Chapter 106

With a soft tap of her toes, Kieli left the room with the same bare feet and white slip as the other girl had. Tee-hee! She turned in the direction of the voice. She saw the hem of a slip fluttering down the hallway for just an instant before it melted away into the gloom. Kieli pointed her feet in that direction as if drawn by a magnet. Strangely, she had no hesitation or fear. For some reason she felt as though she’d known this bizarre girl for a long time. The inside of the tower was like a maze, but whenever she seemed about to get lost, the girl’s voice beckoned her. Kieli padded obediently down the cold hallway floor as she was beckoned. After several winding corridors and staircases, she came out into a wide, straight hallway with a vaulted ceiling. Engraved pillars lined the walls on both sides, with religious paintings between each one that were much larger in size than the picture in her room. That was where Kieli came to a stop. That girl from before was standing on the other side of the hallway; it was just like looking into a mirror. Her white slip stood out in the gloom. “Who are you?” Her own voice echoed softly against the ceiling. “You forgot? You always used to smile whenever you saw me.” The girl pouted her lip, miffed. Then she giggled again and spread her arms wide, reaching both hands out to Kieli. The hem of her slip fluttered high up in front of her, and then she said, “Welcome home, old friend…” Foosh— Though they were indoors, out of nowhere a strong wind hit Kieli straight on, and she turned her face away and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Psst psst psst psst… She began to hear people whispering to each other. The next time she opened her eyes, the pictures lining both walls all began spinning at once like rewound reels of time, playing scenes from the past. Too many images flowed into Kieli’s mind for her to sort through them all, giving her vertigo. The scene in all of them was the cathedral she’d been shown today. The whole throng of people inside talked uneasily among themselves. All eyes were riveted on a spot directly below the balcony that jutted out into the main hall, where a sea of blood was forming around someone on the ground wearing the long white ceremonial robes of a clergyman. Kieli thought he was an old man, but his face was too horribly crushed to look at, let alone tell anything from. His pure-white robes were dyed crimson before her eyes, and the sea of blood oozed steadily outward like a living creature. The crowd circling him drew back fearfully. What happened; why did he fall all of a sudden like that…? Did he slip? No, I saw it! I saw someone push him! Kieli could hear their unsettled whispers. The expressions of all the people in their buzz of conversation showed from different angles in each of the paintings lining the wall. The priests had begun working to clear the bustling congregation from the room. Kieli even saw Father Sigri and Julius’s father in one of the paintings, guiding people outside. They were both a lot younger than they were now. She could make out Setsuri standing next to Father Sigri, holding a baby. Soon after the people started to follow the priests away, an enormous shadow fell over the electric lights illuminating the great hall. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! Kyahahahahahaha! Shrill, crazed laughter echoed over the heads of the people. The torches adorning the walls crackled and burst, and everyone began running around in terror. Gya-ha! A lone innocent giggle rang out, out of place in the midst of the confusion. The baby in Setsuri’s arms alone seemed happy, squealing with laughter and waving her tiny hands toward a shadow where there was nothing to be seen. “That child did it! She’s demon spawn!” someone yelled, pointing at the baby. The hysterical shouts wove their way through the crowd, spreading like wildfire among people who were already at the height of fear. They fell into a frenzy and mobbed Setsuri, surrounding her and jostling as they tried to snatch the baby she protected. Mom! Stop it. My mom—somebody help my mom! Kieli shouted with all her breath at the scene flowing into her mind, reaching out her hands. But naturally, neither her hands nor her voice could reach it. It only glided along the surface of her consciousness and then away. The baby—the baby Kieli, who’d been laughing up until then, burst into ear-splitting wails. The shrill, grating cries only spurred on the people’s panic. As she cradled her baby protectively to her chest, Setsuri scanned the crowd, looking for someone. Finding that someone, she extended a pleading hand for help. Kieli mentally followed the line of her mother’s gaze. Standing there a little apart from the confusion was Father Sigri. He seemed rooted to the spot, just looking on blankly as the agitated crowd elbowed him violently this way and that. He took in the frail, outstretched hand of his wife, who stood holding his daughter—and Father Sigri bit his lip and abruptly looked away. The last thing Kieli saw before the images of the confusion went dark was Setsuri’s sad black eyes. After a period of blankness, she began to hear subdued murmurs from inside the paintings again. “Who will fill the late Eleventh Elder’s seat?” “Lord Sigri was the prime candidate, wasn’t he?” “But there are rumors that his daughter is a demon child…” Against the backdrop of the people’s murmuring, the image of a lavish room with a heavy round table in the center formed itself within the painting. Old men sat around the table in long, adorned black robes. Next to the lowest seat at the table, where the old men all turned their harsh looks, stood a man. “Well, Lord Sigri?” asked the old man in the highest-ranking seat. “Would you like to add your name to the list of men who have sat in that seat at this round table?” asked another old man. “Are you prepared to forsake your wife and daughter?” asked another. The ten men’s twenty eyes all focused on the standing man. There was silence for a little while. And then the man, staring straight ahead, said, “Yes.” All the religious paintings on the wall were back to regular, unmoving pictures. The girl who’d appeared from out of the painting in Kieli’s room was gone, too. A cold wind blew in from the far end of the painting-lined corridor where she’d been standing just moments ago. Kieli made her way toward that end with quiet footfalls like cold waves lapping at a shore. The moment she stepped out of the hallway, a violent gust of wind crashed into her. Before her stretched a colonnade completely open to the elements, connecting this tower to the next one. In the gaps between the fat, evenly spaced columns she could see the towering, inky shadows of the mountains. Cold mountain wind riffled her thin slip. Her exposed skin was freezing in no time. Kieli cringed, folding her arms over her chest for warmth. Someone was walking up the cloister toward her. Someone about medium height and skinny, wearing long, black robes that melted into the darkness around him and carrying books and papers under one arm. The long, thin edges of his glasses caught the faint outdoor light and gleamed silver, telling her who he was. Perhaps her white slip stood out in all the darkness; he noticed Kieli right away, too, and halted, seeming surprised. Kieli spun around 180 degrees and started to flee, but a voice called after her, “W-wait!” and she slackened her pace automatically. Sigri caught up to her and grabbed her arm from behind. Momentum sent her stumbling forward, and they both ended up falling. Papers scattered over the floor, rustling. “I-I’m sorry. Are you hurt?” Apologizing clumsily, he reached down to help her up, but Kieli slapped his hand away. They both sat there for a little while at the edge of the colonnade, wordlessly catching their breaths. Turning her face away from the man in front of her to glare at him out of the corner of her eye, Kieli said coldly, “You’re still working so late?” At her question, Sigri looked down for a moment at the papers and books littering the floor. “Yes…there are…a lot of problems happening right now, so things are busy…” He wore a tentative smile on his haggard, tired-looking face as he answered. Kieli lowered her eyes and tightened her fists in her lap. “Did you want to be an Elder that badly? Badly enough to throw away Mom and me?” Her murmur trembled a little. She could tell that Sigri was speechless. Kieli squeezed her fists even harder, tightly enough to cut off the blood to her fingertips. After a long pause, a short, grief-choked answer came. “I’m sorry…” At the sight of one of the top men in the Church meekly bowing his head without a trace of dignity, Kieli felt bitterly disappointed. Not in what he looked like making his pathetic apologies. In what he didn’t, more likely. “Stop it, please. Apologizing to me won’t do anything. If you’re going to apologize, apologize to Mom. Mom was…Mom was—a strong person—but…!” Kieli remembered the images she’d seen just a little while ago. Her mother’s despairing face when her father deserted them. “…But I’m sure she wanted you to help her that day!” She couldn’t bear to let this man see her cry, so she lowered her head and held back the tears. One of them escaped anyway, falling with a tiny splat onto a clenched fist. Sigri covered it with his own big, thin hand. “Let me go!” “I’m sorry…!” Kieli tried to shake him off, but he wouldn’t let go. He lowered his head until his brow rubbed against the back of her captured hand. “I’m sorry, I’m so truly sorry…” “Apologizing to me won’t bring back Mom. I don’t accept you being my father.” Kieli forcibly snatched her hand out of Sigri’s where he bent over it in humble contrition, apologizing over and over. She whirled around and half-ran, half-stumbled back the way she’d come, leaving Sigri on the floor where he sat. She was so disappointed. This was just unbelievable. A top Church official was supposed to be more stuck-up, more high and mighty, more like the cocky bad guy behind the snake-oil salesman who trumpeted the teachings of some nonexistent God to mislead the public. He was supposed to be the great wall of evil blocking her path. It wasn’t okay for him not to be. He’d killed Jude, he’d killed her mother, he’d hurt Harvey so badly, and he’d captured Beatrix—and it wasn’t okay for the ringleader behind all kinds of unforgivable things, Kieli’s most hated enemy, to be just an exhausted, normal man like that. The people Kieli loved had been tormented all this time because of a stupid little enemy like this? No, she refused to accept it. This wasn’t enough to get her to forgive him. He didn’t get to just make an easy apology. If an easy apology like this settled things, I wouldn’t even know what I came here to fight! Kieli ran barefoot back down the hallway. By the time she made it back to her room, she was panting hard. She shut the door and dived straight into the bed. Hurry up and come get me, Harvey…! she wailed at him silently. I thought I’d reached the end of my rope. I don’t want to be in this stupid place. Let’s just rescue Beatrix and go home. Let’s go home, right away. Can’t we all go back to Easterbury and live a happy life there without ever having anything to do with these people again? “Harvey…Corporal…” Her face still buried in the pillow, Kieli’s murmur and her muffled sobs were swallowed up by the silence of the room. Even as she wished for that future in her heart, she knew no amount of wishing was likely to make it come. Harvey’d said they should live in the house at the transfer station, but he definitely wasn’t really picturing a future like that. Before she knew it was happening, the happy time two and a half years ago when she was fourteen, when she’d just met them and felt so sure she’d found her place to belong, had drifted far away from her. She could never get it back now. “Yo. Whatcha crying about?” asked a voice above her suddenly. When she lifted her face from where she’d buried it in her pillow, a pair of dark blue-gray eyes, hardly distinguishable from the dimness of the room, were looking at her. When did he…I guess he must have come into the room while I was out there. A tall, lean man in priest’s garb was squatting neatly with his hands around his knees by the decorative molding at the head of her bed. Kieli shot up from the mattress and jumped to the far side of the bed. She wiped her eyes and glared at him, clutching her pillow in front of her like a shield. Three days had gone by since he’d disappeared on her first day here. “Where have you been?” she asked. And then, a beat later, “I thought you were going to kill him?” Her words sank nastily into the murky dimness of the room. “Hmm, true…I figured I’d be nice and wait till you finished your touching reunion with Daddy before I tore him apart, but your meeting pretty much bombed…” the man answered with a thin smile. Half of that might be true, but Kieli guessed that it was at least half a lie. In what little light there was, she could make out that the skin of one cheek was green and mushy. She bet he’d been crashed out somewhere, unable to move again. “So, whatcha crying about?” he inquired again insincerely, and grinned. He must know why already, too, the jerk. She sniffed, embarrassed. Then she scowled at the floor and quietly began to answer him. Kieli didn’t understand herself what made her speak so openly to this jerk, but a part of her actually felt as though he was exactly the one she could confess something like this to. “…I was so sure there was a big enemy here, and that if I beat him, all my problems would be solved. But there isn’t one…” Just a normal, tired man who regrets what he did. “It’s not fair! What am I supposed to hate now…?” As she spoke, she realized that she was the same as that old engineer on the miners’ train, that there was a darkness deep inside her heart, and it crushed her. She was like that crotchety old man who could only cope with the pain of losing someone he loved by hating someone else and taking it out on them. Kieli must be the type who needed to have an enemy, too. The people special to her kept being lost one after another, and she couldn’t rest until she’d made that someone else’s fault. Even though she was sure Harvey didn’t see it that way. Harvey was someone who could forgive those who trespassed against his own interests without any trouble. She was so small-minded compared to him. With no warning, someone was messily ruffling the hair on her lowered head. She hadn’t noticed him moving, but all of a sudden Joachim was crouching right in front of her. “There, there, no need to cry,” he said, as if he were soothing a baby. Kieli stiffened uncomfortably, but she didn’t resist. Though she didn’t know why, his voice made her want to cling to it like a lifeline. It sounded calm and kind, but at the same time it had a sort of darkness to it like the sky at night. Her ears soaked it up. “You and I are birds of a feather. So you know what? I’ll give you a hand with this. I’ll kill your enemy for you.” When his voice disappeared, all sense of his presence had bled away into the darkness again, too. Hugging her pillow with her head bowed, Kieli stayed unmoving for a while. She felt sort of delirious, as if she had a fever. Nebulous half-formed thoughts swirled around and around in her head. I’ll give you a hand with this. I’ll kill your enemy for you. And she hadn’t told him not to. She’d kind of felt that if someone would do that for her, she really wouldn’t mind. An image of Harvey’s face flitted through the back of her head. Those coppery eyes always looked about to cry whenever Kieli made a mistake. Right now, one of them was dark brown instead…. It’s no good. Clutching her pillow tightly, she thought with conviction, It’s wrong, I just know it. I’m about to make another mistake. “Joachim…!” Kieli finally came back to her senses and looked up. She was the only presence left now in this room ruled by darkness. After stiffening for just a split second, Kieli slipped out of bed. Before she shot out of the room in her bare feet, she tossed the pillow she was still hugging back onto the mattress. His soul is too starved, it’s not tasty… Would it at least make a decent snack, though…? Maybe we’ll eat him… Whispering raspingly to each other, the shadowy people-shapes slithered out of a corner of the room on their bellies. They crawled along the floor with eerily long, crookedly bony hands and feet toward the man standing in front of the writing desk. They stopped short midway there, though. You again…Are you getting in our way? You don’t have a soul. We can’t eat you. You’re only in the way… When Joachim spared them a glance, they withdrew to the corner of the room again, leaving accusing whispers behind them as they melted away into the darkness. The man in long robes who’d just set his pile of documents on the desk noticed someone else in the room with him and moved to turn around. “Don’t turn.” Joachim cut him off by seizing one of his arms from behind and twisting it up, thrusting the folding knife against his throat. The man stopped moving with a tiny moan. In a reedy voice, he asked, “Who are you?” “The grim reaper,” Joachim answered coolly. The man’s shoulder joint creaked audibly. Contorting his body, he managed to bear the strain, though it was difficult, and when he spoke, his voice sounded pained. Still, he resolutely asked again, “You’re the assassin, then…?” “Aw, you’re giving me too much credit. But hey, if you people want to make the criminal a human you can see with the naked eye, I don’t mind taking the credit.” “Are you going to kill me?” “Yep. Do you want to beg for your life?” It was almost an innocent question, really. Still, even as he sweated greasily from the pain in his shoulder, the priest neither pleaded nor fought back. Joachim didn’t know if the guy was acting tough or what, but the unexpectedly calm response took the wind out of his sails a little. That greasy old geezer he’d killed last time (well, no, he’d wormed his way into the man’s good graces while intending to kill him, but the ghosts had beaten him to the punch and cursed him to death first) had begged plaintively for his life even after he kicked the bucket. Joachim had a hard time understanding why this man wasn’t getting scared and begging for his life like that. “Come on, beg for your life,” he whispered, drawing his face in close to the neck he pressed his knife against. But the man only gazed at the floor with a resigned, philosophical expression on his face. He had this vibe that said he’d taken it upon himself to carry a load of fruitless, pointless guilt around with him everywhere when nobody’d ever asked him to—a vibe a lot like that bastard’s, which made Joachim abruptly pissed off as hell. Snik. An incongruous, dry, inane sound. He’d given the priest’s twisted arm another hard twist and dislocated the shoulder joint. A thin cry escaped the man’s mouth. However, he still didn’t resist. Joachim found himself being questioned again instead. “…What are you trying to accomplish? What are you doing these things for?” “What am I doing them for?” Considering who was the killer and who was the victim here, Joachim didn’t see why he was the one being interrogated—and anyway, at the moment he wasn’t actually the serial Elder killer; it was the evil ghosts who were cursing them all to death…But the question intrigued him a little. He experimentally tried answering from an assassin’s perspective. “Because I want to kill people. They piss me off, so I’m gonna tear them all apart.” “Mm-hmm…And? What are you going to do after that?” Joachim was so thrown off by the unexpected question that he broke character. “What do you mean, ‘after that’?” A line of blood welled up from the man’s neck where the blade touched him. Beg for your life. Plead pathetically like all the other old geezers, he thought, pressing down on the knife, but the man’s voice was quiet even as his face twisted against the agony in his dislocated shoulder. Joachim even saw him give a self-mocking smile. “I had something I desired, too, once. I’ve sacrificed all kinds of things to get it. But once I reached a position where I could actually get it, all of a sudden I couldn’t figure out what it was I’d wanted anymore. I realized all I’d been doing was grasping after a stupid ideal that didn’t exist…And by that time, I’d already sacrificed something that couldn’t ever be gotten back. “I was a fool…I was a fool for hoping I could go back and atone for my sins after all this time, for ever hoping for even one minute that I could get her back…” Joachim had left the room and pushed the door closed behind him when he heard the slap of bare feet running toward him. The girl who appeared from the end of the hallway caught sight of him and came to a stop. She caught her breath and swallowed once before asking, “Did…did you kill him?” Her face was white as a sheet. Joachim shrugged one shoulder and gestured to the door behind him with his eyes. “His shoulder’s dislocated, so why don’t you go take care of him?” The girl turned her gaze to the door. She took a step, then changed her mind and stopped. After hanging her head, looking undecided for a bit, she turned back the way she’d come. “I-I’ll go get someone to come…!” Joachim merely spared her a glance before he started walking in the opposite direction. “Joachim—” she called tentatively. He turned a little. She’d stopped, too, and turned toward him. She opened her mouth to speak, but then she got a conflicted look on her face, as if she couldn’t decide what she wanted to say in the end. Joachim clicked his tongue deliberately loud enough to hear. “You’re nothing like me after all.” Then he abruptly broke eye contact and resumed walking. She called his name one more time, but he didn’t turn around again. What’s your deal? he thought. You got worried and came running! I was going to do it for you because it was what you wanted, and you really didn’t want me to after all! He felt pissed off. At everything around him. At that girl, and that man who gave pompous, complicated speeches instead of begging for his life, and that idiot who always managed to hover like a shadow at the edges of Joachim’s consciousness even when he wasn’t around. But you didn’t kill him, either… Why didn’t you kill him…? The ghosts were whispering mockingly from a corner of the hallway. When he shot them a glare out of the corner of his eye, they slipped away into the wall, their mockery still hanging in the air. His own footsteps echoed in the shadows as he walked alone down the deserted hallway. The heavy plop, plop of the sticky substance dripping from the fingertips of his dangling left hand accompanied them. A little while later he started to hear the bustle of a crowd forming behind him. What are you trying to accomplish? He hated everything, so he’d figured if he destroyed everything, the world would become something that pleased him. And? After that? What do you mean, “after that”? He experimentally stretched his left hand out in front of him. Hyperactive cells welled up from between his fingers and plop, plopped down to the floor in rotting clumps. His fingernails had already lost their original shape. He glimpsed exposed bone at his knuckles. What I wanted… He watched the mushy cells dribble from his fingertips for a while, with no expression on his face.