The Faraway Paladin 4: The Torch Port Ensemble Read online

  It was the kind of night in spring when the cold air had lost its edge and green grass seemed to grow in the span of a single evening. The office was lit up by the brilliant glow of a lantern. What was inside the lantern was not wavering fire, but a pure-white shell with a character engraved upon it: Lumen, meaning “light.”

  Under the lantern’s light, I untied the hemp cord that bound together a sheaf of papers and spread them across my desk. This was not the paper from my previous world, dazzlingly white, thin enough to turn with a fingertip, and smooth to the touch. It was a pale-yellow ochre like fallen leaves in autumn, too off-color to call plain white, and had a rugged and substantial thickness that reminded me of construction paper from my previous world. It had a rough texture and fuzzy edges. It was, in short, coarse paper. It might have received a passing grade by the standards of this age, but even so, it couldn’t have been called “good paper” by any stretch of the imagination.

  Smiling, I played with the paper, turning the pages, bending them, and holding them up to the lantern so the light shone through. Then I ran my fingers over the pages a few times to check their texture.

  “Doesn’t take much to put you in a good mood, huh, Will?”

  I could sense the grin before I even looked. On the other side of the desk, sitting in the chair for guests, was my close friend Meneldor. The last time I looked, he was scraping a reed with the knife in his hand, but apparently he’d started watching me at some point. He was leaned way back in the chair, looking at me with his head at an angle. His silver hair cascaded over his shoulders, revealing his white forehead and nape and the pointed ears that were characteristic of half-elves. His jade eyes sparkled, and the corners of his mouth were turned upwards into a wry smile. It was obvious he’d found something to tease me about.

  I said the first thing that came to mind. “It showed that much?”

  “Uh, I just watched the Dragon-slaying Paladin run his hands over paper like he was caressing a woman or something. And you had a grin on your face. It didn’t take much guessing.” He looked at me in disbelief that I hadn’t realized.

  “I was like that?!”

  “You were.”

  Apparently, I was really easy to read.

  “Those the ones you were gifted by the workers?”

  “Yeah. They said these were the best samples they’d produced.”

  “They looked pretty happy about it.”

  “Yeah...”

  Everyone who had taken part in the making of this paper—humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings alike—looked very happy, from the adventurers who pushed through the woods in search of materials to the workers who actually manufactured it. Right about now, they were probably all at the workshop patting each other on the back and raising their cups to success.

  Once more, I stroked the paper with love. This was the first piece of paper ever made in Torch Port.

  “It’s the future of this town.”

  ◆

  In late autumn of my seventeenth solstice year, I fought the foul-dragon Valacirca and defeated him. Even with the help of my allies and the protection of the gods and the heroic spirits, it was a battle that brought me to the brink of defeat and drained me of everything. If I had to go back in time and do it all over, I had no confidence that I could pull it off again.

  But what awaited me after defeating the dragon was no fairytale ending, no “And the paladin lived happily ever after.” Life is not fiction, and so, despite everything I’d accomplished, reality’s unremarkable days carried on just the same.

  My body had absorbed dragon factor, and my beloved weapon and armor were lost forever. People were now petrified of dragons. Beasts became more active, driven mad by the foul-dragon’s howling. A tribe of forest giants made first contact with our society. I also had to deal with the isolated settlement where the people of the former land of Lothdor lived, the demons left over from the destroyed Rust Mountains, the status reports to the city of Whitesails, the coordination with the city that was necessary to prepare for the future, and more besides.

  I’d been running around dealing with these things since straight after the party celebrating the dragonslaying. Autumn and winter were very busy, but now that they had passed with hardly a flake of snow between them, I was at last getting the sense that things were starting to settle down. The day of the winter solstice—the day that added another year to everyone’s age—had come and gone. Before I knew it, I was eighteen.

  “This paper, the future of this town? Is it really that big a deal?”

  “It is that big of a deal. If cutting down trees and floating them down the river to sell to Whitesails is all we do, then as soon as the woods around here are completely deforested, the town will die. We also got some treasure from the dragon, but someday that’ll be used up as well, and throwing money around will just cause chaos anyway. We have to diversify our manufacturing steadily.”

  “I get all that, seriously, but brother, there’s a lot of woods to Beast Woods. We’re good for now. I don’t know how you have time for all this.”

  “I know we’re good for now. That’s why I want to find some time to think of what I can do right now and get someone other than me providing them profit.”

  If you gain an understanding of how things are and keep an eye on how they’re changing, in a sense, it’s possible to see the future. Take shifts in forest resources, for example. Once a town is built and grows to a reasonable scale, the woodland around it steadily recedes. Starting with the closest areas, large trees are used as material for all kinds of things, while small trees and branches are burned as fuel, creating areas of flat land which are then cultivated into fields. Provided with food, the town grows bigger and the forest retreats farther.

  This process was an unchanging constant in both this world and my previous. And I knew that in the majority of cases, “when it’s needed” was too late to start planning. I wanted to set my sights ten years into the future and have a plan in place that far in advance. I was already investing in the town’s future in many ways besides papermaking, starting up all kinds of workshops—woodworking, metalcasting, leather processing, ceramics, textiles, dyes—but was this really enough? If I was going to be rebuilding the City of the Dead that was my birth home and others even farther south, what kind of role would Torch Port be able to play in that future?

  As I pondered the future of Torch Port and Beast Woods, Menel set down the dagger and the reed (the future shaft of an arrow), spun his chair around, and sat on it backwards, his arms folded on top of the backrest. And then, he sighed at me. “You know, the way you think is real elf-like sometimes.”

  He was talking about the way I took the long view.

  “Really? Isn’t it more that you’re just pretty hasty for someone with elf blood?”

  “Not gonna deny that, but you know what they say, right? Seize the day, for tomorrow we die.” Those were the words of a certain poet who had been prolific in the golden days of the Union Age. Menel shrugged. “I might die tomorrow. Getting the most out of today is more important to me than gazing at a future ten years away.”

  Those words, muttered quietly with a dry throat, touched a chord. I might die tomorrow. The words summoned memories. Menel’s sober eyes as he stood on the brink of becoming a bandit, aiming his bow at me. A village destroyed by demons and reduced to ruins. Menel sobbing in front of the ghost of the old lady to whom he owed so much.

  “Most people who live out here probably think that way,” he added.

  “You’re right...”

  This was that kind of world, that kind of place. Death and despair attacked suddenly here, whether you were ready for them or not. Most couldn’t fight them, and everyone had their own circumstances to think about. It was shamefully rare for anyone to offer the afflicted a helping hand. The situation had improved a little in the past few years, but things were a long way from changing at a fundamental level.

  None of us were unbeatable or had all the answers, and that went for Menel and me as well. There had been people we couldn’t save, tears we couldn’t hold back, things that had been lost and could never be recovered. I’d come close to dying while fighting Valacirca just this winter and been in peril on multiple occasions in the months since as I dealt with the aftermath. I was even at death’s door at one point. Defeating a fearsome dragon and gaining its power didn’t give me any guarantee that my death would be any less ordinary than anyone else’s. At the farthest reaches of the south, that was how things were. No one had any way of knowing if they’d still be around in ten years.

  “Maybe that’s why the god of the flame chose you, huh?” Menel suggested jokingly, breaking into a slight grin. “You’re someone who can stand smack in the middle of the front line, where you really could die tomorrow, and suggest sowing seeds to reap ten years later.”

  As Menel looked at me under the light of the lantern, I felt the gentle warmth of friendship within his eyes.

  “Thanks, Menel.” The look and tone I responded with must have been soothing in just the same way. “But I often look too far away. If I hadn’t had you to look at the closer things, the little things, and talk to me as an equal, I think I’d have tripped up somewhere by now.”

  When I told him how thankful I was, he snorted. “Cut that out, you’re exaggerating. But yeah, autumn and winter got pretty hairy in places.”

  “The Invincible Giant. That was a really
close one...”

  “Ya, and let’s not forget when you had an actual feckin’ battle with Reystov.” There was a pregnant pause. He side-eyed me. “Sure, let’s send a talented warrior to the grave, it’s not as if we need all the help we can get right now. What were you thinking?”

  That had been a complicated situation, but even so, I really had no argument.

  “And I heard you took Bee someplace weird.”

  “Th-That one wasn’t actually very dangerous...”

  “If you say so,” he said, and sighed. “Oh, and my blood still runs cold thinking about how you fell in love.”

  I groaned. I had a lot of... well, a lot of regrets and reservations regarding that. “I have faith that you will come to my aid!” I proclaimed in the hope of distracting him with positivity.

  “Feck no!” he shouted back, as if he couldn’t imagine anything worse. “Don’t get me involved!”

  “Whaa? But we’re friends!”

  “Even for friends, some things are too much to ask!”

  We both laughed as we cracked wise with each other.

  “If we’re going to talk about danger, what about when you...”

  This winter had been a time of many adventures, both big and small. In this small moment of downtime on a spring night, we laughed and talked about our memories.

  As they looked at the spear, Menel frowned, Bee’s eyes sparkled, and Al looked satisfied. It was early afternoon one day in winter. Logs crackled in the fireplace in the great hall of my Torch Port mansion, where the spear rested on a large table. Their three reactions to it couldn’t have been more different.

  Menel rubbed his temple as though he had a headache. “Are you sure that was a good idea? That sword was a treasure they’d passed down for generations...”

  The spear’s blade was awfully long, and gleamed a brilliant gold. Yes, brilliant gold—this was the dwarven heirloom said to have been forged by Blaze, god of fire, that had slain the foul-dragon Valacirca: the enchanted sword Calldawn.

  “And you just went and turned it into a spear?!”

  I laughed nervously.

  “I know you were in a fix ’cause Pale Moon broke, and I know a makeshift spear won’t do the job, but who would do this?!”

  “Well, it’s for actual usage.”

  “Al, what about you, are you okay with this?!”

  “It is for practical usage...”

  “Like mentor, like squire...”

  Of course, I hadn’t gone so far as to cut the blade of the sword short, so to be precise, it was closer to a glaive than a spear. I’d gotten Al to ask the favor of the dwarven craftsmen on my behalf, and now the blade was attached to a completely different style of weapon. The near-awakening of the foul-dragon Valacirca had sent the beasts into a frenzy, and demons were running rampant as well, so acquiring a usable main weapon had been an urgent necessity.

  “It is well made, I’ll give you that...”

  As Menel said, the glaive was made well. Just as you’d expect from dwarves, it had a pragmatic design with all excess stripped away, a sleek straight line without a single imperfection from the sharp point of the blade to the end of the shaft. I had no idea what kind of metal the golden blade had been forged with, but it had a captivating sheen. I wondered if the tools of this age were even up to the task of cutting down this blade in the first place, though I had no intention of trying it out.

  Several dark-brown rings made of a strong-binding metal alloy had been fitted between the golden blade and the shaft to reinforce the connection. Signs such as Connexio and Ligare had been engraved into them. The shaft extending from the rings was white with a hint of pale yellow. It was made of white oak. The Words adorning it were the same ones I had been using previously with Pale Moon. They controlled the expansion and contraction of matter. The blade was heavier and longer than I was used to, so it did feel different, but I had a good feeling I’d be able to handle it in much the same way as Pale Moon.

  Bee the troubadour was ecstatic. “I love this, I love it! I mean, getting to see the legendary Calldawn for myself was great too, but a paladin holding a glaive with a white handle and golden blade?!” Her hands were clenched with excitement and her eyes glittered. “What an image! You make my work too easy!” She darted around the table, gazing at the weapon from all different angles and singing impromptu poems to herself.

  “A shaft pure white like lilies, a blade that shone like the morning sun~♪”

  The way her unique red hair bobbed about as she moved was humorous in a way I found hard to explain. “Oh! Why don’t you try ordering armor and stuff made of silvery metal to go with it?!” she said, growing increasingly excited. “A young paladin in an outfit of pure white and gold? The girls’ll go ga-ga over you, I guarantee it!”

  “Bee, Bee...” I laughed softly. “Armor isn’t for showing off with. And silvery metal armor would be way too much of a hassle to manage and maintain. It would stand out, though, which isn’t a bad thing.”

  “Really? I thought you didn’t like standing out.”

  “I do when it’s needed. Like when we’re outnumbered.”

  “So the enemies focus their attacks on you?”

  “Right, exactly.”

  I remembered reading at some point in my previous life that a certain famous comic-book superhero deliberately didn’t avoid bullets when he was shot at. To avoid casualties caused by stray bullets, he let them hit the thing that was most resilient: his own body of steel. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a superhuman like that, it was part of the job of a frontline warrior to draw the ire of the enemy.

  “So you make a big thing of showing you are there, and that stirs up the team and discourages the enemy?”

  “That depends on who you’re facing, but yes, it can have that effect.”

  Battle gear often comes in colors and shapes that stand out: shields with unsettling eye designs that stare at your opponent, muscle armor that makes you look like a bodybuilder, helmets with enormous ornamentation, and grandiose warpaint. Blood had talked about this kind of thing back when I was a child. He said that most fighting happens between animals and that ideas like “intimidation” and “appearing strong” are pretty important for the same reason animals make their fur stand on end and take the high ground to make themselves look big and strong.

  “And if you look cool, that gives you confidence and drive.”

  True, it can sometimes lead to pride, arrogance, and overconfidence. But on the field of battle where the slightest flinch or hesitation can make the difference between life and death, even bravado and misunderstanding are functional weapons. Pretense is no joke.

  “In that sense, this redesign of Calldawn into a glaive feels just right. It’s really cool.”

  “If it’s to your liking, Sir Will, I’m sure everyone who worked on it will be happy as well.”

  Just knowing I was allowed to use it as my personal weapon and I could swing it around as much as I wanted made me almost giddy with excitement. “I’ll visit the dwarves soon to thank them directly.”

  They’d done me an incredible favor by lending an ear to my unreasonable request to redesign their legendary enchanted sword into something practical for actual battle. For this, I could only feel incredibly grateful to Agnarr and everyone in the part of Torch Port known as Dwarftown.

  “Oh, and...”

  I had another motive for having the sword redesigned.

  “Al, as I mentioned before, I’d like to ask you to take care of its former housing.”

  “Certainly.”

  Calldawn had been entrusted to me by the ghost of the last monarch of the Iron Country, Lord Aurvangr. Just like the crown we had taken back from the beetle-demon Scarabaeus, it was originally royal regalia, a symbol of royal authority among the dwarves of the Iron Country. Though it was a very powerful weapon and I certainly needed it, keeping it all to myself for a long period of time would have been slightly problematic. I had promised to have it returned upon my death, but it wasn’t as if I’d be around to see that followed through, and if I died in some untrodden part of the land, it was possible that the sword would disappear off the face of the earth. So I decided that at the very least, I should split off the blade’s housing, including the hilt and sword guard—these too were a part of the sword, sacred objects made by the fire god—and leave it with Al.