When He Turns Us Back from Captivity (1)
The phone left by the pillow buzzed and rang.
Eyes still closed, Hitomi groped until her hand found it and lifted it up.
"Shion. Shion, there's a call..."
But the thing vibrating was not her phone. She had only just broken the surface of sleep and hadn't realized; listening now, even the ringtone had never been hers to begin with.
Hitomi burrowed deeper into the arms of the Seoyeon lying beside her, nuzzling her cheek lightly against her as she said her name.
"Ah... I see. Thank you for waking me."
Roused by that, Seoyeon rubbed at her eyes and picked up the phone. She pushed herself up on one elbow, yawned once, and answered.
Neither of them ordinarily needed much sleep. If a call was enough to drag them out of it, the matter was usually urgent enough to justify phoning before dawn. Today was a little different, of course. For a certain reason, they had only fallen asleep at a very late hour.
"Hello. This is Han Seoyeon."
The contact displayed on the screen belonged to the Church—and to the holy knights, at that—so she took the call with a faint knot of concern.
"Ah, yes. Lady Margarita. Were you asleep, by any chance?"
"No. I'd only just woken, as it happens."
Han Seoyeon was not a woman of especially wide acquaintance, but she was not so devoid of social sense as to answer, Yes, and thanks to you, you woke me.
She brushed her sleep-flattened bangs lightly back and went on.
"May I ask what this is regarding?"
It was not a call out of the small hours, so it was probably no emergency—and yet the hour was still early enough to be called morning without any stretch. A call at such a time might fall short of urgent, but it would hardly be idle talk. Seoyeon steadied herself for whatever answer came next.
"It concerns Hinata Shion."
"......What has the president done this time?"
"And that's the reaction you lead with?"
The voice on the other end sounded thoroughly dumbfounded, though it soon shifted into something closer to reluctant understanding.
If they were invoking neither Han Seoyeon nor Margarita, but the broadcast alias Hinata Shion, then the matter plainly had to do with Anathema Production. And when something involved Anathema, suspecting the president got you the right answer more than half the time. Of whatever remained, pinning it on Hyakurenno was right more often than not.
"It was not committed by anyone within Anathema Production."
"Then an outsider?"
"If one insists on putting it that way."
"If one insists?"
The phrasing snagged at her, and Seoyeon murmured it back. An insider was an insider and an outsider an outsider—what need was there for a qualifier like that? Which meant it had to be someone not affiliated with Anathema, and yet not wholly unconnected either.
"A group claiming to be fans of Hinata Shion has come forward demanding the name of the Rosicrucian Order, which is currently under deliberation."
"......Have you been drinking, by any chance?"
"...I know it's hard to believe, but it's true."
Han Seoyeon closed her mouth and thought. This was not, at least, the sort of person who would joke about a thing like that. And so she said:
"...Why on earth?"
"...How should we know? They want a meeting, in any case, so we would be grateful if you could stop by the church this afternoon."
A sports festival, with every member of Anathema Production in attendance.
Having gone to the trouble of staging an event that large, they needed to draw in as many viewers as they could. In plainer, cruder terms, they had to milk it for everything it was worth. The broadcast schedule had, of course, been arranged with exactly that in mind. To be more precise, the two-day program had been run on Friday and Saturday evenings. Which meant that today, the day after, was Sunday—which was to say, a day with Sunday Mass.
The church was bound to be full of people, ordinary residents of the surface world among them, and one simply did not discuss the business of the hidden world inside a church under those conditions. So Han Seoyeon, having come to the church, followed the holy knight in charge to a café nearby. It was, of course, a discreet meeting place operated directly by the Church.
She was sitting quietly, taking a sip of the coffee the server had set before her—though the server, and everyone who appeared to be an ordinary customer, were in fact all Church personnel—when a small brass bell gave a bright little chime. She looked that way. A woman who seemed to be in her early twenties was coming in. She appeared to be wearing makeup, so her real age might have been a little higher... but probably not by much.
"A pleasure to meet you. You would be Lady Margarita?"
Her hair was pulled up in a scrunchie. She glanced around the inside of the café, found Seoyeon almost at once, and came over. Whether she had already seen a photograph of Seoyeon's face, or had only a rough description and simply recognized her on instinct, there was no telling yet.
"I am."
"Then you would also be Hinata Shion."
"Yes. That's right."
The woman smiled and sat down in the chair across from her.
Her manner was remarkably at ease. Calm, for someone seated before an Apostle—and before Bartholomew in particular. Either she possessed a strength beyond all ordinary measure, or she was a person with a screw loose, so far gone that even "guts hanging out of her belly" didn't begin to cover it.
The first, I couldn't say. The second is certain. Otherwise she would never have stood before the Church and coolly declared her ambition to walk off with the Rosicrucian name for a fan club.
"Ah, I should introduce myself too, shouldn't I? Machihiro Etsuko. For now I'm working as an indie VTuber under the name Haruka Kanata."
"Haruka Kanata. The spelling, if I might ask..."
"A spring day, and an autumn night."
A rather eccentric way to read a name. Then again, coining wildly peculiar names was hardly rare in the VTuber industry. Widen the frame to show business at large, and odd stage names were commonplace. In this case, her name was not the point.
"I was told you said you intend to form a fan club."
Better to go straight to the point than circle around it. When Seoyeon said as much, Machihiro answered with a bright little smile.
"Yes, that's right. To be honest, I'm not actually a fan."
"So the fan club is a pretext, and the real objective is the Rosicrucian name itself."
Just as the Church people had told her beforehand. From what she had heard, the woman had not even tried to conceal the intent; she had laid it out to the Church exactly as it was.
And the reason they had arranged for someone harboring such motives to meet Han Seoyeon, rather than simply showing her the door... was surely that the question of what to do with the name of the Rosicrucians—the Rosenkreuz—was still mired in difficult debate.
From an occult standpoint, it was no small name. What mattered most was its position: it could draw up the unmoored faith of the surface world's occult enthusiasts. To inherit the Rosicrucian Order was, by itself, to obtain the resource called faith in great quantity, and without end.
They also needed a body that looked likely to endure long enough that this debate would not have to be held again—one that would not conceive idle notions and waste that faith in strange places, or, better, one that would wield it in a direction useful to the Church. Only such people ought to inherit the Rosicrucians.
Organizations that would actually help the Church were one thing, but organizations liable to squander power on nonsense surely already had several candidates among them. They might simply have chosen a suitable one from that number. That they had gone so far as to summon Seoyeon and set her face to face with this woman meant... the woman who had appeared out of nowhere was, in the Church's judgment, a rather tempting candidate.
They must have come away with the sense that she meant to act in a way quite useful to the Church. A quiet what do you think of this one?, in other words, while they sought Seoyeon's tacit permission.
Be that as it may, she needed to pin down exactly what this woman was after.
"But why my fan club, of all things? You said you don't have any particular devotion as a fan, and I doubt you imagined that doing this would make me fond of you."
If she had simply announced that she wanted to start a fan club, Seoyeon might have looked on it a little favorably... no, even then, she probably wouldn't have. Still, wouldn't it have tilted, by the very smallest degree, toward the positive?
Even Han Seoyeon was not going to feel unpleasant if someone said nice things about her.
But that was clearly not the intent. If it had been, the woman would never have confessed that she was not, in fact, a fan.
So what was the goal? In answer to that question, Machihiro drew something from the bag she had brought.
A printout, the printing skewed enough to mark it as a copy.
At its center was engraved a hexagram. The symbol was used in many places, but in this case it signified the Jews, and so it ought to be called the Shield of David.
Russian, written to the left and right of the star. And beneath, as if by way of translation, the English words The Protocols, set down in a cursive hand.
One treaty among a great many. The Secrecy Protocol was occasionally referred to that way as well, but in that case the name ordinarily used was the Second Protocols.
And the Secrecy Protocol was hardly a matter of Judaism alone, so it would have nothing to do with the document in front of her now.
"...The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Seoyeon murmured the document's name.
When people spoke of famous grimoires, any number of titles tended to come up.
The Key of Solomon, the Lemegeton, the Black Hen of the Grand Grimoire... and, if one were to name one more, the Necronomicon, which a mere human being had managed, against all sense, to bring into existence.
But there were books called grimoires that ran on an entirely different track from those.
Books known by a name that sounded as if it had to be a joke: the Non-Magical Four Great Grimoires.
And yet, though their magical value converged on zero, they were in no way unworthy of the name grimoire, or book of magic—texts that had not originally been occult at all, until ideology and faith gathered and turned them into anomalies. Strange books.
The volume commonly called the Protocols of Zion, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was one of them.
"The original of the Protocols of Zion—the truth is, we have it."
Machihiro Etsuko lifted the corner of her mouth in a grin as she said it.
"All those wretched conspiracy theories. As a Christian of the Church, wouldn't you like to get them under some kind of control?"
At that, Seoyeon was silent for a moment.
"...And what does that have to do with my fan club?"
"You're Shion, aren't you. Zion."
"That's all?"
"Uh. Yeah."
"......"
So the ones who changed the world really were the lunatics. Han Seoyeon turned that proposition over once more, quite seriously.