Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [174]
At last everyone was sitting comfortably in their chairs, and the questions proceeded quickly. Wataru’s group hadn’t witnessed the accident directly, but they had seen the aftermath.
It was a stroke of luck that there hadn’t been any serious injuries, Captain Ronmel concluded. “We’ve had a number of accidents involving darbaba carts turning over on roads all over the country lately. We investigate them seriously because some of them seem to have happened on purpose in order to obstruct traffic.”
That’s why they came to investigate in the middle of the night.
“Everyone was quite surprised that you came here yourself, Captain,” Kee Keema said.
Captain Ronmel looked at Wataru. “I thought it might be a good chance to meet this Traveler that Kutz was talking about. I counted the days since you left Gasara and determined he would be around here by now.”
“Kutz told you about me?”
“‘For all his crying like a baby, he’s a brazenly clever little one,’” The captain said, doing a passable imitation of Kutz. His eyes were smiling. Wataru laughed.
“That sounds just like her!”
“We’ve known each other for a while. You might say we’re rivals.”
Because you dumped her?
“By the way, there was another thing I wanted to ask. You stopped at Maquiba, did you not?”
Wataru nodded.
“Then you were there at the time of the fire?”
“No. When we arrived, it had already gone out.”
Captain Ronmel’s eyes glinted. “Then you heard the story of the traveling sorcerer—the one who put out the wildfire?”
Wataru related the tale as he had heard it in Maquiba. The captain listened intently to every word, and the young Knight recorder sitting next to him scribbled furiously in his book.
“The power of the seawyrm—a water incantation, then,” the captain muttered. “And the sorcerer was a boy as well…”
“That’s what they said.”
“Could he be another Traveler, such as yourself?”
“I believe he is. I think he’s my friend. He came here before me.”
For some reason a shadow moved across Captain Ronmel’s eyes. Wataru had noticed nothing of the sort when he told the captain he was a Traveler. Why should this news of another Traveler concern him?
“Have you met this friend of yours here?”
“No. I thought I might like to though, so I’ve been following him. That’s why we’re going to Lyris.”
The captain nodded slowly and rubbed his jaw with one hand. His brow furrowed ever so slightly. “You, or rather, Wayfinder Lau…” He glanced at the recorder. “On second thought, don’t write that. It has nothing to do with the matter at hand. I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time,” he said, turning back to Wataru.
He told them they would examine the overturned cart once dawn broke and then they would head back to Maquiba. They were going to investigate the cause of the wildfire. When Wataru commented how busy they were, the captain shook his head. “We’ve been running ourselves ragged dealing with monsters of late—there always seems to be more, and they grow fiercer every year. Most local peacekeeping and investigations we’ve had to leave to the Highlanders. And of course, that won’t do.”
“It reminds me of something that Puck was saying,” Meena said. “In the towns they passed through, they always heard one or two stories of people being attacked by monsters. They had never heard such stories before now.”
“Same here,” Kee Keema nodded. “That’s all people talk about nowadays in the darbaba huts. Stories of mountain-rats, usually quite tame, forming great masses and attacking udai and the like. And then there was that roaming gimblewolf near Gasara.”
“That’s right. We had to send the Highlanders out with one of our patrols, we were spread so thin,” Captain Ronmel said with a wry smile. “Kutz had a field day with that one. That’s right, you were one of the ones that rode out. Thank you for your help. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
Wataru and the others went back to their tent. Kee Keema and Meena fell asleep right away, but Wataru couldn’t get his eyes to shut. He kept thinking about that suspicious shadow he saw briefly across Captain Ronmel’s face. He couldn