The Medial Plain (2)
“You’re awfully brazen about rifling through my purse, aren’t you, Hero?”
Ceres let out a dry, hollow laugh.
Those people over there appear to be refugees, so hand over some food—and by the way, let the Regent pay for it, not the Head Elder. Said with that much confidence, even Ceres found herself with nothing to say in reply.
Love her or hate her, she was the Regent of Carpatia. Providing relief for an entire nation’s poor might have been beyond her capacity, but simply putting food in front of the refugees right in front of her eyes? That was hardly a difficult task.
“How about we say the Hero pays for it instead?”
“Ah, well, money and I have always kept our distance, you see.”
“Then the Saintess?”
“Pfft, no.”
“Our group can just restock from local suppliers as we travel, Sir Lewis, so please don’t trouble yourself over it. I’ll be paying out of my own pocket.”
“…That is not quite the point.”
Lewis, commander of the Holy Knights, could not shake his displeasure. It was not that he begrudged the refugees a meal. It was that, whatever circumstances had driven these people here and whatever had actually happened to them, the refugees themselves were too busy shoveling food into their mouths to explain any of it—and that, more than anything, grated on him.
Worse still was the sight of the grand and exalted Saintess of the Heavenly God Religion weaving among those paupers, personally waiting on their meals.
“Why such a sour expression, Sir Knight? Your whole face is full of complaints.”
Lewis turned toward the voice. Tall of stature, with clean, handsome features—a man with bronzed skin who could truly be called the very picture of manliness: the Hero, Ludvik.
“It would not have been too late to first ask what happened.”
At those words, Ludvik exhaled a long, heavy breath.
Then, his face twisting into a wry grimace, he stared fixedly at Lewis.
Two men, each a head taller than ordinary folk, standing toe to toe and locking horns like that—the people eating their meals nearby shrank under the pressure and quietly slunk away.
“Ahh, I suppose our Knight Commander has never once known the bite of hunger. A hungry man can’t even string his words together properly, you know. Besides, what good does hearing the reason first do, hm? Does it fill a single belly?”
“…Might I suggest the Hero work on his manner of speech, first of all.”
For a man of lowly adventurer stock to put on airs just because he’d scraped his way to Gold Rank was bad enough.
But now he was a Hero besides, and that shoulder of his rode the wind higher than ever.
And he spat out his words this raw and unfiltered, so Lewis’s gut was churning just the same.
“Why are you two fighting again?”
Yona, who had been carrying a basket of bread, stopped midway and glanced back and forth between the two men. They both towered over her, but not a trace of intimidation showed on her face.
“Even dogs don’t get bothered while they’re eating. Why are you two doing this next to people trying to have a meal? Lud, you go away too. Go help Vig or something. And you—mister.”
…Mister?
Lewis, who had never once in his life been addressed so insolently, felt more baffled than angry.
“Well, what do you expect? I don’t know your name or anything else about you.”
“…Knight Commander of the Holy Knights. Lewis.”
He was, after all, one of the so-called Heroes of Carpatia, having played a major role in the upheaval at the heart of Carpatia Port.
“Sir Lewis. Ordinary people aren’t knights, you see. And because they’re not knights, when they’re hungry they can’t even speak properly. Look over there, Saintess—ugh. Even Vig is personally waiting on those people’s meals, so what exactly has the knightly order been doing?”
“Tending meals is hardly their duty.”
“Ah, then I suppose tending meals is the Saintess’s duty. Must be.”
Yona’s tone was unmistakably sarcastic, and it stung. Lewis nearly erupted right then and there—but between Ludvik glowering at him point-blank and the bald giant who had somehow materialized behind Yona and was now glaring at him too, the pressure was too much. Lewis clicked his tongue—tch—and turned away.
“We came from a village about two days’ walk from here, sir.”
Another village, huh.
Yona almost frowned before she could stop herself.
The place where they’d rescued Rubina had been a tiny village too.
…Well, that’s also where we met James, so fine.
Best to think of it positively.
Once the meal had more or less wound down, the man introduced as the village’s representative was summoned into the carriage.
They would hear his account, and if it was something the government could help with on an official level, help they should; if not, they would at the very least have to relay it to Infula.
Before Ceres, Regent of Carpatia Port, the man was rigid with terror. He would never in his life have expected to meet someone of such exalted rank, so it was hardly an unreasonable reaction.
“The name of your village?”
Ceres asked without much expectation. A village so small it wouldn’t appear on any map usually had no name worth recording, and even if one were given, who would know it?
But the words that left the man’s mouth were—
“Semek. We came from Semek.”
“…Semek, you say?”
“S-Semek, sir…?”
“Semek?”
Three voices echoed at once—Ceres, Vigrind, and Yona, all equally stunned.
Semek, the graveyard village.
It sat roughly midway between the Infula Holy See and Carpatia Port, though in truth it leaned closer to Carpatia.
The village called Semek was, in its entirety, a graveyard.
By custom, the dead were almost always laid to rest through funerals presided over by a cathedral. If no cathedral was to be found, one did whatever it took to reach a village with one before drawing one’s final breath—or else summoned a priest to perform the last rites.
The same held true for the Infula Holy See. For those in the neighboring villages, drawing their last breath within the Holy See itself was considered the great wish of a lifetime.
Those who entered the Infula Holy See and died there were given funerals by the Holy See’s own priests. And the bodies that passed through those rites were not returned to the villages where they had lived, but sent instead to the Holy See’s official graveyard to be buried—and that graveyard stood in Semek.
The resting place of all who had been blessed with a holy death in the Infula Holy See.
That place was the graveyard village, Semek.
“What… happened in Semek?”
Vigrind’s voice trembled, thin as a thread.
Semek should have been peaceful, cradling the repose of the dead.
Something had surely gone terribly wrong there.
Now that she was the Saintess of the Heavenly God Religion, it was not something she could possibly ignore.
“Tell us everything. In detail.”
Ceres was, after all, merely the Head Elder of the Carpatia branch—and no more than a cooperating partner to the religious order, not one of its own. She did not feel the shock Vigrind did, and that was precisely why she could stay calm.
The man’s gaze flitted nervously from Ceres to Vigrind to Yona and back again.
Then, as though he were the criminal in the room, he bowed his head deep and spoke in a small voice.
“The dead… the dead… have begun to rise…”
Semek, the graveyard village.
For as long as anyone could remember, it was the village where bodies gathered after receiving their funerals in the Infula Holy See.
Tucked behind the edge of the Carpatia forest, on slightly elevated ground with soil that drained well—little risk of flooding even in heavy rain—and bordering the Medial Plain besides.
The graveyard was so vast that each household had inherited its upkeep as a family trade, generation after generation, for longer than anyone could remember.
That night, too, the men assigned to the night patrol gathered before the vast iron fence known as the sanctuary.
Fifteen grown men in all, formed into five squads of three, rotating through the patrol rounds. Split across morning, afternoon, and evening shifts, forty-five men patrolled in total, and every change of watch they assembled at this iron gate to take count, pass along anything unusual, and see the handover through properly.
“Anything to report?”
“Nothing much, except the crows have been flying about something fierce…”
“Any new bodies come in?”
“Last one was three weeks back.”
Naturally, Semek was crawling with crows. A corpse carted over from the Infula Holy See was bound to start decaying in transit, and the stench of it drew the crows down from the sky time and again, cawing overhead—nothing out of the ordinary there.
“Any sarcophagus lids sitting loose? You checked?”
“Didn’t get to that. There’s a hundred-odd coffins in there—how’s anyone meant to check every last one?”
“Tch…”
At Jacques’s words—he’d only come of age recently and been on the job barely days—the village chief Danny clicked his tongue.
Who did the village owe its living to, that the boy would slack even at this one duty?
Youngsters these days… tch.
Danny resolved, once again, that a proper re-education was in order, and took the handover board from Jacques.
“Anyway, good work, old man.”
“Aye. Go on in and rest.”
After the afternoon shift headed home, Jacques called together the other four squad leaders.
The unnaturally numerous crows had been gnawing at him.
“Go see whether any sarcophagus lids have come loose. Walk the ossuaries and the crypts, one by one, and check every lid.”
“Aw, c’mon, that’ll eat the whole damn day.”
One ossuary held three crypts. Each crypt held twenty sarcophagi. And there were more than fifty ossuaries besides.
Check every lid across a hundred and fifty rooms in a single night? The squad leaders made no effort at all to hide how little they wanted to. But Danny’s face was set like stone and his order was final, and they could do nothing but nod along reluctantly.
Timmy was one of those squad leaders.
Forty years old this year, a gravedigger veteran enough to call himself as much—and yet Danny’s order today truly made no sense to him.
A sarcophagus lid was no light thing, whatever the chief made it sound like. They were slabs of solid stone, so of course they were heavy. Each and every one had to have a lamp held up to it to see whether it had shifted, then be shaken to confirm it was properly shut, and if it wasn’t, wrestled shut by hand. It was no ordinary ordeal.
But Danny’s authority was what it was, and refusing was not on the table either.
That stubborn old buzzard, so hung up on doing everything by the book… he probably angles his prick just to piss. Tch.
Timmy stepped into the ossuary.
By day it was a fairly respectable stone building, but come nightfall it turned uncannily skin-crawling—that was just the sort of place the ossuary was.
It weathered wind and rain year-round, so no amount of upkeep could keep the years from eating at it. The dark gray flagstones underfoot seemed to cling to Timmy’s soles with every step, and now and then let out a faint creak.
Startling at his own shadow flickering on the lamplight—he wasn’t a man of such small nerve—and yet tonight a chill crept over him all the same. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with a light vest on top, and still the cold seeping between the layers bored toward the bone, aching as it went.
“Damn it all, even the weather’s gone to shit.”
Had it been anywhere else he’d have spat on the ground for good measure, but the place being the place, he couldn’t even do that.
Heaping silent curses on Danny all the while, Timmy descended the stone stairs leading down to the crypts.
—Caw.
…Hm?
Certain he’d heard a crow, Timmy swept the lamp around the moment he reached the bottom of the stairs. His wavering shadow cast against the sarcophagi bulged and warped, jutting out in lumps—and there was something about it he simply did not like.
—Caw.
“…The hell was that.”
A crow. It was definitely a crow.
And that caw—it had come, without a doubt, from inside the crypt.
“Hey. Who’s there?”
Sounds take their color from the mood around them. He thought it was a crow, so it was a crow. Maybe, Timmy reasoned, someone had come down before him and was hiding somewhere, playing a prank. He weighted his voice with all the menace he could muster.
“I said, who’s there. Jeff? Allocho?”
Jeff and Allocho, his squadmates. But they would have headed to different ossuaries. There was no way they were here. A strange cold was settling over Timmy now—a chill that pierced the skin and froze him to the marrow.
“C’mon already, wh-wh’s there!”
The fear boring into him snapped into irritation. Who the hell was pulling such a vile stunt? Timmy yanked the silver club holstered at his side. Whoever it was—even if the dead themselves came crawling up, one swing of this silver club, blessed by the great cathedral, would settle the matter for good.
“Who’s there, damn it!”
The moment his hand closed around the silver club, courage he hadn’t known he had came surging up. Guts hauled from somewhere deep in his gut spread through his whole body, and riding that momentum Timmy took one big stride forward.
“Come out before I cave your skull in!”
Timmy bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Nothing answered his shout.
He looked around.
Only then did he truly see it.
Every sarcophagus lid, sitting not in its place but skewed half-open.
And the shadow of his own that had bulged and rippled over those sarcophagi—
was slowly, standing up.
“U—u—uuuh, uuuhhhaaaaaghh!”
Timmy screamed.
Some primal terror of that thing boring toward him clamped down on his throat, and his mind was filled with nothing but flight—silver club be damned, run.
He turned.
He had to bolt up the stairs, raise the alarm, tell them of this calamity.
And the moment he set one foot on the stairs, he came face to face with it.
Flesh sloughing away in sheets, foul yellow pus dripping down along that skin.
A socket gone hollow and empty on one side, and a half-prolapsed eyeball dangling from the other.
The skin that should have covered the jaw had vanished somewhere, leaving the teeth bared wide and stained yellow—
whatever it was, it was advancing toward him, and Timmy met it head-on.
The bodies in the crypts alone numbered over a hundred and fifty; beyond them, the ordinary graves held hundreds more.
And those bodies were rising. Stripped to rotting burial shrouds far too thin for the first edge of winter—rags so decayed they had long since stopped serving even their one purpose—the dead tore through the earth, split the ground, toppled headstones and buried their names in life forever, and slowly rose to their feet.
—Grraaahh…
A slow but heavy and relentless tide soon swallowed the graveyard whole. Screams rose, alarms drums thundered, and the village locked the iron gates of the graveyard shut, severing it from the town.
It did no good. The mountain of corpses charged like a tidal wave, hurling themselves at the wall heedless of their own bodies breaking apart. The dead stacked their rotting flesh into a tower, climbed it, and came crashing down upon the village like the sea itself.
Danny the village chief and the rest of the night watch had clearly already been swallowed by the tide. The villagers who had crowded into the communal hall split themselves into two parties.
Those who would go to the Infula Holy See and report the calamity, and those who would go to the Grand Duchy of Carpatia and report it to the government.
“…And so, we were on our way to the Grand Duchy of Carpatia when…”
Even as he spoke, the man could not stop shaking. The teacup clutched in his hands rattled and clattered noisily, telling of just how horrifying the ruin he had witnessed in his village had been—and through it all, Vigrind let out a soft sigh.
“We must save Semek before we worry about the Holy See. Elder, Semek is an important place.”
“…I know. I know full well, Saintess. I feel the same.”
Ceres’s gaze turned to Yona.
It was plainly a question of what she and her party intended to do. They had been hired strictly as escorts as far as Infula, so she could not compel them—but if the rest of them were turning for Semek, then what of Yona’s group?
Yona fell deep into thought.
She, too, was a member of the clergy, in her way—but Semek simply did not mean to her what it meant to Vigrind.
The Church called Semek important, but that was a matter for priests. For a healer, it was really no such thing.
After a long moment of deliberation, Yona answered carefully.
“…Let’s talk payment first.”
Her essence was that of a cleric and an adventurer, and every last one of her companions was an adventurer too.
And when the question was what will you do, the cleanest way to answer it was to turn it right back around: how much are you offering?