Pindel Morein (5)

The paladins were being cut down and there was nothing they could do about it. Not one of them could put so much as a scratch on Pindel Morein, and barely holding on was the most any of them could manage.

“Brother, haven’t you got some kind of answer for this?”
“Damn it.”

The lapse was mine. I should have come alone and left the paladins behind. Alone, it would have taken me a little longer to find Pindel Morein, but nobody would have died. Bringing them along to hunt down a thing that had gone into hiding had only made matters worse.

It was not that we could not win. In the end it would wear itself out fighting me and die. But that would be after every paladin here, Drick included, was dead. So I had to devise a plan that bordered on the impossible, one that would bring the thing down and still keep as many men alive as I could.

One of its swinging arms caught a paladin and slammed him into a corner in a spray of blood. That made six.

“…Something’s strange about this.”

“Whatever it is, I’d ask you to be quick about it.”

Was it only my imagination that Pindel Morein looked to be in a hurry? Since its second sculpting the thing had been thrashing about wildly, swinging its arms in every direction and chewing up paladins as fast as they came. That in itself was proof enough that it was rushing.

Why? What did the hardening of its body have to do with its impatience?

“Drick.”
“What d’you want!”

Drick shouted it back at close quarters with the thing, knocking its arms aside as he went. The rest of the paladins were in much the same state.

“Hold out as long as you can. It cannot keep that state up for long.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“If there were no constraint on it, it would have hardened from the start. It did not.”

Which meant there was a limit on how long it could hold that hardened body. Stamina or holy power, whichever it was, something was draining away fast, moment by moment, even now.

“Hold out and we win.”

Drick set his teeth.

As time went on Pindel Morein grew more and more violent, and it became clear that its luck was running out. At some point, knocking its arms aside stopped throwing sparks. Drick caught that the instant it happened.

“Blades bite again! Cut it down, all of you!”

The paladins, who had given themselves over entirely to defense, pressed forward on the attack again. Teeth sprouted back out and caught at their swords, but Drick did not stop.

His sword is not something my eyes can follow. All that ever shows is the result after the stroke. In a single instant six of the seventeen arms had been sheared cleanly away.

Drick shook out his blade and vanished. He reappeared right in front of the main body where it hung in the air.

The moment the sword in his hand began to reach for its neck.

— GNAAASH!

The main body’s mouth tore itself grotesquely wide and closed on Drick clean around the waist. The teeth were human ones, sculpted in haste perhaps, nowhere near enough to crush armor.

“Ngh!”

A large mouth opened in the palm of an arm mounted on the main body’s back. It meant to chew Drick’s head off, by the look of it.

What happened after that, I could not know. I had already bolted out without thinking.

Propped up on its long arms, the main body stood high in the air. Once I closed in and my line of sight was cut off, there was no telling what was happening above me. I dodged a grasping hand as it swung in, kicked off another arm, and flung myself upward.

“Drick!”

Drick had his sword up crosswise, holding off the hand bearing down on him. The teeth could not get past the flat of the blade and snapped shut on empty air. I forced myself in between Drick and the hand and rammed my left arm into that mouth. The feel of skin tearing and bone breaking came flooding in, and with a wet crack the blood came pouring out.

And at the same moment.

I twisted around and planted a foot on the main body’s neck. My sword came down, and teeth grew out of that wound just the same. I shoved my leg into it. The teeth set about grinding the leg down, but the wound only gaped wider for it, and I dug my blade into it.

“Block the arms, all of you! Do not let the arms get in the apostle’s way!”

At Drick’s shout the paladins threw themselves at every arm the thing had left, heedless of their own bleeding.

My left arm was already gone. This was a race against time. Either the wound in the neck would sever my leg and break my sword first, or I would cut the neck clean through while the leg held.

In its sculpted form, Pindel Morein was enormous even in the main body alone. There was no taking the neck off in one clean cut, so I sawed at the neckbone with my sword. My left arm had grown back at some point, and I got both hands on the longsword. The hand that had meant to eat Drick was still chewing on the old one. From the leg I had fed into the wound I could feel nothing at all. There was not much time left to me.

In that desperate strait, of all things, I found myself thinking of the manor in Brus. My leg had been chewed at then too, exactly as it was now.

Yes. There.

That manor was where I met Kalen Leont. The journey of nearly two months to run Pindel Morein down began in that very place. And it ended the day we reached Oskalt, with Kalen’s neck breaking in my hands.

“…”

It was strange. An unfamiliar sensation.

Was a hundred years long enough to forget a feeling?

And when that feeling lifts its head again.

How pure is that feeling?

For the first time in nearly a hundred years, I was feeling pure anger.

That sensation of my whole body running hot, felt for the first time in a very long while.

An emotion I could not master came boiling up. No. That is the wrong way to put it. Right in front of my eyes there was a single point onto which I could pour all of it.

— GRRRK!

The wound took my leg off completely.

But faster than that.

My sword crushed the thing’s neck and turned it to minced meat. The sharp jolt of breaking bone swept through me once, and after it the blunt feel of parting flesh lingered at my fingertips.

And then.

— THOOM!

Pindel Morein’s enormous head dropped to the ground.

My head was swimming. Only then did I realize I had been holding my breath, and I let the stale air out of me.

I leapt down from the collapsing trunk and put out a hand to Drick, who was working his way out of the severed head.

“…”

“…What is it? Are you not going to take it?”

“No. No, I am.”

Drick took my hand, got to his feet, and brushed himself off. Then he added, quietly.

“Just doubting whether you really never took the baptism.”

Setting things in order afterward did not take long. Fourteen paladins still had life in them; four corpses could be recovered.

The living pray for the dead.

After a short silence Drick gave the order that every body be gathered up whole. They would be carried to the headquarters in Pirberk and given the proper funeral rites.

After a brief discussion we decided to leave Pindel Morein’s carcass where it lay. Burning it carelessly would be dangerous, and leaving it took the least work.

…This has gotten strangely tangled up.

I had tracked Pindel Morein to learn where the hidden Lucseon church was. But now that I knew Lucseon was Ecclesia, their locations would be laid out in detail on any map.

“Brother, what’ll we do now? Head back?”
“The search operation still stands. We need to look further into this passage.”

The place where we had fought was a fork in the passage. A wind came out of the left-hand branch, which meant it probably led outside; the right-hand branch was still.

“Right. How are we splitting them?”
“You take the left. You should be able to lead the paladins out.”
“And what do you mean to do about the right?”
“I go alone.”

I had already made one lapse in bringing them here. I had no intention of making the same mistake twice.

“…Alone? Will you be all right?”

“Isn’t that the safest way, if anything?”

Drick thought it over a moment and nodded. When my words reached the paladins, each of them turned a look of his own on me. They were complicated looks, but most of them were warm, with something like admiration in them.

They disappeared into the left-hand passage, and I moved off carrying a troubled feeling with me.

Why did he wait here, of all places?

Pindel Morein had said it was Lucseon’s will that he not leave Oskalt. What on earth was that will, that he had to die for it?

From the circumstances, it had gotten word that I was staying in Slonhar and handed Pormel to the lord of Brus. After that it drew me on through Darbar all the way to Oskalt in Erbern. Darbar had been no more than a bridgehead for reaching Erbern; the Talios church’s involvement can hardly have been intended.

In Oskalt there was the trap Lucseon had laid, and that part was just as suspect as the rest.

A trap? For what?

It can tie me down a very long while, but it can never dispose of me. Even without the Talios church’s help I would have gotten it settled one way or another in the end. That was exactly why the Lucseon church never actively resisted me a hundred years ago. When an enemy cannot be brought down however hard you attack him, running is the best answer left.

What nonsense had gotten into it, that it should begin attacking me only now, a century on? It had dropped me into a trap with no intention of disposing of me, and thrown Pindel Morein at me like a reward.

…What are you thinking, Lucseon?

I needed to look at it from a slightly different angle. What if the aim was not to drop me into a trap at all, but to bring me to Oskalt? If it had dragged me into a trap while knowing full well the trap would fail, the act of dragging me here had to carry some intent of its own.

My thinking stopped there.

“…”

Because there was a door in front of me.

The door was wood, like any other, and the one thing that set it apart was its sheer size. Spread wide in both height and breadth, it looked as though even Pormel could come and go through it at will.

A door built for that very purpose, then.

The reason for a door the size of Pormel is simple: things like it have to come and go through it.

I pushed the door carefully. It was heavy, as its size promised, but not so heavy that it would not shift when I put my strength behind it.

“…This is.”

A broad room opened up in front of me. Things like animal cages were stacked inside it, every one of them empty. For a room of that size it was furnished, oddly, like an ordinary family home, which made the stacked cages look all the more out of place.

My heart beat hard. I knew it by instinct: the reason Lucseon had lured me to Oskalt was right here.

The place was complicated enough in structure that it would be better called a dwelling. No fewer than six other doors led off the large central space, and I opened every one of them, slowly. They varied in kind. One room held stored foodstuffs, another had straw heaped in it, and so on.

And when at last I stood before the final room.

I felt the presence of someone inside.

…So a believer who did not run is still here?

Whoever is beyond that door, whatever is beyond it.

If it has anything to do with Lucseon, killing it and being done is answer enough. Its intentions are no consideration of mine. Because when it is all over, the thing left standing at the end will be me.

I opened the door.