Chapter 55
The Outer God waited for the priest of the Church of the Holy God standing before her to react. Only an uncomfortable silence answered. If she spoke and he answered, she could work her way around to the words that would let her punish Hyungkesuni — so what was this silence? Ill at ease, she looked over the execution ground, which had gone suddenly quiet.
But the priest's position had to be understood. With his own mouth he had just declared that killing her would earn a blessing. The Outer God had added that even the blessed might believe in any faith they pleased, yet from the outside it could only look as though they had taken an evil thing into their arms. Whether that was true or not, he would have to step down from the station he held. Who was going to kill a god? And he could not simply order just anyone to do it. A holy knight had already failed. He had brought a weapon that had killed a god once before down across her neck, and she had not died. Far from dying, she had defiled the holy knight.
And yet — there was one exception, wasn't there?
The priest's gaze came to rest on a single man. A holy knight who had already fallen stood there: to a priest's eye, a man turned a nauseating purple. Not a shred of his own will had gone into it, but the priest saw an apostate all the same. Killing the Outer God would earn him no blessing, because he had already received one. The one to be sacrificed was decided. The highest priest went up to Holy Knight Martin without hesitation and opened his mouth.
"Holy Knight Martin. Go, and discharge your duty."
At those words Martin looked down at his sword. The sensation of severing a neck was still clear in his fingertips, and he had watched the head strike the ground. Could he truly kill her? The doubt flicked through him. He turned inward and looked at himself once more. Faith in the Holy God still lived in his chest, and holy power filled his body together with that faith. The god was still with him. Brimming with devotion, he raised the sword. If taking the head was not enough, then he would keep killing her until she died.
"In our Lord's name."
Martin nodded to the priest and leveled the blade at the Outer God, who was watching them in silence. When he prayed to the Holy God from the depths of his heart, a faint golden light began to frost along the edge.
Ooooh.
The crowd could not look away from a miracle of god unfolding before their very eyes. Some of them were delighted, remarking that this was exactly why an execution platform made such fine entertainment. Even Hyungkesuni, seated far off on the terrace of someone else's house without the owner's leave, wished she had a snack as she looked forward to the sight of the Outer God being put to death.
The Outer God did not miss her chance. In the moment Martin raised his sword, she laid a road for the future, and the words drove deep into him and stuck. Martin's blade stopped. He turned and asked the priest,
"Those who received a blessing in place of executing an evil god are not sinners. Isn't that so?"
They were the words of a forked road. Affirm them now, and Martin — blessed by force though he had been — would be guilty of nothing. He could keep the station of holy knight he had built. He could not bring himself to pretend he had not seen the lifeline dropped at his feet and carry out this execution on the strength of faith alone. Above all, the magnanimity to take heretics in was a virtue of the Holy God. That was why Tisaha was so famous a hero within the Church: famous enough that headquarters, bitter that no such hero had ever come from their own body, had gone so far as to chip away at Tisaha's dignity.
Had this been a bargain of the sort that said look the other way for me, and let someone else go, Martin could have refused outright and cut her down. But this was a matter of sin. She had not denied the sin. She had admitted it. To say she would die taking the punishment in their place was to acknowledge the rules the Holy God had set. The Outer God who spoke did not know it, but the move boxed them in all the same.
Deny it here, and by the Church's own standard Tisaha became a sinner. The hero would fall completely, and Martin, swinging the sword in this very place, would become someone who could never be forgiven. Suppose he lowered the blade. Then who would die? Who would be sacrificed? A mere martyr might, somehow, have been found. But this was dying as an apostate. They had believed in god all their lives, and because of that very faith in the afterlife, the afterlife would become hell.
Of course Martin could still be ordered to do his duty. And if he refused, what then? From their point of view he had already gone over to the evil god. A sacrifice would have to be chosen, and they could not be seen choosing one here. Let the evil god say one more strange thing, and the whole situation would turn uncanny.
Then what if he affirmed it? The sin they had gone to such trouble to pare away from Tisaha would vanish. But Martin would cut the sinner down without hesitation. Afterward they could call it god's will, make Tisaha a sinner again, and shut Martin away in some backcountry monastery. The priest need only apologize for having judged wrongly, then set the will of god out in front. Having thought that far, he affirmed the evil god's words.
There had been only one choice. So that is what the priest did.
Only then did Holy Knight Martin raise his sword.
"When you die, I'll come find you. But don't worry. I suffered at the hands of Hyungkesuni, the Witch of Ecstasy, and still I forgive humankind. So don't worry. Swing."
The Outer God did not miss her chance. She also laid the groundwork so that Hyungkesuni, whom she meant to keep tormenting from here on, would go on suffering for a long time to come. She knew that a governor of a certain land had been blamed for two thousand years for no better reason than that he had sat in the seat of the man responsible for executing the most famous religious figure of his age. She was copying that. And Hyungkesuni happened to be alive, didn't she?
Just before the blade came down, she stole a quiet glance at that face far away, frozen in shock.
Martin swung. Light flashed gold along the edge and tore the Outer God's flesh apart in a beautiful arc. But her body returned at once to what it had been. In place of the thick smell of blood, grotesque triangles scattered on the air, and again and again she came back to her first form.
Martin swung to kill her to the very end. He swung for a long time. Swung. And swung. And swung.
Little by little the cheers died out of the people around the platform. The sound thinned only gradually, but there came a moment when the crowd startled, all at once, to realize they had fallen silent together. The pleasure and frenzy of executing a sinner who had to die had long since turned to unease.
Had the Church of the Holy God not sold Tisaha out at the start, the people of the Kingdom of Anselus would have ended at doubting a holy knight's quality. But they had already drawn away from the Church in their hearts, and now suspicion had fallen on the divine authority the Church claimed to hold. And so the people thought: is the Church of the Holy God truly a god worth our faith? Riding on anxiety, disbelief seeped in.
The sun climbed high, then slowly went down. Now it was dark around them.
The shackles and the clothes that had bound the Outer God were already torn to rags, baring a pure white naked body. But no one who looked at her felt anything like a human emotion. A desperate executioner, and a condemned woman kneeling with her eyes quietly closed, sitting as if in prayer — ask which of the two was the more mysterious, and anyone would point to the Outer God. She herself, of course, was sightseeing the world through the eyes of the blessed, thinking ah, when does this end? Is a holy knight just short on damage? Mysterious was only how it looked from outside.
In the end, the one who gave up was Martin.
"Your Reverence. I cannot cut this evil god down alone."
The priests of the Church of the Holy God who stood there said nothing. They knew the mood of the place. Mixed into the crowd were not only the king, the queen, and the nobles of Anselus, but the kings, queens, and nobles of other kingdoms as well. They had judged it a chance to display the Church's majesty, and that judgment had turned to poison and tightened around their necks, because if the worst came to pass, burying this affair would be exceedingly hard.
But a way of escape remained.
Half a day earlier: once the Outer God was executed, those who had received the blessing would be clear of sin. They had meant to treat the whole thing as if it had never happened, but being unable to kill her was a problem that came before that. Better to kill her here, and then acknowledge that the promise made with her was right.
The Outer God had said it without any such deep design. She simply had not wanted the blessed to be massacred in the name of religion after she was gone. She had learned that the harvest could reproduce, and if they were ruined, well, that would be a bit of a problem. That was all.
But the tangled knot ended by tightening around human necks. So the priest steeled himself to be defiled by the evil god, and resolved, together with the priests around him, to borrow the power of god and remove her.
The people were pushed back from around the platform. Sacred characters of god, the script used at the headquarters of the Church of the Holy God, filled the space they left. Join the characters, and a vast polygon appeared, and at each place upon it a priest or a holy knight took a stand. Then they knelt where they stood and prayed. The sunset had already sunk, and torches filled the dark with light.
Then the darkness split, and a tremendous pillar of light drove down into the platform. The people witnessed a miracle of god: divine punishment falling from high in the sky. The light swallowed the Outer God.
Crack.
With the sound of something breaking, a fissure split open where she had been, and the rent gap pierced the heads of the priests and the holy knights.
The Outer God was certain her body would melt away like this and vanish. In that moment, wondering what to do, she decided on a spiteful little trick. Drive a fissure into a person, and she could reach that person through it. A blessing was a very active thing. Which is to say, it was also possible not to bless. So she withheld it from the one priest who seemed to stand highest, and from two more chosen at random. Of the nineteen, only three received nothing.
There was one thing she regretted. The fissure climbed into the sky, but sadly it never reached that high heaven. She never got a look at the god's mug. Even so, she was satisfied in her own way, and vanished from this world.
The light faded. The evil god had been put down.
And yet, in that place — though every soul who had come from the headquarters of the Church of the Holy God had taken part in the work of killing her — there were three priests whose hair had not turned purple. A hellish suspicion defiled the ground where they stood.