Chapter 4 — Little Sister And Big Sister (2)

That morning, stepping out of the Specter Realm, he’d had no leisure to look around him.
Now, walking the streets in broad daylight, he found himself noticing things afresh.

The first was that, set beside Zone 1 where he’d once lived, Zone 2 might as well have been another country.

Back then, even just stepping outside his home, Shin Hweein had thought the roads and the buildings too straight-lined and Western in their making, and had found them strange.
Next to Zone 2, though, Zone 1 was practically a keeper of Aeshin’s traditions.

Everywhere he looked, everything was built in the Western style, and worse, there wasn’t a single road sign or shop signboard that didn’t carry those curlicue foreign letters.
Shin Hweein grew confused, half wondering whether he hadn’t landed in Zone 2 of the Capital at all, but in some foreign country.

“H-how can this be… We have the beautiful script that the Great King left to us — the Hangul — and yet.”
“…Brother Shin Hae, are you, by any chance, someone who lived in the past and was sealed away?”
“Young master loves the traditional culture of Aeshin. Then again, what would these Western swine know.”
“Western swine….”

The one tearing Father Lucas down like that was Geum Moa.
In one hand she held the box with the dessert set, the offering set she’d bought from the Western confectioner’s, and in the other a chocolate éclair she’d picked up for herself at that same shop, munching it as she went with no dignity whatsoever.
Only, her dazzling beauty wrapped even that up to look lovable.

The amusing part was that if forced to say whether her golden hair, ash-grey eyes, and exotic looks made her seem Westerner or Easterner, the answer was plainly Westerner.

“Moa. Is it good?”
“Yes, young master. Ah — but yakgwa is more delicious¹. Of course it is.”
“And yet a moment ago I saw, at the Western confectioner’s, that they were selling pastries with yakgwa baked into them. Should it happen that the yakgwa you say you love so much—”
“…”

The tide turning against her, Geum Moa clamped her mouth shut and exercised her right to silence.
If she liked Western pastries that much, all she had to do was say so honestly.
Why she fretted over what he thought of it, he had no idea.

Shin Hweein let out a sigh and let his gaze wander again.
At first the exotic feel of the streets had caught his attention; now it shifted to the people.

The overwhelming majority wore Western suits like his own, and though it was still spring, many were dressed quite lightly.
Excessively lightly.

Verily — how can — this be…!

At the few family banquets of his childhood, Shin Hweein had heard the elders speak and shuddered at how antiquated their thinking was.
Now, he thought, he understood that sentiment perfectly.

But he had to bear it.
If this was the present state of Aeshin, and he had no further occasion to live in Zone 1, then surely he had no choice but to adapt.

“We have arrived.”

As a rule the rich prefer places not far from the city centre yet not heavily trafficked, so once he stepped off the crowded road and climbed a little way up a hillside, before long fine-looking hanok houses came into view, spaced at regular intervals.
Each of them was the desperate flailing of pitiable folk trying to paper over, with showy ornament, the deficiency of birth that kept them out of Zone 1.
And yet even he, thinking such things, would rather live in a hanok than a Western house, so perhaps one day he might find himself flailing right along with them.

“Father!”

He’d left half asleep that morning and couldn’t have told one of these mass-produced hanok from another, but fortunately a man came bursting out of one of them and clung to Father Lucas.

“You came back! I was certain you’d given up on us….”
“Given up? The Lord never abandons the lambs who seek His salvation. I only feared my own poor ability might fall short of carrying out the Lord’s will — yet the Lord has, just so, sent me one who shall lend me aid.”
“One to lend you aid… Hic.”

The man, Kim Hyeonwoo, came face to face with Shin Hweein as Father Lucas stepped aside, and let out a small, strangled cry.
In town the stares hadn’t fixed on him as much as he’d feared, and he’d thought it would be all right, but it seemed that those who met him one-on-one still found the masked figure uncanny.

“Are you — perhaps — a sorcerer…?”
“My identity cannot be disclosed. Consider me an assistant to the Father.”
“I, see. The thing is, my wife isn’t very fond of sorcery….”

In Aeshin, the very country of sorcery?

Even as he found that strange, Shin Hweein felt a question of his finally being answered.
If a wife had been laid under a curse, the proper thing was to call a sorcerer, and the procedure would have been simpler too.
Something hadn’t sat right with him about it: that despite being a Catholic, the husband had gone so far as to have an exorcist priest dispatched all the way from the Vatican.

Without knowing it for certain, the man had surely donated no small sum to the parish to arrange Father Lucas’s coming.
And if his aversion ran deep enough to make him shun sorcerers, then it was no wonder he turned pale at the sight of Shin Hweein.

And yet his house is a hanok. So he does not deny Aeshin altogether, it seems. Then… it is sorcery alone he dislikes? Has he some bad memory tied to sorcery — even now, while suffering under a curse?

“Brother! Has the Father come?!”
“Sister-in-law!”

While these tangled thoughts ran on, Shin Hweein spotted a young woman bursting out of the house and knit his brow.

Could that woman, by any chance…?

Every human being, having a soul, possesses at minimum some measure of spiritual power, but those who can handle it are few indeed.
For that very reason, anyone able to wield spiritual power in any fashion is bound to show signs of it, and concealing those signs well is itself part of a spell-worker’s training.

By now anyone could guess it: the woman Kim Hyeonwoo had called sister-in-law was someone who could wield spiritual power.
The feel of that power varies with how a person opens it into use, and in her case it ran close to a sorcerer’s, what is commonly called sorcery-power.

No… I feel I have seen, also, a power closer to that than to sorcery-power. What was it, now.

While Shin Hweein was absorbed in thought, she too caught sight of him, and her face darkened.

“A sorcerer…?”
“And what of you?”
“No!”

Her face turned a livid blue at his words, and she warned him.

“My sister and I, having gone through something bad in our childhood, have lived our lives at a distance from sorcery. Do not call me that.”
“I see.”

So that was why the aura coming off her had felt unstable.

Among those whose blood didn’t mingle with the great houses there were, of course, some born with a talent for sorcery.
But if it went unrecognised, and the talent was left untended, sometimes the sorcery ran wild and an accident followed.
If something of that sort had happened to her, leaving a wound on her mind such that she’d kept her distance from sorcery ever since, then her present state made perfect sense.

Only, the phrase “sister and I” snagged a little in his mind.
That, he supposed, he would understand once he’d seen the elder sister for himself.

His thinking done, Shin Hweein gave a snort and answered her, still eyeing him as if on guard.

“But this matter cannot be settled by the Father’s ability alone. However little you like my presence, bear it.”
“Tch — and you, supposing, can settle it?”
“Sister!”

Father Lucas stepped in at once, planting himself between Shin Hweein and the woman who made no attempt to hide her hostility, and spoke to her as if soothing her.

“Brother Shin Hae is the one who kindly came to my aid when I was in trouble, and so I can vouch for both his character and his ability. Please, trust us and leave the matter to us.”
“Hmph. To my mind the Father isn’t all that capable either.”

When a man as handsome as Father Lucas, with so earnest a face, asked you to trust him, you’d think she might hand over the deeds to her house without a second thought.
Yet watching her stay coldly aloof from first to last, Shin Hweein found that, oddly enough, he trusted her.
At the very least, she wasn’t going to hold a masked, suspicious figure against him.

“Ha-ha-ha, I shall do my utmost. Saint Nicholas, patron of brides, will surely watch over Sister Do Yuna as well.”
“Then do it well, why don’t you. After my brother-in-law has paid all that money — if you go and fail…”
“Sister-in-law! It’s an offering, an offering. Not money paid for services rendered — it’s a token of thanks given to the Lord. Asking Him to watch over Yuna, to look on her with pity.”

His Catholic devotion so fervent that he was the one doing the chastising, Kim Hyeonwoo shook his head; the sister-in-law shook hers too, exasperated.

“Aigh, really, my brother-in-law is too good for his own good. Fine — the two of you handle it however you will. As for us, we’d better go and at least get something to eat.”
“Eat? With Yuna unwell, the two of us going out alone is a little….”
“That’s exactly why we skipped breakfast and stayed at her side, isn’t it. Now that people who can look after her in our stead have come, we ought to rest at least a little. If my brother-in-law collapses too in a situation like this, what then? Come on, hurry up.”
“Even so… Ah — Father! I beg you, please, take care of it!”

The sister-in-law, who seemed to count her brother-in-law as family, was dragging him out by both hands.
And Kim Hyeonwoo, whose own vital force was perhaps naturally weak, was hauled along with hardly any resistance, bowing his head to Father Lucas over and over as he went.

Watching that in silence, Shin Hweein called out softly to Flame-tail.

“A single strand of hair from each. Can you manage it?”

— What do you take me for. Not one strand — I’ll burn them all up for you!

“Hoo…. Moa?”
“I’ve already plucked them.”

This much, surely, fell within the bounds of “a handmaid with some little skill in sorcery.”

Shin Hweein sighed as Geum Moa, having acted before he could so much as ask, handed him without a word two strands of hair, which he wrapped in a tissue and tucked into his breast.
He, too, had wanted to be the sort of sorcerer who employed many shikigami and conducted intelligence-gathering, search-and-track operations, and fierce close-quarter combat alike without trouble….

“Soon I shall have to obtain a shikigami skilled in stealth.”
“For that sort of thing, you may keep on leaving it all to me, in the future!”
“Erm… Brother? Why the hair of those two?”

While Geum Moa was answering briskly, Father Lucas, perhaps unable to grasp the situation, asked in bewilderment; Shin Hweein answered him in a cool voice.

“Because they are presently the most likely suspects. I have need of a part of their bodies.”
“Wh-what?!”

Could he truly not have suspected the two of them in the slightest?
As the priest replied with a startled face, Shin Hweein answered in a tone of bewildered exasperation.

“They are the ones who met no one else and stayed with her all the while. When a woman has been laid low by a curse, surely the two who never left her side must be the first to be suspected. Even setting motive aside; and now, in fact, the motive is plain to see as well.”

At those words, Father Lucas’s face finally screwed up.

“Are you saying there is a motive — for a husband to curse his wife? For a younger sister to curse her elder sister!”
“Of course. …Desire.”

Recalling the face of the sister-in-law as she dragged her brother-in-law along, and the emotion he’d seen so vividly on her, Shin Hweein quietly let the word fall.
That what came out was “desire,” that blunter word, rather than “love,” was perhaps owing to the morning’s dream, which he could already scarcely recall.

“Brother Shin Hae, what you are saying — that is…”
“I, too, dislike drawing conclusions in haste. But even casting sorcery against a person a single time makes that same person more easily caught by sorcery in turn. So for now let us go in and look more closely.”
“Let us do that. I am certain Brother has overstepped. Thou shalt not commit adultery is one of the fundamental teachings of the Catholic faith. I trust Brother Kim Hyeonwoo.”

What Shin Hweein had been speaking of was not him, but the other one… still, it does take two hands to make a clap.
Without bothering to say anything more, he stepped up onto the wooden veranda.

When he’d left this house in the morning his only thought had been to rest as fast as possible, and he’d had no leisure to look around.
Seeing it now, the house looked truly, eerily empty.

And yet in every corner a faint aura lay subtly draped, and it was neither mere spiritual power nor yokai force.
It differed slightly from a sorcerer’s sorcery-power as well, and as he drew near the inner room where the Father had said he’d felt danger, Shin Hweein grasped its true nature.

“Spectral aura, is it.”
“Most ghosts pass on by themselves or become yo and slip away into the Specter Realm, do they not? For one to remain in the present world means it must be that strong.”
“Or else… that it has a master.”

The moment he laid his hand on the door of the inner room, saying so, Shin Hweein knew his intuition just now had been right.

So the elder sister, too, has sorcery-power, it seems. In that case, the fact that she is holding out against the curse is by her own strength…?

But just as he was about to open the door and check the victim’s condition in detail, he felt an aura stealing, creeping, toward him.
An aura more powerful and sinister than he could have imagined.
It was the aura of a ghost.

“Flame-tail.”

— You know it too, don’t you? It doesn’t seem to be on this side.

“Then.”

Shin Hweein abruptly thrust out a hand and seized Father Lucas by the collar.
Geum Moa, likewise, took hold of him at some part of his body.

“Moa. Not the chest — the shoulder.”
“Oh — my mistake.”

— You perverted little wench!

“Brother? What in the world are you…”
“What of it.”

The spectral aura around them swelled in an instant.
At this point Shin Hweein was reassured, inwardly, that the Eight Pure-Blood Houses were certainly not involved.
This was closer to what wild yokai do.

By some means or other they lure a person into a remote place, blur the boundary between reality and illusion, and at last drag them whole into their own domain to be devoured.

“To catch a tiger one must go into its den. So we shall, once again, let ourselves be caught.”
“What?!”

In neighbouring Hwa, where yokai are as numerous as the disasters the country has suffered, they called this kamikakushi (the gods hide one away).
What set it apart from the ordinary kamikakushi, though, was that the power at work here was great enough to draw them into the Specter Realm with ease, even in a place where the conditions for opening it were nowhere near in place.
This ghost, in all likelihood, possessed an ability specialised in collapsing the boundary between the present world and the Specter Realm.

But even so, compared with the Gatekeeper’s Brand carried by the legitimate heirs of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, it had considerable deficiencies.
Had he meant to suppress it with his own power, he could have done so, yet Shin Hweein did not bother to.
As he’d told Father Lucas: to catch a tiger one must go into its den, and blocking the mouth of the den with a boulder for a moment would not settle anything.

“Only — we cannot go in bare-handed… Moa. Throw it.”
“Right.”

By now a thick purple mist had settled at their party’s feet.
The surrounding landscape was slowly collapsing; in effect they were already halfway into the Specter Realm.

“Hyup.”
“Hup.”

The moment Geum Moa flung the box with the offering set into the air, Shin Hweein swept his staff in his one hand and split the box clean through.
Ignoring the priest, who stood gaping at the macarons, slices of cake, and cream puffs scattering through the air, Shin Hweein chanted his incantation.

“Aengseol — Old Aengseol — declare the ghost’s true identity to us, and guide us to it.”

— An offering well to my liking!

This was the third time he’d called Old Aengseol, and he’d wondered whether he might be able to summon her without disclosing his identity, so he’d put it to the test; mercifully, the voice of the old oriole answered him.

Immediately the macarons and small confections in the air vanished all at once, and even the last remaining slice of cake had a bite taken from it, then a second, bite-marks appearing on its cross-section as though something were eating it, and on the third bite it disappeared entirely.
The offerings had been eaten up in an instant, and he couldn’t tell in what manner she meant to indicate the direction; just as Shin Hweein narrowed his eyes, his vision, together with that of the rest of the party, crumpled into wrinkles.

“Ah, already!”
“It’s the Specter Realm.”

As though folding a sheet of paper, or rather, as though washing watercolour off drawing paper with water.
After everything had slowly settled downward, what bloomed within the disorder was a wholly Specter Realm landscape.
When everyone’s vision had fully returned, they stood already amid wild, unbroken nature in which no trace of the buildings remained.

Looking up at the sky, what one saw was a purple crescent moon, a sight to be found only in the Specter Realm.
In the darkness, where no source of light could be found save that bleak moon, two red eyes quietly rose into view.

It was Old Aengseol.

— Then, first to declare the ghost’s true identity: it is a taejagwi.

“A taejagwi?”

Pretending not to have heard Father Lucas’s naive question, he not knowing what a taejagwi was, Old Aengseol continued, still hidden in the darkness.

— And what is more, a child who was cursed and died in his mother’s womb. Having met death before he had even won life, it is inevitable that he gained the power to cross between boundaries; and it is inevitable, also, that he thinks deeply of the mother who carried him.

“What — did you say…?”
“Is that so.”

Father Lucas, only now able to roughly imagine what a taejagwi was, let out a choked sound; Shin Hweein, on the other hand, merely gave a quiet nod at Old Aengseol’s words.
He had been, to some degree, expecting it.

“So — you mean, surely, an infant? One that cannot yet so much as tell good from evil….”
“No. It is a devil — the very thing a priest hates. One to be put down.”
“Brother!”

A taejagwi, a ghost reborn from a dead child.
And now a foul spirit set on dragging a woman who carried life, and the child in her belly, down to their deaths together.

That was their enemy.