Chapter 523: The Ecclesiarchy? Monks?
Once the Minamoto family had climbed in by rope, the samurai on the walls told them:
"Once you're inside, find any empty house and move in. The people of the city have either been eaten by the Big Yōkai or run outside the walls and been caught and killed by them.
"But remember: don't pick a house near the great gate. The Giant Yōkai comes into the city every day to eat a hundred people, and the five hundred demons under him each kill a few more every day."
The samurai checked that the Minamotos really were human and then let them in. Right now this was a crisis of humans against monsters, and household registration and the like had all been pushed aside.
Hei thanked him, and the family went into the city. They picked an empty house with a large courtyard and settled in for the time being.
The house was a mess and smelled of blood. The front door had been broken in. It looked like the Big Yōkai had ransacked it.
The Minamotos spent the whole day putting it in order and didn't finish until the sun came up.
Kian looked out at Kyoto and said to Hei, "Kyoto's a great city. I'm going to go have a look around."
With that, he waved a hand and walked out of the courtyard on his own, heading out into Kyoto.
Kyoto truly was a great city. It was a metropolis of a million people, after all.
On a feudal world like this, technology and productivity were low, and gathering that many people in one place cost a great deal. For Kyoto to support a million people who didn't farm, it had to be very powerful indeed.
Kian wandered the streets, hoping to find some clue about this lost world.
Most of Kyoto's houses were wooden, mostly two or three storeys, and from almost anywhere you could see the castle keep at the centre of the city.
The castle keep crowned an enormous complex of wooden buildings. It was very tall, and it was the Son of Heaven's palace.
The castle keep was both a defensive structure and a ritual one. Its height gave defenders a view of the land and early warning of which direction an enemy was coming from.
During rites, the Son of Heaven could also use it to proclaim how close he stood to Heaven.
Kian took it all in, walking along without any real purpose. Suddenly he heard a commotion.
Because the Big Yōkai came into the city every day to eat people, hardly anyone was wandering the streets now, and crowds were rare. So Kian strode toward the noise.
The moment he reached the source of it, his eyes narrowed. He'd found another trace the Imperium had left on this planet!
It was a hooded monk with a double-headed eagle pendant hanging on his chest. He was loudly preaching a modified version of the Imperial Creed to the common folk around him.
The monk proclaimed:
"The Big Yōkai are foul things bred in darkness! As long as you have faith in the Golden Sun, the divine light of the Golden Sun will sweep away all darkness, destroy all evil, and keep you and yours safe from harm!!"
The common folk below had been tormented half to death by the Big Yōkai lately, and every one of them was shouting that they believed in the Golden Sun, they believed in the Golden Sun!
The monk was very pleased with the crowd. He was about to keep reeling them in when his gaze suddenly landed on the towering Kian in the crowd.
Kian made the sign of the aquila at him, hands crossed over his chest, and tears instantly burst from the monk's eyes.
He abandoned preaching his modified Imperial Creed to the people around him, rushed up to Kian, and asked, anxious and thrilled at once:
"An Angel?"
Kian shook his head.
"An Inquisitor!"
The monk thought for a moment and seemed to decide an Inquisitor would do, then said, "Please, my lord, come with me!"
The monk led Kian down a winding maze of streets to a small temple on the outskirts of Kyoto.
The little temple was full of monks, but they had turned into warrior monks now. Every one of them wore armour and carried a naginata, standing guard at the temple gate and along its walls.
The monk led Kian straight through to the heart of the temple, where they found an old monk.
The old monk was tapping a wooden fish drum. When he saw Kian's towering frame, his eyes went wide too. "An Angel?"
Kian shook his head.
"An Inquisitor."
The old monk froze for a second, then nodded.
"An Inquisitor will do."
Then Kian and the old monk had a long talk. Kian sat cross-legged on the tatami, looking around at the statues of the Buddha, and asked:
"What happened to this planet? Why has every trace of the Imperium vanished?"
The old monk sighed and said:
"You may not know this, my lord Inquisitor, but 386 years ago our planet was struck by a Warp storm. The whole world fell into a void and lost all contact with the outside.
"The space stations in low orbit and all the ships vanished!
"Worse still, after the Warp storm, most people forgot the Imperium. They forgot the Emperor. They forgot everything!
"It was as if some being had reached into their minds and taken out everything to do with the Imperium!
"And not only that. Our planet's technical experts began forgetting how to use their technology and equipment too, so our society has been regressing ever since, until it fell to where it is now!"
Kian frowned. That settled it. Anything that could make ten billion people on a planet forget the Imperium in an instant had to be Tzeentch.
But why would a power like that do this? Was he bored? Or was this part of some plan?
Kian went on:
"If everyone forgot, then what about you?
"You're Ecclesiarchy, aren't you? Why do you present yourselves as monks?"
The old monk sighed sadly and explained.
"More than three hundred years ago, in the great forgetting, the Ecclesiarchy's people forgot the Imperium and forgot the Emperor too.
"Most of the priests simply set down their holy books, went out into the fields, and became farmers.
"But a few still held fast to the faith in their hearts. They'd forgotten who they had faith in, but faith is pure, and the mark faith leaves behind can't be forgotten!
"Relying on that faint mark of pure, steadfast faith, our ancestors began to rediscover who they had faith in!
"Before the Son of Heaven burned the books, our ancestors saved some of the scriptures. From them we learned of the Imperium, of the Angels, and of the Golden Sun!"
Kian felt a surge of respect. These people of the Ecclesiarchy had been struck by a Chaos God and made to forget their Creed, and yet with nothing but the faith that remained, they had pieced the truth back together bit by bit.
They might have reworked the Creed until it was in pieces, and they'd gone from Western priests to Eastern monks, but on the whole, their efforts had kept some seeds of the Imperium alive on this planet.
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