Chapter 366: Ash and Filth
The blaze in Breisach showed no sign of dying down even in the dead of night. Those left in the streets fought desperately to put it out, but it was beyond them. The one small mercy amid the disaster was that the entire city had not been reduced to ashes.
A city’s greatest enemy is not war but fire. That is why each district is laid out so that even if a fire breaks out, it cannot spread across the whole city.
In other words, what was burning was the harbor district and nothing else. The fire had not spread beyond it. The problem was that the harbor was the largest district in Breisach.
The city’s losses in property were staggering.
For the administrator and his bureaucrats, it was a catastrophe, as though the sky itself had fallen.
Just as in Schafen, those who made their living around the harbor suffered worst of all. All we could do was see to the refugees’ safety.
Naturally, we sent a request for aid to Breisburg, and even now a messenger had to be riding there at breakneck speed. Once word of the Great Breisach Fire got out, the capital would surely be turned on its head.
In the midst of all that, Ted offered some timely advice.
That Mort might be hiding among the refugees.
The refugees were in a pitiful state. To people shivering without even proper clothes on their backs, driven into the street by the sudden inferno, we handed out the field blankets we used ourselves as a stopgap.
After taking those basic measures, I activated the Manager and Searcher Scouters.
And found Mort so easily that it felt anticlimactic.
"..."
My men and I surrounded him. Mort sat huddled under one of the blankets we had handed out, and the stench coming off him was overwhelming — it rose from the filth smeared thickly across his face.
An excellent disguise, and excellent endurance.
Anyone else would have walked right past him.
But for all his desperate efforts, the Scouter told me with certainty that this man was Konrad von Mort. The moment his eyes met mine, the fight went out of him and he resigned himself.
"So my luck runs out here."
"An excellent disguise. But deceiving my eyes is another matter entirely."
Mort submitted to arrest without resistance. The first thing I ordered was that he be washed clean. He had to endure a cold scrubbing in the dead of winter, but it must have snapped him wide awake.
The interrogation took place in my private tent, pitched on the outskirts of Breisach. It had been an impossibly long day and I was tired, but there was a great deal I wanted to ask him.
It was shaping up to be a very long night.
"..."
Mort said nothing. He only glared at me. Regret and killing intent tangled together in his eyes. I could roughly guess what he was thinking.
"When I think of that day, the regret cuts me to the bone."
"That day. The day you lured Rüdiger into a trap and killed him?"
Adelbert’s right-hand man had originally been the late Deputy Inspector General Rüdiger. Back then Rüdiger and I were rivals, and Adelbert had planned to marry him into the Elsheimer family as a live-in son-in-law.
Mort, who had been biding his time, tried to use the slum organizations’ turf war to pit Rüdiger and me against each other and be rid of us both. But I did not go to the site at once; I put it off until the next day.
I had deliberately stepped aside so Rüdiger could claim the credit.
That single choice sent the two of us down entirely different paths.
Rüdiger was ambushed by Frost of Schlange, who lay waiting at that spot, and lost his life for nothing. Adelbert, unaware of the truth, then recommended Mort, who had served under Rüdiger.
And so Mort was married into the Elsheimer family as their live-in son-in-law.
That was the spark that set Adelbert and the Finance Minister on a collision course in earnest.
"Dismissing you as a green knight who had merely gotten lucky was my mistake. I should have removed you then and there. I suppose that complacent judgment is what brought me to today’s ruin."
Back then I was an unremarkable duchy knight, so it was hardly unreasonable for Mort to make light of me. Thanks to that, I slipped out of the Finance Minister’s line of sight.
And while Mort tightened his grip inside Elsheimer, I grew into a monster no one could touch. I became the lord of a small village, and now I had risen as high as prince.
My power had grown too great for him to do anything about. Mort truly did regret the decision he had made back then. He resented his past self, the man who had seen no particular need to kill me.
"Why did you betray Adelbert?"
"You may find it hard to believe, but at the start I had no intention of betraying him."
Mort’s words rang true.
Hmm. So the original scheme to bring down the Finance Minister really had been meant to install Adelbert in his place. It seemed Mort had genuinely wanted to be a kingmaker.
"The Finance Minister meant to restore his standing by using the Beren civil war and the absence from Breisburg of the grand duke, the Military Department, and you, his greatest political enemy. But slipping past the eyes of those of us who held most of the Finance Department was no easy thing, so instead we devised a plan to corner him in a trap and drag him down. However..."
As Mort trailed off, I asked coldly,
"Did the neck of the master who raised you this far begin to look tempting?"
"..."
"Did it never occur to you that if the Finance Minister, Adelbert, and your wife all disappeared, you could take her younger sister in her place and inherit both the Reinfeldt family and the Finance Minister’s seat?"
Of course, to take that seat outright he would have had to wage a political war against the countless houses eyeing the post, and the Reinfeldt collateral branches could have attacked him over questions of legitimacy.
Even so, it was tempting enough to be worth the gamble.
Mort glared at me for a moment, then continued.
"...I won’t deny it. It’s true there was a chance to rise to the very top. But a plan is only a plan. I had no intention of betraying Lord Adelbert and my wife. Not until I learned that Viscount Elsheimer had an illegitimate child..."
And that was the beginning of everything.
Having added those last words, Mort fell silent for a while.
The beginning of everything.
The scenario had been drafted, but the risk was so great that Mort never meant to carry it out. What set him in motion was Viscount Elsheimer’s illegitimate child. In the end, Bodo was the trigger.
"My wife never had the slightest intention of handing me the Elsheimer family’s power. As a live-in son-in-law, I was forced to clash with her at every turn. They were days so exhausting they sickened me to the soul."
"Then it would be more accurate to call the two of you political enemies than husband and wife."
"Exactly. Not once did we attend worship together, and the marriage bed was a formality and nothing more."
Hmm. It seemed she had at least not refused the marriage bed, since an heir had to be produced somehow.
Mort and Amalia embodied every ugly aspect of a noble marriage of convenience, and worse, they waged an outright power struggle within the family. It was dysfunction of the highest order.
Until now I had thought Margareta and her husband were the worst of the lot, but the same breed had been close at hand all along. And so Elsheimer had split into two factions and worn itself out with infighting.
"If things were that bad between you, I assume you each kept lovers."
"..."
It was an open secret that noble couples on the worst of terms often turned a blind eye to each other’s lovers, so long as those lovers were kept discreetly out of the Church’s sight. In noble society, keeping a lover was not considered a failing.
Mort had a lover. So did Amalia.
The problem was the identity of Amalia’s lover. I had assumed it was Adelbert.
"So Adelbert’s mistress really was Amalia."
Out of regard for our friendly relations and for his dignity, I had never dug into his private shame, but I had had my suspicions. When Mort learned of the affair between Adelbert and Amalia, he must have felt deeply betrayed.