Chapter 489

I stared up at Narke for a moment before asking, “Why?”

I couldn’t immediately understand why the artifact was the Pythia of Delphi. Even though it was obvious that Narke, who had actually known this object closely, would have a more accurate account than any guess or prediction of mine, I asked again as though I couldn’t accept it without hearing the reason for myself.

Just as I had felt something out of place when I first heard Gabriele’s words, Christian prophecy and the oracles of ancient Greece came from entirely different origins. So the fact that they had named it the Pythia of Delphi didn’t seem like something I could simply brush aside. A storm of thoughts raged through my head.

The Pythia of Delphi was the marble angel plated in bronze that now lay shattered into powder at my feet. If that was the case, then Delphi was the intact temple here in the Forum Romanum where I was standing. The Oracle of Delphi was the mana emitted through the Pythia.

Of course.

My guess was that, when Gabriele and Narke were young, they had come to believe that the artifact’s prophecies were the kind that could never be overcome by human free will, that one could only submit to fate—in other words, the prophecies it produced here had always come true without the slightest deviation. That was why this could only be the “Pythia” of Delphi.

“…Then this statue must have known that it would die today.”

I continued, “It was supposed to be smashed by my hands today. That’s why you didn’t stop me. Right?”

Narke didn’t answer. He only continued looking down at me from above. As the ceiling light in the center of the room made my vision swim, I asked again.

“What did you mean when you said Lord Caetani couldn’t break it?”

“He wanted to break it, but he couldn’t. No matter how hard he struck it, it wouldn’t break.”

“Wouldn’t it break even if someone else hit it?”

“No one else tried to break it.”

“I suppose not. What do you think? Is it the kind of thing that wouldn’t break even if someone else hit it?”

“…….”

“Then how was I able to break it?”

Narke fell silent again. We didn’t have time for this. With impatience rising inside me like a tide, I gestured to him.

“Come down already. The elders who were using the fragments to see the future are going to come rushing over foaming at the mouth, so we need to get out of here. You know where you’re supposed to go, right? Slip into the family estate while the owner comes out of the Marcellus Theater.”

Have you stopped bleeding? A mage powerful enough to be the head of the family might notice your divine power, but they are going to be too distracted to catch something like that. You should be able to control it well enough not to get caught…

Useless advice filled my head even though he would obviously make his own judgment and act accordingly. Then I realized the reason. I stopped speaking and stared at Narke.

“Was I really allowed to break this?”

Narke remained silent for a moment before giving me a different answer.

“I didn’t think this thing was all that bad. I was always on the verge of suffocating from idleness… I could never tell which came first, the chicken or the egg. I always thought there was nothing wrong with things staying this way, and yet I never intended to simply remain as I was. I lived in Rome, enjoying it in my own way. I knew there were people who wanted to harm me or harbored ill intentions, but I only rested my chin on my hand and watched them, enjoying myself in my own way. I never punished them. And the heavy responsibilities placed upon me—I accepted them without finding them any more burdensome than grains of sand scattered by centuries of wind across the cipollino columns of this temple. Perhaps I didn’t understand it when I was very young, but once I grew older, I accepted my fate and found a way to enjoy it.”

“Back when I was very young, I didn’t understand”—this was the only thing I had ever heard from Narke about his childhood. This was the first time I had heard that, once he had grown to a certain age, he adapted to the exploitation of the adults around him and had come to regard the responsibilities placed upon him as hardly any burden at all.

If he simply meant that he was powerful enough to purify several thousand square meters with ease, and therefore had no trouble supplying divine power to his family or fulfilling his duties as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then I could have easily inferred that from what I already knew. That didn’t seem to be what he meant. Instead, he seemed to be talking about something more fundamental—his own fate.

Only four or five hours ago, whenever he was forced to reveal something about himself to us, Narke had shown clear discomfort. I vividly remembered the troubled look in his eyes when we talked about Matteo Orsini. Narke had hardly ever brought up his childhood—or Rome—and he had never seemed eager to tell us about it. So it would be difficult to call him a liar simply because I was hearing something from him for the first time now. Still, it was true that he had deliberately limited most of what he had revealed to us about his earliest childhood.

Whatever it was, that time was already in the past. Now, I was hearing the memories of Narke’s teenage years—the ones he had chosen not to reveal—through his own voice. And, however unsteadily, I could faintly sense that he was beginning to put his feet on solid ground.

Of course, the Narke standing before me was still looking down at me from the railing.

“But how could this have happened after only a little over half a year?”

He was speaking on the assumption that I would figure it out on my own. And, in fact, I could just barely grasp the thread of what he was saying, so the best thing I could do was listen in silence.

“I didn’t know it would turn out like this. I truly didn’t think or calculate that it would ever come to this. How could I not have known? Right now, I feel as though my heart has been pierced by an arrowhead made of gold…”

His words began to scatter. I could tell that even Narke hadn’t fully sorted out his thoughts. Perhaps that was simply because this was who he was in the present. He could describe his past with remarkable clarity, yet he had left his present self somewhere in the Labyrinth of Crete¹. I knew the members of the Senate would be racing here from all across Rome, but I waited for Narke to sort through his confusion. He had chosen to tell me about it instead of keeping it all tangled up inside himself.

“Could it be that the dissatisfaction I’ve always had with myself has only now finally turned into something else? But I never thought I had been that deeply dissatisfied with myself. I often enjoyed myself in Rome, and though this restless desire to improve kept rising in my heart, I thought of that sort of youthful impatience as fuel that could light up an otherwise unbearably dull life like a brilliant flame. I loved Rome, and I liked watching the flocks of sheep wandering through the wilderness beyond the city. Houses and churches have been built where the sheep once grazed now, but I still loved watching the sunset settle over the land. I didn’t particularly care for the light that illuminated the edges of the spires, but I loved the way the rays spread through the sheep’s soft white fleece. I liked the sound of the hem of my cassock fluttering in the wind, and when that happened, I liked the stronger wind that blew beneath the arcade beside the blue pond, too. I didn’t always agree with the Church, but I loved Christ in my own way. I loved the passion for learning that burned without ever fading, the desire to reach the mirror of eternal truth. I loved the books of the Vatican that had been placed in my hands, and I loved the smell of ink freshly made from ash and moss.”

“…….”

“While I felt sorry for the people who revered me, I never once found their presence bothersome. I let them kiss my hand and held it out to help them back to their feet. Perhaps because I never presumed that my blessings would always come true, there were times when I wanted to return to my room and open a book while reciting prayers, but I was content enough. Even when there were things left unfulfilled within me, I had lived by relying on them, so I never resented not having them in my hands right away. At least, that was what I firmly believed until then. So… could it be that I only realized now that I had been relying on the wrong things? Could that be why something I did back then without a second thought has brought me back to my senses today and led me here?”

From this point on, I couldn’t tell. To me, he seemed to be suffering from excessive inner turmoil. Either his moral standards were too high, or there was something about Narke that I still didn’t know. It could have been both. What was certain was that Gabriele’s words about me understanding it someday happened to cross my mind at that moment. I had to remember all of this.

“Perhaps someday, you’ll say this to me: Gabriele was right.”

“…….”

“Yes, Lukas. Gabriele was right. And you’ll be disappointed that I said all this today. At least, that’s how I feel right now. I’m deeply disappointed in myself. Today, I’m feeling a self-loathing and anger I’ve never felt in my entire life.”

“Why?”

“What did Gabriele tell you?”

I remained silent. I knew that wasn’t really a question so much as a foundation for what he was about to say.

“Didn’t he say he wouldn’t tell you because you mustn’t know yet? Yes, you’ll be angry when you find out, but so am I. That’s why I’m telling you all this even though I know it will only deepen my disappointment and despair in myself. Because if I say it like this, you’ll figure it out.”

Both Gabriele and Narke had high expectations of me. They believed I could interpret what they were saying. And in truth, there was quite a lot I could understand even with my limited background knowledge—they were talking about things only they knew, after all.

“Even if the whole world turns its back on me, I have to make sure everyone knows. That’s my last line of defense against committing an even greater sin.”

After saying that, Narke became as still as a statue. A moment later, rather than continuing from what he had just told me, he returned to talking about how much he loved Rome. Because of that, his next words sounded somewhat out of place.

“…That’s why I never broke the Pythia of Delphi. Gabriele was different, though. He loved Rome, but he hated it even more, and he had every reason to. Gabriele never looked at the flocks of sheep the way I did. He would breathe in the barren dust and stare at the horizon with burning eyes. To Gabriele, the wastelands around Rome and the Colosseum were a savage battleground soaked in the smell of blood, the Arch of Constantine was a monument to the victory of Romans who had forgotten their humanity, and the Vatican was a place he both loved and hated. Once, Gabriele told me that he didn’t want to stay in this terrible city any longer, with the ugly traces of damnatio memoriae still left all over it. The Colosseum wasn’t in the city. The city itself was one enormous Colosseum.”

The reason the Arch of Constantine² and damnatio memoriae came up was because there was a theory that the Arch of Constantine might have been rebuilt as part of the damnatio memoriae of his rival, Maxentius³, using an arch he had originally constructed. Whether the theory was true or not didn’t matter. What mattered was that they had talked about it that way.

“It may have been because he genuinely hated damnatio memoriae, but perhaps it was even more because everything in Rome around him was hostile to his fate. That was why Gabriele decided to destroy the Senate’s oracle. This thing that had lived longer than either of us.”

So that was why he had called the Pythia of Delphi an old man.

Narke quietly retraced the memory in his mind as he spoke.

“I stood by the door, three steps away from you, and watched. I knew it wasn’t time for our ‘Pythia of Delphi’ to be destroyed, but I didn’t stop you. That was all. I did try to stop the adults from dragging Gabriele away, but I had to watch them take him away. And I knew it would happen, too. I was satisfied with Rome, while Gabriele wasn’t. So in truth, Gabriele never thought of this as the Pythia of Delphi. He believed that if he stopped the elders of the Senate from relying on the oracle to carve out their future, he could change his own fate as well…”

Narke fell silent for a moment, lost in thought, before finishing.

“That child is a Christian to the very core.”

“And you?”

“I am, too.”

Narke smiled. Then he whispered, “At least, that’s what I believed.”

The sound of carriage wheels coming to a stop came from outside the temple. The noise of people began to surge closer, like the roar of flames. Seeing as they hadn’t foreseen what happened today, I became convinced that this statue had to be broken today.

As always, Narke jumped down from the railing without hesitation. He tucked the still-sleeping Matteo Orsini under one arm, then carefully picked up my bag and took my hand, wearing the cautious manner he always had when doing something he hadn’t been given permission to do.

When I opened my eyes again, I was standing in front of an unfamiliar stone wall.

“I understand your plan now. The clue we haven’t made use of yet. Not bad.”

Narke said that while looking straight into my eyes. Having read my thoughts, he continued.

“It’ll come more straightforwardly than you’d expect. As you know, the Papal See is currently censoring all documents and correspondence, so no one sends letters containing anything overly personal. Private letters aren’t even allowed, in case they’re used for codes.”

“What about the possibility of sending an official letter to someone they have a personal relationship with and using that person to decode it…? The Papal See doesn’t account for that?”

“Hahaha. If they went that far, they wouldn’t be able to send work-related letters either. Still, that works out well for us, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

I nodded and gestured for Narke to follow.

“Then you know where you need to go now. I’ll cast concealment on you one last time. Put on the mana restraint.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“…What do you mean, you’re fine? You need to wear the restraint to get through the barrier. Even if you take it off again as soon as you’re inside.”

The first time we entered the Theatre of Marcellus residence, Narke had helped me by putting on a mana restraint and casting concealment. The second time, when we entered the Monterotondo residence, I crossed the barrier together with Matteo Orsini, so I didn’t need to wear one.

But Narke shook his head.

“That’s true. But my mana is registered with the barrier here, so I’ll be fine.”

“Then couldn’t you have gone in earlier?!”

Narke burst out laughing. He waved a hand and whispered, “Sorry. I didn’t because the feeling I got from my Precognition wasn’t good. Now that I think about it, I suppose it was because no matter which choice I made, I was bound to meet Matteo. I only did it because it didn’t seem like anything dangerous would happen even if you went in. If I’d seen a future where something serious happened at the residence, I never would have told you to go inside.”

“…Good grief… Fine.”

I said that, but somehow, I understood. If you interpreted the ‘Oracle of Delphi’ bestowed upon Matteo according to its name, then it was something that could not be avoided. He was supposed to meet Narke at some point today, no matter what. If even meeting for 0.1 seconds counted as a meeting, then the oracle had been fulfilled.

I took Matteo Orsini from Narke, changed clothes, then parted ways with him and tapped the artifact by my ear.

“Elias, is there still nothing?”

Knowing I was asking whether any letters had arrived at the communication post, he answered immediately.

— [Nope. Nothing. What was that about earlier?!]

“Just something. Something that’s going to turn Rome upside down… Is the mansion empty right now?”

— [Yeah. Everyone’s leaving, all of them. I thought a fire had broken out or something. I’m not going to die if I stay here, am I?]

“Of course not. Did you secure the warp point?”

— [Yeah.]

Taking my words as the signal, Elias called out the coordinates of the warp point. I entered the coordinates into the spell I had learned from Narke earlier and stamped my foot.

“Whoa~”

Elias caught me. He narrowed his eyes when he saw Matteo Orsini tucked in my arms, then led me outside. Once we reached another building on the mansion grounds, Elias picked the lock again with his universal key—a piece of wire—and entered the building after putting the restraints over his entire body. I did the same.

Inside, we found ourselves in an archive. Following Zähringen’s method, I gave the perceptive Elias a high five.

Why did I call him perceptive? Because he had realized that the original plan of identifying the culprit from the letters that arrived was gradually becoming useless. From now on, we were going to look for letters that had already arrived. And what we needed to find was the letter from the Secretariat of State of the Papal See.

This was the very first hypothesis we had left unused from the Saint Mark clue. Now was the time to put it to use. Einsiedel wouldn’t have given us a clue that could be interpreted in a completely pointless direction.

We had connected Saint Mark to the Secretariat of State. Taking Elias’s opinion that this alone wasn’t enough, he focused on the irony of Einsiedel bringing Saint Mark into the search for a negative figure. From the question, ‘Who could regard Saint Mark negatively?’ Elias worked out how that negativity could be connected to Saint Mark, and Saint Theodore came up as the answer.

Then what did Saint Theodore, Venice’s first patron saint who had been pushed aside by Saint Mark, symbolize?

We had learned about the relationship between the Cardinal Nephews and the Secretariat of State from Narke, who had figured out the situation. Historically, the Cardinal Nephews—secretaries made up of the pope’s relatives—were abolished, and the Secretariat of State took their place. From that, we could infer that the Cardinal Nephews corresponded to Saint Theodore, while the Secretariat of State corresponded to Saint Mark.

From here, there were countless ways to connect the clues. Focusing on the negative meaning attached to Mark, we first reasoned that the culprit might be someone who had taken on the iconography of Saint Theodore. That led us to investigate the Orsini family, who would originally have held the position of Cardinal Nephew, and that was how we ended up here.

But now a new problem arose, one that went back to the question Elias had raised in the first place. If Einsiedel had brought up Saint Mark to tell us that the culprit was somewhere in the Secretariat of State, then which of its countless employees was the culprit? Likewise, if the Orsini were the culprit, which of the countless Orsini was it?

That was when I realized I needed to combine the two hypotheses. The Secretariat of State was the first hypothesis, and the Orsini were the second. So, could I combine them and look for an Orsini in the Secretariat of State?

There were no Orsini in the Secretariat of State.

So I had to look for an Orsini who was in contact with the Secretariat of State. There was one thing that bothered me, and I would interrogate them to find out whether they really were the culprit, but that could wait until later. I pulled off the mana restraint once again and quietly channel divine power into the tip of my staff.

— Seek, and you shall find.

“Secretariat of State.”

Pure white divine power spread out in every direction. Narke had said the letter would come in a more straightforward manner than I expected, so the Papal See’s spy would reveal his identity in a similarly ‘straightforward’ way.

I took a deep breath and counted the seconds. Not a single light appeared anywhere. Even though we were in the residence of the Orsini, a clerical family that had produced a pope, there wasn’t a single letter exchanged with the Secretariat of State. Did that make any sense?

I slowly looked around the room, then exchanged a glance with Elias and smiled.

Among the Orsini living in the Monterotondo residence, there was a culprit—or at the very least, an accomplice. Then, who had the authority to clean out the archives?

Translator Note

1. A massive, confusing maze built by the architect Daedalus at Knossos. King Minos hid the half-man, half-bull Minotaur inside the maze. The hero Theseus later entered the structure, killed the beast, and escaped using a ball of string provided by Ariadne. ↩︎
2. The Arch of Constantine was built to celebrate Emperor Constantine the Great’s victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. ↩︎
3. Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius was a Roman emperor from 306 until his death in 312. Despite ruling in Italy and North Africa, and having the recognition of the Senate in Rome, he was not recognized as a legitimate emperor by his fellow emperors. ↩︎