Initiation Rite (2)
A building could be a surprisingly useful tool for reading a person’s tastes, purposes, and temperament.
Authoritarian types favored tall structures decked out in ostentatious finery; pastoral souls preferred quiet comfort over luxury.
In that sense, the Holy Knight Department’s building was almost painfully transparent.
“I must ask your pardon that this is hardly a sight fit for a young lady.”
“It certainly is… a rather distinctive atmosphere.”
Yoanna nodded in agreement, taking in a landscape she had never experienced before.
The first thing to catch her eye was the ogre’s head mounted at the center of the room.
It had been taxidermied with vivid realism—an ogre missing the middle of its three eyes.
Next her gaze traveled to the walls, packed with every kind of weapon and a bookcase that filled the remaining space.
Swords, spears, axes… none of them looked like mere decoration. The wear and the fine nicks made it plain that each had known a user’s hand.
After a sip of the tea Sir Iskandar had poured for her, Yoanna pointed at the shelves.
“What sort of books are those?”
“Mostly dry religious tomes. The rest… well.”
Sir Iskandar considered a moment, rose, and walked to the bookcase. He scanned the spines, then pulled out a volume that seemed suitable.
“There are quite a few of this sort as well.”
Yoanna checked the book he held out and set it down with a look of open distaste.
What he had shown her was an evil-god text filled with filth too vile even to name.
Ordinarily, mere possession of such a volume would be enough to drag a man into court and prison without anyone batting an eye.
“Is it all right to keep books like that?”
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, how can you hope to win? At the very least, the instructors of the Holy Knight Department are not hauled before a tribunal for reading heretical texts.”
He answered without the slightest shame, returned the book to its place, and sat again.
Sir Iskandar dropped three sugar cubes into his black tea and stirred. Yet the face of the man actually drinking it was full of the expression of someone who hated the sweetness.
“D-do you like sweet things?”
“I rather dislike them. This is… simply how I drink tea, and only when I drink tea.”
He swallowed the brew with a bitter look and stared emptily into the cup.
Whatever he might try to draw up from the tea, reality would not yield it.
When the last of the tea was gone, Sir Iskandar took a sheaf of papers from a drawer and held them out.
“First, let me make clear that my decision to trust you does not spring from any personal fondness.”
“A man foolish enough to trust a girl he has only just met would never be the head of an entire department.”
With that reply, Yoanna began to examine the papers.
The stack held her life laid out cleanly in ink—as if someone had written her entire existence down. Even her birth parents were there.
Sir Iskandar lit a cigarette and spoke.
“From the child of heretics, to the young lady of a noble house, and then the saintess of a single order… quite a turbulent life.”
“Is that a problem?”
Having a past that had never once been made public suddenly laid bare was unexpected, yet Yoanna remained composed.
Showing her this meant he had chosen to help her even knowing the truth.
If he meant to make an issue of it, he would never have invoked the rights of the chief instructor to aid her in the first place.
“I have no intention of making it a problem. On the contrary—I support your methods.”
“My methods?”
“You crushed the Guinhwe and made a profit from it, and you wiped out a human-trafficking ring and took their church building for yourself, did you not?”
Iskandar pushed a few more documents across.
Information on the Guinhwe members handed over to the city guard, the trafficking syndicate that had used a church as its base—and even the personal details of the criminals she had killed in her hometown.
“I’ll concede the first two. But the last part feels like a stretch.”
“Did you know? A corpse tells more than you might think. If you wanted to hide your identity, you would have done better not to use your father’s swordsmanship.”
“……”
Yoanna hid her lips behind the teacup and checked whether Sir Iskandar was lying.
She found no sign of falsehood. His eyes and face, like rusted steel, showed not the slightest change.
Confirming that concealment was impossible, she set the cup down and asked,
“What is it you want from me?”
“First, it would be wise for you to understand the state of the State Church. After what you experienced today, you have probably already guessed—the present condition of the State Church cannot, even by the most generous estimate, be called good.”
Having opened the subject, Sir Iskandar slowly laid bare the Church’s failings.
Corruption and graft, discord among the orders, the privatization of Church-affiliated groups…
Acts no servant of the gods should ever dare commit were being carried out as if they were the most natural thing in the world.
Of course, if a body with as much influence over the Empire as the State Church were pure and spotless, that would be a joke in its own right…
“The strange part is that the corruption began to grow markedly worse about ten years ago.”
“Is that so strange? One loach can muddy an entire pond.”
Yoanna raised the question with Albert in mind.
One capable, selfish piece of trash was more than enough to ruin a whole city.
But Sir Iskandar shook his head.
“The State Church is closer to a coalition of many orders than a single body. The other orders never simply stood by and watched while someone used the Church’s authority to line their own pockets.”
Because of that, the priests who did commit wrongdoing only skimmed a little; they never managed to shake the Church as a whole.
Priests with their heads screwed on straight avoided anything that would distance them from divine favor, and so the State Church—dirty though it might be—had still managed to function reasonably well…
Sir Iskandar took out a fresh cigarette and drew the smoke deep, as if trying to clear a blocked chest.
“Haa… Lately, though, the mutual checks among the orders have grown lax.”
“Have they formed some kind of alliance?”
“Unlikely. If they had, every bishop would have joined the trial just to kill you.”
One thing was certain: something important enough to stop the orders from policing one another was underway.
“We have been moving busily ourselves to uncover the reason, but chronic manpower shortages keep handing us defeat after defeat.”
“I hate to say this, but you aren’t asking me to find a reason even all of you have failed to grasp, are you?”
She was grateful for the help, yet even Yoanna could not accept a request that bordered on the absurd.
How was she supposed to solve something that a group with the information network to strip her past bare had been unable to manage?
Fortunately, Sir Iskandar possessed that much common sense.
“We are in a position where we would not refuse even a cat’s paw if it could be borrowed—but we are not so desperate that we would dump an impossible task on you.”
“Then what is it you want me to do?”
“I will not ask for anything grand. I would simply like you to lend a hand with the work my holy knights handle.”
Monster subjugation, tracking and eliminating evil-god cultists, escorting clergy, and more.
Holy knights performed a great many duties, and those under Sir Iskandar mainly took on the subjugation side.
“To be precise, we have been stuck with it. The holy knights belonging to each order use the pretext of protecting the clergy to stay out of the hunting parties.”
“Judging by the disgrace I saw today, I doubt they would help you either.”
If they had been offering support in the first place, he would never have needed to make this request of her.
After a brief pause, Yoanna asked Sir Iskandar,
“What do you intend to give me in return?”
“I will guarantee your graduation from the Academy. And I will see to it that skipping every general-education and useless elective course brings you no disadvantage.”
“And? That is simply the time I would inevitably miss because you are putting me to work.”
Since she was not wrong, Sir Iskandar savored his smoke while he ordered his thoughts.
When roughly half the cigarette had burned away, he spoke in a low voice.
“The name of the god you serve is Dantalion, was it? I will provide subsidies to your order. And, depending on your performance, I will tell you about my own patron.”
“My, you have a patron?”
“Drop the clumsy act. You must already have taken that much into account.”
As if conceding he was right, Yoanna nodded.
If she had not been confident she could handle the fallout, she would never have barged into a conference room full of bishops.
Regardless of personal martial power, no one attempted such a thing without some measure of confidence that the situation could be smoothed over.
Having sensed the source of that confidence, Yoanna found herself thinking unbidden,
…Could I not wring a little more out of him?
To uphold her convictions and save many people, money and power could not be separated from the work.
If she could extract a little more while the opportunity was here—
“Yoanna. When you know the other party has already yielded and still grow greedy, the relationship is bound to sour.”
At that moment Dantalion, who had been watching quietly, rapped her lightly on the head and spoke.
However lofty her goals, taking a slightly longer road would not keep her from reaching them. She must not cast aside a lasting connection for a mere handful of extra gain.
Fortunately Yoanna seemed to understand; she nodded with her usual clear smile.
“Since it is the chief instructor’s request, I will be content with this for now.”
“A ruthless woman. It is inconvenient how little like a child you are.”
“Heh. My past is my past—please understand.”
The two of them sealed the bargain with a handshake in place of a contract.
Even if their relationship came under suspicion, so long as no evidence remained, any special connection would end as mere suspicion.
When the teacup showed its bottom, Yoanna rose without lingering.
There was nothing more to discuss, and she was about to leave the room when…
“But will you be able to persuade the instructors? I doubt they will be pleased to have a student skip their classes.”
When Yoanna asked out of curiosity, Sir Iskandar blinked at her.
Then he answered as if she had said something absurd.
“Would you not pity instructors forced to drone on about ‘education’ to a student stronger than themselves? If it were me, I would thank them for taking her off my hands.”
“……”
Imagining herself trying to teach Dantalion, Yoanna found herself nodding without thinking.
That would indeed be a humiliation of unfathomable depth.
After all, no one strutted and preened in front of a chrysalis.