The knock came just as Haimer finished tucking a thin blanket over Mary Kikakujou and Rei the siren, both sleeping deeply on the bed.
At the sound he turned his head and glanced at the locked door.
The two girls had only just been through the reforging of their magic, so he kept his steps feather-light as he crossed the room, twisted the lock without a sound, and eased the door open a crack.
A dim amber sconce burned in the corridor.
Tsukuyo Inaba stood in that warm ring of light.
She held the white-sheathed tachi against her chest, and her cheeks were flushed a strange, vivid red — even the pair of small, tapered ears half-hidden in her silver hair had gone a tender pink.
Her feet were wrapped in spotless white tabi, the toes curling and uncurling with nerves, scuffing at the costly handwoven carpet.
She kept her head down, not daring to turn her sightless face toward where Haimer stood, terrified that one look would give away the shameless scene her "Mind's Eye" had just picked up.
"Kami-sama…" Tsukuyo spoke first.
Her clear voice had thinned to a thread, the last syllable shaking with an unmistakable guilty tremor.
"Lili — she's back. She's waiting in the hall downstairs right now."
Haimer glanced up at the antique clock hanging beneath the corridor lamp. The hands had indeed left midnight well behind. He gave a small nod.
The Pleasure Quarter was a money-pit past the gates, a den that ate people and left no bones behind.
The [Ishtar Familia] had deep resources, and not one of those battle courtesans was harmless.
With Lili's current Lv.1 ability, if she had lingered a little too long, if she had shown even half a crack, she would already have been cut to pieces and dumped in a sewer to feed the rats.
That she had come back at all said everything about what the girl could do.
So.
Haimer nodded, reached back, and drew the master bedroom door shut behind him, leaving no gap.
"Let's go. We'll see what she has," he said, keeping his voice low.
The two of them went quickly down the oak staircase with its soft runner to the first-floor hall.
The Magic Stone lamps there were still burning at a gentle glow.
Lili stood alone beside the sofa.
Her trademark little red cloak was crushed into a wad of wrinkles, its hem caked with great smears of dark green sludge and water stains of unidentifiable origin.
She had come in such a hurry that her small boots were still printing muddy tracks across the polished floor.
She had spent herself to the last drop. A Pallum's stamina was never much to begin with, and slipping into a Pleasure Quarter locked down that tightly was work that could cost you your life at any second.
Lili's whole face had gone ashen with exhaustion, and heavy bruise-dark rings hung under her eyes.
Even so, when she lifted her head and saw Haimer, her eyes lit up.
"Lord Haimer, Lili is back."
The moment he came around the turn of the stairs she straightened her spine and planted her feet, too eager to speak to spare a thought for the sour stink coming off her.
"You must be worn out. Sit down first, drink something. Whatever it is, take it slowly. You did hard work tonight," Haimer said, and walked over without the slightest flinch at the filth and the smell, without lifting a hand to cover his nose.
He reached out and ruffled that dust-caked little head.
Then he pulled over two chairs, poured a cup of water at the round table, and pressed the warm cup into Lili's small, still-trembling hands.
He pointed at the empty seats beside him, motioning for her and Tsukuyo to sit and take their time.
"Th-thank you, Kami-sama."
Lili cradled the warm porcelain cup in both hands. Thin lines of dried blood from scrapes crossed the backs of her fingers.
With that broad, lingering warmth still on the crown of her head, a redness she could not control rose fast in her eyes, and the tears welled straight up with it.
Back in her days with the [Soma Familia], she could gamble away half her life, roll through mud and monsters, and drag the spoils home, and nobody would spare her a second glance. They would only complain that she was fouling the air — and then curse her for being slow, with fists and boots to follow.
And now.
All she had done was scout and bring back a little intelligence, and Kami-sama poured her water with his own hands and patted her head and told her she had worked hard.
At that thought, Lili pulled in a deep breath and sniffed hard against the sting in her nose, swallowing the tears that wanted to spill along with every bitter year behind them.
She lifted the cup and gulped down half of the warm water, and the tight, parched grip in her throat eased enormously.
"Kami-sama, everything you asked for — Lili has it all."
She scrubbed her mouth roughly with her sleeve and wasted no time.
Her hand went inside the cloak to the pocket against her body, and out came a square of parchment, creased and yellowed, which she spread flat on the round table in the middle of the hall.
Then she snatched up the black charcoal pencil kept nearby for notes, sprawled half over the table edge with her small body, set the tip to the parchment, and began sketching with practiced speed.
"Kami-sama, the whole Pleasure Quarter district right now is a sealed iron drum. Not even a fly gets out."
"All those three-story houses with the colored lanterns out front have been nailed shut with dead planking, no gaps at all. Here at the mouth of East Street…"
"The number of patrols in the streets has tripled. Exactly three times."
"Every fifteen minutes a ten-woman squad rotates through a crossing changeover with no blind spots, and every last one of them has been swapped out for armed battle courtesans."
She talked at a furious clip while the pencil hissed across the parchment, and the tangled outlines of the Quarter's buildings and the layout of its intersections took shape fast.
Soon the tip came to rest on a curved mark like a pool of standing water at the back of the sheet.
"The front courtyard is basically sealed off. Lili went in through a long-abandoned underground sewage outlet on the west side. Just barely got into the inner district."
Then Lili gripped the charcoal tight and drove a heavy X into the center of the sketch — beside an enormous flower house at the very heart of the Pleasure Quarter.
"As for the area around this main building, the Ishtar Familia have crews working day and night beneath the main street. They mean to force up several very tall wooden watchtowers."
"Lili watched from cover. The equipment mounted up there is all giant heavy crossbows, the repeating kind."
"And the ammunition stores are ridiculous. The racks are heaped with bolts, and every one is coated in that purple barbed poison that kills the moment it draws blood."
Remembering what she had seen with her own eyes a few hours earlier still left her shaken. "The whole setup in there is honestly terrifying."
"It looks like they're sealing the exits on purpose, like they're bracing for a full-scale war with everything outside."
"And the security doesn't stop there."
At that, Lili bore down with the pencil and stabbed hard at the isolated three-story building drawn deepest in the sketch.
"Right under the noses of those battle courtesans, Lili worked around their blind spots and got all the way here."
"Fifty paces around that separate little building have been cleared so thoroughly a bird couldn't fly in."
"At the front door alone there are two battle courtesans standing watch, Lv.3 at the very least, and they never take their eyes off the bar."
"But."
A thief's sly triumph kindled in Lili's eyes.
"When the wind came up, it happened to blow the curtain on the second floor open by the tiniest sliver."
"Less than half a second — but Lili saw it with her own eyes. A big, golden, fluffy tail swung past behind that window!"
"A fluffy tail that size could only belong to the legendary renard."
"So Lili is certain. This has to be exactly where that girl Kami-sama mentioned before, the one called Sanjouno Haruhime, is being kept!"
She got the whole long report out in one breath, then looked up at Haimer with wide, expectant eyes.
Haimer studied the sketch, dense with her charcoal lines.
Genuine admiration rose in him.
A girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen had spent half a night under the noses of a pack of man-eating tigresses and come away with a clear picture of the vital point a major faction like Ishtar's was guarding with everything it had.
Talent like that was first-rate and scarce, even measured against all of Orario.
A born spy, this one.
With that thought, his big hand went back to Lili's head and rubbed vigorously.
An instant later, Lili's large eyes curved into two lovely crescents and the corners of her mouth flew up.
A whole night of fear and filth, of eating dust with her back to a wall and swallowing mud, evaporated under that one soothing gesture from the god she looked up to.
All she felt was that somewhere inside her, a place had taken root so solid that a falling boulder couldn't frighten it.
"Beautifully done, Lili."
"This sketch is detailed enough to strip Ishtar of the underwear she thinks she's got hidden away so tightly."
At the comparison Tsukuyo tilted her head aside, her sharp ears twitching toward the sketch, her fine brows drawing together. "Speaking of which, Kami-sama."
Her blind bearing was still locked toward Haimer.
"The Ishtar Familia are spending without limit to build a death-formation you can enter but never leave. They've shut down their own trade, and they've even hauled out repeating-crossbow towers."
Tsukuyo's fingers tightened on the cords of her scabbard.
"Do they mean to smash the pot since it's already cracked — gather their strength and move?"
"Move against us?"
Haimer shook his head at the question.
"Ishtar is arrogant, but she hasn't the nerve to make trouble out in the open."
"At her present strength, if she really dared march that many fully armed battle courtesans out of the Pleasure Quarter, Shakti's guardsmen alone could invoke the new statute and bring an army down to grind her into paste, all perfectly lawful."
"Ishtar is a woman whose jealousy burns out her brains — envy is the only thing she understands. Which makes the purpose behind all this commotion easy enough to read."
"After all, the thing that woman has hated most in her life is Freya up on her pedestal. And now, it seems, the list gains one more name: me, the man who choked off her Evilus money route with one hand."
"Give her the smallest opening and she'll find a way to press me down flat, even if she has to climb a staircase built out of her own people's bones, just to wash off the humiliation she's been swallowing lately."
"Only…"
Haimer laced his fingers behind him and let his upper body settle back against the chair.
His gaze came to rest on nothing at all in the air while his thoughts cut straight through the surface of it.
It was clear as a mirror to him.
What was all that frenzied fortification of Ishtar's actually for?
Sanjouno Haruhime, of course.
She needed Sanjouno Haruhime, and more than that she needed Sanjouno Haruhime's outrageous rank-up magic, the "Uchide no Kozuchi," to raise her own level and shake Freya's position.
An evil rite that required sacrificing a renard.
The activation of the Killing Stone.
Neither could be done on just any day you happened to pick.
It had to fall when magic ran fullest and the moonlight was at its most brimming — the night of the full moon.
That was Ishtar's real trump card and her real calculation. And that was why the Pleasure Quarter had been sealed up like a tin can braced for a fight to the death at any hour.
It simply wasn't something he could say outright.
"If Ishtar wants to come at us, the hand she's holding isn't hard enough yet. That iron-drum formation is only there to buy time," Haimer said, breaking apart Tsukuyo's unspoken worry.
"So for the next few days there's no need to rush at her. Let her courtesans go on standing watch in the cold wind at night."
"Besides, the main event on all your shoulders hasn't even started."
"Don't forget that little matter — you still have a live-combat wager against the Second Corps of the [Loki Familia]."
At that, Haimer turned to look at the deep night beyond the window.
Counting tonight, the nearest full moon over Orario — the one that drew up the tidal magic — was still a good half month away.
For that half month there was no need to worry about that viper Ishtar getting impatient enough to leap the wall and bite.
As long as she still valued the uniqueness of Sanjouno Haruhime's magic, nothing would happen to the girl's person. She would be kept fed and comfortable.
Which meant the urgent business right now was something else.
It was how this pack of green, freshly hatched girls established where they stood.
With that, Haimer brought his eyes back and settled them on Tsukuyo.
"The duel with the Loki Familia's Second Corps, and the deep-Dungeon expedition riding on it — that's the first piece of meat you girls have to pull together and swallow in the next few days."
"Orario has only ever respected fists."
"If you can't win a place on Loki's expedition fairly and squarely in that contest, then all the rats watching from the shadows will only fear you more."
"Only then will the many moves against the rest of that garbage have solid, legitimate ground to stand on."
"So the first thing is to get your priorities straight."
"Yes! Understood, Kami-sama!"
The taut string in Tsukuyo's chest steadied.
Thinking of the match a few days out, she found her hand closing hard around her sword's hilt.
If Lili could carry off a life-or-death scouting job that beautifully, then as one more member of this household she certainly could not cost Kami-sama a shred of face on the dueling ground to come.
"Good. Then the intelligence briefing is officially finished."
"And it's already late."
"Lili spent the whole night slogging through waterways, and getting that filthy is honestly pitiful. Go take a proper hot wash in the first-floor bath in a moment, and get a change of clothes from the cupboard."
"If you don't get your head on a pillow soon, the sun's going to be up over the treetops toasting your backside."
Haimer pointed at the clock on the wall.
Four or five hours left until daybreak.
He raised both arms and stretched back into a long, hard yawn of a stretch. His joints let out a run of dry cracks — plainly these last few days of nonstop work had taken more out of his own body than a little.
____
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