If there was nothing else for him to do, all he could say was this.
“Then I’ll lay down in the corridor, and you walk over me.”
“What on earth?! I couldn’t do—”
Just as they had begun to fight—
“I have an idea.”
Ilenia spoke up.
“An idea?”
They were in an underground room, surrounded on all sides by stone walls, with the only exit blocked. The firewood and buckets filled with oil placed about the room were at last turning it into an oven.
The inside of Col’s body was growing hot, and breathing seemed as if it would burn his lungs. At the very least, he could pray to God in what little time he had left, devote himself to saving his soul so that he would not succumb to hate and anger and go to hell.
Then Ilenia placed a sword before them. It was from a set of armor left in the room.
“I will become a sheep, so you should cut open my stomach and use the blood to put out the fire.”
“…Huh?”
“My intestines will probably help in stopping the fire from spreading. Then when you’ve taken everything out, hide inside. Parchment is sometimes found unscathed after a monastery goes up in flames, and you know how much trouble it is to fully roast pigs and sheep, right? It does not cook very easily.”
She spoke indifferently, and Col stared back at her blankly.
“…Is this a joke?”
“Is this the time for jokes?”
She smiled bitterly in response.
“If we do nothing, we all will die. It’s better for just one to die than all three.”
It was perhaps her merchantlike way of calculating loss and profit. And her hard-boiled plan was much too logical. Myuri was not too big, and they could not hide in her stomach.
But Ilenia had such giant hooves.
“And if you ration out the fire-roasted parts, you could survive quite a long time.”
That had to be a joke.
“No! No, no!”
Myuri screamed like a child. Of course, Col felt the same way.
“We can’t do that. Absolutely not.”
“Could you say the same thing if our positions were flipped?”
Her gaze threatened to pierce right through him.
If he were not a pathetic lamb of God but a giant sheep. If he could save someone by sacrificing himself, like how a mother bird protected her nest…
Then what would he do?
Damn it, he cursed God.
He would do the same.
“…And yet—”
“I am the one who got you into this mess in the first place.”
Silence fell over them.
Time ticked away in that room, where there was no moment for respite.
The flames burned stronger and stronger.
“Well then.”
Ilenia stood.
Col could not say anything, only follow her with his eyes. Myuri was saying something in a howl, but he could not hear it. His impertinent reasoning was whispering arguments at him—Didn’t both humans and wolves eat sheep to live? He felt like he was going to give in to the temptation of possibly surviving this predicament.
No. This was not something he could allow, but at the same time, it was painful to refuse.
Could he allow Ilenia to die in vain, then watch as Myuri burned to death? Was that all meaningless?
His logic and emotion were fanned by the flames, and he felt as though he were going insane.
Is there no reprieve for them? Is this not a house of God?!
“Erm, please, if you don’t mind looking away…”
Ilenia spoke bashfully, and she sounded young when she did so. It was not strange at all that she was naive enough to truly believe that there was a new land at the edge of the sea.
If he looked away now, that would be accepting her command. They would cut her stomach open, and only he and Myuri would survive. His body would not move even when he tried to move it, perhaps because of how stretched out time felt in the face of death.
Then his vision blurred at a sudden impact, and he fell to the floor.
Myuri the wolf was holding him down.
“Ilenia, my claws and fangs are sharper.”
Ilenia replied.
“Okay.”
He did not try to resist as he lay on the floor because he knew deep down that this was the best option for everyone.
Myuri’s claws dug into his shoulder painfully. It seemed like she knew that if she did not do that, he would try to get up.
He thought as he was stuck to the floor.
God had not given them a miracle when they were in the northern islands.
The only ones fighting in the present were those who were worshipped as gods in an ancient age, then forgotten.
Though he honestly knew how powerless faith was, anger welled up within him as he wondered if he should simply throw himself into the flames. He stared at the fire, almost expecting an angel to extend a hand in salvation, even though he knew his wishes would never reach heaven, even though he knew that nothing would happen…
“Huh?”
He lifted his head and spotted it. He did not mind the claws digging into his shoulders.
“Please, Brother. Don’t let Ilenia’s last wish go to waste.”
He did not even look over at Myuri as she pleaded, and instead he stared at that one thing.
“Myuri.”
“Brother!”
He then responded clearly to her irritated cry.
“Myuri, look!”
He pointed to the corner of the room. Lying there was a normal-looking piece of cloth. It was thick, rather hard, and oddly heavy. It was the same sort of material as Saint Nex’s cloth.
It was not made from animal hair, plant fiber, or insect silk. Sligh said it must have been made out of metal.
It did not matter.
The cloth was engulfed in flames but was not burning.
“…What is that…? It’s not burning?”
Myuri looked at the saint’s cloth and murmured, puzzled.
“Myuri, the cloth!”
He repeated himself, and she let go of his shoulder, as though overwhelmed.
“Get the cloth!”
Myuri dashed off, picked it up with her mouth, and immediately came back. She placed it before him, the confused look still on her face.
“It’s…not hot at all. Isn’t it supposed to be metal? Is it really metal?”
Even children knew that metals immediately grew hot.
Ilenia, who had just offered up her life, was also looking at the cloth, defeated.
“This fabric was covering everything when we opened the hidden door, right?”
What was a holy relic’s most powerful foe? No, what sort of benefits did Saint Nex give as a patron saint? Threads remain unbroken, cloth uneaten by bugs. And…
“No fires.”
This was a real relic.
Goose bumps spread all over his back, and he fought back the urge to sob.
“This is…this is protection from God!”
He took the cloth in hand and inspected it. It was not burned anywhere, and as Myuri said, it was not even hot. It had not been placed over the other relics merely for decoration.
“I suggest we cover ourselves with the cloth and hide.”
He looked at Ilenia, who stood in place, and Myuri as he spoke.
“And we will all survive.”
Sligh and the others had dug an even deeper hole out of greed where the relics had been hidden.
Luckily, both Ilenia and Myuri were small, slender girls. All three of them could somehow fit inside, but the problem was, the hole was long and in a cylindrical shape.
“Ilenia, don’t lie down! Brother, you lie down on your stomach!”
The bottom of the hole was narrow, only big enough for one person to lie in it. Both Myuri and Ilenia were skinny, so if either were on the bottom, they would likely die under the pressure of two othe
r bodies on top of them.
In the end, Col was at the bottom with Myuri and Ilenia on top, but Myuri was still saying things like that even now. She must have been worried about something happening in such a small place with the opposite sex.
“Don’t be rude to Miss Ilenia…”
He sounded annoyed, but Myuri jumped on him and he could not finish his sentence.
“P-pardon me.”
Hesitatingly, Ilenia also sat on him. And the two on him insisted that just in case the saint’s cloth could not keep back the flames, they could manage something with their fur.
As he felt their weight on his back, the grown man had mixed feelings about where he lay in this safe space. God had given this pathetic lamb a miracle, but he prayed desperately, as though giving excuses for how shamelessly two girls sat on top of him.
Then he felt Myuri chuckle on his back
“…What is it?”
She snorted, then responded.
“Hmm? I was just excited to rip those guys to shreds once the fire goes out.”
“Be ladylike, even in the face of death.”
He had certainly said that, but they were now in a hole, which was covered by a saint’s cloth that would not let fire in.
It was unlikely God could hear them.
“Stop moving around so much.”
“Okay.”
Ilenia chuckled as she listened to their conversation.
Everything had changed so quickly in the town of Desarev, and they had been made fools.
But earth would return to earth, and dust would return to dust. The truth would, without a doubt, reveal itself as the truth. Col’s wavering faith once more retook its shape.
The fire continued to rage, but their path was, once again, headed in the direction of their wishes.
EPILOGUE
Though the fire died down after midnight, they had made a miscalculation. There was still the issue of the residual heat, and it was like an oven that was still hot enough to bake bread even after the firewood had run out, so the temperature did not go down very easily.
While the saint’s cloth kept them from having direct contact with the fire and heat, it did not keep away the heat that surrounded the hole they were hiding in. Had they stayed there any longer, they either would have roasted to death or collapsed from thirst.
That did not happen because as the remains of the shelves in the corner of the room were smoldering, the door to the vault opened.
Without any time to breathe in the cool, fresh air that had filled the room, Myuri bounded up, became a wolf, and jumped out. When the other two stumbled out of the vault, she had already struck down most of the bad guys, and when they finally caught up to her, she was just intimidating the ones hiding under the altar as she pulled them out.
Col and Ilenia tied up all the unconscious men, and there were eight of them in total. Col thought Sligh, the mastermind himself, had returned to the trading house, but he had been standing in front of the entrance to the vault and he was the first to receive Myuri’s blessings.
Though Col was rather surprised about that, there were dark circles under the eyes of the collapsed man, and he was so haggard he looked like a different person than he was the night before. He might have had a more stressful night than they did.
He might have thought that there really was a secret exit and they had escaped to town, or perhaps he had been tormented by guilt. What made him think that was not his good-naturedness that always annoyed Myuri but because the scripture lay open beside him.
After Myuri checked around to see if there were any others who were hiding or escaped, they found jugs of water in the kitchen annexed to the cathedral and drank some cold water.
It was only then that he could relax, knowing he had been saved. Both he and Ilenia sunk to the floor in such relief and could not even open their mouths, but Myuri was different.
Once she found the food that Sligh and the others had brought in, she carried off an armful as she tried to go off somewhere in excitement. Suspicious, Col called out to her, and she said she would be frying an egg, curing meat, and toasting some bread while the stones in the vault were still hot. The faint light of dawn filtered through the skylights, so it was like an early breakfast.
Without any energy to get mad, he just saw her off.
And there was something he needed to think about more than breakfast: how to tidy this all up.
What should they do with Sligh and his men, who were tied up in a small room? The next logical step was to hand them over to the city council as the treasure thieves, but he was worried if such a simple thing was all right to do.
As he was thinking about that, there came the echo of a knock at the cathedral door, and his heart leaped.
Myuri was in the underground room. With no one else to depend on, he looked at Ilenia, and Ilenia was tilting her head, looking toward the main entrance.
“…Fish?”
He had an idea of who it might be when she said that. He quickly ran along the side aisle and opened the door, and there was exactly whom he had expected: Autumn.
“Oh, you’re all right.”
Autumn’s hair and beard were dripping wet, and he glanced at the giant bird sitting on his shoulder. The hawk-like bird gave a shrill cry.
“He said you might be burned alive, so I drank a lake’s worth of water.”
Col was not sure how much of that was true, but he got the gist of the situation.
“It’s true we were trapped in an underground room, and it was set on fire. We are safe thanks to God’s protection.”
The man who had even temporarily called himself a monk only glumly shrugged his shoulders.
They then came across Myuri, who was stuffing her face with the breakfast she made from the fire that had just tried to kill them, and they gave a brief explanation of what happened the night before. Autumn offered the dangerous idea of dealing with Sligh and the others by abandoning them on a small island somewhere. He said they were then free to escape as they pleased.
Though that raised the question of what to do if they did escape, Autumn’s idea was still rather amicable.
Not only had Sligh tried to lay the blame on them and kill them, they had also stolen the treasures from the cathedral. If they handed them over to the city council, they would not escape being sent to the gallows, no matter how much they struggled.
While Col knew that sins should be punished, he recalled that Sligh might have spent the night reading the scripture, so it could also be thought of as a reckless act after having lost self-control. And if word got out that Sligh was the culprit, then the Debau Company’s reputation would plummet in Desarev, and that might affect the entirety of the company. He wanted to avoid that.
Having said that, it was very unlikely he would be acquitted.
Myuri and Ilenia agreed to go along with Autumn’s plan, and they all looked at Col, who was trying to show lenience, with eyes half filled with annoyance and criticism, but he had an even better plan.
When he explained it, Myuri only stared blankly at him, but Ilenia and Autumn shuddered instead.
“You are sometimes cruel.”
“Yes, I don’t think…”
He thought their reactions were exaggerated, and that it would absolutely benefit them much more than exiling them to a small, distant island.
When he stated that, he got no more arguments.
But there was one problem. He required Autumn and the bird for his plan to work.
Myuri won over the bird by giving it a piece of cured meat that was dripping with oil, but Autumn only morosely said the following.
“I will think of this as my way of paying back what I owe you several times over.”
Then Myuri, who was slurping out the fried egg sandwiched between the bread, licked away the piece of yolk stuck to her mouth and smiled at Autumn.
“If it’s too much, then I’ll go dig some holes for you, and my brother will help me out.”
Coal
mines supported the livelihoods of the people of the north, and Myuri, with her nose and claws, would be able to find new coal veins.
After a while of weighing the pros and cons on the scales, Autumn finally sighed in defeat.
“…Oh well.”
“Thank you.”
When they saw Autumn, whom Col had kept working since the day before, off from the island, the sun was just barely showing its face above the horizon.
“Haaah. I’m sleepy now after all that eating.”
Myuri yawned, standing before the marvelous view, and her tail wavered back and forth.
“It will be a while before Autumn and the others come back. Let’s take a rest.”
They of course had not slept since they spent the entire night in a burning room. Myuri was already beginning to stagger, so Col held her up, and they began to make their way back to the cathedral.
He stopped in place because Ilenia had not moved, staring out to sea.
But she was not looking east toward the rising sun but to the west, where it set.
“About making a country in the land far west…”
His words were so sudden it even surprised himself.
“How much of that is true?”
Myuri, who had been on the verge of melting, suddenly tensed.
Ilenia’s face, gazing out to the western sea, was half covered in soot.
When she looked back at him, there was a strange expression on her face.
“Why?”
“You work for the Bolan Company, don’t you?”
Two seabirds took flight from the point and quickly vanished into the sky.
“Yes, but what about it?”
“Eve Bolan is an old acquaintance. I was thinking, perhaps, that you might be trying to curry favor with the prince so that Mrs. Bolan can take back her title.”
Ilenia’s eyes widened.
She only gave him a troubled smile afterward.
“I can’t say I didn’t think about that, but…Lady Bolan does not want her title back.”
Of course, she could say whatever she wanted. It just came down to whether he should believe her or not.
The girl in Col’s arms pinched at him, as though telling him he should.
Wolf & Parchment, Volume 3 Page 20
