Page 6 of Vilest Things
“I’ll be right back,” Calla interrupts, hoisting herself into the saddle. The palace guards stir, puzzled by the sudden commotion.
“Wait!” Venus puts her phone away. “If you’re off to see what happened, I’ll come—”
“No! Stay here. Stay with the palace guards.” She points at one of the guards, catching his attention with a threat in her eyes. “Watch her!”
Calla snaps the reins. Her horse surges forward. She isn’t certain she knows the way to the barracks they inspected earlier, but Rincun shudders beneath her at menacing speed before she can doubt herself. The wind turns razor-sharp as it blows against her face. Calla, wheezing, grabs the collar of her shirt and pulls it up beneath her eyes for protection, then continues charging forward with only one hand on the reins, her horse stomping a cloud of dust along the main path through West Capital. She rushes past two meager, gaunt villages. Scans their greeting gates, keeping track of the names.
There.The barracks were close to those brown trees. She remembers that.
Calla skids to a stop and rolls off the horse. It’s quiet. Startlingly so, given that West Capital’s main strip of shops stands to her right. Her jacket isn’t enough to stop her from shivering anymore, and Calla pauses for a moment to stare up at the darkening clouds. There must be some better explanation than what her instinct is telling her.
“Where is this coming from?” she whispers to herself.
Without time to waste, Calla runs forward, curving around the barracks and drawing a knife from her boot. They didn’t let her bring her sword—this is a peaceful delegation, Princess Calla; the royal guards are your best protection—so she’s making do with a smaller blade she swiped from the palace vault. The wind pulls her long hair in every direction, whipping it back and forth, over and around her eyes.
At the back of the barracks, she finds three men outfitted in the clothing of officials. Yamen workers already in the area, probably sent to poke around when East Capital couldn’t locate General Poinin either.
“Your Highness!” one of them says stiffly, spotting Calla as she approaches. The delegation was introduced to him upon their arrival; she doesn’t recall his name. He bows, but Calla’s attention is already fixed on the dead general lying before him.
General Poinin has one arm tucked beneath him and the other splayed out. The left side of his face is pressed hard into the ground, his stare an eerie, unblinking burgundy. Hard to believe he was chattering nonstop earlier in the day. Maybe a villager finally had enough of his insistence on ridding them of their old gods.
“What happened?” Calla asks, putting her knife away.
“It’s hard to tell,” the official in the middle answers.
“An examiner will be here soon,” the third says. “We called this in the moment we saw him. They’ll find the cause.”
“Let me save you the investigation. Make some space.” Calla leans down and rolls the general over. There’s a moment when the left side of his face is terribly red—then, seconds later, unnervingly pale. The officials must have noticed too, because one emits a disgusted noise, and Calla waves a hand at him to back up farther. She drops to a crouch. Peels back his jacket.
Two of the yamen officials start to gag.
“Ididrecommend that you make space.”
A gaping hole glares out from his chest. Despite the gruesome sight, it is shockingly bloodless—a clean carving that goes through the sternum, past the ribs, and leaves empty space behind. Calla reaches her hand in, and the gagging noises behind her get louder. She runs her finger against white bone, gently. Smooth. Before a weapon made this cut, the body had already stopped bleeding.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Calla mutters, standing up.
It’s happening again. In San-Er, these qi experiments were the work of the Crescent Societies under Leida’s guidance. But Leida Miliu is currently in a prison cell underneath the Palace of Union, and the Crescent Societies have no temples or reach outside of San-Er’s limits, so what gives?
Calla loosens her shirt collar, lowering it from her face. The temperature appears to be returning to normal, the switch back just as abnormal as the sudden glacial plummet.
“What was he doing out here, anyway?” the first official asks. He’s fanning himself to prevent further gagging.
“Probably wanted to see what other complimentary remarks he could include about the soldiers,” the third answers, his hand still grasped around his nose. “Poinin has been petitioning for budget changes. Less for the farms, more for palace operations.”
“Well”—the second official searches the grass around the general’s dead body—“I don’t see the report anywhere.”
“Perhaps he handed it off already.”
“What was he doing lurking around behind the barracks if he had already handed it off?”
“What are you sniping that question at me for? Let’s just ask a lieutenant in the barracks—”
Calla doesn’t have much to contribute to the conversation. She says nothing before turning on her heel and walking toward the entrance of the barracks. Though the three officials fall silent at her sudden exit, they don’t follow her. She’s alone when she rounds the bend again, steps over the raised entryway, and enters the walled facility.
“Heavens,” Calla whispers.
When Yilas was kidnapped during the games, they found her in the Hollow Temple, surrounded by other unconscious bodies. Enough time has passed that Calla can rewind back to that scene on occasion without flinching, try to recallthe details and wonder if there might have been an easier way out that night than brute force. An easier way than being stabbed in the heart, than having Anton Makusa yank her out of there to recover under his watch, his hand threading through her hair and her fleeting sense of peace molded into his bedsheets.
