Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  Proving it, though, was another matter. Setting aside the fact that half of my reasoning was predicated on metagaming and thus would be very difficult to justify my character having reached spontaneously, none of this (save perhaps for the secret passage, though that would still require breaking into someone else's room) was materially verifiable. There weren't any obvious smoking guns, any aspects of the setup I could point to as objective evidence of Phaidime's murderous intent, or even of murderous intent existing at all. Since the whole scenario was artificial in a way that meant it would be difficult to tell between a fake backstory and a fake fake backstory, I couldn't even think of an angle for how to prove she was lying about her identity.

  You could look up her skirt, some indecent part of me suggested.

  Absolutely not. We are not looking up her skirt.

  In any case, it seemed as if the only way forward was to wait. If I got very lucky, maybe she'd accidentally let an incriminating detail slip, but it was more likely that things wouldn't move forward until a murder actually occurred. Assuming I was able to keep close tabs on her, the evidence to confirm my hypothesis would likely emerge in the process.

  Until then, it was a wolf-and-sheep situation. I needed to stay close to Phaidime to observe her, but I couldn't risk being alone with her, as obviously that could end with me getting murdered. I had zero confidence in my ability to defend myself without the Power, even if Kasua's body seemed to be marginally brawnier than my actual one. The staff, especially Gaizarik, also needed to be avoided, as there was a good chance they were accomplices. Bahram wasn't out of the question either, although the impression I had right now was that he was more of a patsy.

  But again, in practice, the size of the train and the diversity of things to do meant that this would likely be less of a complex game of social needle-threading and more just staying in the observation car with everyone else until it was time for dinner.

  At the very least, I could work on my character objective of solving what had happened to Kasua's mother. Though having already reached the hypothesis I had, it wasn't difficult to make an educated guess about this either. Mariya, one of the closer confidants of Rastag, had been upset at him leading up to her disappearance. Either through discovering a dark secret or threatening to reveal one she already knew for other reasons, she'd probably become a threat to him that needed to be eliminated.

  ...I'm still using 'he' for Rastag because this is all technically theoretical, just to be clear. I'm not trying to suggest that being a murderer means that it wouldn't count or something. I mean... well, you know what I mean.

  Anyway, it was probably something like that, but unlike solving the murder, it wasn't enough to take a conclusion and work backwards. My goal was for Kasua, not me, to learn the full truth of what happened. That would require a more methodical approach. I needed to try and squeeze out information on the deeper lore of this whole scenario. What were all these occult beliefs that everyone kept alluding to? What, specifically, was the Lifeblood Foundation doing? What had originally bound together the Fellows of Hinshelwood Hall (and what was Hinshelwood Hall, exactly?)

  The role I'd been given felt a little unfair, with how little information I seemed to be starting with compared to most of the others. Though I guess the asymmetry was supposed to be part of the fun when it came to this sort of thing.

  As we were finishing lunch, Hildris finally arrived. She'd changed her dress for some reason, now clad in a bright purple single-shoulder one that I couldn't quite culturally identify, but definitely belonged in a warmer country. She smiled broadly.

  "Good afternoon, darlings!" She cast her eyes over the scene, raising her eyebrows. "Oh dear; you've gone and started without me."

  "Hello, Hildy!" Bahram said, looking like a man in the desert being handed a water canister to be joined by someone who, at least for the time being, wasn't displaying open contempt for his former best friend. "Come join us if you like! I set a couple sandwiches aside in case anyone else wandered in."

  "Oh, Ram, you're such a chuckaboo," she said affectionately. I twitched at the contraction 'Ram'. Why did this keep happening? "I'm quite alright, though, quite alright. You know me-- I always like to build up a proper hunger whenever I'm invited to a fancy dinner, enliven the flavor."

  He shook his head, smiling. "I knew you'd say that. No small wonder you've not gained a pound since the day we met."

  She laughed performatively. "Flatterer." Her eyes shifted towards Tuthal, and her lips twisted into a smirk. "Oh my, look what the cat dragged in." Her tone made it difficult to tell whether the words were affectionately mean-spirited or the regular type of mean-spirited.

  Tuthal sighed, and spoke with a reservation I hadn't heard from him so far. "Hildris. I'd started to think you hadn't come."

  "Did you now." She looked amused. "Wishful thinking, perhaps. You know I'm never one to leave business unsettled."

  He snorted. "That's what you'd call this? Business?"

  "Of course. Regardless of how it all ended, the Lifeblood Foundation, Rastag's work, was half of my life. My very flesh and bones were given to it." She tilted her head slightly. "But all relationships in this world are transactional. You of all people ought to know that."

  He stared at her in silence, his lip curling downwards.

  After a moment of awkward silence, Bahram cleared his throat. "Have a seat with us at the very least, Hildy. Have a drink."

  Her smile returned. "Don't mind if I do!"

  As she approached the time, Tuthal - wordlessly and with a surprising lack of emotion - rose from his seat and crossed the room, taking what remained of his beer and strolling towards the bookcase, where he quickly picked something out and sat down. Bahram, his eyes following his movements, muttered something like 'oh dear...' as this all happened.

  Hildris chuckled to herself as she claimed a different seat to the one he'd just vacated. "Well, now. Someone's certainly a little fragile."

  Phaidime whistled. "Feels like there's a story there."

  "Not a particularly interesting one, I assure you," Hildris countered dryly. "You're Ras's sister, I presume?"

  "A-Ah, forgive me, I ought to have introduced you two at the jump," Bahram said apologetically, seeming a little thrown off by what happened. "Hildris, this is Phaidime. Phaidime, Hildris - she was our group accountant."

  "Pleasure to meet you," Phaidime said, sticking out a hand.

  "Charmed," Hildris replied, taking it. "I've heard so much about you. Rastag spoke of you often."

  Did he?

  Phaidime snerked. "Is that right? Good to know he was thinking of home, even if he didn't send any fucking money."

  "He was rather mercurial even with those of us close to him, I'm afraid," the other woman commented. "A man who was always worried about being left without the resources to accomplish his goals, to say the least."

  "And yet who'd spend money on a golden train."

  "Yes, well, we're all of us a web of contradiction." She glanced in my direction. "Kasua, darling, you're looking a tad bit scattered."

  "Mm? Oh." I hesitated. "...sorry, I was just thinking about something."

  "I should hope so! It would be rather worrying if you were thinking about nothing." She laughed at her own joke, then lowered her voice as to only be audible to those at our table, leaning towards me. "Sweetie, if you're feeling left in the dark, it's nothing that deep. We just used to be an item, that's all."

  I blinked. "What?"

  "Tuthal and I," she explained. "We were romantically involved. That's why he's being a little baby, and rushing off into the corner to sulk at the sight of me."

  I couldn't avoid glancing in his direction as I processed the information. It had only been a few moments, admittedly, but I felt stupid for not having put two and two together myself.

  But I recalled a trivia from the guide. "Hasn't he been married for nearly a century...?"

  She cooed. "Oh, dear, you're still so pure of heart."

  Phaidime giggled to herself, while Barham looked a little embarrassed, crossing his arms.

  I peered at her. "You mean..."

  "Oh, relax, darling, I'm just being silly. No-- This was a very long time ago, not long after we were still in school." She shook her head. "He's just never been able to wholly get over the affair, I'm afraid. Some men, well, they're like bloody scent hounds. They get one little sniff and you never hear the end of it."

  I moved to bite my lip, which the body translated as Kasua just holding her lips together pensively. Somehow, that didn't seem to quite fit with the way he'd reacted.

  "But look at me, condescending to you like you haven't plenty of experience being chased by boys yourself! You have to forgive me."

  "You were Rastag's accountant, weren't you?" I asked, going out on a limb. I had to remind myself that Kasua was supposed to be blunt. "Maybe he feels like you betrayed him over whatever happened with his finances, rather than just being upset about something that happened nearly a century ago."

  Oh god. That was so forced. Fuck this. Fuck acting.

  She rolled her eyes. "Oh, god, that affair," she grumbled. She looked to Barham. "Just what has he told her?"

  "Nothing much," he said, taking a sip of beer. "Just his usual grievances."

  "Kasua, you mustn't get the wrong idea," she spoke insistently, making an inscrutable hand gesture where she thrust her fingers at me before twiddling and clasping them together for emphasis. "Regardless of how much of a chip on his shoulder he might have, Tuth's position is entirely of his own making. He simply made the worst mistake one can make in matters of investment: He played chicken and lost his nerve."

  "What do you mean? What exactly happened?"

  "Rastag had two major rail projects over the course of his life, Kasua," Bahram informed me. "The first was his network in Lahia, and that was the one which made his fortune - rising up from doing modest work on civil lines in the old country to seizing the frontier. This was, I don't know, 60 years ago now?" He looked towards Hildris expectantly.

  "Round about," she confirmed. "I believe the paperwork was all done in '49."

  "Right, yes." He nodded, looking back to me. "Back then, Tuth had a chance to invest in the venture. He'd always been the wealthiest of our little group by far, so Ras went to him before anyone else. He ended up turning him down - wasn't convinced there was enough of a market to capture, between the canals expanding and engineers and arcanists still trying to crack commercially viable airship travel - and ended up regretting it more than anything in his life."

  "He's always had terrible instincts for business," Hildris chimed in with amusement. "Short of finding a way to bring back inbreeding, one could scarcely make a better argument against hereditary aristocracy."

  Bahram let out a half-laugh that turned into a scoff. "Be nice, Hildy." He took another sip. "Anyway, he regretted that choice for decades, because of course Rastag's line was an enormous success, and even now we still don't have a clue how to build an airship in the Remaining World capable of carrying more than a fraction of weight in cargo without being babysat by a dozen arcanists. So when Rastag announced the Zythic expansion to the network about 25 years ago..."

  "He saw it as a second chance," I inferred.

  "Again, a child's way of looking at the world," Hildris declared softly, giving another glance in Tuthal's direction. "Assuming that success is merely a matter of finding the button that spits out money and pushing it over and over. Terribly naive."

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  "So it didn't go as well? I never heard about any of Rastag's ventures failing, at least not until the company shut him out after what happened with Summiri."

  "'Failing' is simply putting it too dramatically, darling," she said. "The issue was just a matter oftime and method. Rastag's success inspired many imitators, and of course Zythia is a rather less developed land than Lahia." She cast a hand towards the window; the steppe was appropriately barren. "I saw the numbers, and barring any black swans, it would have paid out sooner or later. But Tuth just couldn't leave it alone. Within a year of the money leaving his hands, he started getting neurotic about the lack of other investors the project was attracting, and treating it like a pie he was impatient to see baked. Constant questions, constant demands. And then after five years of interfering, he was upset it wasn't making money already!"

  I frowned. "That's..."

  "He got cold feet, Kasua," Bahram said, his friendly tone carrying a note of condescension. "Pulled out too soon, then took it too personally when Rastag refused to reimburse him with company money."

  "Well, admittedly, some of his methods were becoming a little more eccentric," Hildris remarked. "If he didn't know him, I could have understood being perturbed. But after all these years, he should have known that Rastag always had his methods, and plans that more mediocre men were incapable of grasping. To jump overboard at the first sign of trouble-- He was no more robbed than a man who flees a restaurant before his meal arrives because he doesn't like the smell."

  It felt stupid to sympathize with Tuthal insofar as he was obviously being played as a self-interested asshole who would indeed blame anyone but himself for his problems, but I strongly suspected there was more to the story than that. If the venture began only 25 years ago and he'd still been involved five later, him pulling out couldn't have been too long from when he'd named Summiri his successor and the debacle that followed.

  Nor had it been too long from what had happened with my mother.

  A timeline in my head was definitely starting to form around all this, and how that could lead up to Rastag/Phaidime's decision to commit murder. 20 years ago, their latest business venture goes wrong, and they lose their primary investor at a time when things are delicate. A few years after that, a bad decision leads to them being pressured out of power in their company. Then Kasua's mother becomes some kind of threat. Tuthal is threatening legal action. The walls begin to close in.

  It all lined up. I was definitely on to something, even if there were still unknowns.

  "What happened to the Zythia line, after Tuthal pulled out?" I asked.

  "You're riding it, darling."

  "No, I mean... was it finished, in the way it was originally planned? Or did there have to be changes made, absent his money?"

  Hildris and Bahram shared a look.

  "...as far as I know, it was mostly completed according to the original plan, but the board forced a sale of parts of the company to see it through," Bahram explained. "Rastag still directly owned parts of the line, however, and that gone spun off into a much smaller venture directly under his control. I believe he raised capital privately when it came to that."

  He'd raised money, I raised an eyebrow. "Where did he get it?"

  He glanced towards Hildris, who shrugged. "I believe it came mostly from his personal fortune, though I'm not wholly certain. Even though we were still working together, I must confess I'd grown a little distant from him by the very end, both personally and professionally." She looked at me sadly. "Our little group never quite reconvened after the death of your mother, unfortunately."

  All through this exchange, Phaidime watched quietly, sipping her drink.

  After that, Hildris brought the conversation around to the 'catching up' she'd said we needed to do, and I was forced to be the one answering questions for a while. In the process I spilled pretty much all the errata about Kasua's personal life that I'd been given in the briefing that didn't relate to her mother or Rastag, which wasn't much - most of the stuff I hadn't said already oriented around her education in finance in Inotia (Hildris, naturally, thought it was ever so wonderful that we ended up on adjacent career paths) - and also improv'd a lot more information about her fiancé, like deciding that he worked for the military and that our relationship problems were also driven by the fact that he wanted children and I didn't. (I've never claimed to be creative.)

  Phaidime and Hildris said that I should break up with him before I became committed to the relationship, the latter describing him as a 'freeloader', while Bahram played the role one would except for an older man of this era and suggested that I try to work through it before making any harsh decisions, and that also that I might change my mind about having children or 'grow into' being a mother after having children. The whole thing was a little on the nose, frankly.

  It did leave me thinking about how, even when my relationships had been going okay, I'd never even considered having children in the real world. It wasn't just that I thought I'd be a terrible mother, although I certainly would have been, or that it would be an unprecedented alteration of Utsushikome's identity, although that was also true. It wasn't even that my coping mechanisms were too fragile to deal with any serious obligations.

  I just... couldn't even conceptualize it. Couldn't shift my view of myself from 'kid' to 'adult'.

  I attempted to transition this into asking some questions about Kasua's mother, but before I could finish, Bahram stated that he needed to excuse himself for a few minutes to use the lavatory. Unexpectedly following this, Phaidime told Hildris that there was something she wanted to ask about Rastag privately, to which Hildris seemed puzzled but agreed. The exchange felt vaguely suspicious - between it and their initial meeting, I was starting to toy with the idea that it was her who was the accomplice, or at least that they knew something - but I couldn't think of a way to take advantage of it, so I let them make their apologies and move to the other side of the room.

  I struck up a conversation with Tuthal. He'd promised to explain Rastag's occult obsession when Bahram wasn't around, and I intended to hold him to it. Despite evidently feeling sour from what had happened ('bored of gossiping behind my back?') he wasn't a difficult man to please. I flattered his grudge a little, offered to pour him another beer, and within a minute he was talking.

  "I don't even know how to fucking start," he nevertheless started. "It's not as if I've become some expert on all of this just by being exposed to the consequences. Getting the shits doesn't make you a gastroenterologist." He took a long drink, setting the book he'd been reading - the title was something weird and placeholder-ish, 'Student's Novel' - before crossing his legs and looking at me directly. "I assume you know what Shendao is?"

  "...isn't that the name for traditional Saoic religion?"

  "Yeah, that's right," he affirmed. "I'm sure you've heard it before, but the basic idea is that everything has a soul, whether it's alive or not. So, you know, humans have souls, but so do ants. Trees. Mountains. Whatever."

  I nodded distantly. I'm so glad this character isn't a real person.

  "Anyway, like I said, I don't know much about it. But back when we were all fresh out of college - around your age - Rastag took a trip to the Arcanocracy, and when he came back he was filled with all sorts of bizarre ideas. He went on some bizarre multi-year odyssey, went to all sorts of spiritual sites in Asharom, studied under some guru in Viraaki... just, you know, completely fell down the rabbit hole with that sort of bollocks." He leaned back a little in the chair, gesturing as he spoke. "He ended up settling into some fringe-of-the-fringe sect based in Yuloi, absolute ass end of nowhere, that combined that concept with a load of pseudo-science that assigned attributes to various things based on the Ironworker's records of constructing the Mimikos, meaning you can somehow 'read' the 'soul' of an object based on certain properties."

  This was kind of giving deja vu about when I'd first learned about the Order's occultist streak. "What sort of properties?"

  "Dimensions, when something was created or born, that sort of thing," he attempted to explain. "You're supposed to cross-reference that with some kind of registry the Ironworkers left behind that defined types of objects in their experiments rebuilding the world. Obviously it's all absolute bullshit, but the idea is that you can take the result and measure the strength and nature of a soul's destiny."

  "Or the reverse, presumably."

  "You catch on quick," he said, tipping his glass. "That was the philosophy the prick followed in building his company. Not planning lines or train designs based on what was sensible in terms of something as banal as engineering or economics, no. It was all about the magic numbers." He sipped. "And you know, I wish we lived in a world where I could have laughed that off as the crackpot nonsense it was. But the thing is, for a long time, it seemed like it fucking worked."

  "How do you mean it worked?" I inquired. Kasua inquired. "In what way, rather?"

  "It just worked. What ought to have been inefficient seemed to bend fate to make up for those inefficiencies. His lines had less accidents, passengers were happier, investors flew to him instead of his rivals." He threw his free hand into the air. "He turned all of us, rational, educated people, into true believers! Even I started to buy into it. Your mother too-- I'm surprised she never told you about this, honestly."

  I tightened my lips, thinking. In a real murder mystery (as opposed to the fantasy stuff that also infested the market), anything that was presented as supernatural was always there purely to present a challenge to the reader. I'd known that even back in the days of the conclave, which was why I was suspicious of the whole 'punishment from the goddess of death' thing right from the start.

  Even if it wasn't part of the scenario, there would be an explanation for what he'd just described. The key probably laid in the way he'd described it: 'made up for those inefficiencies'. It wasn't that his trains were faster in a way that contradicted the laws of physics, he just seemed to do well despite that for reasons that amounted to luck.

  There was no such thing as luck, not on that scale. So the question instead became, 'how else could that appearance of luck have been cultivated?'

  "...she never spoke to me much about any of the things your group did," I told him. "Not about the Lifeblood Foundation or the Fellows."

  He seemed amused. "Maybe she was too embarrassed by the time you were born. That was around when Rastag's successes started to become a little less consistent." He shook his head. "I should have seen it back then. I let my desire to please my father blind me to what ought to have been obvious."

  "When we were outside, you said that the Lifeblood Foundation operated based on 'magic' too," I recalled.

  "Oh yes," he confirmed eagerly. "Rastag got that ball rolling at the height of his power, about 50 years ago. The whole idea was to single out children whose destinies were supposed to be the most spectacular - based on their birthdates and and their measurements at different times of their life, primarily - and pluck them from their mundane lives to give them state-of-the-art schooling in accord with their specific potential." His tone was so dry you could kindle firewood with it. "Well, 'state-of-the-art' might be pushing things, since the methods were often arrived at equally esoterically."

  "I heard that it produces a lot of geniuses, though." This was true; it had been in the back of the guide. "Summiri isn't the only one."

  "From a certain definition of genius, perhaps," he said derisively. "Though in any case, that's just confirmation bias. Any school with a lot of money to throw around will produce a few clever children. It's not as though people who come from money are inherently better; it's all learned.

  I blinked. That feels like a surprisingly progressive opinion, coming from him.

  It might not have even been wrong, but obviously the idea of a school based on occult teachings with an unorthodox method that produced eccentrics made me hope something a little more interesting was going on.

  "Anyway," he digressed. "I told you how this all connects to this fucking nightmare of a train, so let me stop beating around the bush." He sipped again. It sounded as though he was already getting marginally tipsy; evidently he couldn't hold his drink much. "So the thing to understand is that, even if the stuff he was doing was still bloody bonkers, Rastag still wasn't fully following his insane belief system at first. He was still held back by, you know, investors. Common business sense. Reality. Meeting his more practical needs in the middle."

  "But once he achieved success, he didn't need to do that any more," I inferred.

  "Right. Especially when it came to his personal projects. Fuck-- How should I even explain this." His eyes lulled as he leaned his head back. "So basically. The train is meant to be a person."

  I blinked. "What?"

  "A person. Man. The sons of Gayōmart." He sat back, setting his glass down for a second and laying out his palms. "It's like this. One's destiny is determined by the nature of one's soul. Naturally, one's soul is determined by one's nature. Like, a dog has a better destiny than, I don't fucking know, a set of pidgeon droppings, right? So if you want something to have the best possible destiny, it needs to reflect, in its numbers, something greater than itself. And the animal with the biggest destiny is, well." He gestured between the two of us. "A human. So that's the 'perfect form' to order things around. As above, so below, or whatever."

  "...how could this possibly connect to the designs of the Ironworkers?" I asked him. "And how does having the engine at the center of the train make it anything like a human?"

  "I don't fucking know. And, well, the heart is the engine of the human body, isn't it? And that's at the center." He laughed sharply, as if having taken himself off-guard. "Not that I mean to defend it. I can just see the deranged logic."

  "So it's not about form, but function?" I frowned. "Or symbolism?"

  "Something like that. He explained it all to me when first showing me the fucking thing, but I've done the best to block it out of my mind."

  If I really was Kasua, I'd probably think all of this was a distraction from learning about what I truly cared about, but I justified it on the basis that he'd brought the topic back in this direction and I needed to exhaust it before pivoting back to the Lifeblood Foundation. Out of character, however, I found this all fascinatingly bizarre. "So what are the other cars supposed to be."

  He gestured to the walls. "Well, right now we're in the back of the train, right? The base of the body, the root chakra. The center of sexual desire. So it's all hedonistic shit-- Drinks, cushions, games and other 'fun' things to do." He pointed to the door. "Then the next is the lower back and gut, the part of your body you lean on when you sleep, so bedrooms. Then the engine, then where you eat, then where you think, for the private rooms of the conceited fuck himself."

  So that confirms how it's supposed to be again, at least. Five carriages, the frontmost being his private one.

  I frowned, looking up towards the front of the train. "...seems like a stretch."

  He laughed. "What, you don't need your karma swelling as you speak? No fucking kidding, of course it's a stretch."

  But I meant more than just in the believability of the metaphysics. Like, yes, the engine=heart analogue was pretty obvious, but... was the concept of 'private bedrooms' really meaningfully linked to the stomach/abdominal region, more so than the dining car? Didn't this setup mean the 'eyes' were stuck to the chest? Wasn't it a bit too cute to connect the observation car, which would have been at the rear regardless due to the view, with genitalia based only on the vague idea that it had fun stuff to do? It felt like a post-hoc justification.

  Besides, there was one glaring element to the train's design that seemed to contradict the entire thing.

  "When we got on board," I began, "I remember thinking it was strange that there only seemed to be one door. And rather than explaining that, this just makes it even more strange." I folded my arms, glancing out the window at the yellow-green nothing. "I mean, if it were supposed to reflect the body, it'd be in the dining cart, for the mouth. Or, if not that--"

  "Here, for going straight up the ass, right?" He grinned. "You've got a dirty mind, girl; I like it."

  "I don't think that was especially dirty," Kasua said bluntly.

  "It's funny you say that, though. I thought the same thing when he laid it all out to me." He lifted his drink up again, looking away from me for a moment. "You know what he said?"

  "What?"

  "That he was trying to reflect the human body in its pure form, rather than the one it takes on to survive. The one with the greatest destiny of all."

  It took me a second to understand. "You mean--"

  "That's right," he confirmed. "We enter through the oldest hole of all."

  Something twinged in the back of my mind.

  https://topwebfiction.com/listings/the-flower-that-bloomed-nowhere/) and consider pledging to the Patreon if you like the story.