27. Evil (1)

“This way.”

Beron pushed on through the dark with confident steps. We made it through a zigzagging run of stairs and, by sheer luck, never met a single patrol, and by the time we reached the final door the clamor of the banquet hall had already faded out.

When I cracked the door open again, soldiers who looked like they’d drunk themselves stupid were sprawled everywhere. From here on we couldn’t talk, so it was all eye contact and hand signals.

“Haaa, of all nights, why do I have to pull night-watch duty on this one.”

We hid behind the terrain where we could, and where we couldn’t we sprawled on the floor like the passed-out soldiers, and that was how we got past the sentries’ line of sight. Soon enough we’d slipped out of the banquet hall entirely, and then out of the building itself.

She was right. It was pitch black outside, and even the moon had mercilessly hidden itself behind the clouds and refused to light our way. The saving grace was that none of it slowed Beron’s footsteps.

We walked for a long stretch, and what finally brought us to a halt was, of all things, a smell that knit my brow.

“Is this a hospital?”
“Looks like it.”

It stung the nose, acrid and sharp. The reek of alcohol pouring off disinfectant was saturating the air on every side.

This place was wildly different from what I’d imagined. I’d been expecting horrific torture scenes, in conditions even more wretched and squalid than the dungeon.

“This is just where they bring prisoners for treatment, isn’t it?”

A small wash of disappointment came over me, because it didn’t look like I’d find any clues in a place like this about the Saintess’s disappearance, the actual objective of the Trial of Wisdom.

But Beron spoke with the gravest face in the world.

“Sure, war is people wounding each other, over and over. But not every prisoner is wounded. Comrades captured with all their limbs intact got dragged in here too.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Times like this, I envy humans. You can’t smell this hideous, thick stench of blood.”

The instant he finished, the smell of blood punched through the alcohol and slammed into my nose.

Only then did I grasp how grave this was, so I took another slow, careful look around the outside of the hospital. But however thoroughly I looked, nothing stood out, and in the end there was nothing for it but to slip inside.

“Seeing is believing. Let’s go in.”

Creeeak.

Surprisingly, the hospital’s entrance opened easily. Inside it was so quiet, without a single guard, that I wondered if it was really okay to just walk in. I strolled down the corridor looking into the wards, and here and there I could see patients lying in bed, but it was hard to spot anything particularly strange.

“Over here!”

That was Beron, calling me right then. The room he was in looked like the ward holding the most patients in the entire hospital.

“…Are they dead?”

I’d hurried over at his call, running rough and loud, thud-thud-thud, and that was the very reason I took these people for corpses. No matter how much noise I made announcing myself, not one of them stirred.

“Not dead. But for some reason, they’re out cold.” Beron had gone to the nearest bed and was checking the patient’s condition.

“Did someone put them under anesthesia or something?”

I furrowed my brow and looked around, but nothing anywhere caught my eye. The place was clean.

Clean?

And then I felt the wrongness of it. This place was much too neatly arranged to be possible.

Apparently she’d sensed the same nameless wrongness, because she was quietly pointing at something. I walked slowly over to where her fingertip indicated.

“…Beron.”
“What?”
“Is there any use for prisoners’ blood?”
“…What are you talking about.”
“Take a look at this.”

I stepped aside to give him space. Beron studied the tube with a grim expression, and a moment later his face went pale.

“Looks like you were right — they weren’t brought here for treatment,” I said, calm and even.

A transparent tube had been inserted into the patient’s arm. An ordinary IV tube would run upward, to a fluid drip hanging above.

“They’re drawing blood and sending it somewhere.”

These tubes ran downward, toward the underside of the mattress.

We went on to check every other patient, and when he’d finished, Beron spoke with a bloodless face.

“So this was it. The reason they were dragging prisoners off.”

Every single one of them had a tube in their arm, connected to somewhere. Beron’s eyes had gone murderous, which told me he was trying his best to hold his fury in.

I moved along the direction the tubes ran. They all converged on an empty bed in the most cornered-off spot of the room, so I shoved it aside with my foot. The bed slid out of the way and revealed an underground passage hidden beneath it, and along that passage hundreds of tubes were carrying the prisoners’ blood in real time.

“Disgusting.”

The moment the bed moved, a wave of stifling heat and a faintly raw, fishy smell hit us full in the face, and a spiral staircase leading down welcomed us.

Having taken in this horrific sight, Beron looked very bad indeed.

Can’t blame him.

Looking at people having their blood drained out of them while unconscious, how could anyone keep their sanity?

“I’m going on ahead.”

Just by guiding us this far, Beron had been help enough, and I had no intention of forcing him to come along. As I started down, his voice reached me faintly.

“…Aren’t you afraid of what might be down there?”

There was a fear in his voice I hadn’t heard from him until now, and I could vaguely guess what it was that made him ask. But even so, I didn’t try to comfort him, or rally him with talk of digging out the truth together. Instead, gazing into the darkness, I answered evenly.

“What I’m afraid of is not finding out anything. Walking right past the answer sitting in front of me, like an idiot. To me, that’s more horrifying than whatever monster might be down there.”

No reply came from Beron. Reply or no reply, I added one more thing.

“You don’t have to follow me — just please don’t close the door. I think we’ll need to air the place out.”

The end of the spiral staircase. Finally my feet touched flat ground.

Timid Eve was already pressed right up against my back. She must have hated having to come, fated as she was to tag along whether she wanted to or not, but she was keeping up well enough in her own way.

It was the kind of mood where you’re scared but you still want to watch the horror movie, and from what I could see, that was the state Eve was in. This was why curiosity was such a fearful thing.

In any case, I followed the tubes to wherever they led.

“…Whoa.”

Overwhelming madness unfurled before my eyes, and a gasp escaped my lips before I knew it.

This was a vast, circular underground chamber, and its ceiling looked as if a spider’s web had overrun it. The hundreds of transparent tubes from every bed in the ward above came down through holes in that ceiling, and here they bundled and tangled into one mass that stretched out toward the center.

Eve’s voice was trembling.

A river of fresh red blood was gurgling and flowing on all sides, and those hundreds of branches all converged on a single destination.

Dead center in the chamber, a man was bound to a grotesquely twisted black iron chair.

It was a hard sight to believe. Hundreds of people’s worth of fresh blood was running down the tubes and being forcibly pumped into the man through needles driven all over his body. Neck, collarbone, chest, even the thighs. The tubes were packed in without a gap, wound all around him.

I approached him carefully. He was so wasted away that his ribs jutted out, stark and skeletal. His skin had passed pale and gone transparent, without a trace of blood color in it, and through it I could plainly see dark-blue, blackened blood vessels writhing.

Not human.

For an ordinary human, that much blood being pumped in would mean death by shock, or death by burst blood vessels. But he was taking all of it.

Like a living sponge.

And out of his back ran a thick black hose, as fat around as a forearm. Through it, a substance entirely different from the bright crimson going in, a thick, sticky, black-red liquid, was being refined and drawn off.

At her question I checked the man’s face. His head sagged limp. The eyes I could glimpse between strands of matted hair were open hollow and wide, but there was no focus in them. There wasn’t even a plea to be killed, or to be saved, and he wasn’t writhing in pain either. He was barely breathing, a meat puppet mechanically swallowing the blood that came in and regurgitating it transformed.

Then his chest swelled in a great heave.

Thump.

I could see his heart beating beneath those skeletal ribs. No, it wasn’t just one.

Thump. Thump.

His left chest and his right chest. Two hearts beating out of rhythm, holding up some grotesque parody of life.

“You’d do well not to touch him.”

A low, cool voice came from behind me, and in the darkness the sound of heeled shoes rang out, tap. tap. I spoke to the owner of those footsteps.

“This scene doesn’t really suit a Saintess, does it?”

Astraea snorted and shot back.

“I am a General of the Arne domain. Not a Saintess.”
“General or Saintess, I don’t think anyone would call this normal, do you?”

She was getting closer, but I didn’t move out of the way, and I spoke to her again as she came.

“They say the Arne army doesn’t die even when you stab them in the heart. The only way to kill them is to take their heads… Is this the secret behind that curse?”
“Curse, you say? The soldiers call it the Saintess’s Miracle.”

I gripped my one weapon, the club, with both hands, but Astraea showed no intent to fight. She kept walking, completely unguarded.

“Do you believe in angels?”
“I’m not the religious type.”
“Hmm. I was uncertain, but I suppose you really weren’t from the Imperial army after all. They say in the Empire, the first words a child learns the moment they take their first step are Long live the Empire.”

“…”

She had a good nose for things. Apparently she’d been suspicious of me from the moment she invited me into her chamber.

In one blink Astraea closed the distance and was on me, and in a single motion she drew the sword at her waist and sliced clean through the club in my hands.

“I had been aiming for your wrist.”

I only just escaped the blade with a backwards roll. It was swordsmanship as fast as Seraphina’s.

If I’d been even a beat slower, like she said, my wrist would have gone flying.

I rolled my wrist around and around. That’s how close it had been.

“Your skill is not bad.”

I couldn’t take her compliment with any kind of pure pleasure, because just like that, the only weapon I’d had was snapped in two and I’d been forced into a bare-handed fight. But for some reason, Astraea slid her sword back into its sheath.

“In the beginning, God created man, and sent down two emissaries. One was an angel. One was a demon.”

She was suddenly launching into some bullshit, which threw me off, but —

Oh wow, seriously?

I’d forgotten. House Arne was a house of chivalry, and attacking an unarmed opponent went against the code of chivalry.

In any case, still spinning her tale, she stepped closer to the man riddled with hundreds of tubes.

“The angel was good. Whatever humans wished for, he granted. Bread to the hungry. Rain to the thirsty. But what was the result of that unconditional love?”

Astraea stroked the bound man’s cheek, and he didn’t twitch at her touch.

“Humans grew selfish and arrogant. They were not content with what they had — they wanted more. Their wishes grew larger and larger. The hungry man who had once wished for bread now wished, I want the house of the man next door.”

What in the world was she trying to say, out of nowhere? But for the moment, I listened to her tale without interrupting.

“The angel granted even that wish. It was his very reason for existing. But the man whose house had been taken — he didn’t stay quiet either. He, too, made a single wish to the angel.”

Astraea stared straight at me. There was a try to guess the answer in that gaze, so I reluctantly opened my mouth.

“He asked for the man who took his house to be killed?”

Astraea shook her head. It meant wrong.

And then she gave me the answer to her quiz.

“No. He wished that the lover most precious to the man who took his house be killed.”