Pindel Morein (1)

The sun had gone down completely. Night settled over Oskalt, and the shabby inn wasn’t yellow anymore either.

I was lounging about like an idler on the ground floor of an inn that had lost its color.

“Hey.”

No answer came. The innkeeper lay face-down over the counter with his head buried, and however many times I called, he didn’t stir.

“…”

Two hours had passed since I first called out to him, and suspicion had turned into hard evidence. Everyone in Oskalt was standing still.

Without a word, I pushed the inn door open and stepped outside.

All around was quiet. To be more precise, not a sound could be heard but one. The single sound in that sunken city that rode the wind and carried. It was the cathedral bell, which had no business ringing in the dead of night.

Kalen.

An unease I couldn’t put a name to came over me. Rarely for me, I was so tense that my hands and feet had gone numb.

The night in Oskalt was dark. Because nobody anywhere was lighting a lamp. So I had no choice but to find my way by the broken outlines of the roadside and by the bell that wouldn’t stop, as though it were calling me.

The clanking of my plate armor grated on me more than usual, and my helm, which could never have felt awkward, felt stifling and awkward and nothing else.

Those thoughts didn’t last long. Because a brightly lit square opened up before my eyes.

“Kalen Leont.”

At my voice, a single figure turned around. It was Kalen, wearing the same expression as ever. His shoulder must have been set, because the yellowed cloth he’d bound it with was nowhere to be seen.

He came toward me slowly. There was a piece of bread in his hand, and now that I looked, every one of the people gathered in the square before the cathedral was holding something to eat.

“You didn’t come, so I came to fetch you.”

I said that much and then shut my mouth. I couldn’t stand the bitterness in it.

Kalen spread his arms wide, as though for an embrace, and I watched him walk quietly toward me.

A hundred-odd years. That’s how long I waged a blood feud with the Lucseon church. A hundred years went by, and I was still cutting them down.

“Disgusting.”

Naturally, I’d had no choice but to get to know their methods.

Kalen lunged at me, and I saw a blade glinting inside the bread in his hand.

“Kalen. Can you hear me?”

“…”

“Put that down. Are you trying to hurt me?”

“…”

“Trying to kill me with nothing but a scrap of bread… No. Enough of this.”

— SNAP.

The feel of something hard snapping came prickling up through the gauntlet. A feeling I’d gone past being used to and grown sick of. Kalen, his neck broken, dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

“…”

The dead have nothing to say. But then, Kalen hadn’t been speaking before his neck broke, either.

“How anticlimactic. I had thought you would be shaken rather more than that.”

A voice as full of loving-kindness and grace as ever. In the midst of the frozen crowd stood the bishop of the Ecclesia cathedral.

“…What’s one more wound to a heart that’s already in rags?”

Rags torn to shreds are only rags, however many times you slash at them, and my heart had been torn through already in the hundred years I’d spent fighting them.

I looked at Kalen’s corpse lying still. The expression was the same as ever.

The expression he wore squeezing his eyes shut in the manor at Brus. The expression he wore drinking down the willow-bark decoction while the fever wracked him. The expression he wore hiding his tears in the rain as we came away from the Talios church. The expression he wore confessing his happiness with all that innocence.

All of it had risen up on the face of the man lying dead with his neck snapped.

“Let me ask you something.”

I couldn’t bring myself to face it, so I turned my head away, and where my gaze landed was the bishop, looking exactly as he had that afternoon.

“Are you Pindel Morein?”
“I am.”
“Are you Lucseon’s man?”
“I am.”
“Is Ecclesia Lucseon?”
“It is.”
“Then the healing miracle Ecclesia works must be Lucseon’s authority. With the power of sculpting, that wouldn’t be impossible. Did you use the authority of sculpting to transform everyone in Oskalt, Kalen included?”
“As you see, I did.”

Use an authority on the entire population of a city and turn them into puppets. It was an absurd thing to say, but Pindel must have been at that work for a very long time, since before he ever came to Brus.

If Eladin’s authority is dominion, Lucseon’s is sculpting. It’s an authority that pares away and works the form and essence of a being however its wielder pleases, and put to use, it can be turned to a fairly wide range of things.

For instance, laying a constraint that turns part of the body into poison the moment a certain condition is broken. Or planting a trigger in someone the authority has already been used on, then handling them like a puppet.

With the puppets, though, the efficiency isn’t especially good. Because it isn’t a matter of their obeying a master, but of sculpting each one to carry out a specific order. Kalen had probably been sculpted into something on the order of ‘a being that, on sighting Roan Belgard, approaches slowly with its arms spread, and then swings whatever it is holding in its hand’.

“That still leaves a question. However long you took over it, you still performed a staggering number of blessings. How was that possible?”
“Roan Belgard. Ghost of the past. The world has changed.”

Pindel Morein spoke my name as though reciting a prayer.

“Seventy years since you trampled us down. In that time two long-entrenched marquess houses of the empire have declined, a new ducal house has been raised up, and the imperial house itself has been replaced. If even the master of this land changes, there is no law saying we must not, is there?”
“You want to talk in riddles?”
“I answered your question quite clearly, I am sure. That all of this is the work of our god, Lucseon.”

“…”

All of this arrangement. Handing Pormel over to the lord of Brus, making puppets of Oskalt, standing Pindel Morein in front of me. He was telling me that every bit of it was Lucseon’s doing.

An absurd leap of logic went through my head. It was nothing but a leap, yet when I thought about the force it would carry if it weren’t, I couldn’t help clenching my fist for a moment.

“You haven’t received Lucseon’s holy power.”

The bishop, Pindel Morein, smiled, his face full of delight.

“You didn’t work an authority with Lucseon’s holy power. You’re nothing but a channel Lucseon can use to intervene in the world. Lucseon borrowed your body and brought the blessing down on the people of Oskalt directly.”
“Well now… I have nothing to say to that.”
“So of course it could only ever be ‘the god’s work’. You aren’t a vessel that can bless hundreds of people. You were never a vessel at all.”

The world had changed. The way an infant grows into an adult and matures. A body of people changes and grows as time passes too, and over the past seventy years the Lucseon church had become a greater monster than I’d ever imagined.

“Just so. Our god has begun to intervene in the world. I am Lucseon. And not I alone, for everyone in the church is Lucseon. Because our every will is Lucseon’s will, all of us are Lucseon.”

Becoming a channel for Lucseon would surely require taking in holy power to some degree, so his claim that every one of the faithful received the power directly was very likely a lie. Even so, the fact that those of bishop rank and above had risen far beyond where they stood seventy years ago was fatal.

“If that were possible, the world would be under the church’s rule by now. What’s so special about Lucseon that it’s doing what no other god has managed?”
“Roan Belgard. Crisis is only another name for opportunity. On that count I could never thank you enough.”

“…”

“Eladin, was it? The god you serve, I mean.”

The servant of the one who killed my lover was taking my lover’s name into his mouth. How could I not shake with humiliation? It took superhuman patience not to rip his maw apart on the spot.

“Are you not curious how the remnants of that thing can be handled by the authority our god possesses? No. Why do you suppose Eladin was killed in the first place? Naturally, as naturally as can be, our god did it because there was some gain to be taken from the act. In these seventy years, what on earth did you imagine that gain was?”
“That’s enough. Say any more and I may grind you to paste.”
“Riding about on the fruit of that gain without turning a hair, what have you been feeling all this while?”

I drew my sword and lunged at the bishop. Or I meant to, until Kalen, his head bent at an uncanny angle, caught hold of my ankle.

From that moment on, every human being in the square began to swell. Bodies falling away, growing, running down, being sculpted into shapes that resembled nothing at all.

In the middle of that hellish sight, I shouted.

“You think a pathetic scheme like this can kill me!”
“Kill you I cannot, but I can put you in a state no different from death. Whenever you regenerate, we pound you to pulp again, and that is the whole of it.”

One grasping hand, no, dozens of them, seized my sword, and the blade, weakened from breaking ghoul bones, snapped in two at last.

With the chipped, broken sword I smashed the skulls of the countless humans biting at me, hacked down through collarbones, caved in faces, and pushed forward. Though whether they could still be called human, I didn’t know.

“Pindel Morein!”

But.

By just that much, I was driven further back. The things that had lost their human shape dragged at me, shoved me, bore down on me.

“I will kill you!”

Pindel Morein gave no answer. He went inside the cathedral instead, and the sound of its doors closing rang out loud.

Monsters were pouring into the square from every quarter of Oskalt. The whole population of the city had been sculpted. That meant close to a thousand monsters had begun to come for me and me alone, and at the same time it meant Oskalt had lost the strength to hold off an undead assault.

I wanted to smash the cathedral doors in that very moment, but I couldn’t. Breaking alone through a wave of several hundred monsters was impossible even for a deathless one. In the end I made do with striking down every one of the things that had me bound.

Once a dozen or so of them were out of commission and no more hands were holding me, I began to run through the city drowned in darkness.

— SPLAT!

Monsters spilled out like lumps of meat from every window I could see. Ones crawling along walls, ones running on all fours, ones dragging themselves along with no feet: the monsters came in as many kinds as shapes.

I’d long since given up on going back to the inn, so I threw myself into an alley. Oskalt’s alleys are as good as a maze, and thanks to buildings thrown up every which way, I’d be able to keep out of the monsters’ sight as much as possible.

A good long while of running the alleys. Perhaps because the way was dark and narrow, footsteps echoed the whole time. The sound of bare feet on the stone floor, I mean.

— TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK!

I looked back, and a woman with no head above her neck was chasing me. Something must have gone wrong in the sculpting, so that what had come away from her body never grew back.

People turned into monsters, and those who hadn’t even managed to become monsters.

The glass ahead of me burst outward, and a lump of flesh came tumbling down. It was about the size of two people packed together, and it gave voice in several ways at once.

“O Ecclesia…”

The front, wailing and calling on the god.

“KHEEEEEEK!”

The back, writhing and screaming.

I jumped over the limbless lump. There was no time to take the monsters on one by one. They cried out on every side with human vocal cords and came running barefoot as if to trample the alley flat.

But the footsteps weren’t only coming from behind. Before long a wave of flesh came flooding in from around the corner, and wherever I turned, there was nothing but scraps of human flesh.

I halted, and set my teeth.

“…This is going to be a long day.”

I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. My nose had long since gone numb to the reek of blood, and the city that had been so quiet was full of the monsters’ cries. My armor creaked under its crust of baked-on blood.

I pulled the sticky gauntlet off for a moment and wiped the ruined sword on a monster’s clothes. When I looked at the sky beyond the alley, light caught in my blurred vision.

Does the dawn rise even in hell?

Before I knew it, the night had passed, and a new morning was coming on.