Old Testament: Margarita, Age Fifteen (1)

"Pardon me. Could you say that one more time?"

A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠glossy black landline, and the European man with its receiver in his hand, asking it again in a dazed voice. He had just been told something he could not bring himself to believe.

But the voice beyond the receiver, crushing that hope of Giacomo Marchisio's, delivered it with perfect calm.

Human sacrifice. The phrase alone was enough to mark the matter as grave, and this was no ordinary offering — they were speaking in provinces. Fujian, where Giacomo was staying even now, held some thirty-nine million people.

Right. Fujian. The greater problem, given the present circumstances, was exactly the one just named: Giacomo had already entered China. He had come to see an old friend, Wei Chen, and this was how he had been swept into it.

Worse, a fifteen-year-old girl had come with him. He understood, in his head, that she already did one person's work and more to spare — and yet, to him, Han Seoyeon had not shed the image of a child. That made it worse still.

"And where is this rite supposed to be held?"

"Damn."

Right next door, of all places. Granting what China was — that enormous sprawl of land — a single province ran nearly the size of a European country, so the physical distance was considerable enough. And yet a human sacrifice on this scale could not be trusted to remain safely on the far side of even that "considerable" distance.

Put plainly: if a meteor dropped on Germany out of nowhere and all but wiped the Germans from the earth, did anyone imagine France, next door, could sit and watch the spectacle untouched? Effects, great and small, would spill across both the surface and what lay beneath it. And the chance of their running in a favorable direction was vanishingly small.

"We're in no position to dismiss this as someone else's affair. What is the purpose of the rite?"

Mass slaughter and a mass sacrifice were not the same thing. The difference lay in whether one regarded human beings as objects simply to be burned, or as fuel — and if it was the latter, a purpose was inevitable.

A work of sorcery, a plea for a god's blessing, a bargain struck with a devil: it did not matter which. So long as fuel was being burned, there had to be some phenomenon one meant to buy with it.

"...Don't tell me the one being offered to is some ancestral deity. Marx, is it?"

Damn it. Giacomo swallowed the words that had surged all the way to the root of his tongue. Atheism, in itself, was fine. The Church even encouraged it in secret, to a point.

From the very start, the Secrecy Protocol — the parting of the surface from the underside — was a strategy with an atheistic cast, was it not? A system for steadying the world: through the belief that no god existed, it held down Scenario Y and weakened the power of the divine.

It was for much the same reason that Christianity presently served as the world's police, or its firefighters. At a glance, one would think certain polytheistic faiths, far kinder to freedom of religion, would do more for the peace of the world than an exclusive monotheism that spurned every other creed. In practice it was the reverse. The reason so many nations recognized the Holy See as the vanguard of order was precisely that exclusivity. By dragging every other divine being down to the rank of devils and demons, they became, simply by existing, the natural enemy of anomalies.

Borne up by that exclusivity and by an overwhelming number of the faithful, Christian belief still entered most contests of divinity against anomalous beings holding the advantage. And now, through the advance of science and of education, it was slowly paring away even its own strength. The Church was an organization that moved while fearing a runaway of its own making. Even if the Christian faith weakened in that fashion, there was no problem so long as, in the end, it remained stronger than the other anomalies. That was the Holy See's position.

Atheism itself, moreover, spent its force only on denying anomalies and weakening them. With no firm center around which an atheist's belief might gather, the trouble was far smaller — a militant atheist was hardly going to wield sacred power on the strength of that faith. Which was another way of saying that the instant a center existed, a problem was born.

The atheism of a communist state was a very different story. Call it communism if you liked; in truth they were turncoats of the sort that would have Marx bolting upright in his grave to rain curses down on them. Most of them used communism as little more than a stepping-stone for dictatorship. Atheism, in a communist country, was nothing but a means of crushing the freedom of every other religion and of deifying the ruler — of making an idol of him. In effect it was no different from a monotheism that worshipped a living man as god.

That much alone might have been bearable. The misfortune was that this was China. Almost no one would welcome the birth of an upstart monotheism with a billion believers. The only ones who would were the cult-head standing to receive that faith, and the terrorists who wanted the world in disorder. They would not defeat the Church, but they would gain a power that could never be ignored — the sort of foe that, once it set its mind on a fight, could deal the Church a grievous blow. In the terms of the surface world, it amounted to a kind of nuclear armament.

"And what has the Church decided to do?"

"Confirmed."

Giacomo Marchisio nodded. If the other side was pressing ahead with unlicensed nuclear development, the answer of the international police was obvious, was it not?

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling and let the words fall, low.

His Holiness the Pope had ordered a "chastisement" of the People's Republic of China.

The instant she caught her master's scent, Han Seoyeon stopped what she was doing, rose, and turned. Then, at once, parade rest — a continuous motion as natural as flowing water, and yet forceful, crisp with discipline.

"...At ease, Seoyeon."

"Yes."

Giacomo sighed and waved a hand so she would let the posture go. Once he would have been appalled — what are you doing, you don't have to do this — but by now he had adapted, after a fashion. He had also learned that "don't do that from now on" never worked, and that the next-best thing was to cut it short with "you may relax for the moment." Strictly speaking, it was closer to resignation than to improvement.

Had the choice of who would see to her education in childhood been an utter mistake, after all? Thinking it, he sat on the sofa opposite Han Seoyeon. Only then did Seoyeon sit as well.

Presently his eyes drifted over the low table set between the two sofas.

"What were you doing?"

He could see perfectly well what she had been doing from that glance alone, but human conversation, by its nature, sometimes trades in idle talk of just this sort. Han Seoyeon needed to learn that. Han Jihan, extremist of efficiency that he was, might have made a fine drill instructor, but he was neither a good teacher nor a good father. From the moment Giacomo had laid eyes on the finished article called "Han Seoyeon Margarita," he had given up hope for his old friend.

"I was cleaning a firearm. As you can see."

"I see."

What fifteen-year-old, on meeting an elder, dropped at once into parade rest and froze there — and, given a spare moment, set about maintaining guns? On account of it, Han Seoyeon's education in how to live among other people would have to be started over from the bare foundation.

"Where has Jihan gone?"

"If you mean Master, he has stepped out to inspect the equipment he left for servicing."

"Has he. Then I'll contact him separately, later."

The timing was a little bad. Very bad. Thinking so, Giacomo went on.

"Word has come in that signs of a human sacrifice have been detected across the whole of Jiangxi."

"How reliable is the information?"

"It is a fact acknowledged by all three — John, Andrew, and Matthias."

Monsters, each of them alone said to be a match for the whole of Vatican intelligence. If all three had returned the same answer, it could be taken as established truth.

"...The Vatican's special-measure grade is Flute. The name of the measure is Monsieur de Paris. —In short, a decapitation of the enemy commanders, carried out by multiple Apostle-class forces."

The aim, of course, was to finish it swiftly and cleanly, before any uproar could begin. A mass human sacrifice imposed a limit on their time, and so a battle of speed would matter all the more.

"The deployment is myself and Jihan. In addition, Apostle Bartholomew will join us, with eight Holy Knights under her command."

"I..."

"Seoyeon, you are in the rear."

Giacomo's voice was firm. It was partly to avoid taking Han Seoyeon, still underage, onto the front line — but there was surely another reason as well.

"The resurrection of the sacrificial lambs. Easing the time limit by that means will be your share, Seoyeon."

Best of all would be to end it before they ever laid a hand on the sacrifice. Failing that, the next best was to make the victims impossible to offer — or, if offered, to raise them back again. A simple operation, and effective for that very simplicity.

"Wait in Fujian, and the moment the rite is performed, enter Jiangxi."

"But would it not be better to go on ahead and wait? Less time would then pass before the power the enemy gains from the sacrifice could be seized."

Giacomo shook his head as he answered.

"If only you live, Seoyeon, we could in theory bring ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the final death toll to zero. So no matter what happens, your survival is the first priority. Remember that."

She was, he added, no different from the king in a game of chess. So long as she alone did not die, one could fairly say they had not yet lost.

"Understood."

Han Seoyeon nodded at once. She did not like that she would have to stand and watch people die, but she understood that this was the groundwork for bringing them back to life. With that, she began swiftly fitting together again the parts of the firearm laid out across the table.

"I'll say it once more. Be careful, Seoyeon."

"Yes. I will keep my role firmly in mind."

"Seoyeon, that isn't what I meant."

Giacomo smiled, gently.

"Then... how ought I to have responded to what you said just now?"

"Let us leave that as homework for someday."

The day she could answer another person's kindness with nothing but an honest smile — only then would she become the "somewhat ordinary girl" Giacomo had wished for. And so he allowed himself a little mischief.

"Well, I should be going. I'll assign some of our people from the Church to you regarding your part in this, so make good use of them."

A moment later he rose. The operation would begin only after Bartholomew crossed over from Korea and joined them, but preparations, at least, could be seen to in advance.

Han Seoyeon rose as well and saw him off, standing rigid at attention. Truly — a mercy they had not gone so far as to teach her the salute — Giacomo lamented inwardly, toward a certain old friend.

"It's been a while, Thomas!"

It was a bear.

That was the mistake Giacomo Marchisio's brain made the moment the transport's hatch opened and the figure came down. Of course, it was nothing but a mistake.

"Have you been well, Bartholomew?"

As if that could possibly have been some mere bear.

The woman who came toward him with a heavy, thudding tread held out a hand, and he took it. Giacomo himself was a large man, and still he had to look up at her; the sheer size of the hand closed around his was enough to stun.

If the Bartholomew of the previous generation had been called the greatest of Holy Knights, then the Bartholomew of this one — Yoo Hye-rin Agnes — was the one they called the strongest. The muscle had grown so hulking that one could hardly guess at her sex, and the sight of it set the knees trembling of their own accord. More dreadful still was that her true strength did not end with the muscle on display.

A frame mighty from birth. A discipline that had reached not the limit of one person, but the limit of humankind. And the miracle of Samson, acknowledged in her as an Apostle. All of it compounded into the strongest body humanity possessed. That was Yoo Hye-rin Agnes: the Guide, the Mold.

"By the way, what about Mr. Jihan? I heard he was coming along on this mission."

"He's running a final check on his equipment."

"Aah... this is why I told him last time, too, that he shouldn't lean so hard on firearms. Today, same as always — isn't it a nuisance, hauling all this and that around?"

Well, to a person who knocked buildings down with her bare fists, a gun meant nothing at all. Giacomo laughed a dry little laugh and awkwardly looked away.

"Anyway, let's get moving! I never thought the day would come when I could legally beat the big boss commie to death, under official sanction of the Church!"

"The big boss commie... no. That isn't inaccurate."

The man held, of course, the political office of Chairman of the Communist Party — and now, it seemed, he meant to open a path by human sacrifice and ascend, if that was the word, as the very incarnation of the Reds.

"True enough. Then shall we begin the commie hunt. After Jihan gets back, that is."

He nodded in his turn and laughed under his breath, thinking that for a mission which set two Apostles in motion, it was an absurdly ridiculous name for an operation.