Chapter 464: Hidden Stone House

Only after stepping onto the island did Richard realize it was far larger than it appeared from a distance.

He climbed the cobblestone path for over thirty steps before finally treading on grass. The island winds were fierce, flattening the grass toward the inhabited side.

Further up, Richard saw a cluster of round houses—more than a dozen in total.

They were built from dry-laid stone slabs, stacked in inward-leaning rings until they sealed at the top. The structures were held together entirely by the weight of stone resting on stone.

From a distance, they looked like a pile of bowls flipped upside down on the grassy slope. The rims had been gnawed away by the wind, but their bottoms remained intact.

Richard stopped in front of the outermost house. Stepping inside, he found it significantly warmer.

The wind hooked around the doorway, failing to follow him inside.

A patch of stone on the western wall had been smeared with a layer of plaster.

Someone had carved words into it. It was Latin.

The strokes were stiff and clumsy. The carver was clearly no stonemason; it looked like the work of someone used to holding a pen who had suddenly switched to a chisel.

Richard carefully deciphered the inscription. It read:

"We eat one meal a day. Before we dine, we leave a portion outside the door, for the Lord, too, was once a traveler on the road."

Richard had read plenty about the rules governing hermits. The ones here in Ireland lived the most austere lives; even the gentlemen at the School of Theology in the Imperial Capital would shake their heads at the mention of them.

They ate one meal a day, lived in stone houses, and slept on stone beds. In winter, they would wade into the sea, standing waist-deep in the freezing water to recite psalms.

But the rule carved here was different. It spoke nothing of asceticism, only of hospitality.

If people with only one meal a day still gave a portion away—who were they giving it to?

He turned and walked back to the doorway.

A standing stone stood there, its edge marred by deep gouges. The horizontal and slanted lines carved into its corner were Ogham script.

Richard crouched down. Ogham had to be read from bottom to top.

The rough meaning was: "Leave a portion every night. If left, they are guests. If not, they become something else."

Still crouching, Richard fell into silent thought.

The text on the wall was Latin—the language of the Church.

The Ogham script on the doorframe was older than the Church's words by countless years.

Yet both passages were talking about the exact same thing.

Yesterday evening, when Richard returned the tide chart to MacFie, he had been unable to stop himself from asking a question:

"Professor, there's something I don't understand.

"The people we're sending off tonight—their origins are all completely different.

"Queenstown, Liverpool, Hamburg, Bergen... There are Irishmen, Germans, Rus, and even merchants from the Eastern Continent. A few are even listed as being from the New Continent.

"They come from all over the world. But here on a mountain in the Highlands, we're using a Gaelic verdict. Will they really listen to us?"

MacFie had plucked a sprig of heather from the grass and crushed it between his fingers.

"Do you think the dead actually understand language?"

Richard thought of that night at the Black Trench. "I think they actually can."

"Then think about Whitcom," MacFie countered. "The one suppressed underground for so many years—does it really understand medieval Church Latin?"

Richard frowned, discovering a blind spot in his logic.

"You're right... It was sealed away in the pre-Roman era. The very concept of Latin didn't exist back then."

MacFie brushed the crushed heather from his hands.

"Sometimes, verdicts are indeed spoken for the dead. But other times, they are spoken to what lies behind the veil—or rather, to the land behind the veil."

He looked up and continued:

"Why did the seal at Whitcom rot away?

"Because the medieval Church crudely classified her as a female demon of the underworld.

"That land dates back to the pre-Roman era, yet they brute-forced their own methods to seal it.

"The land refused to acknowledge it. And so, that entity was able to birth a horde of children right under the seal."

He continued, "Tonight, you will see two types of dead.

"Those who can be accepted are our task for tonight. We must send them back, one by one.

"But what if a man dies at sea, thousands of miles from home, with an entire ocean separating him from his homeland?

"The Church won't take him. Perhaps he was unbaptized, or a pagan, or his name was simply never recorded.

"On the shipping company's manifest, his line is empty. Unclaimed."

"In the Branch Office's records, it is written as sluagh na marbh—the Host of the Dead. Or simply, the dead swarm."

"The records classify it under aggregate evil creatures, but that's just for laymen.

"They don't aggregate on their own. It's more accurate to say they snowball together."

"Every single dead person inside was once someone unaccepted. They drift on this estuary until they forget who they are, and then they merge with the previous batch.

"Once they gather in sufficient numbers, they start picking people up.

"Over the years, batch after batch has rolled up.

"It has no leader, and it doesn't hate anyone. It only instinctively adds more people."

MacFie raised a finger. "But it can only pick up those who are unaccepted."

Richard suddenly recalled the west-facing windows in the village. "So that's why the western windows in the village have to be shut tight."

"Exactly. The living bar their doors and windows and keep silent to guard against this."

MacFie's words from last night, combined with the stone carvings before him now, made sense: leave it, and they are guests; do not leave it, and they become something else.

The phrase on the stone pillar was expressing that exact principle.

Richard slowly stood up. He accidentally bumped his knee against the stone edge, making it go numb.

The hermits of Ireland didn't enter the cities or build grand cathedrals.

They boarded ships and sailed west, stopping only when they reached the furthest rock. There, they built their rings of stone houses, lived on one meal a day, and never returned for the rest of their lives.

They called this the "Wandering for Christ." Because they viewed themselves as guests, they understood the older truth carved on the stone.

When they maintained the seal, they translated those words into their own language.

Richard compared this seal to the one in Whitcom.

"No wonder some seals last a thousand years, while others rot away in three hundred."

He unbuckled his canvas bag and pulled out the Rubbing Machine.

He unscrewed the copper cap and cranked the handle.

A drop of Condensate seeped onto the paper, causing words to appear.

Once the rubbing was complete, Richard held the paper up to the dim light outside to examine it.

On the side of the material world, there were nineteen sets of carvings.

But on the side of the veil, they were densely packed.

Outside the stone house, shadows surfaced from the deeper reaches of the veil.

The water outside was still rising. The path that had risen from the sea was now nearly touching the island's edge.

..................

On the other side, MacFie sat in the dead center of a circle formed by twelve standing stones.

He began to chant the first line of the incantation:

"éirigh, a mhuintir na mara. (People of the sea, arise.)"

Up on the slope, the eight women slammed their hands into the wet mud, producing a dull thud.

The young woman who had driven the cart set the tune. Sitting on the outermost edge with her child resting at her feet, she sang as she pounded the cloth.

From the island, Richard could see the west faintly beginning to glow.

This island was the pier. For a thousand years, someone had always kept a fire burning for that western path, leaving a meal outside the door for everyone who washed ashore.

This lasted until the hermits died out. Of the two Hunter families in the village, one had moved away, and the other had completely died off.

By April of this year, there had been no one left to go up the mountain and reinforce the seal. That was why they had to pass this duty on today.

Richard planted the Caduceus upright. Ferrying did not require him to extend a proactive invitation.

He had spent the last few days preparing a very thorough verdict.

He had considered using the three confirmations of church liturgical Latin, the chain inscriptions of Old Gaelic, or the same methods he had used that night at the Black Trench.

But now, all of that was useless.

The people returning along this path spoke at least dozens of languages—Irish, Gaelic, Norwegian, Germanic, Yiddish, and various Slavic dialects whose names he didn't even know.

Even if he shouted until his throat went hoarse, the vast majority wouldn't necessarily understand what he was saying.

The true power of a verdict lay in its hook. But on this page, the hook wasn't in language at all.

Richard turned the Caduceus horizontally. The two golden snakes separated, and the door of Ferrying swung open.

He spoke. "Those who boarded at Queenstown."

A massive swathe of people in the procession raised their heads at the same time.

The harbor's name was printed on their ticket stubs and etched into the heart of every person who had boarded there.

It was the last place they looked back on. It transcended all languages.

"And those who boarded at Liverpool."

A second wave of the crowd looked up. This time, there were far more military uniforms among them.

"Those who boarded at Derry."

"Those who boarded at Glasgow."

"Those who boarded at Bergen."

"Those who boarded at Hamburg."

Even though it was a port of an enemy nation, the crowd that looked up was no different from the rest.

They wore the same sodden clothes and carried the same tightly corded cloth bundles, and they were all looking his way.

The procession began to move. They marched through the gap collectively, their steps perfectly aligned.

Standing behind the staff, Richard watched them, realizing that they had lined up to board their ships in life just like this.

The gangways were narrow, only allowing one person to pass at a time. The heels of the person ahead would be right in front of your eyes.

For so many years, across dozens of shipping routes, that rule had never changed.

Once through the gap, they sank into the stones one by one. They were all incredibly obedient.

Not far away, Richard noticed the firelight in the village leap, burning a little brighter.

The first round of Ferrying took nearly an hour. Richard couldn't even count how many there had been.

All he knew was that by the end, the dense column that had once completely obscured the road had gradually thinned out.

Resting his hands on his knees, he panted for breath before reactivating the Condensed Mirror Method.

Yet quite a few still remained motionless. They stood scattered along the roadside—some at the very front, others far in the back.

One man stood less than twenty meters from Richard, both of his hands entirely empty.

Richard saw that the list still had columns for ship names and cabin classes. He prepared to test them one by one.

Just then, the sheep on the slope suddenly began to collapse.

The three in the very center dropped first.

Sheep were the most vocal of livestock. They bleated when sheared, bleated when driven into pens, and even bleated when dreaming in the night.

But these three didn't make a single sound. Their four legs just went limp and they sank to their knees, all facing toward the west.

Immediately after, the rest of the flock across the slope followed, collapsing row by row in perfect unison, as if an invisible hand were pushing over them from west to east.

Someone in the village shouted, "The sheep! What's wrong with the sheep?"

The young woman who had driven the cart was the first to stand. She tossed her wooden mallet onto the long board and turned to head up the slope to check on the sheep.

Sheep were one of the most precious assets to the people here.

But the old woman rushed forward and forced her to the ground.

The move was so swift and fierce that the young woman was pressed flat.

Before she could even cry out, the old woman ripped off her own dark shawl and threw it over the girl's head.

"Don't look up!"

"But the sheep..."

The old woman pressed the shawl down tighter. "The sheep will get up on their own! If you look up, you never will!"

Among the eight women, the other six didn't stop their hands for a second.

Their mallets continued to rise and fall, the wet mud pounded against the long boards just as before, one voice leading and the others harmonizing.

The only two who had paused were brides married in from outside villages. After a brief hesitation, they immediately resumed the rhythm.

Back on the island, Richard saw the faint glimmer on the sea get wiped away, leaving only a blackness with no background color.

The sight before him inexplicably reminded him of a flock of starlings sweeping past at dusk in autumn.

Tens of thousands of them would merge in the sky, stretching thin one moment and bunching tight the next. They would twist into the shape of a fish, then a hand, and sometimes an overturned bell, before scattering back into thousands of separate dots.

He had once witnessed that bizarre spectacle at the entrance to Slag Alley, staring in such sheer fascination that he hadn't snapped out of it until his neck ached.

This darkness in the sky looked exactly like that, except there was no sound of flapping wings as it shifted formations.

When a flock of starlings passed over, the cacophony of beating wings could drown out a horse carriage.

But as this shadow swept past, Richard only heard a massive crowd of people speaking in the far distance.

It sounded like a great many people talking behind several walls, or across a whole street, or through a layer of rain... He could only make out that people were speaking—some arguing, some laughing, some calling out numbers.

Yet Richard was always half a word short of understanding them.

And the harder he tried to listen clearly, the closer the darkness drew.

Richard silently circulated the Condensed Mirror Method, turning himself into a body of water with no fluctuations, letting that half-heard word automatically slip back out of his ears.

This had to be the dead swarm that MacFie had spoken of.

That swarm of unclaimed dead flew right along the path of return, picking through the ranks from the rear of the line all the way to the front.

Richard noticed a local woman from this side among them. She wore a shawl and went barefoot, her arms cradling empty air.

She was plucked right off the path, yet even as her feet left the ground, she didn't struggle in the slightest.

Once hoisted about three stories high, she simply dispersed.

After scattering, that small piece fell back into the blackness, failing to create even a single ripple.