Pindel Morein (1)

The sun had gone down completely. Night settled over Oskalt, and the shabby inn was no longer yellow either. I lounged about like an idler on the first floor of a place that had lost its color.

“Hey.”

No answer came back. The innkeeper lay face-down over the counter with his head buried, and did not stir however many times I called.

“…”

Two hours had gone by since I first called out to him. Suspicion had turned into hard evidence.

Every person in Oskalt was standing still.

Without a word I pushed the inn door open and stepped out. Everything around me was quiet. More precisely, there was no sound at all except for one.

The one sound in that sunken city that rode the wind and carried.

The bell of the cathedral, with no business ringing in the dead of night.

Kalen.

An unease I could not put a name to came over me. Unusually for me, I was tense enough that my hands and feet had gone numb.

The night in Oskalt was dark. Nobody anywhere was lighting a lamp. I had no choice but to go by the fragmentary outlines at the roadside and by the bell that would not stop, as though it were calling me.

The clanking of my plate armor grated on me more than usual. My helm should have been the last thing in the world to feel awkward, and yet it felt stifling and wrong.

Those thoughts did not last long. Ahead of me an open ground spread out, brightly lit.

“Kalen Leont.”

At my voice a single figure turned around. Kalen, wearing the same expression as ever. His shoulder must have been set; the yellowed cloth he had 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 open ground 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. The bitterness on my tongue was more than I could stand.

Kalen spread both arms wide to either side, as though for an embrace. I watched him come quietly toward me.

A hundred-odd years.

That was how long my blood feud with the Lucseon church had run. A hundred years went by and I was still striking them down and killing them.

“Disgusting.”

Naturally, I had no choice but to grow familiar with their methods.

Kalen lunged at me. I saw a blade glinting inside the bread he held.

“Kalen. Can you hear me?”

“…”

“Put that down. You mean to hurt me?”

“…”

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

— SNAP.

The sensation of something hard snapping came prickling up through the gauntlet. A sensation I was long past being used to, one I had grown to hate.

Kalen, his neck broken, dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

“…”

The dead have nothing to say. Kalen had not been speaking before his neck bone 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 halted crowd stood the bishop of the Ecclesia cathedral.

“…What difference does one more wound make to a heart that is already rags?”

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

I looked at Kalen’s corpse lying there 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 could not bring myself to face it, and turned my head away. My gaze landed on the bishop, who looked exactly as he had that afternoon.

“Are you Pindel Morein?”
“That is so.”
“Are you Lucseon’s man?”
“That is so.”
“Is Ecclesia Lucseon?”
“That is so.”

“Then the healing miracle Ecclesia works must be Lucseon’s authority. Put the power of sculpting to use and it would not be impossible, at that. Did you transform everyone in Oskalt, Kalen included, with the authority of sculpting?”
“As you see, that is so.”

Use an authority on the entire population of a city and turn them into puppets. Absurd on the face of it, but Pindel must have been at that work a very long time, from before he ever came to Brus.

If Eladin’s authority is dominion, Lucseon’s authority is sculpting. It pares away the form and the essence of a being and works them however its wielder pleases. 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, and then handling them like a puppet.

The puppets, though, are not especially efficient. It is not that they obey their master; each one has to be sculpted to carry out a specific order. Kalen had probably been sculpted into something on the order of ‘a being that, upon sighting Roan Belgard, approaches slowly with arms spread, and swings whatever it holds in its hand’.

“There’s still a question left. However long you took over it, the fact that you performed a staggering number of blessings doesn’t change. How was that possible?”
“Roan Belgard. Ghost of the past. The world has changed.”

Pindel Morein brought up 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, and yet when I thought about the force it would carry if it were true, I could not help clenching my fist for a moment.

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

The bishop, Pindel Morein, smiled with a face full of delight.

“It’s not that you worked an authority with Lucseon’s holy power. You’re nothing but a channel through which Lucseon can 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 ‘a work the god does’. You are not a vessel able to bless hundreds of people. You were never a vessel at all.”

The world had changed. Just as an infant grows into an adult and matures, a community, too, changes as time passes, and grows. Over the past seventy years the Lucseon church had become a greater monster than I had ever thought.

“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 the person to take in holy power to some degree. That every one of the faithful receives the power directly was very likely a lie of his. Even so, the level of those at bishop rank and above had risen so far beyond what it was seventy years ago, and that was fatal.

“If a thing like 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 let my lover’s name pass his lips. How could I not shake with humiliation? Only superhuman patience kept me from ripping 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 lunge.

Right up until Kalen, his head bent at an uncanny angle, caught hold of my ankle.

From that moment on, every human being in the open ground 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.

“Do you think you can kill me with a scheme as pathetic as this!”
“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. The blade, weakened from breaking ghoul bones, snapped in two at last.

With the chipped, broken stub of it 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 did not know.

“Pindel Morein!”

But.

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

“I will kill you!”

Instead of answering, Pindel Morein went into the cathedral. The sound of its doors closing rang out loud.

The monsters were pouring toward the open ground 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 it meant at the same time that Oskalt had lost the defensive strength to hold off an undead assault.

I wanted to smash the cathedral doors in that very moment, but I could not. To break alone through a wave of several hundred monsters was impossible even for a deathless one. In the end I settled for striking down every one of the things that had me bound.

When a dozen or so of them had been put out of commission and there were no more hands holding me.

I began to run through the city drowned in darkness.

— SPLAT!

Monsters spilled out like lumps of meat from every window that came into my sight. Ones crawling along walls, ones running on all fours, ones dragging themselves along with no feet. They were as various in kind as they were in shape.

I had given up on going back to the inn long since, and threw myself into an alley. Oskalt’s alleys are as good as a maze. With buildings thrown up every which way, I could 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 process of the sculpting; the body had only come away and never grown back.

People turned into monsters, and those who had not even managed to become monsters.

The glass ahead of me burst outward and a lump of flesh came tumbling down. The lump, the size of two people or so packed together, cried out in several voices 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 on the monsters one by one. They cried out on every side with human vocal cords, and came running barefoot as though to trample the alley flat.

The footsteps were not coming from behind alone. Before long a wave of flesh came surging around the corner like a flood. Wherever I turned, there was nothing but scraps of human flesh.

I halted. And I set my teeth.

“…This is going to be a long day.”

I could not 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, with blood baked onto it, creaked. I pulled the sticky gauntlet off for a moment and wiped the ruined sword on a monster’s clothes.

I looked at the sky beyond the alley, and 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.