There Is No End Here — 12
I don't know why the king bowed his head so suddenly, but by some luck he took my words in of his own accord, and took them well. What frightens me is the moment his misunderstanding breaks. How will he turn? So I have to keep this going just as it stands, however I can.
"I bestowed a blessing on the descendants of Tisha who were gathered in this place. There will be those among them who gain special abilities, as Tisha did. Watch them. Keep them in your sight."
An unnecessary thing to say, if what I want is for people with power to do as they please until, in the end, they kill someone. Once you know a person has a special power, you try to control them, don't you? Bring them under management and the disorder shrinks — and then the warmth I receive shrinks with it.
But here, it needed saying. I am not looking at what stands directly in front of me. I am looking a little further on.
Receive a blessing, and there is profit in it. If one who received a blessing does something strange, the meaning is this: that is not my responsibility. It is entirely yours. True enough, as it happens. But people never miss a chance to lay the blame elsewhere — they snatch it with a ghost's instinct. Better to close that road before they find it.
Besides, among the royalty who have stood in this place until now, almost no one knows a thing about the Church of Future Hope. Even what they were taught comes to no more than this: heretics attacked the capital, Tisha appeared and took it back, struck down the heretics who remained, and became king. There is, of course, a passage in the account about receiving a blessing from the Holy God and working miracles.
I am truly glad I can read memory. It means there is no one who knows me in any detail. The one who knows the most is the king himself, and he has bowed his head, so the rest are likely to be fine.
The warmth I just took from Tisha is actually less than what came to me the moment I first laid eyes on him. The season of the greatest warmth was around the time he became king. Then the light was packed tight with it. If that had been a forest fire, the last moment was a candle.
So it looks like a loss, and it is not. How many people died by Tisha's hand? A boy who strove to judge right and wrong without bending walked his own road his whole life, steadfast, never once declining into frailty. The warmth drawn from the lives he cut away along that road — that alone — is past any comparison with the warmth of his single brightest moment.
Yes. People give warmth when they gain power, whether they are good or evil. The investment succeeded.
Then it is better if more of them receive the blessing. Brand them carelessly with the stigma of an evil god's power, and for a while a great deal of blood may flow as they kill and are killed — but the ones who die will be the blessed. All the more so because their hair turns purple. A convenient mark, when you mean to seek them out and kill them.
You ask how I can be so certain? Among everything I know, at least, conflict between races has never once been settled. Hostility toward a living thing whose form differs from your own is crueler than anyone imagines, and it does not let go.
Wide thought of himself as a new humanity. He never said the words outright, but when I recall how he boasted of the blessed as special people, only the phrasing differs. The essence is the same. Racial discrimination becomes, in time, racial cleansing. Those who received my blessing must not be the ones cleansed away.
While I was thinking this, the king raised his head.
"By what name should I call you?"
A name? Rebecca.
No. That won't do. I am wearing her shape, yes — but she died once, and after she came back she went off to live a life of her own. So I will say what is true.
At my words the king looks at me with the face of a man who has understood something. I had neatly cut away every mention of coveting the warmth inside the lights. What, then, did he decide I meant?
A man faded to gray whispers it.
"A god of the underworld."
Ptui. That is not what I want to become.
The lights I take for souls — drain the warmth out of them, and I don't care what they become after. Even so, rough as the guess is, I know how it ends. I have never once left the warmth untouched, so I cannot say what would come of that. What becomes of a person who falls beneath the surface, though — that, I believe I have seen. Something that was there, the last time I went down to the bottom after a long while away.
Think of the one whose warmth was taken while he still lived, and who turned into a monster hungering for warmth, and you can guess what became of it. But that is not what made me.
I still remember, down in the bone. One day I woke, and I was in a darkness endlessly cold. I was there a very, very, very long time. Only after so much time had passed that I myself had grown strange did the sky and the sea, at last, divide. The day the first light came to be.
I still remember it. There was truly only a single light in all the sky. And little by little, the lights increased.
I am not a light that changed its nature. Someone cast me into that cold sea. There must have been someone. Yes — who? And who could it be, if not someone fit to be called a god?
Kehehe. As for why I hate gods — well. Be that as it may.
A witch who smashed a window and broke into the royal family's private rooms is genuinely dangerous. Of course, once the book is written, it won't matter what I do. But that time is not now.
If. If, only just if, the people before my eyes are taking me for a god of death, then I can invent a reason Hyungkesuni came running to this place. For that I need to be certain. Blurt it out without looking, let a crack open in the setting, and they will decide I deceived them and stab me all over again. I don't want that.
Listen to the murmuring that passes among the soldiers, and the talk is that some tremendous god is in conversation with the king. There are doubtful voices among them, too, asking whether I am truly a god at all. Someone here is clever.
Mm. Then I ought to show them proof that is easy to understand. Something that can make me look like a god.
Rising again after my head comes off? That is exactly the sort of thing that earns you So you've shown your true colors, you monster!
What I possess is the power to regenerate, the power to make objects, and the power to bless. The most convincing of the three is the blessing. It is also the power I have been claiming, steadily, all along.
I need a man with some years on him. I pointed to one of the knights before me.
"I give my blessing to those who are lacking."
The knight stares at me as if to ask what I am suddenly saying. The king, though, wears the look of a man who has caught the hint, and he asks me in a voice that trembles.
"If one receives the blessing, does one improve?"
Oh? A trembling voice? Was there anything that moving, just now?
"You return to the body of your prime."
In fact, every person I have blessed until now has been so.
At that the knight looks to the king, draws himself to attention, and speaks.
"May I?"
"You may."
The knight steps up before me and removes his helmet of hard plate. He tucks it under his arm and comes forward — a typical man of years, hair left only at either side of his head.
Hold the profession of knight and you wear an iron helm a long while; of course the hair dies quickly. Grow young again, and all of it is solved.
"I wish to receive the blessing."
Hehe. Yes. Good. Blinded by the gain before his eyes, he has grown dull at judging what has actually happened in this place. When the talk piles up too far past what ought to be real, you lose track of whether any of it is reality at all, don't you? I'll make it dizzier still.
I spoke the line I always speak.
"I will give myself over to you. In return, later — once you have brought everything to its end — I will take all that you hold then. How about it?"
He nodded.
I reached out my arm and touched his light, and pushed myself in. The light turns black. The skin of his face begins to crack like porcelain, and then the old skin sloughs away like earthenware, and out from within bursts a man with snow-white skin and purple hair.
Good. A return to youth is a miracle simple enough for anyone to grasp.
He lifts a clumsy hand and sets it on the crown of his head. Thud. The helmet under his arm hits the floor, and he never so much as looks at it. His fingers worry over the hair that has grown back, and at once he bows.
No — wait. He isn't bowing because he was made young. He's doing this because his hair came back? A man of a nation whose state faith is the Church of the Holy God, switching gods on the spot — that makes me the wicked god!
Lump him in with the rest, call him rotted through with heresy, and have him executed, and then what am I supposed to do?
I look to the king in a hurry. The king, of all things, is gazing at the man with a faraway, wistful face. Then he turns to me and bows his head again.
"We thank you for the blessing. Yet I do not know by what name we are to call you. What should we call you?"
The point has slipped, just slightly. They are too overcome by so tremendous a miracle to keep hold of their wits. Then this is the moment — the perfect chance to tie Hyungkesuni into it, somehow.
I pointed at Hyungkesuni.
The spectator who had been sitting on the floor, watching this ridiculous little play, startles when she is singled out.
"One who has lived for several hundred years set upon me the name of Outer God. So please — call me that."
She was the one who gave me the name. I am leaving myself room to pass the responsibility along, and planting, besides, the suspicion that she may hate me. In truth she probably does. But this makes the hatred official, so that later, when she speaks, people will be able to wonder whether she is not distorting me out of ill intent.
"The Witch of Ecstasy — Hyungkesuni."
Say the name alone and they may not know her, so I give the rather famous title first. And why is the Witch of Ecstasy famous, you ask? Because she is known, by quiet word of mouth, for appearing now and then, laying a curse on a village, plundering it, and running. Even among the royalty, most of those who have spent long years on the military side know her.
"I forgive you."
Yes. I flung an indulgence square into the witch's face.
With this, Hyungkesuni is a witch who came to strike at me, and lost. And whatever lay between the two of us ends in my forgiveness. Anyone with ordinary sense is unlikely to make something of a matter already finished.
So long as they take me for a god, her chance of surviving the moment has risen. Honestly. What a bothersome witch.
"I will not be taking any warmth from you."
To anyone who doesn't know, that will sound like nothing more than strange words. Hyungkesuni will understand that it means she is to keep the contract.
Hehe. The large part of it is finished. To bring this gathering to a close, I look at the king and say this.
"Then I shall wait, until an answer comes from the Church of the Holy God."
All the way back to the beginning — I drew out the matter of Tisha, the first one I had contracted with. I will have them misunderstand that this, and this alone, was my purpose from the start.
Consistency makes a thing all the more convincing, doesn't it?