Pindel Morein (4)

The Ecclesia cathedral in Oskalt.

Behind the chapel inside it, a single passage ran down into a cellar. There was nothing special about it, and nothing particularly hidden either.

Just a stairway that happened to be there.

“There’s nothing up on the ground floor, they say.”
“So this is all that’s left?”

Twenty paladins had combed the cathedral as though hunting rats, but nothing tied to Lucseon had turned up. In effect, then, the space beyond this is the real territory of the Lucseon church.

We set our feet quietly on the stairs. There was no need to trade any grand signal. I took the lead, Drick fell in behind me, and the twenty paladins came after him.

The stairway ran on in a spiral. Cobwebs had settled over the torch brackets along the wall. The passage was dark and quiet, but the silence felt natural, if anything. They must have kept their places here, unlit, for a very long time.

“So. A door.”

The door was wood, furred over with mold. I pushed at it and it slid open with unexpected ease. That was possible only because people came and went through it often.

“None of you let your guard down.”

Drick’s voice struck the high ceiling and rang back.

An enormous underground cloister.

Perhaps because no light was ever kindled here, moss had crept over the stone walls. We moved on. The damp air and the clatter of armor dragged at our heels.

Lucseon.

Why has it only now begun to reach its claws toward me? Ecclesia, the screen it hides behind, was put together half a century ago. Handing Pormel to the lord of Brus was relatively recent by comparison, and it isn’t hard to guess that the act itself was part of a plan it laid to draw me here.

But why? Why now, of all times?

From the way it has moved so far, I can form a few hypotheses. Lucseon has business with me. That business has to do with Oskalt here. The elements needed to settle that business have only now all come together.

And those elements?

Securing a force enough to deal with me… or it could be a question of funds.

Nor can I rule out some peculiar thing beyond my imagining.

Suppose I had worked out every one of those elements, and its purpose besides. What would change?

…Nothing, I suppose.

I would still have been walking this dark underground cloister. Because either way, matters have to be settled with it face to face.

Whatever its purpose was, this situation was not one I welcomed. Becoming its game piece and moving as it intended was not something I could call pleasant, even as a joke.

“Brother.”

Drick’s call dragged me out of my brooding and back down into the cold, damp underground cloister.

“There’s something up ahead.”

Directly in front of us, the structure of the cloister had changed.

“This is almost like…”
“Yes. A cathedral.”

The layout was as though the cathedral above ground had been picked up and set down here whole. But for the wide, empty space that must once have been a chapel, and the doors slapped on at random that kept snagging the eye, it was near enough to be mistaken for the very same building.

“What were they doing that they needed so many rooms?”

The paladins began a careful search. While they went over the space, I tried opening one of the small rooms. There was nothing of any note inside. The only thing that caught the eye was the bedding, perhaps.

“Looks like they ate and slept in here.”

The small rooms all seemed to be quarters for Lucseon’s believers. I was prodding at the heaped-up bedding with my scabbard when one of the paladins shouted.

“I think you had better come and see this!”

He stood in another broad hall, the one that in the building above would have held the crowds of the city lined up inside. In front of him was something large, covered over with cloth.

“What is this?”
“It’s…”

“…”

The carcass of a beast. And not one or two of them, but a heap of them piled high. By the degree of rot, they had not been dead long.

“Damn it.”

Why they had piled these things up is not what matters. What matters is that carcasses of beasts of every size and species were heaped up down here, which meant there was another passage of a size to match. The spiral stairway back there was never, however you looked at it, going to carry a beast of Pormel’s bulk.

“Let’s hurry. We might already be too late.”

Dead or alive, beasts live outside Oskalt. To bring them in, that passage too would have to run all the way out beyond the city.

…Pindel Morein.

Come to think of it, sculpting the city and then walking into the cathedral was a colossal self-defeating move. Wasn’t that the very picture of a man isolating himself? Until now there had been no room to wonder at it. But looking at it now, if the cathedral had held a hidden passage out of the city, I would have done the same.

I called the scattered paladins and Drick together and laid out my guess.

“That’s bad. There was nothing out of the ordinary here either.”
“Then all that’s left is beyond there?”

Beyond the door the woman priest had shown me through.

The answer to all of it was there.

I shifted my grip on the longsword in my hand. Camilla had given it to me, the finest blade the Talios church owned.

After one short, deep breath.

I pushed the wooden door open.

“…Huh.”

The first thing to come into view was a path that forked in two and ran on.

And Pindel Morein, seated between them.

“Pindel Morein.”
“Oh dear. You have brought company. I do not believe I recall inviting your side.”
“Who said anything about being invited? I’m a robber come to clean the place out. If you have a complaint, call on the Talios church’s Pirberk branch afterward.”
“Drick. Where in this world is there a robber who gives out his name?”
“Is that so? Then don’t call.”

Pindel Morein was watching Drick placidly.

“…Talios, is it. So you have not spent all seventy years at play.”

“As you said, the world has changed. Should there not be a thing or two changed about me as well?”

I felt a current of air brush past my armor. It blew out of the passage Pindel Morein sat with his back to. The assumption that this place led outside had become settled fact.

“Arrogant. Why did you not run?”

Pindel Morein was smiling from beginning to end.

A smile of boundless loving-kindness, entirely human.

And for that very reason, a smile less human than anything else could be.

“How should I know? Do your own hands and feet move as you intend only after they have understood the true meaning of the order you gave them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I am no more than hands and feet.”

Pindel Morein rose from his seat.

“This is not my will. It is the will of my master in heaven. But precisely because of that, it is also my own will.”

Before long his body began to come apart. An arm dropped away. Two arms grew in its place, and those dropped away as well.

Metamorphosis and molting, over and over.

With the authority of sculpting, the one who wields it matters, but the one it is used upon matters more. Breathe holy power into an ordinary person and sculpt them, and they become a monster made of lumps of flesh.

And when a high bishop already steeped in holy power sculpts himself, what does he become?

“And so, by my own will, I mean to try dying here today.”

He becomes something that cannot be named.

Long black arms braced against the floor like an animal’s legs.

Pindel Morein’s trunk was left hanging in the air like a spider’s.

He senses an inevitable defeat.

Pindel Morein had declared that he would die here of his own accord. Was that simply a calculation that took my undeath into account, or was there some other, hidden meaning to it?

There is no knowing. Now was the time to move my body, not my head.

There are no believers here besides Pindel Morein. They will all have gone. Then bringing down this one alone should settle it.

There was no end of things that struck me as murky, but I was already giving the paladins their orders.

“None of you close on it carelessly! Do not be deceived by what you see!”

Pindel Morein moved like a spider. It scuttled up in an instant and caught one of the paladins in a huge arm, at a speed that was hard even to react to.

The paladins did not lose their heads even before an incomprehensible enemy. Instead they set about cutting away the arm that held their man.

— GNASH!

Teeth sprouted where another paladin’s downward stroke landed, and bit into his sword. The mouth that had formed on its arm chewed the metal blade and swallowed it like a sheet of paper.

At the same moment, the paladin held fast in that grip screamed. Blood poured out as though he were being wrung, and one grotesque sound after another rang through the passage.

— SQUELCH! GNAAASH!

Pindel Morein was chewing the paladin alive inside that grip.

Drick swung his sword. The blade came around at tremendous speed and cut away the arm holding the paladin. Blood spouted from the black cut surface.

“So it has to be cut away before the teeth grow?”

Easy enough to say, but it came to the same thing as telling them to attack at a speed the thing could not react to. Drick was the only one here capable of that kind of feat.

“Let’s all rush it for now. It will have a hard time reacting to every one of dozens of blades.”

The paladins moved as one. There was no need to trade any special hand signal, because for them fighting in concert was as natural a thing as breathing. When one man’s blade is seized, another swings; when that blade is seized, the next man swings. It was a simple attack, but the result was anything but simple.

Dozens of superhuman men, professionally trained, move with one single purpose. Taken one by one, a paladin is already a monster. And when nineteen such men move like a single organism, they become a monster that hunts monsters.

Pindel Morein was putting up a fair fight against the paladins, but he was steadily taking wounds. For Drick to cut into their concerted attack would only get in the way, so he stood a step back and watched how things went for a while.

And then, at the moment he was certain Pindel Morein had nothing to spare for defending the main body.

Drick swung his sword.

— KLANG!

Drick’s blade failed to cut the thing’s skin and only struck off sparks.

“…Tough as hell.”

Pindel Morein sculpted his body once again. Teeth and mouths no longer grew anywhere on it. Instead it turned outrageously hard. Drick’s sword, which cut through iron like child’s play, was stopped. A sharp blade was of no use now, and there was nothing left the paladins could do either.

Having neutralized every move we had in a single stroke, Pindel Morein went on a rampage. It swings its arms, seizes and crushes, tears and devours with its whole body. We, meanwhile, could not so much as respond, and the number of men put out of the fight climbed exponentially.

“Brother! What do we do about this?”

Blows do not get through. Cut off its breathing? It would simply open a windpipe somewhere else. Sear it and burn it? Plainly it would sculpt itself to match that as well.

An opponent that remakes its body at will to answer any situation.

Fights with the Lucseon church had always gone this way.

The method I used to use cannot be used here.

As a rule I had held out until they wore themselves down and dropped. Since I never die, I could kill them if I dragged the fight out to the moment they could no longer sculpt. Of course, it was not a method Talios’s paladins could use.

The situation was racing toward despair.