The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

by Yukako Kabeif

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  -Light Novel-

  Kieli: The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

  YUKAKO KABEI

  Translation by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley

  KIELI Vol. 1

  © YUKAKO KABEI / KADOKAWA CORPORATION ASCII MEDIA WORKS 2003

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2003 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2009 by Yen Press, LLC

  -Manga excerpt-

  KIELI, Vol. 1

  YUKAKO KABEI

  SHIORI TESHIROGI

  Translation: Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley

  Lettering: Alexis Eckerman

  KIELI: SHISHATACHI WA KOYA NI NEMURU, Vol. 1 © 2006 YUKAKO KABEI/MEDIAWORKS, SHIORI TESHIROGI All rights reserved. First published in Japan in 2006 by Akita Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with Akita Publishing Co., Ltd. through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2008 by Yen Press, LLC

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: December 2017

  Originally published in paperback in July 2009 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-1-9753-0094-4

  E3-20171130-JV-PC

  WHY ISN’T GOD HERE?

  On this planet, there is a Church, but no God. Kieli realized this fact when she was four or five years old, and she always thought it strange for a world to have such a prominent church even when it seemed so obvious there was no God. When she was seven, she finally hit on a very satisfactory answer to her dilemma.

  “Grandmother, after I heard the sermon today, I finally figured it out.” In her excitement, Kieli would sometimes skip or twirl around as she announced her brilliant discoveries to her grandmother on their way home from church.

  That day, the head priest had given a sermon on the Church’s history. Apparently, a spaceship carrying the legendary “Eleven Saints and Five Families” had landed on this godless planet hundreds of years ago and built a church. But that ship had left its mother planet hundreds of years before that, and the very patient Saints had traversed the universe for many generations before arriving. Now no one remembered the name of that place.

  “God wasn’t very patient, was He? I think our planet was so far away, He got tired and went home before He got here. I wonder why the important people in the Church can’t figure it out. It’s so simple! Do they think that God will stay with them forever?”

  “Kieli,” her grandmother said quietly, walking beside her. She would repeat her granddaughter’s name like this whenever she did something she wasn’t supposed to. She would never yell or lecture. Without changing her expression or her gaze, she would just say, “Kieli,” in a sad, quiet voice.

  Kieli had promised that she would never, ever talk about the absence of God when she was outside of the house. If she talked like that, she had been told, “the Church’s Soldiers would gouge her heart out.” The warning that this is what happened to bad children who didn’t keep God’s teachings was a story adults used to make their children behave. It came from the legend of the Undying, demon soldiers who killed many people in the War long, long ago, and had been defeated only when their hearts had been torn out.

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother. I won’t say it anymore.” Dejected, Kieli shut her mouth, stopped skipping, and faced forward. But what Kieli was sorry about was that she had gotten carried away and broken her promise; that childish threat never scared her a bit.

  There was a reserved kind of bustle on the streets as worshippers walked home on Sunday morning. They all wore hats of myriad shapes to worship in and bundled themselves up in dark-colored overcoats. The Colonization Days holiday was approaching once again, and the air was beginning to carry the scent of winter. To Kieli, the smell of winter was the smell of the smog spewed out by fossil fuels. An exhaust pipe stuck out of the roof of every building that lined either side of the street and sent thick gray smoke into the sky.

  Kieli turned around again and walked backward for a little while. Pushing back the brim of her hat and looking up, she could see the grand and imposing domed roof of the cathedral standing in the center of the town, peeking out between the other buildings.

  Suddenly, behind her there rose a commotion. The jeers and screams in the distance drew closer, and as she turned around in surprise to see what was going on, a man pushed aside a passerby that had been walking ahead of Kieli and jumped out right in front of her.

  “Wah!”

  Kieli instinctively drew herself back, and then…

  Fwa-boom!

  If she’d been forced to describe the sound of such an explosion, she’d have said it was like the heavy atmosphere being tightly compressed and released all at once. The sound roared through the morning street.

  Before her eyes, Kieli saw the man’s chest burst open. Through the gaping, round hole, she could see men covered from head to toe in strange white armor. Wisps of smoke rose from the barrels of several guns aimed her way. She heard a woman gasp somewhere, but Kieli just stood there, unable to remember to breathe, let alone scream. Finally, she managed to stagger backward and fall back onto the paved street. As if in response, the man fell to his knees, then collapsed at Kieli’s feet. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, and his face turned toward her. His unfocused gaze rested on the air in front of Kieli.

  As someone came running toward her, Kieli regained her senses and the crowd’s stirring came back to her, as if she’d just remembered how to hear after a temporary loss.

  “Kieli, are you hurt?” her grandmother asked as she knelt beside Kieli and embraced her. Her aged, wizened hands trembled slightly. Kieli took her hand and answered in a monotone that she was fine.

  Amidst intermingling whispers of both fear and awe, the crowd moved aside, and metallic footsteps echoed as the armored men marched through their center. Kieli, still sitting, watched them, and as a corner of her mind thought, “Oh, they’re coming this way,” she returned her gaze to the fallen man.

  Something had rolled out from the hole in the man’s chest.

  It was a black stone, about the size of an adult fist. It wasn’t unlike a strange machine component. A few torn, narrow tubes that looked like both cables and blood vessels hung from it, and a thick liquid that resembled used oil puddled around it. Inside the stone, a dull, amber-colored light blinked rhythmically, like a heartbeat.

  She unconsciously reached out for it, but another hand snatched it up first. It was a grim, armored hand, wearing a white gauntlet made of special metal fiber. When she looked up, a soldier was mumbling something inside his mask. We have just executed a wicked man. There is nothing to worry about. You didn’t see anything. She thought they said something like that, but none of it stayed in Kieli’s mind.

  After that, no matter what she did, she couldn’t remember the face of the
man who had died right in front of her. Only the mysterious black stone and his open, empty eyes remained, burned forever onto her memory.

  CHAPTER 1

  ROOMMATE

  Miss Hanni was a teacher, almost thirty years old, who wore her hair tied back in a bun and angular, rimless glasses. Aside from her tendency to be melodramatic and her love of pop quizzes, she was a virtuous and devout believer. But to Kieli, “devout believer” was not a compliment.

  “My goodness, Kieli! Honestly, whatever is the matter with you?”

  Honestly, whatever is the matter with you? My Lord. Oh, what are we to do with you? For a while now, Miss Hanni had been lamenting the state of affairs with repetitions from her limited collection of phrases, looking up at the ceiling with exaggerated gestures, and taking off her glasses to dab at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  “Not only are you late, but dressed the way you are. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about today’s service.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Hanni,” Kieli apologized, checking her desire to say, “I didn’t know.” She wanted to avoid giving lame excuses and having a pointless argument with her teacher. After all, it would look bad to say it was because no one had told her (even if that was the truth).

  A few of her classmates snickered in the three rows behind Miss Hanni. They all wore their beautifully embroidered, white choir uniforms; Kieli alone was dressed in the normal black bolero with its big collar. The plain, black uniform had its own kind of dignity when everyone was wearing it, but right now, Kieli looked like a witch-in-training, wearing a cheap robe, who’d been thrown into a chorus of angels.

  The parish’s head priest would be giving a congratulatory address on the first day of the Colonization Days holiday, so the service was not being held at the school’s auditorium but rather in the cathedral in the center of town. Kieli and the other ninth-graders at the boarding school would be singing the hymns, so they were to wear their white choir uniforms and meet in time for rehearsal. The announcement was made at the student assembly last week, but Kieli was in detention doing a report and thus absent. The school dorms were double rooms, so normally it wouldn’t have been a problem for one of the roommates to miss an assembly. Unfortunately, Kieli didn’t have a roommate, and neither her classmates nor her neighbors were kind enough to tell her. She was used to it, and she didn’t feel like crying to her teacher over every little incident.

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. As long as you’re sorry, we’ll let it go this time. Don’t let it happen again.” Maybe she’d made the right choice in opting not to make excuses, because Miss Hanni left it at that and let Kieli off the hook surprisingly easily.

  “Now don’t dawdle. Get in line. The service is starting. Go to the back where you’ll stand out as little as possible.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Kieli gave a quick bow as she passed by her teacher and took her place in the very back row of the choir. To her right, the freckle-faced, frizzy-haired Zilla let out a short laugh through her upturned nose. No doubt she was one of the girls who’d laughed earlier.

  Blond-haired Becca suddenly appeared at her left. She glanced at Kieli, raised the skirt of her own black uniform, and winked as if to say, “It happened to me, too.”

  Kieli blinked at her for a second, then looked at Becca and let out a small, wry grin. It wasn’t as if Becca wearing the black uniform would help Kieli at all, but it cheered her up a little. Sensing Zilla’s dubious glare from her right, she suppressed her smile, erased the expression from her face, and turned forward.

  The choir stood on raised platforms against the wall, so even from the back row, she could look out over the inside of the majestic central cathedral. A high, arched ceiling capped the white concrete walls. She’d heard that the impressive stained glass covering the walls to the right and left and the electric lights designed to look like candles were gifts from the Church in the capital. In the front, the black-robed priests were in neat lines on both sides of the pulpit, and behind them, the general congregation packed tightly into the pews. The diversely shaped hats of the parishioners wove together in an artless, uneven wave in contrast to the uniformity of the priests.

  It baffled Kieli as much as ever that so many people would gather in reverence of a mother planet whose name they couldn’t even remember and a God whose name they’d long since forgotten, but she didn’t speak thoughtlessly of those things the way she used to. As far as Kieli knew, she was the only person who’d realized that there was no God in this church, and the Church’s prestige continued, unwavering, to this day.

  The rustling noise of the worshippers’ whispers that had filled the space suddenly fell silent. The white-robed head priest appeared from behind a curtain and proceeded to the pulpit at a leisurely pace.

  Kieli hid her grimace at the reverent sighs that escaped the silent congregation here and there. She’d seen the head priest many times since she was small, but she couldn’t reconcile what was so holy about him that would elicit such appreciation of him from people. He was an aging man with thinning hair, and his stout build gave him a kind of dignity. Anyone passing him on the street, though, probably wouldn’t think of him as anything more than a man getting on in years with a decent amount of wealth.

  For one thing, if he had any kind of sacred, divine insight, how could he fail to notice that? There was no better evidence that the Church possessed no holy powers than that, weaving in and out of the chapel during prayers as if it owned the place.

  Shifting her gaze, Kieli could see the image of a man with a rope around his neck, floating in the air above the head priest’s head. Swollen blood vessels colored his face a dark red as he peered with great interest at the manuscript from which the head priest was reading.

  The hanged ghost lifted his face as if he’d felt her gaze. His eyes met Kieli’s, and his red, blood-swollen lips twisted in a crescent-shaped grin.

  Kieli glared expressionlessly back at the hanged ghost and refocused her attention on the head priest. Even his oh-so-wonderful sermon that spoke so grandly of death and rebirth didn’t leave any deep impressions; it just sounded phony to her ears.

  Kieli.

  She heard a voice calling her name.

  Kieli, it’s starting.

  “Eh?”

  When she came to herself, Kieli looked in the direction of the voice and saw Becca’s blue eyes, like the glass eyes of a doll, winking at her from the end of the choir row. At the edge of her field of vision, Miss Hanni’s rimless glasses glared angrily at her as if to say, “Am I still going to have to talk to you before you’re satisfied?”

  The next thing she knew, the organ’s accompaniment had started and the choir began singing “The Song of Our First Blessings.” Kieli panicked and started dragging the lyrics from her memory, practically lip-synching along with the alto chorus, and looked over at Becca standing next to her.

  Becca stood as straight as she could, looking directly ahead, and her beautiful voice happily sang the soprano part. Kieli’s row wasn’t singing the soprano part, and Becca’s lyrics were a little off, but no one but Kieli would pay it any mind.

  After the service ended, it would be the Colonization Days holiday that her whole class looked forward to so much.

  To Kieli, it would be just another boring, melancholy ten days.

  At any rate, Becca was in a good mood today. Apparently she was going to see the sights in Westerbury during the holidays. Her parents and younger brother had gone on ahead and were waiting for her to meet up with them.

  At the moment she was rambling on about Westerbury being a city that had developed cable networking and audio-visual technology, and how when the sun went down, screens on building walls projected sparkling colors that shifted dizzyingly along the streets as far as the eye could see. Something about a wondrous ice cream inlaid with pieces of stars being all the rage. Something about some experiential theater that just opened and how she was going to see a show there with her family at the end of her st
ay.

  Kieli mostly ignored Becca as she bragged about her sightseeing plans, interjecting the occasional “Hmm” or “Wow.” She couldn’t imagine what someone would experience at an experiential theater or how it would be experienced, so Kieli had no idea if it was really worth all the excitement. The ice cream trend was the one thing that held some slight interest for her, but Becca veered away from that subject the second she brought it up.

  “You can expect a souvenir, Kieli.”

  While Kieli was using all the imagination she had to picture what ice cream inlaid with pieces of stars would look like, Becca stopped boasting for a minute and turned to face her, her coat twirling as she moved.

  “What would you like?”

  “I don’t need anything,” Kieli refused vaguely.

  Becca pouted. “Aww, you could ask for something.” Her sleeves fluttered in the wind as she turned and resumed her jaunty walk down the street.

  Becca was a pretty girl. Today, instead of the school-designated travel clothes, she wore a brilliant red coat and carried, as expected, not the school-designated bag, but a brown Boston bag. As for Kieli, over her usual uniform she wore the school-designated black duffle coat, and the unfriendly bag (which most students preferred not to use because of its resemblance to a mail sack) hung diagonally across her shoulder. Becca’s supple, blond hair fell in waves down to her waist and looked stunning against her red coat. Kieli’s hair was long and black and just hung artlessly down her back. Becca was tall and attractive. On the other hand, if her class were to line up according to height, Kieli would be a little ahead of the center.

  If someone on the street were to catch sight of Becca and Kieli walking together, there is no doubt they would think Kieli was exceedingly plain next to the girl as lovely as a fashion doll.

  But apparently Kieli was the only one thinking of such trivial things. The passersby paid no special attention to the two girls and quickly walked on by, turning up the collars of their coats.