Chapter 3 — The Sorcerer And The Priest (4)

“Oh dear, young master. How can you go about with all this on you?”

The battle, fierce on only one side, and the talks that, mercifully, both sides had taken seriously, had alike come to an uneventful close.
Her clothes already changed back to their proper form, Geum Moa drew near Shin Hweein as though intent on pretending the events of moments ago had simply never happened, and set about playing handmaid again.

“Indeed, my thanks—”
“Tsk.”

Perhaps because he had let his guard down, returned now wholly to his ordinary register, Shin Hweein could not parry the hand Geum Moa stretched toward his chest.
She slipped it lightly inside his inner garment and drew out the Indulgence, watched his eyes fill with astonishment and a sense of betrayal, gave a low heh-heh of laughter, then took one of his hands and, slowly, slowly, set the talisman back on his open palm.

“See, young master. To make this talisman manifest again, no doubt you’ll need to pile up no small quantity of karma, or else infuse it with the yokai aura of some great yokai. But if you draw the blood of the very one who laid the curse on you, like so…”

So saying, she cut her own palm and let a few drops of crimson blood fall upon the talisman.
The three characters carved upon it, Indulgence, flared with a dazzling light, and the red thread that bound Shin Hweein to Geum Moa stood out, for the moment, all the more vivid.

Directly afterward, the dull, intermittent ache in his upper abdomen washed clean away.
His insides, which had not known a moment of ease his whole life, felt rather at peace.
He was glad, too, that his usable spiritual power had increased once more.
It was still cutting things close, but at this rate, perhaps he might call himself a sorcerer in earnest now.

Seeing his brow smooth, Geum Moa spoke in a prim, dismissive tone, as though it were nothing.

“Your liver is in good order now, young master. You took a portion of my power, so most ordinary poisons should be easy enough to flush out. And you may drink a mal of liquor, roughly eighteen liters, and never once feel the drink.”

“…Moa.”

“Hmph. Don’t think for a moment my curse ends with so little. I have lifted only a part of it. Only a part. Just enough not to interfere with our Three-Year Pact.”

At her words it struck him afresh: the handmaid who had been at his side all this while was, in truth, one of those who had made his body ail. Shin Hweein could not help bursting into a hollow laugh.

“Indeed. What was it, then, that I did to you in the past, to deserve such a curse?”
“Curious, are you not? Why it is that not only I, but so many beings of high rank, have laid curses upon the young master, one and all. By what means you could possibly have earned such terrible resentment from such a row of beings at once.”
“Sorely curious. …And yet at the same time, it is a record of original sin I cannot bring myself to acknowledge. So perhaps it is better that I not hear it.”

There are two senses to wonjoe.
One is the original sin of which Christianity speaks, the sin every man is said to bear from birth.
The other is the Sinitic compound used in Hwa-script, false accusation¹, a sin unjustly laid upon one.
By unlucky chance, in Shin Hweein’s case, both meanings fit.

“Hee-hee… To feign ignorance will not let you escape, young master, yet no good can come of your knowing it now either. So let us go slowly. I shall tell you each part, in its time.”

If Geum Moa herself spoke of beings of high rank, then surely the secret hidden was greater than anything Shin Hweein could imagine.
Just when his innards had been set right, here they were aching again.
He shook his head, side to side, side to side.

“Before that hour comes, I would have you lift the curse with your own hand, in full.”
“Oh dear. They say an easy woman has no allure, you know. To my young master I should like to remain a woman who is ever difficult, and yet stirs the will to conquer.”
“…Is that so. To hear it, I am relieved.”

Tucking the Indulgence back into his bosom with a reply spoken in earnest, Shin Hweein paid no mind to the venomous look Geum Moa wore at his answer, and went on.

“Then let us go out now. We cannot keep Father Lucas waiting too long.”
“Ugh. Are you truly meaning to keep company with that suspect fellow? If you have business outside, I could go in your stead—”

That the priest was not to her liking remained as true now, returned to Geum Moa, as it had been in her other guise; she spoke with open distaste.
But Shin Hweein shook his head, resolute.

“It is already decided. And was it not only just now that I told you I would show you another face of myself? Am I to lean on you straightaway, then?”
“Tch… If that is so, then all the more you cannot go out as you are now.”
“Ah.”

When Geum Moa drew a small hand-mirror from her bosom and held it up, Shin Hweein could only nod, helplessly, at the figure laid plain in its glass.
His coat had been consumed by flame.
The clothes beneath had been rolled across the ground more times than he could count, were torn ragged, and smeared all over with dirt.
More than that, beneath what cloth was left, half-charred, half-torn bandages still wound about his whole body, his face included.
That Father Lucas had not at first sight pronounced him a yokai felt, just now, like a fresh miracle.

“This is troublesome.”
“I shall make your clothes clean again. In the meantime, young master, do unwrap the bandages. Their effect should be near gone by now, and besides, your skin is no longer so frail, is it?”
“…That, I suppose, would be so.”

He nodded at Geum Moa’s words, and yet a considerable disquiet stirred in him.

Unwrap the bandages?

If he was not to give his identity away, he had no choice. But the very thought was so unfamiliar, so dreadful, that he could hardly bear it.
He had been born with skin too fragile, covered in inflammation from the moment of his birth; even within the house, let alone outside it, he had never once unwound the bandages.

But… I must, surely.

The curse of the burning bird had been thrice softened, by one means and another, until the inflammation on the outer skin was now nearly gone.
There was no longer any reason to keep the bandages on.
To leave them on regardless would be to keep the skin beneath unexposed, and so frail, forever.

“Ngh…”

Even so, unable to hide the dread within him, he shut his eyes tight.
Slowly, slowly, Shin Hweein peeled the bandages away.
As it happened, the bandages around his fingertips had already worn down nearly to nothing, which made the peeling easier.

But when he set his hand to the bandages covering his face and began to lift them, Geum Moa, who had drawn close by then, rewound them and said:

“No. Not the face. The face you cannot.”
“What nonsense is this. The face is the most easily marked of all.”
“That is precisely why I say it. Mm. I thought the remnant of the curse was still considerable enough that it would be all right…”

Babbling something he could not follow, Geum Moa unwound the bandages again as though there were no help for it, peered intently at his face as if checking something, then, with a sulky look, said:

“It cannot be helped. Young master, if you cast a transformation art and give your face some small change, then over it I shall lay the mask I have prepared.”

At the words transformation art, Shin Hweein’s eyes opened a touch wider.
Even sorcerers nowadays might handle it without much distinction, but in truth that art lay closer to the Way of Tao than to common sorcery.
For that reason much of its underlying principle was more occult than ordinary sorcery, and, enlightenment being paramount, it was harder still to learn or to train in.

“It is true enough my bare face may be known, and to be thorough is best. But I had heard the transformation art is a craft that picks and chooses its practitioner. Is it not a special Way-craft that only such as the famed Feathered Adept of the Jeon House are able to use?”²
“You mean dungap-sul, the shape-shifting art? What he handles is closer to illusion and sleight-of-hand. But you, young master, must surely have come into the proper aptitude for true transformation art. After all, my curse has been lifted.”
“…Ah.”

Remembering that only moments before Geum Moa herself had been disguised without the slightest flaw, Shin Hweein nodded.
He had been half-uncertain until now, but it seemed plain at last what manner of yokai Geum Moa was.

“Then… having spoken so brazenly only a moment ago, it is shameless of me to ask now, but might I learn the transformation art from you?”
“Of course. Rather, had you said you would not take even this help from me, I should have been cross.”

The transformation art was the most basic accomplishment of any handmaid, Geum Moa declared; there was no trouble at all in teaching it.
As Shin Hweein thought, being a handmaid must be a thoroughly demanding office, he said:

“Before that, first return my clothes.”
“Yes. Here, I have made them clean.”
“…Hm?”

When he took the clothes and looked them over, both the fashion and even the cloth seemed plainly altered from what he had handed her.
What he had been wearing before was the modernized hanbok the people of his house commonly wore, but what Geum Moa had returned to him was a pair of black cotton trousers and a Western-style upper garment in white. That is to say, a shirt.

“Moa. Have not my clothes been changed?”
“Hee-hee. Young master. Will you settle for transforming only yourself? In this present age hardly anyone walks the streets in modernized hanbok, only the old… that is, only the persons of the famed houses. So I worked sorcery upon the cloth and remade it as what young people commonly wear. Young master may put it on just as it is.”
“That such a thing is possible by transformation art… how astonishing. Only, it is, indeed, far too unfamiliar.”

But if to shrink from the new was to be left with nothing but the old, then to venture was the only course.
Shin Hweein shut his eyes tight and put on the trousers and shirt.
To his surprise, they were more comfortable than he had imagined.

…Perhaps it was only that everything I have worn until now was uncomfortable.

— That perverted little wench, really— Yowp!

“You filthy mongrel. Keep at it and you’ll truly meet your end.”

“Ah. Drat.”

In the interval the two had been unable to restrain themselves, and were once again snarling at each other.
But Shin Hweein’s attention was elsewhere.
He had stripped off every bandage and donned modern dress, shedding his old appearance entirely, which was well enough, but he had just noticed that his newly acquired feature was proving a hindrance.

“The Gatekeeper’s Brand… being on the backs of both hands makes it all the more conspicuous. Concealing the backs of the hands is possible, but should I meet others of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, they may sense it.”
“That part is all right. I can hide it for you! Once you’re practiced in the transformation art, young master, you’ll be able to do it yourself.”

Geum Moa, having sorted out the pecking order with Flame-tail in admirably short order and returned, took both his hands and ran her fingers across the brand-marked patches on the backs of them, rubbing, rubbing.
For all that, the brand did not vanish; but, marvelously, the energy it gave off seemed wholly gone.

“Your transformation art truly is capable of anything.”
“Not anything. Only what I am able to do. Already I cannot hide the brand itself, can I.”

That, she said, was because the Gatekeeper’s Brand had been wrought by a being of higher rank than even Geum Moa.

Shin Hweein took the strips from among the bandages he had just unwound, those whose efficacy had not yet gone, cut them away separately, and wound them about his hands.
Then he learned the transformation art from Geum Moa and recited the incantation; she cried, “Again,” several times for reasons he could not quite grasp, and only at the last gave him grudging passage.

“Now none will know you for the young master. But just in case, here, a mask.”

When he was handed a featureless plain-white mask without pattern, Shin Hweein, seeing that it had neither strap nor any fastening, wondered at it and brought it to his face.
Whereupon, as though magnet to magnet, it adhered of itself, naturally, against his face.
It had no eyeholes, and yet his sight had grown, if anything, the brighter for it.

“Is this, perchance, a cursed object?”
“Not so grand a thing as that. But it does hold the power to ward off weak curses.”
“Ha. And that you would give to me?”

This, from the very one who had threatened him in no uncertain terms that she would not so easily release the curse upon him?
Shin Hweein gave a soft snort of laughter and once more inspected his appearance.
His face was hidden by a mask, both hands wound in bandages, and he was still a man with a limp; but for all that, no one would recognize him for the ill-favored youngest son of the Shin House.

“Now if we just had a silk hat, a vest, and a frock coat, you’d be perfect!”
“Ignorant though I may be of Western things, I do at least know what those are. Are you meaning to make me into one of those self-important gentlemen of the Western Land of Black-Arts?”
“Forgive me, young master, but that very notion is already outdated. As for clothes, one simply wears what one thinks well of.”
“Then I shall be plain: I dislike uncomfortable clothes henceforth.”
“It cannot be helped, then… Tch.”

Resigning herself to her failure to dress Shin Hweein to her own taste, Geum Moa pouted and laid a hand to her own face as well.
It was not so dramatic a thing as when she had worn Hoa’s form, but feature by feature her face shifted, little by little.
Her hair lost its dazzling gold and shortened to about her shoulders; her eyes, too, changed from a jade-bright green to a dull, ashen grey.

That much was not enough to disguise her beauty entirely.
But when her clothes too were altered to match Shin Hweein’s, into a modern formal suit, she came to look, by any reckoning, like someone no one would guess for Geum Moa.

“Why not take Hoa’s form?”
“Because if I were to stay long in that form, young master might forget what I really look like. I’d be jealous.”
“Jealous…? Of what, exactly?”

Shin Hweein cocked his head, unable in the least to understand.
But Geum Moa gave him no leisure to think on it long.

“Then off we go! Let’s be done with the Father, or whatever he is, in a hurry, and the two of us go a-traveling, just us alone.”
“The Father is not our enemy. And Flame-tail comes with us.”
“Ugh.”

— What, me? Why? Just leave me behind. If I’m a shikigami, you only need to call me out when you need me!

So that was why he had been quiet all this while: because Shin Hweein had been making ready to leave the Specter Realm.

To Flame-tail, who cried out with the look of a man struck by a sudden bolt from above, Shin Hweein spoke with a kindly face.

“The shikigami arts of the Shin House are well known for sparing spiritual power even while the shikigami is held in form. Moreover, the more time one spends with the shikigami, the more one’s shikigami arts advance. So there is no reason to keep you confined within the Specter Realm.”

— No, no, no. Think on it. A fearsome and dignified flame-hound such as I, wandering about the world of men? Pity the humans who’d be terrified, won’t you!

“I am sorry, Flame-tail.”

Shin Hweein went over to the creature, took him up in his arms, rose to his feet, and said:

“As you are now, you are no more than an exceedingly cute little puppy.”

— Take that back. What you just said—!

Shin Hweein triggered the Gatekeeper’s Brand, opened once more the exit out to the present world, and, with Geum Moa, flung himself across the threshold.

Born direct heir to the Shin House and yet born malformed, suffering hardship of every kind and yet kept like a bird inside a cage, ignorant of the dangers without: eighteen years he had lived so.
This day, in which he cast off everything he had gained in the Shin House and took up, in its place, the Gatekeeper’s Brand.
Only now had he finally finished readying himself to step out into the world.