Chapter 5 — The Sorcerer And The Mudang (3)

In a shop on a busy street in Zone 2 of Seoul, Shin Hweein had fallen into the gravest deliberation of his life.

“Young master, won’t you get the same one as me? Hmm?”
“But… ngh, that is a telephone come from foreign parts, is it not?”

The matter was, in short, which phone he would carry from this day forward.
Up until now Shin Hweein had never set foot beyond the annex, dragging his frail body about its rooms with nothing but his books for company, and the chance to so much as touch a phone had never come his way.

Yet he had watched the priest, the first outsider he had ever properly met, keep up with this person and that on his own phone, and the watching had set him thinking.
And his handmaid Geum Moa, though when she had picked up the trick of it he could not say, handled hers with the practised ease of a veteran and could fish up information from ten years past. Seeing that, he had at last grown certain that he, too, would need one.
All the more so if he were to go about playing the part of a State Sorcerer from now on.

“Even so — surely an Aeshin Korean ought to use the home-grown make?”
“Young master, really… Do you so dislike the thought of matching with me?”
“That is precisely why, from the start, you ought to have been using an Aeshin one yourself.”
“Brother, forgive me — would you mind picking already? There are far too many eyes on us.”

Who in heaven is that strange masked cripple, to be addressed as ‘young master’ by such a beauty and to be carrying on a lovers’ quarrel like that?

Gazes of that flavour were pouring in on them from every corner of the shop.
The party was eye-catching enough to begin with, the three of them together, and the attention had only sharpened for it.

“There’s no help for it, then. I had meant not to use this secret weapon, but…”

Geum Moa raised two fingers.
The meaning being: with these two alone, she had the confidence to sink Shin Hweein outright.

“Shin Hae. The price.”
“…!”

He was, at present, under the identity of Shin Hae. There was no reason, then, to weigh home-grown against foreign in the matter of his belongings, and since her phone was the far costlier model, if he was to be given one gratis either way, better the costlier one. So went the argument.
At last Shin Hweein cast aside his pointless attachments and his deliberations and chose the model she had wanted.

“That is how it has come out, Father.”
“No — yes. The funds are coming out of the budget either way, so it is fine, but…”

The priest wore an expression of less-than-total conviction, but he activated the phone all the same.
All the while, Geum Moa kept producing further items from the same brand, insisting they needed the peripheral accessories as well, and the priest paid for the whole lot without a word of complaint. It was, frankly, moving.

“The young master will find it hard to carry the bags, so I shall keep them for now.”

So saying, like a parent at a holiday gathering scooping back the money a child has just received from its relatives, Geum Moa swept the rest of the purchases into a bag and carried them off.
Shin Hweein wondered whether those things would ever again emerge from her keeping, but since what he had wanted in the first place was the phone and the phone alone, he resolved not to trouble himself over it.

“My thanks, Father Lucas.”
“This much is nothing. Ah — more to the point, while we have your phone activated, do let me register my number.”
“And how dare you go first.”

Glaring daggers at the priest, Geum Moa seized Shin Hweein’s phone, entered her own number, and handed it back.
He took it and found the number saved under the name My Love ♥; he tapped the screen at once and changed it to Handmaid.

“Aagh! How — how have you grown so adept already!”
“Did I not stand at your elbow and the priest’s, watching the both of you handle them?”
“That’s right, our young master is a genius…!”

Geum Moa pleaded and pleaded, wept and clung, until he relented and amended it once more to Moa.
Even that proved insufficient, and she begged him, by any means whatever, to attach a red heart-shape to it. He replied that he would do so on the day the Three-Year Pact was fulfilled and not a moment sooner, at which her face turned a bright scarlet and she said no more.

“As I thought — a Gigolo….”
“As you thought? Father, that absurd bit of nonsense, I am quite sure, was Zer’s doing, not yours.”
“In that case, between Zer and myself a point of common ground has at last emerged. I thank you for it, Brother. Now then — give it here, that I might save my number as well. Are we not partners?”

The priest’s parting flourish did not sit well with him, and Shin Hweein moved to take issue with it, but the priest had already saved his number with the quickness of a man getting his elbow in first and handed the phone back.

“In fact, your identity card has come through, Brother. Thanks to which I was also able to activate this phone under the name Shin Hae.”
“Already?”
“Surely the reason you entrusted it to me is precisely that I am quick about such things. Ah — and there he is, just on time.”

A man in nondescript clothing slipped into the shop as though seeping in, and handed the priest a single sheet of paper and a small object the size of a name-card.
Father Lucas passed both straight along, and Shin Hweein inspected them: an identity card and the accompanying certificate, made out to the name Shin Hae.

“The photograph on the card — is it truly all right with this one? To be frank, the face is so featureless one can scarcely tell it apart from any other, and I cannot for the life of me believe that this is what your true face looks like, Brother.”
“No — it is good. It is perfect.”

The photograph was, as the priest had said, something like the averaged face of every twenty-something man in the country, devoid of personality, but that was exactly what he wanted.
The face would do well enough. Whenever he had to remove the mask, he could simply change to this one for a moment, and that would be the end of it.

Of course, Shin Hweein was even now using a transformation art to alter his face, but the transformation art was a thing that could not greatly change one’s appearance unless one had achieved no small mastery of it, and even when one could, it devoured a great deal of spiritual power.
Spending it at the moment of use he might have managed, but the maintenance of it was its own labour, so in ordinary times he kept the alteration only at a level whose drain on his spiritual power was not great.

‘I cannot exactly walk into a state examination wearing a mask… On the day, I shall have to call upon Moa’s help.’

Fortunately the recent surge in his spiritual power was no small matter; if he could only grow a little more accustomed to the transformation art, he should be able to bring it off on his own strength alone.
That sensation of growing, of advancing by his own efforts, was a thing he had had no chance of feeling at any point in his life thus far, and it had set his heart pleasantly at ease. He was running his fingers over the identity card when a familiar voice carried into his hearing.

“Whoa, this place is on a completely different level from Zone 1! It’s, like, totally Western! It’s big! It’s tall!”
“Well, naturally, Myeongin… Is this really your first time coming out to Zone 2 of the Capital?”
“That’s what I keep telling you, how many times do I have to say it, Sis! I was, like, totally locked up in prison!”
“Ahaha… It must be very different from Taebaek-si.”
“Ugh, what is there even to compare? Some mountain valley? Anywhere’s better than that!”

The lively voices of two young women rang through the shop, loud as though there were no other patrons in the place.

Shin Hweein’s hand went instinctively to the mask, checking that it sat properly across his face.
For both voices were voices he knew.
The one he had heard only a few times and that long ago; the other he had heard a fair amount.

To begin with, he had so rarely gone outside the annex, and when he did, he had only ever gone to the main house to bow his head under the elders’ insect-watching gaze and turn back again, so the women’s voices he knew came to only a limited number.
While his mother still lived, he had attended a few of the gatherings of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses with her, and remembered hearing the voices of the daughters of the other houses from those occasions.
But after his mother’s death he had ceased to attend even those, so the women’s voices he had heard since came down to his stepmother and the daughters she had borne his father.

‘One of them must be a daughter of another of the Eight Houses, and the other one… Myeongin — yes, that one was the second.’

His mother, in her lifetime, had borne three sons, Shin Hweein among them.
Whether his mother had known herself to be of a destiny that bore only sons, or whether there had been some prior arrangement with another house, he could not say; but not long after the birth of the second son, his father had taken a second wife, that is, Hweein’s little mother, from the Seo House, which was one of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses and likewise one of the Three Capital Houses.
Comically enough, his little mother Seo Yeryeong was of the opposite destiny, that of bearing only daughters, and she bore three of them: an elder half-sister one year older than Shin Hweein, a half-sister one year younger than him, and lastly a youngest half-sister more than ten years his junior.

When she had first come into the house, his little mother had been ablaze with the ambition to place a son of her own in the seat of the head of the house; but with the birth of her youngest daughter she had cleanly abandoned that dream and begun, instead, to throw her support behind the eldest brother Shin Uin.
There must, surely, be talk going back and forth between Shin Uin and the Seo House as well.
Perhaps, in his turn, Shin Uin too would take a bride from the Seo House, generation after generation.

“A mountain valley… well, it is a mountain valley.”
“Aw, Sis, are you sulking? I’m joking! Still, Sis, don’t just live up on the mountain — come down to the Capital. There’s no law that says a mudang has to stay in Gangwon-do. Of course people belong in the capital.”
“Haha, that’s so. Mm…”
“All right, all right — today the two of us are doing a dry run! There are tons of things I’ve been wanting to try. First — we’re buying an AI Phone! The elders at home, even once they let me have a phone, were yelling that it absolutely had to be a home-grown one, and how does that make any sense?! What kind of shame is a girl in the bloom of her teens supposed to endure carrying something like that around!”
“Right, of course. Ah — looks like the AI Phones are over this way.”

From the moment they stepped inside, the pair paid no mind whatever to the other patrons; with looks that were doubtless out of the ordinary, they drew every eye in the place, and all the while they drifted steadily nearer to where Shin Hweein’s party stood.

“Brother?”
“It is nothing. Our business here is finished — let us be on our way.”

It was only on hearing his sister’s voice close at hand that Shin Hweein realised he was not yet prepared to face his own blood.
It was not as though his sister, Shin Myeongin, were at fault for it in any particular way.
She had baulked at so much as meeting his eyes, had never once looked his way nor spoken a word to him.

But her voice made the voices of those others come back to him along with it.
The voices that ground him into the floor without end, that piled upon his shoulders burdens that were not his to carry, that would make of him a sinner for the ages and would have him cut off from the House.

“Young master, it is all right.”

Geum Moa, having drawn up beside him at some point, whispered softly and took one of his hands in hers.

“I am here at your side.”
“…Yes.”
“Brother, if your condition has turned poor, would you not perhaps step outside for a moment to take some air?”

— What, is it because of those? Shall I burn them to a cinder?

“Flame-tail, do refrain from acting on the most short-sighted thought that crosses your—”
“Whoa, it’s a flame-hound!”

At that the younger sister’s shrill cry rang out from right beside them.
The very thing he had feared had come to pass, and Shin Hweein conceded that he had been careless.
The flame-hound was one of the famed yokai that stood as a symbol of the spirit of Aeshin, and the Shin House, versed in the shikigami arts as it was, was hardly the sort of family to pass such a thing by without a second glance.

“Whoa, and there’s a handsome man with him, too… A priest?”

And then, having discovered Father Lucas on top of it, Shin Myeongin could not bring herself to walk on past, and came right up to them.

“Excuse me, Father — are you acquainted with this flame-hound? It isn’t your shikigami, is it? Then could you not let me have it instead?”
“Hm, sister…?”
“Myeongin! As if a yokai that wasn’t a shikigami would be out wandering loose. Obviously it has a master!”

The young woman dragged Shin Myeongin back hurriedly, scolding her even as the girl stuck her face right up to the priest.
It was only on seeing the woman’s face at close range that he remembered.
She was, among the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, the youngest daughter of the head of the Ham House, the line that carried the orthodox lineage of the mu-gyo tradition. Her given name he could not recall, but he remembered her face from one of the gatherings he had attended while his mother still lived.

“Sis, really — do you even know what kind of yokai a flame-hound is? They choose for themselves the one who is to be their master! And besides, even should one come out through a Specter Realm Gate that has opened of its own accord, it is a spirit-beast, one that will do no harm to a human — a true spirit-beast! Right, Father? Anyway, the priest cannot handle the shikigami arts.”

In a remarkable coincidence, exactly half of what his sister had said was correct and the other half was not, and Flame-tail, feeling Shin Hweein staring at him in pointed inquiry, turned his head slightly aside as though he had at least some conscience left in him.

“The first part is quite right, but this devil is the familiar of my partner—”
“Partner?”
“Indeed. That flame-hound is my shikigami.”
“Huh? Just now, who… eek.”

The priest, no longer able to bear with Shin Myeongin, had cast him a glance; Shin Hweein nodded and stepped forward with his words ready. At that, Shin Myeongin, who had been doing her utmost to close on the priest, turned, caught sight of him, and recoiled in horror.
The comical thing of it was that this present figure of him, wearing a mask without so much as eye-holes cut in it, drew less revulsion than the figure he had cut in his bandages of old.

“Flame-tail. Come here.”

— What am I, your dog? Every time, these inane little orders…

“Would you prefer to come on your hands?”

— Coming, coming now!

Flame-tail, in horror, came trotting over on all fours, and once arrived smacked Shin Hweein’s leg sullenly with his tail.
Shin Myeongin’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the creature obeying him only under duress.

“The spiritual power coming off you is barely a rat-tail’s worth, and however I look at you you don’t seem nearly the sort to have a flame-hound at your beck and call… You — what kind of fraud are you running? You aren’t carrying some illegal cursed object on you, are you?”
“An illegal cursed object?”

Shin Hweein had, until now, believed himself to bear no particular grudge against Shin Myeongin or against any of his stepmother’s daughters.
But on hearing words so plainly framed to pick a quarrel, the thought came to him: perhaps that was not so after all.

“Yes! These days there are more and more shikigami-masters using illegal cursed objects, and it’s been a real problem! There are even stories that when the cursed object breaks, the shikigami runs wild and brings about disaster… anyway! You are completely suspicious!”
“Hah — what an interesting little tale…. Rather young to be discoursing on such matters. Where did you come by such talk, I wonder? Did the elders of your house, perhaps, instruct you?”

His mouth had run a touch faster than his thoughts, and that, in the event, proved to be a problem.

“What? You—”
“Myeongin!”

Shin Myeongin glared furiously at Shin Hweein for so brazenly throwing words at the authority of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, and the Ham House daughter stepped in between them.

“Myeongin, you started it. The shikigami arts aren’t something only Shin House people can handle! And as for you, sir. However sour your mood, the person standing before you is the daughter of the illustrious Shin House, head of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses. Are you aware of what it means, in Aeshin Korea, to challenge the authority of the Shin House?”
“The Shin House, is it? Goodness — how remarkable.”

Shin Hweein rubbed at the mask-covered brow of his with his own hand, as though genuinely astonished.
He knew well enough that, with his identity hidden, he ought not to let his mouth run wild, and yet there was no curbing the dark impulse that pressed upon him.

“It never occurred to me that a member of an illustrious house so versed in the shikigami arts could fail to recognise another’s shikigami. My discourtesy. Will you accept my apology?”
“Eep, eee-ee-ee-eek…!”
“Haa…”

The Ham daughter, judging that the standoff would yield nothing if they remained as they were, let out a great sigh, first bowed her head to Father Lucas, and then spoke again.

“Father, my apologies. We were the ones who began the disturbance, so we shall take our leave for now. But if that man is truly your partner, you would do well to keep him in proper hand. As he is, it would surprise no one if his head were to part company with his shoulders before long.”
“Allow me to make myself clear.”

The priest’s voice as he answered her had taken on, somehow, a faint chill.

“Should the rights and wrongs of any matter prove plain, the Holy Mother Church will spare no effort in the defence of my partner.”
“…Is that so. That is most reassuring. Then if you will excuse us.”
“Sis, let go! I am completely going to kill that bastard!”
“You will not! That you started it doesn’t change. If word of this reaches the main house, before that man’s head can fly your ankles will be in irons first — and would that be any better?”
“Ugh, uuuwaaaaah! I’m completely furious—!”

The young woman, desperately holding fast to Shin Myeongin as her temper threatened to burst its banks, turned and made for the door.
Shin Hweein stood watching the two of them recede, and presently said,

“Perhaps the absolving of my curse came too late after all. As though my reason has been struck dumb, the same impulsive talk, the same impulsive deeds, over and over. I have done something altogether foolish.”
“No, no — you were completely normal there?”
“Brother…”

He was about to thank the priest, who was looking at him with an exasperated face, for having stepped in on his behalf. And at that very moment, the young woman who had been dragging Shin Myeongin out of the shop stopped short, and turned to look back at him.

— Two hours from now, the café across the street, the two of us only. …Mr. Shin Hweein.

She sent the words on a current of spirit-power, in a voice meant for his ears alone.