Chapter 10
Hieronymus went out with the corpse, and two men went with him.
From the look on his face as he left, showing him the taking of warmth may have been a mistake. Even so, it was better than having the thing uncovered later, caught out after the fact.
I hadn't thought he would change in an instant. Last time, I believe, there had been a faint connection. This time there was nothing of the kind. He never looked at me through the other one's eyes.
And so a question rose in me. What was I, then? Of course there was no need to dwell on it. Before I troubled myself over what I was, I had to obtain more warmth. This might be the only chance I would ever have to come out into the world.
If I sank back to the bottom — nothing but a sway, drowned under everything as if beneath a sea — I might never again be able to emerge with a body like this. This body was never me to begin with.
It was only because the body existed that Joanna had been able to succeed at all. Only a very little, so far. Even the smallest push I could give made her burst.
That aside, Joanna was watching me with a peculiar look. What was it? Had what just happened made her afraid of me? For all that, she still gazed at me the way the faithful do. If anything, it seemed to have grown stronger.
Presumably because I had turned a person into a monster. To someone like Joanna, that must look like a magnificent power. All the more, since she herself had changed the same way.
I rose and let my eyes travel over the room. The furniture was heaped with very costly ornament, and none of it agreed with the rest, which was surely why it could hide the strange apparatus overhead. A clammy, sunless energy lay wrapped around the whole room. It felt akin to the arrow that had struck the altar, and to whatever had been smeared on the blades those men carried.
Meanwhile Joanna went out — to wipe away the blood spilled when she cut the boy's throat, I supposed — and brought in the cleaning tools from a corner. Strange, that I could see both at once. If the people at Hieronymus's side could be seen this way as well, I thought I would feel easier. Or Hieronymus himself. But given how wary he was of me, making him into what Joanna had become would be difficult.
I would watch for the moment.
The main objective: increase the harvest. The production plan was already set, so I had only to fix the schedule and the quantity. After that, I would have to think about how to obtain still more warmth.
Looking at Joanna, I could see the confidence peculiar to those who hold power. Said another way, that was all there was. Her light had been dyed a dark purple, and her skin had turned blue, so there ought to have been something more — an impulse, something of that sort. There wasn't.
It had been the boy, rather: the warrior of the faith, only faintly connected to me. His name was Cheki. He had changed in a way much like mine. The moment he lost his warmth, he felt a cold that seeped in deeper than the bone, just as I do, and he knew by instinct that the light before him was warmth, and he attacked. The girl standing in front of him, the one named Patricia, was struck by the strange arrow Cheki formed and died on the spot.
If I followed the chain of connection, shouldn't the warmth have flowed from Patricia to Cheki, and only then been mine to take? But the warmth came straight to me. Or was it that only the result occurred, once every calculation was already finished?
What was warmth, to begin with? The light seemed like a soul. Or a vessel with a soul held inside it.
The warmth was here. The light fell to me out of the sky. At the beginning — in the time when I could not even make it burst — all I could do was watch it fall. Then came a stretch when the light would hardly fall at all, and only after a span that was, for me, immensely long could I obtain warmth again.
And so, just now, I had eaten warmth. The light clouded and shriveled, but it remained. Where, then, had all the light that fell to me before now gone? When I lick the light, I receive memories together with the warmth. I licked it this time as well. But the light did not disappear.
Or perhaps the light that fell to me had already been in the midst of vanishing. Every one of them had ended their own life, or come to something near it, and so I judged this warmth to be very bitter. And indeed, the light of someone who had lived happily and then died a sudden, violent death held far more warmth. So warmth must have been what I first took it for: joy, happiness, an expectation of what was still to come.
In other words, I could obtain warmth only by killing someone in a good state, through a person dyed in my color.
I needed warmth. Then I would do it. Anything.
Fortunately, Hieronymus hated those who ruled now. He had spoken as if he meant every king, prince, general, and minister, but the ones he truly resented could only be a few — someone in a country or two, at most. Even so, he had raised this cult on hatred, and so he had no right to stop that hatred. The moment he denied it, someone else would kill him, seize the cause, and carry on this cult that called itself the Church of Future Hope.
This was also why every dictator was bound to rot. Even if the dictator held some pure ideal, the people who followed him did not. Those with force of arms, in particular, had to be kept well provided for. Otherwise the first dictator died, and a second appeared.
Hmm. Yes.
If I did nothing but grant power, I could keep the factory running. This place was a ranch, designed by someone so that people would hate one another. Then the harvest had to grow.
Looking at Joanna, her bodily abilities had risen a great deal. She had watched her opponent, caught hold of them, regenerated the wound, and gone for the light with a cold head. A very fine-performing power.
I came back into the room and looked at Joanna, wiping the blue blood from the floor and the walls with the cleaning tools. She wore the form of a beautiful woman, but she had originally been a woman past fifty. No doubt she had been pure and lovely when she was young, until her husband's violence wore her to ruin, and miscarrying her child broke her heart entirely. That was why she did not hesitate at filthy work.
How would this person change?
I quietly watched Joanna Smith as she sat scrubbing the floor with a rag — swish, swish — pausing now and then to touch her own waist, and glad of it.
Hieronymus. His true name was Yasle.
The leader of this Future Church carried the corpse to his laboratory. One of his men laid it on the operating table, bowed to Yasle, and left. Yasle watched until he was certain both of them were entirely gone, and only then turned his eyes to the corpse.
It had mutated into a form no one would believe had once been a person. The leavings after a finished meal, left behind by whatever wore Rebecca Rolf's skin — the thing that had called it the taking of warmth.
Against any danger, he drew on thick gloves, took up a knife, and drove it into the corpse.
A huge horn had grown from the left side of the boy's face, where no bruise had shown. It was closer to a mass of meat than to a carapace. What mattered to him was the skeleton. Flesh swelling up was common enough, but truly powerful magic, or a curse, twisted the shape all the way down to the bone. When he scraped the flesh away, only a few fragments of bone remained where the skull should have been.
He had established this much: it was the work of an extremely powerful force. It was also proof that whatever wore Rebecca Rolf's skin was stronger than he had expected.
He was just about to carry the thought further when the door burst open.
Yasle looked that way.
Someone barely half his height stood in the doorway. One of the four who had waited before the stairs of the stepped pyramid, deeper in than the three circles at the altar. What marked her was the staff in her hand, taller than she was, a human skull fused to a spine.
She came in and flung back the cloth she had been wearing over her head. Dull silver hair spilled down, and a girl's face emerged. By the sculpting alone one might have called her beautiful, but she came toward Yasle with a thoroughly wicked smile spread across her whole face.
"Oho! So this is the creation that monster made! Yes — twisted every bit as grotesquely as the ones outside told me."
"Hyungkesuni. Do not come into this place as you please."
Yasle called her that, and the girl looked at him as if he were being tedious.
"Hey. This is the sort of thing we ought to be looking at together, don't you think? We have to grasp what that thing is — the one that slipped so neatly into the body we prepared for a god. Hm? Isn't that right, Yasle?"
Giggling in an exceedingly clear voice, Hyungkesuni spoke his name.
"Hyungkesuni."
"Sorry, sorry. Here you're Hieronymus, aren't you? To think the naive leader of the Church-State of Yeongrang became the worst sort of heretic. You never can tell, with a life."
Hyungkesuni pattered over in short steps and stood before Yasle. Then she shoved a hand into the head of the monster he had been taking apart and rummaged through it. She drew her hand back out, took up the staff made of extracted human bone, and went to where the body lay — a twisted torso with the head already cut away. Hyungkesuni drove the staff into the raw cross-section of the neck.
A wet crunch.
Once the staff was planted in the body, the jaw of the skull fixed to it opened several times, then closed again. Hyungkesuni stared at that in surprise, tapped the staff a few times, and laid a hand on the monster's body — precisely over the place where the heart was.
"Well, well. This isn't human. Was it ever really human at all? There's no dead spirit here whatsoever. Hmm. Mm. A faint trace of energy left behind. Is this the energy that something was carrying?"
Purple mist seeped from the chest, wavered for a moment, and vanished as if it had never been.
The smile left Hyungkesuni's face at once. With a grave expression she swept back her long silver hair, not a strand of it tended.
"Did you learn something?"
"A little. But this—"
Then she sprang up onto the operating table and shoved her sleeve to the shoulder. She set a small, pure-white hand on the place where the heart should have been. A dark shadow passed over that hand, which looked like nothing but a child's, and seized the corpse's chest. Hyungkesuni snatched her hand back in a hurry.
It could not withdraw the way her hand of black shadow had. It was caught fast at the exact center of the body. Then, as if a small black hole had opened, every substance except the light crushed inward to a single point within a space about a handspan wide, and disappeared.
"Mana Pair-Annihilation. Ha. You really did call something from beyond the Interminable."
"What is that?"
Instead of answering, Hyungkesuni hopped down from the operating table to the floor, and grinned enormously. Beaming, she looked at Yasle and opened her mouth.
"A monster the Church-State of Yeongrang calls a being of the Void. The Law of Despair — one who has fallen into extreme despair raises an immense explosion, then suddenly sucks in everything within that domain and is annihilated. The false god you made, Ksaxfuck. The names are many. They mean only one thing."
Soaked in a madness that could be described no other way, smiling with her whole face, Hyungkesuni lifted both arms as she spoke.
She declared it with a face so stained with killing intent and hatred and joy and scorn, and with countless other feelings besides, that it could only be seen as rapture.
"You! Drew it!"
And Hyungkesuni laughed as if she were vomiting blood.
Of course she laughed. Yasle had once stood in the very place that suppressed cults and heresies such as these, and the moment he fell for the sake of revenge, the god of vengeance those cults and heresies had wanted appeared in the world.
Yasle clutched at the place on his neck where the sacred relic of the Yeongrang Church had once hung, found nothing there, and lowered his hand again. He glared at Hyungkesuni — once his enemy, and still his enemy now — and took up the knife, to finish the analysis he had only just begun.
And while he listened to Hyungkesuni's mad laughter, he studied the byproduct left behind by the thing he meant to use.