Chapter 34
Soon after, Astair’s voice came through.
“I’ll head up right away.”
“No—don’t come. Hide nearby.”
“…Is there someone else on the second floor?”
“Yes. It’s better to wait until these people leave their posts and then move.”
After she finished speaking, Elseze put her ear toward the basement.
Voices echoed up from the sealed cellar, carrying up the stairs.
“That bastard— I brought him food thinking of him, and he won’t even eat it!”
“Hey, at least give him some water.”
The sound of water hitting the floor came several times, followed by someone who couldn’t even make a sound coughing and gagging.
Then the men’s chuckles echoed.
At least two men were tormenting someone.
Elseze, about to descend straight for the basement, remembered Astair’s words and stopped in her tracks.
‘It’ll look better to sneak into the manor and find irrefutable evidence, then request the count’s household be searched.’
They needed to proceed covertly until they secured hard evidence. If they intervened now, they might ruin everything.
Elseze ground her teeth and clenched her fist.
After a while, the men’s chuckling stopped.
“This bastard’s passed out, huh?”
“Let’s leave him and go. He just needs to wake up before His Excellency finds him.”
The men’s footsteps approached the stairway.
Elseze slipped out of the room and hid on the balcony.
Soon the men who had come up the stairs showed themselves. They were two knights wearing uniforms bearing the count’s crest.
They pulled the candlestick from the fireplace and placed it on the table in front of it.
At that, the fireplace shifted on its own and concealed the stairway they had come from.
Remembering that sight, Elseze tapped her earring as she watched the men descend the stairs outside the room.
“Two of them went down to the first floor. It seems the second-floor fireplace connects to a stairway that leads down to the basement—I’ll check it out.”
“I’ll come right away, just wait a moment.”
After a short wait, Astair—who had climbed the stairs—found Elseze and approached.
Elseze picked up the candlestick on the table and, like the men had done, placed it back into the fireplace.
The fireplace moved, revealing a stairway descending into the basement. Seeing that, Elseze spoke.
“It sounded like someone was being held down below.”
“There may be guards watching—let’s go down quietly.”
The two of them took the stairs down into the basement.
Because the staircase led from the second floor to the cellar, it was fairly long.
Torches were lit here and there in the basement, but they did not dispel the darkness completely.
Still, even by the faint light they could tell what this place was.
A prison.
A use befitting a place under the manor.
They looked around and, thankfully, there were no guards. The two moved slowly deeper into the cells.
Astair, who led the way into the interior, suddenly froze.
Just ahead of him, beyond the bars of a cell, lay a boy who had lost consciousness.
Elseze pulled a torch from the wall and, peering at the boy’s face, her gaze wavered.
“That’s the child who had the shard of the dimension.”
The boy looked utterly mangled, as if he had been beaten severely a short while ago.
It didn’t seem like just a few blows—the scars and bruises looked old in places and fresh in others.
Astair frowned painfully at the sight of the boy.
‘I still haven’t found the clue. If we rescue this boy now…’
If they left without finding the clue, it would only leave evidence that someone had infiltrated the manor.
In that case, the count would hide whatever decisive “thing” deeper and increase security.
To preserve future opportunities, they would have to leave the boy and turn back for now.
‘But…’
Just then, as Astair hesitated, Elseze stepped back slightly and produced a bunch of keys from somewhere. She began trying them on the cell’s lock.
“My lady, what’s that?”
“Keys. I saw them hanging by the entrance earlier.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Elseze intended to rescue the boy.
She must have known how this would complicate the matter, and yet she did not falter.
Astair watched Elseze in stunned silence, then bit his lip.
Faced with such straightforward resolve, he felt embarrassed for having hesitated even briefly.
On the eighth try, Elseze finally found the right key.
With difficulty, she turned the rusted key, and with a clack—the lock opened.
Elseze approached the collapsed boy at once to check his condition.
“He’s burning up.”
Astair, who had followed in, moved beside Elseze and checked the boy himself.
As Elseze had said, the boy had a fever and numerous bruises across his body.
The fever would require medical aid, but the bruises were something Astair could treat.
Astair placed his hands on the boy’s wounds and cast a healing spell.
In the pitch-dark basement, the healing magic glowed unusually bright as it enveloped the boy’s injuries.
Elseze breathed a sigh of relief and rose from her crouch.
“I’ll check the rest of the place.”
“Be careful.”
They inspected as far into the prison as they could, but there was no one else besides the boy.
Elseze returned to Astair and the boy after looking around.
“It seems this child is the only one here.”
“Ugh…”
At that moment, the boy weakly moaned and struggled to open his eyes.
After blinking a few times, he saw the two figures before him, and his face twisted in frightened shock as he recoiled.
“Wh—who are you?”
“It’s okay. This is His Eminence the Cardinal.”
The boy glanced back and forth between Astair and Elseze, and when he looked at Elseze his eyes widened.
“Sis—you were the one in that alley back then…”
Elseze only gave an embarrassed laugh instead of answering.
The boy’s eyes reddened as he looked at the two of them, and then he started to cry.
It was a sob born from relief at being alive.
“Thank you. For saving me…”
Astair took off his jacket and draped it over the crying boy, waiting silently until the sobs died down before asking,
“What’s your name?”
“…Valentin.”
“Valentin, can you tell us what happened—why you were locked up here?”
Valentin hesitated, eyes flicking between them, then carefully told his story.
“I live with my mother. She’s not well, so I work running errands for the guild to make ends meet.”
One day, when Valentin went to the guild to pick up work, he was offered a job with good pay.
A guild member told him it was a simple task: deliver this box to a noble.
Carrying the box to Count Rort’s manor, Valentin got into a quarrel with a guildmate, and that’s how he met Elseze.
After parting from Elseze and arriving safely at the count’s residence, Count Rort offered him a new deal.
“If you help me with my work, I’ll have the manor take care of your ailing mother.”
It was an offer Valentin couldn’t refuse.
Not knowing what the “work” entailed, he nodded and agreed to do it no matter what.
Count Rort took Valentin to a cellar in an annex.
There, waiting as if they had come to help the count with his work, were two boys a couple of years older than Valentin and two mages in black cloaks.
“And in the very center, there was a small black shard floating,” Valentin said.
Astair and Elseze, who had been listening silently to Valentin, exchanged glances at the mention of the “black shard.”
‘The dimensional shard.’
They decided to hear Valentin’s entire account first.
“The mages stood around that shard and used magic while we were there.”
Then a terrible pain pierced the three boys.
The two boys who had been writhing in agony collapsed and could not move, and then the magic finally ceased.
When Valentin begged the count to spare him, the count clicked his tongue and said,
‘You would do anything for your mother, didn’t you? That filial devotion of yours is apparently nothing more than this.’
‘…’
‘It’s not yet time to open the door, so let’s stop here for now.’
He turned and left the cellar, saying as he went,
‘Keep this one locked up and feed him well. He’ll make a valuable sacrifice when the time comes to open the door.’
After that, Valentin was moved here and left neglected until the two of them found him.
Elseze and Astair realized that the “door” the count had spoken of was a dimensional rift.
And that the method to open that door involved killing someone to accumulate life force.
Elseze muttered without thinking.
“Bastard…”
Startled, Astair and Valentin looked back at her.
Realizing too late that her inner voice had slipped out, Elseze hastily changed the subject.
“Ahem! Do you remember where that shard was?”
“It was in the basement of the opposite manor.”
Astair had searched the opposite manor thoroughly.
That he had not found it suggested the device that leads to the basement was very well hidden.
Moreover, the opposite manor currently had the count and his guests in it, so they couldn’t search it right away.
If they were discovered to have taken the boy, the count would notice Valentin’s disappearance faster than Elseze and Astair could find the shard.
‘If someone realizes the boy has been taken, the count will hide the dimensional shard somewhere else.’
If the count informed the crown prince of this, it could bring them into conflict with the royal household.
Astair bit his lip. But he had no intention of leaving the boy here now—so there was only one answer.
“First, let’s get out of here. We should wait for another chance to find the shard.”
“No. We have to find the shard now.”
Elseze opposed Astair’s suggestion.
“If we take this boy away, they’ll simply sacrifice another child to open the dimensional rift. We must find solid proof and arrest the count first.”
“I will prevent that from happening—on my name. But right now we can’t search the manor.”
“We don’t have to search the manor ourselves.”
Astair looked at Elseze with a puzzled expression.
“We’ll have the count lead us to where the shard is himself.”
He said it with confidence.
