BFT | Chapter 16

Seeing no response, McGhee seemed to decide to just gossip.

"You haven’t been here in a while. Anything you want to know? Ask me anything."

"Hmm."

After drawing it out a bit, Rlyel said casually, "Will the Marchioness of Clarence be at tomorrow’s execution too? She came before, and I was wondering if she would this time too."

"Hmph, so you want to see the pretty face again? Sadly, that lovely métresse[[4]] was burned at the stake. She cursed the up-and-coming Duchess of Portsmouth with black mass."

"Black mass? Even noble ladies believe in superstition so seriously? Women..."

He had purposely mocked it as a jab, but in truth Rlyel was the one who believed in black mass more seriously than anyone. That was only natural, since he was the one washing the devil and changing its clothes every day.

"Superstition? Do you know what happened to the Duchess of Portsmouth? She suddenly collapsed and died."

McGhee took the bait. After that, Rlyel quietly drank and listened. As is often the way with the world, the Marchioness of Clarence’s black mass incident was more complicated than it first appeared.

"The woman said to have carried out the black mass for the Marchioness of Clarence isn’t a witch. She was a wandering invalid and died for no reason. The queen bribed the torturer and the judge to forge a confession document for the Marchioness of Clarence. The real witch is someone else."

McGhee chattered on.

"The royal couple are regulars with that witch. If the woman who died from black mass hadn’t been the Duchess of Portsmouth, the matter probably wouldn’t have blown up at all. That witch is still running her business just fine. I heard she’s booked up three years in advance."

"What’s that famous witch’s name?"

Rlyel suddenly asked. McGhee, who had been talking to a man who’d been mostly disinterested, looked pleasantly surprised that he had finally reacted.

"Johanna Ulrich. Anyone from the Ulrich family of House Scot knows her. It’s probably just a rumor, but apparently half the infant corpses in the capital are bought by Ulrich. They say she boils them in a pot and offers them as sacrifices, though even if it’s a rumor, it still leaves a bad feeling."

This was going well. He had snagged a big fish right from the start without having to poke around court maids one by one. After listening to her gossip a while longer, Rlyel sent McGhee away.

Ulrich of House Scot.... He wasn’t sure whether she had the skill to summon a devil, but she seemed able to lend him some suitably wicked wisdom. If she could even control the royal couple, then she definitely wasn’t a fool.

***

The execution ceremony began early the next morning. A religious ritual had been going on for an hour before the execution. In this country’s court society, there was a tradition that if people were acquainted, then even if they were political enemies, they had to listen to a condemned person’s final words. Since they were executing sixty-seven royals in one day, there were many attendees. Not only the families of the condemned, but also powerful figures in politics, the king and queen, and the prince.

Thanks to the black mask that covered him down to the shoulders, Rlyel could examine the attendees one by one with his eyes. A royal execution was a condensed summary of the court’s power structure that could be understood at a glance. Those who ascended the scaffold were the losers in the struggle for power, and those seated below the scaffold were the winners. The arrangement of seats below the scaffold precisely revealed the ranking among the victors. Rlyel’s second purpose on this trip was to grasp the current power structure of the court.

--You’ve probably noticed this too. This matter involves the court. I don’t know who the mastermind is, but it’s definitely some high official.

The "mastermind" was right here.

To Rlyel, the culprit behind the matter was not an ordinary high official. On average, condemned prisoners were sent to the execution grounds one month after being imprisoned. Yet for the past two months, requests to transfer death-row prisoners to Abaddon Prison had almost completely stopped.

In other words, the mastermind was keeping the prisoners at Abaddon alive so he could keep using them as breeding studs, which meant he must possess powerful judicial authority. Add to that the ability to control both the senior priest and the holy knight order at once....

The closer one sat to the scaffold, the higher one stood in the pyramid of the court ecosystem. Rlyel’s gaze lingered on King James IV and Prince Arthur in the front row.

Since the king and his son sometimes attended royal executions, today was not the first time he had seen them. As for the mastermind’s conditions, King James IV fit them exactly. He was also number one on the list of mastermind suspects Rlyel had mentally made on the very first day the beast came into Abaddon Prison. Even today, that ranking had not changed.

Prince Arthur, who had been ranked twelfth on the suspect list, was looking at the priests reciting prayers. Like his father, Arthur’s ranking had not changed either. That psychopath had become quite swaggering now that the succession was approaching, but he still did not have the power to control judicial authority. Of course, he was a likely accomplice who had actively helped his father.

If Prince Arthur were the mastermind, he would already have taken the calf as his mistress. Or dissected her himself.

To Rlyel, the beast when she first entered Abaddon Prison had been the very image of the beautiful prince girls dreamed of. Because of the inbreeding tradition rampant among Europe’s royal families, royals of both sexes generally looked frail and suffered genetic diseases all too often. Beautiful princes and lovely princesses were fictitious creatures that only existed in fairy tales.

Still, in some ways Arthur was a special prince too. It was said that, though rape was a hobby common to princes of every country, a taste for corpses was rare even among them. Arthur had apparently been especially interested in human dissection since childhood, even setting up a private dissection room in the palace and visiting it often. There had even been a time when he secretly dug up the corpse of a young noblewoman freshly buried after her funeral and looked at it all night, only to be caught and cause a huge uproar at court.

Around nine in the morning, the executions finally began. The first condemned prisoner was an elderly silver-haired woman who held a rosary tightly in her hands. Refusing to convert, the old woman ascended the scaffold and left behind her final words with a calm expression.

"I forgive everyone here."

Rlyel brought the axe down at once. Then, as was customary for executions, he lifted the condemned woman’s head high with one hand. After handing the head to the weeping family members and gripping the axe again, Rlyel froze. Several red spots had splashed onto one cheek of Prince Arthur in the front row. It was blood that had leaped out from the old woman’s neck.

As if sensing Rlyel’s gaze, Arthur wiped his cheek with his fingertips. Recently he had apparently gained considerable influence over state decisions by riding on his father’s backing, and today his face looked especially arrogant as he stared without blinking. Rlyel looked away from Arthur and thought absently,

That perverted sex freak would probably be delighted if prisoners did that to him every day.

***

After killing sixty-seven people all day, Rlyel finally left the court. It was around four in the afternoon. The square in front of the court was packed because of Bishop Pyerd’s execution. The execution had apparently just ended, because priests were coming down from the scaffold. The crowd hurled trash at the platform and jeered.

"What kind of work do you do so sloppily?"

"Did you get drunk last night?!"

Seeing the rough mood of the crowd, it seemed Bishop Pyerd’s head had not come off in one clean blow. Bishop Pyerd was a major priest who had been respected for decades. The man handling today’s execution might be beaten up by the crowd if he was unlucky.

Is the calf holding up?

Rlyel quickly shoved the thought away as soon as it surfaced. He steeled himself and headed toward the bustling district. He had a drink at a tavern and gathered information about the witch Ulrich. Because of the Marchioness of Clarence’s burning, almost nobody did not know of her. Rlyel quickly learned her residence and headed to House Scot after midnight.

Ulrich’s mansion stood near the forest, far from the residential district. Against the bleak woods, the old house standing alone in the winter wind looked perfectly suited to be a witch’s den. Rlyel reined in his horse and surveyed the place.

To be honest, until he actually got here, he had been half doubtful, but looking at it now, he felt more and more certain that Ulrich was a real witch. The atmosphere clinging to the forest around the mansion was that ominous.

What a truly convenient environment for a thief... Living alone in a place like this, the old woman really had no fear.

Rlyel put on the mask he had prepared and dismounted. After smashing through the mansion’s front door with his bare hands and going inside, screams rang out from the bedroom.

"Who’s there?!"

A series of sounds followed as someone hurriedly locked the bedroom door. Rlyel casually smashed through that door too with his bare hands. When the huge, heavily muscled man pushed into the bedroom, Ulrich looked stunned.

"H-how did you break the door... I cast a locking spell..."

"Looks like the old woman cast the spell while half asleep. Broke it in one hit."

Even as he answered, Rlyel was once again seized by suspicion. A locking spell? So this old woman was a fraud after all?

Still, he had come this far and could not go back without doing anything. Rlyel hoisted the old woman up and plopped her onto the bedroom sofa, then sat in the chair across from her himself. Ulrich’s face as she looked at Rlyel was pale as a corpse.

"I’ll tell you why I’m here."

Rlyel got straight to the point.

"I want to perform a black mass. Summon me a usable complete devil. Well, if you can call up a demon king, even better."

"You are the demon king, so why would you call another demon king?"

"Yeah, my build is pretty demon-king-like. If the old lady treats me politely, I might even consider acting like a little baby angel. So, can you summon a devil or not?"