Chapter 10 — The Sorcerer And The Mother (1)

“M—Myeongin.”

“Is our Mr. Yun Jubaek frightened that the elders will give him a talking-to? Oh dear, what a sorry excuse for a man you are.”

When he tried to be friendly she only backed away, but when she wished to tease him she closed the distance without a shred of hesitation.
At Shin Myeongin’s blunt manner of address, Yun Jubaek pulled a sulking face.

“No, that wasn’t it! I was simply startled!”
“Startled, my foot. Voices within the Shin House are already whispering suspicions against the Seo House. There’s no question the Yun House is doing the same.”
“That isn’t a thing one decides so simply. And besides, you — your own mother is of the Seo House, so how can you…!”

Shin Myeongin had barged in headlong and was driving Yun Jubaek into a corner.
Yun Jubaek, flustered, laid out one practical consideration after another in reply.

Shin Hweein marvelled at the quiet smile with which Father Lucas watched the scene, and asked.

“Don’t tell me the Father called her here?”
“Just so. Did we not hear together what the devil had to say before? I thought it would be well to have more figures from the Eight Pure-Blood Houses who might be of help to you, Brother.”
“Ha.”

That was the correct answer.
Yun Jubaek alone might do for a pretext, of course, but adding Shin Myeongin to the mix could only be for the better.
Now that Yun Jubaek had been revealed to be a greater coward than he had imagined, all the more so.

It was simply that, as Yun Jubaek himself had mentioned, the Shin House was already entangled with the Seo House through marriage.
And above all, reaching out to Shin Myeongin first from his side had felt like taking on some needless debt, and so he had hesitated.
That Father Lucas, who could not bear the sight of her, should be the one to summon her. There was something in that.

“Well done. The Father’s sacrifice shall not be forgotten.”
“Eh? No, I didn’t particularly mean it as a sacrifice…”

Come to think of it, though Father Lucas, over whom she had so utterly lost her head, stood right there before her, Shin Myeongin was not clinging to him.
She cast the occasional glance his way, of course, but as such things went this was at the cute end of the scale.
He could scarcely believe it, but had some change of heart come over her after going through real combat?

“You!”
“Hm?”

The fragment of a thought by which he might have grudgingly judged his little sister admirable was wiped clean out of existence the moment he found himself face-to-face with her.
Shin Myeongin had crossed up close and was jabbing a finger at him.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You were at the site of the operation that day, weren’t you! As an examinee!”
“That I was.”
“Hang on, now that I look — this staff…! Eek!”

Her eyes alighted on the staff Shin Hweein leaned upon, and she abruptly stretched out a hand to seize it.
A barrier of flower-petals lifted lightly into being and checked her, and she could not.
He stroked the head of the staff once, idly, then snorted as he spoke.

“Does the daughter of a great house now take to highway robbery as well?”
“I only meant to have a look! That man was definitely holding this thing!”
“That man?”
“Yes! What I wanted to ask you, that is — among the examinees! There was, wasn’t there?”

In the end she gave up on inspecting the staff directly and pressed her face up to his, fuming.
Looking at her now, her face was flushed scarlet for a reason other than anger.

“Wasn’t there an i—i—i—incredibly handsome man? He definitely wasn’t one of the military sorcerers, so he must have been an examinee. Truly the most handsome man in the whole world!”
“There was not.”
“Don’t declare it so flatly — think back properly! I’m telling you, I definitely saw him!”

Shin Myeongin was in great excitement, demanding that Shin Hweein dredge up a memory he did not possess.
Behind her, Yun Jubaek wore the expression of a mouse whose cheese had been snatched away, and Shin Hweein desperately ignored his pitiful gaze as he pronounced.

“At the least, there was no examinee handsomer than Father Lucas.”
“No, there was! Someone whose handsomeness no priest could be compared to!”
“…Why is that, I wonder? Surely a thing for which I ought to be grateful, and yet it leaves me chagrined.”

Judging that no conclusion would be reached, Shin Hweein shook his head and pushed Shin Myeongin away.

“In any event, I know nothing of it. And as a young woman past your prime, you ought to comport yourself with greater propriety.”
“Anyone listening would think you were my older brother. The one wearing the hideous mask, no less… No, wait. There’s no way it could be. And yet, the staff — the mask?”

Even as she said there was no way it could be, Shin Myeongin’s gaze travelled in confusion between his staff and his mask.
Then, fastening her eyes at last upon the mask, she swallowed once and spoke.

“You… take that thing off.”
“Ha.”

Shin Hweein, of course, did not take off the mask.
Instead, in the hope that the absurdity he felt would somehow transmit itself to her, he replied.

“Are you in earnest? Are you speaking with the hope that the ‘utterly handsome man’ you describe might be me?”
“No! Just thinking of it sends goose-flesh over my whole body!”
“In that case it should be a relief to you. I am not he, so be at ease. You may confirm my face by no more than the list of Third-Rank examination passers on the state-sorcerer homepage.”

So replying firmly, Shin Hweein thought.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Shin Myeongin had not been under any hallucination at the time, and that she had indeed seen his actual features and taken a liking to them.

If from the very moment they met she had not liked him in the slightest, and yet now their whole relation might be altered by no more than the lay of his face, Shin Hweein could not have received that with anything like a glad heart.
So even hereafter he had no intention of removing the mask in front of Shin Myeongin.
It would, however, be necessary to speak with Geum Moa about the possibility he had until now never even considered.

“Now that everyone we need is gathered, let us be on the move at once.”

Shin Hweein cleanly ignored Shin Myeongin, who had recoiled in disgust yet could not pull her suspicious gaze from him, and turned around to address Yun Jubaek.
Yun Jubaek stood wearing the expression of a man whose shins had been kicked by the woman he loved.

“Lt. Colonel Yun, by my sorcery I can trace the point of origin… but as it points to the interior of Zone 1, might I trouble you to lead the way?”

At those very words, which anyone could have anticipated, Yun Jubaek’s expression twisted a further degree.
He removed his rank cap and glared at his own insignia, at nothing else but his own, with a resentful expression, then blew out a great sigh and looked Shin Hweein straight in the eye.

“Hoo… If there is any falsehood in the sorcery, or if your bearing is feigned, you will not escape a heavy penalty. Are you confident — of this?”
“Of course. And the matter, I think, will not prove so great as Lt. Colonel Yun fears.”
“It is already a great matter!”

Yun Jubaek had abruptly let out a great shout.
He gathered his breath with a start and went on in a voice that carried not the slightest personal grudge against Shin Hweein.

“If the Seo House — no, if any of the Three Capital Houses — really is involved in this. Even if it were only a collateral figure, it will not be the perpetrator but you yourself, Mr. Shin Hae, who will be in the greatest danger. This is not a threat — I mean it in earnest.”
“Hm.”
“Just now I find myself almost wishing instead that a foreign spy had been hidden in the Capital these several years, conducting operations, and only now been discovered. Mr. Shin Hae, it really is dangerous. Truly so.”
“Don’t talk rubbish, really. When we’re right beside you keeping watch with eyes wide open, who would dare pull such a dog’s trick?”

The blockhead who had tried to crush a man with sheer authority upon their first meeting was babbling something or other, but in dealing with her Yun Jubaek remained gentlemanly to the very end.

“I’m sorry, Myeongin, but there’s still something you don’t know… Later on I’ll explain it to you one piece at a time, so for now, just—”
“What is it I don’t know!”
“Heheh. I am well aware myself of how fearsome a place the Three Capital Houses is. Only—”

Just when the conversation between the two of them was about to topple into a quarrel, Shin Hweein, who had been watching the patterns drawn in the air by blood that flowed and re-formed in intricate motions, broke in and said.

“As the sorcerer himself has now been swallowed up, perhaps they will even welcome our coming.”
“…What?”

The doubt had been there from the very beginning.

For when he had seen the yokai in Do Yumi’s dream, the one that looked as though a great mass of grime-stained grains of rice had been clumped together, what Shin Hweein first called to mind was a yokai some distance removed from a dream-demon.

Bulgasari: protagonist of the folktale most commonly told among the common folk of Aeshin.
A trifling little beast, kneaded out of grains of rice, that gains life, devours iron, and swells in body until it runs wild.
Whereupon its body becomes harder and vaster than iron itself, so that no thing can wound it and no one can stand against it.

According to one tradition it can be expelled by fire, and so it is called bul-gasal (“killed-by-fire”); according to another it can be expelled by the bul-beop of a monk’s Buddhist Law, and so it is bul-gasal (“killed-by-Buddha”).
But if one consults the tale of the Hwamo (the Mother of Calamity) in the Buddhist scripture presumed to be its original source, the Sūtra of the Old Miscellaneous Parables¹, even fire only feeds the creature’s strength further; a truly formidable yokai it is, without question.

‘It is a tale of considerable antiquity, so there would be nothing strange in the actual appearance of a Bulgasari. Of course, the lore tells us that a Bulgasari can stand against an entire nation single-handed; that mastery over such a thing could be grasped in the palm of a single man’s hand is hardly to be believed.’

There was also the possibility, of course, astonishing as it might be yet not to be wholly dismissed, that someone, after long years of painstaking effort, had genuinely tamed a Bulgasari.
But in that case the creature would scarcely be permitted to roam abroad at random.
And above all, by Shin Hweein’s own judgement after his actual encounter with the thing, the creature had not been so formidable a yokai.
A Bulgasari is, in the first place, not a dream-demon.

“—In short, the creature is no Bulgasari, but a mere mutant unhappily born from the intermingling of features of disparate yokai. It is hardly to be wondered at, then, that it should run wild and devour even its own sorcerer.”

So Shin Hweein expounded inside the limousine, which now bore a sizable party: Father Lucas, Sister Barbara, Yun Jubaek, Shin Myeongin.

“Disparate devils, you say?”

At Father Lucas’s query, Shin Hweein nodded readily.
At first he too had been unable to grasp the thing, but now that he had touched the creature through the power of the dream-demon queen, Lyl, he could venture to guess at its origin.
The identity, astonishingly, was that of a yokai quite familiar.

“Among the common folk, the view that the Bulgasari originated from the baku² — a yokai which devours nightmares — has gained no small persuasive weight. In most media, too, the Bulgasari is depicted in a form resembling the baku. Originally, the form ascribed to the Bulgasari differs from tradition to tradition.”
“Ah — so it was.”
“The baku, too, is said to feed not only on nightmares but also on iron and copper. Even looking at the baku our own house has under contract, one would know that this is something said by people who don’t know what they’re talking about… don’t tell me?”

Yun Jubaek and Shin Myeongin, being of great-house stock through and through, snorted at Shin Hweein’s words and put on the expression of ‘there are such fools, aren’t there?’
Shin Hweein privately thought how very well the two of them, soaked in the airs of great houses, went together, but he let none of it show on his face as he nodded.

“In all likelihood, the sorcerer who set this yokai loose originally wished to make a Bulgasari. Even in its origin-tale it was a thing born out of human hands, so he must have judged that the possibility was there for him too.”
“The fool — the Bulgasari is a great yokai that runs through the very history of Aeshin’s wars, and now to think it could be made by human hands… hm?”

Yun Jubaek, who had been snorting at Shin Hweein’s words, abruptly knit his brow and fell silent.
Yes, to him too a possibility must have occurred.

The artificial creation of yokai for use was, in some respects, not unlike the Nati project the military had recently put on display, was it not?
Whether this was simple coincidence, or whether someone who had actually taken part in the Nati project had collaborated in the making of a Bulgasari, Yun Jubaek could no longer simply let the matter pass without overturning the military, borrowing the strength of Lt. General Yun, if need be, to do it.

Of course, since Shin Hweein could not reveal that he ‘knew the Nati which had appeared in this exam had been made by the military’, he merely cast Yun Jubaek a puzzled look and continued his explanation.

“Yokai are unstable beings, easily shaken by human perception and the voices of the many. Even great yokai of considerable rank are prone to it — how much more, then, a yokai made by human hands from the beginning. Far more dangerous still.”
“Th… that is so. Ngh.”
“In all likelihood, while they were in the midst of crafting their Bulgasari, the public perception of the baku became mingled with their work, and a yokai that was neither Bulgasari nor baku was born.”
“Things of like form are easy to resemble in sorcery as well… fools.”
“Just so. And the yokai, having naturally run wild, drew in not only the sorcerer himself but countless commoners of the Capital besides.”

The baku, the devourer of nightmares, is by its essence a sacred beast, no question of it.
And yet this one, twisted from its very birth, had taken to the brazen art of making nightmares itself in order to devour them.
And not even to consume them and have done, but to keep drawing in strength, infecting victims and binding them to reproduce nightmares without end, an outrage going so far as that.

“And so it is a foul spirit. The creature must be put down.”

Having defined it in a word, Shin Hweein’s eyes glinted coldly behind the mask.

“That is as much as I am able to tell you. Lt. Colonel Yun — how say you, will it be possible to punish those responsible?”
“…I am sorry. Most likely it will not.”
“You there, Yun Jubaek.”

The one who addressed him without honorifics was, of course, Shin Myeongin.

“How does that make any sense? They’ve inflicted utter, ridiculous public harm across the whole of the Capital! Even just rashly setting out to make a Bulgasari-class yokai is a major crime! What’s the point of you carrying that Lt. Colonel pip? Is sucking up to the Royal House all you’re good for?”
“Even if a Lt. General came in place of a Lt. Colonel, what can’t be done can’t be done. Myeongin, calm down first, and let’s discuss how this matter can be brought to a smooth conclusion.”
“Whaaat?”

Shin Myeongin had her temper well and truly up, yet Shin Hweein found himself rather sympathising with Yun Jubaek, who was at his wit’s end before her.
If Yun Jubaek had been truly a villain, he could have feigned ignorance and gone along with everything Shin Hweein and Shin Myeongin said, crossed over to the Seo House, rescued the Seo child first, then played the innocent and conducted negotiations alone with the Seo House. Nothing would have stood in the way.
For one acting in the interest of that one alone, he ought, rightly, to have done so.
Of course there was no chance Shin Hweein would have been taken in by such a contrivance, but Yun Jubaek had, from the outset, done no such thing and had laid out the situation honestly.
From the way he, even now, did not lose his temper at the foolish things Shin Myeongin kept saying and was at pains to soothe her, one could tell he was a man of inherently good nature.

Shin Hweein, unable to stand by and watch him being tormented, lowered down to him a rope of rescue.

“Lt. Colonel Yun, do not be so put out. I am content so long as the yokai is exterminated. It is merely that I have no wish to be made to pay the price for it. The reason I used somewhat strong language was on that account.”
“Aha — so that’s it… I thank you. It is true that to him it could indeed amount to a punishment.”
“The price? What’s all this now? Punishment?”

Ah, when human foolishness exceeds its proper bounds, does it begin from that point to feel almost endearing?
Striving to keep from sighing, Shin Hweein spoke.

“It is a yokai that threw the whole of the Capital into uproar, a yokai not even the strength of the Seo House could bring under control. The making of it surely cost no inconsiderable sum. To be unable to recover that money is, in itself, a punishment for him — that is what I mean.”
“That’s only because they meant to make a Bulgasari and so they invested heav— no, no, no. That’s a strange way to talk. They went and made it on their own because they wanted to, they caused the damage, and you, because you got rid of it, are to be made to pay them the price? Have they lost their minds?”

Of course.
That is what those with power do.
They wield their great power purely as they please, and shift all responsibility for it entirely onto others.

He who has standing may do so without consequence.
He who has power may do so without harm to himself.
Those who are harmed are only the weak, who are tossed about.

“Leave that matter to me alone.”

Yun Jubaek said it in a firm voice.

“In the name of this Yun Jubaek. No — in the name of the Yun House, I will absolutely keep any harm from coming to you, Mr. Shin Hae. If only you would rescue the sorcerer for us.”
“That I can answer only when I have gone there, but it should likely not be difficult.”
“That is a true relief. …You really do have the makings of the Ham House son-in-law after all.”
“Wha, whaaaaa! How utterly infuriating!”

Watching the conversation between the two settle into a conclusion, Shin Myeongin pounded her chest in frustration.
The feelings of the common folk who dealt with her on an everyday basis were likely not all that different, but she was in no state at present to consider even that.

— Young master, are you not vexed by it? To resolve this whole narcolepsy affair and gain nothing for it, to be unable even properly to punish the one who has committed so grave a sin, and to let it all end so half-heartedly?

At the voice that came through from Geum Moa, who was secretly trailing along behind them, Shin Hweein snorted to himself.

— You speak a strange thing. Who said the perpetrator was not to be punished?
— Eh?

A sin is the property of the sinner alone.
The judge above the earth shall not punish the criminal.
The judge beneath the earth shall be silent until the criminal is dead and buried.
But the judge of dreams yet holds the hammer in his own hand.

“We have arrived. It points to precisely this place.”

So spoke Shin Hweein, gathering back the blood whose role had ended.
By now the vehicle they had ridden in had come to a halt before a mansion so imposing it could be counted among three fingers’ worth of the most magnificent in the Capital.

“The Seo House, indeed.”
“From halfway through… no, the truth is from quite an early point, I had been suspecting it. I had already sent word as well.”
“I see. So that’s why someone is—”

Through the window he could see a middle-aged woman of evident refinement standing out in front of the Seo House gate, and Shin Hweein let a cold smile play upon his lips.
That the wife of the Seo House head had come out, knowing of their coming, to wait for them. What did that signify?
It was plain enough.

“Of the direct line, evidently.”
“…So it would seem.”
“Provided my own safety is secured, beyond that I shall not concern myself with whatever the Shin House and the Yun House extract from this affair as recompense.”
“Ah.”
“Ah? Hm?”

Yun Jubaek comprehended in an instant and let out a sound of admiration; Shin Myeongin only cocked her head.
Striving not to look on her with too pitying an expression, Shin Hweein stepped down from the car.

Once more Geum Moa’s voice came through to him.

— Then what manner of punishment do you mean to mete out?
— Why, is it not plain? Since no one is to know who the perpetrator of this affair was, and the matter is to be let pass —

The perpetrator, too, must suffer where no one knows of it.
In the most secret place, and most cruelly.