There Is an Abomination Among You (3)
You only learn who your true friends are when you find yourself in trouble. East or west, ancient or modern, that has always been taken for a truth.
The Herem Protocol was a kind of ideological vetting conceived from precisely that angle.
The condition for setting it in motion was simple: the Church had to commit some great blunder, or take a heavy blow, and watch its prestige fall. The sign that it was coming was that the Church, far from hiding the loss of face, would admit the thing outright. It was the sort of affair one ought to keep quiet even without staging a deliberate cover-up—and yet, to exaggerate only a little, the story would be allowed to spread until there was not a soul in the hidden world who had not heard it.
When it came to that, the monsters with years behind them, or with sharp enough instincts, hurried to duck their heads. That was the signal flare of a great purge. It was a reaping, meant to take the heads of every malcontent who lifted theirs in the certainty that a shaking Church meant opportunity—to thin out, ahead of time, the ones who would try the very same thing on the day the Church was truly rocked.
And the minnows, giddy with excitement, had taken the hook. Now it was time to jerk the rod.
Something had gone wrong. It did not take the man long to understand that.
A sound came, as if something were punching a hole clean through the air—the crack of a round past the speed of sound, collapsing the pressure wave as it went. It was the sort of sound that sent a chill up the spine if you knew what it meant, and he, who had lately been making a fine living as a mercenary around the Balkans, was regrettably familiar with guns. For all the eeriness of that crack, the noise of the powder itself never arrived. Even granting a suppressor, it meant the shots were being taken from a very long way off.
Then a head nearby burst. It belonged to a comrade who, flailing though he was at the sudden attack, had managed to jerk his rifle up. A moment later another report came, and in the same instant the man standing beside the corpse became a corpse himself.
By then the rest of them had found the line of fire and thrown themselves down behind the rubble of the abandoned building. When the next shot rang out, a bullet came in from the exact opposite direction and punched through yet another skull.
"Fuck…"
Surrounded? No—could you even call it a tactic, hemming a target in from both sides and sniping them in turns? He thought it even as he set his back to the rubble and drew a long breath. Whether the thing made any sense hardly mattered. All that mattered was the fact of it: they were being shot at from extreme range on both flanks.
Another sickening crack came. For better or worse, this one passed him by as well. The comrade crouched against the same cover let out a sigh of relief—and before that mouth could even close, a round tore through jaw and throat. Blood and scraps of flesh sprayed in every direction. A little of it spattered the man's face.
"…Huh?"
The witless sound slipped out of his throat on its own.
The bullet definitely sheared off to the side…?
His nerves were drawn wire-tight. There was no chance he had missed the sound, and judging by the rhythm of the firing so far, it didn't seem as if another shot had been squeezed off just now. But then it made no sense. Not unless the bullet had changed direction halfway there—
"Ghk—!"
The report came again. Once more the round whipped past above the cover where he hid.
The sound that announced death drew slowly away—and then drew near.
"Ah."
That was the last thing he remembered.
"—Gwenaël Duver. Apostle James the Less."
The cabin was appointed in lavish luxury. A middle-aged man with a mustache stood beside the sofa as he said it.
Seated at her ease on that sofa was a young woman, scars lingering here and there across her face. She seized a fistful of her own hair as if she meant to tear it out, and muttered.
"Hey. What did I just ask you?"
"You asked how in the world they managed to kill that many bastards without giving them so much as a chance to fight back."
"Right. That's how I remember it, too."
She stared at him, eyes wide.
"So why is the answer that bullshit? I asked you for the cause of this pathetic mess. We declared war with our heads held high, and now we're running. I asked you why."
"Yes. I believe I answered you correctly."
"Mercenaries who cut loose even on that hell of a battlefield, wiped out bawling like babies over one decrepit old sniper—and you want me to believe that?"
And if you don't believe it, what exactly do you intend to do? The words climbed as far as his throat. He forced them back down.
"Are you familiar with David and Goliath?"
One does not talk back to one's employer. He swallowed the complaint and offered a different story in its place.
"James the Less is the one who holds the miracle of that tale."
"What, so the bullets just hit harder?"
And David ran quickly toward the Philistine, and put his hand into his bag and took out a stone, and slung it and struck the Philistine in the forehead, so that the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.
The story of how he brought Goliath down is famous enough that plenty of people know it even if they aren't Christian. Felling an enemy commander with a single stone will do that.
"An ordinary bullet kills you in one shot if it lands wrong anyway. So what's the point?"
"It isn't that the power increases."
But the man shook his head.
"A sling. A hardy man dying in a single blow from a stone thrown by a sling is no miracle."
Take a rock to the head at speed and a grave injury is all but guaranteed. At close range it smashes through skull and helmet alike and kills on the spot. David had not prayed to God in the hope that his throw would display some miraculous force.
There was a lesson the Church liked to give its students. Do not pray that a lucky guess will land you the right answer on something you never learned. Pray that you will be able to bring out, without a single mistake, every bit of the skill your study has earned you.
"Gwenaël Duver's bullets do not miss a vital point."
There had been time, and a round for every body present. What happened after that required no further looking. A massacre. Nearest first, in whatever order the aim moved on, they had simply tipped over and died. That was why James the Less's epithet was Infection.
"Something like that… is that even possible…?"
Only then did the woman's eyes begin to tremble. How in the world was anyone supposed to face a thing like that?
"Which is why I advised you not to pick a fight with the Church."
"I—I didn't think it would be this…"
Well, of course she hadn't. That was why she had caused the mess. The man let out a small sigh. Had she done it knowing, she would simply have been mad.
The most frightening part was that all of this had been the work of a single man. For the Church, it amounted to nothing more than an errand—one person tossed in as lightly as a stone. She had let herself believe they lost only because her own side committed some fatal blunder, or because the Church had thrown real weight behind the fight. The color drained from her face until it was white.
"It's already done. What can we do about it? First we think about how to run. We've only just entered Kuwaiti airspace, so be ready to move the moment we land."
Whether his words were reaching her at all, the woman only stared out the window, her face full of fear. Beneath a night sky soaked black lay a sea of cloud.
"…Huh?"
And then she noticed a handprint left on the glass.
How long has that been there?
She had no memory of seeing it when she first boarded. Wondering if she had touched the pane without thinking, she laid her own hand over the mark—but the sizes were nothing alike. Half-convinced the print must have been there from the start, she drew her hand away, and this time her own print remained on the glass.
A moment later, she understood. The two marks did not overlap.
Huh? Wait. This wasn't made from in here. It was pressed from the outsi—
Bang!
"Eek—!"
Something struck the window hard. A man's hand—wrinkled, the fingers thick, callus worn deep into the skin. An instant later a face was shoved in against the far side of the glass: a cleft lip, the mouth split open.
"Apostle Philip…"
She had frozen solid in the sheer shock of it, and the mutter came from behind her.
"An Apos— an Apostle? You said an Apostle?"
"No mistake. Without a doubt…"
At those words she turned her head without meaning to, and when she brought her eyes back, there was already no one beyond the window. But she had not seen wrong. Had it been her alone, perhaps—but the attendant she had hired had reacted to it as well.
"AAAAAAAH!"
"……!"
A moment later, a scream came from the front of the aircraft.
This was no ordinary airliner. It was a private jet meant to carry a single passenger, and the cabin was one broad hall from end to end. The front of this space could only mean the cockpit. Whatever monster had flickered past a moment ago, it had not seemed the sort to scream like that.
"…Miss. Do you happen to know how to fly a plane?"
"…Obviously not."
"Then we're already dead."
"Th-the emergency parachutes…"
"They'll come right after us and cut the lines."
Not that anyone was going to be permitted to strap on a parachute and jump in the first place. Watching the hunchbacked man come plodding through the door that led from the cockpit, he let out an empty laugh. Whose blood it was, pattering off the spear in that hand—he had no particular wish to imagine.
"Two Apostles, just to take out one person. That's over the line. It really is."
Those were the last words he left, in the instant before the hurled cruciform spear drove through his skull.