Oskalt (6)

The Ecclesia church.

With the empire’s wholehearted backing, it had grown in a single stride to a size no church had ever reached before. It had been founded fifty-odd years ago at the very most, and set beside the histories of the empire’s other churches, its own was an embarrassment.

Nothing connected me to them, so I’d never had cause to get tangled up with them, and in truth I’d paid them little attention. To me, the Ecclesia church was something like a new power that had seized the empire’s leadership at a stroke.

But now.

Now my whole view of them had to be revised.

“I’m a free knight, but I also serve as a paladin of the Talios church. There are a few things I want to ask.”

The bishop studied the token I held out for a long moment, and then he smiled.

“This is no place for such a conversation. Would you wait a moment?”

He soon begged the pardon of the crowd in the cathedral and sent every one of them away. Their discontent must have been piling up, yet not one of them let it show. Nothing could have explained more plainly what the cathedral and its bishop meant to the people of Oskalt.

Before long the bishop came back and showed me into a small room. A priest offered me something to drink, but I shook my head.

“What is it you wish to know, Brother?”

I ran through the possibilities in my head. Asking around the matter, or asking straight at it. I weighed what each choice would lead to and what would follow, how useful it would be and how far it would reach, and came to a conclusion.

This is something that has to be met head-on.

“How is a thing like that possible?”
“A thing like that, you say?”
“What else is there? I’m talking about the blessing.”
“I wonder in what sense you are asking.”
“A miracle that cures the sick at a stroke. That much I can put down to Ecclesia’s authority. But that’s exactly what makes it a problem. Do you think it makes sense to work a god’s authority on thousands, or hundreds at the very least, in so short a time?”
“Of course it makes sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it is the god who does it. To doubt a being that is all-knowing and all-powerful is folly. If the god wills to use me as a bishop, then so it is. If the god wills to relieve the townspeople through me, then so it simply is.”

“No. A god isn’t all-powerful. That’s the kind of thing only an ignorant clod who knows nothing goes around repeating. You and I are both men in touch with a god, aren’t we? You must know that even those creatures up above, the ones who play with us like puppets, have things they can’t do.”
“I will not deny it. But for that very reason, because I sit in a seat that stands in touch with a god, must I not believe that the god is all-powerful? Ecclesia means to use me. I am bound to believe that Ecclesia will do all-powerful works through me.”

“…You’re muddying the point. Do I have to say it twice? I asked how that oh-so-all-powerful being is doing this at all.”

“And I, too, have only the one answer to give. The one who does this is the god, and the god is all-powerful.”

There was no talking to the man. From then on he did nothing but talk around it, and I couldn’t get a clear answer out of him on anything.

“Do I need to put it more plainly? Bringing down a blessing takes holy power. And the citizens of Oskalt who need that blessing number close to a thousand. How does one mere bishop handle holy power on that scale?”
“I have already given you my answer.”

“…Now you’re not even bothering to talk around it.”

There was no point in asking anything more. I pushed back from my seat and left the cathedral, and the bishop, for his part, did nothing to stop me.

All the way back, his riddling words circled in my head.

‘This is a work the god does.’

‘It is not the god who does it, it is you. Are you trying to tell me you have become a god yourself?’

‘You are laboring under some misapprehension.’

The blessing is a work of the god. The god is all-powerful, so to doubt the method is foolish. That was what the bishop asserted, and it was nothing but sophistry.

Before I knew it the day was drawing to a close, so I hurried to the inn. It was as shabby as when I’d left it, and the dusk light it had soaked up stained it yellow.

I opened the door, meaning to go straight up to the second floor, and stopped where I stood, because Kalen was out on the first.

“Ah, you’re back.”
“Why are you down here?”
“Well…”

Kalen shot a sudden glance at the innkeeper behind the long counter. It looked less like he was reading the man’s mood than like he was telling on him.

“I asked for a splint to brace my arm, and he says there’s nothing like that here, so go to the cathedral.”
“A splint?”

Now that I looked, a good long stretch of him, from his right shoulder blade down the arm, was bound up in yellowed cloth. The result, presumably, of whatever first aid he’d managed on his own.

“Honestly. This city hasn’t got so much as a common herb in it. One trip to the cathedral and you’re healed clean. What do you want a thing like that for?”
“No, come on, does that make any sense? You’re telling me the cathedral fixes you right up for nothing, just for showing up?”

Kalen looked at me as if lodging a protest. He seemed to expect something from me, but as it happened I was the one at a loss, and I had little enough to give him.

“…It’s true.”

“Sorry?”
“I said the cathedral heals people for nothing.”

Kalen worked his mouth as though he couldn’t believe it, and in the end he shut it. Only once the dusk had fully come down did he seem, barely, to accept it.

“…Er, I’ll head over, then. Be back quick.”

Now that he knew the cathedral could heal an open wound in an instant, Kalen set out, declaring he’d get himself treated too. Something about the bishop I’d spoken with sat uneasily with me, but I didn’t go out of my way to stop him. However much I doubted it, the plain fact remained that the cathedral had cured a great many of the townspeople of their sickness.

“No need to hurry. Looks like they take people in until late at night.”

Kalen cocked his head, but he left the inn all the same.

Far off, I faintly heard the cathedral bell.

Kalen walked a street gone orange with the falling sun.

Alone on streets with hardly a soul in them, he thought back to the days of hunting Pindel through Pirberk. It was around then, too, that he’d first set foot in earnest in the world of the divine and its churches.

A man can become superhuman through holy power, and beyond that, he may even come to have a body that regenerates without limit. So the cathedral, too, must be using some such unknown power to heal people. That was how Kalen had it figured, and the figuring soon turned to certainty when he watched the bishop restore a severed hand in an instant. The bishop had been handing out food on the broad open ground outside the cathedral when a man whose hand had been cut off came running to him, and he’d healed the man without turning a hair.

It struck Kalen that not much time had passed since the cathedral bell rang. This was the hour of the poor’s evening meal.

“…”

Kalen stood a long way off from the open ground and watched the poor crowd in thicker by the moment, and the bishop, and the few priests with him. The fierce pain in his shoulder urged his feet forward, yet he had no intention whatever of going up to the bishop. Instead, a conversation he’d had with Roan some time ago filled his head, and nothing else.

‘What is the Lucseon church?’

‘The church Pindel Morein belongs to.’

Right now, Kalen had a few questions.

Hadn’t sir knight been chasing Pindel Morein? Could the reason he’d been looking for him be to have a peaceable talk? No, that made no sense. Sir knight hated the Lucseon church. That much had to be true.

Then why hadn’t he said anything back there?

That bishop — he’s Pindel Morein.

The cathedral’s bishop, handing out food on the open ground. Beyond any doubt, he wore the face of the Pindel Morein that Kalen remembered.

Wasn’t Pindel Morein a follower of Lucseon? And that man is the Ecclesia church’s bishop?

Then didn’t that mean the Lucseon church Roan had been chasing was the Ecclesia church itself? If they’d known it beforehand, it would have changed everything Roan and Kalen did, right down to the foundations.

Kalen wondered briefly why Roan hadn’t told him, and arrived at one conclusion.

…Have I ever told sir knight what Pindel Morein’s face looks like?

The thing so obvious it had been passed over for that very reason.

As it happened, Roan didn’t know that the bishop was Pindel Morein. So even having come face to face with him, even having sat alone with him, he couldn’t help but stay ignorant of it. It wasn’t that Roan had chosen not to seize Pindel Morein. He hadn’t been able to.

When his reasoning had carried him that far, gooseflesh rose over Kalen’s whole body.

“It has been a while. Soldier of Brus.”

Kalen heard the bishop’s voice with perfect clarity. A voice that, with so many paupers in the way, should never have reached him at all.

“…What have you done?”

Everything around him had gone quiet. The poor on the open ground, the priests, every human being within any distance Kalen could sense. In this moment, Oskalt stood still.

“Surely there are questions you would sooner ask than that one.”
“If I ask, will you even answer?”
“Of course.”

Pindel Morein smiled.

“I will not be answering. Asking the questions is not your role.”

Kalen felt as though his breath would stop. The sight of every being in view frozen, as if time itself had halted, was grotesque enough for that. Yet even so, trembling all over, he pulled himself together.

“Whatever I do now, I’m in your grip. Isn’t that right?”
“That is about the size of it.”
“Then I’ll keep you company a while. A word or two before I die can’t hurt.”

He had to get as much information as he could. Information was power, and it was also the thing Roan needed most. So Kalen meant to tear information out of Pindel Morein, come what may. To add whatever strength he could to Roan’s.

Pindel Morein was silent a moment, then opened his mouth.

“You mean to drag this out, do you? Well, I see no reason why not.”

Kalen drew a deep breath, as inconspicuously as he could, and struggled to shove away the scattered thoughts churning through his head.

“…Are you going to kill me?”

“That depends. Your role is to bring him here. If killing you helps toward that, I will kill you. If it does not, I will not.”
“Bringing sir knight here is my role? Then why didn’t you lay a hand on him this afternoon?”
“I could say that I have a rather strong perfectionist streak.”

That could be read to mean he hadn’t been ready to receive Roan in the afternoon, and that now every preparation was finished. Pindel Morein had already perfected his way of disposing of Roan, and he was waiting for him.

But there’s no use learning information if you can’t pass it on.

Kalen ground his teeth. There was nothing at all he could do.

“…Pull something like this and heaven’s punishment will fall on you. Aren’t you even afraid of the god?”

Pindel Morein laughed out loud, as if he’d heard a very funny joke.

“The god, send down a punishment? This is the very will of the god. I am sure the god will be quick to lay a curse upon itself.”

At that word, every human being who had stood frozen came rushing at Kalen.