The Lord of the Rust Mountains

by Kanata Yanagino

  Even though Bee had no instrument and was just talking off the cuff, there was a kind of power in the way she spoke. She had a flowing, sing-song voice that was pleasing to the ear, and she knew just how to pause to draw the listener in.

  “So it’s a secret they keep hidden within themselves. No one who isn’t from the fallen Iron Country knows. So that’s all I can tell you. Sorry...” Bee gave an apologetic smile. “If you want to know anything else... I think there were dwarves who migrated to your river port, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’d open up if you were the one asking, I think. No, I’m sure of it. If you keep what I said in mind.”

  I nodded and smiled at her. “Thank you.”

  I wondered how much of it they would tell me. While picturing the rugged faces of the dwarves, I thought about the prosperity and fall of that kingdom of mountain people.

  ◆

  After that, Bee said she would wander about singing her stories for a while longer, and Menel and I left her to it. We departed the city of Whitesails and headed south.

  After a few days, we returned to Beast Woods, and stepped foot into the fairy trail.

  Once again that strange scenery surrounded us, of day and night trading places at whirlwind speed, the forest wriggling, fairies whispering amongst each other, and horribly thick darkness. The tingle I felt down my spine was no different than the first time I’d done this. I walked cautiously through that place for about half a day, the sense of awe and fear never leaving me.

  We passed through a strange ring of light that was the way out of the fairy trail, and our field of view opened up. I felt wind blowing towards me. I took a moment to get my bearings, and realized that it was dusk, and I was standing on top of a hill.

  An endless number of trees stood tall, and beyond them an orange sun was setting in a red sky. The sky around me had started to turn the color of night, and I could just make out the twinkling of the stars. There was forest as far as my eyes could see, and a vast river snaking through it.

  I shifted my gaze and saw that straddling that great river was a ruined city of two colors: a dull gray, and the green of clinging plants. And nestled right next to it was an expanse of soft-red brick roofs and white plaster. It was a living city, with people coming and going through it.

  A long time ago, after I had that battle with the god of undeath and said goodbye to my parents, I followed this river from the city of the dead downstream to the north. It was there, before meeting Menel, that I had seen a half-submerged city, and at this very moment, human hands were hard at work redeveloping it.

  “Looking at it like this, it’s gotten pretty big,” Menel said in a murmur.

  “Yeah. It’s grown quite a lot in just two years.”

  We talked about it as we made our way down the hill and said hello to the people we passed as we walked through the sunset streets.

  We found Tonio near the harbor, talking about something with a warehouse keeper. Noticing us, he cut his discussion short, gave us a brief wave, and came over.

  “Welcome back, both of you.”

  “Thank you!”

  “You’ve returned considerably earlier than I was expecting. Is the abnormal—”

  “Safely resolved. We’re done with our report to the duke as well.”

  Tonio looked at us in amazement.

  Menel and I looked at each other and laughed conspiringly.

  “Goodness, you truly are frightening. What trick did you use this time?”

  “A secret elementalist trick,” Menel said. “Might not be much use for business, though. It’s not suited for transporting stuff.”

  “It sounds useful for gathering information, however. I’d very much like to hear the details from you later, if you’d be willing to share.”

  “I said it’s a fig secret and you’re still trying to get it out of me? Wow. Aggressive tactics.”

  “I am a salesman,” Tonio said, laughing.

  When I first met Tonio, I got quite an impression of tiredness from him, but lately I was getting the feeling that some of his spirit had returned. Maybe the fact that business was booming had caused self-confidence, a sense of fulfillment, and all those kinds of things to show on his face.

  The redevelopment of this city was something Tonio had taken the opportunity to propose while the adventurers were still in one place after getting rid of that chimera. We had sent many parties of battle-hardened adventurers out on a large-scale sweep to remove all the dangers still hanging out in the ruins. With Ethel’s support, we had performed maintenance on the river port, dismantled the ruined buildings for materials, and rebuilt houses.

  Then, using this place as his base of operations, Tonio started a lumber business in the depths of Beast Woods, felling trees, building rafts, and sending them downstream. This was hugely successful. The development of the Whitesails area had left it in need of firewood for fuel and lumber for construction. Meanwhile, Beast Woods, which was located upstream, had a ruined port city that could be redeveloped, as well as an abundance of wood resources. Where there’s demand for something, you stand to make a big profit if you can find a method of supplying it.

  That may seem obvious, but it was the way that Tonio reliably spotted those obvious opportunities and actually took advantage of them that defined his way of doing business.

  As for me, after I killed the chimera, the areas around there had reached an easy consensus on making me a feudal lord, but it seemed that all they were expecting from me was the military might to guarantee the region’s safety and for me to use my title of paladin to stand in front of His Excellency and represent the area. It wasn’t as though there were a mountain of things for me to make decisions on, either. In fact, despite being a lord, I didn’t even have a house.

  I’ll repeat that: I didn’t even have a house.

  I thought of persuading some village to let me live with them, but my entry into the village would mean I would be forcing my way into the top of their social hierarchy. There would be people who wouldn’t be very happy about that, and others who would try to use me. Furthermore, I thought it was completely foreseeable that some people in the village would get the idea of using my existence to give themselves the diplomatic advantage in relations with other villages. So given all that friction I would probably cause, I was hesitant to ask to live in a village without careful thought.

  There was the option of not settling anywhere and governing by traveling around my territory—I knew examples of that from my past life—but that method had all kinds of problems, so I wanted to avoid it if possible.

  And so I decided to get on board with Tonio’s business. I invested, helped provide security, and while I was at it, I settled here in this newly formed city.

  Together with Menel and some adventurers including Reystov, I spearheaded beast and demon hunts for the city’s security and provided medical treatment. Sometimes I headed out to various places in Beast Woods by request and handled an assortment of minor issues by coordinating with His Excellency and the priests I had borrowed from Bishop Bagley, including Anna. And that was how I spent my days.

  It was just about that time that it happened. A band of mountainfolk—that is, dwarves—came, hearing that the woods had become pretty safe. I was the first one to meet them, in the woods. They were covered in dirt and mud, and looked as though they had fought starvation and wild animals to get here and only barely made it. They seemed to be really struggling, so I provided them with food and temporary lodging, and tried to help them find jobs.

  Dwarves were a race of craftsmen who were good with their hands, but these were drifters, and I wasn’t expecting a high level of specialized knowledge from them. But once we got talking, I found that many of them did have a surprising amount of knowledge in things like smithing, the manufacture of leather, woodworking, pottery, weaving, and carpentry. I asked them why on earth they had gone through so much just to come all the way here to the depths of Beast Woods, but they
wouldn’t speak about it.

  In any case, since they had skills like that, I wasn’t going to let their talents go to waste. I decided to invest most of the money I had on hand, which I’d gotten from exploring ruins and so on, into their craft. I offered to lend them the funds to build all kinds of facilities: a woodworking shop to process the logs after they’d been chopped down, a leather-processing facility for making products out of the skins of the beasts we hunted, a smithy, kilns for pottery and making charcoal, and more.

  I intended that proposal to be taken at face value, but they goggled at me in surprise, and came to the negotiating table greatly fearful and wary of what kind of terrible interest and terms I would impose on them. And when I presented them with the interest and terms, they goggled at me again.

  But for me at the time, it was a necessary decision. There are an unbelievable number of things needed to maintain and expand a newly created settlement: weavers, woodworkers, stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths, leatherworkers, charcoal burners, and much more besides. At the beginning, you can get by to a certain extent with makeshift purchases and amateur work, but before long, you need skilled professionals.

  There weren’t very many craftsmen curious enough to come all the way to the back of Beast Woods when they already had marketable skills. So now that people who had the skills we so badly needed had made their own way to us, there was no way I could waste their potential on unskilled labor like loading and unloading wood. They were emphatically worth spending my money on.

  However, simply lending a person money would just make them suspect that I had some underlying motive. That was particularly true for these dwarves, many of whom were acting very cautious. I could only guess what had happened to them while they had been out roaming the land. Several among them insisted that creating debts was a bad idea. I visited them several times, each time re-explaining my circumstances in the hope of winning their trust.

  As I bowed my head to them for the nth time and told them we needed them, their leader, a man named Agnarr, spoke up. “I think,” he said, “if this man betrays us... none of us could be blamed for having believed him. What do you think, everyone?”

  I remembered feeling very happy for those words.

  Not long after, workshops of all kinds were built; the air filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, and looms; and fires burned in kilns.

  Once workshops existed, people opened shops targeted at the people who worked there. As the list of items being shipped to Whitesails grew longer, there was also an increase in the number of ships coming and going along the big river. Of course, it was a waste for the ships to come back up the river without any cargo, so they started to return loaded with things they thought they could sell here, and after selling them, they went back down the river loaded with this city’s products.

  Goods and money changed hands again and again, and this was accompanied by an influx of people. By now, this place that was once a half-submerged city was rapidly becoming a center for river trade. Ships carrying wood and leather goods cruised down the river with the logs, and ships loaded with products came from downstream, their sails swollen with the wind.

  More and more houses were appearing each day, and the sounds of the craftmen’s hammers and saws never stopped until the sun went down. I felt quite happy about it all.

  “Well then, shall we head back?”

  “Yep!”

  People now called this city “Torch Port.”

  That night, after I fell asleep in my home in Torch Port, I had a dream.

  It was a dream of that city of the dead, of which I had such fond memories.

  “Listen closely, Will. What, in fact, are the fae?” Gus, with his pale blue body, spoke slowly while stroking his chin. “In a time beyond time, the God of Creation spoke the Words, engraved the Signs, made the sun and the moon, split day from night, and gathered water to separate the oceans and the earth. Fire was born, wind was born, trees were born. It was before gods, and before people.”

  Blood was there too, leaning his skeletal body against the wall, hearing Gus’s lesson but not listening to it. It was a peaceful moment in the afternoon.

  “Within the water, earth, fire, air, and trees dwell the great Words of the First God. They were more than natural phenomena; they possessed clear individual will.”

  “Phenomena with minds of their own?”

  “It may be hard for you to imagine... Hmm, especially since there are no elementalists here. If there had been, I could have had them make the sylphs dance or something; that would have made the explanation simple. Well, no matter.” Gus shook his head.

  That “no matter” didn’t mean “it doesn’t matter anyway”—rather, it meant “you will meet one before long, so you simply need to keep this in the back of your mind.” And in actual fact, I did meet Menel shortly after, and could now understand what Gus meant by “phenomena with individual will.”

  “Owing to the fact that they had wills of their own, these fae split into two types after their creation. The first was a long-lived way of existence spent clinging to unstable phenomena along with the lesser minions, that is, the fairies and elementals. If an elementalist were to go to a mountain of fire, even today he should be able to see a great fae known as a Lord of Fire there, with elementals of fire obeying its will. In the depths of the vast oceans there would drift a Lord of the Sea, and deep in an ocean of trees a Lord of the Woods would stand silent.”

  Gus paused. “Elementalists, incidentally, are those who can perceive and communicate with the fae and fairies who exist in the invisible world overlapping our transient one. Shamans, in other words.”

  As I listened to Gus, I nodded and took notes. There was no better way of remembering things than listening, thinking, and writing.

  “The other group, however, chose a different path.”

  “A different path?”

  “Not the nebulous existence of the fae, omnipresent within phenomena, sometimes existing, sometimes not, perhaps dead, perhaps alive, and at some point becoming too indistinct to perceive. Instead, they chose to live a crystal-clear existence, and die a crystal-clear death. In other words, the human way of life.”

  I found it slightly amusing that Gus the ghost was the one saying this to me. He seemed to be aware of this and shrugged his shoulders. “They fell in love with humanity.”

  His uncharacteristically romantic phrasing caused Blood to make a sound like he was spitting out a drink. Gus instantly willed a small pebble to fly in his direction.

  “Ow! What was that for, old man?!”

  “You know what! Now pipe down!”

  After muttering irritably under his breath for a moment, Gus continued. “Of the elementals who longed for life with a body of flesh, those who belonged to the air, water, and trees brought the matter up with the goddess of the forest, Rhea Silvia. She was a pleasure-seeker, impulsive and fickle, but that was why she was able to see eye to eye with the ever-changing phenomena that the fae were.”

  And the goddess saw fit to grant the fae what they desired.

  “Thus the elves were born as the minions of the goddess Rhea Silvia. They were a race with lives as long as the trees, as swift as a gale, and as graceful as a flowing spring. That goddess who lived for love took the fae’s admiration for humans into account, and made it so that the two races would be compatible. It is said that this is the reason that humans and elves can produce mixed-blood children.”

  Gus shrugged his shoulders. “But there is an old saying: ‘The neighbor’s wheat looks riper.’ It is sometimes the case that a thing can only be admired from a distance. Although some elves actively mingled with humans, there were also those who yearned for the time they were fae.”

  He went on. “Those elves of ancient times, who lived with passion and mixed with people, disappeared naturally with time due to their mixed blood and natural lifespans. Even now, every once in a while, a half-elf will be born from two human parents—a remnant of those elder elves. Me
anwhile, the elves who yearned for the days of the fae, and chose to live deep in the forest and insularly among their own kind, preserved their purity.”

  “Uhh, I don’t—”

  “I’m not trying to say one’s better than the other or make some kind of point here. I am simply telling you that there were two groups who each made different choices. Nothing more.”

  It felt like a topic I could see myself sinking into thought over, but Gus seemed relatively content to brush it aside.

  “Yeah, so, ’cause of all that, the elves who exist now are pretty unsocial. They’re good guys if you get to know ’em, but that can take a while.” Blood added to Gus’s explanation. “They’re a skinny bunch, but quick on their feet, and they make good hunters and fighters. Many of ’em have what it takes to be elementalists, too. They go back to the fae, after all. Uh, the takeaway here is, don’t get in a fight with an elf in a forest. ’Cause that’s some scary shit.”

  Blood then told me that there were apparently even some he had no idea what to make of, who had mastered elementalism to its utmost limits and could discard their body of flesh and turn back into a fae.

  “Those stories are somewhat unreliable...” Gus said. “Though, if there were to be a being capable of such a thing, I doubt it would be anything other than an elf. They are the minions of the god of the forest, and the closest things there are to fae. They are close to human, and far from it, too. A great race.”

  With that, Gus brought his talk about the elves to a close.

  “But there were also some who obtained flesh-and-blood bodies in a different way: the fae of earth, rock, and fire. Earth and rock command the attribute of immutability, while fire controls destruction and creation. None of them were very close to the goddess Rhea Silvia, and neither did they long for the human way of life.”

  “Really? Then why did they get physical bodies?”

  “The object of their admiration was human technology. They found it incredibly fascinating, the way we extracted ore from the earth, heated it with fire, refined it, and made it into metal. It is said that fae and fairies are not generally too fond of metals and money, so these were certainly an odd group.” He shrugged. “They made their way to see Blaze, god of fire and craft. Blaze was stubborn and spoke little, preferring to create and tinker, but he was also a god of battle and anger who, once enraged, would bring about terrible destruction. He exchanged brief words with the fae who had shown an interest in the industrial arts, and once he was sure of the strength of their determination, he nodded wordlessly, and granted them physical bodies as his own minions.”