Chapter 2 (2/2)
“Ohhh! G.o.d! I thank you. What were the earrings made of? What kind of design were they? Please tell me in detail.”
“I don’t mind, but…”
Seeing Teo Keh’s breath getting more and more wild, the woman leaned backwards, and raising her arms, she showed her palms to try and calm him down.
“Um, well… could you not get mad?”
Perhaps feeling guilty about something, the woman suddenly looked away from him.
“W-, what’s the matter?”
The woman took something from a clear, rectangular shelf that was attached to the wall, before slowly presenting it to Teo Keh.
“This is-!?”
Teo Keh’s eyes widened.
Those earrings were undoubtedly the ones he had been looking for. Tenuhg had given these to Iyoh’s mother, the queen, and after she pa.s.sed, they were pa.s.sed to Iyoh, and from Iyoh they were pa.s.sed to the girl that he loved, and from her, they were inherited by the child she had given birth to; it was unmistakably those pair of lip’seearrings.
But something had happened, and those earrings were only half their original size.
“Ohhh, ohhhh, what a thing to have happened.”
Receiving the earrings from the woman, Teo Keh shut his eyes.
The place where it had been cut was more beautiful than he had ever seen it. The one who had cut this was surely a person of great skill. If there was a person like that amongst the bandits, then…
Teo Keh conjectured that the prince had died, and sank to his knees defeated.
He, no, Yohk’Zai, had lost their hope.
“Umm. I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t think that you’d get this depressed. Um, it wasn’t on purpose, you know? I have no idea how it happened either, after all. To think that it would disappear once you brought it out of the bathroom. n.o.body would have expected that, right?”
“…Hah?”
Hearing the woman’s words, Teo Keh lost what he was going to say next.
“It disappeared. When I tried to take the earrings out of the bathroom, the parts that went past the boundary of the door disappeared! Ah-, don’t ask me “WHY!?” okay? I have no idea either, after all.”
The woman frantically tried to explain, in an anxious voice. It was an incredibly unbelievable story, but the woman didn’t seem to be lying.
“It disappeared…”
If this was true, then it was something for Teo Keh to celebrate.
“Then the one who was wearing these earrings was safe then?”
Teo Keh gulped.
“Yeah, he was. For a stranded person, he was pretty lively.”
“Truly!?”
When he bent his body through the window, the woman took a step back as though overpowered, and quietly nodded.
“And what of that person? Where did they go?”
“Where? …Ah-, if I remember correctly, he said that he was headed to an oasis town in the east. And the place that we met was the Zaharya. He said that he had left the desert, and certainly, that place was more a wasteland than a desert, but sand flew in from that window and it was pretty rough cleaning it up, so maybe he had only just left the desert, huh?”
“Did he have a ruba?”
“A ruba? What’s that?”
Teo Keh couldn’t answer the woman’s question.
From the woman’s reaction, there didn’t seem to be a ruba with him.
Had he been pulling a ruba along, the woman’s reaction would have probably been different after all.
With his eyes shut, in Teo Keo’s mind he projected the dizzying map of Zaharya. Zaharya was huge. There was probably no merchant stupid enough to walk through it during the day without a ruba, nor sufficient water or food. For a man to go by foot from the place of the bandit attack, walking only at night, it would take him 3 or 4 days to leave the desert. After that, walking for a whole day without stop, he would reach a major trade route. If he sought help on a trade route with many merchants coming and going, then there was no mistake that he would be reaching the oasis town around now.
“Girl! I thank you. Because of you, the lives of the innocent people in this nation may have been saved. No, rather, we will save them.”
“Ha-, hah… That sounds like a lot of work. Ummm, please try your best.”
The woman’s mouth twitched in bewilderment.
She didn’t know about the circ.u.mstances of Teo Keh’s side after all, so it couldn’t be helped. Teo Keh lowered his gaze to the earrings in his hand, before fixing his stance, and looking at the woman.
“I am the prime minister of Yohk’Zai, Teo Keh. Won’t you give me these earrings? I am willing to compensate as much as you want for them.”
There were a clue towards the prince that he had finally found. Teo Keh couldn’t help but feel that if he parted from these, the ray of hope that he had finally found again, would once more be lost.
“Eh-, that’s totally fine. To begin with, it was something I traded for water after all.”
Teo Keh was on guard, wondering if she would complain for an extravagant sum, but the woman readily agreed.
“What do you wish in return for this? Gold? Jewels?”
When Teo Keh said this, the woman frowned, and then sighed.
“I see. It wasn’t good to take something for free, right? …Ummm, well then, please bring me any old rock lying around.”
More than admiration, what Teo Keh felt was astonishment. What a greedless woman.
“Are you fine with that? If you so wish, we could receive you with an appropriate position in our country, you know?”
When they were too unselfish, it instead made you uneasy.
“Eh? I don’t need something like that.”
Teo Keh’s eyes seemed like they would fall out of his sockets. He couldn’t believe the words he had just heard. For a powerful nation such as Yohk’Zai to treated as “something like that”. She had a different skin colour, but he thought she was otherwise a regular woman, but as expected, she might really have been an employer of the dark arts. Teo Keh suddenly found the woman fearful.
“I-, I will immediately pick up a rock. Please wait a little.”
Teo Keh who had now wanted to end negotiations before the woman changed her mind, hurried outside the pavillion after leaving those words.
The sun was said to have been born from the breath of the G.o.ddess Shawa, and in the Month of Onse, it relentlessly scorched the ground.
Teo Keh produced a cloth from his pocket, and after wrapping a rock that was small enough to fit in his palm, he picked it up and returned to the pavilion where the woman was waiting.
“Is this fine?”
He pulled off the cloth and showed her the rock.
Seeing the stone with a reddish-brown l.u.s.tre, the woman nodded in satisfaction.
“It’s fine.”
“Wait!”
When the woman casually reached out for it, Teo Keh called out to stop her in a panic. And when he did, the woman exaggeratedly snapped her hand away.
“W-, What?”
“What are you doing touching a fire stone barehanded? It isn’t my business if you burn yourself, you know.”
“Fire stone?”
The woman tilted her head in confusion. Teo Keh was bewildered. If she didn’t even know of fire stones, then what did she know of?
“In the Onse Month, stones baked by the sun of Shawa will turn into fire stones. You said that that was a bath, didn’t you? Try filling it up with water, and putting this stone in it. With a bath of about that size, this stone alone should be just right to heat it to bath temperature.”
“Is that true!? Woww, so convenient.”
The woman’s eyes suddenly sparkled.
What did “This’ll cut down the gas bill!” mean? Seeing how extremely happy the woman was, perhaps even employers of black magic have their own worries. Or so he thought, as the existences he had thought of as nothing but fearful and abominable, suddenly felt closer to him.
“Our trade is complete. I thank you, Miss Magician.”
Teo Keh folded his arms and expressed his thanks.
“Ah-, wait, hang on.”
The moment he heard her call out to stop him, Teo Keh’s face stiffened.
As expected, was a fire stone not enough for compensation?
“Could I ask you a little something?”
It seems that the rumours about employers of the dark arts wanting information on occasion, were indeed true.
Just what kind of cla.s.sified information would she seek? Teo Keh braced himself.
“That person you’re looking for. How long has he been wearing these earrings?”
“Hah?”
He involuntarily let out a foolish sound.
“I had received information that he had worn them ever since his mother pa.s.sed away ten years ago, but…”
What did she plan on doing after asking about something like that?
That the employers of the dark arts truly were an entirely different existence, was something that sank deeply into his heart.
<script>