Waving the platoon back, this particular priest came to stand in front of Kieli. “I’m very sorry. That violence was my responsibility; I didn’t make my instructions explicit enough. I promise you, we mean you no harm,” he apologized frankly. Kieli was a little startled at that, but she quickly refocused and cordoned herself off from them again, glaring daggers up at the priest through her lashes. “Truly, um…I’m not going to do anything to you, so please don’t glare at me like that.” He looked discomfited by Kieli’s blatantly hostile attitude before straightening himself with a little cough and executing a neat bow. It was the polished gesture of a capital priest. “I’m here…I have come here on orders from Father Sigri, the Eleventh Elder on the Council of Elders, as an envoy with full authority in this matter. At Father Sigri’s request, I’m extending an invitation for you to come to the capital.” “……?” Blindsided by this totally incomprehensible announcement, Kieli gaped. “…What kind of joke is this, sir?” “No, I haven’t said anything to laugh at…” The priest trailed off hesitantly, bewildered at her entirely incredulous answer, but after another cough, he persevered. In slightly uncertain tones, as if he himself were only reciting a speech someone else had given him to memorize: “Well, now…sixteen years ago, Father Sigri’s wife, Setsuri, took their baby, who was about to turn one year old, and disappeared from the capital. You are that lady’s gift to this world, and…well, that makes you Eleventh Elder Father Sigri’s daughter.” The priest stopped talking, looking relieved to have finished with this summary explanation, and watched for Kieli’s next response. Several seconds of blank silence passed. And then the priest cried a loud “Ack!” as Kieli took him off guard with another escape attempt. Paying him no mind, Kieli ran as fast as she could. “C-catch her!” The Church Soldiers chased after her at the anxious priest’s instruction; while she did manage to get a good distance down the path, in the end it didn’t take them long to subdue her. The priest caught up a while later, panting hard and kicking up the hem of his long coat as he ran. “Why are you running away?!” “Let me go! Let! Me! Go!” With her arms locked in a full nelson by a Church Soldier behind her, Kieli thrashed her legs as hard as she could, aiming to kick over the priest standing in front of her. As he dodged hastily, looking nonplussed, he tried a different tack. “Oh, dear…Ahem, well, I didn’t want to play this card, but…” And, his tone becoming a bit pompous, the priest broached a new subject. Specifically, that of a person Kieli wouldn’t have expected in a million years to hear about from him. “We have an acquaintance of yours in our custody…Does the phrase “Witch of Toulouse” ring any bells? She’s safe for the moment, but her treatment in the future will depend on you. So I’m asking you, please, listen to—” “Beatrix!” Kieli cried, almost screamed, in fact, cutting off whatever the priest had been about to say. After the reflexive shout, she was too astonished to speak. The blond woman’s face the last time they’d talked at that bar on the parish border sprang up in the back of her mind. Kieli’d told her off for keeping Harvey’s letter a secret, and she’d gotten this expression that was sort of sulky yet ashamed at the same time, and then started smoking there at the counter as if she didn’t know what else to do with herself, and then a customer had come into the bar and the moment to start up the conversation again had never come. Kieli’d worried. She’d worried for so long. There were things she had to apologize for when they saw each other again, but she was sure Beatrix would tell her she was an idiot for worrying about them and forgive her right away, and once they made up they could talk so much more than they used to, and go clothes shopping together, and all kinds of things. That’s what she’d thought. And she’s been in the capital this whole time…? A seething rage boiled up within her and erupted. “Did you do something to Beatrix?! If you did, I’ll never forgive you!” “I-I told you, we haven’t done anything!” The priest, who’d shied back when Kieli interrupted him and had stood stiff ever since, hastened to explain further. “She’s just fine, I promise. So listen to what I—” “Why should I believe you?! You say all this stuff that makes no sense, and you bring my mother’s name into your lies! Just who does this ‘Sigri’ jerk think he is, anyway?! I’ve had enough!” Kieli screamed hysterically, fighting back with everything she had. When the soldier behind her flinched back, she took advantage of the opportunity to shake free and try to make a break for it, but they caught her and overpowered her again in no time. “Augghh!” A husky scream, and then the soldier gripping Kieli’s arm bent backward, holding his face in his hand. She whirled around, stumbling with how suddenly she’d been released, to see a jet-black beast with one bird’s leg and one grotesquely twisted protruding wing landing between her and the soldiers, protecting her. “Mane!” The beast glanced back to her when she called his name and nodded pointedly to reassure her everything was fine. When she got a good look at him, her momentary relief was gone in a flash: his left eyehole, the one where a dark brown eye should have been, was pitifully crushed in. “What happened to you…?!” “Don’t worry about it,” Mane answered easily, giving a glance at the enemy with his remaining amber eye. The platoon was daunted by the strange beast’s appearance, but they resumed their formation and readied their rifles. Mane didn’t give them a chance to fire. He closed the distance between them with one powerful leap, getting right into the heart of their camp and beginning to bite one soldier after another. For several moments Kieli was too stunned to do anything but watch the uproar begin, but then she jerked back to her senses with a start. “No killing, Mane!” He paused for only an instant at her voice, and in that instant there was the bang of a bullet slamming through the air—the bizarrely shaped wing seemed to leap into the air, broken right at the base, and his black body staggered, equally black bodily fluids pouring from it. However, he planted his feet and kept himself upright, immediately hurling himself at the soldier who’d fired, mauling him with his forelegs and knocking him to the ground. “Mane…!” “Get uphill!” he snapped. So Kieli wrenched herself away, turning on her heel to find a single soldier standing in her path up the slope. She somehow managed to duck underneath the gloved hand reaching out for her, but she couldn’t hold enough of her balance to stand back up again, and she ended up landing on her butt on the ground. Just as she thought she wouldn’t be able to evade the soldier again, he suddenly stopped moving. Holding her body stiff, Kieli looked up with her eyes to see a tall, thin redhead standing behind the soldier. He was holding the soldier by the throat with one hand and squeezing. Long, bony fingers bit deep into the struggling soldier’s throat as he gasped tiny, thready noises, and she heard an uncanny creaking—from the bones in the soldier’s neck, and, she suspected, from the ones in his throttler’s arm, too. “Harvey, wait…” As Kieli called out for him to stop, right before her eyes, a bullet grazed Harvey’s arm with the sharp sound of a gunshot—his lower arm—and tore off a chunk of his skin. Kieli gave a raspy shriek, frozen to the spot. Harvey casually dropped the soldier, who was beginning to foam at the mouth, and rolled his eyes slowly toward the man who’d fired the shot. After first glancing down at the blood dribbling freely from his arm and tilting his head almost questioningly— “—!” With a battle cry that Kieli could hardly even hear, he suddenly leapt at the shooter with no warning movement whatsoever, closing the distance between them and seizing the barrel of the soldier’s gun faster than her eyes could follow. Never mind Kieli; it all happened so quickly that the now weaponless soldier himself was equally dumbfounded, and before he could recover, Harvey had shifted to an underhand grip and felled him with a blow to the jaw from below. The black-robed priest who’d been standing behind him collapsed nervelessly to the ground, blabbering. Harvey just thrust the mouth of the rifle against the priest’s head, supporting its whole weight with just his left arm, and put his finger on the trigger. There wasn’t any conspicuous hesitation in his coppery right eye—or in his inky brown left eye, either. “Harvey, wait, stop…!” Something was wrong; there was too little uncertainty in his actions. I think he’s kind of snapped a little. And then Harvey abruptly swung the barrel straight out to the side. There was a dull metallic impact—the man who’d been on the verge of stepping in managed to raise the hilt of his saber just in time block the attack. Upon which they both immediately jumped a step backward and faced off from that distance. The soldier who’d inserted himself between Harvey and the priest as a shield wasn’t like the ordinary Church Soldiers; he was a man in the prime of life wearing a highly decorated white greatcoat. Kieli realized right away that he was the officer who’d come to the radio tower. “Oho…” Squaring off against an opponent with some skill, Harvey let out a surprised noise that also sounded fairly amused. The officer, on the other hand, looked tenser. He licked his lips lightly, and then resolutely, though with a surprisingly mild attitude, set about the task of talking Harvey down. “We apologize for our bad form. We don’t want to fight you. We’d like you to listen to what—” Without waiting for the man to finish, Harvey gripped the rifle like a saber and lunged at him. Kieli wouldn’t be able to stop him in time— “Will you just cut that out, you damn fool?!” As the bellow rang out, the air in front of Kieli’s chest swelled up, and a shock wave gushed forth that hit the rifle Harvey was about to mow down his rival with dead center and smashed it in half. Harvey was blasted backward along with the broken rifle, rolling downhill in a backward somersault. Knocked off her feet herself by the recoil, Kieli looked down at her chest with her mouth hanging dumbly open. “C-Corporal…?” Dark green bits of static spewed noisily from the speaker of the radio around her neck, and an image started to form in midair. The face floating within it diffused and laboriously reformed several times as it opened its mouth and spoke. The low voice coming from the speaker in time with its movements was distorted, filled with awful static, but it still had an intimidating air. “Very well, then…let’s hear what you have to say.” Thus addressed by a strange, unknown body of noise, the officer widened his eyes. He was still holding up his saber to parry the blow. Behind him, the priest was sitting on his rear, white as a sheet. The other soldiers that Mane had been attacking stopped moving too, stunned, and all the uproar abruptly died down into silence. A few men here and there did panic and run, but their cries sounded feeble and far away. “Herbie,” the body of noise whispered to the youth behind him, all the while keeping the men around them in check with the force of his glower. That pet name Kieli hadn’t heard in so long, the one that as far as she knew only one person in this world used; that mis-pronounced pet name, and that rough but warm tone. “Calm down, Herbie. What the hell do you think you’re doing, for God’s sake?” “But—” Harvey was just sitting there where he’d landed with a poleaxed expression on his face, but now he opened his mouth and started to make some kind of excuse for a moment before closing it again, seeming to forget how to speak. Then something in his face shifted, and he looked as though he were about to cry. To Kieli, it looked like the face of a little boy who’d just been scolded by his father. She thought he reminded her of someone. He was a really high-ranking officer in the Capital Security Forces, and yet he didn’t come off as so high and mighty. He seemed trustworthy. Could he be…? Maybe she should’ve asked him if he had a son, but she missed the right moment to do it, and then he was boarding his truck and leaving. They stood on a rock ledge about halfway up the slope of the fault, watching the men at the armored trucks on standby down in the foothills collect the injured. Mane was lying on a rock a little ways down from them, keeping a sharp eye on the scene below him, at once watchful and menacing. Before long, the line of trucks began to withdraw, leaving behind only a circle of smaller trucks hanging back at a distance for observation. Leaving a surveillance team to watch them had been the one condition they wouldn’t budge on, and Harvey had accepted it without argument. They’d heard the priest who called himself the “envoy of the Eleventh Elder on the Council of Elders” state his business again from the beginning, and after a considering expression, Harvey had answered fairly readily. “We’ll accept your invitation.” Kieli felt lost. She couldn’t figure out what he was really thinking. Harvey fixed his eyes not on the priest envoy, but on the Capital Security Forces officer who claimed to have brought his men to serve as their escort at the Father’s personal request, as he continued. His attitude was unruffled. “But we’re not interested in being hauled in like criminals. We’ll get there on our own steam. Kieli’s being invited there as an honored guest, you said. Is that how you people treat your guests? You take them prisoner and force them to come with you?” It was a valid point, and moreover, thanks to Mane’s mauling spree, half of the escort platoon was currently nonfunctional; even if what he’d said had been pretty absurd, their side was in control here anyway. Not to mention the sheer nature of the group who’d placed themselves around Kieli as a barricade. To start with, the one-eyed black beast curled up on the ground at her feet glaring intimidatingly—who periodically terrorized the soldiers by opening his mouth wide from ear to ear to display his bright red tongue and sawlike teeth. And particles of noise gathered around the radio in her arms to form the face of a soldier’s ghost opening its mouth to growl at them before dissolving and then starting the whole process over again. And last but not least, there was the half-copper-eyed, half-dark-brown-eyed, one-armed Undying…He was standing at Kieli’s side looking unconcerned, but every now and then he’d glance over at the circle of lower-level soldiers as though some thought had struck him, and whichever one his eyes happened to meet would gasp in terror and back away. As for Kieli, the key figure in their conversation, her legs were trembling so hard she thought they might crumple beneath her any moment, but she drew reassurance and courage from everyone protecting her and managed to hold her ground. “I’m afraid that, er, won’t do. We’ll need her to come with us…” the priest had persisted through his own obvious fear. But then the officer leading their escort force had taken over the negotiations and accepted Harvey’s terms on the condition that a small unit stay behind with them to keep watch (“escort” though he might be, he was clearly higher-ranking than the young priest). We’ll get there on our own steam—hearing Harvey say that so casually made Kieli happy, but more than that it made her scared. There was no way Harvey could possibly think that an Undying going to the capital would get by there without incident. And yet nonetheless, he intended to go there with her, as if it was just a given that he come. The Council’s Eleventh Elder’s…daughter? As if she could believe something like that all of a sudden. Since the priest had specifically brought up her mother’s name, it seemed as though they weren’t just completely mistaking her for someone else, but that only made it harder to figure out what they were after. Doubt and unease and confusion just swirled around and around inside her. Keeping watch over the procession of trucks receding into the distance out of her peripheral vision, Kieli darted a glance behind her and to the side. Harvey was sitting on a ledge a level above her (it was plain that he was sitting because standing was too painful), inspecting the radio. It was lecturing him about something or other as he fiddled with its tuning knob and grumbled back with a sullen pout. At one point she heard him saying, “Shut up; you let me do all the work and then just stole the limelight.” The armored station assistant’s repairs had been almost finished. Evidently when Kieli’d fallen on top of him, the last connection had been knocked into place, and the radio had started working again. The Corporal coming back to them was the one thing, the one real, true saving grace of all of this. Noticing her gaze, Harvey turned his face toward her. The moment their eyes met, he grinned and said, “Hey, you. What’s with that face?” Embarrassed, Kieli turned away. Was she really making such a weird face? Lately seeing Harvey’s smile made her chest hurt for some reason, and it was hard to look at it. She’d always liked it when he smiled at her before… “I was always planning to go to the capital sooner or later anyway, so if they’re not going to get in my way, that suits me fine. And if they really are holding Beatrix there, I have to go.” “I…think it’s some kind of trap.” “What kind of trap?” “Well, I’m not sure, but…” Kieli looked down, faltering. She didn’t have any grounds for thinking it; she just did. After a short pause, she heard a rustle of fabric coming from the rock ledge above, and then she felt a faint warmth of body heat over her shoulder. When she looked back just briefly, Harvey was crouching close over her shoulder, peering at her. “But you know, if what they said was true, it would mean you’ve still got relatives.” “I don’t want any,” she answered curtly, turning her head away again with a huff. “…Hey, Kieli,” a quiet voice reasoned in her ear. “You don’t have to overthink this. You might have a father there. Just meet him and see what he’s like.” “I don’t want to meet him.” A father in the capital? Even if that was actually true, it didn’t make her one bit happy. Just the idea that she might be related to someone in the Church actually gave her chills. To think that she was on the side of the people who’d made Harvey, and Beatrix, and all the other Undyings suffer for so long… She hadn’t wanted to learn that, not now. It would’ve been enough for her just not to lose what she already had. There wasn’t anything else she’d wanted beyond what she already had—she’d never wanted to know something like that, something that was only good for upsetting her. “Kieli.” When she stared at the ground and stayed quiet, he tugged lightly at her hair. Reluctantly, she tilted her face up to look at him, not bothering to hide the scowl. When they were squatting on the rock ledge like this, Harvey’s eye level was actually a bit lower than Kieli’s even without her completely raising her head, and he looked up into her face at an angle. His inky dark brown left eye looked strangely at home against the inflamed skin of his cheek; if anything, the fact that it didn’t seem out of place to her made it more distressing to look at, making her feel conflicted. “I hope it’s true. ’Cause I’ve always wanted to help you meet a living, breathing parent. So let’s go find out. The Corporal and I will both come with you. Okay?” “……” Kieli couldn’t find any response to make, and she hung her head again, unable to meet his eyes any longer. When her eyes turned downward, Harvey’s hand tugging at the hair hanging off her shoulder entered her line of sight. Joints even more prominent than before made it look all the more slender, and it was such a wreck, and yet this hand kept on trying to protect Kieli as it always had…Why did God treat him so unkindly, and rip away a little more of his life like this every time something happened? Kieli was the one who deserved to be punished, so why couldn’t Kieli take his place? Harvey’d always been planning to go to the capital sooner or later, even if this hadn’t happened. And if that were the case—if Harvey would take her with him, and not abandon her yet, mess though she was, to Kieli that all by itself was enough reason to accept the invitation from the capital. More than enough, if it would let them stay together a little longer. Because Kieli wanted to protect Harvey just as he always tried to protect her. Because she might not know what to do just yet…but in the end, rather than running away from the thought of hurting what was in front of her, she wanted to become strong enough to protect it. Softly, she laid her own hand over the long fingers threading through her hair. After a short hesitation at the feeling of those bony knuckles, she wrapped her hand around his pointer finger, and nodded. It gripped back lightly, as if to nod back. For as much as she felt heartened, she also thought she could see the end of the fragile thread binding them together, the one that had almost slipped off, that could snap any moment, but she squeezed Harvey’s finger tightly as if to hold on to it. All along she’d been thinking, Will we still be journeying together when we leave this gorge? What if we all end up going our separate ways there? What if our final destinations are different? But for now, at least, their journeys still all led in the same direction. I don’t want to cut this thread yet. I want to protect him. So let’s go to the capital—.
Chapter 94
20 min read