Shepherd Wizard

Side Story 10 - Turan Zahar (5)

"The heir of House Aravion escaped a single day after being captured?"

"Just how careless was the watch over her!"

Early that morning, the council chamber of House Zahar was in an uproar.

Word had come of the absurd news that the heir of House Aravion, captured not long ago but only the day before, had escaped.

No one gathered there was fool enough to misjudge how immense an asset, tangible and intangible alike, she could have brought to the house, and so their faces were full of discontent and fury.

"Whose doing was this? Surely she didn't break out on her own?"

"No. According to the guards' testimony, there was an assault from outside. The attacker wore the main house's combat garb and could employ Concealment at a high level."

A young noble charged with investigating the incident answered an elder's question with deference.

Concealment, the exclusive property of the Zahar bloodline, could be used even by those not born with that same power.

It was only that, ordinarily, it merely hid one's form while one's presence remained detectable, so it could not evade a wizard's senses.

But the guards who had been keeping watch before the prison at the time testified that their adversary had wielded a perfect Concealment, one that betrayed not even a trace of presence, and revealed themselves right in front of them.

"And on top of that, rather than forcing their way through the defenses set within the prison, they opened them entirely by proper procedure to get inside......."

"So it was the work of someone on the inside."

At the explanation that followed, the vipers of Zahar regarded one another with suspicious eyes.

A Zahar noble freeing the heir of House Aravion might sound preposterous at first, but surprisingly, quite a few had motive to do exactly that.

Chief among them.......

'One of the heir candidates, perhaps.'

If Meisa, as a captive of Zahar, were to bear a powerful noble, it was they who would be most discomfited.

For the ordinary members of the house, more powerful kin was a welcome thing, but for them it amounted to a threat to their own standing.

Rahmann, Alma, Perga.

The three heir candidates smiled bitterly as they felt the suspicious gazes turning toward them.

"Even if I say it wasn't me......you won't believe me, will you. But I truly know nothing of it."

"Same here."

"I wouldn't have stooped to such a petty method."

Laughably, even as the three protested thus, they suspected one another.

Just then, one of the elders turned his gaze to Turan.

It was Korel Zahar, Haroon's cousin.

"Turan?"

"Yes."

"I don't mean to interrogate you, but I heard that on the journey here you grew rather close to the heir of House Aravion......."

A suspicion that he might have set her free out of pity.

Even with the remark striking dead center, Turan laughed as if it were absurd and shook his head.

Fortunately it was a question he had anticipated, so he could keep his emotions in check and let no strange scent slip out.

"I just toyed with her a bit to keep her docile. You don't actually think I fell for a scrawny stick of kindling like that, do you?"

"Fair enough."

Meisa, just before she was dragged off to the prison, had been better off than in the days when she'd been little more than a skeleton, yet she was far too gaunt to be called a beauty, which lent his words credibility.

At the blatant mockery the others snickered as well, then caught the gravity of the mood and fell silent.

"Besides, with that woman gone, the credit I earned has been rendered meaningless, hasn't it. If anything, I'm the one with grievances."

"Hm, I merely asked, so don't dwell on it too much."

Though he wasn't of a standing to become heir, Turan's position, slated to be the next second-in-command, was hardly a low one.

For all that he was the Family Head's cousin and an elder, it was no easy thing for one noble among countless others to press him.

Once Korel backed off, no one provoked Turan any further.

The discussion went on afterward, but no fitting answer emerged.

As was to be expected, the intruder had left not a single trace behind, so they had to rely on the guards' judgment, and all the guards knew was the one fact that the attacker had been a Zahar noble.

They could not even be certain of the adversary's sex or build.

The combat garb they ordinarily wore was cut loose so as to distort one's identity, making it hard to gauge a figure, and height could be easily faked by bending the legs.

"Then for now the culprit will be hard to find right away. How should we organize the pursuit party?"

"Let it go. There's no way to catch the heir of House Aravion fleeing in full health regardless. The Family Head-nim and Talis-nim can hardly take the field themselves."

It was well known that the speed of an Aravion noble soaring on Flight Magic was the most superior among all wizards.

And on top of that, since they'd assumed she was already prey safely caught, they hadn't bothered to collect any part of her body, and so there was no means to track her either.

As the meeting drew to a close after nothing but such fruitless talk, a woman sidled up to Turan.

"What a shame, isn't it?"

"What is?"

"You went to all that trouble to earn credit, and it just flew away."

A tone closer to mockery than to the consolation the others had offered.

Looking at Berit Zahar, his stepniece, in truth his sixth cousin, Turan let out a small sigh.

'And this passes for kin.'

Meisa had grieved and raged so over the death of her sixth cousin, and yet why was the only kin he had like this?

Last time she'd fawned all over the heir of Varaha, so she might as well just go off traveling with the man.

When Turan narrowed his ash-gray eyes, stepped closer, and looked down at her, Berit, who had been so smug only a moment before, shrank back.

"Just like you said, I'm in a foul mood, so know when to stop."

"N-no......I only meant to comfort you because I felt sorry."

Their relationship had always been bad ever since he'd driven a blade into her face at their first meeting, but as for who held the upper hand, Turan was something close to her natural predator.

All the more so once they'd grown older and their levels of Magic Power had drawn even.

Turan glared sidelong at Berit, who had withdrawn with a sullen face, and soon left the council chamber.

This much should have been enough to make clear that the escape had angered him, so no one would suspect him.

Now it was time to hear the full story from his father and uncle.

*

"Well done, Turan. Clean and excellent work."

"It was nothing, really."

At Haroon's praise, Turan answered modestly with a smile.

As father and son lightly cleared the air, Talis, seated beside them, broached the matter at hand with a grave face.

"Brother, do you still think the same?"

"I do. I believe Turan has grown ready enough to accept it."

"If that's how you see it, then I've no choice but to go along."

From their brief exchange alone, Turan could guess at the situation.

Haroon intended to reveal something he had kept secret all this while, and Talis thought it still too soon.

And of the two, the one who held the deciding say was Haroon.

What he had to do at such a time was show that he was ready to listen.

When he lowered his eyes and adopted a submissive bearing, Haroon regarded it with satisfaction, then spoke.

"It's the first time I've ever laid out a tale like this, so I hardly know where to begin......."

The story Haroon proceeded to unfold was truly shocking.

By his account, Haroon and Talis, along with part of House Zahar's leadership, were not human.

The Preah God Tribe.

In the distant ancient past, the spirits of those great beings who had descended from the heavens and saved humankind had remained upon this earth, dwelling within human bodies, or so he claimed.

"Th-then......you mean Father and Uncle are gods?"

Turan felt it almost blasphemous to dare call the two of them Father and Uncle at all.

He was not especially more devout than others, but he too, as befit a young noble, had revered the gods who were the wellspring of the power flowing in his blood.

At this Haroon laughed heartily and pulled Turan into his broad embrace.

"Think of it however you like, but know at least that I regard you as my son. Truly, I mean it."

"Father."

"You don't call me Papa the way you did as a child anymore. When you first called me Father, it stung me so."

Talis, watching the warm scene between father and son with a faintly disdainful look, gave a small cough.

"You of all people can guess why we're disclosing this, can't you?"

"The upper echelons of House Aravion are the same, then."

"Yes. And not only them, but Nagin, Carmine, Varaha, and Ruvan, all of them are the same."

To begin with, the Great Noble Houses themselves were, for the most part, founded and sustained by them, Talis said flatly.

Turan did not miss that one house was absent from those he'd named.

"What about Lavitas?"

"That one rose on its own. It's rare, but once every few centuries a house like that is bound to arise."

Turan, too, knew that there had been a few Great Noble Houses that had sprung up and then vanished in regions the current Great Houses did not occupy.

Most had been destroyed by internal strife or by conflict with another Great House, and Zahar, too, had once wiped out a fledgling Great House.

"In any case, Meisa is a body that the master of House Aravion will one day use, which is why she's awkward for us to touch. We have to regard them and House Nagin as effectively one faction, and House Nagin has far more hidden strength than is known, which makes them troublesome to fight."

By Talis's account, the world's political landscape was in fact vastly different from what people commonly believed.

For one, Aravion and Nagin, thought to be bound by no more than a light marriage alliance, were in truth as good as a single bloc.

The combined force of Zahar and Varaha was, by comparison, somewhat looser in its cohesion, while Ruvan stayed neutral and Carmine was closer to a common enemy.

But Turan could not bring himself to take in the explanation that followed.

The shock delivered by what he'd heard just before was simply too great.

"A body the master of House Aravion will use, you said."

"Yes. I suppose I must confess that we don't dwell in human bodies and grow up in them from infancy."

The gods, he said, did not come into being as newborn bodies but had carried on their immortality by settling into the flesh of humans already fully grown.

Talis explained it calmly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

But Turan found it hard to accept meekly.

For it meant that Meisa, that the very person of the woman who had stolen his lips the night before, would be replaced by that of a god.

No, perhaps, since she'd fled the house, it might not come to that.......

That thought lasted only a moment before a new realization came naturally to Turan.

"Was I, too, fated to become someone's body?"

"Had that been so, I wouldn't be telling you this. Kindly informing livestock that it's going to be slaughtered would be far too cruel, wouldn't it."

Yet for all that denial, there was no guarantee those words were true.

For Talis, like Turan, was a born master of deceit and performance.

But Haroon, his own father, who gazed at him so tenderly from beside Talis, was the one man Turan believed would not deceive him, and so it was to Haroon that he turned his gaze.

"Turan, what kind of god do you suppose I originally was?"

"Hm? Why, surely......you must be the Night Hunter."

Ancestor of Zahar, doom of the giants, he who shoots down the night.

At that, Haroon smiled and shook his head.

"Regrettably, no. I was merely one of the Attendant Gods who followed him. One who couldn't even leave a proper name in history. And the same goes for Talis."

"Then, where did he......."

"Right here."

Poke. Haroon lightly jabbed a finger into Turan's chest.

"You are the Night Hunter himself, Turan."

By Haroon's account, several thousand years ago, at the time of the Preah God Tribe's downfall, most of the powerful gods could not remain on earth and had departed for the heavens.

And so, decades ago, they had performed a certain rite to summon one of their number, the Night Hunter, back to earth.

The product of that rite was Turan himself.

"But, I......."

"You mean you fall far short of being the Night Hunter's reincarnation?"

"Yes."

Turan took pride in his own skill with magic, but objectively the power he'd been born with fell short for a god's reincarnation.

At his very best he'd amount to no more than the Talis before him.

He was still growing by leaps and bounds as he devoured Magic Power, but he could sense that his limit was no longer far off.

"There's no need to worry about that. You still hold within you a tremendous potential that even you yourself don't know of. All you need is a little time and effort, and some new teaching."

"New teaching?"

"That meditation method I taught you long ago, are you still practicing it?"

"Yes."

The year Turan turned twelve, once he'd awakened his Magic Power, Haroon had begun imparting a strange meditation method, earnestly urging him to tell no one of it.

One that employed all sorts of bizarre techniques, like holding one's breath or shutting one's eyes and screaming.

He had wondered what on earth use it served, yet he'd kept up the practice all the same.

Because it was what his father wanted.

"Good, then the groundwork should be well laid. Most likely you'll see proper results before long."

"To put it simply, what you're training in is a god's art."

Talis, who had been watching quietly from the side, added.

Turan could sense that Talis, though he gave no sign of it, did not much welcome the present situation.

"The humans of old called it Soul Magic. Once you've trained in it properly, you too will be able to call yourself a god, just like us. Perhaps even the Night Hunter returned."

*

From that day on, Turan came to belong to the Inner Circle, where the gods within House Zahar gathered.

It was not only the Family Head's close blood relations in the direct line who belonged within it.

There were also the likes of Ridel Zahar, who, when one counted his kinship to Haroon, was so far past eighth cousin that calling him a relative was almost embarrassing, yet who was recognized on the strength of his skill alone.

"Now, everyone, say hello. This is Otas."

"I look forward to working with you all."

Within the group, they used aliases.

Haroon was Caesar, Talis was Phoenix.

Others called themselves by names such as Gold and Life, and to Turan was given the name Otas.

"Otas, you say?"

"Heh."

Whatever its meaning, judging by the other gods' reactions, it seemed to be no ordinary name.

In truth, belonging here changed little of note.

It was only that, unlike before, he'd come to know a more hidden structure of power, one different from how things appeared on the surface.

He could be said, in other words, to have joined the side that knew the world's secrets.

"It's about time I switched bodies."

"Couldn't I use Alma's body this time?"

"No. The temperament's too different. Caesar may need that one. Pick something that fits from among the younger ones."

"Ah......."

To the gods, the nobles of House Zahar were as good as spare bodies to be swapped into at any time.

Even the three heir candidates were no exception.

Turan felt a curious sense of superiority in such circumstances.

The fellows who ordinarily regarded him as nothing more than their future adjutant were, in the end, mere playthings of the gods, whereas he was treated as an equal to the other gods.

But that too lasted only a moment, and whenever he thought of Meisa, gloom settled back over him.

Because Meisa, too, was among the 'playthings' he spoke of.

'I wonder if she's getting on all right.'

Not long after Meisa fled, word came from House Aravion that she had not returned to her house.

Through secret channels, of course, not openly.

Fortunately, Haroon and Talis did not ask Turan whether he held any clue with which to track Meisa.

Had they asked, he would have lied, but in his experience his lies had never once worked on the two of them.

'Nothing. She must have run farther than I thought.'

Now and then he tried Tracking Magic with a strand of Meisa's hair, but he could not tell where she'd gone.

Even using a medium, Turan's tracking reached only far enough to blanket the whole of the Enril Desert.

Unless she'd lost her mind, surely she wouldn't keep lingering in this place.

Somewhere on an island of the southern or northern seas, or perhaps hiding in some far corner of the continent.

Wherever she was, if she simply went uncaught for the rest of her life, he thought he could be content with that.

Never seeing her again would be a regret, but at least the gods wouldn't steal her body.

Another change that came to Turan from becoming a member of the Inner Circle was the training in Soul Magic.

The training proper was, quite literally, something close to a near-death experience.

"Open your eyes."

"Haah, khek, kuh-hurgh......."

"What are you trying so hard to die for? You've a long way to go yet, so get ready."

Turan, his throat throttled and his eyes half rolled back, made to throw a punch at the unruffled Talis, then clenched his teeth and held back.

Because Haroon could not bring himself to be harsh with Turan, Talis took sole charge of the training, and there had been more than one or two occasions in the process when Turan had felt he truly nearly died.

It was only a guess, but Talis also seemed to think it would hardly matter if Turan died by accident.

Even so, what let him endure it was pride.

That a god who had saved humankind regarded him as a son, and that he himself might be the reincarnation of one of those great gods.

If he could become the great Night Hunter as his father wished, then a trial of this order was one he had to overcome.

And so, several months passed.

After fierce training, Turan was at last able to activate his Spiritual Sense and project his Spirit Form.

[Did it work?]

"Yes. Well done."

Talis, who praised him for having greater aptitude than expected, went on to teach him how to use the Spirit Form.

The method of combining the Symbols seated within him to wield abilities that bent the laws, powers one ought never to have been able to use.

Among them was a technique for determining whether one's counterpart believed their own words to be true.

"It's green."

"Yes, that's the Eyes of Truth."

"So this is why none of my lies ever got through all this time?"

"That's right."

At Haroon's manner, as though he were preening over having fooled a child, Turan, dumbfounded, let out a dry laugh.

Was it that he had a gift not only for magic but for handling souls as well?

Turan picked up the technique of combining Symbols to draw out new powers faster than expected.

The sight of Turan deftly masking his magic with Concealment techniques drew cries of admiration from Haroon and Talis, and from the other gods as well.

"Wow, when we taught the other kids back in the day, didn't it take a lot longer?"

"I think Caesar's right. No matter how you look at it, he's no mere human."

"You don't think he really......."

And not long after he'd grown adept at handling the skills, one of Zahar's elders reached the end of his lifespan and passed from the world.

"In remembrance of Gabes Zahar's final hours–"

After the funeral rites had been completed according to custom, one of the four places for the final absorption of the deceased's Magic Power fell to Turan.

This was because the deceased's power was not of a level appealing enough for the topmost nobles, the heir candidates among them.

As he absorbed the power alongside three other nobles, he suddenly realized that his own Magic Power had reached its limit.

In the moment he clicked his tongue in disappointment, a sensation surged up from within him of something newly clicking into place.

'This is......?'

Peering into his own interior with spiritual eyes, Turan realized that a third Symbol had formed within him.

The eye and black mist that symbolized Zahar, and something like a bubbling, purple-hued marsh.

Once the funeral was over, Turan slipped away from the gathering with a haste that bordered on rude and headed for his private training ground.

'It couldn't be.'

Back when he'd been learning Soul Magic, Turan had heard from Haroon what shape the Night Hunter's combination of Symbols took, and so he knew it.

If his guess was right.......

With a fwoosh and a flick of his hand, dark-purple tentacles surged up from his shadow and coiled about him.

It was the power of the Shadow Bloodline, said to have died out in the distant past.

*****

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