Hawk's Eye, Kaufman Teosis (5)
The Holy Light Church.
They worshiped the constellation known as “The Lighthouse that Illuminates All Creation” as their principal deity, and took charge of all matters related to starlight. Compared to the other two churches that venerated the stars, they handled their affairs with moderation and peace, and so commanded the greatest number of followers.
But Najin knew better.
They were nowhere near as pure and blameless as the world believed. Their ordinary faithful might be another matter, but the leadership was thoroughly rotten. He knew that well.
“Did the Holy Light Church send you?”
And so Najin put the question to him without hesitation.
Merely speaking the words could have been treated as an insult to the Church and punished without mercy—but if he had cared about such things, he never would have escaped the underground city in the first place.
“The way the Church’s name comes out of your mouth that fast, you and those bastards must have one hell of a history.”
Kaufman let out a short laugh.
From that reaction alone, Najin could confirm several things: Kaufman did not think kindly of the Church, and he was not one of its people.
“Yeah. The Church sent me.”
Kaufman lifted his chin.
He flicked Najin’s longsword away from his throat with two fingers, then unwound the bandages wrapped around his own neck.
“They promised that if I killed you, they’d free a hostage. From the underground city of Atman.”
Najin frowned.
What was carved into Kaufman’s nape was a brand—and Najin had seen that brand before. It was the same mark etched on the inside of Ivan’s eyepatch, and the same one stamped into Druggy Hakan’s arm.
The brand burned into anyone who fell into the underground city.
Oppen had told him once: even if luck and coincidence stacked high enough to let someone escape Atman, as long as that brand remained, the Church would hunt them down and kill them.
“You too…?”
“Sorry, but I’m not from Atman. This is just the leash those bastards put on me.”
They must have decided a single hostage wasn’t enough.
Kaufman shrugged as he muttered it.
“A hostage?”
“My daughter. Common enough story. Makes you wonder why soldiers ever have kids.”
Kaufman gave a rough, gravelly laugh.
“I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m not begging for my life either. If I don’t kill you, I die. So what—you going to just die for me?”
Najin stayed silent. That was answer enough.
“See? I lost to you, and thrashing around here isn’t going to change that.”
“Then?”
“Then the winner gets to claim a winner’s rights.”
He spoke.
“Looking at you, your grudge against the Church runs deeper than most. Hell, if you’re from Atman it couldn’t be anything else. I don’t know why they’ve decided they have to kill you so badly, but…”
Kaufman looked at Najin. Then he suddenly barked a laugh—the kind that said everything had just clicked into place.
“No. I get it. An eighteen-year-old monster already brushing up against Sword Seeker… they probably figured you might actually become a Sword Master someday. At that level, you could tear the Church down. So they decided you were a threat.”
“……”
Najin did not deny it. It was almost certainly true that the Church saw him as a danger.
“Anyway.”
Kaufman let out a long breath.
“Mind if I ask you one thing?”
“Go ahead.”
“You planning to bring the Church down?”
“Yes.”
Najin answered without the slightest hesitation.
No ornamentation. No lie. Pure conviction.
On the name of Ivan, who had sent him up out of the city, Najin had sworn it: he would break the Church.
“With my own hands. Without fail.”
“You’ve got a face that looks like it’s carrying a lot of stories.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, well… doesn’t sound like a lie.”
Kaufman stretched out a hand.
His finger pointed toward the poncho lying some distance away. Najin started walking in that direction.
“Search it and you’ll find a contract. The paper I signed with the Church. Keep it—you’ll find a use for it somewhere.”
Kaufman laughed as he said it, and something about that laugh set Najin’s instincts on edge. Just as Najin picked up the poncho and started back toward him—
“Don’t come closer.”
Kaufman thrust out an arm and stopped him.
Najin frowned. Kaufman did not look as if he were preparing anything, nor did he show any sign of counterattacking. Then why?
“Hey, Najin.”
Even as he turned the question over, Najin stopped where he was. He kept his distance and watched Kaufman, trying to name the wrongness he had felt in that laugh.
“The Holy Light Church is more vicious, more thorough, and more rotten than you think. Remember that.”
An abrupt warning, out of nowhere.
Kaufman exhaled slowly.
“They’ve got plenty of dogs they can sic on people. A whole pack of them. Hostages, brainwashing, pure fanatics who’ve lost their minds to the faith…”
Kaufman pulled a necklace out from inside his collar. An ornament hung from the end of the chain; he looked at whatever was sealed inside it, then smiled bitterly.
“I’m only the beginning. All kinds of lunatics are going to come after you from here on. Plenty of people with nothing left to lose. Damn it all.”
As he spoke, Kaufman clenched his fist.
With a soft snap, the chain of the necklace broke.
“Well. Do your best.”
Kaufman flung the necklace he had carried his entire life toward Najin.
Tak.
Sensing no magic of any kind, Najin simply caught it out of the air. Kaufman gave a short, dry snort of laughter and said:
“Wouldn’t mind if you buried that necklace with me.”
Before Najin could answer, a vicious sizzling rose from Kaufman’s nape. The brand glowed cherry-red. Blood began to pour from Kaufman’s eyes, nose, and ears.
—A Forbidden Word…? No—why would they—
Before the startled Merlin could finish, Kaufman forced the last words past the blood flooding his mouth—determined, it seemed, to pronounce the name of the bastard he meant to drag down with him.
“O… r… lan.”
A name.
The instant it left his lips, Kaufman’s body began to swell. Najin’s eyes flew wide; he clutched the poncho and dove for the waterway.
The moment he hit the water, a dull, bone-shaking BOOM tore through the underground channel.
Najin dragged himself out of the water and looked back at the place where Kaufman had been sitting. Kaufman was gone. Only scraps of flesh and spatters of blood remained, flung in every direction.
—…It’s a Forbidden Word spell.
Merlin said.
—A particular word, a particular name. You make speaking it the trigger. Usually paired with a body-bursting curse.
Even as she explained, she could not erase the unease from her voice. Softly, almost trembling, she added:
—It was a forbidden spell even in my era.
—Because even then, this is how people used it.
Najin stared at the soot-blackened wall.
Kaufman had died without leaving so much as a corpse. Only the blood and meat sprayed across the stones testified that he had ever been there. In silence, Najin opened his hand.
The necklace Kaufman had thrown lay in his palm.
He opened the locket hanging from it. Inside was a photograph: Kaufman, a woman who must have been his wife, and a little girl who could only be his daughter. Najin looked at the picture for a long time.
“……”
This was a man who had tried to kill him.
Najin knew perfectly well that if he started grieving and feeling guilt over the deaths of people like that, he would never last. He tried to turn his head away—but the moment he saw the photograph, something inside him lurched.
The young girl in the picture.
Najin knew her.
When he had cleaned up Trixie—the merchant who had gone so far as to traffic children, something Ivan had strictly forbidden—Najin had examined the ledgers and the “merchandise.” He remembered clicking his tongue at the destinations those goods had been sold toward.
The memory twisted his face.
“Son of a bitch…”
Najin spat the curse through his teeth.
He had eaten nothing, yet something rolled in his gut and tried to climb back up his throat. He ground his molars until they creaked.
—……
Feeling every surge of that raw emotion as if it were her own, Merlin simply kept silent.
“Merlin.”
—…What.
“I… I thought…”
Najin’s voice was a low groan.
“I thought the surface would be different. That a place under the gaze of the stars would be different from the underground city. But… I’m starting to wonder.”
He had believed the underground city was filthy because the stars did not shine there.
After everything he had seen, doubt had begun to take root.
“Do the stars even care about this world? At the very least—shouldn’t the churches that claim to serve them refuse to do things like this?”
—You want an honest answer?
“Yes.”
Merlin exhaled a long breath.
—Most constellations don’t care much about this world. Especially not about the Central Continent.
Why? Najin asked.
Merlin answered in a bitter voice.
—Because we are already finished beings.
The ancient constellation spoke.
—We achieved great deeds, hung our stars in the sky, and met our ends. Unless we stand where the boundary between heaven and earth grows thin, we cannot intervene.
There are those who still try to intervene, of course.
But even they only end up regretting it.
In the end, we are nothing more than bystanders.
—Constellations are not as grand as you people imagine. Bound to the Starfield battlefield, to the land of the Abyss at Camlann, forced to continue an endless journey… if you look closely, we are not so different from the dead.
Najin said nothing.
Merlin went on.
—Most constellations simply do not care how the world turns. Most stars are far more interested in their own safety and in making their own light shine brighter.
Hunting other stars on the Starfield battlefield.
Creating avatars to roam that same battlefield.
Yearning for the next chapter of a story that already ended long ago.
—That is the essence of what constellations are. Perhaps I am not so different myself.
When Najin started to speak, Merlin gave a short, dry laugh.
—I, too, long for what comes after a journey already finished.
She let out another long breath.
—I’m sorry to say this to someone who looks up at the stars the way you do, but being a constellation does not make someone great or perfect. There are far more stars uglier than any human.
A truth that shattered illusions.
A truth she had never wanted to speak. As she spoke it, Merlin watched Najin’s mindscape, wondering whether the star floating in that night sky might change.
But the star did not change.
The star hanging in Najin’s mindscape remained exactly where it was. Then his voice reached her again.
“Then I just have to climb even higher.”
—…What?
“The constellation the Church serves—that Lighthouse. Do you think it knows about all of this?”
—Probably. I can’t say for certain about Excalibur, but I can’t claim it knows nothing of the evils the Church commits.
Najin slipped the necklace into his coat and rose to his feet.
“Then I’ll have to ask it as well.”
Gain a star. Climb higher.
One more question had been added to the list he would one day hurl at the Church. Clutching Kaufman’s poncho, Najin started walking.
Orlan.
He turned over the name Kaufman had spat with his dying breath.
Ironically, it was a name Najin already knew. He had seen it while digging into the Holy Light Church.
Archbishop Orlan of the Holy Light Church.
The man who sat at the very summit of the Church’s main cathedral—built directly above the underground city of Atman. Najin finally understood exactly whose throat his blade would have to find.
Orlan felt Kaufman’s death.
So the hunt had failed.
Orlan clicked his tongue and let out a long sigh. It would have been so much cleaner if everything had ended with Kaufman. Now things were going to be troublesome.
“What should we do?”
—The water is already spilled, and the Lighthouse is stained. A shadow has fallen across your goddess’s radiance.
“Something that should never have been allowed. Perhaps I mishandled the matter.”
—You were right. If light was born in a place your goddess does not illuminate, that is her failing—her stain. Your choice to erase it was wise.
The Lighthouse’s radiance must never be stained.
A small blot breeds doubt, and doubt spreads into a great shadow. Therefore the goddess must always remain perfect and without blemish. Orlan knew this.
If a stain appeared upon the goddess—
If there existed a shadow she could not illuminate—
Then it was the duty of her faithful to make it as though it had never been. To cover the goddess’s failing with one’s own flesh. That was true devotion.
“If the Lighthouse Keeper…”
—If that child begins to move, every star will take notice. Your goddess’s failing will be known to the entire world.
“That cannot be allowed. We will handle it quietly.”
The goddess answered with silence—and in that silence, consented.
Having finished his prayer at the summit of the Lighthouse, Orlan rose. The goddess’s voice left his ear and did not return, yet he already knew exactly what he must do.
“Bring them.”
One useful dog had been broken.
But he still had many more that could move under names other than the Church’s—more than enough remaining in his hand.