Siltrein (1)

The next morning.

The Talios church’s knight orders withdrew from Oskalt. They were not making straight for Pirberk, though; for a time, I was told, they would stay posted in Erbern and clear out every sculpted human still scattered across the domain.

Oskalt at least had a trade road running to the other domains, and it had one because part of its own forces stood permanently posted out on the plateau, clearing the undead out in an organized way. Every one of those soldiers had come back into the city at some point, naturally, and received the cathedral’s care. So when every subject who had received Pindel Morein’s holy power was sculpted, the soldiers outside the walls turned into monsters of lumped flesh along with the rest.

That the undead came over the walls the instant Oskalt was sculpted is deeply bound up with this. The army that had held them in check had ceased to function in a single moment.

“Well, I’ll be off then. Mind yourself too, brother.”
“Is there any real need to wipe out every last monster?”

“…That’s a remark to shake the roots of our own church. Honestly, in private, I think the same myself. But as a commander I shouldn’t, should I. A man is sometimes made by the seat he’s given.”

Drick felt nothing much for Talios’s doctrine, and adding him to the count produced a strange phenomenon. Every last commander of the Pirberk branch was now a man of little faith.

Though I had yet to meet the one they call the grand commander of the First Order.

The knight orders were all gone, my baggage was gathered, and I was finishing my own preparations to leave. Lilian, meanwhile, seemed thoroughly taken with Pormel.

— Krrrk.

“Roan! Come here!”
“What is it?”
“Come look at this one’s tongue. How is it this long?”

Lilian had her hand inside Pormel’s mouth, hooked around its tongue, pulling. Pormel’s fearsome teeth did not concern her in the slightest.

“…I’m not sure pulling on that is a very good idea.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s not as if I’m about to be eaten.”

Lilian being eaten by a beast was as preposterous a notion as Eladin coming to harm from one. Though for my part, remembering the Pormel that had once chewed my leg to pieces, I wanted nothing so much as to pull her off it that very instant.

“Didn’t you say a beast that has had a pendant made from it can’t be handled?”
“I just can’t give it orders. I can still talk to it. I think this one’s really gentle.”
“Pormel does have a mild temperament.”

With its tongue in Lilian’s grip, Pormel only blinked.

— Kh-hek.

Perhaps because its tongue was still caught, Pormel spat out a strange sort of cry, and hearing it, Lilian let go.

“What did Pormel say?”
“It says my hand tastes salty.”

I burst out laughing before I could stop myself.

I lifted Lilian up and set her on Pormel’s saddle. Behind me, in the very seat where Kalen had sat. I looked at her sitting there and fell briefly into thought.

“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. Put this on.”

The robe that had been strapped in among the baggage.

It had come to me as my own share, though Kalen used to layer it over his whenever the cold bit. I held it out, and Lilian took it without protest and put it on.

“It’ll shake. Hold on tight.”
“Mm.”

Pormel started walking, slowly. That clinging mist off the water, the kind Erbern alone has, wet my face; it kept the view from opening up, and wherever I turned my eyes there was nothing but grey.

We rode on and crossed a low hill. The hour was drawing toward afternoon by then, and the temperature had crept up a little.

“Roan.”
“What is it.”
“Where are we going?”

Our destination.

I could not simply pick a city at random and head for it. In all likelihood it would hold an Ecclesia cathedral, which was no different from saying there would be a second Oskalt, and a third.

For the moment the only bet I could place was Lilian. Once before, the priests of Pirberk had suppressed the holy power in the coachman Pindel Morein had gotten to. Holy power can press down holy power, and an authority is only one among countless ways of spending holy power. So if Lilian could learn to wield hers at the level of an authority, we could keep a whole city from being sculpted and storm the Lucseon church at the same time.

“Lilian. Could you try applying the holy power inside you? With the feel of crushing another god’s holy power flat.”
“What? How am I supposed to do that?”
“Think of it simply. You spend stamina to move your body. In the same way you spend holy power to work an authority. With that same feel, use holy power to flatten holy power of a different nature.”

“…Does that sound simple to you?”

It came to about the level of telling someone to use telekinesis with their stamina.

An authority is a god’s power at its root, while applying holy power, which amounts to its fuel, has always been the province of human beings. Lilian, human and yet born holding an authority, could strictly be called a half-god. And because the other half of her is human, she was the only thing that could work an authority and apply holy power in a different direction at the same time.

I had been reluctant to bring Lilian along, but in the end she was a thing we could not do without if the Lucseon church was to be destroyed.

“Practice at it steadily and you’ll get the feel of it.”
“Now that I think about it, there’s one more problem.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t have all that much holy power to begin with.”

“…You use your authority well enough, don’t you? That much alone would be plenty.”

“An authority actually doesn’t take much holy power. Do you spend a lot of stamina moving your arms and legs?”

Needless to say, moving your arms and legs costs less stamina than telekinesis does.

To take the measure of Lilian’s holy power, I clasped her hand in mine.

“It really is only a thimbleful.”

“…What. That’s strange. Roan, what is this?”

Just as I had taken her measure, it seemed she had taken mine.

“Why do you have this much holy power?”
“Can’t help it. Eladin made me a deathless one. For that to be possible, before anything else it would take a monstrous amount of holy power.”

In the moment she was dying, Eladin had as good as handed every last scrap of her holy power over to me. By rights my body should not have withstood it, but the body undeath had made of me went on endlessly regenerating the body that was crumbling from one moment to the next.

Holy power eats away at the body, and holy power heals the wounds it has eaten. For several hundred years my body had been held in that uncanny state.

Lilian suddenly gave a sly little smile.

“Then there’s no worry about your holy power running dry.”
“Well, no. Though I don’t use holy power at all.”
“No, not Roan — me. What I mean is, however freely I burn holy power, Roan’s there, so it comes right back.”

“…You’re talking like I already agreed to share my holy power out.”
“You won’t?”
“…”

I shut my mouth. Having silenced me in an instant, Lilian changed the subject.

“So where are we going? You still haven’t told me.”
“Anywhere without an Ecclesia church will do. What matters is that you get good enough with holy power to hold Lucseon’s authority down.”

Stamina improves with training too. There was no reason holy power should be any different.

“But from outside the walls, how do you know whether a city has an Ecclesia church or not?”
“I don’t. There’s no need to know, either.”
“Why?”

Instead of answering I pointed a hand straight ahead. There was the same whitish mist in every direction.

“Erbern is a half-isolated domain. Oskalt was the one place with a road driven through to it, and that’s why a cathedral settled there at all.”

Put another way, no city in Erbern but Oskalt has a road driven through to it, which meant every intervention from outside was cut off.

“Erbern is a guaranteed place. Guaranteed to have no Ecclesia church.”

Erbern was a fitting place for Lilian and me to hide ourselves away and build strength.

Lilian went quiet for a while, turning what I had said over.

“If this place is isolated, that means nobody managed to break through, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“So the two of us have to go into a place that no central army and no knight order ever broke through, and all of them turned back from?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“There’s Pormel. That makes three of us.”
“…”
“That was a joke. The central army doesn’t come to places like this to begin with. It isn’t that they couldn’t break through. They didn’t.”

How idle would the central knight orders have to be to bother with a small domain like Erbern out on the western frontier? In this world the lives of the people who live inside Erbern’s mist count for very little.

“Even so, all three of us wandering Erbern like it’s nothing is as good as madness. Set the central army aside; the western defense army did fail to break through in the end.”
“Then aren’t we in real trouble? Is Roan stronger than the defense army?”
“Well. At least this much is certain.”

I scratched Pormel under the neck, and Pormel gave a contented cry.

“I couldn’t say about myself. But you’re stronger than they are, aren’t you.”

Where the western defense army fights the undead, Lilian works them like her own limbs. To travel about with the god of lesser creatures and worry whether a lesser creature might attack us was unthinkable from the start.

Whether her head was full of stray thoughts or empty of any, Lilian said nothing at all after that.

We cut across the damp grassland and came to the bank of a small stream. Pormel wet its throat for a moment, then sprang lightly over the water.

As we went on like that, Lilian tugged at the trailing end of my scarf.

“What is it.”
“Go a little slower. The kids can’t keep up.”
“Kids?”

At Lilian’s word Pormel slowed of its own accord.

By degrees an alien sound came to my ears.

That sound, drawing nearer moment by moment, was one familiar even to me—

“What have you gone and done, Lilian.”

—the drum of hooves beyond counting.

“I only called the fastest of the kids among the undead wandering nearby.”
“And why did you do that?”
“From now on I have to be able to look after myself at least, don’t I? And when I thought about it, there turned out to be a child among the undead that suits perfectly.”
“There is no chance of anything like that among the undead…”
“I mean ghosts. Something like a ghoul is hard to bring all the way into a city, but a ghost can’t be seen by anyone else, and it’s easy for me to take along. Sadly there wasn’t one inside the range I can feel, so I called the quick-footed children instead.”

“…So you called the undead in order to ask around after a ghost?”

“Mm. That’s simpler than us going looking, isn’t it?”

Before long several human shapes appeared out of the opaque mist.

Figures in worn-out armor no better than refuse. Through the gaps where it had split, white bone showed for an instant.

“…Ordering skeleton knights around just to find a ghost.”

A knight of high caliber who turns undead after death, at very long odds, becomes a skeleton knight. The undead neither eat nor sleep, nor even tire. A skeleton knight keeps the fighting strength of its life entirely intact and is a filthy nuisance to deal with besides, which made it an opponent even I preferred to avoid.

And on top of that.

“A death knight? There are limits to using an ox cleaver to kill a chicken.”

One among them was a death knight, an individual ranking above a skeleton knight. If a skeleton knight was a knight of high caliber in life, a death knight is a knight who gave everything to the sword in life. If there were such a thing as an undead knight order, it would hold the commander’s post in name and in fact.

“Hey, kids! While you’re going around, if you see any ghosts, will you tell them all to come to me?”

At Lilian’s word every one of those terrible things nodded its head at once, a sight that fairly deserved to be called a spectacle.