Chapter 25 — The Sorcerer, The Priest, And The Nun (5)

“Is it all finished?”
“It went smoothly.”
“As I knew it would—!”

When Shin Yuhyeon gave the butler a curt answer, the butler marveled at it far past need and made to clap his hands.

Shin Hweein frowned and was on the point of simply walking down the mountain path on his own, until it occurred to him that perhaps even that was what the butler intended, and so he ordered the man to take the lead and guide them down instead.

His business was concluded, and Shin Hweein had assumed Shin Yuhyeon would simply vanish on the spot.
To his surprise, the man drew the black mask back over his face and fell in beside him for the descent.

“There is something I wish to ask.”
“Anything bearing on what Yuryong said, I cannot answer.”
“It concerns the Ushi-gozen mask.”
“…”

Shin Yuhyeon clamped his mouth shut.
Shin Hweein glared at the black mask the man wore and spoke.

“You knew what would happen?”
“To some extent.”
“There would have been a way to remove the side-effects, surely.”
“To kill a yokai’s emotions is the same as killing their power. A sorcerous implement fashioned that way cannot bring forth its true strength. Only those who face it head-on and overcome it are fit to wield a mighty sorcerous implement.”
“When the curse-absolving is finished, the mask will shatter.”
“And when the mask shatters, is that the end of it?”

At that, it was Shin Hweein’s turn to fall silent.
There was nothing wrong in what Shin Yuhyeon said, and, vexingly, he was forced to admit as much.

This time alone, he had gained a great deal from wearing the Ushi-gozen mask.

The immediate crisis had been cracked open, to be sure.
Beyond that, taking on a form unlike his own and meeting the world through another mode had brought him certain realizations, and it had even given him the chance to look back on his own heart, which ordinarily he took pains not to think about.

Above all, he had gained new abilities, and the possibility of further growth.

When the mask shattered, the loss of the sorcerous implement would not be the end of it.
It would mean that Shin Hweein could awaken to everything that implement had been and come to wield it himself.

And perhaps something beyond even that…

“Since I cannot now return it to you, I shall accept it. But I will pay the price.”
“That is not necessary.”
“If a quarter of a quarter of the price will do, then accept it.”

Shin Yuhyeon answered at once, but Shin Hweein shook his head, opened his storehouse, drew out a roundish lump wrapped in a cloth bundle, and handed it over just as it was.

Shin Yuhyeon received it in silence, and when he checked what lay inside, he let out a thin laugh.

“A quarter of a quarter, you say. Within Aeshin this far surpasses the value of the Ushi-gozen.”
“I became Ushi-gozen by cutting it down, so it would be weaker than Ushi-gozen, no?”
“Did you cut it down alone?”
“…I was putting on a touch of bravado. Without my companions it would have been impossible.”
“For now, that is enough. There is no need to grow so impatient. Before long you will walk on your own, and even should you wish otherwise, they will find it hard to keep pace with you.”

Shin Yuhyeon tucked the lump he had received, Jocheonhu’s head, into his robes.

For a while after that they walked down the mountain without speaking, until this time it was Shin Yuhyeon who broke the silence.

“I hear you met the second.”
“Yes. He is more capable than the eldest, it seems.”
“…”
“Heheh…”

In place of Shin Yuhyeon, who had shut his mouth, the butler walking ahead and following their conversation burst out laughing.

Nothing in it warranted laughter, and when Shin Hweein frowned, the butler spoke.

“You truly do take after the head of the house.”
“How so.”
“It has been only two months since you became a sorcerer, youngest young master.”
“…”

Only at the butler’s words did Shin Hweein realize how his own remark must have sounded, and his expression hardened.
That just now had been spoken from the position of a man weighing his elder brother and his middle brother side by side, had it not.

Of course, since he was openly hostile to those two, he had always gauged their abilities out of habit, so the words had slipped out quite naturally…

“Forget I said it.”
“Are these words to be forgotten? Did you speak falsely?”
“That… I did not, but.”
“Then there is no need to forget them.”

Shin Yuhyeon held his peace again for a while, and just as the end of the mountain path was beginning to show, he spoke.

“Princess Mirye’s coming-of-age ceremony would be the proper time.”
“It is still too soon.”

He was being told, then, to reveal his true identity at Princess Mirye’s coming-of-age ceremony.
But that made no sense whatsoever.
To gain even a little more freedom, he had pushed even his confrontation with Shin Jain off until after the ceremony.

“For now, perhaps. But ten days from now, much will be different.”
“In a mere ten days…”
“Are you the one to be saying such a thing.”

The words stung in his ear.
For Shin Hweein himself had been feeling, day by day, just how swiftly he was changing.

“Even if I disclose myself, can there be no clash with my brothers?”
“At the very least, there will be no killing.”

Shin Hweein turned the meaning over carefully, then started in sudden alarm and looked back at his father.

“Surely you do not think I would kill them?”
“If it is not you but your shikigami, that would be more than possible.”

That it might, in fact, be possible struck him, and Shin Hweein could not bring himself to deny it.
Even so, an awkwardness lingered in him and he could not answer easily, and Shin Yuhyeon went on, more boldly still.

“Hweein, on account of the past you fear the House too much.”
“Are you the one to be saying that, Father?”
“Now that you can say even that much to my face, do you suppose Uin or Seo Yeryeong will frighten you.”

When he had finished, Shin Yuhyeon hesitated a moment, then let out a sigh and spoke again.

“Within the Shin House, apart from the head of the house, there is no one who can interfere with you or do you harm. I am telling you so.”
“…”

Shin Hweein shut his eyes tight and opened them again.

“I shall think it over. When I judge it is enough, I shall act of my own accord.”
“That will do.”
“You had read it as far as this?”

To that question Shin Yuhyeon began to answer, then closed his mouth.

Then, when the mountain path had wholly ended and they had come out onto the road, just as Shin Hweein was about to draw on his mask, his father barely managed to part his lips and speak.

“On the day you return, take hold of my collar and ask me again.”
“…So I shall.”

So that was to say he had at least read as far as the part about the collar.

Put out of sorts, Shin Hweein resolved that even after he got home he would refrain from grabbing his father by the collar in person, and was on the point of cloaking himself when Shin Yuhyeon, as if something else remained to be said, moved his lips, then closed them once more.

Fortunately, this time Shin Hweein thought he knew what the man meant to say, and so he gave a soft snort of laughter and spoke.

“There is still plenty of wine left.”
“…Very well.”

By this point, the overall tally could perhaps be called a draw.

Pleased with the result, Shin Hweein cloaked himself and vanished.
Shin Yuhyeon donned his black mask and dissolved into the air.
And the butler, after looking back and forth between the two of them, was left alone at last, and let out a sigh.

“Oh!”

In front of the cathedral, Sister Barbara stood puffing on her electronic vape, and the moment she spotted Shin Hweein she brightened as though she had been waiting on nothing but his return.
She came up to him and spoke.

“Sorcerer. You’re drinking with me today, too.”
“So I shall.”
“What?!”

When Shin Hweein nodded so easily, the Sister cocked her head with a face that said this is not how it was supposed to go.

“You really okay with that?”
“Did you not hear it all from the Father?”
“I heard it, sure, but. You really okay?”
“What would there be to not be okay about?”

Shin Hweein thought it over a moment, recalled the Purple Mist Wine, and gave a nod.

“Although whether I shall bring out the Purple Mist Wine, I do not know.”
“What’s that, that’s stingy!”
“It is a wine I give only to friends.”

“Tch…”

It seemed Sister Barbara likewise did not count herself and Shin Hweein as friends, for she let out a low groan.
But then, astonishingly, she straightened up and declared,

“No reason we couldn’t be friends.”
“Are you in earnest? The Sister will surely dislike me.”
“There’s the grudge over the cigarette, sure, but one good cup of wine’ll wash it away.”
“People call that putting the cart before the horse, I believe…”

A sigh came out of him of its own accord, but since he reckoned he ought to hear the story about the Father and Zer sooner or later, he meekly followed where she led.

Soon enough they reached the lodging where the Sisters stayed, and his steps came to a halt.

“Hey.”
“Shh. Cloak yourself and follow me.”

Could this woman really be called a Sister.

Even under the suspicious look Shin Hweein shot her, the Sister calmly led him to her own room.
The interior, as if it mirrored her character, was clean to the point of holding not so much as a stray odd-and-end. No, “clean” suited it less than “desolate.”

“Is Sister Agatha’s lodging the room next to this one?”
“That’s right. Put up a barrier, a barrier. If she catches us it’ll be a nuisance.”
“I am already in quite a nuisance of a situation…”

Shin Hweein meekly raised the barrier for her, and as she led him on they sat down across from each other at a small table.

“Will you have some tea first?”
“What tea is it. The Sis isn’t here right now. Can you brew tea?”
“Of course.”

Shin Hweein opened his storehouse and drew out a teapot.

“I had it stored at a good temperature for drinking.”
“So it was just your sorcery doing the work. That’s stingy…”

Yet unexpectedly, she did not refuse the tea he poured her either.

When he also set out a few of the rice-balls he had bought in quantity in Gyeongdo, she wore a quietly pleased expression, and when she drank the tea, was she not, frankly, wearing a look of astonishment?

“Why is this so good.”
“Because the leaves are good. And the one who brewed it was skilled.”
“That’d be the Sis. What exactly is your relationship with the Sis?”
“Today I had hoped to hear stories of the Father… but never mind. It is exactly as it appears. Master and servant.”
“I’d say it’s impossible to begin with that the Sis serves anyone else. Lay humans and devils all out together and rank them by class, and she’s a person who’d sit at the very top, no question.”

Shin Hweein took a sip of tea, inwardly surprised by her way of putting things.

“You see it rather precisely.”
“Nobility can’t be hidden. It’s plain to see.”
“Then you as well, Sister.”

Shin Hweein turned his eyes to the upright posture with which Sister Barbara held her teacup, and said,

“You must have been considerable upper-class.”
“Don’t put it in the past tense. I’m upper-class even now. It’s just that, for the moment… I’m out and about owing to a little trifling trouble.”
“I see.”

Shin Hweein returned the teapot to his storehouse, drew out a wine bottle and fresh cups, and said,

“If we are to hear about that matter, the next round will have to be wine.”

It must have been her aim all along, for as soon as one cup of wine had gone down, Sister Barbara began at once on the story of her own and the Father’s past.

She had, no doubt, all along wished to unburden herself to someone.
But it seemed that, until now, there had been no one as deeply entangled with the two of them as Shin Hweein.

“Lucas was a decent Big Bro. That he was excessively popular with women was a little annoying, and he was always getting into trouble, but he was kind to me at least.”
“That the Sister loves her Big Bro dearly, even I know.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”

The Sister, who had thrown back in one go the whiskey he poured her, was rapidly beginning to flush in the face.
It was only then that Shin Hweein recalled her tolerance for drink was not great, and as she pressed him for the next cup he calmed her down, first pouring her some water and making her drink it.

“When was it that Zer appeared?”
“Fifteen, exactly. It was awful.”

After drinking the water and steadying a little, the Sister, with a gloomy expression, began to spread out her tale.

“You seem to treat that devil like some sort of well-behaved guard-dog, but on the day it first appeared, three of the family’s attendants were dreadfully wounded. Mortal wounds, past any hope of recovery.”
“Was the family all right?”
“Yes. That was what became the problem. It meant Lucas had resisted somehow, to protect at least the family. So in exchange for not laying a hand on them, it became all the easier for it to go wild in other directions. Most of all, it rampaged against the Exorcist Priesthood.”

Stammering as if she had no wish even to remember it, the Sister laid out the situation of that time fairly clearly.

The carpet drenched through with the attendants’ blood.
Blood spattered all the way up to the chandelier.
The black aura that, as though crawling up out of hell, darkly eroded a person’s heart.
And, unexpectedly, the holy power that had manifested in the Sister at that very moment.

“Had it not been for the Sister, the initial damage could have been far worse.”
“Not that that’s the sort of thing that’s going to deepen anyone’s faith. It’s too contrived, isn’t it. As for me, I detest that sort of thing.”

But within the Exorcist Priesthood, it was said, there were those who would call the very same thing destiny.

“Cyriaca. That woman was a novice at the time. Most likely, if the Holy See had known what dwelt in Lucas was such a dreadful devil, they’d never have sent a novice out. So that she happened to be there at precisely that moment was a truly horrible…”
“Destiny, you mean to say?”
“That bitch was unhinged. She acted as if there were some kind of mission laid on her to bring that devil to correction. Lucas crushed three Exorcist Fathers before he was finally taken in by the Holy See, and there was no way I could just leave that be, so I resolved to enter the Exorcist Sisterhood.”

The House the siblings belonged to truly held considerable power.

By rights, a devil that had harmed an exorcist priest could not be suffered to exist on earth.
Not only would the demon itself be killed, but the whole House could be erased into the bargain.

And yet their House had prevented that, had in the end secured a way for Father Lucas to live, and even placed his own kin, Sister Barbara, at his side.

“But because there was no precedent for it, the Holy See ran wild in all sorts of ways. Especially given that what dwelt in Lucas was no easy sort of devil. It bore particular hostility toward priests, toward those bearing holy power. People within the Holy See themselves regarded Lucas as gravely dangerous. Some of them, seizing on even the slightest slackening of the watch, would set upon the devil and end up dead.”
“…That must have been a painful experience.”

In truth, what Shin Hweein had wished to hear was a deeper story about Zer.
How Zer, when he had first appeared in Lucas’s body, had thought, what he had said, what he had done.
These things had been catching at his heart all along.

But going by what she said, Zer had been nothing more than the picture of an ordinary devil that hates clergy.
Was it that there were parts Sister Barbara did not know.
Or was it that even Father Lucas truly knew nothing about Zer.

‘My thinking was off the mark. If it is Zer’s story, then I had to hear it from Zer. …After all, there is nothing for it but to share a cup with Zer as well.’

Even while Shin Hweein was sorting his thoughts, Sister Barbara’s words went on.

“It was practically torture. Even after Lucas regained his right mind, he was being whipped. That dog of a woman was the one doing the beating. If your own mind is upright, you won’t be dominated by the devil, that bi—!”

The Sister broke off her words, so excessively worked up that she was demanding wine with her whole body, and so Shin Hweein had no choice but to fill her cup only halfway.

Sister Barbara drained it in one go and then, with a voice a little steadier, went on.

“It’s only since I… since I became Lucas’s personal attendant that that sort of thing happened less. Which is why that woman hates me. She says I stole the place that was hers.”
“Even knowing you are family?”
“All the more for that. As though I’d stolen away a destiny that should have been hers and hers alone. It makes my skin crawl, really. There’s no way I could harbor the kind of pervert’s lust she does for Lucas, is there.”
“You speak of it bluntly, don’t you…”

Shin Hweein pointed at the electronic vape hanging around her neck and asked,

“Speaking of which. That thing must put a heavy burden on the body, I should think.”
“Only in the beginning. And there was no other way. They told me that if I was going to be by Lucas’s side, I absolutely had to pickle my body in consecrated water. By the way, this too is something she had volunteered for originally.”
“Is this story about the strange-headed woman going to keep coming up from now on?”
“Yes. Right up until Lucas came to Korea.”

What the Holy See had not foreseen, it seemed, was that Sister Barbara’s natural endowment was magnificent beyond imagining.

Even a person sufficiently filled with piety, even a Bishop-grade talent, would have found it hard to bear, yet she took special-grade consecrated water into herself every day and made her body adapt to it.
Her venom and her gift, they could not but acknowledge.

And the gift that lay in the younger sister lay likewise in the elder brother, so that when Father Lucas began to manifest holy power, his own treatment too began at last to improve.

“That torture-like ‘correction’ ended around then, too. The deranged woman insists it’s thanks to her that Lucas became a Father.”
“…Indeed.”
“The Holy See, probably, found the two of us a burden. By their reasoning, it should never happen that Lucas manifests holy power. A person who harbors a devil being loved by God. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it?”
“And so they began to scheme to move the Father out from before their eyes.”
“…That’s right.”

They could neither kill him nor accept him.
The result of that was the plausible title of Exorcist Priest and the overseas posting.

The reputation of exorcist priests is high both within and beyond the Church, and Father Lucas’s House of birth could not be made light of either, so there was no one who would dare slight him to his face.
Even now, though, within the Holy See, it is said that a portion of the exorcist priests and some of the high-ranking clergy harbor ill feeling toward him.

“Zer would still, even by then, ignore Lucas’s words and show himself and cause an uproar within the Holy See. Lucas’s own holy power had grown so that he could no longer harm people, but a few sacred relics were ruined, and some of the facilities were partly destroyed too…. Honestly, I can understand him being disliked.”
“If they hated him so, they ought simply to have set the Father free instead of binding him under the name of exorcist priest.”
“How could they do that. They have to present evidence that a man who bears a devil has been brought to correction. In the end, on the grounds of taking measures so he could operate without trouble as an exorcist priest, they laid sealing-bans on Lucas. Several of them…”
“And the Sister, in her anger at that, drank to excess.”
“No. Before that, I had a round with that woman.”
“In the end, then, it does come back to that woman.”

Unable to go on at that point, Sister Barbara hesitated, then, feeling Shin Hweein’s gaze, sighed and laid out the circumstances.

The real reason she had quarreled with Father Lucas was that he had taken Sister Cyriaca’s side.

“He goes around defending her, saying it was all for his own sake. The needlessly sadistic whipping, the obsessive way she wouldn’t even let him go to the bathroom by himself, all of it she did with Lucas himself in mind, he tells me. How can that not piss me off!”
“In his heart of hearts the Father will not have thought so.”
“You think!”
“It is self-suggestion.”
“…”

To the Sister, struck speechless, Shin Hweein answered with a bitter smile.

“There was a time when he could not have endured without thinking of it that way. I would have you take that into account.”
“Uh…”

The Sister, finding nothing to answer in return, at last bowed her head low.

Shin Hweein, casting about for something else to say, asked her,

“Purple Mist Wine. Will you drink it?”
“Later…”

Sniffling a little, she said,

“Later, make sure you give it to me. Right now, no. I don’t want to.”
“Yes. Then so we shall.”

The Father had been right.
She was, after all, a good child.

Shin Hweein smiled faintly and set another wine on the table.

“Then now, shall we speak of other things. I would like to hear stories of the old days of the two of you. Surely friends ought to be able to reminisce together about each other’s childhoods.”
“Ahhh— that, but I really don’t think friends… is the… mm-mn.”

To his bewilderment, with those words for her last, the Sister dropped her head and fell asleep.

“Uncooperative to the very end.”

Letting out a sigh at the absurdity of it, Shin Hweein laid her on the bed, set the place to rights, and then took his leave of her room.

And the very next day, without even getting the chance to meet Ham Seoyeon, he found himself dragged off to Gyeongbokgung.