Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain
Sheathed Against Injustice?
Story Starts
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Chapter 6.7
The Gale’s Justice
Demands a Stakeout
Shirou had survived one hundred and sixty-nine iterations of the worst war humanity had ever devised. He had outlasted the collapse of human order, the incineration of history, and the singularity-by-singularity reconstruction of the world itself. He had stood on battlefields where the sky was made of gears and the ground was made of regret, and he had walked off all of them.
He had never once, in all of it, been fought over by two healers in a public street.
Well. Not exactly a street. There had been that incident at Chaldea involving Tamamo, Nightingale, and Lady Avalon, which had begun in a corridor and ended in a place that could not, by any architectural definition, be called a corridor any longer. He had needed to requisition new quarters. Da Vinci had made him fill out the form herself, grinning the entire time.
Shirou shivered slightly at the memory—though, in fairness, the ending had been fun. He had been in physical relationships with a number of the female Servants during those years, and no one at Chaldea had judged anyone for it. When humanity's continued existence hinged on the next rayshift, people took their warmth where it was freely offered. It had been simple, honest, and mutually understood, which was more than could be said for most of his life.
"Well," Sophie said brightly, as the lane finally emptied behind them and yanked him out of his reminiscence, "that was the best thing I've seen all month, and I process adventurer complaints for a living. Do you understand the calibre of absurdity I'm calibrated against?"
"It was a supply negotiation," Shirou said.
"It was a duel. Over the right to be your potioneer. The little one's tail was wagging."
"Naaza's tail does that all the time."
"Whenever she sees you, you mean?"
Shirou wisely kept quiet.
"He's gone quiet," Sophie observed.
"Leave him be," Rose said, in the tone of a woman who had no intention of leaving him be either, merely of queuing.
They walked on through the evening crowd. The lamplighters worked their way down the boulevard ahead of them, each new flame pushing the dusk back another few medr, and Shirou allowed himself to believe the worst of the evening was behind him. The pleasure district glowed somewhere ahead. The reservation at the Hostess sat comfortably three hours after sunset. Between the two lay nothing but a quiet drink and, if the fates were merciful, no further problems.
He knew better than to trust the fates. He was choosing to anyway. Alaya had told him to learn how to rest, and by every god in this world and the last one, he was going to rest if it killed him.
Rose was quiet on his right, her arm still looped through his—stiffly, like a soldier ordered to hold a position she disagreed with. Her face had stayed flushed since the Guild steps. Shirou had initially attributed it to the warm evening. Then to embarrassment over the potioneer duel. Then he recalled that werewolves probably ran hotter than humans—dogs did, back in his own reality, and the biology probably transferred… probably.
'Probably the heat,' he decided. 'Or she's still angry about the paperwork—probably.'
Both explanations were safe. He committed to both. And he was fairly sure he had already filled on his quota of the word probably for today—probably.
"When," Rose said.
"Hm?"
"When did you save the Dea Saint." Her adviser voice. Flat, precise, the voice she used when his file was open on her desk and something in it had grown a new limb overnight. "I knew about Naaza. I was there when you carried her into the Guild. Airmid Teasanare is new information."
"Ah." Shirou considered the various ways this conversation could go and discarded the ones that ended well, since experience suggested they were mirages. "It was a few weeks after I first registered. She was gathering potion ingredients on the upper floors—herbs from the fourth, I think, and a moss she needed from the sixth. Some cloaked men decided a lone healer looked like an opportunity."
"Cloaked men," Rose repeated. "Evilus."
"Probably. I didn't ask for their Familia affiliation, and I wasn't fully aware of that particular organisation at the time. I'd been in the city for almost two months by then, but I was a little isolated back then—just starting to fix up my place in Rivira and my newly purchased home."
'Oh, another probably overdrafted—probably.'
"And you dealt with them."
"I discouraged them."
"How many?"
"Rose, I was a food vendor on his delivery route. I had a carrying pole."
"How many?"
"...Six."
Rose stopped walking. Since her arm was through his, this had the effect of stopping all three of them at once, like a train hitting a switched brake. Sophie, on his other arm, made a small delighted sound—the sound of somebody else's paperwork assembling itself out of thin air.
"Six armed men," Rose said. "With a carrying pole."
"They weren't very committed. Men who ambush lone healers rarely are." He shrugged, which was difficult with both arms occupied, and settled for a sort of diplomatic ripple. "Afterwards she was shaken, and I was carrying stock anyway, so I made her a bowl of noodles. She needed something warm with a bit of sweetness in it. Shock does that. The body wants sugar and salt and something to hold."
"He prescribed her noodles," Sophie said to Rose. "The Dea Saint of Dian Cecht Familia, foremost healer in Orario, and he prescribed her something."
"She didn't object." Shirou frowned, because a familiar prickle had settled between his shoulder blades—the sensation of being watched, faint and multiple, which had been coming and going all day like weather. He put it down to the obvious. A human escorting a werewolf and an elf through the evening crowd collected stares the way honey collected wasps; he'd counted at least a dozen men tonight whose expressions suggested he had personally robbed them. "I was meant to be in Rivira by nightfall. Instead I spent the afternoon helping her gather the rest of her moss, because she refused to go home with a partial basket, and I refused to leave her down there alone. Then I escorted her back to the Tower entrance. That's the whole of it."
"That is not the whole of anything," Rose said. "That is a rescue, a meal, an escort, and an afternoon of shared labour with one of the most famous women in this city."
"It was moss."
"Shirou."
"There was very little conversation. She talked about her work. I carried baskets."
Sophie had been quiet for several steps, which he should have recognised as loading rather than peace.
"Here's what I don't understand," she said. "The Dea Saint, escorted through the Dungeon and back to Babel by an unknown red-haired man. That's gossip. That's premium gossip. The front desk runs a full week on thinner material. I once watched three receptionists come to blows over whether a certain Loki Familia captain had smiled at a bakery girl. Why did I never hear about you?"
Shirou shrugged again. "Maybe everyone was looking at her. She's the famous one. I was just the man carrying the baskets."
Sophie stared at him for a long moment.
"That shouldn't work," she said.
"I have that kind of face."
"You have gold eyes and red hair—"
"So does Rose."
"Oh." Sophie glanced across him at Rose, whose ears had gone flat. "Oh, that's true, actually. You two match. Did you realise you match? You look like a set. You know what they say about those who look alike?"
"Sophie," Rose said, in a voice from the bottom of a well.
Movement, ahead and to the left.
It was small—a flicker at the mouth of a side lane, the kind of motion the eye catches and the mind discards. His gaze went to it before he could decide otherwise.
A trail of hair whipped out of sight behind the corner. Light red. Almost pink. Gone in half a heartbeat.
Then: a crash. A wooden clatter, an upended crate, a stifled squeak, and silence—the specific silence of someone holding very still and pretending to be a barrel.
The three of them stood looking at the corner.
The corner offered nothing further. Somewhere behind it, a cat expressed an opinion and was hushed.
Sophie turned her head towards Shirou. Slowly. The way a ballista comes about on its mounting.
"Is there another Orarian healer you've helped?" she asked, deadpan.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"How about," Rose said, in the same flat adviser's tone as before, "a girl with light red hair—almost pink—in twintails?"
Shirou looked at the corner. He looked at the two Guild employees flanking him, one wearing the expression of a cat that had located a mousehole, the other visibly drafting supplementary pages in her head.
He wisely said nothing.
"He's gone quiet again," Sophie reported.
"I noticed."
"Historically, that's a confession."
"Admissible, certainly. I'd want it witnessed."
"I am exercising my right to walk to the bar in peace," Shirou said, and set off, towing both of them with him by the simple mechanism of being the thing their arms were attached to.
"Was it moss again? Did you help her gather moss, Shirou—"
"How many bowls of noodles?"
"Did you seduce yet another young woman with a bowl of noodles? Is that your entire method? Is it working? What is your success rate? Is it a developmental ability?"
"I can't hear either of you."
"He can hear us," Rose said.
"Oh, he can absolutely hear us."
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The Amber Veil announced itself the way expensive things did in Orario: by not announcing itself at all.
An old merchant house at the respectable edge of the pleasure district, dark timber and shuttered windows, a single lamp above a door that bore no sign, no name, and no indication that anything existed behind it beyond more darkness. Sophie presented a small card to the doorman with a flourish and a distinct top-note of elven superiority, chin lifted as though the card had been in her family for generations rather than borrowed from a department head who owed her a favour. The doorman examined it, examined them, and stepped aside with a bow measured to the celch.
Inside, the establishment was all amber lamplight and velvet hush. Conversations happened at the volume of falling dust. Shirou catalogued the room in his first three steps—old habit, unkillable, and he'd stopped apologising to himself for it. Two exits besides the front, one through the kitchen, one down through a cellar hatch behind the bar. Load-bearing pillars there and there. Guild administrators at four tables, Familia executives at three more, or so he assumed given Sophie's murmured commentary on the clientele. A long bar of black wood polished by decades of sleeves. A proprietor with dock-rope forearms and the build of a man who had done real work before this—or real adventuring.
And behind the bar, enshrined in a locked case of glass and brass with its own dedicated lamp: a single dusty bottle.
'Someone loves that bottle,' he thought, and left it at that, because it was not his bottle and not his problem, and tonight he was collecting things that were not his problem the way other men collected coins.
They were seated at a table near the centre of the room. Sophie ordered for all three of them without consulting the menu—she had, by her own cheerful admission, been rehearsing the order in her head for days—and the drinks arrived alongside a small wooden board of appetisers: candied walnuts, hard cheese sliced translucent-thin, and little rounds of toasted bread bearing a whipped bean paste glossed with oil.
Shirou tried the bean paste. Chewed. Considered. Turned the flavour over.
"Broad beans," he said. "They've folded something bitter through it—citrus pith, I think, and not much of it. It works. The bread is yesterday's, but that's deliberate; stale bread toasts better and carries more flavour. Good texture. I'd add a whisper of garlic, but I add garlic to most things, so that's a fault in me, not them."
"He does this," Rose told Sophie.
"I think it's charming. He's reviewing the most exclusive bar in Orario like it's a rival stall."
"Everywhere is a rival stall," Shirou said, "if you're honest about it."
He took a sip of his drink, which was excellent, would have cost him, probably, half a morning's profit, and tasted faintly of pears and something floral he couldn't name because it probably didn't exist in his old world. He permitted himself, cautiously, to relax.
The conversation drifted the way good conversations did. Guild gossip he half-followed. A story of Sophie's involving an adventurer, a misfiled form, and the third jackbird-related inter-Familia dispute that month—apparently, every time a Jack Bird showed itself in the upper floors, whichever Familias happened to be present would attempt to outwit both the harmless monster and each other in herding it, and given the creature's value, things reliably got heated. Rose thawed by degrees, adviser softening back into person as the drink and the evening worked on her; her flush had settled into something quieter, and she laughed twice, quickly, both times pressing her lips together afterwards as though the laughs had escaped custody and would be disciplined later.
It was, Shirou reflected, a genuinely pleasant evening.
Which was, of course, when he noticed the merchants—or Sherlock Holmes wannabes; he'd settle for mysterious merchants.
Three of them, in a corner booth: long coats, wide-brimmed hats, dark spectacles.
Indoors. At night.
He had now seen this exact ensemble several times today, which was several more times than fashion normally repeated itself around him. Celty beneath his window that morning, in coat and hat and black-glass spectacles, who had made eye contact and then fled at the specific gait of a person who believed that running fast enough would delete the memory. The purple-coated woman who had shoulder-bumped him outside the Guild. And vague outlines of the same silhouette at the edge of his vision throughout the afternoon, on rooftops, at corners, once—he was almost sure—inside a decorative fountain.
And now three more, sitting in a corner booth, sharing a bottle of red.
"Is it some kind of new fashion?" he asked.
Sophie followed his glance. "Is what a fashion?"
"The coats. The hats. The dark spectacles. I've been seeing them all over the city today." He turned a toast round in his fingers. "I assumed one of the deities introduced something from Tenkai again. Like the swimwear shop."
"The what shop?"
"There's a shop," Rose said grimly, "that we do not discuss."
Sophie's entire face lit up. "Wait. Wait. You've been in that shop? Rose. Rose, have you—"
"…"
"Oh, she has. She absolutely has. Shirou, have you imagined us in any of those wares? Be honest. There's one they call the banana—we should all go together, we'll make him try the ban—mmff."
Shirou had shoved one of the toasts into Sophie's mouth. Smooth. Decisive. A man defusing an explosive with the only tool to hand. She chewed at him reproachfully.
Somewhere at the back of his mind, a baritone that sounded suspiciously like his older, worse self intoned, as it had intoned so many times across so many loops: That's hell you're walking to.
'I know,' Shirou told it. 'I live here now.'
Sophie swallowed, reloaded, and mercifully changed targets. She squinted at the corner booth. "No, I've never seen that look before in my life. It's not Guild fashion. It's not noble fashion. It's not even bad fashion, exactly." She tilted her head. "It's rather mysterious, actually. Sort of dashing."
"It's suspicious," Rose said. "Hats indoors. Spectacles at night. Who needs to shade their eyes from lamplight?"
"People with sensitive eyes."
"All three of them?"
"Sensitive families."
Shirou said nothing. He was watching the booth without watching it—an old skill, eyes soft, attention hard—and cataloguing the details the coats were failing to conceal.
The one in green sat like a soldier at her own court martial: spine locked, hands regulation-still, misery radiating off her in clean, disciplined waves. The one in purple held her wine glass with a very specific relaxed precision he had seen recently, somewhere, at close range—the stem cradled between two fingers, the bowl never quite level, as though the drink were an accessory to some larger and more elegant crime. And the one in brown—
The one in brown was watching the room with her gloved hands folded on the table, and there was a warmth coming off her that had nothing to do with the lamps. A presence like a hearth in the next room. Like standing near something that had decided, quietly and permanently, to be kind.
'Huh,' he thought.
He filed it. He did not open the file. It was becoming a very full file, and it was his night off.
Then the doors of the Amber Veil detonated.
"I! AM! GANESHAAAAA!"
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End
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