Chapter 15 — The Sorcerer And The Great-Mouth Ruins (5)

“That jeweled earring dangling from her left ear, bursting open — I took it for an attack and meant to shield us from it.”

Glaring at the spot where the woman had vanished, Leon withdrew the shield he had spun from his own blood and clicked his tongue.
Shin Hweein snorted at the words.

“She hadn’t the nerve to come at us at the cost of her own body. From the start she was only looking to flee.”

— You knew, and you let her go, didn’t you?

“My suspicions are firm enough. But to turn openly against her now would only weary us and Baek House both. Had I caught her in the act, I’d have engaged her without a second thought, but…”

That, or if Zer had been with him.
For the moment he was a guest of the cathedral, and could not go making his own moves without restraint.

“Still, I imagine there is no need for me to lay a hand on her myself. That woman has already been devoured by the Other Realm.”

“Devoured by the Other Realm… you must mean that, then.”

Leon glanced back at the wreckage of the altar Hweein had collapsed and burned.

Hweein nodded, then spoke.

“Leon. Earlier you meant to ask after the identity of the creature, did you not. To answer — the master of this Other Realm is the Great-Mouth Ghost.”

The Great-Mouth Ghost was a yokai that had shown itself in Aeshin long, long ago.
True to the name, its mouth was so absurdly enormous that its lower lip touched the earth and its upper lip touched the sky.
Naturally those who beheld it fled in terror. But the brave dared to step inside it, and the old tales held that this alone was the means by which the yokai could be subdued.

“Ah, indeed, now that I think on it, the mouth of the ruin did rather look like a giant maw. But the present situation is the opposite of the legend, is it not? This creature was luring people into its mouth, surely.”

“That, no doubt, is because such simple devices can no longer stir terror in men. The yokai too has adapted with the times.”

In the old days it had been an easy thing to drive a person into terror.
To stand alone in the dark, to knock on the closed door of a solitary room, to send a strange voice down a telephone line, to press a red handprint on a window with no living presence behind it. At any of these a person would shriek and collapse, and the yokai could draw force enough from it.

But it was no longer so.
That degree of stimulus could now be met easily, anywhere.
The age had come in which men sought out terror of their own accord, for the sake of pleasure.

Through the proliferation of every kind of media, able now to peer into the whole world from the safety of their own homes, or so they had come to fancy, the men of this present age had grown dull to every stimulus.
Forever wanting more, forever wanting a stronger jolt, they had mastered the art of enjoying even fear.
Trusting that inside their houses they would remain safe forever, they reached for fear as one might reach for snacks and amusements.

Of course every time, they were startled, terrified, kept awake by it.
But trusting that none of it could harm them, the next day they reached for a new fear all over again.
Never knowing that this, precisely, was what made so many yokai stronger and more active.
When the truly mortal hour came, they would all freeze stiff, unable to budge.

“To strip a modern man of his bluster would have called for nothing more than wearing a still more dreadful guise. But the Great-Mouth Ghost, in its inborn cunning, seems to have hit upon a better method.”

“You needn’t say what it is. I can guess. Desire.”

“Just so.”

Even a man whose senses had been pickled numb in every kind of stimulus stayed weak to desire.
Knowing the odds of winning to be hopelessly thin, he poured his money into lottery tickets; consumed by the small gain right before his eyes, he let the greater gain slip past; he hungered after the desire of the moment as though he had no future at all.

What could stir the workers’ desire was gold, and so the Great-Mouth Ghost lured them with gold.
To many sorcerers, ruins were the chance to overturn a lifetime in a single stroke, and so it dressed itself in the trappings of a ruin to draw them in.
For a Gem-Mage it had even taken care to lay out a fine altar, one by which a person could be made into a jewel.
Anyone who did not know that this space was sustained by the will of a single being would fall easily into desire.

“What becomes of those who throw themselves bodily into that desire… I can say at least that nothing pleasant awaits them.”

Perhaps the Gem-Mage was, in truth, hard done by.
It was so that the woman had made gems out of human beings, but before that, perhaps it was the people themselves, witless with desire, who had cast themselves into the trap.
Of course, none of that washed her own crimes clean.

“And that, too, must be why it pried our company apart from one another. A person’s true face is more easily laid bare when they are alone.”

“Just so. Father — Zer and Sister Barbara are in danger. We had best hurry.”

Hweein floated a long needle above the back of his hand, where it spun and spun.
Needless to say, this was a variant of his compass-sorcery: instead of tracking the coordinates of a Specter Realm Gate, he had reworked it to track the spiritual power of a particular person.
It was by this same variant that Ham Seoyeon had once been able to find him inside a Specter Realm.

Grasping by sorcery, in an instant, the positions and distances of those he sought, Hweein let out a sigh.

“The Father is somewhat far off… Sister Barbara, at least, is nearer. Flame-tail, can you keep carrying me?”

— If it’s just you.

“Then I shan’t ride at all, out of pure spite. Young master, just you wait. I will, without fail, procure us a mount-type sorcerous implement the two of us alone can ride together in comfort. Pets shall be banned from boarding!”

“Within the bounds of the Three-Year Pact, then. By all means.”

Yet Flame-tail’s charge did not last long.
From some moment on the temperature around them began to climb, and feathers made of flame whirled about them, blocking their way.

— …This is.

Flame-tail’s pace slowed.
It did not seem, however, that he was hindered by the surroundings.

— His…

“Flame-tail.”

— I know. I’m no fool — I’ve heard the whole story from you, I couldn’t be deceived. If… if I didn’t know this space is an Other Realm built by something called the Great-Mouth Ghost, I might have been fooled to perfection, but…

Hweein himself felt nothing in this space beyond an unpleasant heat.
Had there been any true connection to the one, then he, bound to the same by the cord of a curse, should have felt something distinct as well.

— So if… you weren’t lying to me…

This space had been prepared, painstakingly, for the sole purpose of deceiving Flame-tail.
Since the contract had been struck, Flame-tail had grumbled at him over this and that without end, yet had never once doubted his words or defied him. And now he spoke like this.

Hweein tried calling out to him a few more times, but Flame-tail’s pace only grew slower, until at last he stopped altogether.

— It feels as though… he is calling me. So perhaps he thinks I’m in danger, and means to come and save me. There’s no mistaking it. This is his presence. No one else could imitate it.

Hweein stroked his head, but he no longer responded.
He had already lost any proper sense of the outside world, and seemed to have turned inward, to the work of persuading himself, sinking deeper into the illusion.

“…My sin. Could Flame-tail have wielded the full powers of his true form, he’d never have been duped into a humiliation like this.”

“No, young master. The creature’s power is rather formidable. The Great-Mouth Ghost’s legend is ancient, and he was set down as a yokai of real ability. He must have refined this art of working on human feeling over a great while.”

“Not only humans. Yokai as well.”

He shot them a look that asked whether they had any sharp notion of what to do, but the answers came back beside the point. Meaning they too had no confidence they could wake Flame-tail.

“What if we sent him into the subspace storage for the moment?”

“He’d resist. We’d find ourselves at last in a proper fight with him.”

— A sinner, must be offered, you say? But you are bound to this one by a deep connection, are you not. …I, being deceived. I do not think he lied to me…

The illusion ran ever deeper.
In the end Flame-tail had come to the point of holding conversation with the one of his own imagining.
And listening to that voice, it seemed bent on guiding him toward fracture.

Hweein sighed and set down his staff.

“There’s nothing for it but to work the move myself. Flame-Made-Flesh.”

Perhaps thanks to the steady accumulation of skill, the fire wrapped him with no effort at all; Hweein bent down and threw his arms around Flame-tail’s neck.

“Ah, you’ve never done that for me!”

“This woman has a knack for spitting out the very line one expects, at the very moment one expects it.”

Looking back, it had been like this when they first sealed their contract too.
Turning his body into a flame of the same origin as Flame-tail’s, and touching him through it, he could convey what no words could convey: true feeling.
The things he had wished to hide had carried across with the rest, against his will, and at the time that had mortified him. Now even that struck him as fortunate.
If Flame-tail too remembered it, the same would hold this time.

“Flame-tail. Every flame in this space, save yours and mine, is false. The voice whispering to you is not his. Focus on me.”

— …

It was not only his voice and his heart that carried across.
The instant he made contact with the flame Flame-tail had raised, the voice of the one, audible until now only to Flame-tail, came through to Hweein as well.
It was unlike the voice delivered to him directly through the curse, though: hollow, and more aggressive besides.
And yet, each time that voice carried on, Flame-tail’s memories of the days he had spent at the one’s side came through to Hweein with such vividness that they shook his own heart no little.

‘All the more reason, then, that I cannot leave Flame-tail to be toyed with by a counterfeit here.’

If once was not enough, he meant to raise the flame again and again, ever more fiercely, until it reached the very heart of him.
Mercifully Flame-tail, sunk as he was in the illusion, ceased his rambling at the sound of Hweein’s voice and lapsed into silence.

“Have you come to your senses?”

— Mm… still a little…

“He’s playing it up, young master, that fellow!”
“Strangely, I think I’m seeing someone else’s silhouette overlap with him just now.”

The retainers off in the wings raised a clamor, but Hweein ignored them and held Flame-tail tighter.
Even as he raised the flame higher still, from some moment on the temperature around them began to fall.
The heat-laden space returned to its proper state, and the whirling flame-feathers broke into particles and vanished.

Only then did Flame-tail at last open his mouth again.

— Ah, I think my head has settled a little now.

“It’s a relief that you’ve come back to yourself.”

Hweein released the Flame-Made-Flesh at last and rose, letting out a long haa of relief.
Had Flame-tail been played by the Great-Mouth Ghost’s tricks, he would have had to bear the sight of something he could never have stood to see.
The moment Flame-tail set his heart on attacking Hweein, on killing him, the binding force of the shikigami arts would, against Hweein’s own will, restrain him and even wound him grievously.

— Looking after a shikigami is a master’s duty. Don’t expect me to thank you.

“Who knows, Flame-tail. While we are linked by the same flame, just as my heart is conveyed to you, your heart is conveyed to me.”

— Wh— You’ve already gotten that good…!

Flame-tail’s eyes went wide in astonishment.
Hweein stroked his head and gave a small laugh.

“From now on, then, let us talk more.”

Flame-tail was still too embarrassed to say a word.
Geum Moa and Leon stared at him, curious what lay inside the creature’s heart, but he kept his peace, being a shikigami-sorcerer who respected the privacy and the secrets of his shikigami.

“Flame-tail. Let us hurry.”

— Y— yeah. Let’s go!

Likely thinking he’d only be pressed harder if he tarried, Flame-tail set off again at speed.
It wasn’t his imagination; the pace was distinctly faster than before, and not because Flame-tail was overexerting himself but because the basic output he could deliver had simply increased.
As Hweein came to understand Flame-tail more deeply, and through him the relationship between Flame-tail and the burning bird, his understanding of the source of power they shared deepened in turn, and with it the bond between the two of them drew tighter.
In terms of the shikigami arts, one could say he had passed at last out of the novice stage and into the intermediate.

“Later, will you tell me of the days you spent with him?”

— …You can’t tell the others. Especially that fox-of-flame.

“I’ll bear it in mind. It would be well to have something only the two of us share.”

Stroking Flame-tail’s neck, Hweein gave another small laugh.
This Other Realm that stirred the desires of every being within it was a great heap of unpleasantness, yet thanks to it his bond with Flame-tail had deepened, so one might even call it a turn of fortune.

“— Wait.”

“Young master?”

But once again Flame-tail’s charge did not last long.
For partway along, a slender, well-grown peach tree had risen up to bar their path.
A flat peach hung from that tree, and it tugged at a man’s heart in a strange way.
Or perhaps it was rather the vapor rising from a beautiful pond set near the tree that drew the mind into a fevered daze.

Yes. It was truly a yojigyeong, a jade-pond-mirror world.

“Pando…”

There they were: the peaches of the immortal realm that, eaten, were said to lengthen one’s life-span and to cure every incurable disease.
There was no reason it should be in such a place as this, yet a pull not to be laughed off lightly clouded Shin Hweein’s thoughts.
Perhaps because it was the very elixir he, who as a child had ached at every breath, had once dreamed of.

In the moment after he thought he now understood why Flame-tail had succumbed to so simple a temptation, he had already forgotten even Flame-tail’s name.