The Angel Who Walks the Settlement
If the guards show up, I'll have to settle it then.
That was why Madangbal had gone for them without a word of argument. Maybe fetching the guards was his way of putting an end to this. A man who had watched the whole thing unfold could not possibly fail to see that the guilty one was the proprietor. Had he gone to lay the situation out and demand an arrest?
If the proprietor keeps denying it, there's nothing I can do alone. When Madangbal gets back, we press him together—
It was Moon-ssi who broke the frozen silence.
"I thought the curse had ended, and a blessing come down in its place……."
He opened with something I could not follow.
"Dad."
"So that wasn't it after all……."
"Don't start with useless talk."
"What good is hiding it now? Some things can't be taken back."
"And saying it out loud changes anything?"
"Confessing a sin doesn't need a reason."
"Hah. Suit yourself. Nobody's going to believe you anyway. That postman bastard will never set foot in our settlement again."
This was not going the way I had expected. So there was something here after all.
"I'll tell you all of it, straight," Moon-ssi said. "Hear me out, and try to understand……."
"Understand what?"
"Forgive us……."
"I'll think about that after I've heard it. But why ask forgiveness from me?"
"We deceived everyone, so we owe an apology to everyone……. I'll confess to the neighbors, one after another."
"Hm. I'll listen, for now."
The proprietor sat on the examination bed and jiggled one leg, easy as anything, as if none of it concerned him. Moon-ssi, unable to meet my eyes, began.
"That boy has a Core ability. It's been years."
The healing hand had been a fake, but there had been a real ability under it. If so, only one thing fit.
"An ability that makes people sick."
Moon-ssi nodded, perfectly calm.
"Lay a hand on someone and will it, and the illness takes at once. A cursed ability……."
Not a healing hand, then. A sickening one. A debuff-type power.
"It begins as abdominal pain. Fail to get the medicine into them in time, and they die."
A debuff that killed. No small thing. Wait. Had he ever had the chance to put a hand on me?
"At first my boy tried to use that ability to qualify as a hunter, but—"
"They wouldn't take him."
"That's right. It doesn't work on anyone whose body is superior to his."
So even if he had gotten a hand on me, the debuff would not have landed. The ability had another flaw besides. It took time to kill, which made it a poor tool in a fight that had to be decided at once. Nor was a sickening hand any use behind a desk. Of course he had never become a hunter. He had already failed the personality screening for Postman recruitment, and the hunter screening was stricter still. He would never have passed.
"If my son had become a hunter, perhaps none of this would have happened……."
A meaningless what-if. Anyone lives well when things go well. What matters is knowing how to find a way through when nothing does.
"Ah, would you shut up already? Dad, just go home!"
The proprietor shouted it, but neither Moon-ssi nor I spared him a glance. Moon-ssi pointed to a bottle on the medicine shelf.
"You know your drugs. You've already worked it out. That, right there, is the cure."
Levothyroxine. A medicine for hypothyroidism, and nothing at all to do with abdominal pain. So that was what had been in the canteen. Curing a fatal illness with a drug like that made no sense on its face—unless the illness had come from a Core ability.
The moment you gain a debuff-type ability, you also come to know the compound that cures it. That was what they said.
One of the hunters who had been my apprentice had carried a debuff ability of his own. His could blind a person for a time, and sight returned if you swallowed a digestive. That did not mean every blinding, no matter whose, could be undone with a digestive. Each ability user had a cure appointed to them. Two powers might both steal the eyes, and still demand entirely different medicines, according to whose hand had cast them.
"I suppose it would be best if my son and I left this place……. That will be how we pay."
"Ah, come on! I told you to go home!"
Exile struck me as far too light a price. The son ought to pay with his life.
"I thought his cursed life had been redeemed at last. That he had finally received the power to heal……."
Moon-ssi was guilty as well. There would have been times he knew what his son had done and looked the other way. Still, parent and child is a peculiar bond. A little mercy could be allowed on that account.
Not that any of this thinking matters. It was never going to be settled the proper way.
This was not Headquarters. Looking for due process out here was a luxury. Power enough, and you could wash a sin clean. Powerless, and you wore sins you had never committed.
For now, when the guards arrive, I'll have it out with them.
The door banged open, right on cue. Four guards. Madangbal came in last.
"Took you long enough. It's a stone's throw—what kept you? Hurry up and get that postman—"
Something sheared the air in front of me.
Throwing knives?
I dropped back a step and brought my shield up. Three blades had crossed my sight. They had not been meant for me.
"Kh—"
Someone choking out their last breath. I lowered the shield. The proprietor had both hands clamped around his throat, and blood poured between his fingers. Three throwing knives stood in his neck along a single diagonal.
"Uk……."
His lips twitched, as if there were still something he meant to say. That small movement was the end of it. His face plunged into the pool of blood at his feet, and the blood burst outward like a bomb.
Beside me, Moon-ssi had a hand pressed over his mouth. Shock was plain on him. Not as much shock as on me.
Opposite us stood the four guards, stock-still, and Madangbal with his arm still flung forward. The three knives had left that hand.
At once the guards hauled the corpse aside and began wiping down every place the blood had spattered. Not a heartbeat of hesitation. They had come to do exactly this.
Watching them, I understood at last how the pieces fit.
So. One more unexplained death for the books.
I returned to the square at the heart of the settlement. The two hours I had promised were gone, and settlers waited with mail for me to carry. More of them than usual had come empty-handed. Madangbal had called them in.
"Once again I have news of this kind to bring you. Moon-ssi's son, proprietor of our new clinic, has left our side. The cause of death is food poisoning."
A low murmur moved through the crowd. Moon-ssi, standing at Madangbal's shoulder, stared at the ground.
"But!" Madangbal lifted his voice. "All this while, the proprietor saved us with a healing power blessed by heaven! The time was short, and yet I cannot help rejoicing that a man who fulfilled his calling has gone on ahead of us, to stand at God's side!"
"Oh……!"
"Lord!"
Settlers were weeping. Tears of joy, without a doubt.
"I believe! I believe the last blessing he bestowed as he departed this earth means our village will never suffer food poisoning again!"
"Oh!"
"G-God!"
"We are freed forever from the devil's clutches!"
"Looord!"
One by one, people sank to their knees.
"And now, taking up the calling of that blessed son—Moon-ssi, here beside me, will become proprietor of the new clinic, and watch over us!"
"Oh……!"
"Bless him!"
"B-bless…… blessings upon him!"
Before long Moon-ssi was wearing the same face as the rest of them.
By the time I had crammed the mail into my bag, the square had emptied of everyone but Madangbal and the children he had been romping with all day.
"How much did you know?"
At the question he answered with that same loose, sunny grin.
"Know about what?"
"All of it."
"Well, you're family now, aren't you? No sense hiding it any longer."
Share a secret, and you became family. Was that how it worked?
"Ask it like that, and I hardly know how to answer. Safer to assume there's nothing that happens here I don't already know."
Madangbal—Wide Foot—was a nickname I had hung on him myself. Turn it over as many times as I liked, and I still could not have named him better.
"I'd known for a long while that Moon-ssi's son had a nasty ability."
There was no way he could have learned that except from Moon-ssi himself. Which meant Moon-ssi had known what Madangbal was, too. The real power that ran this settlement. The two of them had been family already.
"But I thought the healing hand was genuine. I believed what Moon-ssi said—that a blessing had come down to compensate for the cursed ability. Tch. To think it was a lie. Death is a light sentence for that one."
So now that he knew, he had passed sentence.
"You could have judged him under the law. Thin as it is, this settlement has laws, and I'd just proved the healing hand was fake."
"Sure. That would have worked too. But doesn't it sit easier, knowing God is the one looking down, rather than the law?"
"Not especially."
"You don't believe in God, so I'll grant you that. But you don't think the law is going to protect you either. Same as me, isn't it?"
He was not wrong. The only thing I believed in was the Backscratcher.
"Anyway, you were no ordinary postman. I knew I hadn't misjudged you. I've got an eye for people, you know."
Everyone else had thought the same. Not only him.
"You worked out the water had been dosed just from handling the cups a few times. The real healing hand was yours. How did you do it?"
"I told you. Forensics."
"Figured you wouldn't say. Well, either way, we came out well ahead. On behalf of the people here, you have my thanks. Without you, they would have gone right on worshipping Moon-ssi's son."
"They would have. You included."
"Don't be difficult."
"Thanks that cost nothing have a way of making a man difficult."
"I know that. I never said they'd cost nothing."
He held out a sack with something in it. I took it and looked inside. A familiar green Core.
"You can move an expensive Core for what it's actually worth, can't you? Things like this are wasted on us. We'd never get a fair price, and we don't have the standing to carry them to Headquarters and hand them to a certified appraiser the way you do."
Moon-ssi's son's blood had not spattered the Core. Even so, it had been a long time since I had held one that reeked of blood this strongly.
"This is worth a good deal. Feeling generous?"
"The price includes a condition. You carry the Cradle's private business to your grave. You can manage that? Not a word to any outsider. Not a word to anyone here, either."
"Take the Cradle's secrets to the Tomb. That it?"
I did not much care for the way Madangbal kept order. But I could not deny that the settlement ran, and ran steadily. This was their justice, and the people here gave it their absolute support. An outsider had no right to meddle. So long as their faith held, God would remain.
Whatever else, this was a settlement I would have to keep visiting. Nothing good would come of it falling into chaos. Not for me.
"If the thanks aren't empty, I'll take them gladly."
"Look after us from here on, Mr. Postman."
"Look after you how?"
"How do you think? What else would anyone ask a postman for, besides delivering the mail and a little forensics?"
"Get lost."
Where had they buried Moon-ssi's son? The guards did not seem to have left the settlement. Hidden somewhere in here, then.
"So they didn't call this place the Tomb for nothing."
"The name outsiders use for our settlement? Completely wrong."
"How's that? I got a look at a corpse today, thanks to you."
"All of that was for the sake of peace. Somebody has to get blood on their hands, or order doesn't hold."
Not entirely untrue. Even so—
"Odd thing for a man who believes in God to say, isn't it?"
"I'll give you back the very words you used on me. How's that?"
"I just don't picture God getting blood on His hands in the name of peace."
"Well……."
Madangbal tipped his chin and stared overhead, lost in the thought. All those eyes of his would be seeing was the steel roof, not the sky.
"You might be right. Maybe God doesn't get blood on His hands."
He turned toward the children at their play and tossed the last of it off, light as anything.
"But that might only be because somebody else is doing the job for Him."
Same as ever, he fluttered away and ran to their side. The same good-natured Madangbal I had always known.
"Aigoo, our little princess—you said your tummy hurt a minute ago, and you're all better already? Sure it's all right to keep playing?"
In no time the children had him surrounded. A sight I had watched plenty of times. For some reason it looked strange.
"Hm? You were upset earlier? Why? Oh, the wings? No, no, it's fine! Hm? Big brother wants to try them on his back too? Shall we?"
I put the Tomb behind me and set out. A short walk, and a broad plain opened ahead. At the far end of it a settlement sent up black smoke. The place Headquarters' intelligence said had been hit by raiders. Ruined or not, it lay on the short way through. I would have to pass it.
Come to think of it, calling Madangbal's settlement the Tomb might not mean anything at all.
Go where you liked, it was a tomb just the same.