Chapter 14
Aren't they leaving me alone a little too much?
Eat, sleep, and use the toilet — is that really all I do now?
I keep such a regular routine that Joanna's life has actually gained some slack. I really am on the wild-animal meta. Put food in front of me, and I take care of the rest myself.
Fortunately, I haven't been bored. Three more people have come into view: Wide, Isla, and Tisha.
The moment Hieronymus parted from me, he took the children to the grounds used for training people — down a long corridor, through the broad chambers that open along the way, and straight on. I call them grounds because the place isn't simply some wide empty lot. The site where the Church of Future Hope keeps itself is divided into quite a number of districts. From the memories of six people in all, I've managed to map roughly a third of it.
First there is the space at the very bottom of the underground, the place where I was summoned. Rooms and passages spread out from it like an anthill. The paths bend at strange angles far too often, perhaps so that anyone who doesn't know the way will get lost. Inside all of that sits an enormous chapel, and — as if they meant for people to live here should the need arise — there are residential quarters as well. Joanna has walked nearly every part of that underground.
Of anything beyond it, she knows almost nothing. The only place she ever went outside was the village she used to fetch food from. Before that, she lived in a different village entirely.
What nags at me is how enormous this underground is. Magic or not, they raised a warren this vast in the space of about ten years?
That's strange.
If I look more carefully at the place where the altar stands, I might see something later. It wouldn't be odd at all if they had simply occupied a site that was already here and put it to use. The world I came from had places like the catacombs, and Petra. Thought of that way, an underground city like this isn't strange.
Only the speed of it is.
Still, finding any other traces may prove difficult. When one person seizes another's temple, every trace of the previous god is smashed with thoroughness. Sometimes, as in Egypt, the thing is simply too vast, so they hack off a nose, or light fires and hide what remains under soot.
The reason I'm turning this over is simple. There may be places that not only Joanna doesn't know, but Hieronymus doesn't either.
If I keep several possibilities in mind, I can choose differently when something goes wrong. Think about nothing, and there are moments like that when you find you have only one option. When time is plentiful, there's time to worry, too.
And while I worry, I watch how the Church of Future Hope moves once it has the children in hand.
They walked for a very long time. Long enough, in other words, to leave this underground warren behind. Past a tangle of twisting passages, they came out at a cave mouth with a village visible far off — a spot camouflaged to look like an animal's den.
Seeing the outside with eyes, rather than through someone else's memory, is a first. It's midday, so everything around is clear. Looking through three pairs of eyes, the country is even more desolate than it was in memory. There are trees, but they're terribly sparse, and the plants themselves are things like cacti. The sort of barren land you see in old Westerns.
Wide and Isla are marveling at the outdoor scenery. Tisha looks around, and his whole body goes slack.
Oh.
Did he think he might be able to run?
Well, his resistance was strangely fierce. It's innate — the sort of personality that can refuse anything it has judged, by its own lights, to be wrong. Human temperaments come in every variety, and most of them can be corrected through physical abuse that goes by the name of education.
There are exceptions.
Those, as a rule, get killed.
But Tisha lived long enough to acquire the wisdom of fitting himself to the strangeness around him. That's why he survived.
This is quite interesting.
Anyway, Hieronymus took them into the village. The moment they entered, a man named Witga came out to meet them — the highest-ranking of the instructors. With his mouth he tells them they have received a blessing, that they are chosen beings, and he pumps their self-regard full to bursting.
What's hard not to laugh at is that neither Witga nor Hieronymus believes a word of it. It's obvious if you look, and yet Wide, Isla, and even Tisha don't seem to notice. Tisha simply appears to hate the fact of having been chosen at all. Even so, none of them reads other people's coldness very well. Is it because those eyes are looking at objects, not at people? Or because they've never seen any eyes but those?
Witga, watching them with eyes like that, led them somewhere. Several large men were there. One of them was Isitur, the man who had once dragged in a boy named La Planza. In other words, people of the warrior class.
Witga set the children down in front of them and shouted.
"The power was bestowed upon the children first. There is a reason the rest of you receive the blessing late."
He went on in that vein.
Hm? Said like that, it sounds as if those men claimed they wanted the blessing of their own accord. But a well-trained warrior might have gone flying, so they made an excuse and shoved the children in instead. That's how it looks.
Still, lying is bad. They ought to have given me some notice before they told the others. Otherwise it's a lie that may be caught someday. Of course, they could strictly control any meeting between me and the ordinary faithful. But in an order like this, once control starts to shake the agency of faith itself, how long can it really last?
I'll sow that seed a little later. For now, I watch the three children being tested.
They say, of course, that this is to show how powerful the blessing is. In reality it's an experiment. I'm curious too.
And the result.
It was rather astonishing.
Tisha was beaten like a dog and went down, but Isla and Wide were different. Isla first. Alone, she dropped more than five opponents. When two came at her at once later, that was apparently more than she could handle, and she was struck and collapsed.
The one who changed the most was Wide.
He set a purple flame on his hand. Every gaze in the place changed, and one of the warriors who met it went up in fire in an instant. The next warrior burned as well, and at last a warrior who could use magic stepped forward. He wrapped light around his sword and floated a chunk of ice in the air. But the moment the purple flame enclosed Wide's whole body, all of it burned away before it could reach him. When the enemy was gone, the purple fire vanished.
A flame that isn't hot to him, and burns the other person.
Wide boasts of it at the top of his voice.
"This is the power Lady Rebecca gave me. She didn't give it to these two. I alone was chosen."
No — I didn't particularly hand it out any differently. As far as I could feel, I went through the exact same procedure. If there was a difference, it was that both the light and the warmth on that side were very great. But the same was true of Isla. If anything, only Tisha had unusually little warmth beside a light of similar size.
Anyway, taking the purple flame as his proof, Wide strengthens his own legitimacy another notch — especially where faith is concerned. He tells them that because he believed the most fervently, he received a gift like this.
Exactly two people watch that with furrowed brows: Hieronymus and Witga. The others, perhaps deciding this is the answer to the faith they had believed in, lift prayers as they look at the flame. For a long while they cry out a curse-like name — Ksaksshibal. Hardly a name that suits something called the Church of Future Hope.
And in the middle of it, there's something interesting. Isla, looking up at Wide with jealousy all over her face, hurts everywhere right now. She took a long beating in the two-against-one. Her whole body throbs, and she is angrier than she is in pain — angry at the opponent standing in front of her. Faintly, there is despair as well: why wasn't she the one chosen? She said it while clutching the dirt on the ground.
"Why wasn't I chosen?"
But this child isn't the interesting part.
The interesting one is the boy named Tisha.
He's the only one among them who didn't grow tall, and his skin didn't change color either. The only thing that changed was the color of his hair. But he did gain an ability, because nowhere on his body hurts anymore. I don't know what level it is, but he was hit hard enough in the fight that something truly ought to have broken, and there isn't a single place that aches. After he was struck and sent flying, he lay still on the ground without moving — but he hadn't passed out. He was holding his breath, quietly watching. And just before Wide's speech ended, he got up, hurried around behind Isla, and prostrated himself.
Why go there?
I understood soon enough. Wide had started making comparisons. First he pointed at Tisha and sneered at him for receiving the blessing and still gaining no power at all. Right after that he turned on Isla and persistently pressed the claim that he stood above her.
Hmm. My prediction twisted a little. I thought that if the three held similar power, Wide would pick a fight with Tisha in the order they received my blessing. That won't be easy now. Instead, Isla has come to hold a grudge against Wide. Faintly, she seems to feel defeated as well. People say their skill is about the same, but in truth Isla had been a little above him, and now it has been overturned.
I like Wide too. Goodness. A whole five people's worth of warmth came in! Isla didn't kill anyone. Tisha lost after the first opponent hit him.
The harvest is performing exactly to spec!
Hehe.
Warmth seeps in. I'm shivering in a cold place, and this is warmth on the order of a warm wind brushing smoothly over my whole body. While I took stock of how much the ones who gave themselves to me had changed, I was able to take the warmth in.
Today is a good day.