The Demonic Cave (3)
The moment Asselin's eyes flew wide open, it slipped back inside.
What on earth had that been?
It had happened in a blink, in an instant he never could have anticipated. Anyone else would almost certainly have doubted their own sanity first, wondering if they'd merely seen something that wasn't there.
But Asselin knew that what he had just witnessed was no phantom. His physical condition was perfectly sound, and his mind was utterly clear.
A hand, springing from the Saintess's tomb. Could it be an undead? For the undead to appear in a sanctum blessed by God—what could be more blasphemous! And yet the undead he knew of did not possess hands so white. The hand he had glimpsed moments ago was far too delicate to belong to any monster.
In fact, it had looked like the hand of a human being, reaching for help. Even though no living person could possibly emerge from a holy site sealed for five hundred years.
Asselin laid his hand on the boulder. The entrance had already begun to crumble, so he felt no particular impiety about breaking open the tomb now. But he didn't even need to put his weight into it—the rock lost its center and collapsed in earnest, the fissures splitting the great boulder cleanly in two.
And then, from within, the hand shot out once more and seized the broken rock. It was unmistakably a human hand, yet instead of helping, Asselin only stared. Soon a strained sound came from the black depths of the cave, followed by the shadow of a figure. The one who wrestled herself out through the gap in the boulder was a woman.
With long, curling black hair carelessly unbound, she hung onto the rock, pale and gasping, before slowly lifting her head.
Between strands of disheveled black hair, strange violet eyes showed. She blinked slowly, her lips trembling, and with a breath that sounded like scraped metal, a faint voice spilled out.
"…I am."
Asselin's grip on his sword tightened without his meaning it. What flashed through his mind, reflexively, was a passage of scripture.
The demon that beguiles mankind takes the form of the most beautiful of angels.
Therefore, the woman before him was a demon.
The moment he reached that conclusion, her lips moved again.
"The Saintess…."
The words left unfinished, her body crumpled toward him.
By the time Hina received Vice-Commander Frixus's discreet summons and arrived at his unit's encampment, the sun had all but set.
Rushed by the sudden call, she hadn't even had a chance to unpack after arriving. No sooner had she stepped through the encampment gate than the vice-commander's adjutants came running up, offering—out of nowhere—to carry her baggage, lavishing an unrequested kindness on her.
Then, herding her forward with hands at her back, they strode boldly toward one of the barracks. Hina had naturally assumed she was being taken to the vice-commander himself, but the moment they opened the barracks door, the fragrance in the air told her what this place really was.
The scent, a kind of analgesic, was one she knew well from treatment barracks that housed the wounded.
The reason Hina had been rushed here was inside this very barracks. She also realized that the adjutants, using her baggage as their pretext, were hoping to get a look at whatever unidentified being lay within.
The instant that fact dawned on her, Hina stopped in her tracks, her expression turning grave, and rounded on them.
"The patient inside has not yet been examined. You two must not enter."
At that, Ixion—who had been striding confidently toward the barracks entrance with her luggage in tow—clicked his tongue and stopped short.
"You're no fun at all."
"Where is the vice-commander? Are you two even aware this counts as insubordination?"
"Please, don't say such frightening things, Dame Hina. How is this insubordination?"
"That's right. We're simply carrying your luggage out of the goodness of our hearts."
Calman and Ixion protested their innocence with perfectly straight faces—all while sneaking glance after glance past the barracks' open door. The barracks wasn't large, and they could easily make out the bulging shape of a person lying on the makeshift bed inside.
"There really is someone lying in there."
"We all saw the vice-commander carry her in, after all."
To Ixion's awe, Calman replied almost accusingly.
"I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me."
Ixion shrugged.
And small wonder—the knights had all been quietly suspecting one another of falling under some collective spell. Asselin had gone in to survey the sanctum's interior and come back out carrying a woman; of course they had.
Without explanation, Asselin had ordered one barracks cleared out, laid the woman down inside it, forbidden every knight from approaching, and urgently summoned Dame Hina Horsa, the military physician stationed in the nearest territory.
"But how on earth did that woman even get into the sanctum?"
"It's forest, for one thing. Anyone determined enough could slip in anywhere."
"I didn't know there were still people hoping to catch God's curse."
"No one in their right mind would want to be cursed! She probably just wandered off the mountain paths."
Rushed to the encampment without a word of explanation, Hina learned at least one thing for certain from Ixion and Calman's chatter: the person in this barracks had come out of the sanctum itself.
"What in the world is going on—"
The moment Hina opened her mouth to ask for the details, a great shadow fell over the three of them. Cold green eyes fixed on the trio.
"What are you doing here?"
"Vice-Commander!"
"Dame Hina just arrived, so we were—"
"Ixion. Calman."
At the flat hardness of Asselin's voice, the two men who had been stammering their prepared excuses shut their mouths at once. At the sight of them instantly wilting and tucking their tails, Asselin frowned, opened his mouth to say something—then simply jerked his chin, signaling them to fall back. Ixion and Calman bowed their heads quickly and scurried away. Hina, who had been watching the exchange with her own share of unease, carefully spoke up.
"My apologies for not delivering my arrival report at once."
"No need to ask—those two surely led you straight here. More importantly, have you examined her yet?"
"I was just about to begin."
Asselin nodded and entered the barracks first. Hina gathered up her baggage, which Ixion and Calman had all but thrown down and abandoned, and followed him in.
The inside of the barracks was spartan. Judging from the two knights' chatter, the space had likely been thrown together in haste to serve as a makeshift treatment station, and it showed—there was hardly anything in it. Confirming that a field cot, a folding chair, and an incense burner on the floor were the entire contents, Hina shifted her gaze to the bed.
Half of the face of the person lying there was covered by a thin handkerchief.
"…Is this a corpse? Shall I perform an autopsy?"
At her question, Asselin shot her a brief glance before returning his eyes to the figure on the bed.
"It's a patient."
Ah, so she is alive. The nose and mouth had been left exposed, apparently to let her breathe. Why one would cover a living person's face like that, he couldn't imagine….
Gazing at the handkerchief-shrouded features with puzzled eyes, Hina spoke cautiously.
"I heard you brought her out of the sanctum yourself."
"To be precise—the holy shrine."
Hina blinked, failing to follow, then belatedly and haltingly responded.
"…Pardon? No—forgive me. I don't understand."
Asselin did not call out her reaction. If anything, he seemed to consider it the natural response. Brow furrowed, he glared at the face beneath the handkerchief as he explained.
"A woman who came out of the Saintess's tomb. I sensed nothing unusual when I touched her, but I can't say the same for ordinary knights or soldiers. Examine her immediately—check whether she carries any communicable disease, or shows any other anomalies."
"With respect, Vice-Commander, my specialty is not general medicine, but—"
"Specialized medicine. Which is precisely why I called for you."
Treating wounds inflicted by monsters inevitably required building knowledge of monsters themselves. That purpose diverged, subtly but surely, from that of ordinary knights, who studied monsters in order to kill them. Instead of vital points and fatal weaknesses, one had to research monster biology as a whole—and in some circumstances, even work to prolong a monster's life.
Thus Hina was a military physician, but she also held a special post as a monster researcher.
"…Do you believe this woman is a monster?"
Hina understood, then, why Asselin had gone to the trouble of summoning her from another territory. She was the monster researcher stationed closest to this place.
"The shrine was sealed for five hundred years. Do you judge that a woman emerging from it is human?"
At Asselin's question, Hina fell silent. Something was clearly troubling her; a deep line carved itself between the vice-commander's fine features. Before long, Asselin spoke in a voice gone cold.
"I intend to send word to His Holiness the Lux tomorrow. Your preliminary examination report will accompany it—so begin at once."
"Yes, understood."