Bluesteel Blasphemer Volume 1

by Ichirou Sakaki

  But he hadn’t expected Berta to stay there, too.

  Now Dasa looked at Berta and said, “Berta, remind me why you’re... here, again?”

  “I guess I thought that was obvious,” she said with a blank look, quite different from her earlier reaction to Yukinari. “Lord Yukinari is here.”

  “And why do... you have to be where... Yuki is?”

  Berta responded without a second’s hesitation. “I belong to my lord. As a shrine maiden, I’ve been offered to him.”

  At this, Dasa’s displeasure palpably deepened.

  Yukinari sighed. “Aw, fer...” This was hardly the first time they’d had this conversation, or one very much like it. Since it was obviously just going to go in circles, he was determined to put Berta out of his mind for now and think about what he was going to do next.

  For starters, it looked like they were going to be living in this hut for the foreseeable future. They were essentially going to be placeholders, either until their “pursuers” found them, or until a slightly better erdgod—slightly better in the sense that it could be remotely reasoned with—showed up.

  Unlike the Schillings mansion, the tiny cottage that had been built on the remains of the sanctuary truly served no greater purpose than to keep the elements at bay. Fiona had said that if there was anything they needed, they should feel free to ask at any time, and she would do everything in her power to see that it was promptly provided to them. But the total lack of even the slightest creature comfort left Yuki unsure what to ask for first. This place didn’t even have a toilet.

  They could use the bushes outside, of course, and did. But it wouldn’t take a xenobeast to give them a miserable time if it literally caught them with their pants down—a dangerous wild animal would be enough. In light of that, Yukinari wanted to get this particular situation resolved as soon as possible.

  And if they had no toilet, even less did they have a bath. Just to get water, they had to go to a nearby swamp or lake and bring it back themselves. It was an onerous process. A bath as such wouldn’t be that hard to make: just dig a hole somewhere around, line it with rocks, and voilà.

  A bath, huh...

  His thoughts wandered to his night at the Schillings mansion. And from there to Berta, buck naked and insisting she was “offering herself” to him. She wasn’t unusually well-endowed, but she had curves in all the right places. Sure, it was arousing. Or rather, she looked soft—like it would be very pleasant to hold her close.

  “...Yuki. You’re thinking lewd thoughts again.”

  “Whatever!” Yukinari scrambled to deny it. “I was thinking about what comes next.”

  “What comes next?” Berta said. “You mean, like, tonight? Will you let me offer myself to you?”

  “Do me a big favor and don’t get distracted, okay?”

  “But I...”

  “And anyway, I told you, you don’t have to offer yourself to me, or serve me, or anything!”

  “But then, I...” She took a long breath. “Then I couldn’t be with you, Lord Yukinari.”

  “And another thing I’ve told you is I’m not your—”

  But before he could finish his sentence, Yukinari thought of something. Berta probably had nowhere to go in the town anymore.

  So long as Yukinari was there as acting erdgod, neither she nor anyone else would become sacrifices. To the townspeople, this probably just made it look like they’d been paying their tax money to support people who were now useless. That would go for all the children at the orphanage, but it would be especially bad for Berta, who had actually been chosen as a sacrifice and had had the gall to come back alive. If she wanted to stay with Yukinari, well, maybe it only made sense.

  Still, though...

  “Look, if nothing else, I’m not a god.”

  Berta smiled and contradicted him with an unusual alacrity. “That’s not true. You’re my god, Lord Yukinari.”

  Yukinari wondered if it was common practice to try to seduce deities around here, but he realized that with him never so much as touching her, she was probably just trying to do her job the best way she knew how. Trying to stay with him.

  “You guys don’t seem to understand, though. I can’t ‘take care of the land’ or whatever it was you said the erdgod did. Make the harvest bountiful, send the right amount of rain at the right time.”

  It was said that the erdgod put down roots in the land, becoming of one body with the meridians of the earth it ruled. This enabled it, to an extent, to control the weather and environment of its territory. Even granted an understanding of the area’s meridians, being able to dictate the weather was indeed a godlike power.

  There had been rain dances in Yukinari’s “previous world,” some of which had even been scientifically shown to have some effect. It seemed to be something about how the fires lit for the ceremonies created an updraft, which caused the clouds to do... something. That much, Yukinari thought maybe he could manage. But more?

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, thinking of the map Fiona had shown him of the town and the surrounding area. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since we stayed at Fiona’s place. Aren’t there a lot of things you could do with the land instead of making sacrifices to erdgods and letting them handle it? I mean diverting rivers, flood works, breeding better crops. All kinds of things.”

  Berta was dumbstruck for a moment. “Diverting... rivers...?”

  “Sure. Flood control.”

  “Flood... control...?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “I don’t... know what you mean...” She sounded utterly mystified.

  Yukinari gave a bellow. “I knew it! I knew that had to be it!” He raised his head and heaved a massive sigh.

  “Lord Yukinari...?”

  “Yuki...?”

  Berta and Dasa looked at him, both girls now equally perplexed.

  This place wasn’t like Yukinari’s “previous world.” Not in any number of ways.

  There, for example, no parity had existed in technological and cultural development. Indeed, inequality was practically the norm. There were times and places that boasted the right conditions for the swift development of culture or technology, and others that discouraged the same. Accidents of geography—including how easy it was or wasn’t to get around—could mean the spread of new ideas in one place and not another. Take China, or Africa—areas so big that it was possible, if care was not taken, for century-wide gaps in progress to develop just within those places. And that was in a world with planes, trains, automobiles—and above all, telephones and the internet. How much more would such discrepancies develop in a world like this?

  All that was to say that the speed at which new developments spread would be very slow. Add to that how tradition tended to resist the integration of new ideas: witness how Friedland had been adhering to its agreements with the erdgods, and the attendant system of sacrifices, for hundreds of years, until it seemed nothing else was possible. On top of that, the people whose livelihoods depended on this tradition—like those priests—were probably making a profit from it, as well. The people who lived off this old custom needed it. This meant that no matter how outdated the practice might be, no matter how repulsive it might appear, it would not be abandoned easily.

  It was hard for new things, be they objects or ideas, to enter such a situation, and even if they made their way in, it was harder still for them to stick. To be accepted, these new things had to have such force as to clear away the existing culture or technology in one fell swoop.

  Dam works and land improvement were no different. To this point, the villagers had made do with the sacrifices to the erdgods. It was enough for them, and it robbed them of even the seed of the impulse to seek a new way.

  “What am I getting myself into...?”

  Faced with two girls giving him completely blank looks, Yukinari let out a long sigh.

  ●

  A farmer’s day starts early. Fields obviously couldn’t be located righ
t in the middle of town, so the farms were outside the town walls by necessity. By the erdgod’s grace, the town was mostly safe from dangerous animals, but even so, one could never be sure when something might happen—so the farmers went out to the fields in groups, always cognizant of where they were in relation to the town, so they could run back if need be. Today, as always, the work started while the sky was still dark.

  “Time to get started!”

  Their skin was tanned from long hours working in the field every day. The blisters on their fingers from using spades and hoes and sickles had long ago burst and become calluses. They were laborers all, but even so, the harvest seemed likely to be slim. Crops were not easy to grow in this soil, and for simple geographical reasons the space for fields was limited. Without the agreement with the erdgod, at least some people likely would have died of starvation each year.

  The men wordlessly lifted their spades and set to working the earth. They might speak once in a while, not ceasing the methodical movements of their hands, but the topics were everyday matters and were soon exhausted. Thus, they passed most of their working hours in silence.

  “Huh?”

  Until one of them, taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow with the cloth draped across the back of his neck, noticed something.

  Something was coming down the road that passed by the fields—the road that ran straight through the middle of Friedland.

  What could it be? At first, the men thought it might be a group of traveling merchants. Most were who came along this path. There were no tourists, because there was nothing to see around here. Whatever they had in Friedland, other towns had, too; and there was nothing they had that could not be found elsewhere. It was the very definition of a country burg.

  But it didn’t take the men long to realize that these were no merchants. Mounted figures in full armor rode at the head of the group—knights, most likely. Behind them came a cart with a curtain on it. And behind that—

  “What in the blazes?!”

  A massive cart, obviously purpose-built, followed. The first farmer vacantly watched the procession approach. The other men, noticing his strange behavior, looked up one by one, and then they, too, stood entranced.

  Along with the knights and the two carts were some attendants on foot. They wore armor, too, albeit simpler than the knights’. Their outfits showed some individual differences, the types and patterns not quite uniform. But there was one feature all of them had in common: a red cross.

  Someone let out an awed whisper: “It’s... It’s the Missionary Order... The True Church of Harris...”

  The spade dropped from the hand of the man who had first seen them. He stood, wide-eyed, as the Order passed by in close formation, heading for the gate to Friedland.

  ●

  “So it’d look about like this, I guess?” Yukinari cocked his head, looking at the map lying open on their table.

  It was a crude thing, drawn in pencil on sheepskin parchment. He had told Berta he needed the parchment and pencil, and Fiona had been quick to provide them. Paper-making technology did exist in this world, so it was possible to get normal paper. But the paper available in Friedland was of poor quality, and clearly wouldn’t stand up to much punishment, so he went with the sheepskin instead. They were going to be making a lot of use of it, and he wanted something that would last.

  The pencil was so they could easily erase anything they wrote or drew, to correct any mistakes. It was Dasa who had made this particular choice. During the years when, unable to see, she had assisted Jirina, she had gained more than a little practical experience in handling paperwork and the like.

  “All that really matters is the direction of the river flow,” Yukinari said. “That, and any hills. Does this look right?”

  “Yes,” Berta said with a nod. “There’s a river here, and a little hill in this area.”

  “And the sanctuary’s here?” Yukinari pointed to a spot on the far right of the map, making sure he had the right place. He had marked the sanctuary with a double circle. The town of Friedland was in the center of the parchment. They had marked the relative altitudes of the surrounding terrain.

  “Yuki,” Dasa said with a quizzical look, “what... are you... doing?”

  “Hm? Oh...”

  When he had said he was going to make a map, he had detailed his requirements for paper and a writing utensil, so he’d thought she understood what he was up to. But he realized that Dasa had been—not sheltered, perhaps, but under her sister’s wing for so long that she had learned a great deal from books (much of it about unusual subjects, like alchemy), but knew little about the wider world. Things like geography and farming were completely outside her experience. Not that Yukinari himself was any kind of specialist.

  “I might not be able to change the weather or any godlike stuff like that, but I figured I could manage something.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “Think about it. If we change the path of the river even a little, we could probably create more farmland, right?”

  “Could... we?”

  “No reason why not. Uh, let’s see, here...” Yukinari mentally went over the tools Jirina once had in her laboratory. “You used stills in alchemy, right?”

  “Yes. The glass ones...”

  “Uh-huh. And some of them were in these really weird shapes, right? Spirals and stuff?”

  “Yes,” Dasa said after a pause. “I remember that.”

  “Well, why were they in those shapes? Just for fun?”

  “It was an... effective way of channeling... radiant heat. Wait... You’re saying...?”

  “Exactly!” he said, thrilled to have gotten through. “I knew you were a quick one, Dasa.”

  As Yukinari smiled and nodded, the blank look came back over Dasa’s face for an instant, and then she flushed ever so slightly and averted her eyes.

  “Water flows from higher places to lower places, and if you constrict the flow, it gets stronger—strong enough to turn a waterwheel, even. Or think of a dam. We could build a flood gate. Make a retaining pond, control the water that way.”

  “I get it...” Dasa already seemed to have understood what Yukinari was driving at, and appeared quite impressed. Berta, however, remained totally lost. She sat with a hesitant smile on her face, not saying a word.

  “And it’s not just water,” Yukinari went on. “If you change the quality of light on the fields, you could potentially affect the way the crops grow. We could put the mountain slopes to work for us.”

  “...That’s true, I’m sure,” Dasa said with a frown. “But what... about labor? Time? Technology? How do you mean to... actually do it?” Dasa, as an alchemist’s assistant, understood that these oft-overlooked ingredients were in fact the most crucial part of the success of any venture. “And in... the case of altering terrain... tools.” There was a beat. “...Oh...”

  She seemed to have reached the same conclusion as Yukinari. She looked at him, her eyes wide behind her glasses.

  “Yeah, that’s right. As long as I’m here, that won’t be a problem, right?”

  Dasa’s expression darkened. “But, Yuki, that...” She seemed to ruminate on something for a moment. Then she said, “Yuki...”

  “Yeah?”

  “You... decided to stay here... because of me, didn’t you?”

  He could tell how guilty she felt about this, so he tried to sound easy-going as he said, “What brought this on? I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but really, I was just pretty tired.”

  “But Yuki, if you... use your power...”

  “Ahh, don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure everything’s okay.” He put his right hand on her head and mussed her hair.

  “...Mm.” She closed her eyes happily.

  She had, as we have said, been blind before, and she favored other senses more than her sight, especially hearing and touch. In a word, touching and being touched comforted her more than a smiling face ever would.

  Berta watched the t
wo of them for a long moment, and finally she came up next to Dasa and said, “Um...” she said, bowing her head slightly.

  “Huh? What’s up?”

  “C-Could you... do that for me, too?”

  “...Erm.” Apparently, she wanted her hair mussed, too. “I’m not sure about...”

  Yukinari was flustered, but Dasa clung to his arm—as if to communicate This is mine!—and said, “Absolutely... not...!”

  ●

  Unexpected visitors came to the Schillings residence that day.

  As the mayor, Hans Schillings, was bedridden, his daughter Fiona normally entertained guests in his stead. But these were no normal guests. They demanded to see Hans Schillings himself.

  The Schillingses could not refuse. Hans emerged into the sitting room, Fiona supporting one arm and a butler the other, to meet the callers. He seated himself, still in his bedclothes, with a comforter over his knees.

  “My apologies that I don’t look more fit to receive guests. I know what a long journey it is to get here from the capital.”

  Fiona and the butler stood a step behind Hans, against the wall, facing the visitors. The mayor went on quietly:

  “And... to what do I owe the honor?”

  Fiona admired him just for being able to speak without a tremble in his voice. He was faced with two knights in full armor, bearing swords. Even though they were now indoors, the men made no move to take off their helmets. It seemed less that they were unacquainted with etiquette and more that they hoped to intimidate the object of their call.

  Their faces were visible from just below the eyes, so it was possible to guess their ages. One was a man in the prime of his life, his mouth surrounded by a beard. The other seemed considerably younger.

  The older man began to speak: “By the inestimable mercy of His Holiness, we have come to bring to this benighted country the exalted teachings of the Church of Harris. To worship in the cults of the lawless ‘demons’ is fatal to your souls, which shall be dragged into Hell. We are in this land to inculcate the Church’s teachings, and thereby to bring all to salvation.”