Chapter 62: Farewell, the First World — 12
When the situation turned against her, Hyungkesuni made ready to flee far from her hermitage. A refuge like this one could always be built again. It stung to abandon everything she had gathered, but what was any of it beside her life? She packed only a little, meaning to slip away at once.
The coward of a witch stepped out of her house as she always had, intent on running far from whatever frightened her. This time she was much too late. Far too late, really, to call it the simple return of every cause she had sown—and still, what she had done closed around her throat.
Dakota had prepared with ruthless thoroughness so the witch would not slip free. Layer upon layer. Not a plan built so that no mistake could occur, but one built so that even a mistake could still be mended. If Hyungkesuni ran and yet lived, she was to be granted no time in which to close her eyes. Let her go into the forest, and the forest would be encircled. Let her go into a city, and every face would be checked until no place remained for her to stand.
A net of that kind usually exhausts the hunted and the hunters alike, and in the end a gap opens. Not this time. Everyone who had joined the witch hunt was smiling.
Their reasons differed. There were priests of the Outer God Church burning with the mission of catching the true Hyungkesuni. There were people who simply enjoyed the festival of a hunt. There were merchants glad that the crowds had come and their goods were selling. There were people delighted that the saint of the Outer God Church had traveled all the way from so very far away.
Only one kind of person was not smiling. Those who had lost someone to Hyungkesuni. People who, like Dakota, had happened to survive.
Dakota had chosen them on purpose—people who bore the witch a grudge—because she believed only they would do the work properly when she asked. She was right. From the top she coordinated them, and those beneath her took the labor up in small shares. The will above was unified, and the people below found that unity a pleasure. What followed was simple. The faithful of the Outer God Church tightened Hyungkesuni's breath by the smallest degrees, until the smile fixed at the corner of her mouth had spread across her entire face. It took exactly three months.
The moment she learned the Outer God Church was hunting her, Hyungkesuni set her mind to work. She had always been exceptionally clever. Long ago she had learned sorcery from a witch and then developed it on her own, and anyone still alive among the few witches of this age needed no further explanation. Of course, the one who had planted the prejudice that witches were wicked was none other than Hyungkesuni herself, and a great many witches had died for it. Once a prejudice takes hold, undoing it demands tremendous effort—but most of them were murdered, for one reason or another, before anyone could undo it. Cowardice was part of why she had lived so long, but it was not the whole. Among the reasons a woman who could twist a human life apart like a toy had survived this long was simple skill. Skill, though, is not enough when the enemies are many. So whenever people came swarming she had always fled smiling, fled while she shook with the fear of death. Had she been able to kill a crowd at a single stroke, her nature would never have let her run. She would have played with them and laughed in their faces.
Lacking the strength to defeat a multitude, she resolved to go west the instant she confirmed the Church was after her. The Adu Jungle lay to the north, the Skad Rock Desert to the south, and east and west of that line differed sharply in culture. Once, the Church of the Sacred God had been the faith of most of the east, and yet it had never managed to push west beyond those two regions. Expecting the Outer God Church to fare no better, Hyungkesuni chose to flee west.
She left her hermitage and began to run in spring. She crossed streams only just thawed, sometimes disguised herself as an animal, sometimes hid in the mud. Forests of that kind were as good as her own ground, and so she managed to last three months. Fear of the pursuit, though, led her into a wrong choice.
To Hyungkesuni, who knew the growth of the Adu Jungle by heart, the jungle was both a place to find food and a stronghold where she could gather the materials of sorcery, itself a kind of magic. As the hunters closed around her throat she had no choice but to go farther, out into country where her knowledge gradually ceased to hold. By instinct she picked the places easiest to break through and fled that way. Before she knew it she was going east rather than west—but she did not have to go west. So long as she lived, the victory was hers.
That was the trap. A blessed person surpassed an ordinary one in every respect, even with no ability of their own. Blessing sharpened the mind as well. An old person who had never received a single day's education could, after a blessing and nothing more than the memories that came with it, master a magic of an entirely different system. People like that had gathered to prepare one woman's death. It was the old joke made flesh: seat a roomful of graduates from the finest university in the land together and have them build a game for the sole purpose of emptying gamers' wallets, and handing over your money becomes simple courtesy. Hyungkesuni was not foolish. If anything, she was clever. She could not beat the numbers.
Wherever she went in the cities, a witch-hunt festival was underway. The people who actually lived there did not believe they were about to catch Hyungkesuni and kill her. They only thought, oh, they're holding that festival again, the one from not long ago. Through her eyes the entire city seemed to be straining to take her. A little more room, the chance to ask someone, and she might have learned the danger was not truly so great. But she had always judged and moved alone, and three months of pursuit had worn her mind down badly. Everyone looked like an enemy. Look here or look there, they were all denouncing Hyungkesuni.
And if, at a moment like that, someone caught sight of a girl carrying a hideous skull staff, what would they cry?
"There's a witch here!"
Hyungkesuni took the speaker's head on reflex, and the body became a marker announcing exactly where she was. Kill once, and it was over. At once the city turned itself inside out after the real witch, the way one hunts down rats. The trap had worked exactly as intended.
She fled with a smile spread across her whole face. Cackling, she behaved precisely as her epithet demanded—the Witch of Ecstasy. In truth she was frightened, so terribly frightened that a trauma from very long ago, one she herself had nearly forgotten, had broken loose. Too many sins lay behind her for that to serve as a cause. And the time comes when sins are paid. For many people, it never does. For Hyungkesuni, it did.
In the end the people who resented her arrived before her. Spears, swords, bows, staves—they came at her with every kind of weapon. However old a witch she was, she could not turn aside so many. Her left arm was severed from the forearm, and the right hand that had held the staff was crushed to the forearm under a hammer. Both legs were a mass of lacerations, and great spikes linked by iron chains were driven through her left knee, her right thigh, the right side of her lower abdomen above the pelvis, and her left shoulder. This was not an attack meant for a person. They struck as if they were hunting some enormous beast.
Then the last moment came. A man brimming with the hope that he might finally take his revenge was about to drive a blade into her throat when Dakota stopped him.
By a hair, the blade sank into the sand beside her neck. Hyungkesuni lifted her head, her face full of laughter. There stood a beautiful woman with vivid blue skin. She knew her. She had heard the name again and again while she ran. Dakota, saint of the Outer God Church. A cautious glance showed the saint halting the attackers and making them draw back. Within the smile stained with terror, a true laugh spread. A way to live had appeared.
"Hehe. Saint? I'm nothing but a worthless little witch. Please, please, have mercy. I haven't done a single wicked thing."
So she begged. To live, somehow, Hyungkesuni opened her mouth while she endured the pain that filled her body.
"I was only scared. They suddenly called me a witch and tried to kill me, and I was just—frightened—and so, like this."
She insisted she was not the bad one. She defended herself.
Dakota came up to where Hyungkesuni lay, her whole body wrapped in chains and pinned to the ground, and crouched at her head. Looking straight into her face, she asked:
"Hyungkesuni. Do you remember the day the Outer God died?"
"Yes! Yes! Of course! The moment those filthy bastards of the Sacred God Church blew the Outer God away? I remember every bit of it!"
It had been one of the truly satisfying moments of her life. Through Yasle's mistake, a monster that should never have come appeared in this world. Hyungkesuni had not known what the warmth the Outer God spoke of was, but she could not believe anyone robbed of it would die as they ought. The ominous purple hair, especially, had nagged at her, and she had killed as many as she could. Ominous imaginings have a way of becoming real. The Outer God returned.
Hyungkesuni was so afraid that she submitted. She begged only that her life be spared, and was ordered to write down the method by which she had been summoned. So she wrote it. A few days together, though, showed her the Outer God was stupider than she had thought—closer to a brat with nothing but power. As a test she twisted the magic written in the book and showed it off, and the Outer God understood none of it. She could be deceived. So Hyungkesuni twisted the summoning. She rewrote the formula so that, if summoned, the Outer God would be sealed for something like ten thousand years.
And it worked. The Outer God was banished from this world. At first Hyungkesuni thought she had died completely, but as those contaminated by the Outer God multiplied, she learned that was not quite true. Even so, the Outer God did not come back. By then the number of humans made into Sacrifices already far exceeded what should have been required, and still the Outer God did not come. Or could not.
Hyungkesuni felt wronged. I dealt with the Outer God—how can they do this to me? But that was a separate matter. To survive, she cursed the Church of the Sacred God with everything she had. Perhaps then they would spare her as nothing but a worthless witch. She begged Dakota hard for mercy.
Then Dakota said something strange.
"Someone died that day, in a house with a terrace overlooking the square. Do you remember?"
"No! I don't remember at all! No! I don't know anything about that! I've never killed anyone! Truly! They just suddenly rushed at me trying to kill me, that's all!"
Hyungkesuni could not see her expression. The sun stood behind Dakota, and shadow lay across her face. Dakota gave the order.
Hyungkesuni mistook it for her survival.