It Was Your Mistake — 4
The next day.
Once I had finished granting blessings in exchange for warmth, I returned to my room.
Hieronymus, who dressed in nearly the same clothes every day, did not leave at once the way he usually did. Instead he sat down at the table and chairs along one side of the rather large room. He meant to talk. So I sat across from him.
He did not begin at once. He sent Joanna to fetch something to drink. She bowed her head and went out. Hyungkesuni was not there, and Hieronymus kept his silence until Joanna returned.
I could not tell whether it was a meaningless waste of time or a way of putting pressure on a person. But if he had meant to pressure me, he had chosen the wrong method, Hieronymus. For me, there is no such thing as meaningless time. I am always watching the people who have received my blessing as they move about. Of course I did not say so. He had not asked.
So he stayed silent until Joanna brought the drinks and set them down, and the moment the cups touched the table, he opened his mouth.
"Lady Rebecca. I heard you tried to go outside yesterday."
"Yes. That's right."
I said it, and drank what had been set before me.
Oh? A flicker of contempt crossed Hieronymus's face. Had I done something rude? Good. Behind the shield of my ignorance, I had one more way to jab at him.
At bottom, Hieronymus and I had a contract, but we were closer to enemies—each of us using the other. The contract had been a tissue of lies from the start. It might as well not have existed, and Hieronymus surely knew that as well as I did. So he was wary. Compared with the beginning, the look he gave me had been shifting, from a dangerous opponent to a fool who merely happened to hold power. Even so, he was dangerous all the same. Hoping he might lower his guard a little further, I drank what was in the cup. It was sweet, a flavor halfway between tropical fruit and bitter root.
From the way Joanna had brought it out, it was probably something close to an aged liquor. Perhaps that was why Hieronymus never brought his to his lips.
Me? I drank it in a single swallow.
He studied my face with care, as if searching my answer for my intent, and then he looked disappointed.
"Does this place displease you?"
"A human body weakens if it doesn't walk. This flesh has to walk."
Yes. A great many videos say that walking is good for one's health, because the people who survived were the ones who could walk far, and for a long time. The path of evolution here did not seem to have run so very differently. If I did not move, the muscle began to waste away.
At that, Hieronymus nodded, as if something had occurred to him.
"Then I will prepare a place."
"It has to be a long walk. Not a level place—an irregular one. This flesh can keep its functions only by walking there."
It was the body that needed it. That was the truth. I do not lie. When you want to lose weight, you watch health videos, don't you? Back when I was human, I had watched quite a few of them. They had never actually driven me to exercise in earnest.
At my demand, Hieronymus fell silent. Of course he did. A place like that would be somewhere around here—not inside the building, but outside. I was telling him I had to walk out there. There would be more encounters. My reputation inside the Church of Future Hope was already quite high. What sort of change would the people who met me bring about?
Go on. Think it through, and put limits on what I do, Hieronymus. I will sow my seeds through laws you never set.
Hehe.
The cult leader who wore the name Hieronymus—Yasle—looked at the outer god standing expressionless before him.
There was sense in the words. The outer god was trying, by whatever means it could, to maintain the flesh it had come to inhabit. That was why it ordered meals and demanded the body be trained.
Once, flesh an outer god had settled into had suffered grave damage. A weapon, made with the various arts he had committed to memory in his days with the Yeongnang Order. Its head had been blasted clean off, and yet it had devoured the one who struck it and restored the wound. Contrary to what Hieronymus believed, it was the power of the outer god within that had regenerated Rebecca's body. What his eyes had seen, however, was only that.
Even the way it constantly hungered for warmth had looked to him like something the flesh required in order to be kept. From a human way of thinking, it could hardly be otherwise. It was strange that a being able to remake another person's body so utterly in an instant should labor so earnestly to maintain its own. Too paltry to be regarded as a god.
Long ago, when Yasle had been leader of the Yeongnang Order, one of the gods he faced had behaved like a beast. That god wore the shape of a wild animal, and yet, unlike its appearance, it did not actually live by eating. After it performed the act of hunting, more often than not it left the remains untouched. The god Yasle had faced himself had been like that.
And not only that god. Records the Yeongnang Order had accumulated since far older times, from confronting gods, stated that what was called a god possessed no biological traits. They also recorded that when a god seized a human body, that person no longer behaved in any human way—still less lived as Rebecca was living now. At most, they ate fine food and drank liquor.
And yet, strangely, the body of a person a god had descended into held together all the way until the god departed. If the god left properly, the person went on living perfectly well even after it was gone. Gathering that information, he reached the conclusion that Rebecca was not so tremendous a being after all.
Precisely because of that, Yasle judged as follows. If he stopped her here, there was no telling what she might do. He would be blocking the very actions by which she maintained her body, and she might take that for hostility. He guessed it was something like stealing the nest out from under a living beast.
"Very well, Lady Rebecca. Then if Joanna and Hyungkesuni go with you, you may do as you wish."
He attached the two who could move, should the worst come. On top of that, he decided he would assign two warriors under the pretext of protecting Rebecca. With that, he believed he could keep control even if something happened. This whole area was the Church of Future Hope's domain anyway, and after a show that had run for forty-five days, there was no one who did not know Rebecca was an important figure.
The spectacle in which one could witness a real miracle at the Church of Future Hope had been a smash hit all the while. Offering a Sacrifice and receiving a blessing—he could set that aside. To anyone in the Church whose mind had not gone entirely rotten, it was an unsettling act.
But what came after was different. Under Yasle's direction, people had watched those who devoted themselves to the Church of Future Hope receive blessings without a Sacrifice. Men and women missing limbs, or carrying fatal wounds, returned whole. No—they came back far stronger, and handsomer, or more beautiful.
And Yasle had arranged it like this. Those who devoted themselves to the Church received the better blessing. Follow his orders, and you became a finer person than if you offered a Sacrifice. The Sacrifice faction, and the Devotion faction. He had deliberately split them into sides and steered matters in the direction easiest for him to move.
Between the two, Rebecca was not a mere tool. She was the blessing itself—easy to use, pleasant to look at, and above all possessed of no violent power. Like a creature made to be used, she had become a great strength to Yasle. So even if she wandered the territory this Church of Future Hope held fast, he could permit it.
No. He had no worry about Rebecca acting, in itself. The problem was strange people clinging to her. Andrew, for instance, who had tried to win her favor. His real name was Andrew Jacks.
He had been one of the figures who governed the faith before it took the name Church of Future Hope. That did not mean he had been the former first among them. Originally the Church had been a network of cells—strictly speaking, something closer to an indigenous religion that had not yet been gathered into one. To put it simply, Andrew had held a place much like a pastor in a Korean Protestant church: his own congregation, complete within itself. So even setting Andrew aside, there had been countless others acting as leaders.
The one who had organized all of that and built it into the shape of a cult was Yasle. Had he borne no malice, one might have said he raised a folk faith into a universal religion. It was amusing, though, that without that malice an organization this vast would have been nearly impossible.
In any case, the reform had been too swift, and believers remained who did not look kindly on Yasle. Ordinarily one would educate children to root such elements out, and form a cartel so that when they grew they would occupy the high seats. That was work meant to be carried out over several generations. But Yasle, set on accomplishing his revenge, had no intention of looking so far ahead. So he had lashed it together in a slapdash way, pulled out only the fanatical elements, expanded them viciously, stirred the whole mess together, and made the cult that was now the Church of Future Hope.
Thus his gaze turned not on Rebecca, but on the people who would approach her. He turned her loose in the Church without laying a single restriction on her, because he thought of her as a beast that obeyed well when it was told what to do. No—rather, he meant to use this opening to catch the dissidents. Direct punishment was a double-edged sword, but laying hands on an apostle could be cleared away easily under the charge of blasphemy. When the sacred is defiled, people lose their reason with ease. They believe their most important value has been taken from them, and human beings answer being robbed with pain. All the more so, then.
"Then may I go out starting today?"
At the outer god's question, Yasle nodded.
"Yes, of course, Lady Rebecca. But Joanna and Hyungkesuni—you must go out together with those two."
"Yes. I understand, Hieronymus. I'll do that."
Hieronymus never so much as touched his drink. He rose, bowed to Rebecca, opened the door at once, and stepped out.
When the door closed, from one side of the corridor—where the shadow lay—a girl with gray-tinged white hair came walking. Hyungkesuni.
Tok.
A deep blue-green veil covered the place. A shroud of silence, from which neither light nor sound could escape. Inside it, Hyungkesuni spoke.
"You allowed it?"
"Yes. Beast or not, if you try to tear down its house, it may react dangerously. Refusing would be the more dangerous thing."
"House?"
For a moment Hyungkesuni did not follow him. Then she understood. He meant that the outer god lived in a house, and that the house was the flesh called Rebecca Rolf.
"You could call that flesh a nest. But you don't think it'll simply run?"
"If it runs, we catch it then and put it in a cage. Still, it has worked diligently up to now. A reward of this much should be fine, shouldn't it?"
Yasle looked at his accomplice. When they had built this cult, she was the one who had done all manner of work for him—killing those who posed a threat, and manipulating the dead to dismantle hostile organizations.
The Witch of Ecstasy.
Back when she had belonged to the Yeongnang Order, doctrine had named her an enemy who must not be suffered to live beneath the same sky. From Yasle's point of view, a woman who moved on nothing but pleasure. But she was also a witch powerful enough to survive in opposition to the Order. So when the Yeongnang Order fell, he had gone to find her. He thought that if the head of the Order cast aside his god, founded a cult, and declared he would take revenge, the Witch of Ecstasy would be delighted, and would help him.
And just as he expected, she lent him her power. She was someone who might betray him at any moment. But so long as he kept her amused, she would lend him her strength until the revenge was finished. That was the contract.
She looked at Yasle with turbid eyes that held not a single point of light, and said:
"Don't regret it."
"Rather, I mean to use this chance to catch the dissidents, Hyungkesuni. I've ordered that whenever Rebecca goes out, she must take you and Joanna. Go with her, and watch the humans who come near."
Hyungkesuni started to answer, then nodded.
"Fine. I'll follow the order, Pontiff of the Church of Future Hope."
She flicked her staff—tok—and the deep blue-green veil vanished. Then she turned and went inside. Yasle watched her go, put the mask of Hieronymus back over his face, and walked on.
There was far too much he still had to do, if he meant to have his revenge.