Guardians of the Prince

The broad sky started to stain with the sunset, and the silhouettes of small birds sailed across it.

We continued along a road that cut in between the mountains, turning the sky into a beautiful gradient backdrop, with the forest spreading out towards us.

An outcropping of thick stone buildings stuck its head out, like an island floating above the forest. That was the Shin research town where Mr Lahzt’s mentor, the Shiinium lived.

We parked the camper in a giant empty plaza just in front of the buildings and got out. Apparently, we were walking from here.

I went down the pull-out stairs first and looked around. There weren’t very many people here right now, but there were plenty of signs of life. It was getting dark and hard to see, but this forest felt like it had a long history, and every single tree seemed like a philosopher standing deep in thought.

I turned around to take the prince’s hand, and let out a reflexive shout.

“Oh my, who is that cute little guy?”

The prince was standing at the top of the stairs, with a weasel-ish, ferret sort of creature clutched tight in both hands. This combo is the greatest! I wish I could get a picture of the two of them!

I picked up the prince and set him on the ground.

“How did he get in the car? Mommy-chan wants to hold him too! ‘Cho-dai’ .”

“Kay.”

I put my hands out and spoke in Japanese, and the prince passed him right over to me. The adorable thing obediently padded over to me.

“Oo! What a good boy!” I shouted, and without thinking, rubbed him against my cheek. The ferret stiffened.

It was at that point that Mr Lahzt got down behind me, carrying the luggage. “That’s Kahzam,” he said.

… What. Whattt!?

I yanked him away from my face and stared hard. His eyes were a dark green.

“He was able to disappear into the crowds before, but there’s a high likelihood we’ll run into someone who knows him here. So I figured it’d be best to transform him. It’s an animal called a timp. They’re small and known to be ferocious, so he can still guard us in secret,” Mr Lahzt said calmly. Well, no… His eyes were definitely smiling. How embarrassing, tell me all that before I hug him and rub him all over my face!

“I’m so sorry Mr Kahzam,” I apologized, and handed him back to the prince. The prince hugged him with all his strength, and Mr Kahzam twisted himself out of the death grip and fled, rushing up my arm to ride on my shoulder. His whiskers tickled against my cheek. He was so cute! Like, Morio, Timp Form, GO!

So he could transform into all kinds of different animals then, huh? Transforming him into Kahzapka would be pretty amazing, but maybe that was going a bit too far. After all, it was kind of unreasonable to just turn yourself into the messenger of a god at will.

The reseach center was surrounded by trees so tall that I had to look up to see their tops. How many hundreds of years old were they? Coming up to stand in front of them, I reflexively gasped, and stared admiringly at the buildings.

The stones were tightly fitted, with arches in rounded triangle shapes. Past those, a round tower made of mossy stone soared into the sky. It felt long and slender, but at its base, it was about as big around as the Colosseum in Rome. Come to think of it, this was the first time I’d seen a building this large in this world.

How did they do this in a forest in the middle of the mountains? I wondered, and was informed that it was built from ruins that existed here long before the Vio Rizonnians came over from the continent. People even came from far away to do research on it, apparently.

We climbed several flights of stone stairs, and went in through an opening with no door.

A globe floated there.

It had to be a representation of this world, Gaduelyon, but… It looked like a miniature blue planet, more than double the size of the Shu-ii, and it was wafting above a giant basin at the center of a flagstone hall.

Shin would occasionally float to the surface of the planet like little white bubbles, and as they left the planet’s surface, they were sucked into the surrounding walls, pulling a glowing tail behind them.

Looking carefully, I could see the wall had seals carved into its surface. The wall rose towards the sky, and it was only when I looked up so far my neck started to hurt that I could see the lapis-colored sky turning to night. There was no roof, so birds were coming and going as they pleased.

Window openings had been left open occasionally as the wall went along, and small squirrel-like animals were camped out in some of them. I was wondering at it all, when a creature like a small bear came in through the same door we’d just come in through and started drinking the water out of a basin.

There were humans there too, of course, young and old, men and women, all wearing navy blue robes, climbing ladders to read the characters on the wall and record them on pieces of paper.

There was another entrance further in, and when we passed through the arch there, we came into a wide, round plaza of flagstones that was lit up with street lamps. This was large too, so big you could probably play soccer in it. There were a few stone buildings around the perimeter, with some newer-looking ones among them.

As Mr Lahzt explained, this was an important center of research on the Shin, and was a base for the Shiinium. Apparently, the entire city was also called Shiinium.

Researchers and royal family members stayed here and studied here, there were occasionally open public lectures, and you could join academic societies and the like, almost like a university.

Mr Lahzt led us to one of the newer-looking buildings, and we went in. It turned out to be lodging facilities. It looked like a perfectly normal business hotel on the inside, with cream-colored walls and a glossy floor that reflected the lights.

The rooms where we were staying were on the second floor, right next to each other, and connected by a door. We’d be sleeping separately, but they were right there if anything happened, so we could feel safe.

I mean, I didn’t think anything would really happen, no one had any reason to make an attempt on the prince’s life any more, but still.

The outer room was large, with a table and sofa in addition to the bed. Mr Lahzt and Mr Kahzam would be using this one, and the interior room, which had just a bed, was the one the prince and I would be using.

Mr Kahzam had changed from his timp form back to being a human, and just as all of us were taking a break in the larger room, there was a sudden rapping sound.

I turned around, and there was an orange bird at the window, a postey, hovering there in mid-air and knocking on the window glass.

Mr Lahzt opened the window and the postey flew easily in and landed on his shoulder. He took the letter from the tube attached to the bird’s leg, and the postey flew right back out again through the window.

I asked if the postey could follow a person’s Shin name, but it turned out that actually they carried their letters to a location, the person’s address.

Mr Lahzt looked over the letter. “It’s from my mentor,” he said. “She said she’ll come here, tomorrow morning.”

Honestly, us going to see her would have been the more usual thing, but without a Shin to act as identification, I wouldn’t be able to get into the building where Dr Lemonina was doing her research. So since I couldn’t go there, she had to come here.

Mr Lahzt must have told her something about me. So I needn’t be nervous. Surely we’d be able to sort out this thing with my name.

As I was working out this whole thought process, Mr Lahzt wrote a response to Lemonina, and then went over to the still-open window and whistled through his fingers.

A postey immediately flew in again, and perched on Mr Lahzt’s hand. He put the letter in the tube, and the little bird flew off again, eager to get to work.

Ah, so that’s how you call a postey. I surreptitiously tried it for myself, attempting to whistle between my own fingers.

The only sound I managed to make was a pathetic huffing noise.

— Which was when I realized Mr Kahzam was chuckling, with his hand over his mouth, trying to hide it.

Yeah yeah, go ahead and laugh. I’m going to practice, and I’ll be whistling in no time!

The first floor of the hotel was a large dining hall, and we went there for our evening meal. It looked like a school cafeteria, or an employee lunch room, and had a simple, clean air to it, without much decoration at all.

A fair number of animals had come in as well, and Mr Kahzam, in timp form, hung back in the shadows under the table. He’d have to eat later, in the room, I guess. The menu was chiefly vegetarian, with steamed vegetables at the core of most dishes. I wondered if it would be enough for the army of men I was traveling with, but that’s what was on the menu, so that’s what we were eating.

The prince was a little excited to be in a new and unfamiliar place, and the second he’d had enough to eat, he got down from his chair and started running around. And then he tried to head for the little garden just outside the dining hall.

Mr Kahzam trotted off after him. Heheh, nice.

Mr Lahzt and I were eating the rest of our meal, watching Mr Kahzam and the prince in the garden through the window, when suddenly Mr Lahzt’s hand stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

I turned around to see where Mr Lahzt was looking… Who was that?

A tall man with very short dark grey hair, dark grey eyes, and dark brown skin had just come into the dining hall. He was wearing a black jacket with a stand-up collar, black slacks, black shoes… He was wearing nothing but black.

Another person in a navy blue robe came in behind him.

The two of them glanced over at us, and Mr Lahzt lifted his hand silently.

The two of them came over to us. The person wearing the robe took their hood down.

Oh… just the same!

The second person also had dark grey eyes and brown skin. And his face was just the same too. These two must be twins.

Their eyes were long and thin, with pupils that seemed too small by about a third, with small mouths and narrow chins. They looked just like each other, but the one in the robe had longer hair and was a little bit thinner, while the one all in black had a thicker neck and looked like he worked out.

The one in the robe brushed his hair up off his neck and opened his mouth.

“It’s been a long time, Lahzt.”

“Didn’t expect to see you here. Idine, Endie.”

Something about that greeting was awfully cold.

But, uh, which one was Idine, and which one was Endie?

The man in the robe looked at me, and then looked back at Mr Lahzt with a bit of a smile on his face. He nodded lightly, so I nodded back, but… The smile on his lips wasn’t reaching his eyes. He was a little scary.

Mr All-In-Black on the other hand, had no expression whatsoever, and was intensely silent. That was plenty scary on its own.

“You must be here to see Dr Lemonina. You want to settle down with this woman, you’ve come to let your mentor know?”

Eh. Wait a minute, what did you just say, Mr Robe?

Mr Lahzt’s expression didn’t change a bit, and he answered indifferently. “No. I just came to consult with the doctor about something. She’s here to visit her too.”

He spoke deliberately, obscuring the relationship between us. That was probably best.

“I see. Well, you’ve had a tough time lately, haven’t you. That certainly was a sad incident,” the man in the robe said just as indifferently, flashing a smile around the corners of his mouth. He must have meant Lady Solamire’s stillbirth (which hadn’t really happened, but he didn’t know that).

Not that he really seemed to think it was too sad. But maybe that was just me getting the wrong impression?

“What about you two?” Mr Lahzt asked, and the man in the robe shrugged his shoulders.

“Accompanying our boss. The East had been quite docile lately, we thought we’d pay some friends a visit and stretch our wings a while.”

As I was still puzzling over what he was talking about, he lifted a hand and said, “Later then,” and he and the one in all black headed off to order their meals at the counter together. We finished our meals and got up from the table.

“Who were those two?” I asked, as we left the dining hall and headed down the hall. Mr Lahzt’s expression grew unpleasant.

“You have just met some very bad characters. They’re with the Crown Prince’s faction.”

My heart nearly stopped.

So in other words, those two people were some of the guys who’d once tried to make an attempt on the prince’s life?

“They have the same jobs as Kahzam and me. Idine is on the Crown Prince’s medical team, and Endie’s a bodyguard.”

Going by their physiques, the one in the robe must have been Idine, and the one in all black must have been Endie.

But, the Crown Prince’s faction…?

“Did they just say they were here with their boss?”

“Yeah. Probably traveling incognito, and decided to stop here for a while.” Mr Lahzt nodded.

Woah, the crown prince of the country was somewhere in this research center, right now?

As we talked, Mr Kahzam-as-timp and the prince came in together –Or more like, Mr Kahzam cleverly led the prince in, letting him chase him, and we all returned to our rooms together.

“I feel I should explain a little about the East that Idine mentioned,” Mr Lahzt said, taking a seat on the sofa and crossing his long legs. “The Crown Prince’s faction and the Second Queen’s faction have been arguing since long before this incident, but the whole thing just poured oil on the fire, and there’s another faction that’s trying to use the disagreement to make a tidy profit.”

Mr Kahzam had returned to his human form too, behind a screen, and joined the conversation after he put his clothes back on.

“The House of Mezzeq is a family of nobles that has territory to the east of the royal capital, so we often just call them the East.”

So there were people like that here too… I guess in any world, there are bound to be people attempting to profit off others’ hard work.

“Is the prince okay? They’re not going to make another attempt on him, are they?” I asked, a little uneasy, as I watched the prince jump on the bed. Mr Lahzt shook his head.

“He’ll be an adopted son, so he won’t have any place in the line of succession. They won’t have any reason to try and harm him. For now, the Crown Prince’s faction and the Second Queen’s faction have a kind of truce going, at least in public, and the East seems to have quieted down for a while. The Crown Prince has been holed up in the castle for forever, but he seems to be confident enough to sneak out for personal matters. They’re just looking for problems to wave in our faces.”

“We have our own information network too,” Mr Kahzam said, “so you don’t have to worry, you’re both safe.” He shot Mr Lahzt a wry smile. “He didn’t lash out at you again, did he?”

Mr Lahzt shrugged. “Not really.”

Now that he mentioned it…

“Are you and Mr Idine competing for something?” I asked.

Mr Lahzt grimaced. “We were always trying to best each other in one thing or another when we were in school, but ever since I was hired into my current job, he just kicks up dirt at me whenever he gets the chance. He’s such a nasty piece of work.”

That sounded like rivals to me. Ho-hoh.

Still though.

Imagine if it had been Idine looking for that medicine for the epidemic.

If it had been Idine who pulled me into another world.

If I’d been guarded by the Crown Prince’s faction.

If I’d been with them, I might have only met Mr Lahzt, Mr Kahzam, and Mr Fatido today.

What kind of impression would I have had of them? It made me feel a little strange to think about it.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot the best part. They had hot springs here! We’d come all this way, so I took the prince with me.

They even rented out bathing clothes there, which sort of looked like white bath towels that wrapped around your body and buttoned at the chest.

They had both indoor and outdoor facilities, and thick white clouds wafted over both. The outdoor baths were surrounded by stone walls, with small animals hanging out on top. Just as I was starting to wonder why they were staring so intently at me, a few of them got in the water.

The prince and I watched the steam climb into the night air. We could see so many stars.

The sky had been perfectly clear in the Garden of Stars, and at Mr Lahzt’s villa too. Not that I was familiar with any of these constellations, but…

Maybe small children were rare around here, because I could hear people chatting. “I wonder how old he is,” and “How cute!” I was worried that if I answered strangely, people would figure out I was from another world. I started getting nervous, so we left early.