Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain
Sheathed Against Injustice?
Story Starts
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Chapter 6.8
The Gale’s Justice
Demands a Stakeout
Shirou did not spill his drink. This was a matter of some professional pride, afterwards, because most of the room flinched hard enough to lose theirs, and one Guild department head at the next table baptised his own lap with something that had cost him eight hundred valis a glass.
'I think I just watched the proprietor's eyes turn into valis signs,' Shirou noted, as the man behind the bar surveyed the carnage of spilt drinks and re-orders to come.
The god of the masses stood in the doorway, fists on hips, cape settling behind him with weirdly perfect timing, elephant mask blazing gold in the lamplight, having announced himself at parade volume to the one room in Orario constructed entirely around the principle of never being announced to.
"FEAR NOT!" the god continued, to a room that had not yet begun to fear so much as to grieve. "I AM INCOGNITO!"
A pause, while everyone present privately inventoried the definition of the word.
"AND THIS IS MY ASSOCIATE! SHE IS ALSO INCOGNITO!"
Behind the god, stepping through the ruined hush like a woman entering her fourth consecutive ambush of the day and finding it precisely as advertised, came a young woman with pale blue hair whom Shirou recognised at once. Ardee Varma. Shakti's sister. Second-in-command of the city's peacekeeping. One of the very short list of people in Orario who knew what he was, and had kept it.
Her eyes swept the room—professional even in despair, marking exits and threats out of pure reflex—and found his.
He watched her perform an entire apology with one small movement of her shoulders. I know. I'm sorry. I couldn't stop him. Nobody can stop him. Nobody has ever stopped him. Scholars believe nobody ever will.
Despite everything—despite the coats, the rooftops, the pink hair in the alley, the growing certainty that his quiet evening had somehow been assigned an audience—Shirou felt the corner of his mouth pull. He knew that shrug. He had performed that shrug, in other lives, standing behind other catastrophic personalities while they declared war on decorum. He had performed it behind a king who bought out entire festival stalls. He had performed it behind Merlin on at least nine occasions, and Merlin had deserved it all nine times.
He gave Ardee the fractional nod of one long-suffering professional to another—hold the line, soldier—and turned back to his table, where Sophie was staring at the god with naked delight and Rose had begun, very quietly, to recite form numbers under her breath like a litany against evil.
"A god," she whispered. "There's a god present now. If anything happens—anything—that's divine witness protocols. That's Form Twelve. Possibly Twelve-B. Do you know how many signatures a Twelve-B needs? Eleven. It needs eleven signatures, Shirou."
"Nothing is going to happen," Shirou said.
He would think about that sentence later. At length. Possibly he would have it engraved somewhere, as a warning to others.
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For a quarter of an hour, nothing happened.
Ganesha ordered one of everything, discreetly, at a volume that rattled the stemware, then sat down at a corner table and went so completely and heroically motionless that the room's collective alarm simply gave up and reclassified him as furniture. Conversation crept back in from the edges. Sophie resumed her jackbird story. Rose confiscated Sophie's third drink on stated medical grounds and then drank it herself, which Shirou noted and did not remark upon, because he intended to live.
He was aware, at the edge of things, of the loud man.
Violet silk, heavy rings, a rented audience of three associates whose laughter arrived a half-second after each joke like a paid echo, and a voice pitched to inform the entire room of his plans for the evening. The bottle in the case. The Starfall Vintage. A hundred and twelve years old, the last pressing of a village called Loness before it burnt to the ground. Forty thousand valis, paid this very afternoon. To be opened at the tenth bell and drunk in one go—here the man paused for effect—mixed with sparkling honeywater. For the story of it. So that he, Bardolph, could say he had done it.
Shirou had spent enough years around a certain golden king, in every version of her, to have well-developed opinions about people who consumed irreplaceable things for the anecdote. Gilgamesh-ko, at least, had possessed the taste to know what she was drinking. He kept those opinions where he kept most things: stacked neatly, out of sight, next to the swords.
But he noticed—because he noticed everything; it was the curse that lived under all his other curses—the young server.
Half-elven, sixteen at the very most, balancing his tray with his ears pinned flat to his skull. Shirou noticed the way the boy's eyes caught on the display case every single circuit of the room, a compass needle finding north. He noticed the boy stop dead when the merchant said honeywater, and the cocktail that slid a full celch across his tray before training caught it. He noticed the boy's knuckles, white on the tray's edge, and the careful blankness that children learn when adults have power over the things they love.
'Ah,' Shirou thought, with a small, sinking, deeply familiar feeling. 'Kid. What did you do?'
He took a slow breath and, out of an instinct he had never once managed to kill in any of his lives, let his awareness unfold through the building.
Structural Analysis had been meant for blades. Over the lifetimes it had grown into something broader—an architect's x-ray, a mason's confession booth. The Amber Veil opened itself to him in layers: honest old timber; a roof truss that wanted attention within five years; walls that had been rebuilt once after a fire long ago and rebuilt well; a cellar below, chalked against damp, its ladder rungs worn smooth on the left side because the boy who used it daily was right-handed and led with his left foot.
There.
In the cellar directly beneath the bar, cradled in a nest of straw inside an empty cask: a bottle. A hundred and twelve years of settled glass and sediment, its structure singing with age the way old swords sang. Wrapped—his analysis reported this detail with complete indifference to his feelings—in what was unmistakably a folded apron, arranged around the glass the way one tucks in something sleeping.
And behind the bar, in the chilling rack, a second bottle of the same shape and the same dark glass, whose structure was eleven years old, whose contents were competent table wine, and which was sweating warm because it had come up from the cellar within the hour.
Shirou looked at the locked display case. At the small brass key hanging on its hook beside the candle sconce, in plain sight, because the lock had only ever been meant to stop impulse, not intent. At the boy.
The whole thing assembled itself in about a second and a half. Take the treasure down to safety. Leave a changeling in the rack. Swap them back before the tenth bell, let the loud man chug the imposter mixed with honeywater, and trust forty thousand valis' worth of palate to be comprehensively defeated by the sugar—which, Shirou judged, with complete professional confidence, it absolutely would have been. Bardolph would have toasted his own magnificence with eleven-year-old table wine and never known. It was, as plans devised by sixteen-year-olds went, genuinely rather good.
'Not my problem,' he told himself, firmly, the way other men said grace. 'The bottle is safe. Nothing has been stolen—relocated, at worst. This resolves itself quietly at the tenth bell, the grandmother's summer stays in its glass, and no one ever knows.'
The proprietor chose that exact moment to open the case.
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"The Starfall," the old man said, into the sudden and total hush, in the voice of a man standing at a graveside. "The Starfall is gone."
The Amber Veil erupted, and Shirou put down his drink and quietly aged several years.
It went the way these things always went, in any world, in any era. The loud man barricaded the door with his own bulk and demanded it be locked, sealed, guarded—his forty thousand valis were in this room and no one would leave until they were found. The room's famous dignity lasted eleven seconds before a Guild administrator accused a department head, the department head accused a Familia executive, and the Familia executive accused, for reasons never adequately explained, the coat rack. Somebody suggested searching "the elf," on the grounds that elves love wine, and was very nearly murdered by three separate elves, one of whom had to be physically restrained by her own subordinates.
Sophie had risen onto her knees on her chair, both hands pressed to her cheeks.
"A locked-room mystery," she breathed. "On our night out. Rose. Rose. Do you understand what's happening? The universe has given us a gift."
"Form Twelve," Rose said hollowly, staring at the middle distance. "God present—that's Twelve-B. Four supplementary pages. Witness statements in excess of—" She did a slow count of the room, lips moving, and made a small wounded sound like a kicked accordion.
"Who do you think did it?" Sophie's eyes were shining. "I think it's the man under the table. Look at him. No one hides under a table with a clear conscience."
"He's hiding from the paperwork," Rose said. "He's Guild. He knows what's coming. He's the sanest person here."
"Shirou! Who's your suspect?"
Shirou took a measured sip of his drink.
He could feel the shape of the next ten minutes and disliked every single part of it. The truth sat in his mouth like a stone: the bottle is in the cellar wrapped in an apron, the boy did it out of love, the imposter is sweating in the chilling rack, and if everyone would please sit down we could all be drinking again in four minutes. Saying it aloud would solve everything and raise exactly one unanswerable question—namely, how the noodle vendor could see through floors—and that question had a queue of people waiting to ask it, several of whom were apparently in this room dressed as wine merchants.
"I think," he said, "that I am but a humble noodle merchant."
Rose and Sophie both turned identical looks of flat judgement on him. He felt several further looks of judgement arrive from other bearings, including—he was almost certain—one from a corner booth, one from behind an elephant mask, and one from the general direction of the ceiling, which he chose not to investigate.
Then the loud man's finger found the server boy, and Shirou stopped being amused.
"You. You were closest to the bar all evening—you've been staring at that case since I arrived! Turn out his pockets! Search him! Guards—someone fetch the guards, we'll have the little thief in irons before the tenth—"
The boy went white to the lips. The proprietor started forward, dock-rope forearms flexing. The merchant's voice climbed towards arrest and examples must be made, and Shirou felt his weight shift in his chair without consulting him—felt the old machinery wake, smooth and cold and instant. Distance to the merchant: four medr. The man's balance: poor, weight back on his heels, all of it in his voice and none of it in his stance. One hand on the shoulder would sit him down without so much as a bruise. And then what? Then questions. Then witnesses. Then the file on Rose's desk grows a new limb, and Rose grows a new grey hair, and the evening he had promised two people finishes in an interview room—
"THERE IS NO NEED FOR GUARDS!"
The voice hit the room like weather. Glassware sang across forty tables. Shirou eased back into his chair, machinery disengaging with something akin to relief, and watched Lord Ganesha rise from his corner like a mountain that had finished pretending to be furniture, cape thrown back, one fist on his chest.
"TONIGHT, GOOD PEOPLE, YOU HAVE SOMETHING FAR BETTER THAN GUARDS! TONIGHT—YOU HAVE A DETECTIVE!"
'Oh no,' Shirou thought, with a strange and dawning gratitude. 'Oh, good.'
The god swept his arm towards the display case in a magnificent arc, as though summoning an orchestra of pure truth—slapped his own forearm at the apex for emphasis—
—and shot himself with a dart.
Shirou watched it happen with perfect, useless clarity. The slim leather band on the god's wrist. The small brass nozzle seated in it. The crisp, apologetic phut. The tiny fletched dart standing proudly at attention in the divine bicep.
Compressed air, he judged, automatically. Good seal, decent draw efficiency for the size, minimal report. Whoever had built it knew their craft, and had almost certainly explained to its user, several times, slowly, which direction it pointed.
"GANESHA," said the god, and looked down at his own arm with what could only be described as scholarly interest, "...HAS MADE AN ERROR IN JUDGEMENT."
He remained upright for eight full seconds, which Shirou considered genuinely impressive for what was presumably an adventurer-grade sleeping draught. Then he toppled like a felled monument, and Ardee Varma was already there—had been moving, Shirou noted, since the phut, possibly since before it, possibly since this morning—wedging her shoulder under the full considerable weight of an unconscious deity and hauling him upright, her face arranged into total, glassy serenity.
"He's fine," she told the room. "He does this."
The room, which had no framework for processing any part of the last thirty seconds, elected to believe her.
Shirou put his chin in his hand to conceal the lower half of his face, which had stopped obeying him.
'Hold the line, Varma. Hold the line.'
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What followed was, without serious competition, the most extraordinary piece of theatre Shirou had witnessed across three lifetimes—and he had once watched Merlin talk his way out of a tribunal the man had convened against himself, an acquittal that had impressed everyone present except Fou, who had delivered the true verdict directly to Merlin's face at speed.
The unconscious god began to speak.
"AH-HAHAHA! DO NOT BE ALARMED, GOOD PEOPLE! THIS IS MERELY MY DEDUCTION TRANCE!"
The room accepted this. The room, Shirou observed with genuine wonder, simply accepted it—confusion rolling over into awe in a single wave, patrons nodding at one another as though confirming a rumour long suspected, one administrator whispering I'd heard he could do this to his neighbour—because the god was Ganesha, and a deduction trance was, if anything, one of the more plausible things about him.
Shirou did not accept it. For one thing, the voice was issuing from a point roughly half a medr to the left of the god's mask. For another—now that he attended properly—it was arriving twice: first as a murmur from across the room, faint as a moth, and a heartbeat later as thunder from the god. Call and answer. Whisper and storm.
His eyes went to the corner booth.
The purple-coated merchant sat with her chin lifted and the fingers of one hand resting on a small brooch at her collar. A songbird, silver, catching the lamplight. Her lips were moving—barely, beautifully, drilled down to almost nothing.
'A relay,' he thought, with honest admiration. 'A voice-throwing device. Paired resonance, probably, with some kind of modulation on the output. That's genuinely clever. Craftsman-grade work—same hand as the dart launcher, I'd wager, and I'd further wager that hand is very tired.'
And then he watched the purple merchant, without pausing the performance for so much as a syllable, reach out with her free hand and pour herself more wine—the bottle held just so, the wrist turning through that same relaxed, lethal precision he had seen at close range, recently, holding a katana over a bowl of his kake udon.
He looked at the corner booth with new eyes.
He looked at the green-coated merchant, whose posture he now recognised down to the individual vertebra, because he had once spent an entire night in Emiya-ya being surveilled by that exact spine while it pretended to read a wine list. He looked at the brown-coated merchant, whose warmth had been tugging at the edge of his senses all evening like a hearth in the next room, and who was at this moment leaning forward with her gloved hands clasped beneath her chin in open, radiant rapture as the sleeping god thundered on.
'Lady Astraea,' he thought. 'And two of her children.'
'…'
'Out on patrol, presumably. Justice never sleeps. They took a break, stopped in for a drink—in disguise, because a goddess of justice can hardly drink openly in the pleasure district—and stumbled straight into a crime scene. And being who they are, they couldn't leave it alone.'
'…'
'…That explains the coats, actually. Undercover patrol wear. It's probably standard issue.'
He sat with this conclusion, found it sound, and felt the day's accumulated strangeness settle into order like a shop being closed for the night. Celty that morning: patrol. The woman at the Guild: patrol, and a clumsy one. The figures at the edges of his vision: patrols, plural—Evilus was active, after all, and the Familias were clearly coordinating sweeps across the city.
'They must be stretched thin, poor things,' he thought, with something close to sympathy, and turned his full attention back to the show. 'Definitely not my problem.'
Around him, the performance mounted. The god—no, Shirou corrected himself, the samurai, because every cadence of that borrowed thunder now carried Kaguya Gojouno's fingerprints—walked the room through it step by step. The unbroken lock. The key on its public hook, which any regular could see and only staff would dare touch. The ring of dust on the case's floor where the bottle had stood, lifted straight up and set down nowhere, because the bottle had not been snatched, it had been lifted slowly, carefully, with—
A pause. A pause of pure, shameless theatrical greed.
"—REVERENCE!"
Shirou heard the performer's own enjoyment bleed straight through the modulation on that word, and had to look at the ceiling for a moment.
Ardee, meanwhile, steered the divine body from exhibit to exhibit. Shirou watched her technique with a professional's respect: she lifted the god by the belt on alternate steps to simulate walking, raised his pointing arm through some cunning leverage at the elbow, and once—when the script called for Ganesha to stroke his chin in thought—executed the manoeuvre by bracing the divine wrist against her own shoulder and rotating her entire body. Her face stayed serene and professionally blank throughout. The crisis, evidently, had been scheduled for the following Tuesday, and she intended to honour the appointment.
And underneath it all, someone was feeding the voice its facts.
The wax print on the key, softened by afternoon sun through the transom—which meant handled between the third and fifth bells. The chalk dust on the cellar hatch, and matching traces on a cuff. The buttoned cuffs, when every other server rolled theirs. The warm bottle sweating in the chilling rack, sweating because it had been brought up recently, into a rack where nothing was ever placed warm. Every deduction arrived clean, physical, correct—things a person could only know by looking, truly looking, with the kind of relentless, suspicious, catch-everything attention that most people found exhausting to be near.
Shirou's gaze drifted back to the rigid green spine in the corner booth.
He thought about Ryuu Lion watching him across his own counter through a sleepless night, cataloguing his every movement as though he might detonate. He thought about how wearing it must be, carrying eyes like that everywhere, eyes that never granted anyone the mercy of going unexamined. And here was that same merciless attention turned outward on a room of strangers, and what it was doing with all that suspicion—methodically, invisibly, brilliantly—was saving a sixteen-year-old boy from being searched, seized, and ruined in front of forty witnesses.
'…'
'Maybe despite Avalon, elves just don't like my face,' he decided, and let the thought go.
"THE STARFALL VINTAGE," the god concluded, arm flung towards the floor with such vigour that Ardee briefly left the ground, "LIES IN THE CELLAR BENEATH OUR FEET! UNBROKEN! UNDRUNK! PLACED THERE NOT BY GREED—BUT BY GRIEF!"
The boy broke.
It came out of him in pieces, the way truth comes out of the young: the grandmother, three streets away, too frail now for stairs. Loness, and the fire, and the vineyard rows she'd played in as a girl, all of it gone before the boy was born. The bottle arriving at the Amber Veil years ago, and his grandmother visiting once—just once—to stand in front of the case and look at it. That's my summer in there, she'd said. That's the summer I was seventeen. And then Bardolph, and forty thousand valis, and sparkling honeywater, and the boy's voice cracked clean down the middle on the word.
Shirou watched the room turn. All together, all at once, the way rooms sometimes mercifully did—the tide of it swinging from suspicion to shame to something warmer. He watched the proprietor cross to his strongbox and count out forty thousand valis with a click of absolute finality, and inform Bardolph—flatly, finally, a door closing forever—that the sale was rescinded, that the Starfall was no longer for sale at any price, and that it had never truly been his to sell in the first place. He watched violet silk gather itself, attempt three retorts, achieve none, and depart into a silence with genuine weight to it, his rented audience already discreetly detaching themselves like passengers leaving a sinking ship.
The Amber Veil exploded into applause.
Sophie was on her feet on her chair shouting "Encore!" with both hands cupped around her mouth. Rose had forgotten Form Twelve-B entirely and was clapping with her ears up and her eyes bright. The boy was crying and applauding simultaneously, wiping his face on his buttoned cuff. The three elves who had earlier been accused applauded with pointed ferocity in the direction Bardolph had gone.
And Lord Ganesha chose that precise moment to wake.
He surged upright mid-ovation, fists already raised, roaring "—SHAAAAA!" as though completing a sentence begun before his consciousness had been so rudely interrupted, and accepted the room's worship with a sincerity so total, so seamless, so structurally perfect, that Shirou genuinely could not determine whether the god knew what had just been done with his body.
He studied the mask. The stance. The way Ganesha bowed to each quarter of the room in turn and then, with grave magnanimity, autographed a napkin nobody had offered him.
He decided, on reflection, that Ganesha did not know. And that this was, somehow, the best possible version of events, and quite possibly the point of Ganesha altogether.
"That," Sophie declared, dropping back into her seat, flushed and radiant, "was the greatest night of my professional life. And I was there for the Great Mushroom Recall. Rose. Rose. Tell me you saw the trance. The trance, Rose."
"I saw it." Rose was fighting a smile and losing on points. "It was—fine. It was ridiculous. It was completely ridiculous and I—" The smile broke through entirely, was recaptured, and was returned to its cell with visible effort. "—may include a favourable note in the incident report."
"A favourable note! From you! Shirou, witness this. I need it witnessed."
"Witnessed," Shirou said. "I'll sign."
He took the last sip of his drink. Across the room, the purple merchant drained her glass in one elegant, unhurried motion—a professional coming off shift. The green merchant sat rigid with unspent adrenaline, one hand still resting near her coat's hem where a sword hilt would sit. And the brown merchant had pushed her dark spectacles up onto her hat brim and was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief, moved to open tears by the sight of justice done in a cocktail bar.
Shirou looked at the three of them—at Ardee, sagging by one degree now that no one was watching; at the boy, being embraced by the proprietor; at the whole gentle, ludicrous apparatus of his evening.
'Still not my problem.'
Curiosity tugged at him anyway. What the patrol had been for. What the coats cost. Whether the brooch-maker took commissions.
'No,' he concluded, peacefully, and this time it held all the way down. 'Tonight I am a man at dinner. Nothing more.'
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They left the Amber Veil into a night gone properly dark, the pleasure district's lanterns strung out ahead like a low constellation dragged down to street level. Two hours yet to the reservation. The plan, per Sophie, was an unhurried wander—there was a street of curiosity shops she had been meaning to inflict on someone for months, and a bridge over the canal that was, she claimed, "criminally underrated by moonlight," a phrase that made Rose's ears twitch with premonition.
"Could you recreate the food from in there?" Sophie asked. "The bean paste thing. Be honest."
Shirou held his chin, considering the question with the seriousness it deserved.
"Easily. Though it's best enjoyed with company. It's a sharing dish by nature—it wants three or four people and a slow evening."
"Ooooh." Sophie's grin unfurled by degrees. "How devious. He's already planning the encore. He's invited us back before we've even left."
"I have no idea what you are talking about, and you, Sophie, are welcome to cook for yourself," Shirou said, "any time."
And Rose laughed—properly this time, unguarded, from somewhere underneath the adviser entirely, before she could arrest it—and for the length of that laugh the evening was, at last, exactly what it had promised to be.
They made it eleven steps from the door.
"HUMAN!"
The voice cracked down the lane like a whip. A second voice arrived hard on its heels, rougher, from the opposite side of the street:
"RED-HAIR!"
Shirou stopped. Sophie's hand tightened on his left arm. Rose's went very still on his right.
Two figures stood in the lamplight ahead, arranged in the unmistakable geometry of an ambush that had been waiting some time and rehearsing considerably longer. On the left: a male elf, silver-haired, beautiful the way a drawn blade is beautiful, quivering with a rage he had clearly promoted to righteousness. On the right: a male werewolf, broad through the shoulders, hackles visibly risen, arms crossed over a chest that had been inflated specially for the occasion.
Shirou recognised the silver-haired elf, distantly—from the Guild steps, and from Emiya-ya, where the man had ordered the mushroom skewers three nights running and left generous tips. Dionysus Familia.
"You," the elf declared, levelling a finger that trembled with feeling, "who parades through the streets with an elven maiden upon his arm, as though the ancient courtesies of her people mean nothing—"
"You," the werewolf growled, jerking his chin at Rose, "walking around with her like it's nothing. Like you've got the right—"
The two challengers glanced sideways at each other, visibly annoyed to discover they were sharing a grievance, negotiated something through pure glaring, and turned back as one.
"I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL!"
The words landed in perfect, furious unison. A passing couple stopped to watch. A window opened somewhere above. And from the rooftops overhead, Shirou was almost certain he heard an entire patrol's worth of breath being caught at once, and a single wine glass being hurriedly set down on slate.
Sophie said, with relish: "Oh, wonderful."
Rose said, through her teeth: "Form. Fifteen."
Shirou looked up at the night sky over Orario—at the stars, at the rooftops, at whichever gods were undoubtedly watching this exact moment and taking notes for later—and sighed from the very bottom of his long, long existence.
His hand brushed his hip and found the hilt exactly where he'd strapped it before leaving the house.
'Just in case,' he'd thought that morning.
He hated being right.
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End
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