Chapter 3 — The Sorcerer And The Priest (2)

Fortunately, the priest, who had introduced himself as Lucas, did not launch straight into the rite of exorcism to drive off Hoa, Flame-tail, and the myodusa.
That was only because he was, at the moment, far too busy scrambling to answer Hweein’s accusation.

“I was not defeated by those little devils! In the unfamiliar surrounds of the Specter Realm, amid the illusions the devils conjured, I let my guard slip for the merest instant, and ended up stripping off my own vestments.”
“So you didn’t surrender your robes and flee them. You stripped of your own accord. Wait.”

Illusions. Stripping.

Something began to cohere out of those two words, and Hweein narrowed his eyes in faint suspicion.

“It wasn’t that some illusion of a naked beauty came drifting toward you, and you flung off your robes in your delight, was it.”
“That is absolutely not the case! Sworn to chastity as I am, how could I—! It was only that, dropped into so unfamiliar a place, the bathhouse of my family’s estate back home suddenly rose up before my eyes, and for an instant I lost my senses and acted on pure instinct…”
“And that alone did it?”
“After my ordination I have lived away from home without exception. It has truly been a very long time since I last set foot in the estate’s bathhouse.”

— Myao.

By now the myodusa had come slinking back to his feet, and it let out a strange cry, flicking its eyes toward Father Lucas’s neck.
Hweein followed the creature’s prompt and looked at the priest’s throat. There, true enough, was a very faint puncture wound.

Come to think of it, the goblins he and Hoa had fought earlier had carried blowpipes loaded with poison darts.
Hoa had driven them off so fast, and the flames she wielded were what they were, that the darts had burned to nothing in midair before they could reach a single target.

“Were you struck by a poison dart from one of the green-faced imps?”
“Yes. It seems the dart carried a hallucinogenic compound. By the Lord’s grace I just barely overcame it, but…”

…So this man, an exorcist priest no less, had been laid low by a goblin’s poison dart.
By what Hweein could gather, he had been a fairly wealthy man before he took his vows. Did the Exorcist Priesthood, then, also accept entry by patronage?

Just as Hweein’s eyes were sharpening by the moment, the myodusa cried out again.

— Meow.

“It seems some of the hallucinogenic poison is still in him. Could that be why he’s been spouting such nonsense all this while?”
“Then he must be treated.”

At Hoa’s offhand interpretation, Hweein nodded, scooped up the myodusa, and held it out toward the priest, who shrank back in a panic.

“Wh-what is the meaning of this, Brother! Come to think of it, I have yet to hear the truth of those devils’ nature. However much you may have recovered my sacred relics for me, depending on your answer I may have no choice but to stand against you!”
“These ones… are my shikigami. So set your mind at ease. All the more so since this one is about to heal you.”

He smoothed it over with a half-truth, though when he thought about it, the figure he cut was a strange one: a man leading around two creatures that weren’t properly his shikigami at all, but plain yokai.
And yet he couldn’t take them on as shikigami, either.

The myodusa, true to its capricious-cat nature, was glaring up at Hweein with a face that said plainly, I don’t recall granting permission for THAT, either, and Hoa… well, she was a matter to think over later.

“Erh, shikigami. I have heard of them. The Eastern name for the familiar spirits that mages call forth, is it not? But the ones I’ve heard described are usually rather more… more endearing, or somehow more wrought by craft.”

Father Lucas seemed to have accepted Hweein’s explanation as best he could, yet shikigami were hardly a familiar subject to him, and he kept glancing back and forth between the myodusa and Hoa with a deeply puzzled expression.

— Hey, what about me? I’m a scary, mighty flame-hound, aren’t I? Hey! Hey!

Flame-tail, finding himself shut out of the priest’s circle of suspicion altogether, glared up at the man with a face itching to lodge a complaint, but Hweein ignored him and pressed on.

“If you’ve understood, then offer up your neck. Should the remaining poison spread again, it could plunge you into worse hallucinations than before.”
“Ngh. As a rule we exorcists are not to negotiate with devils, but as I do not wish to call the words of the Brother who saved me a lie, this once…”

The priest extended his neck, wearing the most reluctant expression imaginable.

Doubtless sulking at being treated with such caution after volunteering its help, the myodusa narrowed its eyes to slits and spat a faintly green-tinged blue droplet of saliva.
The drop struck the wound dead-on, and as it evaporated it gave off such heat that the priest went hopping about in agony where he stood.

“Truly the devil is up to some wicked trick! And I trusted you, Brother!”
“It seems the treatment is done, so why not check the wound.”
“…Hm?”

The priest, who had been carrying on in a thoroughly undignified manner, stopped short and ran a hand over his now-spotless neck with a baffled look.

“It was certainly excruciating just now, but… come to think of it, my head feels remarkably clear. The fog seems to have lifted from my sight as well.”

His hallucination clearing shouldn’t have anything to do with the fog lifting.

So Hweein thought as he turned his head, only to find, to his astonishment, that the mist around them really was rolling back.
If the priest were a sorcerer that would be one thing, but were they to believe that some shift in the man’s own state of mind had set his power working on its own?
He had taken the priest for an utter dilettante, yet it seemed he was not to be entirely underestimated after all.

“Brother, er, my thanks to you. What a remarkably capable familiar…”
“Not a familiar. A shikigami. And offer your thanks directly to this one as well.”
“My thanks, devil. Hellbound devil that you are, due for judgment in the pit, by the grace of meeting the Brother you have been granted a chance to do penance (the making-of-amends for the evil consequences of one’s sin). So be ever grateful to the Brother.”

— SSSHAAAA!

At that point Hweein resolved to give up early on any hope of reconciliation between Father Lucas and the myodusa.

“So tell me, priest. Through which gate did you enter?”
“A gate? Brother, the truth is this is my first time in the Specter Realm. I’m afraid I know nothing of the sort.”
“I mean the entrance. When you came into the Specter Realm, which entrance did you use? If I know roughly where it lay, I can help you exit through the same one.”

As has been said before, the gates that lead into the Specter Realm shift their location from one moment to the next.
The simple fact that Father Lucas, plainly a Westerner by any measure, and Hweein, an Easterner, had met inside the Specter Realm meant the entrance had moved at least once between their two arrivals, whether Hweein had come first or the priest had.
The Gatekeeper’s Brand Hweein had obtained, however, could detect every gate in the world, and could guide a human lost within the Specter Realm back out through the very entrance he had used to come in.

That was precisely what gave the brand such enormous value.

“Where… hm. To be sure, before I came to my senses here, I was in Seoul.”
“…Seoul? Do you mean the capital of Aeshin Korea?”
“Yes, yes, Seoul, the capital of Korea. The truth is, I was originally stationed in the Vatican, but I was dispatched all the way to Korea on a highly confidential mission. Hah! You can see how much trust the Vatican places in me, can’t you, Brother?”

Hweein was left rather speechless at the priest’s blithe tone.
He felt foolish for having sunk, only moments before, into yet another bout of dark speculation. The Shin House must have factored in the very moment the Specter Realm’s entrance would shift, and so on.
He resolved that he would never again give in to such conjecture, and said,

“Enough. With that much to go on, the traces still left on your body are sufficient for me to find the gate you entered through. But the next time you set foot in the Specter Realm, see that you do so with a professional in tow.”
“Truly the Brother is a man of remarkable ability! My thanks to you. As for me, I’d just as soon never enter the Specter Realm again. But, ah…”
“Go on.”

Father Lucas had been wearing the look of a man with something he wished to say, and he brightened when Hweein nodded first.
But the words that followed were not at all what he had been hoping for.

“Before we leave the Specter Realm, put your clothes on first.”
“Oh. Quite right.”

“The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup…”

While Father Lucas, dressed only in his undergarments, recited his prayer with a deeply earnest expression and shrugged on his cassock, Hweein channeled spiritual power into the Gatekeeper’s Brand on the back of one hand, searching for the entrance through which the priest had come.

It hardly needs saying, but a Specter Realm Gate is an exceedingly delicate and dangerous thing, and flinging one open just anywhere is neither easy nor permitted.
Opening a new gate is, save in the most pressing of circumstances, simply not authorized. The norm is to use a gate that yokai have torn open and which, for reasons that prevent its closing, has had to be left standing.
A bearer of the Gatekeeper’s Brand could easily, from inside the Specter Realm, locate a point linked to an outside gate and fashion an exit from it.
This stood in stark contrast to the lot of unbranded folk, who, to find an exit and escape the Specter Realm, had to enter laden with cursed objects, talismans, and charms of every kind.

“My lord, my lord. Look. There, by the man’s solar plexus.”
“Hm?”

Just as Hweein, with the brand’s help, located the gate that carried the residue of the priest’s spiritual power, Hoa stepped up quietly behind him and whispered, prompting him to lift his eyes.
Indeed, at Father Lucas’s chest, Hweein caught a glimpse of a black glimmer.
If pressed to say exactly what it was, he could only say that something seemed to flicker beneath the priest’s undergarment, and even that was hidden again behind the cassock so quickly that he half wondered whether it had been a trick of the eye.

“That man. There’s something to him, no doubt about it. My lord would do well to be careful.”
“…So I see. I shall keep it in mind.”

Of course Hweein himself had never quite believed that Father Lucas had truly entered the Exorcist Priesthood by patronage. He had suspected from the start that the man was hiding something.
And yet, for Hoa of all people to be the one to bring it up…

“Well then, shall we, Brother?”

Wrapped now in the ashen sash that marks the Exorcist Priesthood, the fascia¹, Father Lucas rose to his feet, the silver cross at his chest catching the light, and spoke.
Now that he was fully dressed, the aristocratic cast of his face fell into harmony with the rest of him, and he cut such a striking figure of a priest that he might have stepped straight out of a film. Even Hweein quietly marveled.

The things never to be given him. The things he could not even dare to wish for.

Why, Hweein wondered, had a man like Lucas, who could have laid hands on anything he desired, chosen to become a priest?
He thought of asking, but the question felt as though it might let some of his own ugly inner workings spill into the open, and so Hweein kept his mouth shut and extended his staff instead.

“This should suffice.”
“Oh—! Now that I think of it, yes, this was about where I first set foot in the Specter Realm!”

Only moments ago, in his undergarments, he had played at his priestly chastity-vow. Now, fully and handsomely robed, he was striking both his thumbs up in tacky theatrics. Composure and gravity, apparently, were not among the items listed in a priest’s vow.

“I’ll open the gate, and you go through it as you are. Just one thing. I’d rather you not tell anyone whose help you received in getting out. Can you promise me that?”
“Brother, that is…”

The priest, who at a glance looked entirely incapable of lying, hesitated at the request. But on this point Hweein could not yield.

“I’d have you swear it. This ability can be wielded only by people of a certain standing, and just now, my own standing is something I must keep hidden. Can you do this for me?”
“Hah… from the moment we met, I have done nothing but receive your help, Brother. As I do not believe you would conceal yourself for any wicked purpose, I shall do as you say.”
“That’ll do. I’ll open the gate.”
“In exchange, I have one favor I would like to ask. No, Brother, wait. Don’t look at me as though I were some shameless cad. Will you not first hear me out?”

In point of fact it was less the look one would give a shameless cad than the look one would give a bedbug that had bloated itself on so much human blood it had gone mad. But the priest’s eyesight, it seemed, was about on par with Hweein’s own.
Flame-tail and Hoa already wore expressions closer to should we just go ahead and bury this guy?, readying for combat, yet incredulous though he was, Hweein nonetheless urged the priest to continue.

“I mentioned earlier that I was dispatched to Korea on a highly confidential mission. The truth is, it seems that mission is bound up with the Specter Realm. The reason I suddenly found myself dropped into the Specter Realm was that I was in the very midst of carrying it out.”
“For someone seeking out the Specter Realm, you were excessively unprepared, certainly.”

Though by no means more so than Hweein himself, who had been handed nothing but a single sheet of paper called the Indulgence as a parting present and tossed clear through the Ember-Blood Gate.

“I know nothing whatsoever of the Specter Realm, so if matters go on as they are, I shall fail my mission, and the person depending on my help may come to grievous harm.”
“So you mean to tell me you wish to ask my help with your mission? Even though it is, by your own account, confidential?”
“Erh, Brother, you yourself helped me even though your own ability is also a secret, did you not? If we exchange secrets in that fashion, would that not make us equal partners?”
“Aside from the small detail that you’d be entirely the one in debt, you mean.”
“Compensation! Of course I intend to provide proper compensation as well! What matters to me is none other than the completion of the Vatican’s mission, and the following of the will of our Lord Jesus, who wishes to save the suffering lamb. Whatever fame or financial reward might accompany its completion, I am perfectly willing to hand all of it over to the Brother. There, how does that sound? Is this not mutual aid?”

To Father Lucas’s proposal, Hweein, surprisingly, did not immediately say no.
For if he refused, what else could he do? Where else could he go?

The first place that came to mind was, of course, the Shin House, where he had lived his entire life until now.
But he was already a disowned son.
The bond he had once believed still tied him faintly to them had been cruelly severed.
And could he truly return to the household and boast of having completed the gatekeeper’s rite?

No.

Perhaps they would not cast aside a Hweein who had finally come to be of use.
As one of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses’ young scions, and a bearer of the Gatekeeper’s Brand, he might at least be accepted as a particularly useful resource.
But what meaning would there be in that?
In such a place, could he truly come into freedom, into a life?

No.

There was Shin Uin, who hated him like a thorn in his side; there was the stepmother who had pushed him out to die.
The household’s sorcerers would still envy and curse a Hweein who, crippled as ever, had nonetheless emerged with a Gatekeeper’s powers.
Whatever he dreamed, in the household as it stood there would be no room for him to spread his wings.
Indeed, the very reason he sought to hide his brand was that he understood this perfectly.

…And yet, the reason he kept foolishly turning his thoughts back to the household was not that he longed for the gentle cage.
It was that there was still work he had to do there.
That there was something he absolutely must ask his father.

Then.

Then, let me prepare myself.
Let me become a being whom no one would dare bar from the Shin House’s gate, even if he kicked it down at the front, and only then return to the clan as the legitimate son of the Shin House.
Let him grow into a figure more imposing than the threadbare standard of an old, proud name that the household clutched so dearly, and meet his father face to face, on equal footing.

It was a fancy childishly far-fetched. But for the first time he had a chance, and a chance he could not, on any account, let slip.

“Brother?”
“I was considering your proposal.”
“Then…!”

From that vantage, Father Lucas’s proposal felt rather like a perfectly serviceable first step in that preparation.
A man who had spent his whole life reading books inside the family compound would not, even if he abandoned the household and went out into the world, have any clear idea what he could actually do, for he hardly knew the world at all.
And to lean on Geum Moa alone would likely amount to something one could scarcely call a life.
Before he was flung naked into society at large, he keenly felt the need for a fitting halfway step. Might not joining forces with this priest for a while resolve that neatly?

“First, let me make this clear. I am not a particularly strong sorcerer.”
“It is more than enough that the Brother can teach me about the Specter Realm. The strength of arms I shall take upon myself!”

That very part was what Hweein found most dubious. Yet of the priest’s character, at least, he had ample evidence from his own two eyes, and in the end Hweein nodded.

“Very well, then. We’ll speak of the details outside.”

With that, Hweein extended one hand.
The Gatekeeper’s Brand carved into the back of it shone, and a dazzling blue vortex took shape before them.
It resembled the Ember-Blood Gate, though far smaller in scale. A Specter Realm Gate, opened by his own hand.

“My thanks to you, Brother! Truly the Lord does not give us only hardship. It is plain that He guided me here so that I might meet the Brother in this place and receive his aid!”

Did the man mean, from here on, to invent a reason every single time to praise his god?
Hweein quietly drew up, from the back of his mind, the splendid scene the young boy he had once been had dreamed of, fighting shoulder to shoulder with an Exorcist Priest, and tore it carefully to shreds.
That image did not exist.
What stood here was nothing but a thoroughly untrustworthy zealot.

“Then let us pass through together!”
“No. You go first. I still have something to do here.”
“Is, that so…? I see.”

In that instant the air around the priest shifted so utterly that Hweein’s eyes flew wide in shock.
His spirit-eye, which read the temper of those before him and judged whether they bore him goodwill or malice, was telling him that the priest was now a wholly different person from the one of only a moment ago.

“See you outside, then. Watch your back, friend.”

One eye now stained a vivid red, Father Lucas flashed a grin, said it, and threw himself through the vortex.
His abruptly changed manner was not something Hweein could afford to take lightly, and he whirled around just in time to see Flame-tail flung far across the ground.

Hoa was reaching out toward the creature.
Her whole body wreathed in an ominous flame.