The Sawtooth Oak (3)
The wind of early spring was still cool, but the sun came slanting in, and there was a warmth of its own to be found in it.
A man seated on the sunlit engawa — the wooden veranda running along the house — sipping tea gone lukewarm, lifted his head. Years had stacked themselves into the wrinkles of his face; he looked to stand somewhere between middle age and old age, and the robes he wore were, at a glance, a shrine priest's. Those eyes settled on the visitor.
"You're here, Rikka?"
An unhurried voice drifted out between dry, cracked lips. At the end of his gaze a woman stood in awkward stillness. Kure Rikka — his eldest daughter, and the one who, today, had been charged with going all the way to Tokyo and back to save the god of the Kure family. Judging by the crowd at her back, the errand had gone well.
This was hardly a party from the Onmyoryo, come to finish deconsecrating an old god that was already little more than an empty shell. No. The negotiations must have ended safely, and they had come straight here to close the matter out the same day.
"...Then why do you look like that?"
By any reading of the situation, things had gone exactly to the original plan, and yet his daughter's face was strange. It was not the darkness of something having failed. If anything, she seemed — for no reason he could put a name to — extremely tense.
"No. It's nothing. It went well. Everything worked out."
"...I see."
Something about it still failed to sit right, but it was hardly a matter worth prying into. The man set his teacup down and rose.
"Thank you for coming."
He bent at the waist as he said it. Whatever circumstances lay on their side, whatever intentions, none of that was his to weigh at this moment. He was grateful for one thing alone: that they had come to bring back the god he served.
"Please, there's no need for that. This only came about because our interests happened to align."
"Even so. Because of this, Moyoko-sama will be able to go on living in this world. How could I not hold gratitude in my heart?"
Black robes, impossible to assign to any one country. The woman dressed in them declined the courtesy, and only then did the priest straighten his back.
From the moment she had agreed to succeed to the divinity and come here, he had thought her a truly remarkable person; seen properly, she seemed anything but an ordinary human being. That faintly chilling face looked almost as though it did not belong to this world, and every step she took was the step of someone honed to the utmost. If a near-immortal such as this had come forward as proxy, then the one she represented was surely a god to whom he need not be ashamed to entrust the deity he served. She was a candidate his second child had found. A truly excellent eye — and inwardly, he praised his son.
Kure Rikka watched that warm exchange through a trembling gaze.
This is fine, right? It is fine... isn't it?
What kind of people were Apostles? The sort who could kill someone simply for rubbing them the wrong way, bury the body, and have the whole affair pass with a mild we'll be more careful next time. From the brief conversation this one seemed an exceedingly decent human being, but Apostles were, by nature, cracked somewhere. It would not be strange if she touched the one scale that must not be touched and flew into a fit, at any moment, in any fashion.
Set against her, her father was perfectly at ease. That calm was a response available only to someone who did not truly know what an Apostle was. They were classed as residents of the hidden world, yes, but not everyone who lived there knew its ways. It was especially common among those who had merely inherited their knowledge from a parent, as in families of shamans.
"Hmm......"
Akane, watching from behind, caught on just as quickly that the man was that sort of case. Not from any tremendous insight — she was the same type herself. She hadn't even known, precisely, what Apostles were. It was why Akane and Tenka had once charged in on the theory that a surprise attack would surely work somehow, and been picked utterly clean.
"Hm? Miss Akaba. Is something weighing on you?"
"No. It's nothing."
A painful memory had surfaced with the sigh, and Ninomae, right beside her, answered at once out of worry.
...Honestly. So this was why her peers found the girl so precious. Thinking that, she looked over, and there was Ninomae beaming back at her with a loose, helpless smile, as if something in the world were simply wonderful.
"Auu...? Miss Akabaaa...?"
"...Ah. Sorry. Wasn't thinking."
Without meaning to, she had squished Ninomae's soft cheek. The reaction was so cute that an old habit had slipped out — the one she usually indulged, back at the shrine, with animal spirits and yokai.
"Hehe, I wanna squish those cheeks toooo...!"
"Stay put, Chisa."
In the meantime a certain maid was seized by the scruff of the neck and stopped, though it hardly mattered.
"By the way, Rikka. That young lady somehow looks like someone I've seen on television......"
"Ah, yes. You're probably right."
"What was it — a talent, is she?"
"She is a celebrity, yes......"
A famous person, beyond any argument. Even as the youngest daughter of the Hyakureno, who tended toward relatively little exposure — and that was only in comparison with the rest of the family. She turned up on television often enough, whenever one had half forgotten her, that it would not have been strange to have seen her once or twice.
"Well... what does it matter, in any case. Come, everyone. Let us go at once and present ourselves before Moyoko-sama."
Tatari no Moyoko-sama. Turning the name over and over, Ninomae let her imagination run. Moyoko — a woman, surely? And of what age?
The murder that had given rise to her had taken place in the thick of the war, so more than a few decades past; an elderly grandmother rose in the mind, and then the counter-thought that a spirit would not have aged at all. And why the name Tatari? Tatari was divine punishment closer to a mechanical law than to any personal malice. They must have regarded the killer — who went on with his crimes without being caught, without even having his identity exposed — as less a human being than a natural disaster. That terror would have been received as a tatari.
Then what would she look like? Grotesque as an evil spirit, or unexpectedly beautiful, like some bewitching thing?
"...This is Moyoko-sama."
And so, when the man showed her a single butcher's knife laid in an old wooden box, Ninomae could only be bewildered.
"This is... her?"
"It is."
It rested on silk, so she could tell it was being treated as something precious, after a fashion. A sacred presence could be felt from it as well, faint though it was. But like this, rather than a god...
"Heeh. Looks like some grubby little tsukumogami that's set up house in a twig broom, it does."
Grinning, Chisa said aloud what Ninomae had only been thinking. Just as she said, it was far too shabby to be called a god. And Ninomae understood. So this was why they had searched with such desperation for a god who would lend it faith — because it had grown this frail.
"......"
Even so, Mary took the knife in hand. They had brought Ninomae here precisely because she wished to speak with the god, reduced to this though it was, and so she trusted that at least some bare thread of communication would be possible. Slowly, she closed her eyes, accepting the gentle warmth that rose from a blade which ought to have been cold.
"While you speak, it would be best if we stepped aside for a little while."
No one objected to Han Seoyeon's suggestion, and they all moved off to a distance where Ninomae's murmuring could no longer be heard.
How long had they been watching her from there?
"You said your name was Ninomae Hitomi. She seems a good person. I'm glad of it."
The priest spoke all at once.
"To see her treat so kindly a god this frail — little more than a living corpse."
What Ninomae and the spirit were saying could not be heard from here, but in the midst of it she smiled, and sometimes her face lit as if she had been deeply moved, and the conversation went on. Those expressions alone carried across the gentleness of the person called Ninomae. The man smiled faintly and called it a relief.
"Wasn't it because you knew Miss Ninomae well that you decided to transfer the divinity?"
Listening, Han Seoyeon found that point curious, and asked.
"No. I don't know whether my daughter has already explained, but it was our second child who chose her. That one has always liked internet broadcasts and all the rest of it."
A resident of the hidden world, and a fan of Mary Tepes. As the son of a shrine, he would have had specialized knowledge besides, so it would not have been impossible for him to realize that she had obtained divinity.
"Then it was your son who proposed the transfer?"
"No. I was the one who raised that matter first. He only found the candidate."
"You accepted it rather readily. You don't seem to know much about VTubers."
Tell an elder who had spent his whole life tending a shrine to set out anime-character figures from tomorrow and pray to them, and it would not be an easy thing to accept.
"I studied a great deal. How we might bring our god back to life. Even if we managed, somehow, to revive her, it would be a disaster if the shrine then failed to prosper and she weakened all over again."
A shrine was, quietly, a red ocean. Japan simply had too many of them, but the greater cause was that, come the twenty-first century, fewer and fewer people visited a shrine or paid the gods any reverence at all, except on special days.
"So I thought, if we attached ourselves outright to some truly great god, that would settle it. But from their side — what profit would there be in accepting us?"
To survive, they needed a smash hit, and yet every god they could actually bring in was small and struggling. Even hardcore faith had its limits. Ordinary methods were hopeless. They needed a breakthrough.
"And then what came to me was the path of subculture. Some animated film recently passed ten million viewers, didn't it? I thought, this will do. When I looked into it, the Buddhist side already had two precedents."
"...Ryoho-ji and Josen-ji."
Han Seoyeon nodded, a bitter smile on her face. She could already sketch, more or less, how the rest had gone. The father, having settled on this course, would have asked his otaku son to look for a suitable candidate, and in the end Mary's name must have come up.
"Well. That is how it happened."
"You were truly devoted."
"She is the guardian deity who has watched over our family all my life."
The man smiled, soft and brief.
"When I was married, when my wife was carrying our first child, when our young son was suffering through a fever... she was someone who wrung out what little power she had and helped us however she could. Even when my wife was fighting her illness, though the result was not a good one......"
She had been, in effect, no different from another mother, he murmured.
"Miss Shion! What should I do now?!"
"It seems your talk has come to a close."
Around then, Ninomae's voice reached them. Han Seoyeon smiled and drew a silver-plated hammer smoothly from her sleeve.
"A kind of sacred implement. Please use this for the rite."
The priest took it and approached Ninomae. He recited some prayer — and then prostrated himself before her and bowed. A moment later he rose, offered the hammer up to her in both hands, and bowed twice more in succession.
Ninomae seemed briefly flustered by it, but soon a look of resolve settled over her face and she lifted the hammer high. In her other hand she still held the old butcher's knife.
Then she brought it down.
A sound rang out — a tang, clear and pure past all reason — and filled the shrine grounds.
A tone that lingered at the ear like a ringing, and then the quiet that came down over the precincts. Cracks began to crawl across the knife. Tok. Thud. Broken fragments dropped to the floor. A sudden gust scattered the hems of their clothes and died away just as quickly.
Something that could not be seen, nor felt by any other sense, died in this moment and was born again. Everyone gathered there understood it, somehow, without knowing why.
Ninomae lingered a little while in the afterglow, then turned her head to look at Han Seoyeon. To tell her that it was over now. That it was done.
"...Huh?"
——The anomaly struck in that very instant.
The metal fragments strewn across the floor began to rattle, breathing out a venomous miasma that stirred revulsion from the instinct up. And from the ground, monsters of every shape began to surge upward in every form. Like something compressed to its limit and released all at once, they burst free and swelled in a heartbeat.
It was nothing short of a hyakki yagyo — the night parade of a hundred demons. A procession of things that haunt mountain and river. A banquet of gods gone lawless.
"A-aaaaaah?!"
A beast somewhere between dog and tiger opened a pitch-black maw and bit into the arm of the man who was still bowed to the ground. Right before Ninomae's nose, a hand with twelve fingers reached out, nails raised.
"...Hweh?"
But her view changed at once. Ninomae was already in Han Seoyeon's arms, a dozen meters and more from where she had been standing.
"Whoa, a princess carry~"
Startled, she looked back at the place where she had been a moment ago, and there something like several hundred monsters was seething. ...Along with a drunk who had seized one of their maws and was tearing it apart, top from bottom.
"Hehe, Miss Apostle over there'll stick it back on for ya later."
Chisa fished an arm out of the belly of the beast she had split in half, slung the owner of that body over her shoulder, and strolled unhurriedly back to her employer's side. Her pace was as leisurely as if she were out for a walk.
"Ah, Father——?!"
"Please calm down. His life isn't in danger. And as Chisa, my maid, said, the arm can be put right as well."
A beat later, the color drained from Rikka's face. Yuri soothed her.
"Damn it. What happened? You said she wasn't an evil god."
Meanwhile Akane brought a circle of her fingers up before her eyes and scowled. However she looked at it, the source of those monsters was Moyoko-sama.
"Wasn't what the god herself wanted, I 'spect... but it's also a fact her nature's a calamity god, y'know? Feels like she was gettin' gnawed away from inside her spirit-body without even knowin' it...? Hic. Somethin' like that."
Countless insects that had been eating out the heart of a tree and nesting there had, the moment the tree fell, come pouring out all at once. The attribute of grotesque serial killer must have been a truly delectable meal for evil spirits.
"I'm sorry, Miss Ninomae. I should have considered this possibility as well......"
"No. How could anyone have predicted something like this? And in the end Miss Shion saved me, so I'm satisfied with just that."
Ninomae laughed, a bright little ehehe, and at the sight Han Seoyeon smiled before she knew it.
"You aren't hurt anywhere?"
"No. I'm fine. ...Ah, the back of my hand stings a little, though."
"The back of your hand?"
At that, Han Seoyeon hurriedly checked Ninomae's hand. Just as she had said, a small reddened mark remained where something had scraped the back of it.
"But it only grazed me, so it's fi—ne......?"
"......"
Ninomae smiled again, insisting she was all right, but the words never quite finished.
Han Seoyeon — no, Apostle Bartholomew — hardened her expression.
Creak. That neck turned, and clouded eyes fixed on the monsters stirring.
Silence swallowed the shrine grounds once more.
In truth countless beasts were growling, and it was quite loud — and yet the soul of every being present ignored the reports coming in from the ears and thought only, somehow, that it had grown quiet.
Nothing happened. No one could move.
And then... among the monsters, a bear-shaped yokai with two heads was the first to move.
WHACK! That massive arm swung with all its strength.
...Toward the back of the head of the yokai beside it, the one with the bizarre number of fingers.
In every age, and in every place, there had always existed a sage who could read which way the wind was blowing, and see what lay ahead.