46. Last Escape

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/49/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Pitiful, he had said—as if she had not heard it until she was sick of hearing it.
Camilla, too, must have thought of her that way.
Lily thought it of herself.
Pitiful.
However far she chased an ideal, there was no happiness of her own in it.
For the country. For the king. For her parents.
Anyone who looked at a woman who held no wish of her own would think the same.

“Yes. I am pitiful … But I will not turn back now. Not if it means wasting the life I have already spent.”

She mocked herself as she ran toward Sara’s rooms.
Still—not to pass a single soldier on the way was strange, even for this.
If Madis had been right, and the castle had been as good as occupied the moment the soldiers became women, then this emptiness, too, was part of the vampires’ design.

“Come to think of it—Glass, among the soldiers. Ah. No wonder the feeling was familiar.”

What rose in her mind was a beautiful soldier with black hair.
Lily did not know, of course, that Glass—that is, Chigusa—carried the power inherited from Camilla.
So she had decided that the nostalgia she had felt upon meeting Chigusa was simply because they were of the same kind.

She reached Sara’s rooms in no time, and without obstacle.
An emergency. Knocking could wait.
She opened the door roughly. Sara, who had been looking out the window in boredom, turned in surprise.

“Wha—what is the meaning of this, bursting in without even knocking?”

There was no time to explain.
Lily crossed the room in long strides and took Sara’s hand.

“Ask nothing. Follow me.”
“… I—I understand. You will explain the reason presently, will you not?”

Lily nodded without speaking.
She drew Sara away from the window, then drew her sword.
She could not step beyond the human range—but her swordsmanship had reached what people called mastery.
She swung at a speed Sara’s eyes could not follow, and shattered the glass.

“We are going out this way?”

Lily did not answer in words. A nod was enough.
She lifted Sara into her arms and jumped, without hesitation, from the window.

“Hyaaaaaaaaa?!”

They were on the third floor. An ordinary human might well have died of the fall—still more one in armor, however light, and carrying another person besides. Instant death would not have been strange.
Sara’s scream was reasonable.
Lily landed cleanly on both feet.
Then she ran, apparently unhurt.

“Th-that was terrible for my heart …”
“Forgive me, Your Highness. Endure a little longer.”

First they had to leave the castle.
What came after could wait until they reached safety.
Lily cleared the moat, made for the castle town, and chose the emptier streets, aiming for the Discard District.
She ran alleys she would never have used in ordinary times, Sara in her arms.
When Sara judged the moment right, she asked, timidly:

“Why did we have to flee the castle?”

Lily hesitated.
Did she need to tell the girl, here, that her father was dead? The conflict was real.
But concealment would not last.
Better to tell her now, so the wound might begin to close a moment sooner.

“The castle is already occupied by vampires. The knightly order is annihilated, myself excepted. The king, too, is most likely already dead.”
“The knights—?! And Father, dead …”

Sara was surprised, but she did not seem greatly shocked.
The king had never given her a father’s love.
They had been strangers who happened to live in the same building.
However much blood connected them, if no relation had been built, death would draw only this much.

“It cannot have been Camilla?”
“Impossible. I killed her. There is no mistake.”
“… Yes. You did.”

Camilla had been an abomination who had tried to make Sara other than human—and still Sara did not seem to hate her much.
That, more than anything, shook Lily.
Had cutting Camilla down been a mistake after all?

◇◇◇

 

When Lily had confirmed the way ahead was empty, she signaled to Sara waiting behind.
They ran together to the next corner.
They repeated it, and drew steadily nearer the Discard District.
Along the way, Lily noticed what had happened to the town.

“This place, too, perhaps.”
“Is something the matter?”
“I would like to think I am imagining it. It seems I am not.”

Every human she had seen had been a woman.
Even when she peered from an alley toward a main street, everyone walking was a woman.
Weekday, midday, the hour when men would be at work—even so, this was not normal.
It was the same as the soldiers in the castle.

“I suspect the people of the town have already been turned into vampires.”
“All of them?”

Lily nodded. Sara went pale.
Not only the castle—the kingdom’s greatest town, occupied by things that were no longer human.
It was a matter that could shake the state.

“But they are vampires, and they walk about in daylight. That cannot be right!”
“They do not look like Camilla, either. One would not know them for vampires at a glance. A new kind, perhaps—or they have evolved.”
“Can we win against such a thing?”
“For now we can only go on without being found. There should be a hole ahead that leads to the Discard District. We make for that first.”

She quickened the pace to the limit of what Sara could match.
The hole they reached was the one Chigusa and Ellis had once used to pass from the Discard District into the castle town.
Lily went first on all fours, confirmed that the Discard District side was safe, and called Sara through.
Sara, being smaller, slipped through easily.
Lily at once began brushing sand from the princess’s skirt. Sara gave a strained little smile. “You needn’t mind such things at a time like this.”
Indeed—they were about to leave the town and go into flight. Fussing over a little dirt was a waste of time.

They had escaped the castle town, at least. Relieved, they began to search their surroundings.
The Discard District was not sparsely peopled.
Unlike the castle town, however, they did not see even a woman walking.

“Is there no one?”

Sara held Lily’s hand, uneasy.
The place had always had a peculiar atmosphere. Empty, it had a different kind of dread.

“They may have housed everyone who lived in the Discard District in the castle town as well.”
“Is that so?”
“Ashera and Lalilalai grew close enough, once they became vampires. That sort of creature, I suppose.”
“Is that … a bad thing?”

It was an innocent question, and a pure one.
Lily had no answer.
It was a road she herself had passed not long ago, and she still had not found the end of it.

“For now we go on. Thinking will get us nowhere.”
“… I understand.”

Lily gripped a little harder and drew Sara after her.
They went through the empty Discard District, searching for another “hole” that led out of the town.
Huge structures piled from scrap, which must once have housed many people, were husks now.
Insects and rats, at most. No human voices.
Sara poked Lily’s thigh with a finger while Lily stared blankly up at the hollow buildings.
When Lily looked down, Sara turned on her a gaze so round and direct it was almost dazzling, and spoke.

“I more or less understand why there are only women among the vampires. Then where did the men go?”

There had been, in this town, nearly as many men as women.
Where had they gone?
Lily remembered Madis’s end.
He had been toyed with as a corpse, and had asked for death himself, and he had said:

“They don’t seem to regard men as ‘life’ at all—myself included.”

If so, it was reasonable to think they had already been killed—but—

“And Lily—there has been a strange smell from that direction for some time.”
“Which way?”

Sara’s nose was keen, it seemed; she was catching scents Lily could not.
They walked toward the smell.
Escape was the first priority. The fate of the vanished men interested her nearly as much.

Guided by Sara’s sense, they moved, and little by little Lily too began to catch the stench.
A raw smell, riding the wind.
And this direction—was it not the way of the refuse heap, where the castle town’s garbage was gathered?

“The smell is dreadful. What on earth—mmph?!”
“Shh. Quiet. Someone is there.”

Lily covered Sara’s mouth with her hand.
They hid, and she watched, sharp-eyed, a figure moving toward the heap.
The woman was dragging what appeared to be a man’s corpse toward the mountain of refuse.

“Your Highness. Follow as quietly as you can.”
“I—I understand.”

They whispered it, and went after her.
The woman was humming, in excellent spirits.
The man being dragged looked to be in his twenties, perhaps.
About the woman’s own age, most likely.
There was a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand.
Married—perhaps he had been her husband. The thought crossed Lily’s mind.
When the woman reached her destination, she flung the corpse down without care.

“Hih—?!”
“—Your Highness!”

The sight wrenched a sound of terror from Sara.
The woman turned toward them at the noise.

“Is someone there—? Hiding, so … a human?”

No mistake. She was a vampire.
They had been noticed. Remaining hidden would be difficult.
Lily drew her sword and stepped into the open.
If it came to it, she meant to be bait, so that Sara at least could run.

“Whoa, the captain of the knights! Lucky, running into you here. Looks like you aren’t a Demi-Vamp yet. Does that mean you’re running from town?”
“You are overly familiar.”
“Well, it’s not like I was planning to do anything to you, Captain.”

She was telling the truth; Lily felt no hostility.
If she truly had no intention of killing them, making an enemy of her here might be a poor move.
Lily had no certainty she could win.
Even conversing with a monster was humiliation—but she took the practical course, and sheathed her sword.

“May I ask something?”
“Mm-hm, anything you like!”
“What is this? To what end are you doing it?”
“What—”

The woman glanced back at the mountain and laughed.

“Men’s corpses get in the way, right? They stink, they’re filthy. Unlike other monsters, we don’t eat the dead, so if we don’t make a dumping ground somewhere they pile up. So we make a mountain of them.”

There was not a shred of malice in the words.
Madis had been right. They did not recognize men as life.
They thought of them as so much trash.
That was how they could throw the bodies they had disposed of into the Discard District and heap them into a mountain.

“The one you threw just now. Was that not your husband?”
“Ex-husband. I’ve got someone I like much better now. Honestly I don’t even want to remember I was married. It was an arranged match. I never liked him.”
“As I thought …”
“As you thought what?”
“I am saying I cannot accept that as a correct way of valuing things! It is wrong. It cannot be right …!”
“I don’t really get it, but you look unhappy, Captain.”
“And what of it.”
“I’m happy. No—not just me. Everyone is. A world that’s thrown away being human and filled itself with Demi-Vamps is overflowing with smiles that never used to be there.”
“That is what I am asking. What of it!”
“Is that … such a bad thing?”

She asked it the way Sara had asked Lily a little while before.
Lily could declare that the answer to the question tormenting her was “not wrong”—and still she could not see it.
The choice she could call correct ought to be there.
Why, then—simple enough.
She could choose it, and keep it, and happiness would still not come to her.

“Give it up already, Captain. Then you’ll get it. You’ll see it was so useless you’ll laugh.”

With that, the woman left.
Lily stood alone before the mountain of corpses, her head down.
Sara, body locked with fear, drew near little by little, and put her arms around her from behind.

“Your Highness …”
“We ought to leave this place. Quickly.”
“Yes … we should.”
“We will go. Far away. To a place Lily wishes for—where humans can still be safe.”

Lily nodded, and could not quiet the doubts coiling in her.
There might be a place where humans could remain unharmed.
But a place she herself wished for—where in this world was that supposed to exist?