Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [145]
“And they’re made up of different races, like the Highlanders?”
For some reason, Trone hesitated in his response. “Well, not actually. There are other races within the Knights of Stengel, especially the scholarly types, but the Lancers are all ankha.”
“Why?”
Wataru thought that was a shame. Surely the winged karulakin would be ideally suited as a mobile strike force for the Lancers.
“It’s politics, really,” Trone said, stroking the ridge of his nose with a finger. “See, ankha are the most numerous race in Vision. You could put all the other races together in a group, and the ankha would still outnumber us six to four. They are the majority, and we’re the minorities. That sort of thing carries weight in the Senate.”
Not that this had anything to do with Wataru, Trone explained. “The real reason Kutz doesn’t like the Knights of Stengel is, well, she just can’t abide people who think they’re so important.”
Trone paused, and then added in a whisper, “That, and a long time ago she got dumped by a certain Captain Ronmel of the First Lancers division. Ever since then…”
“What was that, Trone?!” Kutz shouted, shooting him a look sharper than the tip of her whip. Trone jerked back so fast his glasses fell off his nose.
“Uh-oh! Let’s be going, Wataru. We need to meet with the doctor down at the hospital.”
That morning, the town guard had opened the main gates to find a merchant from Bog lying on the ground outside. It caused quite a commotion. The man himself said it was food poisoning, but the opinion of the doctor was that it could be some sort of plague, so they had him secluded in a hut outside the town walls. At the hospital, the doctor seemed busy as ever, but when Trone and Wataru showed up, he smiled.
“Well, it’s not the plague.”
“That’s good news.”
“Yes, but I was wondering if you might talk to the merchant for me?” The doctor continued, speaking quietly so the other patients wouldn’t overhear. “He says he grew sick to his stomach after drinking water from a well outside town.”
His symptoms, the doctor explained, were not unlike the plague he had feared, but also resembled the effects of drinking a solution used to keep insects off fruit trees.
Trone’s whiskers perked up. “Do you think someone might have poisoned the well?”
The doctor put a finger to his lips for silence. “I can’t imagine why anyone would do such a thing. But the merchant, that’s what he thought. Though he did say the water tasted fine.”
“Where is this well?” Wataru asked. For moment, he worried it was the well at the oasis where he had met Kee Keema. “Shouldn’t we put a lid on it so no one will drink the water until we get to the bottom of this?”
“Absolutely, let’s make haste.”
The merchant, still in his isolation hut, looked pale and was in some pain, but he was able to speak. The well from which he had drunk was not the one Wataru had visited, but an ancient, half-buried well at the base of some low rocky hills to the east of town. The merchant claimed he had never drunk water from there before, but with the heat that day, he hadn’t had a choice.
“The hills to the east…” Trone muttered, scratching his chin. “That’s an odd place for a merchant from Bog to be passing through.”
The merchant scratched his head. “To tell the truth, I heard a rumor that a treasure was buried out there. Normally, I just travel the roads between Bog and Sasaya. This is my first time in these parts.”
A merchant whom he shared a room with in an inn on the Sasaya border had told him that the ruins of a church could be found at the base of the hills east of Gasara, and all the treasures that the believers had once donated were still lying there, untouched for many years.
Trone made a sour face at the merchant. “Then I’m sorry to say you’ve been duped. I know the ruins of which you speak, but there’s no treasure to be found there. It wasn’t the sort of church to ask donations of its believers.”
“It just asked for their undying faith?”
“Quite the opposite.