The High Priest's Habits
Rembrary's hand began to move with a soft scratching sound.
Hwanshin watched the busy motion of that hand in a cheerful mood. He had no clear reason for it, but he'd simply assumed Rembrary wouldn't be able to draw. Just a feeling, really.
Except... the longer he watched, the stranger it seemed.
Huh? Hwanshin cocked an eyebrow.
He stared in disbelief at the shape slowly emerging on the white paper. Well, look at that — he can actually draw?
Rembrary was, unexpectedly, drawing remarkably well. The lettering was light and distinctive, unusual in style, but setting that aside entirely, it was simply good work. At first it looked like he was just slashing away with the pencil, but a few seconds later those very strokes turned out to be exactly the lines the picture needed. Line met line in clever connection, and form took shape.
The demon, too, seemed to find the picture unfolding before its eyes fascinating; it shut its mouth and stared at the paper, riveted.
How long had they been like that?
"This won't do. Out with you."
Rembrary, who had been drawing so intently, suddenly made the demand of Hwanshin.
"Me?"
Hwanshin pointed a finger at himself. "You're telling me to leave?"
Rembrary nodded. "Yes. I cannot concentrate."
Hwanshin felt genuinely aggrieved. He hadn't made a single sound — he'd just been watching — and now suddenly he was a distraction?
The demon, its gaze fixed on the drawing, slid its eyes up for a brief glance. Hwanshin's eyes and the demon's met in the empty air.
"Must I really go?"
Hwanshin dug in his heels, but Rembrary only said again, "Out with you."
Far from taking his side, the demon didn't spare him so much as a look.
Hwanshin didn't want to leave — but he was curious what conversation the lunatic and the demon might have once he was out. Which meant he had to vacate the seat. Whatever question the lunatic put to the demon, he could always ask Labrum about it later anyway.
At last, only the two of them remained in the car.
Only then did Rembrary ask Labrum outright. "What is your purpose?"
[Why me, all of a sudden? Why? Me? You're curious about me?]
"What is your purpose?"
Rembrary asked again.
[Why does that matter? Why? I thought you wanted me to draw?]
The demon shot back, as if the whole thing were absurd.
"What is your purpose?"
Rembrary repeated the same question yet again. The drawing had only ever been an excuse. This — this was the single biggest reason he had come at all.
"And in case you're wondering, let me say this in advance. Choose your words with care when you answer. If I hear your purpose and it offends me, you may find yourself back in hell for a hundred years, stitching a torn-out neck back together."
Labrum had been rattling on — why? why? why? — only to flinch at Rembrary's gentle threat. It was puzzled too by the sudden change in his tone, but the content of his words was what truly startled it.
Not because the words were frightening. The demon was shocked because they were so utterly, precisely true.
Among demons, there really were those who'd had an arm or a leg torn off and healed themselves by stitching the pieces back together here and there. An ordinary person couldn't tear open a demon's body in the first place, and even if by some chance they managed it, a demon could simply reattach what had been torn away. No matter how finely it was smashed to pieces, the body would go right back together.
The problem was that a body so difficult for others to tear apart was equally difficult for the demons themselves to suture. Of course, the flesh would sometimes knit on its own without stitching, and new flesh would sometimes grow altogether — but natural healing took far, far longer than sewing it up with thread. Unless you planned to spend several hundred years doing nothing but recovering, it was far more practical to squat down, ugly as it looked, and stitch your own neck or arm back together yourself.
But the number of beings who knew all this was vanishingly small. No — almost no one knew it except the demons themselves. It wasn't the sort of thing one went around talking about, and it could be exploited if word got out, so demons kept it carefully to themselves.
And now a human — one they were properly speaking with for the very first time — had brought it up. Curiosity stirred.
[How did you know? Stitching? Have you done it?]
Rembrary only slid his eyes sideways with a brief glance — and the demon, for no good reason, shuddered and shrank back.
[The lunatic? The lunatic? The lunatic?]
The moment their eyes met, something felt deeply, strangely wrong. That feeling was truly bizarre. Chilling, somehow. Unpleasant, somehow. And yet unmistakably the scent of delicious prey, and at the same time, in some way, remarkably impressive to look at. Was this really what happened when all those things Hwanshin had described got mixed together?
"No answer? Have you nothing to say?"
[What's offensive? What counts as offensive? What answer would offend you?]
"Any answer that brings harm to my Believers — to those who live upright and honest lives, to those who have done no wrong — I will treat as offensive. All of it."
Even through all of this, Rembrary's hand kept moving. Only the steady scratch of pencil against paper seeped into the quiet car.
The demon tilted its head this time. Rembrary's answer was so strange. Truly so strange. There was something almost like a kindred creature about him, at a glance — and yet hear him talk, and wasn't he exactly the sort of insufferable Saint you couldn't stand? Except that not a trace of saintliness could actually be felt from him, which made it all confusing.
[What are you? What's your true nature? Something's off about you.]
"Answer first. Six minutes remain."
[I... am Hwanshin's contracted one. I help Hwanshin. My purpose is to help Hwanshin.]
"And in that process, do you bring harm to people?"
[No. No. Probably not?]
Rembrary set down the pencil. Not because he believed the words and was done with his business — but to turn them over carefully and analyze them for a moment. It isn't a lie, and yet it's going to be a lie.
Demons didn't kill for the sake of killing; they killed people in order to achieve their purpose. Listen to the things demons said, and plenty of it sounded plausible, plenty of it even sounded righteous. A demon's words had to be weighed with care. Which meant that an answer like that was closer to saying: if Hwanshin wanted people harmed, they could be helped to harm them...
Rembrary rolled the pencil in his fingers, nodded slowly to himself, and took up the pencil again in a new grip.
Labrum wondered what on earth the man was doing.
That was the instant —
Rembrary, gripping the pencil like a weapon in one hand, seized the demon by the collar with the other, hauled it close, and drove the pencil toward Labrum's eye as if to run it straight through.
It happened in the blink of an eye — and the demon didn't blink. Like the eyes set in a doll or a carved statue, it didn't so much as flicker; ignoring the pencil that had stopped a hair's breadth from its face, it stared straight at Rembrary and no one else.
"Hm."
Then Rembrary broke into a smooth smile and released the demon. He began drawing again with the pencil he'd wielded like a weapon, and once more only the soft scratch of graphite filled the car.
Exactly three minutes before the time he himself had named, Rembrary lowered the pencil onto his knee. When he stretched his hand forward to tap on the front windshield, Hwanshin, who had been waiting outside, opened the door and climbed back in.
[Finished your drawing?]
"Yes. Let's head back."
As he sat down, Hwanshin went to inspect what Rembrary had drawn first of all. But the sketchbook lay flipped face-down across Rembrary's knee, and the picture was almost entirely hidden.
"A masterpiece, was it?"
Even when Hwanshin deliberately pitched the question as a joke, Rembrary answered flatly. "Depends on the eye that beholds it."
Whatever they talked about, I can just hear it from Labrum later. Hwanshin gave up questioning him further and obligingly drove toward the Wild Animal dormitory.
The demon, its eyes and nose and mouth all fully visible now, watched Rem's profile as they went. Rembrary lounged back against the rear seat, eyes closed in perfect ease.
"We've arrived."
Only when the car finally stopped near the dormitory did Rembrary flip the sketchbook right side up again. But before Hwanshin could get so much as a look at the drawing, Rembrary tore off a single sheet, set it face-down on the seat where he'd been sitting, and got out.
The moment Rembrary walked into the apartment lobby and disappeared from view, the demon slowly turned the drawing over.
"What on earth is this?"
Hwanshin, who had been dying of curiosity over the picture this whole time, twisted around to see the drawing in the demon's hand.
The instant he saw it, a low curse escaped his lips.
In the picture, the collar that should have been wound around the demon's neck was fastened around Hwanshin's own. And the hand gripping the leash at the end of that collar belonged to the demon.
Seeing it, the demon's mouth curled up at the corners. Just as he'd thought — a very strange human. Demons' contractors believed that they dominated the demon, when in truth it was the exact reverse. And that man had just caught the truth and pinched it under Hwanshin's nose on his way out the door.
[Looks like this one's yours. Looks like it's meant for you. You. Yours.]
The demon held the drawing out. Hwanshin took the paper with visible displeasure.
"The two of you drew this together? This is why you made me leave?"
[Strange lunatic. Strange, lunatic. Carries a demon's aura and speaks such righteous words...]
Hwanshin started the car, and it glided smoothly out of the spot. As it pulled away, the orange glow of the streetlamp flickered once — and beneath the window that flickering light touched, a black silhouette appeared and vanished.
The figure stood stock-still the entire time, like a plaster statue, staring after the car, after the place where it had been — until a voice called from behind, "Shin Jo-woon," and only then did it take a step back and turn its head.
"What?"
"What do you mean, what? Why are you striking a pose out here when you're halfway through cooking? Are you planning to finish this or not? It's almost time for Yeon-woo to get here."
"Ah. I was looking at something."
"Just go watch the stove. When exactly am I supposed to turn this burner off?"
By the time Rembrary returned to the dormitory, the cooking was still not finished.
"Fifteen minutes, plus two over."
Jang Tae-ri reported the tally with clockwork precision, but the fact that dinner wasn't done yet was, if anything, a mercy.
"The trip there and back accounts for it."
Rembrary went into the bedroom to set down the sketchbook and pencil, then ducked into the bathroom. When he came back out after washing his hands, Jang Tae-ri and Shin Jo-woon were already laying out several dishes on the table. The same space that had felt desolate despite its smallness when he was alone was, in an instant, brimming with liveliness and warmth and the smell of something delicious.
"Something smells wonderful. Can you truly cook, then?"
"Yeon-woo, sit here."
Once Jang Tae-ri and Rembrary had taken their seats side by side, Shin Jo-woon set down the small plates in front of them and heaped each with a generous serving of food. At the sight of it, hunger struck Rembrary all at once, and he swallowed dryly. Shin Jo-woon placed his own plate down as well and took the seat across from the two of them.
"Pig."
But before the meal could begin, Shin Jo-woon addressed Rembrary first. Rembrary, chopsticks in hand, had been steeling himself over when exactly it would be permissible to eat; he raised his head.
Shin Jo-woon asked, breezily, as if it were nothing at all, in a tone pitched to sound like passing conversation. "What were you out doing?"
"I went to draw."
"Drawing what?"
"A grand picture."
"You went out and drew a picture in fifteen minutes?"
"Not a finished work. Merely the rough sketch. Why do you ask?"
"No, it's..."
Shin Jo-woon let the words trail off for a moment — then broke into an easy smile and urged him on. "Eat up, then. Plenty more where that came from."
But inside, Shin Jo-woon was thinking of the car he'd looked down at earlier. That car... he'd seen it before, once, while hunting down Nakru.