The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [156]
Spiraling minarets adorned the spired reaches of the structure; walls covered by a mass of irregular forms and shapes he could not distinguish from so far away. Stonemasons chiseled away at these forms from scaffolds wrapped around the wings.
The tower in the middle, as high as the building was long, looked closest to completion. Oblong slits perforated a bulging capsule at its peak, perhaps a bell tower, a black slate roof above.
Immense, narrow doors yawned open at the tower's base; sheets of suspended linen prevented Kanazuchi from glimpsing-its interior. Paths in the dirt circled the church and led out to work and supply stations; quarried squares of rock, a lumber mill, tool sheds, firing ovens for the bricks. The entire site teemed with an army of workers. He saw no overseers in the group; each man and woman seemed purposeful and self-directed.
A quarter mile behind the building rose a sheer mountain of smooth rock, a pale monolithic dome reaching twice again as high as the central tower. When viewed straight on, the rock provided a dramatic backdrop that accentuated the tower's stark visage. Between the construction site and the rock lay its rear entrance, less heavily trafficked.
He waited for the moon to drift behind a cloud, then left the cover of the shanties, moving into the open, away both from the tower and the town, then circled back to the outcroppings of the massive rock formation. The back of the church came into view; nowhere near the same level of activity back here. The rear facade exhibited nothing like the front's refinement and detail; its builder had designed his church to be viewed from the front.
Kanazuchi observed the workers' routines as white shirts periodically pushed wheelbarrows of debris out the back entrance, dumping their loads into a widespread area of waste a hundred paces toward the dome. He crept down to the edge of the site and concealed himself behind a mound of dirt.
When the next worker approached, Kanazuchi waited until he lifted the barrow to empty it, then snapped his neck with a single blow and dragged the body behind the dirt. He stripped the dead man's clothes, put them on over his own; white tunic, pants, and boots. A rough cotton weave, the pullover shirt had an open collar and hung to the middle of his thighs, leaving room for him to tuck the long knife, the wak-izashi, in the back of his belt. Pulling down the dirt with his hands, he quickly buried the body.
Retrieving the wheelbarrow, he encountered a second worker arriving with another load; the pale, slender young man dumped out his barrow, hardly noticing him. Kanazuchi grabbed the handles of his wheelbarrow and followed the man along the path back toward the rear doors. As they approached, the immense scale of the black cathedral came clear to him; the largest building he had ever seen. From its base, Kanazuchi looked up and could not see the summit of the central tower.
They entered down a ramp of wood set on a flight of stairs lit by torches in brackets on the walls. Workers were laying sheets of slate on one section of floor. Others chipped away at arches and portals; some applied mortar to cracks between the blocks of stones. Kanazuchi pushed his wheelbarrow into the central chamber of the church, unable to distinguish the high reaches of the walls rising above him in the dim light. Hut he could feel the cold, black sense of dread in the room.
He remembered drawings the priest at their monastery had shown him of European cathedrals and thought they must feel similar to this place; cold and threatening, designed to frighten and browbeat its worshipers. In his land, churches were gentle buildings, tied to the land around them, built to inspire harmony and inner peace. He wondered again what sort of god they followed in these Western countries that needed so badly to be feared.
In his vision, Kanazuchi had been shown a chamber buried below the main hall of