Chương 66: CHAPTER 65 – A Secretary

The yawn was lost in the air, pervaded by the sound of steam and the muffled crunch of footsteps on snow. Lance stroked his chin, adjusted his collar, and tapped his glasses with a smile.

"Incredible how large this city is. It dwarfs Cael by a landslide!" He followed the footprints on the snow-covered pavement with curiosity, cutting through the various alleys flanked by the other, massive brick buildings. The architecture of Sector III was far removed from Bayork's smooth, colourful style, becoming instead massive and stretching upward.

"At least this alley does not smell of rubbish and…" Lance shook his head, remembering everything he had seen at Arden Ring over the course of a single night. He warmed his hands with his breath and caught his breath again, leaning against the stretches of wall free of piping.

"I had not realised how far the plaza was. From what I have been told, I would say there are still a couple of kilometres left…" He murmured, troubled, straightening back up with satisfaction.

"I really should stop talking to myself…" He sighed, calmly smoothing the creases in his trousers.

"If you need someone to talk with, I am here for you." Lance turned sharply, recognising the flame-coloured attire and the blue gaze. The man held in his hands a dark handbag decorated with a silver chain, rather feminine in style.

"Winoc? What are you doing here?" The boy asked, furrowing his brows.

"I placed a small experimental tracer inside the envelope to make certain it was delivered. However, I will take the opportunity to speak with you, if that pleases you." He smiled, adjusting the bag on his shoulder.

"And here I thought I could trust you…" Lance murmured, gesturing for Winoc to follow him. The two of them set off along the street, while the sun withdrew from its highest point.

"You are not human, that much is true, but you are not a Meta either. You might be exactly like Round." Winoc nodded, revealing a scar just beneath his neck.

"Like many of your own employees, my considerable longevity is owed to several operations and refinements. I had an artificial core implanted through my jugulars." He answered, immediately adjusting his collar with impeccable precision.

"So you saw the war too…" The boy's tone dropped, almost as though he were speaking in whispers along the empty street.

"Not all of it, boy. I came here aboard a ship toward the war's end. Fresh meat for the army, in the holy name of faith…" He smiled, adjusting his hair, aided by his own reflection in a shop window.

"Faith? What do you mean?" Lance drew closer to him, matching his brisk, long stride.

"I imagine someone like you is rather uninformed about Termìe, given the near-total closure of its borders. At least now you can build yourself an honest education on the matter." The secretary smiled, drawing him closer with his arm, resting gently around his neck.

"The history of Termìe is unknown even to those born within that nation. They say it arose after the Great Dark or Dark Epoch, but seeing how every single attempt to wrest information from the Church has ended in so many vanished careers and lives, it seems clear enough to me that the entire nation is hiding something." Winoc studied him, losing his earlier elegance entirely.

"A nation ruled by religion? That seems absurd to me…" Lance murmured, drawing away from him to catch his breath. Winoc nodded, revealing a mark on his wrist.

"Here… Herèzie..." Winoc let out a laugh at the boy's various attempts to read those characters carved into his flesh, right where the veins emerge beneath the skin.

"Hérésie. It means 'heresy' in my language. It is the reason I ended up here, along with thousands of others. Someone gave the order, and our flesh was branded and cast upon your shores." He smiled again, quickly covering his sleeve.

"Heresy? Were you punished by the Church? I do not want to guess wildly, but this is truly the first time I have—" Winoc struck his shoulder gently, his eyes open and lively.

"You certainly are a young man! In any case, it is exactly as you say. The Church decided I was besmirching the faith and all its sacred teachings. So, just like cattle to the slaughter, they sent me off to war alongside other heretics." Lance stared at him, the image of the branded flesh on the secretary's wrist still fixed in his mind.

"Once here, I killed dozens of people like you… Some of them must have been your age, or thereabouts. I tore children from their families, but I believed it was right, or at least, I believed doing so would ease the pain in my arm." Winoc did not look at the boy as he spoke; his gaze remained fixed ahead of him. To his eyes, the street had become the filthy trenches dug into the mud and the trees, filled with the deafening roar of steam and grenades.

"There was a girl in my platoon. During an assault, she was wounded in the leg, and they decided to abandon her. I abandoned everyone else to help her. I forfeited any chance of redeeming myself and let my comrades die. At first I condemned myself so harshly for letting them die, but in the end I realised what I truly regretted was having shut myself off from the very redemption I was seeking." Winoc leaned against the wall, fixing his gaze for a second on the sun freeing itself from the blanket of clouds.

"During a storm, I wandered with her on my shoulders. She begged me to leave her behind and go on. I only realised afterward that she had noticed the infection eating away at my side. I collapsed and found myself in the home of a hunter. The moment he felt my hand free, I seized his pistol and pointed it at him. Deborah, the girl, stepped in front of me, and I lowered the weapon while I felt the blood staining the bandages tied around my side." Lance lowered his head, clearing his throat.

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"From that moment on, I lived with her, hiding among shelters and asking for asylum wherever I could. Naturally, after the war, the hatred toward the other nations did not make it easy." Winoc stopped, fixing his gaze on Lance's face, frozen in an expression of doubt.

"This story... Did you tell it to Lexa Worhol as well?" Both of them stopped, looking one another in the eyes. Winoc nodded, the sunlight reflected in his blue gaze.

"In precisely the same way I am telling it to you now. She offered me the chance to live, and I accepted it. Deborah did the same, so as not to leave me alone. That woman gave us a home, and a way to earn our living." Smiling, Lance rested a hand on his shoulder, pulling him close.

"Why are you telling me this? It must be difficult for you to speak about it this way." The boy asked, adjusting his glasses on his nose with a light nudge of his thumb.

"Simple. I saw how you stood beside those two girls. I do not know your relationship with them, but in your gaze, there was no sign of disgust for those like me." He smiled, making Lance blush. The boy caressed the hair on the back of his head.

"The little girl's name is Rea. I found her at a private auction in the capital. She was in such a wretched state that I could never have imagined leaving her in that place." A pale halo of surprise formed on Winoc's weary face.

"If you knew what the survivors of that war know… Would you have done the same?" The question stopped Lance in his tracks, leaving him staring at the shadows of the buildings on the snow. Without hesitation, he nodded.

"All of us have something behind us that fills us with pity or remorse… But that does not mean what we have done must define who we are. I too have killed, and wished to kill someone. I have betrayed myself these past few months more than I ever have in my entire life, and yet I am still Lance." Winoc burst out laughing, pressing his hand to his mouth to muffle the sound.

"I knew you were the right person to talk to, but tell me… The other girl?" Lance immediately erased his confused expression, returning to his thoughts.

"I did not even know she was a foreigner, though I have never seen eyes quite like hers." Lance answered, remembering that deep blue in which her pupils were wrapped.

"Those are rare eyes, even in Saint Lumière! But I assure you, she was born here. There is no need for me to ask you the same question about her, is there?" The boy nodded, without shifting his gaze from Winoc's face.

"I am glad they met someone like you… You remind me exactly of how I used to be." The street split into a fork, where Lance's memory urged him to the right, where he recalled the Hotel to be.

"Winoc…" He murmured, stopping him before he could turn away completely.

"Why all this hatred? I do not recall Northest being hated to this degree." Winoc cleared his throat, taking a step toward him.

"Simple. Termìe terrorised the entire archipelago. The battlefields were slaughterhouses for human beings… I saw what they did to women and young girls. Deborah does not carry the mark on her arm. She carries it here." He slowly slid his finger down along his chest, past his navel, stopping just above the groin.

"Termìe is not an empire, but a condensed mass of madness, and I have only seen the very tip of it." Those words reached his eardrums with such coldness that a sharp pain shot through his stomach. The mere thought of the cruelty behind those wounds sent nausea rising in Lance, who immediately swallowed back down the remains of that morning's breakfast.

"I did not mean to ruin your lunch. In any case, I would like you to try to become friends with Deborah. She is not a bad girl." Lance wiped the thread of saliva from the corner of his lips, smiling.

"Girl? I think she has more years on her than I do…" The two of them laughed, saying their final goodbyes. Lance stepped onto the yellowish crossing lines when suddenly he heard a whistle.

"Can you give those glasses of yours for a second?" Lance slowly nodded, offering the lenses to him. Winoc's eyes expanded rapidly, before a smile formed on his hairy lips.

"I can't believe this might be one of Adam's relics." The boy groaned in confusion, rapidly putting his glasses on. His fingers trembled slightly, distorting his reflection on the little obsidian structure.

"And who would that be?" Winoc laughed.

"He is one of the worst criminals Termìe has ever known. A true monster on the battlefield that wieled on of the Enumerations. He revolted against the empire. It's not wrong to say that the retreat of the Empire was mostly thanks to him." Lance's head was spinning, and he was starting to get dizzy.

"Maybe that's too much to take in! Just keep care of it and yourself, boy!" The secretary patted his shoulder, laughing again.

"Forgive me for asking this last thing… But how would you describe Lexa?" Lance turned, his coat stirred by the wind, which carried with it thin clumps of snow.

"She really ought to change her ways and be a little less...

'particular', but all things considered, I am certain she is a good person." Winoc studied him for a second, nodded, and walked off to his own side of the street.

"Until we meet again, Lance Klint. I hope to have more conversations with you in the future." He vanished around the corner, leaving Lance to his walk. In the distance, on the terrace of a café, a woman smiled as she sipped from her steaming cup. For an instant, a drop slid from her pale lips, bouncing off her black dress. Her eyes lingered on the boy's silhouette before he vanished in another alley.

"My Lady, when do you intend to act? At this rate, someone might die of pure inertia." Behind her, a figure in a heavy coat had materialised, holding in his hands a bronze watch with a shattered glass face. The hour indicated by the dark hands was precisely midnight.

"All in good time, dear D. Let Malcolm and David work the boy over thoroughly." A reddish gleam animated her eyes behind her glasses. She fixed the sky for a second before returning her gaze to the black liquid in the white porcelain cup.

"After all, Lance and Jude are my precious little children…" The coffee cup rippled, then vanished into nothing, just as both figures did, leaving the terrace empty, with only the dead to keep the warmth of the freshly ground beans company.