The Toad's Circumstances

The town of Tsukuba depends on a spring at the mountain's midslope, where the faint water vapor that strikes Mount Tsukuba wells up as ground water.

In a country where, thanks to the upheavals of the past, the county boundaries had gone all to pieces until no one could even say which village belonged to which county, and where, on top of that, no daikan had been posted and a multitude of local magnates had sprung up in disorder, the one house that held strong sway over every region but the north was the Tsukuba clan, a distinguished house of ancient lineage whose standard bore the toad of "four-and-six."

That day, the pig who reigned over Tsukuba Palace, one Tsukuba Naiyaku-no-jō, was in a fouler mood than usual. The Tsukuba clan's standard might bear the four-and-six toad, but Naiyaku-no-jō was no frog-beastfolk (frogs are not mammals, of course) but a human.

"Gah. That grubby little Oyama Shimotsuke-no-suke, that junkie Chiba Shimōsa-no-jō, that vegetable-brained Nasu Daizen-no-daibu, that good-for-nothing Utsunomiya Sama-no-kami, that ass-crest Oda Sanuki-no-kami… and that insufferably cheeky Satake Hitachi-no-suke. Every last one of them!"

"My lord."

A gaunt man, his second-in-command, spoke up.

"And I do not care for being called 'Lord' when I am the Toad. It is their fault for refusing to call me 'His Lordship.'"

"The style of 'His Lordship' has not been sanctioned, my lord."

"If you have come, then it is surely not over some trifle like that."

Naiyaku-no-jō could switch tracks in an instant.

"No, my lord. According to talk among the adventurers, a dungeon that produces water has been found in the western lands."

"Bufo. Water, you say."

"It produces paper and water, and the adventurers are carrying out the paper. But since fire cannot be used within the dungeon, by the principle of 'water quells fire' its essence is, without doubt, water."

"A vassal overthrowing his lord, you say. The phrase I loathe above all others. Those wretched upstart parvenu houses."

"No, my lord. Water quells fire. Water extinguishes fire. From which it follows that a dungeon where fire cannot be used has the nature of water."

A library, after all, forbids open flame. But there was no way for him to know that.

"The west. The soy-sauce-reeking northern parts of Sō? Ah, but Sō reeks of soy sauce not only in the north, but at its eastern edge as well."

"No, my lord, further west. The uninhabited zone of Adachi."

"That filthy potato-eating country? Crossing the desert will be no small task. And the political situation at this dungeon?"

"The Iruma daikan has been poking his nose in, but at present a pirate calling himself the Secretary-General holds it."

Because a mountain bandit cuts a grubby, squalid figure, brigands who lack any sea will style themselves pirates all the same. For this reason, once a band of brigands is organized to any degree, it comes to be called a pirate band. Even with no ship to its name.

"Shokichō? A house I do not know. Surely not those craven Yūki."

"It does not appear to be any famous house of magnates, nor any pirate clan. I should add that the Hiki clan raided it twice, and was annihilated both times."

"With how many did they attack? I should have thought conquering a dungeon was too heavy a burden for the Hiki in their present weakened state."

"Some twenty men each time, I hear."

"Fools. A siege overwhelmingly favors the defender, and a dungeon at that. Against ordinary pirates numbering twenty or thirty, even an ordinary siege would want a hundred. Against a dungeon you cannot rest easy unless you throw in a thousand. Did they mistake it for a homesteaders' village or some such, or are Hiki's sons simply blockheads? … If only their late father were still alive."

"Or perhaps they took it for a dungeon inhabited by nothing but monsters."

"And this dungeon itself, what manner of thing is it?"

"Tower-type. Some four hundred shaku in height. The number of pirates is unknown. It appears several dozen, or several hundred, peasants have settled there."

His data was a little out of date.

"Hm."

"It seems to produce water in fairly lavish quantity, and they are making fields with the water that overflows from the dungeon."

"Bufo, bufo! We shall subdue the dungeon at once. Scrape together every fighting force we can, and hire mercenaries, adventurers, whatever can be hired. A dungeon cannot be destroyed, so a siege is troublesome, but mere pirates are nothing if we muster the numbers and prepare siege engines."

"And reconnaissance…?"

"There is no time for that. Besides, if we send out scouts, there is the danger the Iruma daikan will notice and move. Before Iruma moves in earnest, we subdue the dungeon with overwhelming force, force beyond Iruma's reach. Only, do not be careless about taking depositions from the adventurers."

"You mean to conquer the dungeon?"

"To subdue it. We will not conquer it. Conquer it, and the water would dry up. Drive out the pirates that have wormed their way in, sacrifice them at the entrance, and the dungeon will grow of its own accord. If its element is water, then the more it grows, the more water we should be able to draw."

"If we do not conquer it, there is the danger of the monsters."

"Monsters cannot come out of a dungeon, and it is water-element, is it not? They will be fish, surely. What can fish do in a desert? Naturally, have the adventurers confirm precisely what sort of monsters they saw. A dungeon has a lineage, a system to it, and the monsters that appear follow a rule."

It is not as though Hitachi were an imperial-prince province or anything of the sort, but in this world too, by custom, there exist no Kōzuke-no-kami, no Kazusa-no-kami, no Hitachi-no-kami.