Brus (4)

A night when the stars and the moon had bowed their heads.

The bedchamber lay in thick darkness, its lamps long dead, as if unwilling to welcome any intruder who came in the dead of night. Every step I took sent a wet, squelching sound through the room.

Something was off. Even for a lord’s bedchamber the room was far too vast; the whole place had plainly been built on an abnormally enormous scale.

Mere extravagance? Or else…

The fine hairs across my body stood on end. The only thing in a place like this that should have posed any danger to me was a guard, at most.

Whether it was some movement, or instinct, or simply a trick of the mood, I ducked my head.

— CRACK!

In that same instant, my ankle was seized. And that was no figure of speech: a giant beast’s maw had punched up through the floorboards, clamped down on my right leg, and hauled it under. The force of those jaws was not something I could do anything about, and before I had room even to thrash, the beast dragged me down and slammed me into the hard stone floor.

— THOOM!

My heart hammered like mad. It wasn’t because my right leg was being ground to pulp. No, I couldn’t honestly say the two had nothing to do with each other. But the real problem was something simpler: the beast was here at all.

First I swept my gaze around the room as fast as I could. Floor and walls, all of it stone. The place was fairly wide, and lamps set here and there pushed back the dark, feebly as they managed it.

In one corner stood the lord. That was the moment my suspicion hardened into certainty.

“You’d best have good answers for me.”

Plibentorinus II, and everything else with it, could wait now. A problem that none of it could begin to compare with sat right in front of my eyes. There was a great deal I needed to ask this lord, and a great deal I needed to hear. First, though, I would have to deal with the beast trying to swallow me whole.

The beast was a lizard as huge as a mountain. Its scales, oddly, were black and sharp-tipped, and by that alone it looked to be some very distant cousin of a dragon.

I drove the sword in my hand hard into its brow. I’d meant to split its skull, but the blade caught in the scales and would not budge.

Troublesome.

This was a beast whose hide was hard enough to turn a blade. Plainly, muscling the sword through by brute strength, the way I always had, would get me nowhere here.

“For a man about to die, you thrash about hard enough.”

The lord watched my leg come apart and sneered, even as his whole face knotted into a grimace. I didn’t answer. Instead I sheared off the right leg the beast had in its jaws, just below the knee, and in the same motion drove my left foot into it with everything I had.

— SKRAAK!

The blow knocked the beast back toward the corner where the lord stood, but it only spared him a brief glance before turning its head away again. Blood welled from my bitten lip and wet my tongue.

We’ve always called the things beyond human understanding the miracles of the gods. Each god has its own miracle to work, and that we have come to call a god’s authority. A beast that would not attack a human, controlled like an extension of its master’s own body, resembled, to a sickening degree, a divine authority I knew all too well.

Eladin. The authority of dominion she had once held. Unless mankind had gone and invented some art for commanding beasts in the meantime, it meant that this lord, right in front of me, was wielding Eladin’s authority.

— THOOM!

The moment I tried to lift my upper body, the beast lunged. I barely wrenched my head back in time to slip it. Had I not already been low to the ground, it was a speed I could never have reacted to at all.

Movements the eye could barely follow, and scales no blade would bite. This was no creature that belonged in some backwater like the Slonhar domain, out at the continent’s far western edge. It was so rare a beast that even back when I roamed every corner of the continent butchering the church, I had crossed its kind only very seldom.

I threw down the longsword and seized, with both hands, the spear-shaft still buried in my solar plexus. I wrenched it free, gripped it like a staff, and hauled myself to my feet. The right leg I had cut away would need time yet to grow back.

The moment drool spilled from its snout and the muscles of its face twitched, I sprang off on a diagonal. Almost in the same instant, a tremendous shock traveled up the shaft. The beast had hurled itself into the space where I’d been, driving its own neck onto the spear I’d thrust out like a thrown lance. Monstrous as its strength was, the recoil that slammed back through the spear was just as fierce. I took that force head-on, then poured everything into my arms and spun.

A spin riding the recoil.

Landing point: the beast’s back.

My body traced a wide arc and came down onto its spine, and at once I caught the butt of the shaft with my free hand. Pinning its head under my knee and hauling back on the spear, I crushed its windpipe shut. The beast twisted and thrashed with its whole body.

— SKRAAAAK!

Taking the shock through my arms alone, I waited for it to black out. How long had it been? Clinging to the beast’s back might have been a few seconds; it might have been a few hours. What was certain was that at last, it had lost consciousness.

All the strength gone out of it, the beast swayed and toppled.

— THOOM!

At some point my right leg had finished knitting back together. I sprang down from its back and landed light on both feet.

“That gave me some trouble.”

The lord stood rooted to the spot, dazed, as though the thought of running had never so much as crossed his mind. Only when his eyes met mine did he break for the door.

I flipped the shaft into a reverse grip, drove my whole body forward, and stamped down into a great lunging step.

Then came the throw.

The spear, loosed with every scrap of spring I could wring from my muscles, slammed into the iron door with a thunderous roar.

— KA-BLAAM!

The lord had been fumbling a key into the lock to hurry the door open; that he dropped flat onto his backside was only to be expected.

“Y-your leg…”

The lord looked at me with terror-stricken eyes. It was a look I had been given thousands of times, tens of thousands.

“What… what are you?”
“I ask the questions here.”

I picked up the sword that had fallen in the corner and drove it into the floor beside the lord, as good as flinging it down. The blade sank clean into a seam between the flagstones and stood there quivering faintly.

Eladin’s authority, bent to commanding beasts, and now this lord before my eyes. If anyone had told me the two were connected, the claim would have been so absurd I would have wanted to beat him senseless. And yet there it was, unfolding right in front of me. I had so much to ask that a single sheet of paper could not have held it all.

“Have you heard the name Eladin?”
“Eladin? I— I don’t know it.”

Whether his answer was true or false hardly mattered. If the lord was tangled up with the Lucseon church, opening his mouth at all would be impossible for him.

I went on questioning him.

“Then what about Lucseon?”
“…”

The lord’s face had gone a deathly blue; he could not force out a single word.

So that’s my answer.

It was all but certain now that the Lucseon church still endured in this world. It had not been in vain. All those long years of wandering, all that time I had lived for this one moment and nothing else: none of it had been a mistake.

…Eladin.

It was as if she were whispering to me. I ground my teeth hard.

This was only the beginning.

“…So breathe a word about them, and the poison rises. A whole century gone, and they haven’t changed at all, have they?”

I pulled the sword free from where it stood planted beside him.

“Then we’ll do it this way.”

And I drove the blade down through the hand he had braced on the floor.

“GRAAAAAAGH!”

“Every minute, I’ll take one of your fingers. One joint at a time. Fourteen joints to a hand — and both of yours are still whole, so that’s twenty-eight. Twenty-eight minutes ought to be plenty of time to think it over.”

Right about the time a full seven minutes had passed, the lord opened his mouth, his eyes gone hazy and drool running freely.

“S-some time ago… men came who called themselves the Lucseon church.”

Almost at once, the lord began to writhe in agony. Below his neck, the veins had swollen up black. A curse worked through holy power.

Just as each god possesses its own unique authority, holy power too carries a different color from one god to the next. A priest who could wield another god’s holy power might have been able to neutralize the Lucseon curse tormenting the lord. That, sadly, was not a tale that had anything to do with me.

“Answer my questions with your head alone — nothing more. Their curse responds only to the voice.”

The lord managed a labored nod.

“That beast — did they bring it to you?”

The Lucseon church, surfacing in front of me once more after seventy years. The card they had played was Eladin’s authority. By what means they wielded the authority of a god long since dead, I could not begin to guess. But one thing was certain. They had crossed a line that must never be crossed.

How far do they mean to defile Eladin?

I bit down so hard that one of my teeth cracked. The lord watched my face warily and nodded.

“To borrow an authority you’d need holy power — but you wouldn’t have used holy power yourself. Are you carrying some medium with holy power sealed inside it?”

Once again, the lord nodded. I searched his clothing, and the moment I rifled through his pockets and stripped off his tunic, I could not help but grimace.

“…”

A small pendant. A little glass vial, plain and unornamented, yet with something sealed inside it.

It was blood.

How could I ever forget it? Countless memories had faded as the years wore on, but this one sensation alone I knew with a precision that made my skin crawl. What I felt from that blood was Eladin’s holy power.

Eladin’s holy power. Not Lucseon’s, but Eladin’s, of all things.

“…These f***ing bastards.”

It was very nearly enough to make me feel they had set out, deliberately and with care, to insult me. Holy power is like a fingerprint. Unless Eladin had somehow come back to life, her holy power could not possibly exist in this world.

“Do you know where they are now?”

This time the lord shook his head.

To track them down, I first needed information: the personal details of their members, or failing that, at least the place they had last been seen.

…Wait.

I had the feeling I was overlooking something important. The lord had said they approached him first. If he had come across them while moving about Brus, there would surely have been townsfolk who saw it happen. But that kind of exposure was the last thing they would ever want, which meant they must have come to the lord in secret and held a proper meeting with him.

“So it’s a lie, this business of not knowing where they are.”

Which was why, whether they had knocked politely at his door or slipped into the manor unseen, the odds were high the lord held some means of contacting them. At my words, the lord stiffened visibly.

“…Tell me who the contact is that can reach the Lucseon church. Do that, and I’ll let the lie slide.”

In the end, in a world like this, any means of contact comes down to a person. Someone who belonged to the Lucseon church and yet stood openly enough in the world that the lord of Brus could reach them at any time. That person was the very key that led back to the Lucseon church.

“I-if I say anything to do with them, the c-curse — it spreads, doesn’t it?”
“You lied to me on top of everything. You ought to have braced for at least that much.”

The lord protested with his eyes. If it came to naming the person outright, the odds were high it would kill him, and he no doubt understood that as well as I did. But short of a truly exceptional holdout, there was no mouth I could not open.

Against expectation, the lord had a fairly strong will. Not that it was strong enough to hold out against my torture: it was only after both his hands and both his feet had been cut away that he finally opened his mouth, with the eyes of a man who had given up on everything.

“M-my room… search my room.”

He had worked his mind hard in his own way, it seemed, choosing to hand over a vague clue rather than speak the name aloud. Of course, the Lucseon church was not so slipshod an outfit that a trick that shallow would ever work on it.

“Ggghhhkkk—!”

The instant he gave up information that could reveal the insider’s identity, the Lucseon holy power began to eat into the lord’s body. Before long the poison had spread through his entire frame, and the veins, swollen to their very limit, burst all at once. Their silencing curse was cruel and savage enough to leave even me unsettled.

Turning my back on the ghastly wreck the lord had become, I straightened up from my crouch.

A thread that could lead me to the Lucseon church.

It lay close enough to touch, if only I reached out my hand.