My Light and My Salvation (5)
The situation being what it was, Hitomi was moved under escort to Tokyo Maria Cathedral, and there she was left to wait.
"Hitomi...!"
Ringed by several holy knights, she sat in the empty chapel—and how long passed that way? Seoyeon came rushing in with a thoroughly urgent look on her face, and the moment she reached her, she pulled Hitomi into a crushing embrace.
"Are you all right? You weren't hurt anywhere, were you?"
"Ah—yes. I'm fine. I got a bit of a scare, that's all. Really, I was the one overwhelming them the whole time..."
"I'm sorry. I never should have left my post so carelessly, not with things as they were..."
"No. It isn't Shion's fault."
Seoyeon was rambling, nothing like her usual self. Hitomi gave a wry smile and, meaning to reassure her, lightly stroked the back of her head.
"No. The fault is mine. There are too many who know what Hitomi is to me. If I meant to be apart from her, I should at the very least have left her with an escort."
But Han Seoyeon answered only with her face set hard.
This time, of course, the incident had arisen for reasons entirely apart from that. Even so, a thing that happens once can happen a second time, and a third after that. She would have to be careful from here on. Resolving so, and still holding Hitomi close, Seoyeon turned only her head toward the holy knights.
"Has the party behind it been identified?"
"Yes. We have conducted an interrogation for the time being... but the circumstances appear to be rather tangled."
At those words Seoyeon's expression hardened further. She had not yet heard the details, but if the matter were a favorable one, it would never have been phrased like that. Only then did she let Hitomi go, turn fully, and face them.
"Your explanation, if you would."
"First, the perpetrator is Himei Hidetaka. He is French, of Japanese descent, but he naturalized several years ago and has been residing in Japan. Furthermore, according to Miss Ninomae here, the demon Philotanuss affirmed with certainty that the man belonged to the Rosicrucian Order, and the interrogation itself produced testimony along much the same lines."
"...The Rosicrucian Order."
Han Seoyeon murmured the name over again. It was one she knew.
Not, of course, the mystical secret society effectively dissolved in the nineteenth century, but merely an organization that had borrowed the name. The name of a once-famous secret society—a contradictory and faintly ridiculous phrase, though common enough in the occult world—carries a weight of faith, and of sorcery, all on its own.
Even the Freemasons of the present day do no more than occupy that name. In truth they are a collective of creators, and of the developers who turn such creations into anomalous technology. For the Church, it was better that an organization at least willing to accept its control should hold the name and keep quiet with it, rather than let the power of that name fall, for no good reason, into the hands of some other strange lot.
More than a few groups prolonged their existence in just that way, and the Rosicrucian Order was one of them. Where they differed from the Freemasons was that the Church was not precisely on friendly terms with them. It would rather have cleared them away, and was only leaving them be, for the present, for lack of a pretext.
Put plainly, how was the Church meant to look fondly on people who raised eugenics as their motto, ran experiment after experiment upon living subjects, and from time to time caused accidents both great and small? The sole reason they had survived this long was political ability—nothing more than that, and nothing less.
The subjects were often those ground down by poverty, in no real position to refuse; even so, most of the experiments at least proceeded upon the subject's own consent. And when an accident did erupt, their skill at cutting off the tail and calling it an individual's deviation was considerable. They severed people without the slightest hesitation, to a degree hard to credit in a group of only eight, so that even the Church found itself wondering whether an individual had truly run wild. They were suspected, of course, of laying hands on what was forbidden with exactly that in view—spending one of their own as a discarded pawn to do it.
At any rate, it was an organization that walked this almost uncanny tightrope, now and then dedicating to the Church some technology it had developed, and by such means kept itself alive. At that level, was it not still preferable to other madmen swallowing the Rosicrucian name whole? Opinions of that sort were far from rare within the Church.
In short, to tear the Rosicrucian Order down properly required a justification capable of persuading those voices and drawing the Church into a single mind. Either a replacement had to appear, worth the cost of upheaval enough to justify sweeping them out, or they had to cause an incident grave enough to force a consensus that the organization must be destroyed at once.
"...Might I borrow the line to the Vatican for a moment?"
"Ah—yes. Of course. Please, come with me."
When Seoyeon asked, the holy knight answered at once. Beneath the reply, however, tension moved quietly across his face.
It went without saying that the means by which she could reach her godfather numbered four or five at the least. That she would nevertheless insist on borrowing the cathedral's official line meant the business was unmistakably official—a conversation to be held not as anyone else, but as Apostle Bartholomew.
Whoever was on duty at the Vatican end would, the instant Seoyeon's voice came down the receiver, be certain that something—he would not know what—had been wrecked on a spectacular scale. So the holy knight thought, privately.
Whether or not she knew of that worry, Seoyeon drew her gaze off him, turned her head, and looked at Hitomi.
"Hitomi. Would you come with me as well?"
"Uh—do I have to testify about something too?"
"No. It isn't that..."
Hitomi had asked it back, and Han Seoyeon faltered a moment before she went on.
"I simply want you to stay with me. It has only just happened, and the thought of setting you apart again leaves me thoroughly ill at ease."
"...Yes. Of course."
The answer that came back was cuter, and dearer, than she had expected, and Hitomi smiled faintly. She stepped in at Seoyeon's side and lightly took her arm, as though linking them together.
"Shall we go, then?"
"Yes. Let's go."
A rotary telephone, the sort one hardly saw anymore. Hitomi watched Seoyeon with the receiver in hand, speaking into it.
"...Yes. I believe you may move to subdue them at once."
She had been asked to stay, but that had never been a request to sit in on a conversation with the Pope. It was enough that she simply be seated somewhere within sight.
"Then... yes... regarding that matter, authorization to review the materials... Yes. Thank you."
The call ran nearly twenty minutes. Only after a long stretch of talk did Seoyeon set the receiver back in its cradle.
"Heading out again? Off to take revenge?"
"No. Right now, I want to be with you more."
Seoyeon said it with a faint smile—Hitomi had asked after catching only pieces of the call.
"And I'm not especially inclined to destroy the Rosicrucian Order as payback for their laying a hand on you, either."
They were an irritatingly diligent crowd when it came to landing the first blow, but this time they had clearly crossed a line. They caused accidents as a habit and made a practice of cutting off the tail afterward, yet that only worked if one chose an opponent on whom it would work. A negotiation offered as mutual benefit can be conducted, rationally, only with someone who still possesses reason.
If Han Seoyeon truly saw red and stepped forward declaring she would simply kill every one of them, then however useful they had been to the Church would become a matter of no importance whatsoever. And so this incident was, in all likelihood, truly one person's rampage. If that were the case, Seoyeon had no cause to bear the organization itself any ill will.
"Huh? Then why did you put it that way?"
"Because if this incident had left me thoroughly angry, that alone would be reason enough to destroy the Rosicrucian Order."
That the Rosicrucian Order had lived until now rested on nothing more than the opinion that it was, even so, better to leave them alone—a kind of political logic, in the end. But if Han Seoyeon declared, here and now, that she would smash every last one of them whether they benefited the Church or not, the situation would change. It would become a choice between dissolving an order whose continued existence carried both profit and cost, and making an enemy of a sitting Apostle.
There was hardly a fool who would choose the latter. A mind of that caliber would, at the very least, never climb to a seat from which it might add so much as a word to the Church's decisions.
"To speak frankly, they are one of the organizations I have found distasteful, and have had my eye on, for a long time. This was a truly regrettable incident, but since it has already happened, it is better to use it to the very limit."
So saying, Seoyeon smiled bitterly. At the point of turning even an incident to account in this fashion, she must have felt it herself—that she was not entirely free of political logic either.
"...Did that leave a bad taste, perhaps? My making use, in a way like this, of an incident in which you came to harm."
"As if. If it helps Seoyeon even like this, then I'm glad—ah, no! I'm angry!"
Seoyeon had spoken as if a little worried, and Hitomi answered with a bright smile—then, as though some change of heart had struck her, suddenly said that, drawing her brows up.
"I'm angry to the tune of one hug and one kiss."
"Is that so?"
Seoyeon's face had been about to darken, certain she had truly given offense, but at the words that followed she broke into a soft laugh. At once she drew Hitomi into her arms and pressed a kiss to her lips.
"But will this truly be enough?"
"...Anything more than this isn't something we should be doing in a church, is it? I'll collect the rest when we get home."
"Yes. I will remember. ...Shall we truly go back now, then. To our home."