Kingdoms' drift toward Mūzeg-fealty around, and openly raised the same kind of noble pride Lemuse had once carried — that had lifted Hasim's spirits higher still.

He'd heard rumblings of that intent at the academy. But while everyone at Aios was wearing a mask, that kind of talk got delivered in a half-and-half tone — never quite serious, never quite a joke.

But then —

— They were serious.

He'd wanted to tell them, well done.

He couldn't. He hadn't been in a position to.

He had only just resolved on a coup himself. At first, naturally enough, he had believed — as with the earlier protests — that he could talk his father, the King of Lemuse, around with words alone. He didn't regret the path of attempts behind him. But looking at the backs of those three friends, who had walked so much further ahead, the time he'd spent felt, in truth, far too long.

"Um — your father. Is it really all right to keep leaving him be?"

— Aisha, quietly. Hasim came back to the present with a start.

"Yes. Let him swim a while longer."

"My father being so plainly a fool — there's a use for that, here. There can hardly be another king on the continent of his particular calibre. That far gone, he draws no suspicion at all."

That his father had bowed to Mūzeg in such open self-abasement might, ironically, be useful for tripping Mūzeg up.

The first impulse in him had been immediately, a hot clean line. In the end he'd stood himself down. The cool part of him had whispered, use the situation.

"I'll let my father be the cover. While we have the cover, we do everything we can. Crashing the Summit of Three Kings is one of those things. Until we begin in earnest, we cannot let either side detect us — not the inside, not the outside. — The inside especially. The moment the inside catches me at anything, they descend on it like flies."

Hasim recalled — with a small grimace — the spittle-flecked faces of his father and brothers, denouncing him.

"So. Whether internal or external, all the way through, we treat concealment and infiltration as priority."

"Leave it to me. I shall deliver Hasim-sama to the meeting chamber like a darkness mixed into the night."

Beside Hasim, Aisha gave a graceful bow.

That was beautiful, Hasim thought, internally. Outwardly, he chose a piece of pointed dryness.

"You're describing me like a parcel."

"Please bear with it."

"I know."

A wry smile. He waved her off lightly.

---

"And — tell Reynald and the rest to push the excavation of that deposit faster. If we mine the magic stones from that deposit, they'll find a use, eventually. Almost certainly. Look at how Kushana's been moving — given how active their formula-machinery industry has become, Muran is plainly working on something. Magic-stone-related, most likely."

"Magic stones, you mean?"

"Yes. Marchioness Myure brought back a report — the peddlers who circulate through Kushana have been carrying noticeably skewed inventories. Her eye for that kind of thing is, frankly, fearsome."

Magic stones, literally — stones that contain mana.

Mineral ores that hold spell-element.

By default, spell-elements sit inside living bodies. Magic stones are the rare exception: a piece of inanimate ore that, against type, stores mana. When one thinks of stone or ground, one tends to think of the earth-element lines drawn from underground veins; magic stones, in that taxonomy, are an oddity — a stone that pulls in mana proper.

For practitioners whose formulae run on mana, that property is enormously valuable. Spell-element type changes the performance of a formula; in some cases, it changes whether the formula fires at all. So in the practitioner world — where mana-element is the dominant fuel — magic stones are prized above other element-bearing minerals.

"I have your message for Earl Reynald."

"Good."

After Hasim's nod, Aisha paused — opened her mouth a little — and closed it again.

She was visibly weighing whether to say something.

"What is it, Aisha. Out with it."

He hadn't missed it.

Once he'd asked, not saying was off the table. She braced and produced what she'd been holding.

"— Lately, some of your father's retainers have been making roundabout complaints. It's possible some of them have begun to sense that something is happening."

She had not wanted to load Hasim's mind with such a vague piece. On the other hand, this small piece could light a fire later.

As his maid, she'd have kept silent for him.

As his spy, she'd have reported it.

Aisha's competence on both fronts was, ironically, what made it hard.

"How much of an act we can keep up, then."

"Yes. — What do you wish me to relay to Earl Reynald?"

"Hmm. If they get too persistent, he can deal with them. As long as the timing of discovery is dragged out as far as possible. — Flies that gather around for the meat alone, we crush."

A flicker of cruelty, brief, on Hasim's face. Aisha caught it. It surfaced for a moment and was gone again.

"Where my father himself is concerned — if it's not directly in front of his nose, he won't notice. Even if he does notice, he won't act, because acting frightens him. So the people who matter, really, are those around him."

Years of close observation: Hasim was nearly never wrong about the King of Lemuse's principles of action. There was an outside chance of his father initiating something dramatic — but if he did, with his level of judgement, no good would come of it.

Even so —

"…The leaks reaching outside the country are the part to watch. If anyone makes a move in that direction, tell me. I won't kill them, but it can't be helped — we'll bind them early."

A serious tone; then it eased.

"— Mind you, even if Mūzeg picks up the news now, they aren't going to particularly mind. A deposit or two of ore isn't worth the trouble of taking from us."

Mūzeg would not, at this stage, bother with Lemuse. That was Hasim's near-certain projection.

Lemuse was, fundamentally, a country with little upside in conquest. They were being kept alive in their lacklustre state precisely because of that. Taking the country would oblige Mūzeg to commit personnel to maintaining it — and Mūzeg's available talent and manpower were not infinite. The Mūzeg king, Hasim had concluded, simply found it inconvenient to bother.

So, since they could take it whenever, leave Lemuse's people their morale; let them find whatever value lay in Lemuse soil; harvest it later if the mood arose.

"…That's about the picture."

Not a picture that allowed full relief, however.

If Mūzeg ever decided to crush the Three Kingdoms in one motion, Lemuse soil could become useful as a pincer-base; from Mūzeg proper and Lemuse together, the Three Kingdoms could be hit on two axes.

For now, Mūzeg's force was committed to north and west — that scenario could be deferred. But —

"The instant Mūzeg's king becomes confident he can break the combined strength of the Three Kingdoms — that's when he turns. All at once."

That, probably, was the time-cap.

"…Before that, we have to be ready."

He propped his chin on a hand, tapped his cheek a few times with his fingertips, and narrowed his eyes.

If you started thinking through possibilities, there was no end. Every line was a might. What mattered was the present state.

Lemuse, currently, was transparent. No colour. From the fact that Mūzeg had not bothered to so much as glance at it, one could read that Lemuse had not even entered Mūzeg's field of view.

The first cause of that transparency was, no other way to put it, his father's foolishness.

In retrospect, that meaningless fealty letter might in fact not have been quite so worthless.

A small, bemused laugh.

"— Hah. Maybe future historians will record this — a Lemuse so visibly whether-it-exists-or-not that no one bothered with it — as the foolish king's single greatest accomplishment."

Possibly the King of Mūzeg had, looking at Hasim's father, simply concluded this one's safe to ignore.

Said with a laugh — and, in time, it would prove the truth.

"By the way — what of that Demon Lord party?"

Now he reached, finally, for the most important matter.

"As yet, nothing. As you predicted — the closest town east of Lindholm shows no trace of them. The residents reported no unusual visitors."

"Hmm. Nice to know they have their wits about them. — That puts them at the 〈Duchy of Neuce Gauss〉 or 〈Tot Republic〉, then."

"I have people in both."

"Good. — As long as Mūzeg or any of the other hunting states haven't found them, that's enough for now. With luck, we make contact early and channel them, by appropriate means, toward Lemuse."

He placed a hand to his chin and gave a thoughtful grunt.

"— And — what route they take from Neuce Gauss. Mūzeg, obviously not. The kind of escape they've staged so far suggests south detour — or straight east."

"What of cutting north-east — through the Three Kingdoms?"

"Probably not. The Three Kingdoms are the one route they'll likely avoid."

He turned the thought over.

"Better than the active Demon Lord-hunting states, yes. But the Three Kingdoms have a catch of their own. If anyone in that party knows it, they'll steer wide."

His face darkened as he tracked the thought.

"The Three Kingdoms once tried their hand at it themselves. Something very close to Demon Lord Hunting. They've moved away from it now, and I'll press the point at the Summit. But the fact that they ever did it doesn't disappear. It stays on the record."

He knew. The Three Kingdoms had, at one point, done something dangerously near to the practice. Mūzeg's sudden counter-offensive had backed them into a corner — they'd had a no other option feeling — but a hand once dirtied stayed dirty.

"Not hunting, exactly — but close enough."

Strictly speaking, the Three Kingdoms had press-ganged the descendants of Demon Lords living quietly within their own borders into the war. Compared to the Mūzeg model — in which Demon Lords were killed pre-emptively — there was at least some redeeming difference.

But the press-ganging was press-ganging, and some of those Demon Lords had been allowed to die in the field. That, in the end, was where the parallel to Hunting bled through to the surface.

Different. Not different. A subtle gradient.

Lemuse, in the same kind of cornered state, had refused to lay a hand on Demon Lords — and had been ridiculed as idiotic for it. The Three Kingdoms, not idiotic, had taken the practical route.

In fact: it was thanks to the Demon Lord power they'd extracted that the Three Kingdoms had, just barely, pushed Mūzeg back the last time.

"Maybe carrying contradictions like that is just the lot of an age of war. That said — pinning the absolution of one's own actions on the era is a cop-out I don't intend to take."

He looked out the window, sad in the eyes.

If he, too, brought Demon Lords into Lemuse, properly framed as a deal —

— but if Demon Lords die under our roof, the result is the same.

The instant that happened, the noble pride of Lemuse would, by his own hand, be marred. Hasim understood that with absolute clarity.

Failure was hell.

Winning alone was not enough.

He had to win while keeping the Demon Lords alive.

The very reason he needed Demon Lord strength was to stand against Mūzeg.

— Saving the Demon Lords on top of that — the cart is well in front of the horse.

Even so, that was the rope he had to walk. A thin, thin rope, in a headwind.

The logic that wove that rope was unreliable; at any moment, the gust called contradiction could cut it.

— But I'll walk it.

Hasim only looked forward.

To anyone watching from outside — a man trying single-mindedly to walk a rope like that — he might have looked unhinged. To anyone who could not see the far side of the rope, he might have looked like a fanatic chasing the idol of a god.

But Hasim, alone, did not doubt that the picture he wanted lay on the far side of the rope.

The man who would, in time, be called the 〈Mad King〉 by some — that day, too, was working steadily toward his next step on the rope.