Unruly Summon Chapter 15: Poison (Patreon)

Minister Dennis flinched at the noise, but recovered quickly, carefully putting his spoon down and standing up. Christine spun to face the door, crouching slightly with one hand resting on the hilt of her sword.

"What the hell was that?" I asked.

"Remain quiet and alert," demanded Christine, which despite not being an explicit answer, was a perfectly clear implicit one. Not that I needed someone to explain what a scream meant. My question had been rhetorical to begin with.

"You'll want to stand up," whispered Dennis. "Hard to react to an attack while sitting down."

"An attack?" I hissed, standing up. "What's going on?!"

"With luck, someone dropped a pan on their foot. If we're unlucky..."

"Quiet!" repeated Christine. "If it is an attack, Thomas is the likely target. Do not make us easy to find."

The sound of pounding metal boots echoed outside our room, then there was nothing but silence for several minutes while we waited with bated breath. Or, at least, I waited with bated breath. The other two occupants of the room remained far more professional. Christine, I could understand, but did this happen often enough that Dennis was used to it?

"I should be carrying a weapon," I muttered. Given that we'd been eating stew, I didn't even have a fork available.

"Use your magic," responded Christine. "In an indoor, enclosed space like this, use green or blue magic. Green if there's no risk of hitting me from behind, blue if you need to target an opponent through me. Under no circumstances use red."

"Well, no," I agreed. Throwing fireballs about in a building with so much wood around would just result in not having a building for very long, which was less than ideal when I was inside said building.

I resisted the urge to cast Magus Visus. I didn't want anyone to know I knew it, the range wasn't great enough to see anything I couldn't hear, and Christine's professional demeanour was reassuring that the situation wasn't that dire.

A few more minutes passed before a single set of footsteps came running up the corridor from outside. The door handle clicked, but before the door even opened, Christine blurred with superhuman speed.

The door opened very quickly after that, in a way that did not involve the use of its hinges.

"Knock, dammit," hissed Christine once the echoes of splintering wood and various involuntary biological noises died down. "I could have killed you!"

Wendy, who was now pinned against the opposite wall with Christine's blade against her neck and quite large splinters of wood driven deep into the stone blocks all around her, made an interesting bubbling noise.

"What's going on?" added Christine, releasing Wendy and sheathing her sword. Wendy flopped to the floor. The fact that she did so with a squelch was a fact that, for her sake, I would never mention.

Wendy shook herself, the question apparently reminding her why she'd been in such a rush. "Demon attack! They got Mary!"

"Please calm down," said Dennis, who hadn't even flinched at Christine's display. "You need to explain exactly what's going on before we can risk moving."

"They launched some sort of device through Thomas's window, from the other side of the castle wall. It released an airborne poison. Thankfully, because Thomas was eating over here, Mary was the only one in the room, but she's in a bad way. We need Thomas's white magic."

"This is why I said we should have had you stay in an internal room without windows, but Princess Stephanie was insistent you should have some natural light," complained Christine. "They knew your room and your schedule, but not the fact that we'd adjusted it today. That's a relief, at least. And... I'd like to say that we can't risk exposing Thomas to Mary; there could still be poison around, especially if it's airborne, and she's only a slave. But I suspect the hero in question isn't going to accept that?"

"No way!" I confirmed. "Where is she?"

"Her room," answered Wendy.

"We'll go there directly. Meanwhile, Wendy and Dennis, you both might wish to return to your own chambers."

Dennis nodded calmly, while Wendy looked torn for a moment before agreeing, leaving just the pair of us to rush back towards Mary's room. Half a dozen knights were arrayed outside it, one in substantially fancier armour than the rest. None of them reacted, though, simply staring silently in both directions down the corridor.

"Wait here," demanded Christine of me once we reached them. "I need to do what I can to ensure it's safe for you to enter."

She slipped into Mary's room, closing the door behind her and leaving me shuddering in the middle of the protective group of faceless knights. How could I not? It had been bad enough when they'd talked about assassination as something they were simply concerned about, but to have it actually happen? And for an innocent girl no older than I was to get caught in the crossfire?

"You can come in," declared Christine.

Mary's room was the same size as my own, but far more sparse in its furnishings. Little more than a bed with a chest at its feet. There wasn't even a night-stand, a magical candle with only a single orb of light placed on the floor instead. Another few knights were inside, waiting out of our way.

Mary herself was lying atop her bed unmoving, eyes open but glassy, beads of sweat rolling down her face. Most alarming was the purple tint of her skin and the dark veins visible just under its surface.

"I'm sorry, but... I know what this is," said Christine. "Devil-fire. Wendy must not have recognised it due to spending the war thus far engrossed in research, but I'm afraid your white magic will be useless."

"What? Why?" I demanded. "Sanatio!"

Far from improving, Mary shuddered, her veins writhing under her skin. She did at least regain a little light in her eyes, which turned to focus on me.

"Sorry..." she said weakly. "I have failed in my duties."

"What? How?" I demanded.

"My death... will make you sad..."

"That's hardly the most important thing here!"

At that, she actually managed a weak smile. "Do not... seek revenge..." she continued. "If you go now... before you're ready... you'll only die..."

"Revenge? Dammit, I'm not going to go running off in some sort of berserk rage to avenge your death because you are not going to die! Maius Sanatio! Maius Maius Sanatio!"

Once again, my attempts at healing seemed to achieve nothing, and doubling up modifiers didn't strengthen the spell any further.

"Why doesn't healing magic work?!" I repeated at Christine. "What's devil-fire, and how do you cure it?"

"The demons' weapon of choice early in the war. They imbued a fine dust with miasma, then spread it over a battlefield. Anyone who breathed it... Well, we already described the effects of miasma poisoning when you first arrived. You can't cure it; if you could, we could purify corrupted land in the same way. It's where the name comes from; victims feel like they're burning, with no way to alleviate it. It's a cruel weapon, but I have to acknowledge its effectiveness; we lost entire battalions before we came up with defences. But those defences are geared towards not breathing the dust in the first place—clean air spells and suchlike—so the demons still use it as a tool for assassinations. We never expected them to be able to smuggle the stuff into the capital, though."

I stared at Christine. I had superhuman strength and impossible magic. I was supposed to be a bloody hero, but I couldn't even save one girl dying in front of me?! Miasma poisoning was supposed to twist people into monsters. Was that Mary's fate?

No, of course not. They wouldn't allow a monster in the castle.

"You should leave," said Christine, confirming my guess. "You don't want to watch what comes next."

"No."

"Please, don't make this harder on yourself than..."

"I said no! She is not going to die. You hear me, Mary? That's an order. You are not allowed to die!"

Mary squirmed in her bed, her expression twisting up in the way it did when I asked her to do something that she couldn't. So far, that had been because of conflicting orders, but this time she far more literally couldn't.

"Maius Magus Visus," I chanted, uncaring I was supposed to be keeping my ability to cast it a secret, as long as there was even the slightest chance it would give me a clue. Alas, it only increased my frustration; it showed me something, but not anything I could make any sense of. Mana was blurring into Mary's body, no longer fully excluded. Mana was supposed to be excluded by soul, so did that imply Mary's soul was deteriorating? What even was a soul?

"Thomas!" shouted Christine. "Please, you're making this harder on her, as well as yourself. Do you want her to suffer? If we leave her like this, she'll eventually attack you, and that's not what either of you want."

"Miraculum..." whispered Mary, in a voice so feeble that I could barely make it out.

"Pardon?"

"Miraculum..."

"Is that a spell? A modifier? What's the image?"

Despite my desperate pleas, Mary said no more, her eyes once again turning glassy and staring unseeing at the ceiling.

Well, if that was the answer she came up with in response to my order, I damn well wasn't going to let it go to waste. Wendy seemed to think that magic did what I wanted regardless of my image, so I didn't even try. I simply pictured all the mana—every last drop that was visible to my mana sight—rushing into Mary all at once and making her better.

"Don't...!" shouted Christine, but her voice was drowned out by my own.

"Miraculum!"

The walls hummed as the entire stone fabric of the castle shook. Dust drifted down from the rafters and danced up from the floor as the magic seized the single word from my throat and launched it out into the world with explosive force. Blood followed it as I fell to my knees, struck with the nausea of mana exhaustion and coughing up what felt like half my windpipe, but I didn't care.

Why would I, when it had worked?

"I fulfilled my duty," declared Mary from her bed, still weak, but proud. "I didn't die."

Christine simply looked on in shock.

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"Please calm down, milady," said a maid of similar age and build to Mary, but this one wearing a uniform of far higher quality, with a neck free of any sort of collar.

"How can I calm down?" replied Stephanie, continuing her ceaseless pacing of her bedroom. "This very second, my father is risking everything. Two minutes from now, we could all be dead!"

"I'm sure his majesty knows what he's doing," replied the maid, who wasn't part of the conspiracy, and so couldn't offer any better reassurance. The first step of avoiding leaks was to minimise the number of people who could leak.

"I'm certain he does too! That's what scares me! He knows the risk full well, and he's doing it anyway!"

The maid, well aware of her place in society, refrained from asking what 'it' was.

"Screw it. I want a bath. My head feels like ants are nesting in it."

"A bath, milady?" questioned the maid, glancing around the richly decorated room. "Were you not trying to wear a mask of poverty for the sake of the hero?"

"It's already all over, one way or the other. I'm unlikely to meet him again. No need to keep on pretending."

"As you say, milady. I shall prepare..."

"Miraculum!"

The spell—and it very obviously was a spell—reverberated through the room, slicing through the maid's voice. The chandelier swayed above them, the vibrating crystals causing the room's shadows to flicker and dance.

"Milady?" queried the maid, once the noise had died down. "Do you know what that was? Shall I escort you to shelter?"

"He saved her..." muttered Stephanie. "I've never even heard of that spell before, but there's no way that was anything else. He actually saved her..."

"Milady?"

"Tell me, am I a good person?"

The maid blinked, partially wondering where that had come from, but mostly considering how to answer it in a way least likely to get her into trouble later. "You care for the kingdom, and you do what needs to be done," she eventually answered.

Stephanie snorted. "Only when it doesn't inconvenience me overmuch, otherwise I'd have followed Mother's advice and cut my hair. Mistreating and deceiving a stranger to save the kingdom? That's easy. Sacrificing a mere slave to save the kingdom? I can justify that to myself, too. But what if the sacrifice needs to be me? I don't want to die, but I don't want to see our kingdom fall either."

The maid remained silent, well aware she had no clue what was happening, and that there wasn't anything she could say that would help her lady.

"So be it," declared Stephanie. "I pray that Father is proven right, but even if not, this is an opportunity. If our hero can cure devil-fire... For the sake of the kingdom, we can't squander this chance. Father's contingencies would be a complete waste. We can do so much better. I simply need to deceive our hero one last time."