SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 781: His Answer

Esmond looked at the pieces for a long moment, and something in him gave up the last of its fight.

"They're devices." His ruined voice scraped over the word. "Alchemical ones. Vessels, rods, feed lines." His eyes moved across them, and there was a terrible familiarity in the way they moved. "I know where they came from. I'd know that work anywhere." A breath. "I helped make it."

Trafalgar said nothing, which was its own kind of pressure, and let the man keep going.

"They're built for one thing." Esmond's head sank back against the bed. "Forcing growth. You feed a creature through them, steady, over time, and you push it past anything it should ever become. Bigger, stronger, and angrier, which is the part most people forget to ask about. You don't only grow the body. You grow the temper right along with it, until the thing's half mad and twice the size it was born to be."

"You'll appreciate what I've got to tell you, then." Trafalgar's voice stayed level. "There was a queen in that mine. Apex. Grown well past her tier, the sort of thing a settlement that size had no business ever meeting. She'd been fed on the richest crystal we hold, and she came out of that nest wrong. Furious. Wrong in exactly the way you're describing."

Esmond's eyes closed.

"So that's what they used them on." He said it quietly, without surprise, a man confirming a sum he'd already worked in his head. "A creature that size, held and fed and pushed for weeks. That doesn't happen by luck, or in a cave with a bucket." His throat worked. "You'd need a proper laboratory. Materials, a great deal of them. And someone who knew exactly what they were doing at every step, or the thing dies on the table, or turns on the hands feeding it long before it's ready."

"How long," Trafalgar said. "To do it properly. Start to end."

"Weeks. A month, if they were careful, and whoever did this was careful." Esmond kept his eyes shut. "You don't rush it. Rush it and the body tears itself apart from the inside before it's any use to you. Whoever fed that queen had time, and a place no one would ever stumble across, and no one asking what the noise underground was."

Caelum spoke from where he stood, even and quiet. "Was it you? Who made them."

For a moment Esmond didn't answer. His eyes stayed shut, and whatever passed over his grey face passed in the dark behind them.

"Yes." The word came out flat and tired. "I made them. Or the first of them, the ones everything after was copied from." He didn't open his eyes. "I did what I was told. That's all I ever did, in the end. They wanted a thing built, I built it, and I got to keep breathing another day for it. That was the whole of the arrangement." A pause. "I never asked what it was for. You learn quickly not to ask, in a place like that. I didn't see a mine, or a queen, or two thousand dead miners. I made the tools. What was done with them after was never laid in front of me."

It was the truth, or near enough to it. He had built the method, and the method had gone on to do this without him ever laying eyes on the doing. It made him guilty and it made him useless as a witness both at once, and he knew well enough which of the two the young man cared about.

He had spent the better part of a hundred years being useful to people who would have ended him the day he wasn't. He knew the terms of that arrangement better than he knew his own face. What he had never once considered, bent over feed lines and vessels and careful notes in the cold of the Vaelion halls, was that a thing he built might one day come to rest on a table in front of him, beside the man it had gone and made an enemy of.

"So no one else could have done this," Trafalgar said. "Only you."

"I didn't say that." Esmond opened his eyes at last, and there was something almost like professional pride flickering under the exhaustion, faint and awful. "I said not just anyone could. It isn't knowledge you find lying around. But I'm not the only pair of hands in the world that ever touched this work." His gaze slid to the pieces on the table. "Whoever did this knew how I worked. They had my methods, or close enough to them to serve. Which means whoever built these either sat where I once sat, or learned it from someone who did, or got hold of the records I left behind. Any of the three, and they could walk the same road again tomorrow if the mood took them."

Trafalgar took that in, and the last piece of it dropped into the place he'd built for it on the flight home.

Everything pointed where he'd expected it to point from the moment he first saw the tubing in that nest. The work was Esmond's, and Esmond had been Vaelion's, kept and used and worked to the bone under their roof for longer than any man should be.

Whoever reached into Morgain ground and turned that mine into a grave had done it with Vaelion's methods, in a Vaelion hand, whatever face they'd put on to cross the border. He had suspected it since the beginning.

Now a man who'd built the tools himself had all but signed his name to it. It changed nothing he could act on today, and it changed everything underneath. The enemy had an outline now, a name and a method and a reason behind it, and Valttair would want every word the man on this table had just given up. Trafalgar would see that he got it, in his own time and in his own way.

He'd gotten what he came down here for. More than that, even.

Esmond watched him think, and understood, in his clever and hopeless way, that the useful stretch of this conversation was drawing to its end. And a man is never more afraid than in the moment he stops being useful to the people holding his life in their hands.

He knew it in his bones. The knife, the fire, the endless questions, none of that was the true danger to a man like him. The danger came the day they decided he had nothing left worth keeping him alive to give. He had made himself valuable his whole life precisely to hold that day at arm's length, and he had no way of telling, lying here, how close to it he was.

He wet his cracked lips, and asked the only question that counted for him now.

"What happens to me now?"