Chapter 22 — Four Men And Gyeongdo (4)

The party that had arrived in Gyeongdo were riding the limousine straight on toward the Onmyo Bureau when the driver, all of a sudden, slowed and made a report to Yun Jubaek.

Out in front of the road that led onto the Onmyo Bureau’s private estate, a knot of onmyoji in pure-white kariginu had come out and were standing there waiting for them.
By the look of the atmosphere, they plainly did not mean to simply step aside.
So the party got out of the car first, and Yun Jubaek, bearing the royal command, went up on their behalf to exchange greetings.

Yet the words that came out of that “representative” went as follows.

“I am Kashima of the Onmyo Bureau. We welcome the sorcerers who have come to us from Korea. We do hope you will enjoy to the full the lovely sights and atmosphere of Kyoto during your stay.”
“Yun Jubaek of Aeshin. We’re here on business, so that won’t be quite possible — but for the moment, we’re glad to meet you too. Looking at you now, I see Hwa-guk’s average has come up a fair bit.”

Both sides were practitioners at the First-Rank level of the international ability-user certification.
Even a fool could have felt the prickling-bright clash of force kindling between them.

“So, what’s it you’ve found out so far?”
“Since you’ve come a long way, how would it be if you took your rest first? A pseudo-religious sect of that sort is, in any case, a private matter. They are essentially as good as already caged within our cordon, so it will be more than enough if you lend your hand to us when we move to wipe them out.”
“That won’t do. Up to this very moment, the Onmyo Bureau hadn’t even noticed their existence. Hahaha — you do have a sense of humour.”
“Of course, if one looks only at the surface, it might at a glance appear that way. In actual fact we had been tracking them for a very long time, and this time at last we succeeded in exposing the truth of them.”
“Ah — are you perhaps not in a position to be told of classified matters? The one who unearthed that was Aeshin, you see. You’ve not long been posted out, have you? Has no one of higher rank than this gentleman come?”

The childish pissing-match dragged on and on.

He had never, from the start, dreamed the two countries would manage to cooperate with smiles and laughter.
But that cooperation itself might turn out to be impossible, he had not so much as imagined.
And so Shin Hweein, watching grown men squabble like little children, let out a heavy sigh.

By the look of it, they have no intention of moving together with us. And yet, by the terms of the royal command, we cannot move entirely apart from Hwa-guk’s Onmyo Bureau. But if we comply with their wishes, we really will end up doing the Gyeongdo-tourism tour and going home.

They had said the visitors need only lend a hand when force was required, but what idiot would let slip the chance to keep the credit all to himself?
Still more so when the Onmyo Bureau was currently smarting in its pride that what had happened on its own home soil had been noticed and warned of first not by themselves but by Aeshin, and might even, beyond that, have begun to suspect Aeshin.

It is no surprise they would suspect. Whatever the roots of Honwondorae may be, its goal is the collapse of Aeshin — so it is only natural for them to wonder whether reactionaries from within Aeshin have spilled over into their own country and are running riot here. This kind of reaction ought to have been fully anticipated.

If the Onmyo Bureau truly did not believe them, their work here was going to become wretchedly tiresome.
They would, of course, be excluded from the handling of intelligence, and there was every chance that operation timings too would not be shared with them.
At most they would be asked to cooperate in forming the cordon, or have it dumped on them as thankless, troublesome drudge-work to track down stragglers the Bureau itself had let slip.
And Yun Jubaek, direct-line of one of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses that represent Aeshin, was not a man to swallow that.

It cannot be helped. The King will have known matters would come to this — that is why he so readily accepted the Catholic Church’s request. …Let us split off from these people and move with the Cathedral. Even they will not be able to obstruct legitimate activity.

But just as Shin Hweein, having steeled his resolve, was about to step forward and back Yun Jubaek up, someone moved before he could.
And that was none other than Makoto.

“I’m from the Association of Shinto Shrines. Mochizuki Makoto, guji of the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine.”
“Hotenshi-no-Kami? Ah, that… eh? But why are you with these people.”
“First, let’s deliver to you what you requested of the Association of Shinto Shrines.”

Makoto stepped boldly forward with Shin Hweein and Father Lucas at his back, and held out a wrapped bundle.
The moment the Onmyo Bureau’s representative took it in hand, his eyes sharpened on the instant.

“You — you don’t mean to tell me, to these people…”
“No need to worry. There’s a local who helped me out the last time included in their party, so I happened to come along this far with them.”
“What did you say? A local who cooperated…!”
“Anyhow — when people who’ve been moving in totally different ways suddenly try to band together and cooperate, of course it won’t go smoothly. But the higher-ups are yelling cooperate, cooperate at the top of their lungs, aren’t they? Now then, let’s do it like this. As it so happens — at this moment, am I not on the Onmyo Bureau’s payroll myself?”

The words came tumbling out smooth as flowing water, leaving no room to argue back.
That alone was enough.
The onmyoji, realizing what Makoto was about to say, gaped open-mouthed, but Makoto pressed on with a wide grin.

“So — as the Onmyo Bureau’s representative, I am the one cooperating with these people. That way nobody catches it from above, doesn’t it? Ah, of course on our side there’s nothing whatsoever to worry about. The gentleman you see over there is an exorcist priest who, as it happens, has come at the request of the Kyoto diocese of the Japanese Catholic Church, no less. So they’ll be receiving help from that quarter.”
“…The guji of the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine — would you happen to be of mixed blood? Come to think of it, I’d thought the face was a rather exotic one. Sure enough, your attitude is also quite open-minded.”
“Me? I’m a pure-blood man of Hwa-guk — but thanks to these people, I’ve learned that the world is a wide place. If I look open-minded, I rather think it’s owing to that. They’re people of real ability. At this very moment, if it’ll help save the common folk of Kyoto from a cult, whose hand wouldn’t I borrow, whatever country they’re from?”

Letting out a hearty, unsuiting belly-laugh, Makoto stepped back.

“Let’s not get in each other’s way, and let’s both put our backs into it for Kyoto. Business in this industry has to stay finished inside this industry — we can’t go pulling the common folk into it, can we.”
“…Indeed, indeed. To see the Guji Mochizuki — who set foot on the soil of Kyoto for the first time only today — already regard this land as a hometown of his own, I find myself genuinely glad.”

The onmyoji let out a hoo of a sigh and turned his gaze to Yun Jubaek.
When the latter nodded back as though he too had no objection, the Onmyo Bureau’s representative meekly took his onmyoji and withdrew.

No small number of people, as it happened, had been watching the commotion that had broken out in the middle of a main thoroughfare in broad daylight.
The saving grace was that no lens would have caught any of it.

“Guji — you’ve quite the silver tongue.”
“Kyoto people are scary, Grand-Master—!”

He’d meant it as praise, but the moment the onmyoji left the spot Makoto, on the verge of tears, clung onto him.
Suppressing the urge to shove him off, Shin Hweein said:

“That bit about how the people of Gyeongdo speak with a folded-over inner meaning — was that what it was? Even so, it seemed less bad than the rumour goes.”
“Grand-Master, you only got the rough gist of it — that stuff is much scarier when you hear it in Japanese!”
“I understood it as Hwa-guk speech, though…”
“Now, now — at any rate, you got it settled smoothly, so let’s get on with our own business as well. Honestly, I thought it might come to a head-on clash with them, but thanks to Guji here it sorted itself out without fuss.”

Yun Jubaek too let out a sigh of relief and praised Makoto for his work.

Somehow he had never struck one as a man in the posture of someone asking the Onmyo Bureau for cooperation.
If this was how it was going to be, one could almost wish to demand of him what, then, he had meant by all that talk about how they would end up moving together with the Onmyo Bureau.

Perhaps he had caught even through the mask that Shin Hweein was glaring at him.
Yun Jubaek shrugged his shoulders and replied:

“Don’t get me wrong. Whatever country you go to, locking horns with the country’s ability-user crowd is a sort of greeting — that’s how it works. Both sides size each other up and lock down their own turf. And, surprisingly enough, the conversation we just had counts among the ones where each side properly acknowledged the other’s existence before parting.”
“That, was?”
“You keep it in mind too. When ability-users come over from a foreign country, we do exactly the same — push them out.”
“Hah… when the enemy is somewhere else entirely, it would be so much better if we just joined wills and cooperated.”
“It doesn’t even work within the same country — how is it going to work with people from a different country?”

To that there was no arguing back, and Shin Hweein could only nod his head in concession.

Once the conversation had more or less wound up, Father Lucas, who had been silent all this time, said with a beaming smile:

“Then, shall we head to Kawaramachi Cathedral, the bishop’s seat of the Kyoto diocese? The traces of Saint Francis Xavier — I can hardly wait!”
“We have not come on a pilgrimage.”

He had clashed that much with the onmyoji; would it really be all right with the religious of a foreign country?
Shin Hweein was rather worried.
But.

“An exorcist priest! From the Vatican! Heavens above, dear Lord! You truly have come for us! Hallelujah!”
“Lucas, exorcist priest, at your service, Bishop John. I look forward to working with you.”

Long before any question of pulling local rank, the existence of an exorcist priest, whether to Korea or to Hwa-guk, was something like a symbol of the Catholic Church itself, and so there was no occasion for any clash…

Receiving Bishop John’s lavish hospitality, they were at last able to hear the account of what had been happening in Kyoto.

In fact, the awareness that some of the parishioners had been showing slightly odd movements went back quite some way.
But whenever an attempt was made to dig into it, nothing came out, and there had simply been no means of taking the matter in hand.
Bishop John had at quite an early point thought that perhaps sorcery was involved…

“It is shameful. Even as parishioners broke off their visits to the cathedral in increasing numbers, no harm had come to their lives — and so, thinking it nothing serious, I did not even alert the Onmyo Bureau…”
“I understand.”

In truth he had not wanted to put himself in the Onmyo Bureau’s debt, no doubt.
And in any case, even had the Onmyo Bureau known of it at an early stage, there was no telling whether they would, in fact, have been able to dispel the curse of perception.

So they had looked on in that state, and just when not only the parishioners but the people around them as well were turning strange, that was when the affair finally broke open.
In a flash the name Honwondorae began to make the rounds, and that pseudo-religious sect began to gain power among the common folk.

“Gaining strength by spreading its name… that is, after all, a method very like a yokai’s.”
“Power does, in actual fact, lodge in a name that has become famous.”

A name that had spread, until then, only in the dark, only among those who could never under any circumstance betray it, had in an instant burst into the light, and so at last had been exposed to the outside world as well.
A name once exposed loses its mystery, and for a group not above-board it amounts in effect to the end.

Belatedly Bishop John had assembled priests and nuns endowed with holy power and sent them to track down where the cultists had gone, but somewhere or other they had hidden, and no trace of them could be found.
Even those who had become Honwondorae believers said only that His Eminence has departed; they would not give any concrete information; and so, by every sign, some sort of sorcerous constraint had clearly been laid upon the followers.

“If they took the form of a pseudo-religious sect, there must have been some doctrine to speak of as the issue. They will not have expanded their congregation purely for monetary gain.”
“It is the worst pattern of all. …Human sacrifice.”

So it was.
Or perhaps one should say: of course it was.

He had wondered why, in a gathering already made up of accomplished sorcerers, they would have any need to spread their name among ordinary civilians, and it turned out they had needed people.
Really, genuinely, needed people.

Shin Hweein had himself, only recently, met a sorcerer who practised human sacrifice.
A Gem-Mage who made gemstones by offering up living people.
True enough, she had only been toyed with by illusions inside the Other Realm that the Great-Mouth Ghost had spun, and died miserably; but even before she stepped into that Other Realm, she had been a criminal carrying out evil deeds.

She was a woman who wielded power beyond her measure. Human sacrifice is precisely that. It is a wicked sorcery that lets one wield a great power not in keeping with one’s portion.

It is so because the life of a human being weighs that heavily on the scales.
But once a weighty reward is laid on one pan of the scales, an equally weighty price is also laid on the other pan, as the law goes.
Yet they do not understand that.
They approach human life as nothing more than an easy means of gaining power, and so, when the reckoning comes, they cannot bear it, and they are destroyed.

To think how many lives must have been sacrificed to produce a Rank Two and a Rank Three yokai, and to bring them yet further to bear a kudan within, it was enough to set one shivering.

“Have the casualties been ascertained?”
“It isn’t known yet how many lives have been sacrificed. The believers truly do appear to remember nothing at all. In the worst case, even newborn infants…”
“Ugh.”

At that point Father Lucas was overtaken by a fit of dry-retching, and the account was broken off.
But it was hardly a story they had needed to hear any more of.

Gently rubbing Father Lucas’s back, Shin Hweein bowed his head to Bishop John.

“Might I, perhaps, be permitted to meet one of the believers? I will do no harm to them. It is only that I think I may be able to lift the constraint laid on them…”
“Ah, no — there is that. The Onmyo Bureau has already gone forth and tried it, by the look of things. But the moment they did, the believer dropped dead on the spot.”

At those words Shin Hweein’s face contorted appallingly.

Was it that the curse of perception he himself had broken had triggered some extreme contingency-measure in the sorcery laid upon the believers?
Or was it that, from the very start, the believers’ lives had been valued less than a worm’s?

He had had no good feelings toward the organization called Honwondorae from the beginning.
But in this moment, they became a band of wicked enemies that must, without fail, be hunted down and destroyed.

“And so… the authorities have, without exception, placed all those identified as Honwondorae believers under protective confinement. I myself would dearly love to cooperate, but it isn’t the Onmyo Bureau either, and for you who have come from Korea I’m afraid it would probably…”
“It would be difficult. I understand.”

He had every confidence that, whatever the sorcery, he could readily release it through the Indulgence, but with the situation as it stood, there was no way even to make contact with a believer.
If, this being so, the sorcery on them were not lifted, then Honwondorae would in turn misjudge the measure of Shin Hweein’s capacities, so perhaps he ought to look on the matter in a positive light.

Beset by the urge to crack open right then and there the bottle he had said he would drink only when the mission was done, Shin Hweein rose from his seat.

“In that case, there’s nothing for it but to investigate the field. If there are materials the Cathedral has secured, might I look at them?”
“By all means.”
“Father Lucas, get a hold of yourself. Even in Gyeongdo, fragments of the schemes those people worked — feeding off human lives as sacrificial offerings — may yet remain.”

Lucas, scarcely able to lift his head, spoke into Shin Hweein’s ear.

“It’s Zer… Zer is trying to come out. Right now is no good. Brother, please, just say one word to him.”
“Hm.”

Shin Hweein nodded and cast mind-speech.
Presently the urge settled, and Father Lucas, his ease returned, looked on in bewilderment; but Shin Hweein only shook his head as if it were no skill worth speaking of.

Makoto, who had been watching from the side, was wearing an expression that seemed to take Father Lucas in with a fresh sense of familiarity; but it was far too much trouble to dispel whatever misconception he might be harbouring, and so for now Shin Hweein chose to ignore it.